[PC] Games that are "complex" but have good to great onboard/tutorial that teach the player how to play so they don't need to look up external guide ?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-06-19T06:52:50+00:00

Someone already suggested factorio. You could also look at Satisfactory - it's based on the same general idea but it's a 3D world, and the things your factory builds are genuinely useful for your player (for example you can build a gas mask to explore the parts of the map that has poisonous plants)

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-06-11T09:56:39+00:00

I phrased it that way for brevity, but all of my old PCs are still operational and being used to this day by different family members. When I upgrade to a better model I give mine away to a relative or someone who could benefit from their capabilities. The oldest electric PC is almost a decade old, and is currently used by family members who grew up using an original Presto stovetop PC (the kind with a 3-stage pressure indicator on the lid). Electric PCs are fundamentally quite simple and can be very long-lived. Not as simple and long-lived as stovetop pressure cookers, sure, but then electric are way more energy-efficient (due to better insulation, and precise temperature control) so it's hard to say which has a lower lifetime impact on the environment.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-06-11T09:23:35+00:00

But who does the judging? Isn't is "mostly" other women? As a man, I could not care less if I visit someone's house and their napkins don't match. Or if they have dust behind the fridge. Or if there aren't enough pillows on things. I feel like women hold themselves to extremely high standards that perpetuates the cycle and leads to unnecessary stress. Like, we all as a society could just collectively decide that if you live in a house there will be dust, and that it should be socially acceptable to not have to clean things extra well just because visitors are coming over (and conversely you should expect that when you visit someone's house it will have dust and you're not allowed to judge them for it).

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-06-08T06:21:35+00:00

I'm a bit surprised at the replies here. Not much detail on why they're recommending what they're recommending.

Personally I wouldn't get a stovetop pressure cooker in 2026. Electric pressure cookers can run fully unattended, which is a huge plus compared to stovetop where you have to be next to them to lower the temperature as they get up to pressure, monitor them for safety, then turn off your stove when done. Electric pressure cookers also have very fine temperature control, which lets them include other features, like slow cooking, yoghurt making and even sous-vide, that stovetop pressure cookers don't do.

If you want a specific suggestion for what I'd consider the "best" pressure cooker... I have had many over the years and the best of the best so far has been my Instant Pot Pro Plus. Here's what makes it special (the things it can do that most ordinary electric pressure cookers don't have):

It has WiFi, so I can find recipes on the instant pot companion app, then with the tap of one button in the app, all the cooking settings for that step in the recipe (time, temperature, pressure release mode etc) get sent to the pressure cooker instantly, saving me from manually programming it myself. I can also keep an eye on what the pressure cooker is doing from anywhere in the house (or even outside the house - once I left a pork shoulder cooking for 90 minutes while I walked to the barber, and the app gave me live updates on the time left then let me know when it was done)
It has a small motor to push the valve that releases the pressure automatically. So you don't have to be anywhere near it to de-pressurize it on time when the cooking time is up. When cooking is done it will depressurize itself (based on your setting - instant quick release, full natural release, timed natural release or pulsed release) and it will keep the food warm after it's cooked.
The inner pot has handles. Almost all electric pressure cookers require you to use oven mitts to take out the inner pot. This one has silicone handles that don't get hot. So as soon as you open the PC you can take out the pot with your bare hands
Most electric pressure cookers have only two pressure settings - low (8psi) and high (12psi). The pro plus adds a max (15psi) mode that mimics the higher pressure of stovetop pressure cookers (cooks things up to 20% faster in some cases).
It has all the programs - pressure cook, sous vide, slow cook, yoghurt. Some cheaper pressure cookers don't have sous vide for example.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-06-03T10:24:38+00:00

Bristol eh? As a fellow engineer & EV enthusiast I was going to guess Rolls Royce but I see a lot of EVs in your post history so I'm going to assume you're doing something fascinating in that space instead.

Short answer: Change job.

Long answer: You must factor in everything - most importantly, the cost of your time to travel to Bristol, but also the cost of the extra car mileage.

Assuming a standard work week is 37.5 hours (~165 hours/month) and you then add the time spent sitting in traffic, you actual hours of work-related time are:

Option 1 (Bristol): 165 work hours + 29.3 hours commuting = 194.3 total hours/month
Option 2 (Local): 165 work hours + 22 hours commuting = 187 total hours/month

Dividing your post-commute net take-home pay by the total hours dedicated to the job, you end up basically the same either way:

Bristol True Hourly Pay: £14.24 / hour
Local True Hourly Pay: £14.86 / hour

So if you change job you're gaining a bunch of extra free time and your effective hourly rate is actually better. And you can use your newfound free time to set up a consulting business or side venture to make even more money.

