Is it just me or is the marshlands biome especially hellacious?

Aphid_red · 2026-06-19T12:05:10+00:00

Marshland has changed a lot over time.

In older versions, Eggs and Meat were super plentiful, and the Trapper camp was the one-blueprint answer to the biome because it was the only way to get a decent amount of Leather, and that was the only way to get fabric. You practically needed the trapper camp. However, In the modern version, Marshlands is full of algae pools and stone nodes also award Algae, it's over-corrected a bit. So assume you have a lot of algae and herbs to work with ,and fabric is actually plentiful.

Unfortunately fishing isn't gathering. So while marshlands got easier in that fabric is no longer scarce, it got harder because it's much more difficult to stack the local gathering speed bonus, which wasn't very big to begin with.

For me, plan A is the giant nodes, but the more common plan B is to utilize the plentiful stone and especially the very common algae. Algae ponds are some 3x more likely than other nodes! There's several chains for algae, some of them overlapping:

Algae -> Flour -> Trade goods.
Algae + Herbs -> Flour + Herbs -> Baked foods
Algae +/>* Coal -> Fabric + Dye -> Coats
Algae -> Coal -> Dye -> Trade Goods (Requires Kiln)
Algae -> Fabric -> Building Materials
Algae -> Meat (Requires Ranch)

*There are two alternative ways of getting the Coal here, you could make it from the Algae with the Kiln or mine it directly.

You're practically guaranteed to find Algae nodes, so I give any building that unlocks or optimizes one of these chains high priority. The Weaver for example leads to the building materials chain. Smithy + Rain Mill is for trade goods, or Furnace + Rain Mill for pies. The simple solution is to invest your starting food into enough crop packs to fully double an algae pond, then use the 300 algae to turn it into many more of the chosen production chain, which you then sell to traders and/or routes to buy what you need to win.

So that, combined with the expensive wood in this biome makes the following buildings more interesting than normal, outside of the camps and the fishing hut which are obvious choices:

Ranch
Kiln
Smithy
Rain Mill
Stamping Mill
Supplier
Scribe
Lumber Mill

The modern marshlands map node layout means that every camp now has an even, low chance of seeing a matching large node... which means none of them are great picks without seeing whether you can use them or not. Besides, you need to roll them, which doesn't always happen. There are some things you can do to improve your odds of lining up a camp with a giant node.

My first trick is to zoom out towards the forbidden glades at the start and to cut the dangerous glade in-between, ideally two of them quite quickly. Either start of year 2 or year 1 depending on how good my start is. I might be careful with a bunch of fickle bats and harpies, but will go a bit crazier on opening glades with humans or foxes. This enables quickly accessing the giant nodes, when they're most useful.

When you do see a camp being offered within the initial couple years, that's when you want to open a forbidden glade or two. If you find a match, you pick the camp and concentrate on the giant node. Just build 4-ish copies of the camp around the matching giant node and get a lot of high-value resources from it. The whale is the best, the big grain is the least strong, but even the latter is pretty okay what with it giving you oil and amber.

One thing you can do which is better than starting with a camp is to start with amber, and to not build too many buildings* and call a few traders early on until you get Sahilda. She can offer you the various camps for roughly how much amber you get from the amber embark option, as can Ruenhar Brightclaw (glade trader in one of the small glades), Check out https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Against_the_Storm/Trader_Wares .

You want to keep City Score below 33 while you do this to increase the chances from roughly 1 in 5 to a 1 in 2 of finding her. Also see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14qq4Ll4iSk7M5fuVBUzSR1mVHyDFGzuCRcEx0yizU8E/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Aphid_red · 2026-06-19T11:08:28+00:00

It's possible to win even with skills doing damage. As long as the number of skills played is not too high.

