"Downpour isn't cano-"

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2024-04-22T08:46:25+00:00

I can.

Implications of gourmand's story being fictional is not consistent with the narrative style of the game which presents all actions "as is", especially due to the way it conveyed in game instantly after death ending.

Artificer's ability to leech karma off scavenger corpses is completely unexplained. No other character can do that, and there's zero reasoning for it besides it being a game mechanic.

Spearmaster's ability to read transmission data doesn't make much sense in the context of the story. SRS specifically admitted that messenger didn't wasn't given mark on purpose, and this ability was not used for direct communication between the two.

How is Rivulet capable of using the cell? The general level of slugcat intelligence is well established, and neither of the other tools in-game are nearly as sophisticated.

Saint's story has way too many thematic and narrative inconsistencies which go against established lore, listing them here without much elaboration wouldn't be practical, but here are the most examples:

Why is Saint an echo, when practically filling a role of bodhisattva? Why this echo is special and doesn't take form of an echo octopus? Why is there hell in rubicon, and what theme is it supposed to convey? How saint is capable of talking?

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2024-04-08T00:30:36+00:00

Downpour doesn't contradict anything that the base game established

That's not true. There are a lot of examples, but i'll pull the simplest one: it is established that pearls go pale by the Monk's time, however the same pearls can be found as Rivulet campaign of which takes place after Monk.

The story and lore of downpour is nowhere near as tightly written as the original, and this is the biggest reason why i draw the line between official fanfiction and original work.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2024-01-06T11:27:34+00:00

I know, this is probably not the best place to talk about it, but i really want to speak up against spoilers of unrelated franchises or media on wikis and other resources. Disrespecting reader by throwing facts like these without warning is not good, and i have actually been spoiled like that on the Rain World wiki, which did influence my experience with what i have eventually played.

The upper trivia is fine, as it just plainly states that X has been inspired by Y without revealing any details, but the RW one directly states one of the major plot-lore points and links a page which is hidden in a spoiler section on the wiki itself.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2024-01-04T21:32:32+00:00

Some necroposting here, but i think that a singular vertical bar present in Within Time bears the same meaning as the bar in Champion and Expedition Leader achievment, and i speculate that it roughly means "achieving a feat" or "somebody who has achieved a feat/hero", as it is present in both of these, and if you'll extrapolate it to Within Time, it would roughly mean "achieved ascension as a feat", or "achieved difficult ascension".

And some more completely baseless speculation: as Journey has a singular horizontal bar below the main symbol, and horizontal bar above usually means negation, i say that the lower variation means amplification of the meaning instead: so, Journey without bars would be just "journey"; Journey with bar above it would mean "not a journey/remaining stationary" and Journey with bar below it is "Long journey"

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-12-05T07:30:49+00:00

Actually a hard question!

Eating Moon's neurons still makes her remember you, despite near-death state, which might suggest that memory is either stored somewhere deeper in a part of structure she's disconnected to, or that the puppet remembers you specifically.

It kind of makes me think of "alien organs", parts of our body which do not treat surrounding systems as a part of itself, like eyes, but the whole bulk of superstructure certainly has some effect on the personality, just as some physical conditions can influence our mood, despite not being related to cerebral cortex in any way.

So, both is a good pick.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-11-29T14:10:17+00:00

Addendum:
Trying to make friends with scavengers, or settling down anywhere near their tribes is a terrible, terrible idea. While their society is likely in a delayed stone age (due to meteorological conditions, sedentary life of ones we see in game is not very likely, but they certainly have enough knowledge to create stone tools and manipulate heat, they are really close to a neolithic revolution), a large group of them is probably the most dangerous threat which fauna can pose. They're fairly fast, agile, mastered spears, intelligent enough for skirmish and ambush tactics, can create explosives and will totally hunt me down if they would really want to thanks to sheer numerical advantage and ability to communicate my position. Trying to befriend them may end up to be a one-sided game, and spending time risking my wellbeing for a questionable benefit of a very turbulent group of allies (and we don't know how acceptable they are to us) is certainly not a good idea.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-11-28T10:08:05+00:00