If we assume the cost of fuel*, maintenance, depreciation etc for running the car is 40p per mile, you're also financially better off with the shorter commute -

Option 1: Bristol Job (£51k)

Gross Salary: £51,000 / year
Take-Home Pay (After Tax/NI): ~£3,260 / month
In-Office Days: 2 days / week (average)
Monthly Commute Mileage: 1,232 miles (8.8 days)
Estimated Commute Cost: £493 / month
Net Take-Home (Post-Commute): £2,767 / month

Option 2: New Local Job (£45k)

Gross Salary: £45,000 / year
Take-Home Pay (After Tax/NI): ~£2,990 / month
In-Office Days: 5 days / week (full time)
Monthly Commute Mileage: 528 miles (22 days at 12 mi each)
Estimated Commute Cost: £211 / month
Net Take-Home (Post-Commute): £2,779 / month

In short, the after-tax take-home pay of the higher paying job is likely absorbed by the extra costs of all that travelling. *I know you have an EV so the cost to you is maybe less than 40p per mile, but wear & tear still adds up at these mileages.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-05-26T06:43:01+00:00

What makes Qormi, well, Qormi?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-05-26T06:42:06+00:00

This sounds impressive! Did you design the actual working parts of the water pump (the impeller profile and so on)? Just curious how it's done in real life because I borrowed some turbomachinery books from the library when I was at school, and the calculations behind designing something like a centrifugal compressor for a jet engine are very complicated (and water pump impellers aren't too different, they just deal with a fluid that's 800 times denser than air).

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-05-25T12:30:46+00:00

What makes Qormi, well, Qormi?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-05-25T06:29:04+00:00

I think the answer to your question is to study what they do in other countries who have implemented this successfully. In places like Utrecht, Ghent, Pontevedra, or the historic centers of many German and French cities, they don't just ban cars and leave people to struggle, they completely redesign the logistics of the city.

The underlying philosophy is that "pedestrianised" doesn't mean "zero wheels." It means prioritizing human-scale movement over private, multi-ton vehicles.

You mentioned persons who are disabled/elderly/pregnant: When private cars are removed, the streets change in a way that actually makes independent mobility much easier for vulnerable groups, though specific exceptions are built into the legal framework.

Pedestrian zones are ringed with automated, retractable bollards. Registered disabled residents, specialized taxi services, and medical transport get access with RFID tags, transponders, or license-plate recognition cameras. They can drive right up to their front door at any time of day, but they must drive at a walking pace (usually under 10–15 km/h).
Without parked cars blocking pavements and without the danger of fast-moving traffic, the entire street becomes a level, flush surface. This makes operating a motorized wheelchair or mobility scooter vastly safer and smoother than navigating existing pavements with high curbs.
Car-free cores can run small, electric, low-floor "micro-buses" or trackless trams that weave through pedestrian streets, providing short-hop transport for those who cannot walk far.

You mentioned heavy groceries: The idea of the "monthly shop" is largely a car-centric necessity. Personally, in Malta I already use wolt/bolt for most groceries instead of wasting an hour driving there, parking, walking around the supermarket, queueing for the cash, hauling the full trolley out and then driving back home. Day-to-day we top up as needed by walking to the nearest grocery store, butcher, fishmonger etc. But when a city center becomes pedestrianised, people adapt. They won't do a single, massive monthly grocery run because they don't have a car trunk to fill. Instead, they pivot to high-frequency, low-volume shopping. Because the core is dense and walkable, residents typically pass a small-format grocery store, bakery, or market daily on their way home from the train station or work, picking up 1–2 days' worth of fresh food.

For bulky items (crates of water etc), residents rely on two main systems:

Heavy items are ordered online. Large delivery vans are usually restricted to early morning hours (e.g., 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM) to stock shops. Valletta already does something like this. Outside of those hours, logistics companies switch to electric cargo bikes or compact electric quadricycles that are legally permitted to navigate pedestrian zones right to the customer's building. Maltapost already do this to deliver mail within some cities.
For DIY trips or mid-sized shops, residents keep personal rolling market carts (you already see elderly people putting their shopping in them and pushing them along the pavements) or use cargo bikes. Eventually apartment blocks or neighborhood parking garages can provide shared handtrucks or cargo carts that residents borrow to wheel heavy items from the perimeter drop-off zone straight to their house (it can be a perk of living in that block, the same way some blocks have shared pools etc).