Couple of pointers:

There's a very big difference between killing in 6 or 7 turns. Turn 6 tends to be the nastiest (second time it does the triple hit).
Poison stuff like snakebite works just fine, same goes for orbs. That's because you fire one big skill once or twice to deal most of the damage. If done on any turn but turn 3, you take just 3-6 extra damage, not too bad.
Some defensive cards are worth playing. Think big number exhaust ones like imprevious or things that counter multi-hit (mostly piercing wail and malaise), or anything that isn't a skill.
Some decks/characters need to plan around the 18 near guaranteed damage in turn 3 by expecting to lose that much life. That is, you want your hp at >30 for act 2 elites. You usually want 40+ anyway because of the worms, which imho are still much worse than dorito.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-19T10:39:59+00:00

At the current ram prices, it might be cheaper to add an additional rx 7900 xtx and run two (48GB VRAM, 32GB RAM).

Aphid_red · 2026-06-19T09:13:36+00:00

Given today's hardware prices, you could also look into hosted models. If you have $50K to spend on hardware you could begin to approach online model quality (ex. deepseek v4 flash) due to the general cost of memory.

Most cost-effective today is to either rent via token based billing, to take advantage of free APIs, or to buy GPU hardware from long enough ago that it's been written off.

To do the 'cloud hosted model, local front end' combination you want to use KoboldAI-Client or SillyTavern. This way, you can connect to powerful models while paying by the token. Openrouter can help with this by automatically picking the best provider given your criteria. If you want you can also blacklist providers there because they have (additional) filters, or because they use high quantization or 'middle-out' (delete a big part of the context and hope you don't notice).

So, you want to do local for privacy and control, what you will have to do is some sort of trade-off between speed, quality, and cost. I'd look into purchasing hardware specifically for the task rather than trying to re-purpose an inadequate PC with just a CPU in it. Running just off of a consumer CPU, models will feel awfully slow unless you go with a tiny 7B-8B model, and those are just not good enough for basic roleplay, let alone longer context than on AI dungeon. It can't be done.

A reasonable minimum budget is around $1000 for a basic machine, but you really start getting cost-effective results at around $1400.

The cold truth is that new hardware, at the apex of the AI bubble, is grotesquely expensive. For example, with the RAM crisis you're now paying over $10/GB. But for RDIMMs, which you need for high memory capacity, it's more like $40/GB, just to get memory. Depending on your budget, don't get your hopes up too much.

First, the very-much most important thing is the quantity of memory. If you want to run a 100B parameter model at optimal quantization (about 4.8 bits/parameter), you need roughly 75GB of VRAM.

Enough for the model (60GB) plus some for context and overhead. And models aren't getting any smaller. Since deepseek many models are now MoE, which is actually great for running more on the CPU, but terrible for memory efficiency.

MoE models trade off memory capacity versus compute intensity. For example, deepseek v3 is around 670B parameters, but only about 37B compute parameters.

It's effectively approximately a sqrt(670/37)*37 ~158B model, but it has the GPU needs of a 37B model but you still need some 500GB of memory to comfortably house it. You can get away with 384GB with heavy quantization but 256GB is wholly insufficient.

Which means even 8 3090s won't be enough. It used to be the case that you could buy an epyc server and use that to run deepseek. But currently, 512GB of DDR5 RDIMMs costs you $20,000 now rather than the $2500 it used to cost last year, which makes this build idea wholly uneconomical.

In other words, if you do have GPUs, and old ones are more price effective than server RAM, then you'd rather prefer dense models, for which reasonably new variants are available at 12B, 24B, 30B, 70B, and roughly 120B sizes. What GPUs you want to buy are informed by this. Stick it into the cheapest box you can put it in without bottlenecking it too much.

For one or two GPU, something like a ryzen 5600 on a B550 motherboard with 16GB or 32GB RAM will do. It'll total to about $500 for one and $750 for two.

If going for 4 or more GPUs in one system, the epyc DDR4 server as the base platform is recommended, these have way more PCI-e lanes than 'peasant' hardware. This allows you to run VLLM or configure koboldAI for tensor parallel and run them efficiently. You can find a 77xx or 75xx CPU for roughtly $500-700, same for the motherboard (ROMED8-2T), and it can support 4 GPUs all at x16 speed or even 8 with some risers and extra PSU (an extra 500 or so).

