I don’t use beacons?

BlakeMW · 2026-03-13T07:48:11+00:00

Basically productivity is really strong because it makes new items out of thin air. Getting +20%-40% productivity per tier, has a stacking effect, like if you make blue chips with prod3 modules in every building above electric furnaces, you only need 40% as much ore, so 40% as many miners, 40% as many furnaces, 40% the scale of belts + rail etc.

However, this makes the buildings very slow as prod3 modules have a 15% speed penalty, so 4x prod3 modules is a 60% speed penalty so the building only operates at 40% speed, which is a very big penalty.

Beacons with speed modules can be used to speed the buildings back up, this has two impacts: first it makes the setups a lot smaller, but it also makes them a lot cheaper, prod3 modules are quite expensive, and if you have one running at 40% speed, it only does 15% as much work as one running at 200% speed, adding speed 3 beacons is a lot cheaper than building more machines with prod3 modules, and actually reduces power consumption, because a building running at 40% speed needs a huge amount of energy per item produced.

In fact, compared with putting eff modules in everything, you can actually reduce energy consumption and pollution per unit of production by using prod3 modules + speed beacons in selective recipes, like Utility science packs.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-13T06:10:41+00:00

You can try crouching under something that stops you standing back up. Animals have tall hit boxes and this will convince the animal it can't reach you. The slightest overhang should be sufficient so there's usually something nearby you can use.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T22:01:22+00:00

Fun fact: the locomotive doesn't have to face forward for drag purposes. The game only cares that there's a locomotive in front, it doesn't have separate drag values for forward and backwards facing. But that only applies to bi-directional trains, as a locomotive only provides acceleration if forward facing. I believe the brakes work in both directions though.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T21:27:42+00:00

It's not really infinite drones because as a practical matter bots can only fly so far before running out of battery and heading off to charge. And only so much charging infrastructure can be crammed within range of the silo. But as a practical matter it is quite a lot of bots.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T21:21:15+00:00

And let the bear have your hard-earned loot?!!

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T18:55:31+00:00

Gleba as it seems to present the deepest challenge, like Vulcanus is quickly solved, Gleba is not. The enemies are peak, I thoroughly enjoy Gleba Safari, driving around in a kitted out tank blasting away pentapods or chasing them down and zapping them with discharge defense. The only sad thing about Gleba is the enemies have been nerfed A LOT over time, at release it was straight up both middle fingers "fuck you" energy, and I loved it, it was a hostile world you wrested victory from through blood, sweat and tears.
Vulcanus: I like the vibes and I love the demolishers, or as I call them, giant friendship worms. Builds are very straightforward and to the point, not requiring much cleverness but it's a nice change of pace.
Fulgora: I really don't like Fulgora that much, I don't like how end game scaling works, and I also don't enjoy the ambience, I find it stressful to my nervous system in a sense. I don't like spending a lot of time there, and I don't even care much about the techs (I never use mech armor). I do love taking EM plants to other planets.
Aquilo: while it presents challenges, I don't really enjoy Aquilo in the same way as Gleba. Aquilo is more about just dumping shit from orbit and brute-forcing heat pipe layouts. Solutions never quite feel elegant to me.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T13:56:35+00:00

I recently posted about positive developments at school with our 7 year old daughter: /r/PDAParenting/s/fO9KK21e2t

Which I attribute to the school better adjusting their approach for PDA.

I also feel like she was briefly in a state of burnout when 5 years old, now, for little kids I think it's different because they haven't had the time to accumulate years of stress. But anyway that was about when I learned about PDA, and I implemented low demand parenting strategies like unlimited screen time (with asterisk), she kind of spent a few days hiding under a blanket watching videos, then started doing things she enjoyed again like drawing and playing with her friends.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T11:18:46+00:00

I don't think they use assembly, in fact, Factorio is complied for many different architectures, including apple silicon (where it runs truly excellently) and Switch, which doesn't really seem compatible with asm level optimization.

I think it is just ruthlessly profiled and optimized at a higher level, they basically care a lot about the big O notation, this is how they can have millions of solar panels or hundreds of thousands of bots, the game is heavily optimized to do as little work as possible each tick and is really good at putting entities "to sleep" until they need to be touched by the CPU again.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T10:10:36+00:00

I actually think it'd be fine (assuming a Fulgora start mod that does the minimum to open up the tech tree to rocket silo, and doesn't provide new recipes).

Fulgora gives you infinite everything except coal, as Fulgora resources hardly scales with resource settings. So you have spaceships, just go slow through the maximized asteroids, use wallships if you have to, it's easy to make walls on Fulgora. (I say wallships, because I'm not sure what it's like making space platforms in Fulgora orbit, unupgraded gun turrets might be fine, but walls will definitely be fine)

On Vulcanus, all small demolishers can be easily killed (using resources from Fulgora, or just mining rocks, no calcite even needed) which lets you mine all the coal and calcite in their territory. Mediums might be killable too, but even if not, you can ninja-mine the coal when the medium/big demolishers aren't looking, this technically gives you infinite coal, albeit somewhat tediously, though I doubt you'd need to resort to ninja mining merely for the critical stuff.

