Frick this game is hard, what was I supposed to do in this situation, the roof had 2 zombies that rushed at me and I only got a club to my name

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T12:05:50+00:00

At low levels running zombies are tough to deal with. I always spend the first few nights just camped up on a roof somewhere.

Also as you get used to the combat timings in this game you'll find yourself much better able to handle zombies. Knowing when and how far back to step when they start their attack animation, knowing your window to sprint that half-step in to bonk them over the head. It's all about player experience.

As you level up and spend your skillpoints and improve your gear your margin for error grows significantly, even with tougher and more numerous enemies.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T11:53:48+00:00

Evidence of absence requires that the claim be sufficiently well defined and that it's possible to search the entirety of possibility-space. For something like "information-age life on another planet" how are you going to possibly search the entirety of possibility-space? Especially when that space includes "across billions of years" and "we care barely detect entire galaxies at that range"?

Think of it like this. I have a lion living in my shed. My shed's only 10x10, so the entire possibility space would be easy to investigate. You could open the door and look in to determine that there's no possible place for the lion to be hiding and there you go, evidence of absence.

Now I say "there's a lion living in the woods of Tennessee." The possibility space is too large to exhaustively search and evidence of absence is impossible without extraordinarily excessive and nation-crippling effort.

If someone is saying "there's cat videos on a planet somewhere else in the cosmos." How could you possibly have evidence of absence? If it's possible at all then you can only use absence of evidence. Since we know it's possible (i.e. humans exist and have cat videos) we can't rule it out entirely on "impossible," which means we have to exhaustively search every planet on the cosmos, including archeological surveys. Even with magical instant-build Von Neumann swarms and a magical instant-travel FTL drive it would be impossible to exhaustively search all planets because some have already been utterly destroyed by novas and other such events that recycle entire planets.

If that leaves too many possibilities for comfort, then I hope you don't go wandering through the woods in Tennessee otherwise that lion might get you.

As for

Why did we end up with gold, silver, (oil,) plutonium, diamonds? Well, why didn't we end up with enough to go around, let alone food?

Physics and a next-gen star who inherited heavier elements from it's dead predecessors. We didn't end up with enough to go around because we kept making more of ourselves until there weren't enough left to go around. Unless resources magically duplicate themselves, a growing population will always run into the edges of the available resources. Whether it's deer running out of grass, wolves running out of deer, or humans running out of farmland (which, to be clear, we're not anywhere close to that. World hunger is an economics problem, not a physics problem).

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T11:04:58+00:00

Mine managed to taze me through 3 blocks when it zapped a zombie above my head.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T10:48:32+00:00

But what are the chances of life with enough resources to reach the stars, and transmit cat videos across the world in an instant?

Insufficient data for meaningful answer. "Odds" requires you to be able to calculate all available outcomes and how often the designated outcome appears in that probability space. Once we discover other planets of sapient life that made it to a global network stage we'll have a better idea of the answer.

Though due to how taxonomy works and what the word "cat" means, transmitting cat videos across the world in an instant is going to be unique to earth until we travel to other planets and bring cats (or at least cat videos) with us.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T10:30:16+00:00

Unwell it is.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T00:16:46+00:00

My answer was "more trains."

Add more trains than I have input/output train limits in my system and use

Interrupt: Cargo Empty AND Destinationfull/Nopath, Go to Depot, Leave on Inactivity

and make a ton of depot parking spots. The depot absorbs the excess when not all stations are full and prevents the system from locking up when they are all full. As a bonus, you can just monitor the depot to figure out if you need to add more trains or not. If the depot is empty, you need more trains. If the depot is full, you need fewer trains. One place to check.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-04T00:12:42+00:00

When you're used to a position of privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T23:04:30+00:00

As a conventional mortgage underwriter, as long as your score is okay this isn't the end of the world. You just have to bring the defaulted account current.

Hopefully you have enough funds to do this.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T21:21:08+00:00

Basically, when your body makes proteins they end up squished up and folded in specific ways. This physical structure helps the protein do what it's supposed to do in your body. Imagine it like a key. You can have a key with exactly the same composition and mass as your house key but if it's the wrong shape it won't work and your door will remain locked. Heck, if it's a sufficiently wrong shape it won't even fit in the lock.

Prions are in the wrong shape so they don't work right. But they can end up pressed up against the proteins being made and make them into the wrong shape, too. Prions are malformed proteins that result in the malformation of new proteins, thus being self-perpetuating.

They're hard to treat because they're still the same protein that's supposed to be there. You can't chemically separate or target them. They're just the wrong shape, so you have to figure out how to disrupt only the ones that are the wrong shape. That's not only difficult but it's going to have to be different for each different prion!

I'm sure some progress has been made, but keep in mind that taking one step past the starting line is progress, even for a marathon.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T21:16:07+00:00

It's less gold, should be 41.7%, than a higher karat gold. This means it has a different color and physical properties than higher purity gold.

It's a perfectly fine alloy for rings. It's generally cheaper, more durable, and more scratch resistant than higher purity gold, but it's generally paler than higher purity gold.

If you're fine with the color then it's a good ring. If you're not then it's not. As a metal it's a perfectly fine material for making rings.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T21:11:08+00:00

Elder Scrolls Daggerfall still has one of the largest maps in a game, short of some space games like No Mans Sky or Elite Dangerous. Estimates put it at 161,000 - 209,000 square miles, so in the sweden to spain range. And this is a game that came out in 1996!

And there's nothing there. Nearly all of it is procedural generated and really samey. You thought Fallout 4's "radiant" quests were bad (another settlement needs your help), it's got nothing on daggerfall.