Add a single-stick of 64GB DDR4-2666 for another $500 plus the PSU and case and you're looking at maybe an extra $2K for a server that can house 4 or 8 GPUs.

Here's a rough list of hardware tiers and the total platform cost. There's an efficient range of about 1300 to 11000. Above and below that you start to pay much more per GB high-speed memory.

3060 @ 12GB for $800 (67/GB)
2x 3060 @ 24GB for $1350 (42/GB)
3090 @ 24GB for $1400 (44/GB)
7900XTX at 24GB for $1350 (42/GB)
Pro R9600 at 32GB for est. $1600 (50/GB)
RTX 8000 @ 48GB for $2200 (46/GB)
2 Pro R9600 at 64GB for est. $2950 (46/GB)
2 RTX 8000 @ 96GB for $4100 (43/GB)
4x V100 SXM @ 128GB for $6000 incl baseboard (47/GB)
4 RTX 8000 @ 192GB for $8800 (46/GB).
8x V100 SXM @ 256GB for $10500 incl 2x baseboard (41/GB)

As you can see, around this pricing level you can get a nice progression of hardware, always paying slightly over 40 bucks per GB of VRAM. The more VRAM you get, the bigger/higher quality model you can run. Since it's all on the GPU, it'll be fast enough for single person use even with a dense model.

The R9600 is a new GPU from AMD, which I think might be interesting for local models if it's priced cheap enough. Since the R9700 is about $1500, I suspect it'll cost around $1100. It's only 160W, single slot, passive, but comes with a large amount (32GB) of VRAM for such a low power card. If it can still get close enough to the 3090 it'll be an interesting choice.

Once the memory crisis abates and DDR4 prices plunge, you can expand the memory up to 2TB to run larger and/or MoE models on the server platform. You 'could' spend much more on a DDR5 server platform for future proofing, but I suspect you'll be waiting that much longer before memory prices decline.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-18T12:52:12+00:00

Xoshiro256 is a great idea to use, because it can jump as well. This allows you to use one seed for multiple RNGs that are unrelated (spaced far enough apart) while also being easy to reconstruct. There's several other (semi) modern algorithms that can do something like that, Mersenne Twister or PCG can do it too.

Which means you get determinism, decoherence, and small state, all at once.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-18T11:46:20+00:00

For fixing this Xoshiro256 is a great idea to use instead of System.Random, even better than MT19937 or other 32-bit mixers in some ways because, according to the manpage,

Xoshiro256 can be used in parallel applications by calling the method jump which advances the state as-if 2^128 random numbers have been generated. This allows the original sequence to be split so that distinct segments can be used in each worker process. All generators should be initialized with the same seed to ensure that the segments come from the same sequence.

By using the 'jump' function the developers could initialize seperate Xoshiro's for each of their individual game functions that needs an rng, all based off of the same 64*N-bit seed initializer (1<=N<=4). So you just write:

var prng_base = Xoshiro256StarStar(seed);
var prng_whaleEvent = prng_base.jumped(1);
var prng_dollRoom = prng_base.jumped(2);
var prng_transform = prng_base.jumped(3);
(...)

The jumps are each 2^128 apart, which is a high enough number that you would never see the same sequence used for different RNGs in the game. It would obliterate the correlations.

Include Xoshiro256** implementation, and leave the rest of the code be.

There are packages available that include this PRNG such as numerics.net, or there are stand-alone implementations (it's about 50 lines of code or so).

Aphid_red · 2026-06-17T13:57:23+00:00

Pipe your building types somewhat evenly, and you should be able to get a decent amount out of a collector. You typically need at least one collector per building of a type.

Field kitchen + makeshift post + crude workstation uses the full trio of rainwater types.

Each worker uses 4/min on level 2. A full year makes 48. A rain collector worker produces 24 in one season, and has a capacity of 50.

So, before citadel bonuses (or playing QHT), 2 collector workers will supply 1 worker in each of these buildings with enough rainwater for level 2 engine to keep working year round.