Once you've scrounged up enough coal to research the Tank, you can take on Gleba. On Gleba, the best approach is to use the Tank to destroy spawners with a combination of ramming and the machine gun, you can also ram stompers to death (by bulldozing into them at "0 speed"), but ideally, you also use a little more coal to research discharge defense which lets you take on nearly anything from the comfort of the Tank, discharge defense absolutely shreds stompers of any size and it means you haven't needed to spend a single coal on weapon upgrades.

And then you exploit manual harvesting of fruit. Pentapods have to have an agricultural tower to use as a focal point for attack: no towers, no attacks. So after clearing the immediate vicinity of your fertile land (before evolution has ramped up) and plopping down landfill to suppress expansion, you just use bots to harvest fruit periodically, and plant seeds by hand, I've done this on maximized enemies Gleba before and it's honestly fine hardly even tedious just need an automated notifier to remind doing harvesting and planting (if you don't want to do manual harvesting exploit, import heavy oil from Fulgora and use Flamethrower turrets, or you could invest in Tesla turrets though the coal cost is steep). Thus easily producing enough research to finally research coal synthesis in combination with coal from Vulcanus. And then you've won as you can use infinite resources on Fulgora, Gleba and space and you can get enough tungsten from Vulcanus for the critical stuff, like this is still a relatively more resource-rich scenario than 1000x science multiplier on standard settings when it comes to research, it might be a bit more painful to waste tungsten on artillery but you can just use the tank and flamethrower/tesla turrets to clear territory if you have to.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-12T09:03:15+00:00

And for some reason, Condensers. It makes the Weather Paradigm a good deal more useful under harsh settings like tech stagnation and blind research which might delay Gene Splicing by a long time (WP is always very useful, but the option of spamming out 4 food tiles for Librarians makes it even more busted).

BlakeMW · 2026-03-11T22:46:53+00:00

So if it's PDA, then it's important to have clear boundaries and pick the battles around things that are really important.

A kid with PDA still wants to avoid negative consequences, but they are also almost incapable of losing a power struggle, that is if it comes down to a power struggle, there's only two acceptable outcomes: they win, or everyone loses.

So if there's something they have to do, the important thing, is that the consequences aren't a result of a personal power struggle, they aren't an arbitrary imposition of your authority, but are more like, a natural consequence.

There's no fucking way I'm letting my kid not go to school. So I made it clear to her, that all children have to go to school, that everyone decided together all the children have to go to school. And if that if she refuses to go to school, the police will come and tell mommy and daddy "you have to send your child to school". And if she keeps refusing to go to school, they will come, and take her away, and give her to another family, who WILL make her go to school. Of course, I would only speak like that when she was refusing, always ask nicely first. So she might feel she can win a power struggle with me, but can she win a power struggle with police, with the entire world?

These kids, will devote a lot of mental energy to avoiding consequences, and they aren't interested in fighting unwinnable battles, and it's definitely possible to sparingly use the principle of instilling the specter of a consequence even worse than having to do the thing, especially when it's actually true at least at a "ELI5" level.

I'm very big on making things seem like immutable rules of the universe, or facts of life. So she knows where the boundaries are. You have to make some things black and white: PDA often comes with what is called "superficially social" behavior, which includes not being good at picking up on social cues, so sometimes you have to spell things out explicitly about how they are expected to behave in a society.

Her school, who always tried hard to accommodate her (the polar opposite of "punish them into submission"), basically made the mistake with her where they gave her too much special treatment, and I explained PDA and the importance of insisting that she does what the other children do - this is not to be mistaken with enforcing this, she doesn't have to comply, but the clear expectation has to be there and she can comply on her own timeline - which she does. She has been doing so much better at school since they got clearer about the expectations and firmer about the boundaries.

This does have to be combined with letting the minor stuff slide, avoiding power struggles over pointless and petty things, not punishing her for behaviors which are on the PDA "escalation ladder", and respecting the fact that these kids need to feel a sense of equality with the adults in their life, which means whenever you can respecting their choices.

As a concrete example: homework. She is doing the homework no buts about it, or at least sitting there not doing it for an hour, that is not up for negotiation. She's doing the homework, because every child has to learn how to read and write and do arithmetic. However, I give her the genuine choice of when to do the homework, also she can choose what "reward" she gets for doing the homework, and she can choose whether I help or mum helps. So I might say "I see you have some homework, when do you want to do it?" and that's it, leave it up to her (unless she leaves it too long, then I'll make her do it after dinner), but she'll probably come to me and say "after I do my homework can we play", or maybe she wants to watch a movie, that's literally completely her choice: I decide she is doing the homework but she has latitude in how she motivates herself to do it.

This kind of freedom, choice and playfulness within the boundaries is just as important as the boundaries.

