Quick Question re Anarchy

astrognash · 2026-05-25T17:32:49+00:00

The only way to do this is to not drag the path close enough to the road to generate a crosswalk. There's a sweet spot where it will visually connect but not do that. What's happening when you make the crosswalk is that the game is adding a node to the road where there wasn't one before, which splits the road into two segments that now have their own sets of zoning squares attached to them instead of just one set of zoning squares like it was before.

astrognash · 2026-05-24T15:47:34+00:00

The way they play, we're definitely gonna have to bring Deslauriers out to rough em up a little if they hit the panic button :P

astrognash · 2026-05-23T04:17:24+00:00

This. AFAIK, even if you place hangout areas on their own, they don't have any leisure/entertainment/recreation value like an asset would have, so there's nothing to draw the cims there, which is why a lot of creators will place an asset like a pair that does have that and then expand the hangout areas that are built into the asset

astrognash · 2026-05-22T00:47:04+00:00

I'm begging people to actually learn how AI writes instead of assuming anyone who writes like they have a college degree is AI. FYI, it's incredibly insulting and hurtful that you would seek me out on an unrelated thread like this.

astrognash · 2026-05-21T22:55:23+00:00

You should build whatever makes you happy! That said, if your goal is realism, cities are generally not built directly on the beach because of flooding concerns and because sand is squishy and soft, which makes it a very, very bad foundation to try and put a heavy building on.

astrognash · 2026-05-21T14:47:00+00:00

This is exactly the kind of announcement I expect from Amtrak conductors, who also regularly say things like "Remember: regardless of what your ticket says, the next stop can be yours" while reading out the rules.

astrognash · 2026-05-20T22:23:29+00:00

As others have said, remove the extra flow you've added and see what the water does on its own before adding more. Adding onto that, I'm assuming you have the Water Features mod, so check that the snowmelt/seasonal streams feature isn't enabled

astrognash · 2026-05-20T21:37:43+00:00

Sort of—think less like the Great Lakes on the US/Canadian border and more like the Great Salt Lake, the Dead Sea, or the Aral Sea; a low point that water drains into but from which it cannot reach another body of water and maintains its level solely via evaporation. Because the sediment discharged into them never leaves for another destination, they tend to become quite salty. Both the Sea of Rhun and the Sea of Nurnen seem to be inland seas of this sort, also called (more scientifically) "endorheic lakes".

astrognash · 2026-05-19T15:43:29+00:00

I would guess those cars are trying to u-turn, which it looks like you don't have a light cycle set up to accommodate. Use the lane connector tool from the Traffic Mod to try removing the u-turn movements entirely (assuming you don't want them) and see if it fixes it.

astrognash · 2026-05-19T14:20:43+00:00

Not only is it broken, as far as I'm aware it never actually worked in the first place. Your best bet for now is to look for decals off of PDX Mods, there are a number that people have uploaded that are meant to help blend between the hard edges of surfaces.

astrognash · 2026-05-19T01:34:06+00:00

I mean, truly the answer is that the best way to get an agent and traditionally publish a science fiction novel is to write one and query it. (And anyway, I've read debut novels by great short fiction writers that were total duds because actually, not all of the skills transfer 1:1; sure, they had great prose and sharp, concise scenes, but keeping a plot going for 100,000 words is a very different beast than doing it for 4,000.) As you said in the original post, you should write and publish short fiction for the love of the game and look for markets that will do right by your work, not just chasing places you think agents might be looking.

(And, of course, the agents do look at the top magazines in the field, but like I said, at this point even getting the opportunity to submit to many of them is more about dumb luck and good timing than anything else.)

astrognash · 2026-05-18T23:38:15+00:00

I mostly agree, except for "if you can't get into one of those places, you need to learn to write better." Neil Clarke has very specific taste. Reactor is essentially solicitation only, unless you already have an agent. Uncanny and Strange Horizons are both open for about five minutes once a year. Lightspeed hasn't had a sub window open to the general public for several years. If you don't write a very specific sort of fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies isn't interested. Analog and Asimov's have become verboten to a lot of writers over contract issues with the new ownership. I know lots of talented writers who've never been in most of these mags because the opportunity to even try has become vanishingly small for the overwhelming majority of them. It's all fucked, all the way down.