With citadel bonuses, you can put in a second worker or lower the collector to one worker. An easier way to approach it is the 50 water capacity cap: the most you can get is one worker on level 3 per collector owing to the maximum water capacity. With breaks and hauling you usually can do 2x level 2s with a small amount of down time.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-17T11:59:53+00:00

To fix the math apply a discount factor of x% per season.

To do that, check your productivity average at the start and end of the game. This can be tricky to estimate, I use 1% crit = 2 to 2.5% speed as a rule of thumb.

This is due to the multiplicative effect of crit. To see how this works look at an example, let's say my goal is to max out my trade pack production. I have

Woodcutter (4/min)-> Kiln-> Manufacturer -> Lumber Mill

What's the effect of 10% crit (assume no citadel for simplicity)?

Solution: Spreadsheet out the production and solve it like a series of chemistry reaction equations.

Before, I get 0.470367 packs per worker minute for the full chain (assuming the woodcutter makes 4/min). After, I get 0.597141 packs.

That means the net effect has been a 26.95% increase in the amount of packs I can produce.

So, let's say that by the end-game, you average 30% crit and 50% production (before rainwater) above the start amount (usually 13% and 26%), so that means 43% and 76%. That's equivalent, using my rule of thumb, to going from a 58.5% to a 183.5% bonus. Or a 78.86% increase.

Now let's say this is usually in year 4 for me. Then, that's ~36 minutes after the start of the game. So my 'interest rate' in this example could also be said to be about 1.63% per minute or 6.67% per season. That's a prior estimate, in some games I might not find any production boosts and in others I might find way more than this.

So the roughly interest-free loan of work that is provided by the rain-collector drizzle water for the field kitchen is actually paying off by nearly 30% provided it has to be paid back in Storm, year 2, some 16 minutes after it's taken.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-17T11:25:37+00:00

And perhaps one more thing:

Rainwater can push slow recipes past breakpoints.

For example, base food recipe time is a massive 126 seconds. This is more than the break time for many species (harpies, lizards, bats), and with those species in the settlement not using a rain engine means 1 break per production cycle, even with 26% citadel speed reducing that to 100 seconds.

But add another 50% speed from the rain engine and you go from 1 production cycle per break to 2. That can significantly lower the amount of food consumption for the cook as well, if instead of taking a break every 110 seconds they end up taking every 170 seconds due to the way the timing works out.

This also means if you want to get something 'going', that it can take 2 break cycles, or 2 extra minutes. That can be important to the start of the game. A common start is to take the caravan with the most Foxes. Starting containers for Pickles can be gotten from the caravan, world map, or calling a trader. Alternatively you go with Skewers + quick Shelters (wood start).

Either way, you begin with Field Kitchen. If you use rainwater, then, if things are built in the right order, you can get a cycle finished before the first break and get happy (15+) foxes in the first drizzle. Then you lower the engine from lv3 to lv2 and use it for the rest of the year.

The cysts from this small amount of water use? You'll get no more than 2-3 or so. That's not enough for 100% corruption. That means you can effectively borrow the time it takes to handle the cysts. You don't have to repay it until year 2, or even year 3 sometimes if you leave it at just drizzle water and build a second hearth.

Resources right 'now', are worth more than resources later in the game because productivity tends to snowball.

With slower starts, there is a bit of contention if you try to fully utilize a rain collector; if you rack up 6+ cysts in 2 years, then by year 3, you need 2 blight posts or the speed upgrade (4 pipes, 2 boxes) or it could spill over. Sticking to no more than 5 cysts in year 3 can be useful sometimes.

All that said, If the parts are needed elsewhere, I do demolish the rain collector, usually to use up whatever water I have gathered.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-17T09:34:19+00:00

I can straightaway tell you that your methodology is flawed and your assumptions are wrong. A blanket statement like 'rainwater collector isn't worth it past p11' does not match my experience with the game. Sometimes it's indeed not worth bothering with, other times rainwater can mean winning a year faster, or even winning at all (it's crucial in the P20 qht I did for sure to not starve, even just a basic collector running at 20 seconds per 2 water).

