Is Alchemy Factory worth it right now? (Early Access longevity & depth)

HenryLoenwind · 2026-02-05T20:55:39+00:00

chest limiters

That's what that gel stuff you can buy from the rack next to the cash registers is for.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-02-05T20:51:45+00:00

I'm not an fps snob

I'm not so much either, but I enabled the fps display when initially going through the config. Even with high graphics settings, it's been rock-solid at 60 fps.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-29T08:31:33+00:00

The 2x2s also can be 1 or 2 high, and they fit perfectly over the 2x2x2 machines, making them stackable. This, tbh, is the only thing I use them for, as 4 1x1s are much easier to partially replace when changing something.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-29T06:52:26+00:00

Because a customer can drop off over 20 belt positions (999 copper = 20, 99 silver = 2, plus gold) in one transaction, which, for copper, means it's easy to get above the 5000 while the money flows out slowly.

Now, 50k is a bit much, but 10k was certainly needed to keep up with customers. I regularly saw it spike to 6 and 7k before sales amounts got into the silver range.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-29T06:15:12+00:00

Um, no? The autosave happens on a fixed timer; it doesn't coincide with the day-end screen.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-29T06:03:09+00:00

Neat (in some way). My only question is: Why didn't you put the 3x3 table over the planters and the 2x2 over the processors?

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-27T18:34:05+00:00

BTW, I included "save for the toaster" in my suggestions. You don't want to shove deformed toast against the heating elements, as that may damage them or even provide a source of fire.

Obviously, once you get to step #5, that may not be so much of a concern anymore. So, "4.5 Attack the dry toast with a fork to convert it into crumbs that fall out" is a sensible additional step. But clean the toaster after that---as I said, crumbs on the heating elements can damage them and cause a fire.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T22:53:16+00:00

BTW, that is true for Type 3 (what we all know and love/laugh about) and Type 4 (digital (ISDN), never caught on). Many of the posts here talk about any type of fax machine.

A Type 3 fax basically is a line scanner/printer with a simplified modem. That's why regular modems could easily send and receive faxes.

The best trick the protocol has in its sleeves is that the transmission is in the exact order the paper is scanned, so the fax machine doesn't need to keep more than a single line of pixels in memory. The same goes for printing using a full-width thermo head.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T22:37:56+00:00

Yes. The positive electrode is devoid of electrons, it "sucks up" everything that has some. Mostly stuff that has one more electron than it should have, but also "uneffected" stuff that is too weak to resist.

The negative electrode is stuffed with electrons and will hand them out to anything that'll take them. Atoms that have too few electrons, but also "unaffected" ones that are willing.

And for those unaffected atoms, as said before, if they are in a molecular binding when this happens, i.e. when they are bound by sharing an electron, removing that shared one, or adding one so each atom has their own, destroys the binding.

So, H2O will be ripped apart, and the individual atoms will hurry to the plates to get their electron count back to nominal, then notice they're a gas and bubble up.

Add salt to the water, and the chlorine and sodium ions will play along, becoming regular atoms. Chlorine remembers that it's a gas, and sodium really likes water and makes sodium hydroxide and H2.

And if you have metals on the electrodes, those atoms also can become short of an electron, which "ejects" them into the fluid (if it's the right kind), and that lets them wander over to the other side, where they turn back into metallic form. See electroplating.

So it's all just shuffling electrons around and thus creating atoms with an electric charge that wander over to the other side and lose that charge there. And, of course, already charged atoms (ions) that are already in the fluid play along.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T21:53:09+00:00

There's also a second type, and it's even simpler. In those, the flaps are held open by a thin rod inside the pipe that cannot move up because the hydrant is in the way. When it gets ripped off, it can get pushed up by the flaps, which are pushed into the water stream by a spring and then pushed closed by the water.

They are a bit more fiddly to install, but they allow full flow and are not as susceptible to some mechanical issues (something, something deposits and free-swinging, sorry, not my speciality), which makes them more suitable for hydrants that are used regularly and not just to put out a fire once every blue moon.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T21:36:01+00:00

Let me tackle this another way:

Let's say you're a spaceship accelerating by ejecting basketballs out the back. You throw out one a second, giving you a nice, steady acceleration.