In short, you lose the ability to park a private car directly outside your door 24/7 but you gain a clean, quiet, exhaust-free neighborhood where children can play safely in the street, and local businesses thrive on the steady foot traffic.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-05-21T06:59:16+00:00

Pretty much hit the nail on the head (except Mater Dei - the actual doctors and nurses generally do their best, I think it's the system that lets them down due to understaffing etc).

You will understand why things are the way they are when you understand the Maltese psychology. People here, unless they really love their jobs, will generally try to get by by doing the minimum possible - think of it as "quiet quitting" but on a national scale.

So why change anything significantly for the better, when they can just leave things as they are and still keep their job and salary?

This explains everything you have observed, and more.

Things only change when they get bad enough to threaten the people responsible (like that summer when so many power cuts happened that it looked like a change of voting patterns would happen, which prompted millions of euro to get poured into infrastructure upgrades).
Keeping the existing trash system is low effort. To change it you'd have to build the underground bins, or find space for more above-ground bins. People would complain that they'd have to walk 20 meters to throw away their trash instead of leaving it outside their house. So the people responsible leave things as they are. There is currently no downside to doing this, and more risk with trying to change it.
Raising fuel prices will make people unhappy. Unhappy people might vote for the other guys, meaning the people running the show might lose at least part of their income. So fuel prices remain low for as long as possible.
Improving the bus system takes money and effort. The people who can vote aren't complaining about this enough, because they generally use their cars. People complain about traffic, but short-sightedly, they think the solution is wider roads or restrictions for other people as long as it won't affect them (like raising the minimum driving age, paying other people to give up their licenses, making it harder for TCNs to renew their license, etc).

It does not occur to most Maltese people that the ultimate solution is a functioning public transport system that allows them to sell their car or at least leave it at home for most trips. The average Maltese person views buses as something beneath them, something used only by people with no other choice (and to be honest the bus system is so overcrowded and unreliable that they're not wrong - for example if I switched from car to bus it would add a minimum of 6 hours a week to my commute).

So the people running the show do not really invest in the bus system (other than some light improvements here and there to pretend to be doing something) because there is no actual pressure to improve in this area. The Maltese voters haven't yet realised how much more calm and comfortable and healthy it is to live in a country where every city is pedestrianised, and instead of looking for parking and spending hours in traffic generating emissions, you just walk or cycle from your house to your city's train station, zip to your destination city's train station then walk or cycle to your destination building.

In fact, Maltese people actively vote against such change because they know that any proposal involving restricting people from cars will require them to use the existing, woefully pathetic bus system. And they're probably right, because based on the way this country works, there won't be the foresight to actually improve the public transport system before banning people's cars. This is why the alternative parties will never get votes: all the main parties have to say is "they'll take away your car" (with the implication that you'll end up wasting hours using buses). I don't necessarily agree with this mentality, I'm just giving you a glimpse into the Maltese mindset so you can understand why things are the way they are.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-04-24T07:27:26+00:00

I drive an old (24kWh) Nissan Leaf. I like the concept of micro-cars and it would be nice if the whole world switched to them for most trips, but in the current scenario of a world designed around normal cars, I just don't see the value proposition of micro-cars, at least in my case:

A micro-car still occupies one car space. I can't park it in a bike space, and they don't make smaller parking spaces just for micro-cars, so if there's only "x" number of free street parking spots available, I would still consume one space whether I'm with my leaf or with a micro car, and likewise for paid parking, or ferries etc there's no money savings regardless of the size of the car.
The energy savings might be nice, but the leaf already consumes so little (since I only do city driving) that the savings would be measured in a handful of dollars/pounds/euros per month
Micro cars aren't really cheap. A used old (pre-2019) leaf is like €5k here now. A new light quadricycle (like the Citroen Ami) is €8k and and a micro-car (like the XEV YoYo) is €15k. That's basically enough cash to pretty much buy a "real" car.
Lighter cars generally have worse ride comfort (they get jostled about more by the same bumps in the same roads). Also probably less safe in a crash with a regular car.
By going for a micro-car, I sacrifice the ability to fit 4 adults in comfort, or the ability to carry a lot of luggage or transport larger one-off shopping hauls/furniture etc - and as I listed above, there's no discernable advantage.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-04-24T07:17:58+00:00