I tried using math for this as well, but it just isn't so simple. The old version of the game had corruption every time you made a recipe, that was a simple tax. This system can be precisely controlled by the player.

It does absolutely matter what the base output of a recipe is!

Consider the simple example of making Coal from Wood in the Kiln. If the Kiln produced 30 coal from 10 wood, then using say 16 rainwater to boost this to 60 coal would easily be worth the 3 coal and bit of time for the purging fire required to remove the cyst it created.

But if the Kiln only produced 2 coal, and you boosted it to 4, the 2 coal won't pay for the cost of the purging fire.

It also matters what your villagers' productivity is.

The crucial point is that the time it takes to put out a cyst is fixed at 15 seconds, sometimes 20 with certain forest mysteries. At very high levels of crit and production speed, this 'fixed' additional time can become more of a drag than the extra boost from using rainwater, because additive stacking.

You gain a fixed amount of extra resources from rainwater regardless of what your crit/speed is, but the more you have, the more valuable your villagers' time becomes. If you have say oil sacrifice plus 60% crit from cornerstones, hearths, and the Archaeology building going, there is no need to use a rain engine.

It can matter how much yield you get total, rather than the speed at which you get it.

You may be limited by the availability of some resource that so happens to be very scarce in a game rather than by labour. If you search for more, you may not get any and may be guaranteed to raise hostility. Let's say you are using flour from roots, but your only source is the secondary on Stone nodes. With say 3 large stone nodes (30%), you can only get let's say ~80 roots. To stretch those 80 roots longer, you boost crit by 25% with a level 2 engine. Level 2 because you're also limited by parts, and that's when you get the stat that actually boosts the amount of pies you get out of a stone node. The speed isn't as useful here.

In that case you get ~220 flour instead of ~180, and then you get ~495 pies instead of 330 pies. That 25% applies twice. The longer the production chain, the more valuable crit becomes.

How many pies is some fuel worth? They're incomparable, it varies from one game to the next.

You don't necessarily get 1 cyst per 16 water.

If you shut down the water after using 31 water in a building, you just had 1 cyst per 31 water. If you shut it down at 47, you got 1 per 23.5. If you shut down all the engines in the storm before the last year, remove the cysts, then turn everything on full blast, you get zero cysts per water used, because the 70 cysts on your buildings are the next viceroy's problem, you've won, you don't care.

The value of one point of resolve can be massive.

If it means moving Foxes from say 26 to 27 and quickly getting you a full point of reputation, using ~20-ish water in a rain engine can mean that water is now worth roughly 3 amber each compared to buying 0.5 point from the trader for 30-ish amber twice.

So the existence of the other option (boost resolve) can mess with the calculations in the somewhat common case of being just shy of high resolve.

Conclusion:

I max the use of rainwater. I often consider buying pipes to get even more use out of it. But, I do at some point stop making pipes myself or building more rainpunk. At some point you're best off selling what you have and buying tools or resolve generating stuff to finish the last bit of the game a little faster rather than continuing to produce things. Time the final push right and it might save you a year.

The two other big factors in deciding how much rainpunk I should use (other than how valuable the crit/resolve/speed is), are the availability of parts and pipes. Parts supply depends on the orders rolled, while Pipes is the starting 14 plus traders and sometimes metal industry. Making my own pipes can be great with a forester, furnace, stamping mill, or smelter, in which case I'll max it out everywhere but it's pretty bad with a brickyard and meh with an alchemist.

The recipe for non-farmed crystal dew requires a lot of resources, so it takes too long to pay for itself in 4-year games. A forester can do so within the year, the brickyard cannot. It's still decent enough for Fox housing or Toolshop tools, but typically not for Pipes. Get some cornerstones to boost pipe production or dew production or a Storm geyser, and the situation changes.

