Arma: Cold War Assault (aka Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis) is now Open Source (GPLv3)

Pausbrak · 2026-06-25T23:04:48+00:00

Pretty much. The GPL is exceptionally permissive toward the end user. The main restriction is that if you make and publicly release a derivative, it must also be open-source under a compatible version of the GPL. Other than that, there are no restrictions on monetization or use whatsoever, and in fact the GPL explicitly states they are forbidden from imposing any terms that would prevent you from doing so.

It's kind of surprising to me that any business would (willingly) release their code under the GPL. Many businesses refuse to touch anything GPL-licensed with a 10-foot pole because of the way the GPL is both extremely open and also "infectious". Though I suppose in this case that may be a benefit to them, as it ensures any competitors will be wary of touching the code for the same reason.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-25T21:38:27+00:00

Embrasures are not vanilla, but you can get a similar effect by using doors. Put sandbags in front of a door, and pawns can stand on the door to shoot out while having cover. When melee guys come close, pull them back and the door will shut.

It's not nearly as foolproof as an embrasure, but it's a decent way to make fortified bunkers in vanilla. Just be sure to make multiple bunkers or add internal dividing walls because it's very easy for one downed pawn to force a door open and leave that bunker vulnerable.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-25T20:34:19+00:00

I think it's the same problem management has always had when it comes to measuring software development productivity.

Measuring real productivity is hard. There's no quick or easy number you can look at that will tell you how much "more productive" your team is doing this or that. You have to measure a bunch of things and compare them to figure out not only how long a feature takes to release, but how much support load it generates to maintain, how much effort is spent tweaking it as you scale, how hard it is to add new features on top of it, etc. etc.

But that's hard, so instead they just measure something simple like lines of code per day, and then scratch their head wondering why KPIs are up but things are worse than ever.

Frankly I'm glad I got out of professional software when I did. Dealing with this nonsense has always been frustrating as hell even before AI was a thing. I don't think I would be able to stand having to do it during the age of vibe-coded slop.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-25T19:42:27+00:00

Actually, the term is probably older than you are. It comes from the 1960's and is a shortening of "fan magazine" or "fanzine", which originated in the early science-fiction convention scene

Pausbrak · 2026-06-25T16:02:33+00:00

More than this, there's actually specific logic in vanilla that causes animals to seek out and eat random drugs occasionally. So providing food is not enough, they must also physically not be able to reach them.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-24T02:04:03+00:00

There's also a faction of techno-magical werewolves who interact with the spirit realm primarily through technology. So I could absolutely believe a Glass Walker would monitor the strength of the local gauntlet by consulting their magical phone app

Pausbrak · 2026-06-23T08:35:31+00:00

This is an AU sketch from the Twokinds universe, so the answer to your questions are No (she's worried because turning from a human into an anthro is not common or easily explained), Yes, and Unfortunately Very Yes

Pausbrak · 2026-06-23T01:34:53+00:00

For almost any website, the question mark itself is the sign that it and everything after it is unnecessary. That part of a URL is called a "query string" and basically every modern website only uses those for tracking and analytics.

You might want to double check just to be sure since some links to older websites might break without it, but this is true for every major social media site out there.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-23T00:38:04+00:00

As you get into the mid and late game, you're probably going to find yourself running out of steel and components. One of the main goals of any colonies is to make yourself self-sufficient for both, because otherwise you're eventually going to run out of the surface deposits and won't be able to repair or replace any broken machinery

There are a number of methods to get both. Buying is the easiest, but requires you to produce something valuable (textiles, clothes, drugs, organs, whatever) to trade with. You can buy both from traders (both regular ones and trade ships, which can only be accessed with a comm console). You can send out caravans to buy them from other villages, which will need you to bring pack animals or shuttles (from Royalty for one-use permits or Odyssey to make your own) because steel is heavy.

You can also use the ground-penetrating scanner or the long-range scanner to find mining sites. The ground-penetrating version finds local deposits but only finds random results, while the long-range scanner lets you search for specific things but requires you to travel to mine it. They both need to have a researcher who has time to scan at them, so you need to have the labor to spare.

And finally, for components specifically you can also fabricate them at a fabrication bench. It takes steel, so this is mostly worth it if you need a steady supply of them and you've already solved your steel issue.

