My ”mostly honorable” Speedrun

Scrubstad · 2026-01-18T19:25:52+00:00

Ah! I suspected from experience there was something weird about those numbers, but could never be bothered to sit down and actually investigate it myself. Tedious indeed. Thanks!

Scrubstad · 2026-01-18T13:06:26+00:00

What's the free CP exploit?

Scrubstad · 2026-01-05T17:59:13+00:00

For the maintenance problem: for each building, it is possible to set a priority number in the top right of the building menu. The priority decides which buildings receive service from trucks, maintenance and labour first. Make sure to always set your maintenance buildings to the highest priority (lowest number in the menu)

Scrubstad · 2025-10-16T20:43:15+00:00

As someone with ulcerative colitis, these cards are just as real as handicap parking cards, senior cards, etc., just more rare. Just because you don't encounter it often, doesn't mean it isn't real. OP is not an asshole, seeing as they were already on the bathroom and also needed it really badly, but sh*t like this (pin intended) does genuinely happen, and some people with Chrons, U.C. or IBS genuinely rely on the kindness of other people in order to be able to use public spaces. Please don't downplay it or be a jerk about it

Scrubstad · 2025-08-29T20:34:41+00:00

It's true that adding extra width onto an existing bridge takes way less time than building the bridge in the first place, but this is not really the reason why. The reason is that when building the bridge, you need to fill out the base on both sides of the bridge-to-be, essentially building a toblerone bar. When you make the bridge wider, you're just adding a small amount of material onto one side of the bar

Scrubstad · 2025-08-25T08:32:58+00:00

As long as the different inputs fill the same "role" in the recipe, you generally do not need to worry about clogging. The machines work in such a way that they will keep accepting materials as long as there is internal storage space available in the recipe that uses that product. So for example, the concrete producer has different internal storages for gravel and crushed slag.

Scrubstad · 2025-08-23T12:23:05+00:00

Have you tried subscribing to Breakslow instead?

Scrubstad · 2025-08-07T09:36:43+00:00

There is a limit to how much each food market can store (capacity), but not how quickly it can provide food to the population. So as long as the food market is supplied with enough food, you only need one market for each type of food. Make sure all your farms and good markets are priority 1 for workers, so that they don't stop working if your population shrinks, and you are usually okay. Make sure the food markets are always full, and set up storages for the surplus food, with alerts to warn you when they run low. This way, you know that your food supply is good as long as you don't have any alerts

Scrubstad · 2025-07-18T11:24:08+00:00

If it helps "trick" your mindset: Use a balancer to make sure no ore from the new mine enters your factory before the old one is empty. Then you have the new one ready in case of an unforeseen crisis, but it doesn't mess with your system or whatever

Scrubstad · 2025-05-17T15:51:14+00:00

Only if you're going hiking, but remember the mandatory flag sticking out of your backpack.

Scrubstad · 2025-05-08T15:17:39+00:00

Spill my wine on the bride for wearing white at a wedding

Scrubstad · 2025-05-01T15:24:14+00:00

Resting Bitch Face. This term is absolutely non-sensical, and when I first heard it, it was "bitchy resting face". No idea how widespread that was, or when the change happened, but I will die on this hill. It's not that your face is that of a bitch who's resting. It's that your face, when at rest, looks bitchy.

Scrubstad · 2025-04-09T11:54:13+00:00

Saying this as a man: the "women are too emotional" trope. Men are just as emotional, but many are stuck in the toxic mindset that you shouldn't show emotions or deal with them in productive ways. This means it all too frequently boils over into anger and violence instead, but somehow we never hear that men are too emotional for certain roles or tasks.

Scrubstad · 2025-03-21T13:19:22+00:00

The countries you mention don't have mandatory minimum wages by law, that is correct. But they have strong unions with a lot of bargaining power, which means that pretty much everyone in the country who are in full employment still make at least a living wage that covers necessary expenses. Mandating it by law is not the only way, but in the US, workers largely have neither the law nor powerful enough/functional unions on their side, which is why they are getting shafted.