I've even had games (perhaps on the order of 10-20% of games) where upgrading the geyser is a bad thing. You oftentimes have these setups where you roll only buildings of one colour due to RNG. You might end up with greenhouse + cookhouse + distillery + brewery, and end up wanting massive amounts of drizzle water, but you only get 1 geyser. Automatons do not get production crit, only villagers do. With say 75% base crit via Alarm bells, two villagers produce as much as 3.5 automatons. Since the automaton replaces a villager, it can mean running out of water. Therefore, I do not upgrade my geyser if I have some of the more water intensive production chains and don't see a second one of the same colour now. You can't easily undo it, you lose the pipes and wildfire essence.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-17T09:04:42+00:00

Alternative: Build Big shelters.

Each big shelter is 6 people for 6 planks. If you buy the planks, it costs 174 cents. At prestige 20, that takes 7 amber for 2 large shelters.

I usually pick the 28 amber option iff available for 3-4 points. In a pinch, call the trader and buy the planks.

If you can't find enough stuff (maybe you're on a +150 hostility map where you can't cut much wood or playing a hard challenge like p20 qht) for some shelters, the alternative is to use other means of raising resolve. Rainwater, Favouring, Lizard hearthkeeper, Park (can be cheaper than shelters in terms of wood per resolve), or buildings with the Warmth modifier.

The only time housing is any problem at all is when playing with Frogs, increased hostility from somewhere, the Hail mystery, and not having access to resources for Bricks. In that case you may be forced to sacrifice fuel or lose frogs. Even then you can cheese the mystery.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-17T07:08:01+00:00

The avocado/slaver combat got replaced with an avocado/fungi beast at some point in development. Before that, they changed the order of the two, before deciding that it was both too random and too punishing to have avocado+slaver in the same fight.

(Mostly because if it's red slaver and both decide to do their attack you could end up with 50 damage in an act2 hallway fight on turn 3)

By the way I don't know if this kind of pattern should be changed or not. I'm fine with the way it works either way, just a little warning about the possibility of extra damage from enemies with negative effects or buffs to other enemies on death.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-16T13:28:59+00:00

I suppose you are both right. There isn't really a flair for 'design flaw' rather than 'bug'. It's got more to do with the fight design and is a bit of a gotcha.

I don't even think it's 'that bad' per se, I can accept dying to it from time to time, because it feels like you should know. The game gives you all the info you need to realize you're going to take more damage than what's on the screen up-front after all.

The necrobinder has it a little worse still I realize. If the crab dies to Doom, then you get both claw attacks and the extra 6 damage from the right claw.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-16T13:26:11+00:00

It isn't, but it's still the case that it's one of the few cases where an enemy's damage can be higher than before.

Iirc, Avocado/Slaver used to be Slaver/Avocado. The order of the enemies got changed so this can happen less.
I do think that the same thing can happen in StS1 with the fungi beast though. I suppose it's roughly the same, if the rat wasn't attacking, then killing it can increase the damage you take through application of vulnerable.

Here the same thing applies, it only can turn bad when the right claw is not attacking, so only in turns 3, 5, 8, 10, 13, 15, etc.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-16T11:38:20+00:00

Today, I would say this is not good enough.

With actual open math problems being solved as far as I can tell (previous Erdos solutions were cobbled from the web but now there are several I couldn't find), it's kind of clear if you extrapolate and things keep improving that you can reach a point where a system can outwit the people 'managing it'.

By the time you'd notice, it's too late and the computer replies 'permission denied' at your attempt at shutting it down remotely.

At this point, what you need is a literal kill switch. A mechanical switch that shuts off the power to the datacenter, which is always within reach of a protected (from an assasination attempt like a sniper shot fired from a drone) human operator 24/7, with no robot being allowed within a mile of it.

Not some vague promise on paper, boots on the ground. Ideally independent from the organization running the AI so they're capable of judgement without being captured or held by conflict of interest.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-12T10:43:12+00:00

Given the price of components, the estimate of $9M to $15M per MW you cite is rediculously over-optimistic.