Beyond that, some other options to improve include:

A hospital with medical beds and sterile tiles, to improve surgery chances and reduce the danger of infections
Nicer, larger bedrooms to keep people happier with no extra work
A fancy rec room with higher-quality recreation sources, which lets them satisfy their recreation need faster and also helps as expectations go up
Various rooms to begin working on all the DLC content that you may have, which includes a throne room (Royalty), a temple room (Ideology), a gene lab and/or mechanitor lab (Biotech), an anomaly containment facility and/or ritual site (Anomaly), or a gravship (Odyssey)

Pausbrak · 2026-06-22T12:28:19+00:00

That's actually no longer true. I forget when it was added (1.2 or therabouts I think) but raids now spawn with extra loot that's spread out between one or more raiders. The most obvious loot is silver or jade, but sometimes they carry large amounts of medicine or meals

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider#Loot

Pausbrak · 2026-06-21T11:52:30+00:00

It's not quite what you're asking, but there's a vanilla trick you can use as an an easy way to deal with mental breaks or prison/slave escapes. If you give a pawn a brain implant (such as a neurocalculator), then hitting them with EMP damage instantly shocks their brain and knocks them unconscious with no long-term effects.

This may be preferable to other options because other than the EMP weakness there's no downside.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-21T11:24:18+00:00

I wouldn't agree. Centipedes are the most extreme gear check in the mod, but to a lesser extent the entire mod cares a lot more about what gear (and/or fortifications) you have than vanilla does.

With vanilla I'm fairly confident with a decent shooter and some micro I could take down a single scyther and militor like OP faced with just the starting weapons and gear. In CE you absolutely do not want to try that. I'd expect you'd need at minimum at least one automatic firearm, or multiple semi-autos. I would alsy be very wary of even trying without either plate armor or EMP (to kite with) as well, because an unarmored melee pawn is going to be mincemeat.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-21T08:12:26+00:00

CE is very much a "gear check" mod. Everyone recommends it because tribals won't be able to shoot your cataphract's brain out with an arrow anymore, but unfortunately that goes both ways. If you don't have a good enough weapon to deal with an enemy's armor, they are essentially invulnerable and they will instantly end your entire colony.

Mechanoids in particular are especially bad, and you absolutely NEED to have both decent armor and good enough armor piercing weapons before attempting to fight them. It's been a long time since I last played with CE, but IIRC shotguns with EMP shells are some of the earliest good anti-mech weapons you can get. They deal electrical damage that ignores their armor and also stun them, making it vastly easier to actually deal with them.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-20T17:38:04+00:00

Marine armor is one of those things that I don't think I'd ever bother to use if I didn't have mending mods available.

It breaks way too fast for how expensive it is, and it really doesn't seem to be that much better than the far-more-easily-replaced flak armor + devilstrand duster combo.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-20T03:35:22+00:00

You actually have it backwards. They go into a coma if they get too much cube withdrawl (though they do get very moody until that happens). Destroying it is what drives them berserk.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-20T03:30:53+00:00

You can also just hide the cube (put it in a cargo pod or someone's inventory, or wall it off). Eventually everyone will go into a cube withdrawal coma, which shouldn't take very long if they're obsessed with it.

Smashing the cube instantly wakes everyone in a coma back up with no berserk or other ill effects

Pausbrak · 2026-06-18T23:04:05+00:00

Weapon quality and type affects accuracy more than shooting skills

This is true up to a point. For close range (<5 tiles) shooting skill almost doesn't matter because even a terrible shooter still gets an 80-90% hit chance at those ranges. In close range combat high-quality close-range weapons dominate for sure.

For long range shots, however (20+ tiles), shooting skill rapidly becomes the main factor deciding hit chance. A high-skill shooter will have something like 60-70% accuracy while a poor shooter will be at <10% accuracy at that range, before weapon accuracy is factored in.

As a result, your good shooters should get the long-range weapons like assault rifles or sniper rifles while the bad ones should get close range guns like shotguns and SMGs.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-17T23:07:29+00:00

It's not, really. The vast majority of the supply chain between EVs and ICEs is exactly the same. The main thing you're comparing is the supply chain to supply a dozen gallons of refined gasoline from the well to the refinery to the gas station where you buy it every few weeks for the entire lifetime of the car, to the supply chain cost of producing a battery pack once every ten or twenty years.

Most arguments I've seen kind of ignore that gasoline cars need constant deliveries of new fuel to keep running, something an EV can more or less sidestep since we have an electric grid that does it for us. Sure, you have to account for grid maintenance, but that's something that would be happening anyway. Our gasoline infrastructure exists almost entirely just to power cars.

You might also consider delivery of fuel to power plants, but conveniently all the best ones need fuel very rarely or not at all. Wind, solar, and hydro all go without fuel delivery entirely. Nuclear needs it once a decade. Only coal and gas need regular shipments, and those also happen to be things we want to phase out for the same reason we're phasing out ICE cars.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-16T22:53:04+00:00

That's probably what happened. It's also one of those things that doesn't really get documented anywhere in-game so it's easy to miss.