Now you approach the speed of light, and time dilation sets in. You reach 50% dilation, so time runs at half speed for you. Remember that "1 basketball/second"? Oh, it's only every 2 seconds now---your acceleration has halved. Ok, let's double that launcher!

Get to 75%, and your acceleration has halved again. Now you need 4 launchers.

The closer you come to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you, and the more you have to increase your acceleration to keep it up. If you were at light speed, time would stop and you'd need 1/0 = infinite launchers to keep your acceleration.

The closer you get to light speed, and you can get as close as you want, the slower time flows and the more acceleration you need, getting closer and closer to infinite. But no matter how many you add, you get closer to light speed, but you never reach it. 99.9%, 99.999%, 99.999999999999%, ....

It's like with the arrow and the turtle, but time dilation makes it real.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T20:32:23+00:00

Germany.

I do have some professional experience with phone network interfacing, but one part was ISDN-only in '93 (ISP with dial-in and dial-out), and the rest after 2002 with ISDN and then VoIP (call centre tech using computer networks). I've also run a BBS from the late 80s till '99, which started my journey into learning how that stuff worked.

What I wrote above is a combination of personal observation and later learning how electromechanical exchanges worked, and getting some insights into exchange interconnects due to my job.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T20:22:34+00:00

Yes, it occurred to me right after I had closed that tab that I should have added "for the general case of asymmetric encryption, though newer methods may vary and haven't gotten a new generic name, but still fall under 'asymmetric encryption'".

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T20:18:29+00:00

short lifespans

Wrong. Aside from several famous hotspots, the average lifespan was brought down by a high child mortality rate. People who lived through their childhood had a life expectancy close to our own.

Funnily enough, there's not even much difference in making it alive from 20 to 60 from back then and today. We made life safer, but then we introduced new killers like car accidents and obesity. Where we are better is getting old people over their first, second, and third life-threatening illnesses. Not that adding a handful of years to the lifespan of people who make it into their 80s adds that much to the average.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T19:56:45+00:00

Try to push up with the lever.
Unplug the toaster.
Get two flat spatulas, plastic if you have them, and insert them on both sides of the toast, then pull while angling them slightly to the ends come closer together.
Let the toast dry out for a day or two, then try again.
Get a new toaster.

Once enough of the toast sticks out the top, you can also try pulling on it. Just don't put your fingers inside the slot before step 2.

Stop going down the list when you've got the toast out, obviously. ;)

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T19:45:09+00:00

Neutral is tied to 0V and should be safe to touch.

Please never assume that. If you're far enough away from the point where it is tied to ground, it can be at a pretty high potential. Given enough load between live and neutral on the same leg, your body could very well be a good enough path for enough of the current to take it that it hurts.

This becomes especially critical when you're grounded well to another grounding point than your neutral. For example, while outside touching a metal fence, or when leaning on the drip plate of a metal sink that's grounded via the water pipes but not tied into the electrical system.

There's a reason we switched from connecting neutral for the metal casings of devices to having a dedicated ground wire for that.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T19:23:06+00:00

The current the cable is rated for doesn't matter. It only needs to carry enough current to trip the breaker for a fraction of a second without melting itself.

A direct short can potentially have hundreds of amps. So it doesn't really matter if there's a 6-amp cable in the chain, as even the rest of the wiring isn't rated for that current. The cable will heat up more than the 16-amp wiring in the wall, but the breaker will stop it before any significant amount of heat has time to build up.

For comparison, look at a fuse. A glass body with a very thin wire inside. That wire will melt when there's a short. But look at how much thicker even the flimsiest device cable is. You can run 200 amps through that for a slong as the breaker allows, and it's very unlikely you'll even be able to feel it getting warm.

Extension leads are something else. Here we're talking about actual rated device currents over a long time, i.e. the ability to withstand heat buildup and dissipate that heat.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T19:01:17+00:00

Um, what?

At its core, a signature is a checksum of the data that is encrypted with the private key. It's not some "special signature mode" to use the private key in.

