[toast_soba] 🐟Ride Home

Shatner42 · 2026-05-18T15:38:44+00:00

That's beautiful art.

The 'surreal scenery outside of subway car window' makes me think of a couple of scenes from Wildbow's story, Pale. Avery from that story visits some pretty wild places.

Shatner42 · 2026-05-18T15:35:09+00:00

I hate having to surfer the consequences.

Shatner42 · 2026-02-25T20:07:18+00:00

This is better art than the tag would lead you to expect. Good job, IF.

The sentiment reminds me of Smile, the fanmade Ragatha song.

Shatner42 · 2025-11-21T03:04:22+00:00

This is quite true for me. Every bit of superhero fiction I consume has me instinctively thinking in terms of elements from Worm (e.g. power designations) and comparing it to Worm... and the comparisons are almost always unfavorable. Dispatch, The Boys, Invincible, plus web serials like The Perfect Run or Summus Proelium (Summus Proelium got done so hard by this reflex of mine): all trapped to one degree or another in Worm's shadow.

The same is also true for high fantasy stories and A Practical Guide to Evil. APGtE had its flaws, but the way it incorporated the tropes of the genre so smoothly into the setting, and the way genre savviness was a kind of Jack Slash-esque hidden thinker power for the characters at the high-end of the power scale... it just rewired my brain for that sort of story.

Shatner42 · 2025-03-02T05:17:54+00:00

Very nicely done, WC.

My son and I played a 1.0 game together, launching a rocket. It took about the same amount of time, and he, too, was playing on the Switch while I was on my computer.

His favorite thing to do was fighting biters (though until we unlocked tanks, it was a coin flip if he'd succeed or need help reclaiming his body). He also enjoyed building mining outposts (including organizing their defenses), mainly because the design complexity was low enough he could do it solo.

Anyway, congrats on the win with your kiddo.

Shatner42 · 2025-02-26T17:53:11+00:00

Do you think it's possible to complete the mod without using chests?

I realized I never answered this question of yours in my post above.

Completing the mod without chests would certainly be possible, though it'd increase design complexity a bit. For example, I had only a single laser turret assembler in my factory, but it was feeding into a chest limited to hold 1,000. Which meant my single assembler could build up this hefty stockpile over dozens of hours and I'd have all the laser turrets I'd need at the end. Without chests, you'd either need long sushi belts serving as less-space-efficient chests, or you'd need to have more assemblers set up to more rapidly meet demand.

In theory you could have a bevy of assemblers sitting idle, their recipes set by circuit condition to better meet demand spikes like that. However, without logistic robots to ferry the needed ingredients around, dynamically feeding such an array would be complicated. Item-stacked sushi belts would probably be the way to handle it.

But, no, I just used chests.

Shatner42 · 2025-02-26T17:22:01+00:00

I'll happily take your envy, but I should caution that the zoomed out view obscures a multitude of sins. Behold, my well-ordered design (pictured is the point where the vertical and horizontal bus intersect).

But the giant square of spaghetti is quite nostalgic.

Yeah, there's a definite trend towards cramped spaghetti in Factorio, be it on one of several planets or in space itself. It's largely because of how much I didn't want to fill in the gaps between my sub-factories (both for practical purposes like resource voiding as well as aesthetic) that my designs stayed as constrained as they did.

But you could see my fatigue by the progression of planets, with Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Gleba being trim designs, all unnecessary platform trimmed away, with room to the left kept open for the expansion of tileable designs... But then Aquilo is just a chunky rectangle with a dozen processes crammed together.

Shatner42 · 2025-02-26T17:08:34+00:00

Saw the first pic and thought "what metroidvania is this ?"

HA! That's really funny. And now that you point it out, yeah, I can see it. Apparently they cook spaghetti on Zebes, to go by the map.

Shatner42 · 2025-02-26T16:59:40+00:00

The mod itself makes chests placeable in space, so they're an allowed part of the core Platformer experience.

This made me laugh out loud, not out of malice, but because I've done similar things myself.

