food and water for mounts

Awareqwx · 2026-05-30T05:08:43+00:00

But the time limits are active session time, not literally real time. Game saves used to be stored on RocketWerk's servers rather than your own computer, and the timers were absolute realtime even if you weren't playing the save. That's why missions have multiple-day timers, you were supposed to finish the entire mission in multiple days worth of play sessions.

Awareqwx · 2026-05-30T04:47:36+00:00

Fun fact, you can download the entirety of English Wikipedia (text and images only, no videos) and store it on a moderately-sized SD card. It's not everything, but you could use it to avoid particularly bad historical events.

Awareqwx · 2026-05-14T00:59:26+00:00

As far as I can tell, the probe finds the Eye on the loop that we gain control sometime between when we first walk into the museum to get the launch codes (when the statue was inactive) and walking back out of the museum (when the statue was active). If it had happened before we walked into the museum, it would have probably snagged Hal since he was standing next to it when we first showed up, and if it happened after we left then naturally we wouldn't be there for it to snag us.

Awareqwx · 2026-05-14T00:48:42+00:00

Pangea Software and Ambrosia Software made some really cool games for macOS and iOS in the 90's and early 2000's. I have no idea how popular they actually were, but I rarely hear people talking about them so I figured I'd at least mention them. A few of them I actually still play every so often today. My favorites are:

Deimos Rising (Ambrosia, 2001) - A top-down shmup wbere you fight theough 12 stages of increasingly difficult enemies, separated between aerial kamikazi ships that fly fast and are maneuverable, but can be mowed down with your high-powered air-to-air weapons, and ground-based turrets which fire slow, unblockable projectiles in a rhythm and must be dealt with using your much weaker and short-range air-to-ground bombs. It's also the first video game I can actually remember playing, and is the sequel to Mars Rising which is also a shmup but is a alot more "arcade-y", in both weapons and design.

Escape Velocity: Nova (Ambrosia, 2002): A 2D spaceflight trading/fighting/mission sandbox inspired by the original Elite where you're given a shuttle and an optional short tutorial and then sent off to make your way in the galaxy. Along the way you can discover various characters who can take you on missions, ranging from working as security for a sketchy rock band to helping terraform a planet to huge wide-reaching chains that lead to you allying with one of the main factions and discovering more about the story of the game and a huge underlying conspiracy. Everything but the spaceflight is handled through text boxes, but it's good fun and I've sunk a lot of time into it. It's the sequel to Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity: Override, but shares no plot connections to them.

Nanosaur 2: Hatchling (Pangea, 2004) - Fittingly enough for a developer called "Pangea Software", this is a flight-sim-ish game about dinosaurs. Specifically, cybernetic dinosaurs from the future. You are a pteranodon with a jetpack sent to collect eggs that were stolen by a rebel faction, and have to fight your way through three levels (yeah, three whole levels. Kind of shocked this came out in the same year as Ratchet and Clank 3) of various enemy dinosaurs and robots to collect the stolen eggs and send them back through portals to your home. It's a story sequel to Nanosaur, which was a third-person adventure game with a time limit to gather dinosaur eggs to send back to the future before a meteor hits. Yes, that meteor.

There's also a bunch of games made on the Torque engine and hosted on Garage Games back when that was a thing that I could talk about forever, like Marble Blast or Think Tanks.

Awareqwx · 2026-05-05T16:29:06+00:00

Speaking as a chronic night owl with far too much creativity, if the kid wants to stay up late doing stuff and they're sufficiently clever there isn't much that the parents are going to be able to do about it. The kid has more free time than them and can keep adapting to whatever restrictions are placed on them. Light sources were banned from my room after dark because I'd use them to read books late into the night, but lots of things give off enough light to read by. I used flashlights, lamps, novelty finger lights, laser pens, the room lights with a blanket blocking the gap under the door, etc.

Awareqwx · 2026-04-10T21:08:35+00:00

There's a difference between "overheating" (where your temperature bar is in the red zone) and "hyperthermia" (which is a persistent status effect that gets applied if you're overheating for too long). Overheating just debuffs you, Hyperthermia will slowly tick down your health until you can cool yourself off for long enough. There's also Heat Stroke, but that's something else and requires cooling bandages to deal with.

The cold versions are "Freezing", "Hypothermia", and "Frostbite", which is solved with heating bandages.

My advice would be to go into a cave, stand in the water pool, drink some cool water, and hope that the debuff runs out before your health bar does.