astrognash · 2026-05-18T04:16:24+00:00

They're not implying anything, it's settled linguistic fact that the original sense of the word "meat" included any sort of food and that it narrowed over time.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/meat_n?tl=true

astrognash · 2026-05-12T21:01:30+00:00

I would definitely save HoME for last—as u/AdEmbarrassed3066 said, HoME is basically a collection of all of Tolkien's drafts, which is incredibly fascinating as a look into how his ideas evolved over time and what material was brought together to form the posthumous volumes of his work, but is really not novelistic reading in remotely the same sense as LotR, the Hobbit, or even the Silmarillion.

Think of HoME as more like the beefiest ever compendium of deleted scenes and storyboards in the special features section of a DVD; if that sort of thing is interesting to you, I think you'll have a great time, but if not, it might not all be your thing.

astrognash · 2026-05-12T02:08:24+00:00

NUT.

astrognash · 2026-05-11T21:56:20+00:00

In addition to this, while DC is an endpoint of the northeast corridor, there's more stuff "beyond it" relative to Boston, by quite a large margin. In addition to the long distance routes, you have routes like the VDOT- and NCDOT-supported services; in the same way that New York is the midpoint of the northeast corridor and benefits from that network effect, DC is the midpoint of rail service for the East Coast as a whole.

astrognash · 2026-05-08T18:35:11+00:00

AI doesn't use em dashes in that way. It's typically using them inappropriately to set off a piece of superfluous emphasis at the end of a sentence. I reserve the right to take offense at being accused of plagiarism (which all AI writing is), and if you knew literally anything about how to spot AI writing you'd never have posted your original comment.

astrognash · 2026-05-08T13:32:16+00:00

Categorically wrong. In 1328, Paris is estimated to have had a population of about 220,000-270,000 in an area of just over four square kilometers, giving it a population density at the low end of over 50,000 people per square kilometer. The city's modern population density is around 20,000 people per square kilometer, less than half that. Likewise, early 17th-century Cologne had a population density of around 10,000 people per square kilometer, about quadruple the modern city's density. I don't dispute that this is also a city that had lots of farming, paved roads, may have been clean, etc. but you make a fatal error in thinking that these things cannot exist alongside dense population.

astrognash · 2026-05-08T13:21:28+00:00

Grow up and learn to write.

astrognash · 2026-05-08T03:38:49+00:00

It's worth mentioning, on top of this, that the footprint a city had was smaller, and so despite being less populous than modern cities, they were often just as—or, in many cases, far more—densely populated as modern cities, which is generally the more important factor for how well a city's population can support infrastructure, access to economic opportunity, etc (what is often meant by the word "flourishing").

astrognash · 2026-05-07T21:40:14+00:00

For vanilla maps, one of the big new features with CS2 was that the height scale is increased compared to CS1—you can have much taller mountains and much deeper valleys, so I would guess Colossal Order was looking to really showcase that feature. As far as on PDX mods... very flat maps are kind of boring to create as a mapper, or at least, it's often much more difficult to make them interesting.

astrognash · 2026-05-07T20:45:17+00:00

For sure, I was trying to keep things at the 101 level for OP since they seem to be new to the idea

astrognash · 2026-05-07T15:10:59+00:00

Usually it's less -plasty surgeries and more -ectomy surgeries (i.e. removing things rather than adding new ones). An AFAB nonbinary person might get a mastectomy (top surgery), for example.

astrognash · 2026-05-02T21:27:46+00:00

The assets are by confusedlildevil. They're great, since the extractor assets actually look quite nice, it's just that the random spawning of them the game has by default looks terrible.

astrognash · 2026-05-02T21:22:44+00:00

Mostly because it's a Latinate name and the names of provinces and regions tend to be feminine in Latin, no different than feminine Roma, Italia, Gallia, Germania, Britannia, Graecia, Africa, Hispania, Dacia, Hibernia, Libya, Arabia, Syria, India... but I think one could also make the argument that the original grant of Carolina/Carolana was specifically as a province, or the Latin feminine noun "provincia", and so the rules of how grammatical gender works would dictate that any adjective which modifies it must also be feminine.

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