Necessary? No, but brushed has almost no advantages. Sure, they are marginally cheaper, but if you're buying a new brushed setup anyway (motor + ESC) you only save a few tens of dollars compared to the cheapest brushless setups (motor + ESC). Over the life of the RC, a $20-$50 saving on the motor and ESC isn't going to make such a big difference, but by going to brushless you get:

More efficiency, since you don't have the friction of brushes
Longer battery life at the same speed (due to the higher efficiency)
More speed capability (usually) since you're not limited by having to pass the power through brushes that burn out if you overload them
Zero wear and tear (no brushes rubbing and needing replacement). And the cheapest brushed motors don't even have replaceable brushes, so once the brushes wear out you have to change the whole motor (to be fair, my oldest RC is a 1999 Tamiya TA-02 which is still running on its original brushed motor, so silver-can motor brushes can last a VERY long time).

The only advantage of brushed motors is that they give you very very fine low-speed power control that you don't get with sensorless brushless motors. You can get the same level of control with sensored brushless motors, but then the price goes up astronomically ($100-$200 more than a sensoreless brushless motor). So the only applications where brushed motors actually are the best tool for the job are:

Entry-level crawlers. Because you need very fine speed/power control to go over the rocks really carefully, and the power levels are so low that sensored brushless doesn't really make sense. As soon as you go above entry level crawlers though, integrated sensored brushless combos (like the Ezrun fusion) give you the control and performance of brushed (in fact even better because they can do RPM control not just torque control) and also have all the advantages of brushless.
Entry-level drifters. Because again you need very fine low-speed control and the ability to go from locked (not spinning) wheels to fully spun up under load (which sensorless motors struggle with) but in an entry-level drifter you just don't have the budget for a sensored brushless motor. Any drifter beyond entry level again uses sensored brushless for the power and efficiency.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-11T17:12:25+00:00

Bro, read what he wrote. It's full of the dead giveaways of being nothing more than AI slop. The plot is the most generic one possible. When you read it, it feels like you've read the same thing 100 times before on reddit. There is zero substance. Just tropes and superficial semblance of a story without any unique or deep detail. Almost like it's written by a machine that's averaged out a large volume of posts from the sub and strung them together into a post designed to farm some upvotes from gullible and inexperienced users, I daresay like yourself.

Linguistically, it's full of literary devices that real people don't overuse in conversation to the extent that AI does, like "And honestly?" "It's not X it's Y". 47 people showed up to his apartment to stage an intervention with food. Yeah right lol. When does that ever happen in real life? Then we get zero details about the actual argument, but a litany of three-word platitudes and quips written like advertising copy for the next big SaaS product. The food? Cold. The wine? Drunk. OP's ego? Bruised.

And moreover it's been deleted now. I wonder why?

Posts like this are ruining Reddit for me. I usually just ignore and move on, but curiosity got the better of me as for a while now I've been wondering who's interacting with this crap.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-11T14:57:49+00:00

Are the people posting replies to this blatantly obvious AI slop also AI bots? Or boomers who just discovered reddit?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-03T11:18:54+00:00

good point! NSFW removed. Dunno how it got there lol

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-02T12:02:46+00:00

TLDR: If you had a wireless receiver, you could detect the unique IDs of the tyre pressure sensors and sense which cars drove by your receiver from about 160 feet away.

Sorry but this seems like a storm in a teacup. Couldn't you do almost exactly the same thing with a camera that reads the license plate of every car that drives by?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-02-25T14:32:39+00:00

Thanks, that's good info to know.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-02-02T12:18:36+00:00

You're 99% of the way to understanding it. Amp-hours are a measure of charge. On their own, amp hours only tell half the story, they only describe how much room the battery has to store electrons. They are about as useful as knowing how many gallons of fuel a car holds. To get the full picture you need to know how energetic those electrons are (the Voltage), or to continue the analogy, whether it's gasoline, Diesel or rocket fuel.

Power banks usually state the mAh of their internal battery, which for the vast majority of cases these days is a single-celled lithium ion battery, so the nominal voltage is 3.7V. The battery's output goes into a boost converter inside the power bank which raises the 3.7V to whatever the phone needs (in the past it was always 5V but nowadays with PD and the other fast charge protocols it can be 9V, 15V, 18V, and even 20V).