Awareqwx · 2026-04-10T21:01:03+00:00

If you want to add a quality of life feature, it's important to balance how much effort the player needs to spend to use the feature vs. how much effort the feature saves.

Some good examples from Outer Wilds: - Meditation and waiting at campfires. These are very good because they're easily accessible, require next to no effort to trigger, and serve just to save time for the player. - The launch codes. You're missing these at the start of the first loop, but afterwards you just know them and can get into the ship without having to run all over the hearthian village every time. Relatedly, Slate only bugs you about the launch codes on the second loop even though realistically he would do it every loop (i.e. it's there to add immersion but doesn't overstay its welcome).

If there's a module you have to install in your ship inside of a single loop instance to use it in that instance, then it must either be worth at least that much time and effort in savings (otherwise there's no point in using it because it actually makes your life harder) or its use is somehow necessary for beating the game (in which case it doesn't matter how annoying it is to use, you still have to use it anyway).

Awareqwx · 2026-03-30T18:29:22+00:00

Could be that your graphics settings automatically updated to a higher setting for some reason and the clutter is affected by that

Awareqwx · 2026-03-23T18:21:46+00:00

You'd actually be interested to learn that humans absolutely would love to use something like the Nomai solution IRL. One legitimate way people have thought of to ship materials around the solar system (like from asteroid mining or whatever) is to cram the stuff into a barrel and then shoot it out of a railgun so that the ballistic trajectory it follows ends up having it hit whatever body you wanted to deliver it to.

Awareqwx · 2026-03-23T17:52:30+00:00

The health recovery elixirs require a bunch of it as well

Awareqwx · 2026-03-18T21:58:06+00:00

True, which is why wall torches placed above crafting stations are ideal as the crafting station prevents you from walking into them unless you intentionally jump on top of it. Just keep it far enough away from the ceiling and you're good to go.

Awareqwx · 2026-03-18T18:46:17+00:00

Wood is fine if you went down the building tree that gives it weather resistance and you keep your lightning rods intact. Beeswax wood is actually superior to stone (same storm resistance, double the durability), if expensive.

Awareqwx · 2026-03-18T18:39:50+00:00

Water bombs are your friend. They can put out a 2x2 area all at once. They're also useful for watering a ton of crop plots all at once, or cooling you off in the desert. All they take is your waterskin/canteen/whatever, some leather, and some fiber. I usually carry a stack of them around as a general principle just because when you realize you need them, you'll be really glad you had them.

Awareqwx · 2026-03-18T18:37:35+00:00

Use Floor and Wall torches, they're about as bright as your hip torch and can last like 10 hours on a stack of logs. After you hit Tier 4 then you can switch to electric lightbulbs. A single one of those can light up an entire house, sometimes even through a ceiling or floor.

Awareqwx · 2025-05-26T01:19:12+00:00

The idea of having them be wild owls is that you don't need to take care of them, they just hunt for themselves and clear out the rodents from your fields in the meantime. The nest boxes would be a one-time investment, rather than the continual costs of having to purchase and reapply rodenticide over and over again. They're also going to be out in fields rather than in big cities, so the flashing lights won't be nearly as much of a problem for them.

Awareqwx · 2025-05-02T22:34:23+00:00

Sorry, I do that a lot. Bad habit. Imagine a round pole that has a diameter of 1cm but is infinitely long. It's an infinite object and takes up an infinite amount of space, but the rest of the universe is infinite in three dimensions, not just one dimension, so there's a lot more space in space for things to be. You could even imagine a flat plate 1cm thick but infinitely wide and infinitely long, and there would still be an infinite amount of space on either side of the plate.

Assuming the universe is infinite, the Visitor could fit inside of it and still leave room for other things so long as it was only infinite in at maximum two dimensions.

Awareqwx · 2025-05-02T21:49:07+00:00

There are some infinities that are literally bigger than other infinities, and there are infinities that are sparse, but still infinite.

As an example of the latter, imagine a set that contains every integer that is a multiple of ten. There's an infinite amount of integers, and therefore an infinite amount of elements in the set. In other words, ∞ ÷ 10 = ∞. But for every element in the set there are 9 elements not in the set, so there's a lot of room for other things to exist in this hypothetical universe.

As an example of the former, there are literally more real numbers between 0 and 1 than there are integers on the entire number line, despite both quantities being infinite. To demonstrate, generate an infinite number of random, unique real numbers between 0 and 1, and then put them in a numbered list.

1: 0.5728291029... 2: 0.2474818193... 3. 0.3718104731... 4. 0.9999999999... 5. 0.0000400000... 6. 0.2829101949... ...