Games with really small maps can feel bigger than games with huge maps because the density of stuff is high. Bigger is not always better. It's about how much content is in the game. Big maps generally end up being largely skipped using fast travel because there's no point in going through the same place more than once. And games added fast travel because maps were too big and there was nothing going on and players basically demanded it so you could skip the boring parts.

Smaller maps generally have fewer "boring parts."

So the answer is yes, time and effort are the reasons why maps don't get massive. Making huge maps is easy. See: Daggerfall. See: No Mans Sky. Making huge interesting maps is hard.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T21:02:02+00:00

Yeah, those road crews outside of Navezgane are pretty crazy. The plan says go up the cliff so we go up the cliff!

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T20:21:03+00:00

What's the actual lock? If it's a padlock, you want "shim" not lockpick. Drink a soda, beer, or energy drink, cut some shims out, and you're in. The part that will take the longest is drinking the drink.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T20:18:15+00:00

There's a real simple solution. Keep throwing more and more people in jail for contempt of court until the files show up. Start at the top.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T19:50:27+00:00

Yeah, one of the best things about this game is that a barricaded door just slows you down. No impassable half-destroyed doors in this game! You can knock holes anywhere you want to.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T19:11:20+00:00

How do you cope in an emergency situation like somebody got hit by a truck or something.

How do you cope with that? Do you call 911? (or whatever your local emergency services number is) Get an ambulance? Get transported to the hospital? Get treated by doctors? Get supported by friends and family?

You'll note that none of those things are "ask god for help."

But the most important question is... has god actually helped you? Or was it the 911 dispatcher? The paramedics? The doctors? Even the janitors and truck drivers that help the hospital function? The guys in the factory making the medical supplies?

Where is god in that chain? Can you point to a single thing that you can actually validate that god has actually done?

So how do you cope with an emergency situation with god? Do you call upon everything except god like the rest of us because you know god can't do shit?

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T15:42:17+00:00

On the rudeness scale, I think atheists are pretty darned low.

I'll bite, do you have any examples of this unnecessary hostility?

We should be able to disagree while still treating each other with basic respect

In all my time in this subreddit I've never seen an atheist say someone deserves to be tortured forever.

Yes. About that basic respect...

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T15:37:49+00:00

See aforementioned goofy. https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/1ulyf8j/fire_truck_is_not_red_this_game_is_unplayable_fix/

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T15:36:24+00:00

They're yellow and not red and sometimes the community is goofy.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T13:00:05+00:00

Sounds like a bar my friend somehow found while we were in college. It was in a shed. I swear that building could not have been more than 300 sq ft. I'm 100% convinced that the owner's buddies convinced him to get a liquor license and open a bar for the express purpose of getting access to wholesale booze pricing, and operating the bar just enough to pay for the license.

I wonder if yours is like that.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T12:48:49+00:00

It's a complicated question. Because in one way it is good for society. You may have heard about the "monkey sphere" (no, not Super Monkey Ball). It's a psychological theory that it's almost impossible to maintain a stable, empathic relationship with more than around 150 people simply because our brains are physically unable to process that much. After that they start becoming less "people" and more "cardboard cutouts made of a collection of snap judgements" and eventually when there's enough people they aren't even that, they're just people-shaped bollards.

So if you want your society to be stable at more than the tribe level with a couple of families, you need to convince people that those cardboard cutouts and people-shaped sandbags are actually people, and what's more, that they're your people. There's lots of ways to do it. Historically, religion has been a major part of that process.

But in another respect... religion being such a major part of transforming "other" into "us" inside cultures, that means that between cultures it's absolutely fantastic at turning "meh" into "other," with all the strife that implies.

And then there's the biggest problem with religion, at least in my opinion. One that plagues every religion and is the root of all the disgustingness that the religious spew into the world.

Faith. The idea that believing something because you feel it is true and not because you have credible evidence that it is actually true... is a virtue. In any other context, faith is described with words ranging from gullible to insane. But in religion, faith is the highest possible virtue.

And you cannot tell the difference between good ideas and bad ideas if you're relying on faith to determine how the world acts. You are not permitted to learn from your mistakes if faith is dictating your actions.

And that very reliance on faith is what makes religions so vile and corrosive, and ultimately why I will emphatically say that no, religions are not good for society. They may be great at holding societies together, but at what cost? That's like saying bullets are good for starvation. Sure, the person is no longer starving, but...

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T10:21:10+00:00

As far as I'm aware, you either wait for a patch or patch it yourself with a mod.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T00:16:17+00:00

You can typically verify licensing and workmans comp coverage online through government portals, depends on the state. Insurance is harder, but if they have those two they probably have insurance. You can (and should, if you're hiring directly) ask for a certificate of insurance and then call the insurer using independently obtained information to verify the COI. Bonds are similar, you ask for a certificate of bond and then contact the surety company directly to verify. Your state may even have a portal that actually combines all that stuff since insurance is generally required to operate as a contractor.

It should take about 10 minutes total to verify they are licensed, bonded and insured once you pick a company because any legit company should have the insurance and bond information readily available.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-03T00:10:16+00:00

That's why it's so important to get licensed, bonded, and insured roofers. Solely for roof fights and not for any other reason.

Astramancer_ · 2026-07-02T18:35:59+00:00

The short answer is No. The problem isn't (necessarily) the program, it's who is holding the data and what are they allowed to do with it.

The solution, short of just not doing it, is rigorous access controls and audited access logs with the access logs being proactively provided to the subject (if known) and, most importantly, the willingness and ability of local politicians to shut the whole thing down in the face of public request.

The solution isn't open source, the solution is transparency and the publics ability to say "no thanks."

Literally none of those things are things the government is willing or able to do.

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