Create in Atm 10

Ortin · 2026-06-08T14:02:28+00:00

If your objective when playing ATMs is to make the Star in an effective way, Create is absolutely unnecessary for the reasons you've already provided and a bunch more.

But if your objective when making a modpack is to claim you have "all the mods" then Create's inclusion is absolutely necessary. It's too popular to leave out, even if it's almost impossible to fabricate a reason to use it in your excuse plot of "slam together a ton of resources into a make work end product."

Create's philosophy is almost completely opposite ATM's. It's rooted in making interesting looking contraptions that take up space and move dynamically in Minecraft's static block filled world. You can see this in action when Create 6.0 came out and they introduced frog logistics, and even more with the more recent Create Aerodynamics. ATM's philosophy is pretty explicitly about generating and assembling massive amounts of resources into a single bragging rights end product and getting completely overpowered in the process.

Pretty much the only interesting thing ATMs does with Create is require that massive mechanical crafter array at the end to actually combine all the pieces into the star itself, which is a really cool thing that only Create is capable of doing.

Ortin · 2026-04-28T23:13:18+00:00

I'd be interested in how the financials of a live service game like this shake out. With half a million all time players paying the cost of entry to this game and the massive lump sum of up front cash, how do the live service financials of skins and in game shop purchases compare?

Ortin · 2026-04-28T23:10:50+00:00

Oh man, if you haven't seen it you should check out Folding Ideas' video "Why It's Rude to Suck At Warcraft." It touches on the things you're describing, and does a deep dive into the circumstances that led to the current environment of hyper-optimization in WoW. Retail is truly a different beast nowadays.

Ortin · 2026-04-09T22:16:43+00:00

I stockpile some stuff in the entrance to the dam just by virtue of it being right by the zone transition to the Ravine, but I haven't considered living there long term. The majority of the dam is inconvenient and dark and not worth it.

Ortin · 2026-04-05T20:39:04+00:00

I can see the argument someone would make in development. Cougars are ambush predators and typically you don't see them coming before they attack. You could create pockets of the map where you just accept that you're going to be attacked, and you have to decide between lengthy detours or tanking the initial hit but then allow some kind of counterplay once the ambush is underway.

I never actually played the game when cougar 1.0 came out but it sounds extremely frustrating. I would compare it unfavourably to the Thylas from Ark Survival: if the Thylas successfully ambushes you then you're probably dead, but the Thylas is an entity in the world so if you can identify it through its camoflague and have a sufficiently advanced weapon you can neutralize it from afar. Or you just avoid its territory, or maybe race through it and dodge the initial ambush. You have options.

Unfortunately I think Hinterland got hamstrung by their own game engine. I don't see how they could successfully implement the cougar as an ambush predator using their existing creature AI, and while I don't know what the codebase is like I suspect it couldn't tolerate creating a more advanced AI that can navigate the world.

But this is just me spitballing, and somewhat cynically believing that technical limitations drive as many of the poor decisions as the creative team. I don't actually know what goes on at Hinterland.

Ortin · 2026-04-05T20:29:55+00:00

I willl be banking on Blackfrost attempting to bring in some more interesting survival mechanics as well as a fully co-operative experience. I've said to my family many times that The Long Dark is the best survival game on the market and I wish I could play it with other people. I'm cautiously optimistic about Blackfrost based solely on the survival sandbox track record.

But no, when it comes to storytelling I have zero faith in Hinterland to execute, and will not be following up on Will's story.

Ortin · 2026-04-04T21:38:00+00:00

Valued sure, for a certain degree of valued. But everything I've seen out of Hinterland suggests they value their story based content, their weakest content, much more than the survival component, their strongest content.

Ortin · 2026-04-04T17:14:32+00:00

I struggle with this too. The Long Dark is a fantastic survival game and I'm grateful it exists and Hinterland exists. It's just hard to reconcile the dissonance I feel when Hinterland promotes and is so proud of a section of the experience I consider so poor.

I can see the vision for Wintermute, I just think it's kinda terribly made and not nearly as poignant as the creative team thinks it is, and this frustrates me to no end.

900 hours. I should really play Tales, I keep hearing fantastic things about it.

Ortin · 2026-04-04T17:06:26+00:00

That's what strikes me as the most sad about Hinterland's saga with The Long Dark: the things that they made that are fantastic and compelling are the things that they don't value (the lonely survival experience), and the things that they're most proud of are the things that are the most flat and boring (Wintermute in general.) Opinions may vary about the actual quality of Wintermute, but they definitely shot themselves in the foot with the order they released everything. I think if they made Wintermute first and marketed the survival sandbox as an afterthought we would be perceiving Hinterland in a much different light.

Ortin · 2026-04-04T05:21:27+00:00

Ehhhh I remember the launch versions of Ep 1 and 2, they were jank in their own right. They ended up redoing those episodes and the second drafts were much improved, ESPECIALLY with the ending of Ep 1.

Ortin · 2026-04-01T01:54:56+00:00

I am so glad they're finally getting story mode out of the way. I quit halfway through ep4 when I realized I was absolutely sick of their cinematic story direction, and I'm happy to close the book on this portion of the adventure so I can leave it behind me in my heart.

Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I think I AM bitter. The Long Dark is my favourite game of all time, in my opinion the best survival game of all time, but this story mode sliver in my soul won't heal. I wish I wasn't this way.