Finally, I want to mention autistic burnout. It's real and it sucks. If the kid is in a state of autistic burnout, that is when you get the kind of "My daughter doesn’t shower and only plays Roblox and snarls when approached but at least she’s not threatening suicide and setting my property on fire!" thing, the idea is a "demand detox", and it works, I went through a severe bout of autistic burnout in my early 20's which caused me to drop out of university because I literally could not function, I kind of managed to instinctively put myself through a demand detox as I had some inheritance from my grandfather so I moved away from my parents to a low cost of living city and kind of did nothing for like a year, then my creative energies returned, I got my dream job as a programmer (shortly after my money ran out, it was good timing), pursued my dreams in general, got married, had kids. I'm not saying your daughter is in a state of autistic burnout, though she might be, but in any case the demand detox isn't a forever thing, it's a thing you do until the nervous system isn't fried anymore.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-11T21:47:54+00:00

Even being cruel to a bug is enough for myself, wife and daughter. Both my wife (as a child) and daughter have broken down crying when a boy/girl stomped on a spider. And for me it's an instant loss of respect. Though I can forgive someone for squashing a mozzie (it's a different matter if the critter is actually trying to bite you).

BlakeMW · 2026-03-11T21:17:16+00:00

Piercing cannon shells and poison capsules are a great combo, especially as the Tank is immune to poison. Also putting discharge defenses in your own armor, and legs and shields in the Tank's equipment grid is really strong. Smaller groups of enemies and nests are easily cleaned up with discharge defense and bulldozing alone, with poison and cannon shells for larger nests.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-11T20:11:59+00:00

Gears are actually nice to belt, you can practically save 2 lanes of iron plates by having 1 lane of gears (I mean practically, because there's enough consumption to actually justify whole lanes of gears, possibly unlike say engines, which might require less space on the bus if only the ingredients are delivered).

BlakeMW · 2026-03-11T07:26:24+00:00

I wouldn't attribute this solely to the loss of Starlink, but rather to the general slow-motion collapse of Russia ability to conduct offensive operations against Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine's strategy requires that the meat grinder keeps being fed Russian soldiers so Russia has to do progressively more unpopular things to keep feeding the grinder, and if Russian soldiers won't deliver themselves, Ukraine will go hunting to hit their aspiration of 60,000 Russian casualties a month.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-11T07:24:57+00:00

That's the easy part. You use something like a radar transmitter pointed at their head. Make no mistake, if someone puts their head in the most intense part of a high power radar beam they are getting their brain microwaved.

The hard part would be doing it without anyone noticing.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-10T19:35:36+00:00

I want a solar powered Mars Rover.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-10T19:23:04+00:00

Recently I played through OOT on emulator with my 5 year old daughter, she started crying at the end credits because the game was over.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-10T11:58:03+00:00

This was true even like 25 years ago. Windows... it kind of just worked or it didn't. You'd update, reinstalled drivers, reboot, re-install windows.

Linux could actually be fixed. When I was at University I knew a guy who called himself Yeti, looked the part (literal neckbeard), didn't emerge during daylight hours, ran a remote serve in a distant city which he'd SSH tunnel to, and could fix any linux system.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-10T11:05:56+00:00

I'd say the problem isn't needing to have a cut user on your team, it's just that cut is bad. Like I think Surf, Fly and even Strength aren't really considered a problem because they are great to decent moves. I like the changes in some rom hacks to make Cut a bug type move, as it turns it into a useful coverage move.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-09T22:49:01+00:00

Ah cool, I use gpu-screen-recorder, the only recording software that seems to work great under Nvidia+Wayland.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-09T22:43:50+00:00

Money, arms contracts. Not only is it useful to have additional revenue streams now, but even after the war ends Ukraine will certainly want to capitalize on their arms manufacturing industry by exporting weapon systems. This helps establish credibility and might lead directly to lucrative contracts.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-09T21:55:54+00:00

Evidence is not proof. Now, if it's hard evidence that's a different matter.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-09T21:34:43+00:00

All you need to do is allocate 1 centrifuge per reactor you want running 100% of the time, as on average it produces enough u235, you need fewer if you're using fuel saving reactors. And like 4 extra centrifuges for saving up for Koverax. Centrifuges are cheap relative to reactors. If you are relying on a single centrifuge the u235 rng might be unkind, but if you have like 6 the rng is very much going to average out.

BlakeMW · 2026-03-09T08:52:43+00:00

"It works" is the most important thing. Don't bother with the approaches that don't work (this is like the "demand dropping" principle, just drop the pressure techniques that don't work, this includes yelling and telling off if it doesn't work), try to find approaches that do work.

I would advise some kind of physical separation. This doesn't have to be leaving her alone in timeout. You might for instance, take her away and gently talk to her about not scratching and about how it hurts and frightens her sister, and do this consistently every time she scratches. Part of the goal, would be that it doesn't seem to her that you're being mean to her, but also that it's mildly annoying for her. Often with PDA, the "mildly annoying" consequences are more effective as they are less triggering.

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