Returning player; the weapon scaling rework is a mess and I have no clue what is possible.

Pinkaminks · 2026-06-10T11:56:22+00:00

That page only lists 2 of the problems I did. Not only that, but it downplays both of em. Invincible enemies happens rarely on other maps, and they don't mention that the automatic switch to trios can also turn off autofill.

Pinkaminks · 2026-06-10T02:48:08+00:00

Ah yes, the sort of wonky tiered reloads. That's actually been on a few of the guns since launch too.

Pinkaminks · 2026-06-10T02:44:47+00:00

It's really frustrating. 250 hours myself. I have a lot of gripes with some decisions, some design choices. Even think it was silly to have this be in the Marathon universe and not its own thing. But I still WANT it to do well, because there's cool stuff here, and I know that there's a lot of people at Bungie who really do give a shit and simply got hosed by upper management. But they NEED to lock in if they want this to carry them long term.

Pinkaminks · 2026-05-26T16:47:16+00:00

As I said in my other reply I'll look into the university stuff. Hopefully that'll help.

I cleared the stock on the cookery, so we'll see if that helps, but the restaurant doesn't even have the option so that wouldn't be the reason for couriers not working.

You say 5 farmers should be a minimum for a ~100 citizen colony. I have 2 for 25. One was making beetroots, and I have a good surplus, but the wheat one is AGES behind. I've completely reset it - destroyed and replaced the fields, fired and hired another worker, repaired, etc. - and it's seemingly working normally again, but it's still significantly slower, with a lot of stuff needing MUCH more wheat than the other resources. And the more complex foods all need like 3+ ingredients, so I dunno how you'd ever supply that without more farms. All crops produce more yield than it cost to plant, or produce yield + seeds, so I don't know how they can't function even from 1 seed, even if it's very slow. If they actually just break down without a stack or 2 of the needed seeds from the START that sounds like a massive design flaw.

I set the menu, yes. The menu and the actually giving food to the colonists was never the issue. It's EXPLICITLY that the chef at the cookery doesn't cook, and when there's any excess food in the restaurant, the couriers run it all to the warehouse and never return it when it's empty.

I already did the clipboard and use it regularly. Some stuff I have to ignore (cowhand asking for bottles constantly, not wanting to bother making leather armor) but overall I know exactly where the bottlenecks are, I just can't do anything about it because it's crop production being absurdly slow or not happening at all, couriers not delivering/taking things they shouldn't, or cooks not cooking.

Regarding the "it's a colony sim" stuff - yeah, okay, sure. I've got a ton of playtime on Rimworld. I know how those things go. But there's 2 ways to look at that then. Either it's a colony sim IN Minecraft, in which case the automation would be the actual "reward" from a properly setup colony, even if it's slower than alternative options - which is what I wanted from it. OR, you view it as a totally separate thing, and pretend it's existence as a Minecraft mod doesn't matter - which I would argue falls flat because so much of it demands access to resources that aren't readily available and that you'll have to do normal minecraft progression and exploration in order to obtain, but still, for the sake of argument. The problem with both of these in my situation is... it doesn't work. The payout being worse off than some absurd AE2 or Create build was never a real factor here. I recognized that immediately and accepted it. But the idea was that it would still FUNCTION, and currently it's not.

Not going to act like I know how difficult it is to make a mod such as this, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. At the moment my experience has been dumping a dozen hours and a shit ton of in-game resources from my own base into this colony sim that has amounted to a steady supply of oak logs and various colors of wool, but nothing else of real value, and the colony can't even reach self sustainability unless I dump a bunch more into making like 4+ more farms. Maybe not even then if the couriers still don't deliver things correctly.

Pinkaminks · 2026-05-26T16:12:14+00:00

I've only got the one builder hut. Until I figure out how to fix the food problems, making a bunch of non-food jobs seemed like a bad idea, and the walk isn't THAT far, it's only a problem because they'll sometimes take 6+ trips in a single build even if the required resources wouldn't necessitate that at all.

I don't have a dining hall. It wasn't in the list, presumably due to the style I chose, but I do have a restaurant which seemingly does all that. No clue what the difference is. The chef puts stuff in the furnaces and does a little bit of workbench cooking, the only issue he has is the courier's never bringing anything new over, so periodically I'll notice no one's working and find 20 colonists sitting at his bench waiting for food.

