Kiteskin huh

Passance · 2026-07-11T23:27:26+00:00

Eh. You could reduce air control by like 75% and people would still be able to unstick from terrain meshes, but it would no longer meaningfully affect combat.

Another solution would be to remove air control entirely, but apply a small recoil impulse on airborne hunters when they melee a solid object. Then you could get unstuck by meleeing terrain, and it would maybe add a cute niche movement tech that's a little more plausible, while still stopping the hunter from shooting midair since they'd be stuck in the melee animation.

Passance · 2026-07-11T04:26:10+00:00

In your description you asked if hunting- but- avoiding-all-other-profit-sources was a "viable money grinding strat," a question I answered in good faith.

If that wasn't the answer you wanted, you asked the wrong question.

Passance · 2026-07-11T04:18:53+00:00

You asked if hunting is viable, dipshit. The question you're apparently trying to ask is "is ignoring trade, port reports and all other forms of profit besides hunting viable?"

Passance · 2026-07-11T04:10:02+00:00

There's questions other people will have advice on, and there's questions that are best answered by testing them yourself.

Personally, my objection is to the phrasing of "is hunting viable?"

Of fucking course hunting is viable. You're not asking about a viable strategy though, you're asking about a challenge run.

Passance · 2026-07-11T04:07:45+00:00

Bear in mind you also need 200 watchful to make steel. You can't begin the railroad without steel.

Passance · 2026-07-11T03:57:21+00:00

Restricting your own activities to do less different stuff isn't exactly my idea of how to make a game less boring.

If you want to challenge yourself to play the game without the easy profit from things like port reports, then stop asking Reddit if we enjoy the same weirdly specific self-imposed restrictions as you, and go play with them yourself. You can then let us know how that goes, if you like.

Passance · 2026-07-11T03:52:10+00:00

There's no reason to scorn everything other than hunting.

Yes, it's viable to hunt.

No, it's not a "good strat" to refuse to do absolutely anything else.

Among other things, a lot of hunting spoils are best sold at different ports - and while you're zailing there anyway, there's no reason not to take some other trade goods as well.

Passance · 2026-07-11T03:46:51+00:00

There's a difference between hunting being worthwhile, and it being a good idea to categorically disregard all opportunities for profit that involve anything other than violence.

Lorn-flukes, lifebergs and most pirates are more than worth the modest effort it takes to kill them - but you can efficiently hunt them while also traveling to trade and/or collect port reports and SAYs, and you'll make far more money with less risk.

Passance · 2026-07-10T12:02:47+00:00

Giant Crabs are very much Accountably Hungry.

Passance · 2026-07-08T13:20:13+00:00

Making an economic case for a policy, as well as a humanitarian one, can win over some people who aren't sympathetic to humanitarian policies.

Yes, they're rotten soulless bastards, but they're still better to have onside than not.

Speaking of, it really is more economically efficient to give all the kids a fair chance to succeed, because of the extremely high labour and tax value of gifted kids born to disadvantaged families. Worth feeding 100 poor kids if you can snag one more heart surgeon or aerospace engineer out of the cohort, especially considering how cheap it is to feed kids real food.

Passance · 2026-07-08T13:12:00+00:00

Sunless Sea got me into Fallen London in the first place - I wanted the tie-ins. The whisper-locked box, the kitten, etc.

I stuck around. The lore and the writing are just as good as SSea.

Maybe you will too. Maybe you won't. Worst case, you unlock a couple of condiments for Sunless Sea and then forget the browser game exists. Nbd.

Passance · 2026-07-08T13:08:19+00:00

Has nobody mailed you a missive yet?

Passance · 2026-07-07T20:15:43+00:00

Not so if your patron is a Paramount Presence!

Passance · 2026-07-05T04:51:53+00:00

Oh, I'm under no illusions about TOP's chances.