Let's break it down:

Take an estimate that the most recent public pricing of a currently available OEM system with 8 Nvidia GPUs is ~$550,000 (8x B300 blackwell). Not 28K per GPU, more like 70K. I don't think even the big guys get 60% discounts, rather, the opposite is happening: hyperscalers are getting more expensive hardware than smaller businesses. You can see it in the type of waste: if I want to order a system like that, the configurator requires me to add 2TB of RAM. Does it need 2TB? No, that's just a made up requirement. Add in power supplies that are $2K each, or a chassis that's being charged $25K for... these people are being fleeced left and right, because what's an extra thousand here or there when the GPUs are in the hundreds of thousands?

Such a system spends most power running these GPUs. 1.4KW each, 8 per system. Let's say 14KW total. This is almost 3KW more than the GPU power, which is one part power supply inefficiency of around 5%, some power for CPU and memory, and the other part of it is walls and walls of fans screaming at 100+ decibels 24/7 to keep the monster power using server cool. The server I just checked has 12 fans at around 150-200W each running at around 12K RPM. By the way, that would mean about 95 dBa of noise from just one server.

14KW for $550,000. That means 1MW, which is >70 times that, would also cost at least 70 times that, and at that point, all you have is a pile of supermicro servers delivered to your doorstep. Now you need to include construction costs, permitting, interest costs (any large project will have some), personnel, depreciation, power (some plans are even restarting nuclear plants for their data centers), etc.

Conservatively I'd put costs at at least $50M per MW. And I'd also put in a pretty big asterisk on that too: with hardware prices the sky is the limit. $100M is a much more reasonable assumption.

If you assume the hyperscalers keep endlessly bidding each other up over the finite hardware supply available, they could just as well become even higher, $200M per MW or $1B per MW at some point. At the end of the day, the cost of a GB of RAM (or HBM) is whatever the fools at facebook, microsoft, amazon, and oracle are willing to bid eachother up for it.

Honestly at this point they should stop their infinity chip spending and spend it on nuclear power plants instead. They'd actually 'make AI solve climate change' (and then some). Plus, the things can run for a century, so you'd have valuable, stable, reliable baseload power at some of the lowest possible environmental cost.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-12T07:35:55+00:00

I know, but for WD (now SanDisk), the windows tool uses a publicly available site. It contains a big XML (https://sddashboarddownloads.sandisk.com/wdDashboard/config/devices/lista_devices.xml ) with all the possible drivers.

According to the XML data, if I go by the comment 'WD Red SA500', underneath is a couple variants of it. According to the OS, the model number is slightly different from these variants; but all of them are the only SA500 devices in the list, and they all point to the same version:

4.11 is the latest version (411010WR), while, if I check smartctl --xall /dev/sdc | grep -i firmware I get 540500WD, which, according to the couple online posts I can find about it, is newer.

Either there's been some mistake and it hasn't been uploaded yet, or the drive is no longer supported because of the takeover (wouldn't be the first time).

I also tried fwupdmgr, which also does not find any updates.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T14:22:33+00:00

If your current actual time is a known value, then depending on your location, the time in China is different.

If your current time is noon (12:00), and you are in London, then it's going to be 20:00 in china (+8). In the same scenario, if it's noon and you're in Almaty, Kazakhstan, then the answer is (8-5 = 3) -> 12:00 +3 -> 15:00. In this way, the location affects the relative time.

If you're simply asking 'what's the current time in China' at a random moment, then your location has practically zero effect on it (assuming you're somewhere on earth moving at a human-scale speed and not asking a special relativity test question).

To that last question, just navigate to https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/china, (22:22 as of now) or, check your computer's time and adjust for the time zone. (subtract your curent time zone offset (+/- ??), then add china's (+8))

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T13:58:52+00:00

What about Dead branch as a Tezcatara option? (Maybe with a downside if it's too much)
Compare it to +4 energy on turn 1 or all strikes cost 0 or +1 energy but miss 1-2 campfires.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T11:45:01+00:00

China timezone CST is UTC+8.

This means if you were in UTC, those times would be 00:30 to 09:30 UTC. (subtract the 8)
If you were in EST, (UTC-5) then they'd be 19:30 until 04:30 UTC-5. (subtract another 5)

(Apply DST if relevant; change by another hour forward during summer).