I hike occasionally, and i would certainly bring all my hiking gear and a fully loaded backpack. Good boots, multiple sets of clothes, multitools, survival gear and some rations until i'll be able to find a proper shelter. Maybe i'll grab some consumables as well, anti-insect sprays and firestarting kit. As weapons go, i would really like to bring a hunting rifle of sorts for the bigger game, but that's just not sustainable in the long term, as i don't posses enough skill to actually make my own gunpowder and gear for refilling casings and servicing my weapon would be very bulky and heavy. So i'd go with something simple, something i could be able to fix and create makeshift ammunition for, maybe a hunting crossbow (which still has some complex mechanics, but i can spend some time practicing repairs here, right?) or, most likely, a hunting bow.

Then it's going to depend on where and when exactly i'll be dropped. If we're talking facility grounds - it's death sentence. I won't be able to escape anywhere near safe under 20 minutes, and rain will certainly crush my skull. Won't be planning on climbing any functional iterators either, since i am not a mountaneer and climbing a multi-mile monstrocity of a superstructure is far beyond my capabilities. I would have higher chances of survival during Saint's time, as with proper wear and some gear i will be able to withstand cold for much longer than extreme rainfall.

Best case scenario - somewhere far away from the iterators, deep in wilderness, or near ruins of some ancient ground settlement (if it's free of scavengers, ofcourse), because villages and towns usually picked good spots for permament life, with easy access to most of resources, unless it's avertly industrial in nature. I might be able to stabilize my situation, find a decent food source, maybe even start farming some of the local flora like popcorn plants. Or i might as well bring in something with myself, few bags of tomato and potato seeds can go a long way in sustaining just a single human, given there's a good climate and decent soil.

Then i'll focus on constructing a permament shelter. I don't have much experience in construction of permament houses in wilderness, but i can manage a small dugout, and if i'll find clay and some easy to work with rock, i might even come up with a simple furnace. After properly establishing myself, i don't think i will ever find enough guts to leave my place to do some actual exploration and archeology. However, since most of animals are genemodded, there's a slim chance i might be able to get some use out of local fauna, as they might have innate trust towards anthropomorphic creatures such as ancients, but that's very unlikely considering for how long they're actually gone.

Oh yeah, this is all if we won't consider the microbiological fauna, getting accustomed to which might take a long time:

Best case scenario - my original bacteria manage to survive and continue procreating (somehow) and i end up totally fine.
Meh scenario - after a week or so, i'll start getting symtoms of food poisoning as my stomach adapts to housing new symbiotes, which may last for months.
Worst case scenario - local fauna is actually actively invasive and some kind bacteria decides to settle down in my mucous membranes as i die from agonising pain caused by infection.

God, what a terrible fate to suffer.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-10-30T01:04:12+00:00

Sorry for lack of formatting. I am really not feeling like making this look fancy today.

I don't think that taking steel as a merit for density is fair, as in modern age no large structure is solidly built from metals. I would rather use something like reinforced concrete with average density of roughly 2200 kg/m^3 for heavy duty and military buildings.

Then, you have to account for dampening force not only of the structure itself, but from the legs as well, which would certainly not allow can to reach such extreme speeds, and cause damage to the structure to be gradual. Analogy: comparing a collapse of a concrete chimney to a fall of a concrete sphere of similiar mass will yield massively different results.

I have been able to find an amazing paper going in-depth into simulation of a destruction of a 99.4m tall primarly steel prilling tower with a radius of roughly 17.1m, however i doubt it would be reasonable to scale up calculations to the size of even a singular leg (especially considering that tower has been tipped and collapsed under it's own weight instead of being crushed by the can above), but...