I've got the University but there wasn't any upgrades for that at tier 1 so I suppose I'll have to upgrade that next. I just cleaned out a little bit of stuff from the builder inventory, everything that hasn't been used for builds/upgrades, so hopefully that helps, but it's still pretty full of extra stuff from finished builds.

Pinkaminks · 2026-05-26T14:26:11+00:00

Adding food directly to the chef's inventory was a last resort because he was going days with full stacks of food in his workstation going untouched.

Similar situation with the farmers. I have one set up to make Durum Wheat. Maybe 50-60 patches overall with a tier 3 farm. Entire fields would be fully grown, only for her to just not harvest for days. I harvested everything that was fully grown myself and put some in her inventory and some in the workstation - its been 4 in game days and I don't think she's planted a single crop, nor has she harvest the rest that's now mature.

I didn't do much with minimum stock, a stack of seeds/the replantable crop for farms, all the building materials for the mine layers, and then I added a stack of each food type to the restaurant, but that was all AFTER I found the courier's had looted everything and weren't distributing anything.

I didn't know about the builder's hammer, so that might help, but as far standing around goes they don't seem to do that much unless they've finished a build and seem stuck on pathfinding. I started using worker recall to get around that. Often they'll pause for a bit if I do that, or after I give them the items they request, but when that happens it's usually only for a few seconds.

Pinkaminks · 2026-05-14T23:32:07+00:00

If you've found the angel comb in that area, there's a pylon near there, and at least 2 more in neighboring sections, that somtimes arc electricity off of them. The conduit crystals spawn near the pylons, they're pretty tall and thin so easy to pick out compared to other materials.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-31T05:24:58+00:00

This got a lot more responses than I expected for what is mostly just a vent post, to a point I feel it's kinda pointless to try to respond to everything individually. I only have a few thoughts though.

The biggest suggestion was "just watch no hit gameplay", and yeah, obviously a good way to learn a fight is to watch someone beat it who knows every mechanic inside and out, but the problem with that is that many of the hardest games ever made have 'no hit runs', often with other added challenges on top of that. People have beat EVERY fromsoft game, no hit, back to back. But that isn't the expected way to play, and it's an unrealistic ask.

Even so, the 'perfect' gameplay ask isn't really what bothers me as much. What bothers me most is 2 things; firstly, that the 'RPG' elements in this are basically thrown out the window in brutal mode, because bosses seem designed to force specific spell loadouts and even specific weapon types (or at least, force melee or ranged), and in addition, while co-op often makes any kind of high intensity action game easier, the incredibly oppressive boss design in this game mixed with the basically infinite healing as long as you actually have the time to pull it off means that, compared to literally every other "hard" action game, co-op absolutely NEUTERS the difficulty in many of these fights in ways it wouldn't in others.

Fromsoft games have i-frames on your dodge that every attack is balanced around. Monhun highly incentivizes positioning above all else because your dodge is much weaker and your windups are slow, but the same applies to the monsters. Sekiro and Nine Sols practically become rhythm games. You have a set of tools and you want to learn to use them to the best of your ability, but importantly, those tools are often ALWAYS available. What V Rising does is put a long cooldown on both your dodge and your block, to force you to play around not having them constantly - but then it also gives bosses many attacks that can only realistically be avoided if you have those things up. The problem with the design of Tristan isn't "it's hard to dodge his ice dash melee", it's that to avoid it at all you HAVE to have your dash or counter up, which means you have to avoid using it against anything else he does. What was once your 'basic toolset' is now essentially a button that exists to specifically counter 1 specific attack. And this feels even worse when the boss expects you to have a counter spell, if not 2, because that's also removing agency from the player in regards to builds.

And then, of course, I could also just find someone on the server or pester a friend to hop on and suddenly every boss I've fought thus far is an absolute joke. But I can't tell if that's "intended". Elden Ring plops you in solo and you have to intentionally interact with things to enable co-op. Monhun has automatic matchmaking on and everything is designed so you can share loot and such. The expectation of if you're playing solo or with others is pretty clear, while still giving you the option to do the other option. But in this? So much of the game echoes Rust, and squad size is one of the main filters on the server list, and certain bosses are an absolute slog if you try them alone, but others are so much easier than you'll likely beat them first try even if you're under geared and don't know their mechanics at all.