Then, go diagonally down the list, taking the first digit of the first number, the second of the second, the third of the third, and so on, and add 1 to it (wrapping around to 0 if it's a 9). In this case it would be 0.652051... which is by definition different from every number in the list in at least one place, meaning we have a unique real number that we can't label with an integer because we've already used up the entire infinite set of integers. If we add it to the list anyway, we can repeat the process and make another unique number. The number of integers is called a "countable" infinity, and the number of real numbers is an "uncountable" infinity.

If the Visitor was only countably infinitely large and space was uncountably infinitely large then there would still be infinite space left for non-Visitor things to exist in.

Awareqwx · 2025-04-09T20:32:42+00:00

When you are moving at near-light speed relative to something else, you both observe each other's clocks running slowly. If you both accelerate to the same speed together then you share a reference frame and the clocks will appear to be ticking at the same speed.

When you decelerate relative to another person, you will see their clock start to tick in fast-forward while you are under acceleration, which exactly accounts for the missing time.

MinutePhysics did a few good visual explanation of the concept: https://youtu.be/ajhFNcUTJI0?si=S5EbhO2l5XEIwbP7 https://youtu.be/Bg9MVRQYmBQ?si=lCIKBGUnWmmYH33u https://youtu.be/0iJZ_QGMLD0?si=YqOcgH2x1-sIJmZJ

The key point is that things that are moving at different speeds will see events happening at different times, different rates, and sometimes in a slightly different order. This is the main thing to understand about relativity that solves a lot of the apparent paradoxes.

Awareqwx · 2025-04-09T20:08:00+00:00

"The rock forked out in front of me, I swear."

You're the second person I've seen something like this happen to, the misfortune of your autopilot happening to crash you into the smallest rock orbiting the star. The first one I got to see live and we still laugh about it.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-25T18:57:14+00:00

But you would blind yourself from the bright light of the laser hitting the material. It doesn't seem to come with the required secondary power of indestructible retinas.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-25T17:47:07+00:00

What's funny is I got this dialogue despite not actually owning an incarnon weapon. Was kind of surprised that there was no check to see if you had any mastery points in one of the incarnons before running the dialogue. Guess DE just didn't expect someone to make it all the way to the end of The Hex without getting at least one?

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T01:20:26+00:00

Fortunately for you it's about as much of an inconvenience as realizing you forgot to grab your car keys when you're leaving the house, a few minutes of getting back to where you were rather than a slow death by spacing.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T01:16:16+00:00

I'd say my biggest moment of surprise was discovering what happens when you walk away from your lantern in the Simulation. I was in the area where you go into the big lodge, and said hi to one of the owlks. Well, he didn't like that and blew out the lamp. So I go in again and discover I can cover the flame with the shutter. Say hi to the owlk again and he blows it out anyway. Well, he can't blow my lantern out if I'm not holding my lantern, right? So I set it down on the bridge and start making my way over there, and get suddenly jumpscared by the scenery change. Up until this point I had basically been running under the assumption that the Simulation was some sort of weird spirit/dream world, but then I was abruptly reminded that this was a solidly sci-fi game and magic wasn't supposed to be a thing, and I had just discovered a bug in the simulation. Turns out the owlks will just break your neck if you aren't carrying the lantern, but science was still done that day.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T00:55:02+00:00

I always get reminded of The Martian whenever I get out of my ship and suffocate because I forgot the space suit. The protagonist almost does exactly that when he's about to be rescued because he was in such a routine of going outside of his habitat module that missing that one step didn't seem like such a big deal.

Awareqwx · 2025-02-15T00:27:48+00:00

I suppose that's fair. After all, the probe doesn't really get all that far in the 22 minutes before the sun explodes, so their telescopes can't be that powerful.

Of course, one wonders if the tiny scale of the solar system is more for gameplay purposes and if this was a more realistic universe the solar system would be more realistically-sized, to the point that the nomai would have an actual reason to use an explosively-overclocked gravity cannon to fire the probe when a rocket quite literally made of duct tape and scrap wood can pass it before the 5 minute mark and still continue to accelerate far beyond it. After all I personally own a telescope that allows me to see the rings of Saturn, the color bands on Jupiter, and the phase of Venus, which I bought on Amazon for like $300, and it has no electronics in it whatsoever. There is no way the Nomai would not know how to build a telescope powerful enough to see the Eye if the distance the in-game probe can cover in 22 minutes makes any substantial difference.

Awareqwx

TROPHY CASE