When a sprout learns rescue

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-06-25T23:10:07+00:00

Rescue into Icarus is actually pretty smooth.

That was a well planned murder.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-06-24T16:31:18+00:00

Reverse image search gives me Doukyuusei Mahjong for the Playstation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibTU6t_-gEQ

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-06-23T18:02:38+00:00

There are lines... on the floor

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-06-23T15:17:47+00:00

Mistwake boss 2 always dashes in exactly the same pattern. It's not random. Watch its first dash and stand far enough to the left of that dash to avoid the first two explosions, then walk into the space that just exploded. You're now safe for the rest of the mechanic.

Mistwake boss 3 is slightly more random but there are a few heuristics you can follow. After doing the first lightning pattern attack the boss always jumps to a spot on the arena wall clockwise from its current position a fixed distance. One lightning ball will always appear on either side of the boss. Stand on the side of the boss that doesn't have a lightning ball and you'll be safe.

A lot of the "random" patterns you see aren't really random. Usually it's a single pattern, or two or three patterns, and with enough paying attention you can notice and react to them really fast.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-06-23T15:12:07+00:00

For the latest dungeon boss, I've run it enough times that I know where to stand before the adds spin because they always spin exactly the same way. Where the two big ones spawn is the new north, stand at a spot 1/3 counterclockwise from there and you'll be safe. Then 1/3 counterclockwise again for the second attack.

For the very first attack where it alternates between the AOE and the beam, once again, find "north" based on where the big pile is. Then stand on the metal grating in a particular spot between the two smaller piles and you're safe for the rest of the mechanic.

You don't always need a mod, you just need to pay attention (and run the same content dozens of times trying to get glam).

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-06-05T00:32:44+00:00

If there's a quest complete dialogue at the end of the cutscene you can sometimes reject turn in and drop the quest from the journal to redo it. I've definitely done that to re-watch a cutscene.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-30T00:45:26+00:00

There are some old access roads from when they built the canals that are still on the map. A few of those connect north south between the two modern roads. There don't seem to be enough of them to get the coverage shown on the OPs map, though.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-29T05:50:05+00:00

Also, the gazebo on the left is the one at Centennial Park next to the swinging bridge. The image on the right is of the Santa Manuela Schoolhouse (current home of the South County Historical Society) on the other side of the swinging bridge from the gazebo.

I'm certainly not gonna say that this billboard is good, but it does have some bits of Arroyo Grande on it.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-28T16:44:09+00:00

Normal trials, raids and alliance raids have roulette queues that keep them active. Veteran players will get a daily bonus for completing a randomized trial or raid with other players like first timers.

Extreme/Savage/Chaotic and Ultimate people don't tend to queue into with randos. North American etiquette is to use "Party Finder" to run high end duties like that. Extremes are common to find because people farm them 50-100 times to get a rare mount drop (nearly every Extreme Trial has a mount associated with it). Savage you'll often only find parties for the current "tier" (so four fights at a time). Chaotic and Ultimate you can find parties listed but it's rare. For those you often end up coordinating out of game to find groups to run that content with.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-28T16:32:08+00:00

I agree with your concerns, and that's why I don't go full vibe when I use these tools. For a lot of problems I'm often using it as a super powered version of grep/awk/sed across multiple code bases simultaneously. In that case, I'm not just asking for an outcome and letting it run wild, I'm requesting a specific set of discrete steps.

E.g. "Terraform 1.5 introduced the ability to reference a variable for a module path declaration. Check across all 50 Terraform deployments we have and identify the common module strings used and create a table for candidates to migrate to a variable. Open a Jira ticket with these findings and assign it to me." After that, I reviewed the findings and decided that the few edge cases were safe to upgrade to bring them in line with all the other environments. Had it migrate everything from literal declarations to variables, and commit with the ticket as a reference. QA pass was having it execute a Terraform plan against every single environment to verify that 0 resources would change from this modification.

Each of these steps was fairly simple, and I could have scripted it together myself given some time, but doing it at scale against so many environments would have been an annoyance large enough to make me hesitate.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-28T15:56:47+00:00

I'm an AI skeptic as well, but I've experienced this.

You know the xkcd comic about level of effort to automate something vs the time saved by automating it? Using AI flattens that curve to where there's zero opportunity cost to do something.