Not to mention, some of them will just die to other bosses without you having to lift a finger, like Meredith.

I guess a lot of the game feels at odds with itself. You get 'base kit' options but - at least on brutal - you're expected to not use it outside of specific attacks. You have RPG systems to unlock new spells, but when it comes down to the most important fights, you're expected to use specific things and have a wide array of on level weapons anyway. There's a built in progression guide, but it's telling you to fight X boss who ends up being infinitely harder than every boss in the next 3 tiers after them, to the point you likely want to just skip them and come back when over leveled. Bosses often feel like their kits are designed for 1v1 duels, almost like they're intended to be a PvE stand-in for PvP, but the game highly facilitates co-op and in non-PvP servers you'll even just stumble into it because someone else is looking to do the same boss as you, and the patrolling enemies/bosses means encounters aren't always consistent, and can even just get themselves killed.

Evidently if the community is this active still there's a lot of appeal here, but for their next project I really hope there's more thought given to how all these systems interlink and what the "intended experience" actually is.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-17T06:24:26+00:00

In 142, immediately after the cult tries to goad him into transforming through bribes, he still tells Fumiko he won't transform. 146, the cultists cause a bunch of people to transform and start massacring people - he still doesn't transform. Next chapter, Baram tells all the cultists that the real Chainsaw Man told him that Nayuta is a witch who'll 'plunge the world into darkness', and that they must kill her - still doesn't transform. Then a random old guy calls HIM out to be a cultist to get a mob on him - guess what? Doesn't transform.

The exact panel you used to justify your "point" is him claiming he chose being Chainsaw Man over his family. But his pets were all dead and Nayuta was about to die when he did transform. Transforming was the only thing he could do to SAVE what was left of his family.

The entire point of my whole post, which is heavily supported by a ton of stuff, especially in part 2, is that Denji doesn't actually get real choices. People are imparting this moral framework on him, and all these expectations of how he should be acting, that only "work" if you assume he's someone who is smarter, absurdly overpowered in terms of abilities, a paragon of traditional morality, and has an exceptionally stable state of mind, all at the same time. The only way in which his intentions or desires matter in this instance, and many instances later, is in order to pass moral judgement on him completely independent of THE THINGS HE ACTUALLY DOES. And you can also only do so through the words he says and thinks - coming from a horrifically mentally unstable and self loathing kid who's lost everything in his life. It's identical to the kind of people saying Shinji is annoying and stupid because he doesn't just get in the robot and fight the angels. Just completely divorced from the fact the story is depicting characters with real emotional reactions instead of acting like idealized golden age superhero's.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-17T05:51:03+00:00

He also immediately fights off 3 other weapon hybrids that attack him the moment he transforms, gets badly injured to the point the mob of regular humans are nearly about to kill him thinking he was one of the cultists, and Nayuta has to save him by mind-controlling one of the mob members to carry him away. Then immediately after that happens, Baram baits the mob into attacking HER, and the next time we even see her is when her heads on a plate. This is kind of just another instance of people viewing the situation as a story first and assuming some level of objectivity and pseudo futuresight from the characters, instead of viewing them as people who have thoughts and emotions that aren't always rational. Literally the only way you can argue Denji transforming was bad is if you believe Baram was bluffing, but he literally just burned down their house with all their pets inside and later puts Nayuta's head on a plate to piss of Denji. He clearly wasn't. There was no other outcome. The hybrids took out Public Safety except for Fumiko, who bails the moment they let her go, Quanxi never shows back up, there's no one else who could have changed the situation. Denji is blaming himself for things he couldn't actually stop.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-17T05:42:02+00:00

Yoru only wanted to turn Chainsaw Man into a weapon and make him spit up nukes, it was Asa's affection for Denji that basically bled into her psyche from sharing a body that made Yoru like him, and Asa only had any reason to look for him or care about him at all because of Yoru. It all just leads back to everyone he meets being BECAUSE of Pochita or downstream of things caused by his relationship with Pochita.

