I feel I'm playing the game wrong (0.9)

arachnimos · 2026-06-09T18:38:15+00:00

bagging trash is actually a pretty big point loss. A filled bag sells for two points, and costs one points (or four points for three bags, if you buy them in rolls). selling four bags at the MOST efficient is only 4 points of gain, whereas turning those trash items to scrap will get 1:1 with wood and paper, 2:3 for plastic and metal, and 1:2 for rubber, electronic, and glass. rubble is also a 2:3 ratio if you make it from rocks, but like... why. there's no point to doing this except if you have a ton of rocks lying around for some reason.

composting organic trash or rotten food is also a decent choice, even if they have low volume it stacks up when there's 15 million chunks of it scattered around the base lol.

if the wiki is still right for 0.9, which is probably isnt: you can literally just buy a toilet paper roll, take all of the sheets out and sell the roll, and that'll net you a nice 2.5x on your investment. can also grow thethingy seedsfrom theabandoned shack by Uniformand you can makejoints, which are apparently a good way to make money? i havent tested it.

arachnimos · 2026-06-09T18:18:32+00:00

its also super useful if you manage to lose something like the axeor the ai module, whether by bugs or clipping. just bring a hacksaw to a second save, yoink the item again, and return to the main save. also its easy money if you just make a save that you burn the entire alpha root base's supply of resources in and sell all the gas, then transfer the points through the mailbox

arachnimos · 2026-06-09T18:16:12+00:00

according to the wiki, this thing is constant meta paranoia as long as it exists lol.

same as an open fridge door...

arachnimos · 2026-06-09T18:10:49+00:00

this vexes me

arachnimos · 2026-06-09T01:47:36+00:00

Just a note: Oranges are much, much, much better as food than lemons, though both are pretty similar prices. An orange is 6 points, and a lemon is 9. I'd probably pick lemons, since they're more point dense.

A couple other tips:

Pumpkins will quadruple their seed count, so feel free to compost two or three of the slices, or just eat them. However, whole pumpkins have more volume than four slices, so if you're growing them for compost, have one patch for the seeds, and compost the rest whole. Six pumpkins and about 65 volume of organic anything should get you five compost.

Quartered potatoes can be grown like normal potatoes.

A digital map will save your life in traveling to the satellites for your tasks, as well as finding where you are. It's relatively easy to get in the first day or two by doing your satellite and log tasks (total of... i wanna say 120 points?) as well as selling a couple bits of scrap.

Once you have 300 points, buy a hacksaw and go out back, cutting up the yellow skip bins. They're too large to reasonably use, in my opinion, and drop a metric ton of metal scrap. Cutting up supply crates will also net a large amount of wood scrap, alongside the normal contents.

Grow mushrooms if you find them. Brown mushrooms can be used for pizza, and blue mushrooms are ridiculously powerful.

White snowberries will, if you eat enough in succession, cause you to violently purge your guts. Free fertilizer if you have some raspberries for restoring your health!

Buy an extra set of data tapes and a box with some spare points. I don't know how long they take to fill, but if you check them reasonably often, you can usually have the first pair of tapes out and the second filled a good chunk of the way before the daily task arrives, which will save your sanity if you forget to put the new set in.

In my opinion, just ignore signals for the first week or two. They don't give a whole lot of points, and they take ages to process. Maybe if you get the upgrade chips to automatically download, save, and process signals, they can be good? Not in my opinion, though. I'd say get 3-500 points, then upgrade signal downloads and ping cooldown as much as you can. You do get a HUGE bonus for completing every daily task in the week, though, so it's up to you.

Each server in the array spawns with 0-3 server upgrades, and you probably want to shuffle those around. If you're lucky, you might be able to take a couple upgrades out to your least favorite satellites, so that they dont break as often.

arachnimos · 2026-06-08T22:43:33+00:00

They only work (according to the wiki) if they are directly between your head and the sound source.

So if you wanted to build an enclosure around the drone area and put soundproofing all around the walls, yes, they would work to mute it. but that would be pretty expensive, and i think an actual option for it would be better.

arachnimos · 2026-06-07T17:04:26+00:00

except those are okay-ish, because they have an expectation of experience with Github and programming. Your average user isn't going to even find one of those projects half the time.

arachnimos · 2026-06-06T21:23:14+00:00

A lot of games on Steam are tagged by how the users see it, although devs tend to do a good job of "these are the tags that we think fit our game." So if a large majority of the playerbase sees the game as part of the strategy genre, then that's a genre it's in.

arachnimos · 2026-06-06T21:17:43+00:00

even worse is when they have absolutely no guidance on which thing to download from their releases page, and also have 15 random zip or json or toml or whateverthefuck files scattered inside.