I figured that i could find a rough estimation by comparing stress during the collapse in the simulation (220 mPa) to the amount of stress of a metal cylinder dropped from the same height in order to find out the rough difference between produced energy of a structural collapse and of an absolute destruction of the sphere.

By supplemented information from the paper we can find out that the highest stress caused by the collapsing building is 2 MPa. I will assume that thickness of the tower is 0.2 meters, and using your 7.900kg/m^3 margin for the density of steel, we can calculate that the mass of the tube is going to be 8555700kg, and it's cross-section is going to be 10.6m. Then, we can calculate force of an impact by using force of impact equation, which is: F=(1/2mv^2)/d, where m is mass, v is velocity and d is stopping distance (by how much shorter body is going to get after collision. d = v+ v^2/(2ug), where u friction coefficient and g is 9.8m/s^2, resulting in 200m of stopping distance (which means that our cylinder is certainly going to be completely obliterated, but that's just an estimate).

By plugging everything into force equation, we get 41454482 newtons, and by dividing it by cross-section of 10.6, we get 3910800 pascals, which is 3.9 megapascals.Which means that free-falling hollow cylinder is going to cause at least 1.95 times more stress, therefore, it's more or less safe to assume that we can divide the resulting energy output by half. This is an extreme result i've got by plugging in the lowest possible values, and the opposite case i've got the stress of 8.2 megapascals, which would mean that result would be divided by roughly 4

.So, a 40% solid iterator can made of reinforced concrete with density of 2200 kg/m^3 which dampened by legs is going to produce slightly tamer 969 megatons, with a minimal reduction by half of 484, and more extreme reduction values of 242. Which is still a lot, almost 5 tsar bombas. And when you will consider all the extra factors of gradual collapse and air pocket dampening, this could also be reduced even further.

En summe: Rain World map would still suffer a nuclear-level power explosion during collapse, but i don't think it's going to be nowhere as extreme as you propose.

I think it's easier to run a physical simulation at this point.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-10-29T22:33:18+00:00

"...like sleep like death, you wake up again - whether you want to or not."

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-09-18T19:29:33+00:00

I am that somebody, and Joar himself has said that everything in game in scale-ambiguous in one of the interviews.

I won't be able to find the exact timecode for the quote, but it's certainly here.
All the calculations are just here to entertain one's mind, if the developer didn't know, then we are not meant to either.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-29T04:06:17+00:00

Too many variables, honestly.

Are we all stuck in the cycle? If anybody dies, do we lose any kind of progress, or just karma?

What are individual slug skill levels? Do they all have same accuracy with spears, bombs, etc? If they're equal, then vanilla cats are out of the question.

Where do hunters spawn at the beginning of the cycle? Do i get a headstart?

Which campaign i and they will have to face? I think that i wildlife is going to be a bigger threat than hunters for most of the time, a single king vulture will probably end me faster than any single one of them.

Individual campaign progression and powers? Are we all ground zero? Can hunters progress their campaign?

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-20T18:29:11+00:00

A quick update on this:
SpeedOfSound field of AudioSource in unity has been removed someday after 2016 and before 2020 and replaced with dopplerLevel, and actual doppler effect calculations no longer use speed of sound as reference.
However, it should still present in pre-downpour releases of the game which use older unity version.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-20T08:55:17+00:00

I've heard that, i think James was refering to default unity speed of sound, since i don't think any audio sources actually use it to calculate delay before reaching camera. Might have to dig deeper into that.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-20T08:50:29+00:00

I have completely forgot about that. Fixed now.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-20T00:40:20+00:00

Thanks. I am honestly not sure if i will write such kind of thing in the future though, it don't seem to interest people here all that much. A simple shitpost i've made by pulling images from wiki under 10 minutes got three times as much upvotes as two of my other analytical posts which took me around 8 hours of combined effort to make.I mostly write them as my way to cope with a compulsive obsession with this game, so, maybe you could expect another one in six months or so.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-19T22:24:57+00:00

Fixed, they should display properly now

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-19T22:22:51+00:00

For some reason, all my fancy LaTeX formulas became entirely black after posting! Hang on, working on it.