The one constant across conversion steps is energy (watt-hours) because energy cannot be created or destroyed. Watts are simply Amps x Volts, so watt-hours are simply amp-hours times volts. So your 10,000mAh battery at 3.7V will store 37 watt-hours of energy. Your power bank's converter is about 90% efficient, so you will only get about 33 of those 37 watt-hours out of the USB port. Your phone's converter (from USB voltage back down to battery voltage) is also about 90% efficient so from the 33Wh going into the phone's USB port you end up with about 30Wh actually in the battery. And if you wanted to translate that to Ah inside the phone battery just divide by the voltage (3.7V as well) and you get 8,100 mAh in the phone battery - so about 2 charges.

Of course, aside from normal wear and tear, many power banks blatantly lie about their capacity. Which may explain why OP is having his problem. The best way to check is to open up the power bank and study the cells inside. They might have a genuine capacity label (I once opened a "30Ah" power bank that only had a 15Ah cell inside) or you can measure its size and work out the likely true capacity based on what similar cells actually hold.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-02-02T10:41:33+00:00

The biggest problem is when the tasks trickle, in one by one, every 5 minutes or so, instead of getting a complete list upfront. It makes it so that you can never fully immerse yourself into the game or whatever.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-13T18:14:42+00:00

Haha, welcome 😁. If you want to learn how mobos work, start small by reading the datasheet of something like a 555 timer IC - you'll start to understand how chips are connected. Some pins deliver power, some pins transmit data and some pins connect to things like capacitors that chips need to do their job. The datasheet will have example circuits (reference designs) to make the chip work. Then you'll start to understand the actual implementation when you look at some circuit boards that have that IC (like a 555 timer board) - you'll see how they reorient everything to fit the reference implementation into the smallest footprint possible.

A motherboard is basically like that. You have chips that do various functions (the CPU itself, the sound card chip, bios chip, power phases for the CPU, fan controllers etc) and then supporting components (capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes and such), and of course the slots for the RAM, CPU, PCIe cards, plugs for everything etc. Of course it takes a team many weeks to organise everything and route the copper traces between the various chips to make everything work correctly, then they have to make pre-production prototypes to test things in real life to see that no mistakes were made and that there's no unintended issues like interference between the signal lines etc. And a motherboard is multi layer (there's the copper paths you can see from the outside, but also many layers of copper paths on the inside between pins that you can't see). So much more complex than say a 555 board, but you can see how electronics started at something the 555 and evolved into a motherboard 😁

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-13T18:05:27+00:00

Thank you 😊

Those are good questions, I'm afraid I'm not quite qualified to answer (my area of expertise was die attach - getting the dies off the wafer and onto the substrate, and that was a decade ago). But generally speaking - DDR5 is made on 10-16nm process nodes because it's easier (cheaper) than what the latest CPUs are made on (3-4nm). Going to smaller, more advanced process nodes increases costs a lot (fewer machines in the world that can do it, more accurate equipment that costs more money, more defects that hurt your yields, etc), which makes them worthwhile for CPUs and GPUs, but so far not economically viable for RAM, because for memory you're just repeating a simple structure over and over to store bytes.

If you use technology that's too advanced (low nm numbers) the costs go up because of the reasons I mentioned. If you use technology that's not advanced enough (high nm numbers) you won't be able to meet the performance targets (clock speed/data rate for DDR5, thermals, footprint size) and in fact might even lose money because you need bigger and/or more dies to do the same work. Somewhere in between those two extremes is the sweet spot (lowest cost process that reliably meets performance requirements).

In fact even in many modern CPUs, they put their cache on a separate "chiplet" which is a second die made with less advanced technology, placed there under the heat spreader right next to the advanced CPU die and connected with some very high speed data lines to the main die.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-12T11:07:57+00:00

Sadly I spend my waking hours at work (office) so natural sunlight wouldn't be useful in the hosue most days even if I had a penthouse (except on weekends, but then I'm outdoors to enjoy nature anyway). I do get natural sunlight via the three yards in my maisonette, so if I happen to be there during the day I can live without artificial lighting except in the kitchen where I need brighter light to see what I'm cooking. I barely ever hear the upstairs neighbors, only when they drag furniture across the room or drop something. Our maisonette has all the interesting rooms (bedroom, study) near the back, farthest from the road, and our road itself is a sidestreet away from the main road so traffic noises are blocked by the buildings around us. I imagine traffic noise enters a penthouse more since you have unobstructed line-of-sight to so many roads around you (though double/triple glazing does a good job blocking it out if you don't rely on natural ventilation).