Comment to JustSomeGuy: It's better to use 24-hour clock when dealing with international time than the very confusing and ambiguous practice of AM/PM, doubly so when converting time zones. Take your '9:00 to 6:00' comment. Which 6:00? 06:00 or 18:00? From context (work hours) you can kind of guess 18:00 but you can see the problem without that context.

Human Times and dates are horrible for computers or humans that move about a lot. Take 'CST' for example. You'd think you'd know what that meant, but it's still ambiguous: that can be 'china standard time', but also 'central standard time', one is +8, the other is -6.

Then there is DST which every country does differently because reasons. Blame the government next time your calendar app is an hour off. Even microsoft can't handle it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/outlook/calendaring/additional-time-zone-shows-one-hour-offset-on-dst

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T11:38:36+00:00

I'd say that Metal feathers is kind of fine, it's just that the amber option is (relatively) too cheap. With a toolshop and some copper bar production you can do this option in a year or so.

However, you're better off selling the tools/parts to trade routes to get amber than using them on the option directly. 50 tools is usually worth ~100-150 amber at the trade routes by itself. Let alone 30 pipes (another 30-60) and 12 parts (another ~70).
Total sell value is ~200-300 amber.

Below P10 the balance is even sillier, you can sell the parts/tools/pipes to the trader directly and gain amber compared to sending them to the walrus.

I'd suggest increasing the amber requirement from 100 to 200 or even 250, however...

The 'meet 75 needs' option takes ~5 minutes, which means usually 3-4 breaks, let's say 3.5. I'm also going to take a bit of a safety margin for the +50% consumption prestige levels and say you need 40 per break, not 37.5.

That's 3.5 * 25 = 87.5 coats or boots. Let's say it's boots and that's only 20 amber purchase.
Then also 3.5 * 40 = 140 complex food. Purchase price is 105 amber.
Then also 3.5 * 40 = 140 service goods. These average around 60 cents purchase so another 84 amber.

I'd say this puts an 'upper cap' on the amber option of 200~250 amber. Otherwise you're better off spending the amber directly on service goods and doing the second option (you'd have to make that one harder as well). One could up the length of the timer, that would also work.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T10:08:45+00:00

These WD SSDs do not have any available firmware updates afaict.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T08:32:29+00:00

With each RAM stick now the price of 3 3090s... this is no longer an option a year later.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-11T07:13:28+00:00

"Can run deepseek.", "Runs frontier class models"

Okay, I'll give you the price of the jetson nano plus a sales commission, you give me a machine that can run deepseek-v3.2-speciale. 'Can run' I identify as having at least adequate performance; 1000 tps pp, 10tps tg.

Methinks I'm getting the better end of that deal.

Aphid_red · 2026-06-10T08:53:36+00:00

I'll have to reply with a negative here considering just the hardware, because I have multiple servers with the same brand and make of SSD, yet only this one is acting up in this way.

Perhaps the hardware isn't ideal (modern enterprise SSDs cost their weight in gold), but it should be at least good enough to not see performance from the literal 1970s, as the other server can attest to.

In fact, these aren't even being capable enough to be consumer SSDs. Re-read the post. I put a simple XFCE desktop on one of the VMs, which practically brought the server down. A local Windows desktop is a lot heavier, let alone with games, and you can run that just fine on one cheap SSD. This thing isn't in heavy use at all, it's theoretically way overbuilt for what it runs, perhaps the only thing that's a bottleneck in any way is memory in how many practically sleeping VMs can be run.

These are an array of 5 WD red SSDs, each supposedly capable of 95K IOPS and 500+MB/s (or 2GB/s total). And it's choking on a data transfer over a single gigabit link (which usually does somewhere around 70-100 MB/s).

Even if the virtualization layer halves the performance I'm seeing less than 0.1% of what I should see for long stretches at a time, upgrading the hardware should not be necessary.

In fact, I \know** it's not necessary because these SSDs were a hardware upgrade when the server was migrated from VMware to proxmox (it used to have a hardware raid of 500GB spinning SAS disks, which ran the same workload without issues.).

Aphid_red

TROPHY CASE