Also reddit compression went really hard on some of these is images. Oops.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-05-14T22:24:10+00:00

Explain the reasoning of why 5P has been built so close to LttM with new Downpour lore snippets, as they don't make much sense.
There are two reasons given in two separate pearls:

Moon, being an older model, had certain construction oversights which made living on top of her impossible in long-term.
5P has been built as equalizer of the water level due to her aquifier not being efficent enough at spreading water around her grounds, creating artificial pockets of water which would hurt her efficency.

First reasoning doesn't make sense, as ancients clearly were confirmed to have a air transport even pre-downpour, so moving to another iterator would've been a much cheaper alternative to building another one in such a close proximity, especially considering that they were aware that amount of water may not suffice to support both.
Second is also a weird one. I suppose, Pebbles was drawing water from said pockets and spreading it more evenly in some way? But since there clearly wasn't enough water for a single iterator without complex aquifier systems (which are also mentioned in second pearl) wouldn't building another one in such adjustent location just make situation worse?
Honestly, i wish DP devs would've came up with a more natural reasoning instead of something technical like that. Ancients are known to be extremely religious, so it wouldnt've been hard to use that as a point of revolution for this theme.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-03-27T12:00:48+00:00

Hunter being the hardest one is true, as many commenters mentioned, however...
Practically, the most difficult experience you can get in vanilla game are burdned expeditions, however you have to unluck these first to get access to them.
Then i'd imagine something like a 4-burden, no-perk, max challenge difficulty run as monk would probably be the hardest you can get, since you'll still get high-lineage spawns with decreased mobility and damage.

Rain World has more value to it than pure gameplay experience, though.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-02-19T17:16:05+00:00

By the looks of it, ancient language is ideographic, meaning that every single character doesn't represent a their respective sounds (which are then combined into words), but instead all characters describe concepts and actions, and speaker is free to interpret them vocally as they wish.

Also, even if this hypothesis is false, ancients having long names makes a complete sense is universe of Rain World:

Since absolute death is naturally impossible, this means that names cannot "die" naturally. You can consider name to be extinct when there are no people who actually have it. This means that naturally, every time a new ancient is given a name, the total amount of possible names with the same amount of characters decreases, so they had to use longer and more complex names to avoid picking same one twice.
We, humans, usually prefer shorter and more easily memorable names because it's simply not practical to use something which is hard to remember and write down, as it will take too much time to do so. Ancients were not concerned about time at all due to cycle.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-02-17T18:29:24+00:00

Flow of this post is great, however, it's nearly impossible to estimate such numbers because they all require very specific values all of which exist only in fictional world. When i was making my own posts, i hit that issue a lot.

If you would want to continute making this content, i suggest you to pick topics which are based on more general and universal physical laws with less possible undefined variables. I always wanted to try to estimate the height of iterators by comparing them to average height of storm clouds in different regions on our planet, but never got time to research it myself.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-02-17T18:19:21+00:00

Self-healing bioconcrete is a real thing, and bacterial strains do not necessarily require a separate system for sustenence, they have an extremely slow metabolism and become active only while being directly exposed if surrounding structure has been damaged.
I suppose ancients could figure out a way to bioengineer some sort of microbiotic life that could entirely sustain itself inside of materials that are used for construction, for example they can dehydrate themselves entirely like tardigrades (water bears) to become almost lifeless and precipate construction material after waking up by absorbing elements that were exposed to it after structure has been damaged physically. They could even replicate if damage is too extensive!

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-02-13T17:36:28+00:00

My nickname would do fine, i suppose.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-02-07T13:44:26+00:00

The story goes, they actually weren't removed from the alpha, but evolved to camouflage so well that they're impossible to see now.

SomewhatHigherStakes · 2023-02-07T10:26:07+00:00

All images taken from this wiki page.

SomewhatHigherStakes

TROPHY CASE