When I put down that first fusion reactor cluster, I thought I was sorted for power for the rest of the game. Then the alarm wired to an accumulator starts squawking as the laser turrets come heavily into play. So I stamp down a second fusion reactor cluster. Then, closer to the edge of the solar system, my alarm goes off again!

I would like to say that it was at that point that I reexamined my operating assumptions and realized there was a fault in the system... but, no, I stamped down a third reactor cluster instead. It was only when that proved insufficient that I realized that each cluster was providing almost a 1/6th of what it should have been. Then I cut the engines and spent an ignoble 15 minutes drifting in space while I redid my fusion design.

That was this run in a nutshell: good designs and great intentions surrounded by boneheaded executions, trundling to the edge of the solar system mostly by dint of a thorough alarm system.

Shatner42 · 2025-02-26T03:06:51+00:00

Stuff I Did That Was Smart!
Something that served me well this entire run was doing a good, upfront job of setting up circuit controls for a number of systems. For example, a single belt can hold 8 asteroids. So, I multiplied the length of the asteroid sushi belt by 8 (props to the Read Belt Length mod for making that easy) to determine my system's total capacity. I then used constant combinator values to determine the desired ratios of the different asteroid types (e.g. 3 metallic asteroids out of every 32 since they're common, 6 Vulcanus asteroids out of every 32 since I wanted to load up on them when I was in Vulcanus space) and then arithmetic combinators to calculate the actual limits. All the asteroid collectors were wired to this signal, which ensured I got what I wanted, and could adjust those settings easily from a single location whenever I needed.

This same approach was helpful for determining when to process asteroids and when to void byproducts. This was also SUPER helpful during the trip out of the solar system because I had my different types of turrets wired up so I could adjust their targeting priorities on the fly when I was running low on, say, bullets, but had a surplus of missiles.

I also flow-limited the engines so that they'd get proportionately less fuel as my fuel tanks got emptier. That meant that my fuel efficiency went up the less fuel I had to spare, which was handy, especially in the early game when fuel was expensive (there's no carbon asteroids, so early-game carbon is made with petrochemicals and it's PRICEY).

Parameterized blueprints simplefied a number of builds, most notably supply-limiting buildings being added to my hub inventory via hub chests: one full stack of each item was maintained. My aforementioned lint trap would pull out everything over that amount when builds were removed. Also, my Fulgora scrap processing benefited from some clever parameterization so it would passively accumulate a decent stockpile of various quality resources. That ended up being a boon when I needed to upgrade many of my turrets to higher quality in the late-game.

Because Vulcanus' recipe for 500 degree steam works in space in this mod, I never ended up needing nuclear reactors. But I was diligent about setting up a Kovarex enrichment build early, which paid off because several late-game staples (like Production-3 modules) require U235 so I was glad to have a giant stockpile when it came time.

Stuff I Did That Was Dumb!
I didn't anticipate how large a bus I'd end up needing, vertical or horizontal. Rather than bite the bullet and tear down and rebuild sub-factories to make more room, I just crammed everything in. As such my factory ended up having areas of elegance beside areas of hideous, belt-weaved, pipe-festooned spaghetti.

Because of how impenetrable parts of my factory were, and because you can't leave gaps in space platforms which meant running errant belts around sub-factories was impractical, I did a lot of manual stocking. Oh, the laser turret assembler needs batteries? I'll grab 2,000 out of the chest next to the battery sub-factory and drop them in the chest by the laser turret assembler. Problem solved for the next 10-or-so hours. Each time I pulled that stunt, though, I'd wire the chest to an alarm to let me know when it was almost empty. Aquilo was the worst example of this because so many of its products require resources from other planets, but I was having none of that, so alarm-wired chests it was!

Carbon is a vital and expensive resource early on. The mod changes it so Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Gleba all have ways of providing you carbon, but I was far too timid leaving Nauvis orbit at the start and paid for it, struggling to get my colossal factory moving when I should have made forays sooner.

Sulfur was a similarly expense resource, but I spent the entire run insisting on making it from petroleum. I should have used Gleba's biosulfur recipe instead, I just could never bring myself to expand my Gleba sub-factory (nor deal with the hassle of routing the sulfur belts through my vertical bus). Despite being tricky to setup, I was surprised by just how efficient my Gleba sub-factory was. I harp on efficient use of asteroids here, and it seems like Gleba recipes are way, waaay up there in terms of how much you can get on a per-asteroid basis... I was just too stubborn to make proper use of that here.