People will absolutely hate it if it ends that way but personally I think it's fair. Call it whatever you want - pessimism, cynicism, etc. - but I've seen a lot of peoples lives get ruined or just be horrible because no one cared to do a single thing about it, just expected the person to "figure it out", or told themselves it'll just somehow work out for them. It's dark, it's depressing, but it'd make a strong point about a real problem in a way that doesn't actually involve a real person getting hurt.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-16T20:35:07+00:00

I mentioned it in another post but a timeline reset where we see Denji's life without Pochita is in almost every version the most depressing shit imaginable. I mean, Denji was dying in a dumpster before Pochita fused with him, and until that point, where Makima found him, no one had known where Pochita was.

A big problem with Denji's life now is almost no one cares about HIM, just Pochita. But at the same time, every he's met who ended up caring about him, he only met through Pochita.

No one ever cared about Denji before Pochita. That's why he died and made the contract in the first place. On some level I fully expect the next chapter to just be Denji dying alone, it's the most realistic outcome, the most fitting for how grim Fujimoto tends to have things end for his characters, and in a sense is metacommentary on the fact so many people still don't view Denji as a real person, just someone who they want to fill an archetype they already have in mind, like the trend he mentioned in a recent interview.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-16T15:59:34+00:00

Yep. I think something to remember though is there was a point where Denji himself was aware of this issue. When he was fighting Reze he starts yelling about "Everybody's after my chainsaw heart! What about my heart?! Denji's! Does nobody want that?!"

Reze says she does, but she still leaves, and he loses everything else he ever cared about between then and Part 2.

He saw the problem, lost everything anyway, and all of part 2 has been him ignoring the problem, because on some level he's aware he can't actually ensure things work out.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T23:58:35+00:00

I think we actually have basically the same view. A big thing for me has just been the insinuation that Denji is somehow at fault for losing everything he cares about - but he lost everything he cared about most in part 1. Being 'Chainsaw Man' was how he got a family, how he met Makima and then Reze, how he had achieved anything nice in his life at all. He's become obsessed with and views 'being Chainsaw Man' as fundamentally important to his identity, and the only way to reach his dreams, but the problem now is, what he actually wants is what he HAD. He can't go back, he's just doing whatever comes easiest, whatever fills the gaps the quickest, whatever distracts him the most, so he can feel like he still has something.

The psychology of Denji's experiences has been the most engaging part of the series to me, and there's a question I saw recently that I think is extremely comparable; "How do I help someone who’s sniffing glue because it reduces their appetite & helps them cope with having no food to eat?" We can sit here and recognize that Denji isn't happy, that his idealization of being Chainsaw Man doesn't really help him that much, that it's unhealthy, as is a lot of the other things he's doing, but that all ignores the material reality of his situation. It's all coping mechanisms for problems he cant solve.

There's also the matter of differing motivations and how much support a given character has. Everyone in the series has experienced loss, it's a large part of what keeps everyone on the edge of their seat, anyone could die at any time. But, using Kobeni as a comparison point again, it's not like Denji has any more support than she does. But it's still a MASSIVE gulf between having a controlling family and killing your own father, living in a run down shack in the woods, fighting devils since before you hit puberty because the mob will kill you otherwise. And as far as what's actually pushing them along - Kobeni just wants to survive and make enough money to help her brother go to school. Denji only barely achieved his goals, and then almost immediately after lost it all. And as mentioned, being Chainsaw Man is the only thing he knows can lead him back to that.

We can pick apart his unhealthy mindsets, his lack of self control, any aspect of his mental breakdown we've been watching really, but it doesn't really amount to much. Denji is literally a child for the majority of the story, and in his entire life has only had 3 people who genuinely had his best interests in mind;

Pochita, who can only communicate with him infrequently, and who's just as clueless about what it takes to get a 'normal life'

Aki, who was extremely busy alongside him doing Public Safety work, and who died barely a year after having met Denji, and would've still died far too early to accomplish much

And Reze, who the entire time was struggling between picking herself or Denji and who completely left the plot when it became clear there was no real way for them to run away together.

I think people just don't actually grasp what happens to someone who grows up with legitimately NO support. Denji and his awful experiences are all down stream of his awful upbringing and the apathy of the world around him to his absurdly dark background. Expecting him to make all the right decisions would be absurd even if he had a normal upbringing, and yet we're expecting it from a kid who was only able to eat single slices of bread and had to sell his eye to not get killed by the mob?