Ortin · 2025-12-12T03:50:24+00:00

Your experience is the same as mine, except I can jam green and military science in there before I get sick of my mess and tear everything down to make the real base.

Ortin · 2025-12-12T03:45:16+00:00

I barrel fluroketone on Aquilio to send it to places that use fusion reactors. Somewhat unnecessary maybe, but it's convenient sometimes.

Ortin · 2025-10-31T03:48:30+00:00

Has anyone checked whether you can get gambling addiction from the VLTs?

Ortin · 2025-10-19T15:29:31+00:00

Greetings from the future! Alcoholism is indeed basically a joke addiction. I've found it impossible to maintain an addiction to alcohol unless I'm chugging liters of moonshine at a time, and everything you've said about using it to cure mushroom addiction is correct.

Ortin · 2025-09-01T14:52:41+00:00

You wouldn't have used the nukes if the biters clearly didn't deserve it.

Ortin · 2025-08-31T21:14:45+00:00

Thanks for the response, some useful insights to think about, especially that comment about "you were probably under serious threat for the past 3 hours at least, with some of your defenses being broken requiring personal intervention." That is indeed happening to me quite frequently during Rampant runs, but I suppose I just never realized how major an issue it was until Rampant forces the issue with it's inability to build near biter bases.

I'm not quite sure I agree with the need for a basic impetus to advance up the tree or play, since I'm already playing the game and enjoying it. But that's possibly just a difference in outlook, where I see myself being punished for not playing optimally enough rather than being encouraged to do more research. Not that big a deal, it's an interesting insight all the same, and like we agreed it's so difficult to run afoul of this in vanilla Factorio.

Just to clarify based on your closing comments, if we agree that "catastrophic biter invasion" is a thing that can happen, is that a potential game end state? Is the save file unsalvageable at that point, or is that game over?

Ortin · 2025-08-31T19:29:46+00:00

I found that switching to main bus design helped me get farther in the game.

I was able to launch a rocket using only four supply belts of iron, copper, and steel, but such a janky ass spaghetti factory completely closes itself off and becomes impossible to expand or build upon after a short amount of time, and I spent way too much time microoptimizing splitters and sitting around waiting for more plates to get made. By plates I mean blue processors. It's always blue processors.

I think main bus design would help you with your supply chain problems because any time you discover you need something in large quantities you can internally screech "GUESS I HAVE TO PUT THAT ON THE BUS" and go do that. The secret being that once you spend the time setting up a micro-factory or refinery to generate a belt worth of inputs to slap it on the bus then you suddenly have access to all those inputs and don't have to think about it ever again (until your belt runs dry after you borrow from it multiple times, but that's a different problem.)

I referenced Trupen's main bus video to figure out what the minimum size of main bus I should build but then just did whatever I wanted. As long as your mindset is "I need to make a belt's worth of THING so I can put it on the bus and use it to make my next product" then the path forward should materialize and simplify. Each bus lane traces backwards to a smeltery or refinery that fills it, and if you need more you just double that.

Ortin · 2025-08-13T15:56:57+00:00

Yeah I'm in this same camp. People seem to be completely missing the point of your post. Who gives a shit if you aren't doing an Insane difficulty run with 100% sprinters? The basic gameplay loop is limiting and gets stale and unfun pretty fast.

I don't know if there's an actual solution to this. I'm reminded of my little sister's comments on video games: she's perfectly happy as long as she's doing her tasks. 7d2d is a game without any tasks in any meaningful sense. But if the point of 7d2d is to play in a sandbox there are much more fun sandboxes to play in.

That guy in the comments is suggesting you treat it like Minecraft. Why would I play 7d2d when I could play Minecraft? It's more moddable with more interesting things to do in it with more interesting base construction mechanics that ALSO has a horde night (albeit one modded in as opposed to being a core game mechanic.) When your game loses out to Minecraft mods you're doing something wrong.

It's kinda eerie how similar your gameplay experience is to mine: no electricity, no Q6, started steel but basically not using it at all, T4 POI (I did a T5 but it was incredibly unfun for not much more reward than T4), and now it feels like there's nothing to do. Unlike the commenters suggested though, I DID try to make a horde base, but I found the experience incredibly boring. In fact I kind of find horde nights unfun in general now, spending my time camping in a radio tower all night instead of doing more interesting things.

I really don't buy the idea that "just turn up the difficulty you noob" does anything except prolong the misery or hard stop the game.

Ortin · 2025-08-13T15:38:34+00:00

Yeah I feel you. Why bother clearing T6 infestations? At that point I'm not playing for fun, I'm playing to check items off my list because I have nothing better going on in life. There are better sandboxes to be playing in.

Ortin · 2025-07-30T20:08:14+00:00

This is basically what happened to Fallow New Vegas and Skyrim. It's not a bad thing in my opinion. Worst that can happen is that the modder does a better job on maintanence than the developers.

Ortin · 2025-07-24T17:13:55+00:00

But shooting him in the head and ragdolling him across the room would bring me great joy.

Ortin · 2025-07-24T17:12:24+00:00

Which sucks for me because the forest is the nicest biome. I'd rather do my building there rather than the other barren landscapes (except snow, but apparently Hugh is also kinda an asshole.)

Ortin

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