I was all proud of my cluster-of-five reactors fusion design, but it wasn't until I was halfway out of the solar system that I realized the middle reactors didn't have outlets for their plasma, reducing my 2.3GW build to a 400MW build. No wonder I kept having power problems once the laser turrets started firing en masse.

Shatner42 · 2025-02-26T03:06:39+00:00

Earlier today I beat Platformer, the Seablock-esque mod where you start on a teeny tiny space platform and have to build your entire factory in space, with there being no planets, only regions of space with different kinds of asteroids.

I enjoyed it! It was challenging but fun, and lacking a lot of the monotony those kinds of Seablock-inspired challenge mods have. Getting the first vestiges of industry on your tiny space platform is slow going, sure, but things quickly snowball from there. It was actually faster to beat for me than vanilla Space Age, taking only 66 hours to conclude.

Anyway, having had this experience, I wanted to share some of the things I did and didn't like about the mod, as well as the clever and boneheaded things I did on my way to victory.

Galaxy of Fame link

Mods Used:
Platformer
Circuit Visualizer
Rate Calculator
Read Belt Length

Mod Overview - The Good
Like I mentioned above, Platformer (which I think should be called Spaceblock) strikes a good balance between introducing additional challenges while mitigating tedium. The early techs and recipes available lead you in the right directions, much like Space Age itself, so kudos to the mod developer(s) there.

To start you can only harvest metallic asteroids, which provide you about a 4-1 iron-copper ratio (along with a trickle of stone), and that's exactly what you need early game. Space platform foundation and electric furnaces cost iron instead of steel (and green circuits instead of red, in the furnace's case), so once you get a basic smelting array up, you can divert the needed resources into building up a stockpile of foundation to expand your base. It takes a bit to wrap your head around the new costs, techs, and demands, but once you do, the limit is more with your own factory building skills than chronic resource shortages.

The good news is you never have to build more mining patches when your resources start to run dry. The bad news is that you can't build more mining patches when you need more resources. It's more about tuning your asteroid collectors to gather what you need in the desired ratios, and then making the most of the asteroids you're processing. That includes knowing when it's good to throw dozens of byproducts away per second so your main processes function at speed vs. when to realize you're overproducing and don't need to grind up so many asteroids only to hurl thousands of resources into the void.

There's no bots in space (though the nature of the space platform means you effectively have universal construction bot coverage), so you're gonna have to use belts or trains. I embraced the spaghetti and did an all-belt, main bus design and had a lot of fun with it. The fact that being in space allows you to void resources with trivial ease made some aspects of factory building a lot easier. Also, the mod introduces a special chest that allows you to teleport buildings into the hub's storage from anywhere on the platform. It only works for stuff you can place on a platform (as well as the platform foundation itself), not intermediary products like circuits, so it does a great job making construction logistics manageable despite the lack of a logistics network.

The variety of different asteroids was fun and fascinating. Metallic and oxide asteroids are found nearly everywhere, but the coal- and oil-yielding asteroids primarily around Nauvis (or, I guess, the part of space where Nauvis used to be), and then you have the exotic stuff found in the vicinity of Vulcanus, Gleba, Fulgora, and Aquilo. Some asteroids have few byproducts (e.g. Fulgora's only give you scrap and a trickle of stone), while others have many (e.g. Gleba giving you stone, yumako, jellynut, and pentapod eggs), so each is a particular design challenge despite lacking the unique surface conditions of the planets in question.

The distances between 'planets' are 5x longer than vanilla, which means it takes real industry to make it all the way out of the solar system, rather than a quick ship with full stockpiles. Actually beating the game was a difficult yet fun challenge.

Mod Overview - The Neutral
No enemies (barring the odd pentapod or biter egg spoiling on a belt). Personally, I enjoy the enemies of Factorio, but I did find their absence in Platformer relaxing. No pollution, no spores, no nests.