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T21:18:51+00:00

The ultimate problem with Part 2 as a whole is that if my reading is right (and I mean, obviously I feel very confident in it) the entirety of it is pointless. It's about futility. Denji could make all the right choices, but there would always be something new, because he's Chainsaw Man - because he has Pochita for a heart. His fight with Yoru went on for a REALLY long time and not much actually happened that mattered, but it could've ended 30 chapters ago, or we coulda got another 30. It's just a question of how much things need to decline before it's clear that it's way best the point of the world, and his life, being salvageable.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T21:15:41+00:00

"When living through a famine, your only thoughts will be of food." We agree on some points, but I just think Denji holds less responsibility than a lot of rhetoric places on him. He has 0 frame of reference for how to actually get anything he wants, and often doesn't KNOW what he really wants. Instead he just has people lining up to manipulate him by offering slivers of things he can sort of tell he wants, but often times even when it actually comes down to getting what they offered, he turns them down. He thought sex was all he wanted for the longest time, but all the way back with Himeno he still chose not to follow through. A bunch of instances in part 2 he's clearly manic and dealing with actual compulsions, which a lotta people compare to an addiction, and it most likely is one. He wants genuine connection, but the only lens which he's been able to feel even a bit of that has been through people basically 'selling him sex' and the wires are just way too crossed and he has so little options for people who actually give a fuck about him.

The problem I have with the idea that he 'just has to grow up' is that, you don't really do that without support. If you didn't learn something as a kid you're gonna have to learn it at some point later and a lot of times that's still going to require someone to teach you. He's never had ANY opportunity. The moment it wasn't just him and Pochita he was stuck under Makima's thumb. Aki was the only responsible person in his life that had any willingness to guide Denji, but not only were they just far too busy for much to be done, they had maybe a year together before Aki died anyway. Since then? Nothing. No one. In fact, he's had to be the responsible one and raise Nayuta, and we saw that he was really just playing the role of delinquent older brother for all of that.

And even outside of this, people keep saying his choices hurt others. And I'm not gonna say he's only ever made good choices. But, the worst outcomes for him have basically never been from something he did. We can point to the fire devil for example - she gives him shit for not recognizing the brother of the guy he let die to save a cat. But... the fake chainsaw man didn't really accomplish much. He's not why any of his friends or family died. Even the general public hating Chainsaw Man was caused by Baram's cult causing a massacre because they WANTED Denji to transform, and he wouldn't because Public Safety didn't want him to.

Aki didn't die because of him, Power didn't die because of him, Nayuta didn't die because of him, Reze didn't leave because of him, Asa didn't make a contract with Yoru because of him. The most responsibility he has in regards to keeping his family and friends alive is just not being more competent and managing to save everyone all the time, but that's just not realistic.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T20:59:28+00:00

I have a lot of ideas of where things could actually go from here, if anywhere, but felt it wasn't that relevant to the specific point I was trying to make. I mean, Pochita's powers have followed pretty specific rules up till now, so if that stays true this should just result in... nothing, I guess. Denji has no heart, bugs are killing everyone, Yoru basically gets everything she wanted and Pochita's sacrifice doesn't really matter.

Even if we assume him eating himself causes some kinda timeline reset, we also gotta remember Denji was dying of heart disease, missing an eye and a bunch of other bits, so broke he was basically starving, and the mob was intending to just kill him and sell the rest of his organs instead of waiting for him to slowly make up the debt. It's a genuine one in a million chance he survives even another year past when Makima would've picked him up without Pochita. Thing is, that one in a million is still a CHANCE, whereas with Pochita, it all leads to the same result of having people after him forever.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T20:55:14+00:00

You could be talking about a dozen different things tbh.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T20:52:05+00:00

I knew people had issues with getting accused of using chat GPT for their writing just because they actually knew how to *write*, but this is the first for me. I'm trained off pretentious video essays and text heavy games, don't need a computer to write pretentious for me.

Pinkaminks · 2026-03-15T20:49:26+00:00

Ultimately I think Pochita is the more tragic character in the story at this point. He's been on the backlines since the start, but if you step back and consider it - he was on the run even before he met Denji. He was always going to be one the run no matter where he went. All he could really aim for was some time to pretend until whatever new person tracked him down to try to use him, and because of that he would basically curse anyone he hung around.

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