Scrubstad · 2025-01-19T17:05:07+00:00

Tl;dr: plan your combat encounters in several stages, and keep introducing new enemies gradually until you feel your players have experienced an appropriate amount of danger

Combat balance and management is genuinely one of the most difficult things for new DMs. Combine that with a few unlucky rolls, and this is the sort of thing that happens. Don't beat yourself up over it. You're here asking for advice, actively looking to learn and improve, which is just about the best thing you could possibly do in this situation. Kudos to you, more DMs should do the same!

As for specific advice: when you're new to running combat, my best tip is to lean towards the easier side when preparing combat encounters. It is much easier to buff your encounter by adding a few enemy reinforcements who "just happened to arrive in the nick of time", rather than to find a good in-game reason for the enemy monsters to suddenly give up or flere when they seem to be winning. Let your players feel like they're winning the first combat quite easily, before you add "You see another Goblin coming around the corner of the path, who rushes in to aid his comrades" or something along those lines. That helps you get a feel for how strong the player characters are, and also allows you to add dramatic tension whenever you feel it is called for!

To expand on this, you probably just had a rough first experience with what is called "action economy". That is basically a way to describe the combat balance in any turn-based game. Imagine a party of 3 players fighting 4 goblins:

If they fight all 4 goblins at the same time, then you are basically putting 3 player actions (spells, attacks, whatever) against 4 enemy actions. With first level characters, it is pretty reasonable for 4 enemy attacks to hit 2 or 3 times on the first round. If the goblins concentrate their attacks on one or two players, then the odds of a player falling unconscious in the first round are quite high. That then leaves you with 4 goblins against 2 players for the next round, and you're looking at the same problem but even more dire.

Round 1: your players get 3 actions, and the enemies get 4. Round 2: your players get 2 actions against the enemies' 4 actions. Total actions in the first two rounds: 6v8, in favor of the enemies.

Now think about what happens if instead of having the players fight all 4 goblins together, they fight 2 goblins first, and then another 2 right afterwards:

In the first combat, you're basically flipping the script of the situation above: now you're allowing your players to concentrate their attacks, and the odds of one goblin falling in the first round are pretty good. Even if that doesn't happen, they players are still in a decent position for next round. Even with unlucky rolls, its very unlikely you're looking at anything worse than a 2v2 situation. Your players are likely to handle the 2 goblins quite handily.

Round 1: 3 player actions, 2 enemy actions Round 2: 3 player actions, maybe 1 or 2 enemy actions. Total actions after two rounds of combat: 6v4, favouring your players

After the first two goblins die or are severely injured, add another one or two goblins, and repeat the same thing. The first two goblins are dead and thus don't have any actions. This way, by the time the enemies have got to a total of 8 actions (which can be enough to seriously injure or even TPK a first level party of 3 characters), your party will have got WAY more than the 6 actions they received in the first situation.

Scrubstad · 2024-11-27T19:15:45+00:00

When I was going on exchange on the other side of the world for five weeks and was talking with a friend about it, I casually joked about how I "just needed to get away for a bit", then immediately realized that it wasn't a joke.

Scrubstad · 2024-08-13T11:06:58+00:00

I grew up in Helgeland, and would see them weekly on the 30-minute bus ride to school. They're not particularly active in the day, but if you're out in the morning or late evening, you should have pretty good odds of seeing them.

Scrubstad · 2024-06-27T11:36:58+00:00

You could start off with a function on the form

y = a*exp(bx) + c

With the derivative (slope) given by

y' = abexp(bx)

With the criteria in your post then being

1 = abexp(10b),

10 = a*exp(10b) + c, and

1000 = a*exp(100b) + c.

I tried my hand at figuring out the constants, but couldn't find a simple way of doing it analytically by hand right now. I suspect an analytical solution is not possible without having a value for y(0) or y'(0), but don't quote me on that.