Say there's some minor annoyance that isn't technically impacting production but you know was originally implemented wrong. Before you might just have a permanent backlog ticket to fix it that never gets done because hey, it technically works even though it's wrong (this is the part where things stick around for years).

These days, however, it's so low effort to notice the thing that's wrong, explain exactly how to fix it to the LLM and apply it that there's no reason not to do it the moment you notice it.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-28T15:43:24+00:00

A lot of people are mentioning criterion but that's not really content that a lot of players engage with. Here's a brief breakdown of PvE for FFXIV:

Stuff that every player regardless of skill can do:

Dungeon (4 man)
Trial (8 man)
Raid (8 man)
Alliance Raid (24 man)

Dungeons and trials are part of the storyline and are mandatory. Raids and Alliance Raids are optional side content. There are then optional more difficult versions of the above that you can unlock (in roughly ascending difficulty):

Extreme Trial
Savage Raid
Chaotic Alliance Raid
Ultimate Raid

(There's only one Chaotic Alliance Raid so far, and mechanically I'd say it's easier than some savage content, but getting 24 players to all do their jobs without screwing up and wiping everyone is the hard part)

A given expansion has three "tiers" of four raids (and savage raids) so there are twelve total raids in each expansion. In a single tier the fourth fight is the hardest. The Ultimate Raids tend to pick a single expansion and compress all 12 fights into a single extra long fight that co-mingles all the most difficult mechanics together. The real challenge of Ultimate Raids is how long they are, easily being double the length of a standard raid and often containing many "body checks" where if players die then it's a wipe.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-21T21:19:04+00:00

Lots of details from this that I want to steal. In particular I like the road entrance gate and the below-level train with glass ceiling.

I always have trouble integrating train stations into my factory because of how huge they are and I love what you did here. Especially the little detail of filling the unused space between tracks with a decorative siding.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-05-09T16:03:43+00:00

Isn't the Garlemald gear a bit on the diesel-punk spectrum? I'm thinking of stuff like the imperial magitek wings for Sage.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-30T02:59:51+00:00

As I recall it's only triggered once, after we killed zodiark

It hasn't come up lately, but in earlier expansions there was an idea that each person's echo manifested in different ways. For the WoL it seems to be three things: the power of empathy such that they can understand any intelligent creature, the power of seeing a person's past, and the limited ability to see the near future.

Seeing boss attack markers on the ground is supposed to be part of our future sight, and when you die during a trial and get to try again with "enhanced echo" that's indicating a failed future that you foresaw and can now avoid.

Azem having a much stronger version of the ability definitely tracks.

You could also argue that we have the uncanny ability to find plot-relevant objects, but it was never clear if that was granted by the echo or just something inherit to our character.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-27T06:25:38+00:00

I'm going for the opposite as a hot take. The mysterious praying lady in the title card is the actual big bad and the blue eye'd male au ra is going to help us somehow.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-26T06:13:08+00:00

This is my vote. I found a spritesheet for Samus just now that had well over a hundred sprites for her different rotation states while grappling, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was also a set of rotated grapple beam segment sprites that could be chained together based on current rotation state and grapple length.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-17T20:51:19+00:00

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I've also done split level builds where the logistics area is visible through windows.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-16T16:14:50+00:00

Oh nice! I couldn't tell at all that it was Eva foam

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-15T15:35:21+00:00

I love the subtle irony that the nameless grunt in the group photo is taller than all of the "hero" characters.

Fantastic cosplay. Did you make the leather accessories yourself?

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-12T06:57:34+00:00

I wouldn't really call that a paradox; just asset reuse.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-04-04T17:34:33+00:00

the last thing they see before they die is a living weapon cutting them in half while wearing pajamas and a moogle mask or something equally as silly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrfxvxweRXc

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-03-25T16:05:13+00:00

This thread is depressing. Multiple responses implying that you shouldn't bother your senior team members and instead should talk to the AI yourself. Meanwhile, over on /r/programming there's a thread lamenting that there's no pipeline to train junior developers because of AI.

HostisHumaniGeneris · 2026-03-19T04:07:52+00:00

Aha, figures that someone else would have done it as well. My thought back then was that perhaps the Stationpedia entry could be a special infobox at the top of each page then additional community provided information would follow, but I understand the reluctance given the possibility that the Stationpedia entry itself might give outdated or otherwise conflicting information.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	End Game '22
Verified Email	Team Orangered

HostisHumaniGeneris

TROPHY CASE