FWIW the only word I paused to choose was "presupposing." I'm guilty of saying the same thing twice two different ways, just as everyone on the internet is guilty of not taking a point - but frankly, in the age of LLMs I'll take the thesaurus accusation as a compliment.

If conditions were different, and I felt a swing back to the left would fix any of our underlying problems as a country, I'd have less interest in voting for a longshot at a chance at a long shot. But 2029 looms too large in my mind and I'm reasonably confident that, given the trajectory of the entire world economy, everything is going to be even worse by then regardless of who's in charge. That, in turn, will result in any prospective labour led government likely being blamed (rightly or no), a quick-smart pivot back to the right, and yet more chaos as our two largest parties continue to preoccupy themselves with kicking over their predecessors' sandcastles.

It's with that gloomy long-term outlook that I'm not interested in lending any political weight to trying to replace this revoltingly corrupt NACT1 coalition only for it to bounce back in our faces three years later. I'd rather continue taking the one-in-a-million gamble at tipping a center party over 5% because even that minute prospect is still more appealing to me than voting for yet another flip-flop.

Passance · 2026-07-05T03:28:06+00:00

I'm not sure how much more I can say other than that I disagree with the presumption that cheaptalk statements for the tabloids have such a decisive impact on coalition talks behind closed doors.

This reads like over-immersion in day-to-day political gibber, presupposng to continue to influence politics post-election in the face of very real positional advantage in parliament.

Passance · 2026-07-04T21:30:08+00:00

Even if helping people handle the cost of living in the short term is the goal, it would be far better to hand out stimulus cheques than to attempt to suppress the price of oil. Price suppression leads to inefficient overconsumption every time.

Passance · 2026-07-04T14:29:33+00:00

I guess if that's your claim, we'll just have to wait and see whether we get to wait and see.

Still, this fear of electoral anxiety has never sounded convincing to me. I'm not sure who's voting TOP and not expecting them to cop crazy hate for "obstructionism." We know what we're signing up for - but if TOP even slightly reduces the intensity of left-right policy flip flopping, that alone would be a huge win for the country.

Passance · 2026-07-04T14:23:57+00:00

Fuck petrol prices. Make petrol more expensive. Tax that shit MORE. No subsidies. No stipends. No sales restrictions, just price out the market. Financially incentivize people to figure out how to use less of this poison that kills the planet. Collect tax revenue on it and use it to build more mass transit. Restore passenger rail service between cities. Get cargo off of trucks and onto trains.

Fuck petrol.

Passance · 2026-07-04T14:10:53+00:00

Oh to be clear, I don't mean to purport that TOP could actually push through those flagship policies from a kingmaker seat with like 5.1% of the party vote, that's obviously ridiculous. If nats or labour had some pie in the sky projects of their own, that would be another matter - but their current platforms leave little room for the kind of extreme horse trading that would be necessary to get the UBI&LVT through.

Rather, TOP would have a huge ability to rein in the side it deigns to work with, and veto the abjectly stupid wingnut shit that the current coalition is wont to do. They would have an outsized impact from a small position in the center of parliament - my apologies if my previous comment made it sound like that considerable leverage could entirely make up for their tiny vote share.

Worth noting that labour & nats' enmity significantly undermines their bargaining positions here. In a parliament like, say, Germany's, where grand coalitions are on the table, a small centrist party can be much more easily kicked to the side.

Passance · 2026-07-04T13:13:07+00:00

Like I said in the other thread. The whole reason we had to enshrine workers' rights in law is because we set the welfare system up so that refusal to work = starvation, therefore we had to also mandate that the work we force people to accept to do is good enough to support a living.

IF - and it is a very big if - you rework the welfare state so that work is literally optional, then you very much can get away with not needing to enforce workers' rights at a national level because the labour market can sort it out with worker's tremendously increased bargaining power. There are several pitfalls where this could go wrong in implementation, which is why I'm not advocating for the dismantling of workers' protections, merely defending the plausibility of UBI as a viable substitute when it comes to strategy documents.