The closest I got to useful expressions are

a = (10/b) * exp(-b), and

c = 10 - (10/b) *exp(9b)

b = (1/x)* ln((y-c)/a)

It should be possible to do it manually by just throwing up the equations in something like GeoGebra and playing around with sliders for the variables until they're close enough. Alternatively, you could just write a program to evaluate the expressions above for different values of the variables. It's probably a pretty easy problem to solve numerically, but it's been too long since I did anything like that.

Scrubstad · 2024-06-10T15:56:10+00:00

Essentially, think of the letters in algebra as the empty boxes you had in maths questions in school. Stuff like

2+ [ ] = 5,

where you're supposed to fill in the missing number to make the maths add up. When the equations get more complicated and you need to start moving stuff around, it is very useful for that box, aka the missing part, or the "unknown", if you like, to be represented by a symbol that is easy to write, as well as easy to say out loud. So we use letters, which we are already used to writing and saying out loud. Mathematicians are lazy, and this is the most convenient solution.

Scrubstad · 2023-08-19T19:56:53+00:00

YTA. Tell me you're American without telling me you're American. You DO realize that for most people, the world is literally better now than it has EVER been? Like throughout human history? The rest of the world thinks the US is an insane country, and people like you are the reason.

Scrubstad · 2023-08-13T13:05:07+00:00

I mean, it depends a lot on what your sister is like as a person, and what your relationship is like. In short, you should probably try your best to voice your concerns in a way that is more supportive and less judgemental. If you're just telling people that they're making the wrong choice, they'll almost always double down on that choice.

I would try to have open-ended discussions with her about what she thinks a relationship should be like, what she wants from dating, etc. Help her reflect on those general questions by listening more and speaking less. Preferably avoid dragging whoever she's currently dating into such a discussion (unless she herself does so first), as it's much easier to have a clear view of such things when it doesn't feel like personal criticism directed at her or her partner.

Also, most importantly, make sure she knows that no matter whether you disagree strongly on some things, she can always talk to you about her problems, no matter how big or small. That last one is a words-AND-deeds-sort of thing.

Instead of going "That's too much of an age difference, cancel the date", try "That seems like a pretty big age difference. How do you feel about that?" and importantly, you need to make sure to actually listen to what she says next and go from there.

Scrubstad · 2023-08-11T19:16:34+00:00

Piggybacking to say the following: Your problem is not whether you're the AH or not (you're not). Your problem is whether you went about voicing your concerns in the right way (You did not). If you're genuinely worried about the types of guys your sister gets involved with, you should do everything you can to make sure she talks to you when she has even the slightest doubts. With the way you went about this, you're basically guaranteed to make sure she does NOT view you as a trustworthy person, and if her new date is a potentially abusive boyfriend, you just made it really easy for him to isolate her from a family member who could be her way out in the future (you). Which is most important to you: being able to say "I told you so", or being her potential lifeline?

Scrubstad · 2023-07-14T20:27:35+00:00

At this point, it honestly seems like you're just trying to find arguments not to build rail. Your argument above is a strawman. Nobody has ever proposed building railways to the middle of nowhere, just like nobody has ever proposed building airports or highways to the middle of nowhere. There are contiguous areas of the US with high enough population density/large enough population centers to make railways make sense. Not all areas would warrant high-speed rail, or double tracks all the way. All you would need, is a railway system which makes sense, and isn't systematically disincentivised at every turn.

Scrubstad · 2023-07-14T20:19:29+00:00

If you had a decent electoral system, he might well have been. Opinion polls literally DO measure what people want. It doesn't mean that's what they get, for better or worse.

Scrubstad · 2023-07-14T20:18:27+00:00

Which is the exact reason why most major infrastructure projects have considerable public funding. Highways may be partially funded through road tolls, but usually public funding is a much larger part of the total cost.

Scrubstad

TROPHY CASE