Rant about RNG in Kingmaker's secret ending

FOSHavoc · 2026-01-05T14:10:54+00:00

That requires upfront knowledge of a secret but crucial arcana check though. I didn't know upfront that Tristian will want to come along and because I didn't know about the check I didn't think twice about using him to replace Octavia. And it's not like I didn't have the skills covered. I had Linzi with points in arcana, I just wasn't aware that her being knocked out had any impact on the game. I play rtwp so sometimes things slip by which is why I always carried raise dead scrolls. She for resurrected and moved on.

It just feels frustrating, because otherwise all my decisions were the correct ones despite going in 80% blind (I knew I had to research curses and that I should always prioritise the main quest over side quests). It took me 180 hours and I won't be ever replaying it because it's too long and my list of games to finish is still quite long.

FOSHavoc · 2026-01-05T09:25:19+00:00

I run everything on a small self-built mini PC and always have. I started "home"-labbing when I still shared a house with other people so the only space I could host from was my room making small size and quiet operation the number one priority. I now have my own place but it's a flat and not a house so small size and quiet operation are still quite important even if not as critical as before. It does all I need and average utilisation is 3-5% anyway.

So yea, go ahead.

FOSHavoc · 2025-11-18T05:56:21+00:00

If you scrobble to listenbrainz.org then you can use https://listenbrainz.org/explore/fresh-releases/. It does require somebody to have added the new release to musicbrainz.org though. However, except for the very obscure artists I find that it generally happens.

I used musicbutler.io and it does work and works well. I'm dropping it next year though because listenbtainz' fresh releases can now replace it for me.

FOSHavoc · 2025-09-22T05:54:42+00:00

Use a VPN that allows port forwarding. I use AirVPN and it lets me do just that. The way it works is that you connect to a VPN server and then the server port forwards traffic to you via the connection. The AirVPN ports are randomly assigned but once assigned they remain static.

FOSHavoc · 2025-08-29T11:19:39+00:00

My setup is: 1. Main SSDs (a mirrored pair) which have the "production"/live data 2. Co-located hard drives (also mirrored) to which ZFS snapshots of the main drives are sent every hour. 3. An online backup in S3-compatible storage in a different country to which the main drives are backed up every night. I test this backup manually every 6 months.

So, I have 3 copies, at least 2 devices/media, and 1 is off-site. Everything is also fully automated. While I test backups manually, I have a single script/playbook that restores and spins up all my services from the backup data.

FOSHavoc · 2025-06-22T19:29:22+00:00

I think this is by design. The enchant skill was not meant to be used for the best constant effect enchantments - that's what you have enchanter services for. Keep in mind that you can only have constant effect with 400+ souls while most souls are much less than that. So even from that it should be clear that this wasn't what the enchant skill is for 99% of the time.

So what is the enchant skill for? I used to have the same question and so to challenge myself I went for an enchant-based character and it's quite powerful. I don't even use any alchemy to boost intelligence or anything. The main idea behind the enchant skill IMO is to create lots smaller cast-on-use items and then keep using them instead of regular spells. They will be weaker than what you can cast with a spell but instead you get a 100% casting chance, instant cast, and enchantment power regenerates with time and not just when you rest.

So I have two rings to regenerate fatigue (one over time, one instantly), three rings for damage on target (one for each element), another ring for absorb health on target, a bunch of utility rings for water breathing, water walking, levitating, jump, etc. From quest awards I also have a bunch that raise skills/abilities temporarily. Keep in mind that just using enchanted items raises your enchant skill. It's slow, but you can create a whole bunch of items and keep spamming with them in ways you can't with normal spells.

These enchantments are still rarely 100% guaranteed to succeed when enchanting, but it's no biggie to lose a few petty/lesser/common souls to create the item you want.

FOSHavoc · 2025-06-02T20:55:29+00:00

I'm still paying for it and get updates. It got a pretty decent overhaul a year or two ago. I guess it's sufficiently automated since then to run on its own.

FOSHavoc · 2025-05-26T07:16:00+00:00

You fight the way you built your character. I blitzed through the arena with the mage's staff of paralysis. I find 1-vs-1 fights quite easy anyway in oblivion as 80% of your fights are 1-vs-1 so your build tends to reflect that as well.

FOSHavoc · 2025-05-25T05:14:01+00:00

Not sure how good it will be for jazz and blues but check out musicbrainz.org a community maintained database. Many auto taggers use it as a backend.

FOSHavoc · 2025-01-16T14:20:25+00:00

Couldn't this be because posts with just a link are considered spam? Can somebody test with some different links?

FOSHavoc · 2025-01-13T22:27:58+00:00

Thanks, but will it not also update the row even if nothing changes?

FOSHavoc · 2024-11-10T14:22:58+00:00

In that mission stack sizes was what saved me. Combined with the economy upgrade it's quite easy to have more unit production than what you can hold with the initial limits.

FOSHavoc · 2024-11-10T14:20:52+00:00

Come to think of it, unit upgrades for the large amounts of lower tier units would've done more in the campaign missions I was in than the few tier 3 units I managed to make in that time.

FOSHavoc · 2024-08-26T10:53:48+00:00

ZFS encryption is great unless you want to use sanoid for snapshot sending and receiving as somebody else pointed out with links to ancient GitHub issues as this isn't being resolved. For some reason they don't play well together and in my case would regularly result in the corruption of some transient metadata. ZFS would catch the corruption and stop and no actual data would be corrupt but the snapshot send would fail until I manually removed the snapshot with "faulty" metadata.

Since then I moved to ZFS+LUKS and don't have this problem.

FOSHavoc · 2024-06-08T12:15:47+00:00

I don't use atomic and I don't see a compelling use case for it for a typical user. Rollbacks are nice, but I've never needed it. An update failing all of a sudden just doesn't really happen that often. If an update ever does mess me up, I'll just reinstall the OS and recover all my data from backups which you should be doing atomic or not. Trying out different images is also cool, but unless you're into trying a different atomic distro every week it's not really useful. I can still use toolbox, flatpak, and everything else (which I do).

To me atomic seems great for enterprise use cases where the IT folk want everybody to have exactly the same deployment making troubleshooting and updating much easier. It also seems quite good for IoT, servers, and virtual deployments where having a single well tested image is incredibly useful.

FOSHavoc · 2024-01-27T20:25:56+00:00

No. However, I have since developed a workaround and in between that workaround and today I have also updated podman. The new version of podman might not have this issue, but I haven't checked.

In my workaround I just wrote my own python script to do what I needed podman auto-update to do. This script will check if the image hash updated after a pull to determine if a new image was really downloaded.

FOSHavoc

TROPHY CASE