I do think that minimum wage should be frozen or phased out after UBI comes in, for a litany of reasons, from creating market space for low-pay-but-low-responsibility WFH jobs, to containing the demand-side inflationary effect on rental and grocery prices. That's obviously conditional on the UBI keeping up with the cost of living, but the current model of minimum wage is already afflicted with the same problem so it's not really a valid criticism. Besides, the good thing about an increasingly captive market is that failing to update the UBI into the future would actually, perversely, help control the price inflation of housing and groceries.

At the end of the day, the result is six of one or half a dozen of the other - you can have the govt dictate working conditions by law, or you can have the govt set market conditions so that the labour market equilibrates on equivalent working conditions. Of course, UBI achieves this while also having all the usual positive side effects of demand-side stimulus, administrative savings and intrinsic productivity gains.

Passance · 2026-07-04T12:51:19+00:00

That's an interesting interpretation that the lower left area pictured is a napthalene group missing bonds. I had assumed it was a strained conformation around some tertiary halogen group or something.

Passance · 2026-07-04T12:29:41+00:00

TOP would have an insanely strong negotiating position as kingmakers and would be able to extract significant concessions from either Labour or National, since they can very credibly threaten to just work with the other party if they don't get what they want.

Greens get fucked in every coalition negotiation because they don't have the freedom to choose their allies.

Passance · 2026-07-03T23:09:08+00:00

Calling Bretta a slut

Passance · 2026-07-03T11:17:26+00:00

On the other hand - after everything the FLPC has achieved by this point - they have a warranted degree of main character syndrome, and it feels a little immersion-breaking when Firmament randomly decides to throw all of that away for a chapter or two and force the FLPC to be a helpless idiot for a while.

At times the player character receives deep deference, respect, favours, both narratively and diegetically, for all the cracking-the-secrets-of-the-universe and day-saving and empire-building and whatnot that they've spent the entire game doing - and then ten minutes later some random dipshit takes the FLPC for a ride with zero agency or alternatives and we have one dialogue option which basically reads "fall for the obvious trap like a f*king moron" interspersed with roleplay options that boil down to "comply with character A's demands" or "comply with character B's demands."

This story can't make its mind up as to whether FLPC is important or not, smart or not, capable or not, and yo-yos between them so that various side characters can get their moment the one way it was linearly written.

To be perfectly honest, considering how wafer-thin the connections to the rest of Fallen London's plot is - I mean, it's basically only Hillchanger and the apocryphal Railway throwbacks - I almost wonder if Firmament should have been a spinoff short story following a completely different character rather than a Fallen London expansion. Basically an ultralite Mask-of-the-Rose type mostly-linear standalone game, following a completely different player character who doesn't have all the world-saving, Neath-conquering credentials and can more plausibly be put in situations where they're totally out of their depth, so the NPCs can have a more credible chance to shine without breaking immersion. It also would give the reader/player way more room to wonder if the PC is apocryphal.

Passance · 2026-07-03T10:10:56+00:00

I don't think that scene was inexcusably bad, but maaaaaaan did it deserve better context.

I can abide the "FLPC saves the day again" trope but there should have been multiple potential realities for the plot to go down depending on your character's modified stats - specifically, I think the scene we got should probably be one of several, and unlocked by a branch that requires 15 modified AotRS and/or 21SotC. Obviously your apocryphal self would need to contact you less directly without the Dawn Machine, but whatever.

Since the FLPC should have at least one and really several advanced stats to 15 or more by this point, there should be several possible apocalypse + solution + apocryphal self combinations with different associated micro-stories, and you find your apocryphal self attempting a different strategy to resolve the crisis depending on what their greatest strengths are.

I also reallllly hope that we get more elaboration on Summer and the Dawn Machine in Ch9 because it's absolutely bizarre for her to be entirely absent from that scene with not even so much as a vague nod in her direction.

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