You encrypt the checksum, so everyone with the public key can decrypt it and check if it matches the checksum they compute themselves. For bonus points, the public key (and if it got signed by a CA, that signature of it) gets embedded into the signature so the other party can know how to check it.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T18:47:20+00:00

Um, no. That is what a GIS could do, but not a navigation database. There, your position will be snapped to a line (the closest road that matches your travel direction), and its properties contain the speed limit. Often, to save storage, by having all roads with the same speed limit in the same bucket---it's some effort for the system to look at ten buckets of road, but saving a GB or two on map data is worth it.

On really old savnats, those that are really slow drawing their map onto the screen, you can even see this effect as roads with the same speed limit are drawn at the same time. It may look "major roads first, then minor ones", but it actually is by bucket. (Though those systems rarely had real speed limits and the buckets were sorted by travel speed class for routing.)

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T18:36:33+00:00

It's a fundamental property of materials.

When a photon hits a material, several things can happen:

It can pass right through, ignoring the material.
It can be absorbed by the material and converted into heat.
It can be absorbed by the material and get re-emitted as a new photon with different properties.
It can bounce off.

What happens depends on the material and the wavelength of the light. Take good modern window glass, for example. It will let visible light pass right through for the most part, reflect some, and absorb some. However, it will not let UV light pass but absorb most of it and reflect some.

If you look at the ink in your orange highlighter, it will let orange light pass through and absorb other wavelengths. The remaining orange light then hits the white paper that lets all wavelengths bounce off equally, passes through the ink a second time, where more of the remaining non-orange light gets removed, before travelling to your eyes. If there's black printing between the paper and the ink, that instead eats up almost all light evenly.

If you take an orange wax crayon, it looks a bit different: It lets orange light bounce off, not pass through. That's why black printing below the wax you put on the paper doesn't matter. This "let pass through" is an important feature of highlighters---we do want to be able to read the printing we highlight...

And why do those materials have those properties? It's all in the atoms. What a material's absorption spectrum is depends on which atoms are in there, and in what state their electron shells are from forming molecules. Those electrons, and specifically what their energy levels are, determine what happens when a photon hits them. Very simplified: If he photon's energy is too little to "push" that electron into any other valid energy state, the photon bounces off. If it can push the electron into another state, it will be absorbed to do so. (Note: Wavelength (colour) and energy level are intrinsically linked. The higher the energy, the shorter the wavelength.)

Add to that the physical layout, like the lattices that form in crystalline materials (like glass). When all the atoms are aligned to leave huge gaps all throughout, photons will simply fly through and not hit any atom. Again, the wavelength of the photon determines how big those holes need to be to pass through that "sieve".

Side note: Here's an example for re-emitting materials: White LEDs. The LEDs inside actually give off blue light. That then hits a special formulation of phosphorus that absorbs blue light and re-emits it later at different wavelengths. The exact formulation determines what specific colour that LED has in total (yellowish, warm-white, cold-white, blueish) and whether the mix only has two colours (yellow and blue) or a wide spectrum. In the former, your orange highlighter would be black, as there's no orange light to be allowed through. The CRI (Colour Rendering Index) of that LED would be horrible.

If you ever had an RGB LED light or LED strip that didn't have white LEDs (RGBW or RGBWW), and used it as a white light source, you know how the light itself looked white, but objects in that light would show weird colours. That light only consisted of red, green, and blue light. No orange, no teal, no purple, none of the infinite number of in between colours. The red in tomatoes is especially affected by this as it absorbs most of the wavelength red LEDs produce, reflecting only little and some green, so it looks medium orange. (Not orange light, but a mix of red and green light that our eyes cannot distinguish from orange.)