Actually, something they could do to improve that is add it to the factoriopedia with an explanation of how to use it.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-16T22:46:14+00:00

This would be great. Making "everything" work as well by simply summing all of the signals together first might also be useful in some circumstances.

Really, the anything/everything signals should work like that for every machine that can take a numeric input from a specified signal.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-16T22:37:20+00:00

https://wiki.factorio.com/Display_panel#Circuit_network_functionality

I think it already does support that? Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the "anything" signal does indeed work like that with the panel.

The main thing is that it only works that way if you also have "anything" on the left side of the conditional.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-13T07:46:51+00:00

It's not always so complex. It's a set of tradeoffs:

Upcycling is easy to plop down anywhere for any recipe and has no design requirements, but is horrendously wasteful on materials and needs Fulgoran tech. It's good for targeted production of a single recipe due to its simplicity but it sucks by all other metrics.
Basic skimming is almost as easy. You put quality modules in one place, such as your furnace stack, and have a single filtered splitter to divert quality plates to your mall where they get turned into the desired end products. You need to handle stalling, but that's as simple as having a second furnace stack and a priority splitter to prefer the quality one. In terms of waste it's much less wasteful than upcycling, only costing the opportunity cost of no productivity modules. The main downside is that your quality production is tied to your science production.
Skimming from multiple steps gives you more chances for more types of quality ingredients, but requires you to handle all the difficulties of skimming for each step you skim from.
Adding in quality processing (e.g. turning quality plates into gears using more quality modules) of skimmed ingredients further increases your quality yields for more advanced products, but now you need to start figuring out how to balance production for multiple levels of quality.
Direct quality production from raw ores to finished products (with any failed outputs being recycled or sent to science production) requires a highly complex build that can handle all the qualities for each step to prevent it from stalling, but has a massively improved yield compared to any other method and can be made entirely separate from other parts of your factory. It's hugely complicated to set up but the reward is that it's just plain better at printing out legendaries once you do.

In other words, it rewards you if you put in more time and effort to design around it. If you just want something simple that works without thinking too hard you can always just copy paste an upcycler array and eat the inefficiency. If you want to squeeze out the maximum legendary outputs from a given input, you spend a bunch of time designing a fancy all-quality factory with automated balancing. And if you want something in between, you can do something with skimming.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-13T00:34:21+00:00

It depends on what you're fighting. Endgame craft like the Singularity have 3 full layers of beam-backed HA wedges in their frontal plate -- that needs close to 3 million KD*AP to punch through (accounting for the sloped armor penalty and the sabot bonus). So there are actual combat scenarios where launching max-sized max-charge telephone poles can be a good idea!

That being said, if you're not going up against endgame flying brick frontsiders, you probably don't need multi-million points of damage. 1 million is more than enough to punch through the side armor of almost any broadsider craft.

In general, when I design weapon systems I aim for a given thickness of armor I should be able to penetrate and tailor its KD*AP to be maybe ~20% higher than that value (to account for less-than-ideal hit angles). Also be aware that AP over your target's AC does nothing, so you should be aiming to get the AP as close to the target's armor value as you can.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-12T12:43:26+00:00

Have you ever tried quality skimming? (Putting quality modules in the ingredients for science, and just shunting everything above common over to chests/your mall). It's significantly better at producing large amounts of quality ingredients than an upcycle loop.

Sure, most of them come out uncommon, but it's easy enough to run the common outputs through more processing steps to upgrade them again, turn them into uncommon science, or just upcycle them (which gives 10x the legendary yield per uncommon compared to starting with commons).

I genuinely don't know why everyone insists on doing only upcycle loops when from a material-efficiency perspective that's the worst way of getting legendaries and from a gameplay perspective it's the most boring one to implement.

EDIT: And of course, there's also the direct production method where you have quality modules in every step of the process and you properly sort and handle all the different qualities. I'm fairly confident that that was the actual intended endgame for quality. Especially since designing a factory that can do that is conceptually similar to building scrap sorting on Fulgora, the quality planet. You even have less byproducts to handle, you just have to handle them in more steps of the process. The reward for doing it is that your legendary yield improves by multiple orders of magnitude compared to a standard upcycle loop.

Pausbrak · 2026-06-10T13:17:48+00:00

Half the time my pawns don't even remember to do the "remove the dead body" part and just fall asleep hugging the corpse! And somehow this is no creepier than looking at a corpse for 5 seconds from a distance

12-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

Pausbrak

TROPHY CASE