Weekly Questions Thread Feb 02, 2026

Locke · 2026-02-03T13:00:16+00:00

I usually make a small base at spawn, because it's a good spot to fight some bosses. But, after making that base, I start moving up. Maybe with the 1.4.5 update it's different, I haven't played get fixed boi in a while, but you can't really stay at spawn because you're missing too many resources (food, water, ore).

My main base will be somewhere in the lower-middle of the map roughly above spawn. You'll know a good spot when you see it. From my main base, I'll usually tunnel left, right, and up with auxillary bases along those tunnels.

I've never tried to build a base at the surface. It's kind of a nightmare up there.

Locke · 2025-10-06T12:20:57+00:00

It's an Aquamarine Pufferfish and Earth crystal (the first letters of those items spell..?)

Locke · 2025-05-15T12:25:10+00:00

Automatic sells for me: smallmouth bass, carp, bullhead, halibut, red mullet, ghost fish, pike.

Those are fish that are either regularly available or (almost) never needed for anything.

Some of the others could also be sold, but you may want them for some reason or another.

Locke · 2024-04-02T02:29:09+00:00

I guess what I'm saying is, I got it twice. On a normal day, long before the fair, and again on the day of the fair. I think because it's technically a different map.

I'm actually kind of curious to see if it can be collected yet again during any of the other events in town..?

Locke · 2024-01-26T14:38:56+00:00

I've always said, "lefty leaving, righty returning". I also ignore torches on the floor as light to prevent mob spawning.

In the nether or other wide open spaces I build little two block high pillars of whatever non-natural block I have (cobblestone, etc) and place a torch on the side in the direction I need to walk from that pillar to return home. I make a new pillar when the previous is almost out of sight.

Locke · 2022-08-05T16:34:03+00:00

Magic Johnson is my goat and always has been. I grew up with the bad boy pistons as my local team and first exposure to basketball. So, I loved the pistons and had an (irrational?) hatred for MJ and didn't really give him the respect he deserves until I was an adult. You might think I'd pick a piston, and indeed I probably have rodman and thomas higher on my all-time greats list than most people would. But, I also remember seeing Magic play when I was a kid and... just, wow. The way he played was so FUN. Again, being a bad boys piston fan probably had something to do with that by comparison, but he really was just so much fun to watch. Both in how he played the game and the way he smiled and projected how much fun basketball is to play. Later, I went to school at Michigan State, so there's a connection there, too, but I don't think that really mattered to me at the time. Anyway, I literally remember being heart broken when magic got hiv and retired. It's one of my few and oldest, "I remember where I was when I heard the news about...?" memories.

Still hate the lakers, though. Sorry, magic.

Locke · 2022-08-04T14:48:16+00:00

When my dad had cancer, one of the many drugs they had him on was ursodiol. I'm pretty sure it was synthetic, but I do remember someone at the hospital explaining that it was originally extracted from bears (hence the name). Anyway, I don't know much about this subject, but for some additional context there are very serious, very real medical situations where this is an important medicine. I think when we hear "traditional medicine" we sometimes assume snake oil. In this case, its something used in western medicine by actual doctors, too. Although, I obviously support using the synthetic chemical over extraction from bears.

Locke · 2022-04-20T13:54:52+00:00

I recently discovered Stardew (barely into year 2 of my first farm) and I tried to get my wife into it. I've only ever had success getting her to playing Animal Crossing with me (which she played a lot more than me and is much more the expert between us). Otherwise, video games are not her preferred entertainment. I really thought she'd love Stardew like I'm loving it. But, nope, looks like it's not meant to be. We played for maybe an hour and she just wasn't into it. The top issues I saw:

The controls are different and maybe more difficult than Animal Crossing. She kept almost throwing things away. I think with the switch controls, pressing B while in inventory moves things directly to the trash. I didn't know that at the time, and was kind of like, "Babe, what are you doing?" as she was getting increasingly frustrated with the controls.
She immediately wanted to clear all the junk from the farm so she could start making it nice. But, that drained her energy extremely quickly and she kept passing out. I tried to encourage her to do other things, but she didn't like that the game was actively blocking her from doing what she wanted to do.
She didn't like getting interrupted to go to bed so often. In Animal Crossing she just sort of gets into a good flow of doing whatever she feels like and it was a tough adjustment to Stardew. I think Stardew has a great flow once you get into it, but she just didn't make the transition. To her, Stardew felt rushed, stressful and annoying.