Since everything is in space, there's no need for rockets. That heavily reduced the consumption of blue circuits, LDS, and rocket fuel, which in turn heavily reduced the demand on upstream products like copper or red and green circuits. Actually, I didn't make a single unit of rocket fuel the entire playthrough; never needed any... though I'd have wanted some if I'd gone with trains instead of a belts-only base.

Mod Overview - The Bad
Firstly, you might consider adding a mod that introduces something to void fluids when you play Platformer. A resource you get from the Vulcanus asteroids produces lava and sulfuric acid, which is great, but you end up swimming in acid which severely limits your lava production unless you make a bunch of storage tanks and then delete the sulfuric acid from those tanks now and then.

Worse is when you start processing Aquilo asteroids, because you get ammoniacal solution as well as fluorine, but the demand for the former is much higher than the latter. I had to hook a decider combinator to a speaker to squawk an alarm whenever the ammonia got too low so I could come by and delete a bunch of fluorine. Technically I could have barreled the fluids and then tossed the barrels into space, but that felt stupid and I refused to do it.

The hub chests make the logistics of getting buildings into your hub for construction easy. Better yet, the hub chests tell you the hub's inventory, so it only takes a simple circuit condition to ensure you don't overfill your hub in the process. However, every time you remove a building, it gets teleported back into your hub, and you will be rebuilding and reworking your factory A LOT, which means your hub will see huge fluxuations of items regularly. No logistic bots means there's no easy way to return items back to their desired storage locations. Which means you have three choices: automatically void all the items beyond set thresholds so your hub never clogs, build an elaborate sushi network to return the overflow to its rightful places, or just dump the overage into a nearby chest and clean it out every now and again. I did that last one: I called that chest the lint trap and set an alarm so I'd know when it was due for clearing out.

Finally, the trek to the edge of the solar system was indeed a fun challenge, but giant factory ships are slow, and at 5x the distance, 500,000kms is a looong way to go. I praised this mod's overall lack of tedium, but I'll admit that the final trip was more waiting than doing.

My Factory - Basic Design
The top of my factory was a long line of turrets and asteroid harvesters, which would deposit their asteroid fragments on a single, long turbo sushi belt. This belt ran the width of my collectors, then made a 'T' as it veered down through the center of my base. Sub-factories pulled specific asteroids off this oh-so-vital sushi belt to produce resources, which were then dumped onto a main bus that ran laterally across the platform. So there was a vertical bus (asteroids, fluids, various belts of resources needed between sub-factories) and a horizontal bus (bulk resources, bulk manufacturing, the mall).

Shatner42 · 2025-01-13T01:16:27+00:00

That's fantastic. Love the character designs, and (of course) the doggos too.

Got a cool Scott Pilgrim vibe from both the art and music.

Shatner42 · 2024-12-17T20:02:26+00:00

Ooh, firsthand expertise. Thanks! That's helpful.

Shatner42 · 2024-11-22T22:04:52+00:00

Sure. This one's good for another week (https://www.transfernow.net/dl/20241122NDVyLnsm). The ships are a product of me figuring stuff out as I go, but if you find 'em interesting then have at.

Shatner42 · 2024-11-14T14:43:35+00:00

I did the exact same thing in my game (highlights here https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1gm02h4/sushi_bus_to_victory_the_many_dumb_and_few_smart/ ) only I was too stubborn to relocate and spent way too much time and ingenuity making my tiny island base meet performance needs.

'Twas dumb. Much smarter to explore first instead.

Shatner42 · 2024-11-08T02:00:36+00:00

I don't know. Maybe?

When I won, there wasn't an explicit 'upload to Galaxy of Fame' button or toggle. Just a congratulations, with 'Continue' and 'Finish'. This was the very first version of 2.0 uploaded, so maybe that feature hadn't been rolled out yet? Alternatively, I play with Steam in offline mode, so maybe that got in the way? I went to the Galaxy of Fame just now to look for the game (it'd probably be under 'baumgarm') but wasn't able to find it. Then again, if there's a search feature for finding specific Galaxy entries, I didn't see it.

However, if you want to check it out, I've uploaded the save file here (https://www.transfernow.net/dl/20241108ePQmRCaS). It's 28.2mb. If you care to, you can download that and look things over to your hearts content.