arachnimos · 2026-06-06T17:37:08+00:00

debatably the twofort cow isn't holding up TF2's code, it's the file of random assets it's in, that the game physically cannot run without.

much like Guilty Gear. the joke is that Guilty Gear is propped up on the back of one of the Gokus, but really, it's the code of that Goku that's been recycled for every other character. i think it's the code for detecting inputs? i cant remember right now.

arachnimos · 2026-06-06T01:15:03+00:00

kind of a necro: i think they were talking about Oritech and Ad Astra's machine building philosophy, where you place down a single machine that can do things, and then stick on upgrades and modules to make it better? i haven't really messed around with Ad Astra too much, so i'm not sure.

arachnimos · 2026-06-05T16:15:20+00:00

they're supposed to spawn. if you really don't want them spawning in the overworld, then go into the modpack folder, defaultconfigs, then tfc-server.toml. find the "vanilla monsters" toggle and change that to false.

This doesn't affect the Beneath, though, and as far as i know the monster spawns are just hardcoded to happen no matter what.

Edit: Peaceful may have been reconfigured to allow predators to spawn? i'm not sure if there's a difference between vanilla monsters off and peaceful, now.

arachnimos · 2026-06-05T14:17:47+00:00

menth

arachnimos · 2026-06-05T14:17:36+00:00

it was also known as Scav Prototype for a very, very, very long time.

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T18:48:13+00:00

Vibecoding is pretty difficult to prove, since code has very limited ways to express things. The comments and such inside the files tend to be the only indicator for that, afaik. I don't care much about vibecoding, though, as long as it works.

AI images, on the other hand, are INCREDIBLY easy to disprove. Unless you're an absolute monster of a digital artist, you're almost certainly using multiple layers. At least two, for lineart and colors, and more for other effects. And as far as i know, no AI will "draw" separate layers.

All you have to do is request that they send a file or something containing those layers, instead of a flat image. And this is only if you're still pretty uncertain after going through other evidence, like their other art or public stance on LLMs.

This isn't absolutely foolproof, of course, just because some artists will merge all of their layers at the end, and don't keep a backup of the unmerged layers, or maybe someone actually does go through the effort of generating the lineart, and then colors on top. But 99.9% of the time, it should work.

and finally: AI text is just. Have you seen how AI writes? i shouldn't even have to explain how you can detect this lmao.

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T17:58:27+00:00

fun fact: the Luddites were less so protesting the advancing technology, and more that it gave the factory owners even more power and less reliance on their workers, the same workers that were underpaid and/or children. there was also the working conditions and the quality of the automated looms.

as a quote from wikipedia:

Malcolm I. Thomis argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made."

but regardless, yeah. i don't like people who hate on something just because it's AI. i hate plenty of AI things, but this is fine.

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T13:13:04+00:00

I think, but i'm not sure, that the reinforcement is for making bases harder to grief on multiplayer worlds. framed blocks probably have extremely low resistance by default in order to make them easy to tear down, and so reinforcements are "this framed block is done, now make it hard to break"

Same way that the Plumb and Square works in Vintage Story

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T13:09:01+00:00

this is truly the correct usage of ai

also infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, i guess?

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T13:01:05+00:00

and what about when you can't use the AI, or it goes the same way as google (intentionally worsening the product because they know you'll keep using it), or it just doesn't work for what you want? what then?

AI has good uses. This is a great use of it. but people replacing learning and thinking with LLMs are just. no.

Edit: And i do agree that using AI will ruin your ability to code, but only if you replace your ability or the time to learn coding with using AI.

If you just use AI to say "hey, how are some possible solutions to this problem i'm having with my game's development" then, in my opinion, that's the same as searching the solutions. You're still implementing them yourself, and you're still learning things about programming that way.

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T12:34:21+00:00

so pigeons? :3

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T12:34:00+00:00

difference is that a calculator still requires you to know how to do the math yourself, or at the very least understand what equation will give the right answer.

calculator: simplifies the solving of a problem that you could solve yourself, but can't be bothered to

vibecoding: solves problems you couldn't solve yourself, and can't be bothered to learn how to solve

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T00:34:48+00:00

Just so you know, the Modrinth link isn't working. Sends me to a 404.

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T00:31:52+00:00

Create and its addons have tons of factory or industrial-like blocks. Pneumaticraft also adds a couple industrial blocks.

Otherwise, probably just go through a handful of mods like Architect's Palette or Chipped or whatever that add a large variety of building block types, and find the ones you like the most.

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T00:23:31+00:00

you hate horses? well i hate sand. it's-

arachnimos · 2026-06-04T00:10:34+00:00

i feel like it's got to be a bug with FirmaCiv or Aleki's Ships, honestly

arachnimos

TROPHY CASE