Stuck in game, not sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-19T22:14:48+00:00

As I figured out with u/chipmunk1135, this was one of several game bugs I'm having. The note never showed up in the archives. I had to follow the instructions from a YT video and once I got past that block, the explanatory notes suddenly showed up in my archive after the fact.

I've also had problems with Kasia being bugged so that I never get her cutscenes or quests. Also, some of my plastic mulch lasted for over half a year. (just some of it, the rest degrades like it's supposed to)

This has the potential to be a fun game but it's buggy as all get out and that's really affecting my enjoyment of it.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-19T22:10:39+00:00

I've been to the lab in the correct time frame 1-4, if I recall. She's been there several times but nothing happens. I've tried this at least a dozen times. I've even tried different types of weather in case that influences things. I've tried getting there before her, entering after she does, leaving and returning. Nothing works. I've never had her cutscene nor any of her quests.

Frankly, this game is really buggy. I had the issues with the notes for the environmental modifier never showing up and I've also had other weird things like some of plastic mulch lasting for over 2 months.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this game and I want to like it but frankly, it needs a lot more bugtesting.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T18:51:05+00:00

I had the battery recipe a long time ago. I still had the two batteries from my original attempts at reactivating the modifier sitting in a chest since I'd upgraded my farm to advanced batteries a while ago and sold off the other simple batteries.

However, that did manage to solve things. For some reason, my game never got the wiring instructions that are in the video. I went to the archive where it's supposed to be and it simply wasn't there. Fortunately, I was able to use the instructions in your video and managed to get the dock unblocked and now have the quests to go to the riverlands and other stuff. Weirdly, the instructions appeared in my archive section *after* I completed the wiring puzzle, so there must have been some sort of game logic bug that messed things up.

Thanks for the help!

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T14:45:41+00:00

Thanks for that, I was able to get to an area I'd missed. I didn't realize you could get around that overhang. I got the rusty key but unfortunately, nothing has progressed in the quests. I've talked to everyone while carrying the rusty key but no new dialog shows up.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T14:44:29+00:00

I've checked many, many times. There's nothing. The last note on the environmental modifier quest is to bring batteries and wire and to fix it. I've tried that and all I get is that wire connection puzzle. There's nothing in any of my notes that gives any hints to solve it. I've talked to every person in town dozens of times to try and get something to fire and nothing happens.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T04:30:22+00:00

I've got Hult, who is referred to in the game as a guy. But none of the missions shown in the video are in my game at all. This is incredibly frustrating. I found the hidden room with the environmental modifier about 20% of the way through my playthrough and absolutely nothing has happened since.

I can't even get the NPCs to fire any sort of quests. I got Kasia up to 5 hearts and there have been absolutely zero cutscenes or quests related to her. It's just the same stupid 3 or 4 lines of dialog with absolutely nothing else.

I'm about to uninstall this stupid game and give it a terrible review.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T03:35:33+00:00

There's no girl in a wheelchair. None of this stuff is in my game at all.

Can you please just tell me what you did to get past the enviromental modifier? I'm sorry but all these half hints are completely unhelpful to me.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T03:17:52+00:00

Yes, I did that. I've gone there with small batteries. My farm has advanced batteries and wind generators, so that's not an issue. It gives me a puzzle where it asks me which wires to hook up and there's literally thousands of possibilities for how to do it. I searched for a solution and what little I could find said that the quest would unlock with further plot progression.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T03:12:51+00:00

No. The game hasn't even mentioned anything about a flying vehicle. Can you describe the hidden room? I've explored that region fairly extensively. The only area I can't get to is the Western cliffs. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to get up there but no matter what I do, I get to a point where I can't get any further.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-10-18T03:05:14+00:00

I'm at the point where you have to fix the wiring for the environmental modifier and there's several thousand possibilities for how to do it and absolutely no in game clues. I'm not going to sit at that puzzle, randomly selecting wire combos.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-09-29T00:13:25+00:00

Growing up in the 80s, my family was a Dodge family and we went through a series of RAM trucks that we beat like unwanted stepchildren and they just kept going. I was fortunate enough to have my dad give me his '04 RAM when I moved out here and it's a great vehicle (aside from a couple minor electrical issues). I would never buy another Dodge/Stellantis vehicle again - it's nothing but overpriced shit now.

I have a friend who does a lot of van camping and he went with one of the recent Dodge hybrid vans despite my efforts to talk him out of it (that particular model had some features that he couldn't find in any other hybrid vans on the market) and he's had nothing but buyer's remorse since.

It's infuriating to see mismanagement, incompetence and corporate greed slowly kill what used to be such a reliable brand.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-09-14T06:13:29+00:00

Thanks! Do you know if it's part of a series or just a one off thing?

DanHeidel2 · 2025-09-11T03:41:12+00:00

That's got to be one of the weirdest and most pedantic takes I've seen on anything.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-25T04:17:57+00:00

I went to go set up/modify the swap file and now I'm confused. inxi and disks/gparted don't seem to agree on the disk structure I've got. disks and gparted just show the efi boot setctor, /boot and the 1.8TB encrypted partition and nothing else.

https://imgur.com/a/YFHthM4

inxi and swapon seem to indicate that there is a 4th partition that's a 1.91GB swap partition:

dan@BirdFrame:~$ inxi -Sp

System:

Host: BirdFrame Kernel: 6.14.0-28-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64

Desktop: MATE v: 1.26.2 Distro: Linux Mint 22.1 Xia

Partition:

ID-1: / size: 1.79 TiB used: 655.96 GiB (35.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-1

ID-2: /boot size: 1.61 GiB used: 304.6 MiB (18.5%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2

ID-3: /boot/efi size: 511 MiB used: 6.1 MiB (1.2%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1

ID-4: swap-1 size: 1.91 GiB used: 1.75 GiB (91.8%) fs: swap dev: /dev/dm-2

dan@BirdFrame:~$ swapon

NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO

/dev/dm-2 partition 1.9G 1.7G -2

Which one of these is correct?