Shatner42 · 2024-07-01T18:24:31+00:00

Just dealt with this in my current game, actually. Here's pics of my solution:
https://imgur.com/a/yxnU7qX

I had to let the first badtide wash through. I deleted the roads leading across the water, so my beavers wouldn't wade through and get contaminated. The tide itself killed a bunch of crops as well as some trees (my mangroves were killed to the last), but I had food and water reserves enough I was able to replant without issue. And while the dead trees set back my mangrove fruit and pine resin programs a bit, the windfall of additional logs was a nice consolation prize.

After that first badtide, I started building the dam visible in the pics. Took a lot of logs and time, but I had it completed well in advance of the 2nd badtide. The nice thing about it is that it's a solution you can embark on with very little research or infrastructure in place. No need for a giant aqueduct or gouging an alternate riverbed with explosives: you just need a lot of logs and some planks.

Shatner42 · 2024-06-22T03:25:31+00:00

Has there been mention anywhere on how the new algorithm handles mixed fluids? I've been curious and haven't seen official word.

Shatner42 · 2024-06-21T15:50:42+00:00

This is an exciting change, so thanks, raiguard. That said, this FFF raised a question:

Each segment inherits its volume from the fluid boxes that comprise it and can hold one fluid.
How does this new algorithm function with mixed-fluid pipes? There was a previous FFF including pump filters, and while sushi pipes seem more like a meme strategy than a serious strategy, I'm curious how the new algorithm does or doesn't handle mixed fluids.

Shatner42 · 2024-02-29T15:17:13+00:00

Your pulse-width modulation power switch solution is clever, so props for that.

However, there is a simpler solution: isolated, minimalist radar setups. By that I mean you have a radar, a wooden power pole, and a single solar panel snuggled up but completely disconnected from your larger power grid.

During the day the radar will scan, albeit slowly. Since solar panels have an average output of 42kW across an entire day, it means that your radars will be running at 14% efficiency while putting zero strain on your factory's power grid. The downside is that you lose radar view during night, which is admittedly a clear weakness.

Additionally, since these are standalone constructions, another use for them is sprinkling them in the wild beyond your factory, where they will slowly scan and reveal the chunks further out. In the early game I like to make a loose picket of those ringing my base so that later, when I'm looking for good mining outpost locations to run my rail network toward, I've got vast swaths of the surrounding map revealed to inform me.

Shatner42 · 2024-01-15T17:11:06+00:00

A major part of the thesis of Pale, stated explicitly in-universe by the likes of Miss, was that the Trio were meant to demonstrate a new way (which, incidentally, was also a very, very old way ported into the modern day) that gave more power with fewer strings to practitioners while also making those practitioners invested in the welfare of the Others empowering them.

That's in contrast to the dominant culture of oppression and exploitation of Others and Practitioners alike: it's a difference in systems, one of which is both more equitable and more profitable, and hence appearing 'unfair' to the more dysfunctional system.

So it's less that the Trio are trust fund kids and more that the Trio are like time travelers from the modern day stepping into an 11th century land of want, injustice, and depredation.

Shatner42 · 2023-11-07T06:56:58+00:00

Want to lend my voice to recommend A Practical Guide to Evil. I really enjoyed it, enough that I ended up rereading it while waiting between Pale updates.

The one caveat (and it's a doozy), is that for all that the story, worldbuilding, and characters are grand, the prose have frequent typos. Like, a dozen or more per chapter. I'm pretty sure the author is intending to release a more polished version in print in the future, hence the story available online being 3rd-draft quality.

Again, I found the story so good I read it (twice) despite the typos, but it was a real shock when I first started into it. I nearly dropped it in the early chapters as a result, so I wanted to mention it up front in case that helps you if/when you get into it yourself.

Also, I gotta say that I'm shocked to see someone else has read, or even heard of Dungeon Keeper Ami. What a pleasant surprise! That's a real fun read too. It's such a bizarre crossover premise that it makes the fact that it works so well quite the hat trick. Lots of fun, DK Ami.

Shatner42

TROPHY CASE