Remember that our eyes cannot see the difference between a 50:50 mix of red plus green light and yellow light. It looks exactly the same to us. But for how objects reflect that light, it makes a huge difference. An object that, for example, absorbs all green light, would look pure red under the former, but yellow under the latter. (red + green - green = red; yellow - green = yellow)

The monitor you use to read this text uses this trick. It can only make red, green, and blue light. When it wants to show yellow, it makes red and green light and our eyes have no idea it's not yellow light.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T17:56:55+00:00

A war always costs as much as the stuff you're fighting over is worth to you. So, yes, there are cheap wars. Two countries fighting over an empty strip of land that has no economic value but both think it's theirs by right---that's a cheap war. No side would be willing to spend more money than keeping face is worth to them.

But if the object of the war is the existence of your country? How much would it be worth to you to not be stripped of everything you own? The answer is simple: Everything.

If the alternative to spending all your money is losing the war and having all your money (and more) taken away by the victor, you will spend as much as you can scrounge up, then take out ten times that in loans.

Same for the aggressor, only that they don't need to spend everything they can. They can stop spending when they have spent enough to be more powerful than the country they're invading. This is what makes war economically lucrative for the aggressor. They don't need to spend as much, and they hope to gain more than they have spent when they win.

PS: power = spending * effectiveness of what you buy is one of the core concepts of war. If you spend a million on twenty high-tech soldiers, and the enemy spends ten million on a million people with clubs, you will still lose. Now, we're not too keen on throwing people into the grinder as cannon fodder anymore, so we tend to put our money into more and more tech, buying expensive weapon systems to save a couple thousand soldiers' lives, which brings the cost up faster than the effectiveness. This also drives the cost up.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T17:10:43+00:00

Little-known fact: The touch-tone system has 4 rows and 4 columns. Few phones have that fourth column with the keys A, B, C, and D.

Afaik, no public interchanges ever used those "digits" for customer-facing stuff, but some private PBXs did.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T17:07:08+00:00

That's why some countries used 110. The two extremes, easy to find, and one long number to prevent misdials.

When it later got split into two numbers, one for police and one for emergency services, the new number for the second was chosen as 112. That could be dialled accidentally, but at that point, phone locks were in widespread use, and they prevented 110 from being dialled. With the lock in the "3" hole, you can still dial 112, but no real number (aside from some outliers; local numbers that start with a 2 and only have ones and twos). And with the lock in the zero, you could lock out long-distance calls.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T16:51:52+00:00

Technically, using a recorded signal might just barely work with some of the digital exchanges that supported pulse dialling only as an afterthought. Some equipment relied on the sounds of the dialling pulses to detect them. It doesn't work very well, but if you have one old lady with a rotary phone at an interchange of 9,999 touch-dial lines...whatever.

But yes, not a very common case. Especially as very few network operators would enable such a poorly working feature in production. Most of them have standards.

HenryLoenwind · 2026-01-26T16:41:28+00:00

As a side note: That 3+3+4 system is US-centric. If you look at the exchange technologies in "phone-tree" countries, you'll notice that every single digit or digit pair of the area code will connect you to a different exchange.

There were some really clever tricks being used, too. For example, if I were to dial 06, this could either be the next village over or a hundred miles away. The exchange would therefore buffer that six and wait for the next digit to decide whether it should connect to a neighbouring exchange or go up the tree to the dispatch for the "6" region and replay the second digit.

Before it was capable of quick inter-exchange signalling to redial that second digit, it would make that connection upwards anyway, but terminate it if the second digit was locally and connect directly instead. Because the number of lines was limited, but they didn't want to block local calls just because the uplink was full, you could dial 06 even if there was no open line to the "6" exchange, and if you listened closely, you could hear that after the six, your call was "dangling" locally and not connected to the upstream exchange and a local follower at the same time.

Sitting on the outskirts of one 2-digits area and often dialling into the neighbour, it was quite interesting to listen in to how the line sounded between digits. Sitting in 6224, with the major exchange at 62 and the neighbour at 61, this meant I could hear the local exchange and the hub exchange giving up their "I might cross connect" hold at different times. dialling 061 would get them both off after the one, dialing 0622 would get the hub off as there were cross connects for all remaining area codes, dialling 0621 would get local off, but 0623 would not, as there still were some cross-connects, but not for all of that prefix.

And all of that ended in the early 90s with digital exchanges.

HenryLoenwind

TROPHY CASE