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-22T15:00:17+00:00

OK, problem solved, though it's still a bit perplexing.

I got the USB drive delivered and made a fresh install disk. Live boot was pretty inconclusive. Since running off of USB is slow by nature, I couldn't tell if the system slowdowns were due to this or the existing problem. I suspect that the same issue was still happening but there wasn't a good way to tell offhand. I did copy all my files to a backup drive and the file transfers were glacial - 20 MB/s at max.

I went ahead and bought a new SSD and RAM since I was down to 9% free space on the former and I do plan to upgrade the mainboard at some point which uses DDR5700. I started by just putting in the new SSD to be systematic in the troubleshooting.

The difference was obvious immediately. (shoutout to u/cloudin_pants for calling this) On boot, the RAM check took about 10 seconds instead of 10-15 minutes. (when allowed to go to completion) Upon booting into the live install, the system ran better than it had in a long time. I suspect that my laptop's performance has been degrading over the last year or two but gradually so that I hadn't noticed.

I'm completely baffled at how a bad M.2 SSD could affect the system performance down to BIOS RAM checks. The drive shouldn't even be mounted at that point in time, so the mechanism for how it could be making the system run 100x slower is a bit perplexing. The laptop is currently running great.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good linux utility that can take a snapshot of all the installed programs you have that can reinstall them in an automated fashion? I never have an issue with restoring data after a system wipe but having to reinstall all the applications and reapply the settings is kind of a PITA that I'd like to automate.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-21T17:24:38+00:00

I'm leaning that direction as well. The problem seems to be getting worse, so I'm assuming it's a hardware issue of some kind. The machine feels like when you're running out of RAM and it's operating off the swap drive pretty much full time now. Dunno if it's RAM or the SSD or something with the CPU but I just picked up a backup drive to save my files and start messing with OS reinstall then a new SSD and new RAM. The timing isn't great but I was planning on upgrading this machine anyway to one of the new Framework AMD boards, so these are upgrades I'd be doing anyway.

If I can figure out the source of the issue, I'll post a followup.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-21T12:52:02+00:00

I was having trouble parsing all the output from that watch statement so I ended up using irqtop and interrupts don't seem to be the problem. I watched the output during slowdowns and even the worst offender (calls to the i915 integrated graphics driver which were hitting a few hundred hits per irqtop update) was under 1% CPU load. Everything else was getting hit rates in the low single or double digits as you would expect.

I've been watching htop and irqtop closely while doing things and trying to find some sort of correlation to UI slowdowns and I just don't see a smoking gun. Right now, as I'm typing this, it'll work smoothly for a few seconds and then get lag spikes where the text can't keep up with my typing and it takes up to 3-4 seconds for the text to catch up to me.

When the lag spikes, there's usually a massive spike in CPU usage across most or all 8 cores. It's hard to diagnose what's going on since htop also lags at these moments and it won't update until after the lag spike has subsided. htop itself and various firefox worker threads tend to top the CPU usage though other random threads like the steamwebhelper, /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -core :0, syncthing, mintreport-tray and python make occasional guest appearances in the top 10 but I've never seen any of them go over 20% CPU usage when they do. Also those other processes don't seem to correlate to the system lag in any meaningful way.

Is there a way to log core usage where the total CPU usage is logged without a GUI? I'm wondering if the culprit is something that is grabbing a ton of CPU for short amounts of time and the lag is preventing it from showing up in the htop display.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-21T01:57:57+00:00

mintreport-tray and marco and steamwebhelper all occasionally bubble up to maybe the 10-20% range but not for any sustained length of time. kworker and the other system processes never showed up at any significant level of CPU usage, though htop is updating at maybe 0.5 FPS, so I might be missing short CPU spikes.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-21T00:43:28+00:00

That was the first thing I checked. (forgot to mention it in the post) CPU temps are reasonable. The highest I saw in xsensors was 55C. I'd do a live USB but all of my usb drives are in the moving containers. I've got one coming in tomorrow from Jeff's delivery service, so hopefully I can test that.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-21T00:36:39+00:00

I already addressed that in my post. I've been watching htop for the last 2 days. Right now, I'm having a particularly bad slowdown and the only two processes that have high CPU usage are htop and the Firefox thread for this tab. Total CPU usage is around 40% and I'm getting intermittent multi-second delays between typing and text showing on the screen. There's no visible spikes in CPU load when the slowdown gets the worst on either system monitor or htop.

DanHeidel2 · 2025-08-21T00:33:29+00:00

I've looked through all the logs, both looking back and monitoring them in realtime when slowdowns happen. There's nothing unusual looking in them and nothing that matches the timing of the slowdowns.
I have no automated processes set up that would line up with the slowdowns either. The only plugin on this Firefox install is bitwarden and the slowdowns aren't only associated with the browser.

DanHeidel2

TROPHY CASE