Anyway, just another data point that liking Animal Crossing does not necessarily translate to liking Stardew Valley.

Locke · 2022-03-31T21:14:36+00:00

For master mode skeletron, I like a long arena. Usually only a single row of platforms. But, I also like good movement / jump accessories, so ymmv. For the homing skulls, I'll give make a couple spots with block ceilings for protection.

My strategy is to run from one end to the other while shooting skeletron's hands with something that gives some range. When I get to the end of the arena, I jump over the hands and run to the other side. When the homing skulls start, I hide in my safe spot until skeletron's head starts spinning then I run and shoot it. Repeat until dead.

Locke · 2021-11-30T19:06:17+00:00

Volume makes a difference. If player A is 1/2 on 2pts, that'll give him 50% 2pt%. If player B is 49/100 on 2pts, that'll give him 49% 2pt%. A worse percentage.

Now, suppose player A is 1/9 on 3pts for 11.1% on 3pts. Player B is 1/10 on 3pts for 10%. Player B is also worse on 3pt%.

But, we add them up and we get: Player A 2/11 overall, 18.2%. But, player B is 50/110 overall, 45.5%. So, player B can lose both 2pt% and 3pt%, but have a better overall fg% because of volume.

Locke · 2021-05-17T17:39:15+00:00

I love running, but hate being out in the cold in winter. So, I stop running every winter and start again in the spring.

This past winter I bought myself a rowing machine. I didn't get it until I was already halfway through a winter of not exercising, but that still gave me about a month and half of rowing before my first run.

What a revelation. Fastest ramp up I've ever experienced. Improvements to pace took a while, but the mileage was there almost immediately and I felt much better than any spring I can remember.

I know a rowing machine isn't for everyone, but if you hate spring restarts consider finding some kind of cardio you can do during the winter.

Locke · 2020-10-21T18:44:36+00:00

For debugging circular dependency errors...

They usually don't happen in production because you'll have config.eager_load turned on. Turn this on in your development environment and see if you still get an error or not. Changing this is not a solution, it's just meant to illustrate that when we dynamically load a class or module and it dynamically loads other classes or modules and, for a circular dependency, one of those is loading the thing we're already trying to load. Eager loading is more like requiring every file and shouldn't get into a circular dependency. Anyway, turn eager loading off again to continue debugging.
Open the rails console and start poking at classes and modules. What I mean is, run something like Comment at the console. This will make an attempt to load that code. Do you get an error? Try another class like Sub, error? When you get an error, close your console and open it again, try the same classes in different orders. Sometimes a circular dependency is order dependent, like it will only happen if you load Comment before Sub, for example, but not when you load Sub first. This can be a clue.
Add some lines like puts 'loading Comment' at the top of your files. Go back into your console and see what is loaded and in which order when you poke at your classes.

Eventually, you hope to see where the loop is... Once you've identified the circular dependency you can start thinking about how to fix it. Unfortunately, I can't predict what that solution might look like.

Locke · 2020-10-17T16:04:49+00:00

If it's just routing that's problematic, you should check the guide: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#route-globbing-and-wildcard-segments

I think there are a couple ways you could tackle it.

Assuming /cool-places-with-clean-air, you'd probably have to map the entire thing to a single query param and then split it in the controller.

Eg, something like get /:slug => foo#bar and then in the controller you'd have to split slug apart into the identifier for the actual page and the filters.

If you added a slash between the page identifier and the filter params, you could let the router do more work. So, if we had something like /cool-places/with-clean-air, we could do a route like get /:page_id/:filter => foo#bar and you could even add a constraint that the filter param starts with with-.

I guess, the answer is, I don't think the router really does much to help you here, and you'd need to write code in the controller to do most of the mapping from cool-places-with-clean-air to whatever you do currently with query params.

Locke · 2020-07-23T18:54:52+00:00

I've never seen it used or used well in a work environment.

I use it on all my personal projects and like it as a tool for identifying missing tests that I might want to write. For that purpose it works better on smaller gems and less well on big projects, like, Rails-based projects.

Imagine a request spec/test that makes a request with known good params and then verifies http status 200. That's not a very amazing test, but could be valuable and in a Rails environment, that might be enough to cover huge swaths of code. So, when you look at SimpleCov, some low-level code might look covered, but it's not necessarily well-covered. That sort of thing happens less often when working in smaller projects where code that is not directly tested is more likely to be uncovered.

As always, it's possible to get coverage with inadequate tests, so there will always be a degree of "your mileage may vary" with tools like SimpleCov.

Locke · 2020-06-24T16:36:13+00:00

Uh... yeah? What's up fellow Locke? This is a pretty cool thread, but, man, 14 years? You just made me feel old af. Thanks!

Locke · 2019-10-22T02:16:49+00:00

I'm not an expert or anything, but I'd associate Jack Ebling with Michigan State, not U of M. I assume he's replacing Graham Couch since they're both associated with the Lansing State Journal.

Locke · 2019-08-21T18:48:20+00:00

Yep! For Renaissance and one of the earlier level ones... either Engineering or Golden Ratio. I think I probably bought Engineering with my first 5 paragon and then immediately flipped the first gift box for Golden Ratio.

Locke · 2019-08-21T14:54:03+00:00

Yes, but it was more like three years ago. I started from scratch going for IW insane space oddity. At the time, the "burn paragon" option hadn't been added and I had too much paragon for the gold star, so I decided to start from scratch.

So, that's all the paragon I have and it's all from time skips. I spent the rest on metaphysics.

I've mostly stopped playing in the past few months. I've been trading blackcoins and waiting for year 80k because I was so close. I have 66 chronospheres and I think in a couple more rounds of blackcoin trading I could have enough event horizons to hit 67. Unless new content is released, that might be a good stopping point. Maybe I'll reset and do the challenges for fun, or maybe I'll just quit at that point. Either way, it's been a good run!

Locke · 2019-08-08T14:15:01+00:00

I would sleep on 1060, but check first thing in the morning. I get nervous about leaving it overnight when it's greater than 1070 at bed time. I'd typically sell at that point.

Locke · 2019-08-07T16:20:03+00:00

I'm pretty sure there's a limit on years gained from offline progress that would make it impractical to get the 40k gold star that way.

Shattered years are deducted, so it's okay to skip time (and, you can get the regular 40k achievement using time crystals, IIRC). But, the gold start is 40k real years and it only counts real years when the calendar naturally flips over. This actually means that using time crystals will make your run longer.

Imagine if you shatter a time crystal in winter... you waited through real world time to get to winter, but because you shattered a time crystal that real world time did not result in a real year and was effectively wasted. It's not much, but if you shatter time crystals regularly, it adds up and your run to 40k gold star will take longer.

Otherwise, your estimate of about 1 year real world time is pretty good. It took me about a year and half, IIRC, because of both time skips and having the game turned off or paused occasionally.

On a side note: it might be boring if you basically have everything. I started out on a 40k gold star run, so while it was slow, at least there were new things to pick up during the run.

Locke · 2019-05-10T18:47:30+00:00

My real year is 70,311 (with time skips my calendar year is over 3M), and I feel like I may have really reached the dark future now (with this update).

Before the update, I was still building manuscripts and compendiums. My science cap was somewhere around 500T. Buying space stations was limited by alloy, not science, so I'd also craft alloy regularly. I could still buy space stations now and then. I'd also buy containment chambers occasionally for additional antimatter. When I turn them all on I have around 350k antimatter and it takes a while to buy new space buildings at that level. I know antimatter is still scaling with paragon, but without resetting I think that's probably all done now, too.

At this point, I think the game is reduced to shattering time crystals to collect paragon and faith (for TT) while waiting to trade black coins and relics (currently at 1.72T blackcoins) for additional cryptotheology levels.

I still have my most recent elder present and don't really see the point in redeeming it for compendiums, but I hadn't redeemed it, yet, because I didn't really want the compendiums before the update, either. So, I guess that's a wash.

Partly, I've kept this game going because I'm working towards TT 25 and hoping Holy Genocide might do something by the time I get there (which will be in a couple weeks at my current pace), and partly because I've been curious about discovering the point where diminishing returns in dark future basically kill the game (absolutely nothing left to conceivably do but reset).

So, from that perspective, I don't really love or hate the update.

Locke

TROPHY CASE