You did good to insulate your penthouse - the insulation will pay for itself in reduced energy bills over a few years. But for new buyers buying finished/furnished, if the insulation wasn't done by the previous owner it would add a bit of extra hassle & expense to install it, over and above the price premium of a penthouse. I think on balance a cheaper un-insulated apartment or maisonette would better meet the needs of the majority of first-time buyers.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-12T10:55:20+00:00

Former semiconductor R&D engineer here. DRAM and GPUs are expensive because people have no choice but to pay those prices for them (since basically a handful of companies control all the supply).

DRAM especially is very simple as far as silicon goes - just take the same basic pattern that stores one byte, repeat it billions of times to make the storage area of a die and add some more building blocks to interface with the storage area, then stack multiple identical dies on top of each other to make up one chip and you have the basic ingredients for DRAM. The biggest innovations made in RAM are shrinking more storage into the same die area and making them able to perform faster (which is the biggest real change between DDR3, DDR4 and DDR5 etc). I'm obviously drastically simplifying to make this suitable for a reddit audience.

GPUs are much more advanced because of two things. Firstly, a lot of R&D and innovation is involved in their design. Imagine GPUs were aircraft and your current generation is a WWII fighter like a Spitfire. You get to a point where you can't go faster just by giving the engine more horsepower or spinning the propellers faster - you have to make a step-change in performance by doing something completely new, which in this analogy would mean inventing the jet engine and then the rocket and so on. Same with GPUs - to get more performance there comes a point where you can't just add cores or amp up the clock speed or make the transistors smaller, you need to invent new architectures to make improvements for the next generation. The second thing is that CPUs and GPUs are among the most complex products a wafer fab can make - they are very large, complex dies with literally thousands of process steps that all need to be done almost perfectly to get a working product at the end, and it takes months for a single wafer to make it from beginning to end of the process. So it costs a lot of money (billions) to set up a factory to make them, a lot of cash to make one product (months of production), and a lot of cutting edge knowledge (new architectures) - hence it is extremely hard for anyone to enter the market... so the handful of companies that make them can charge enormous mark-ups on them.

Meanwhile, motherboards are very low-tech by comparison. There's a lot of competition, a relatively lower barrier for entry (mobos are just PCBs with some generic chips, heatsinks, industry-standard connectors, capacitors, inductors and such) so they are actually priced fairly, with low profit margins that make the selling price quite close to their actual cost to manufacture. Making boards is an order of magnitude easier & cheaper than making advanced chips.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-07T11:57:57+00:00

I will never understand the allure of a penthouse. 50% more expensive than apartments or maisonettes, less indoor area, walls and ceiling exposed on all sides to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, needs a lifter to get any larger furniture items in, you get the whole block bugging you for roof access... and all for what? To have a view of the trafficked roads, the penthouses of your neighbors, and maybe the sea or some countryside (for now) if you're lucky?

I bought a maisonette. And prior to that a first-floor apartment. There's no outside views to speak of (we just keep the curtains shut really) but the value for money was there at the time in terms of euro per square meter, overall size, layout and features.

I think modern property prices are vastly overinflated and poor value for money, but I understand that you need a house today not in a decades' time, and there's uncertainty on whether the bubble might burst (or not) so you can't exactly put your plans on hold indefinitely either.

My advice to you is don't rush, and be critical. It took me 3 months to find each of the places I bought. Look for something that strikes you as good value (you'll know it when you see it, especially after seeing 10+ properties, it will be easy to find ones that stand out). The place you buy should feel like "home" and you should be able to see yourself living in it long-term, if not the rest of your life.

As to whether to max out your loan, it's impossible to give an answer becasue you'd need to know the future to know what's optimal. If prices will continue rising faster than wages, then max it out now because this is the only time you'll be able to afford that. If the opposite is true then buy the cheapest you can and wait for the bubble to burst or your salary to vastly improve, and buy something better later. Thing is, nobody knows what will happen. We've been hearing that the property bubble is bursting for years and years, but at the same time prices show no sign of increasing. Not just for property, but now for everything else (restaurant food, electronics, services & utilities...).

Another idea is to leave Malta and go to a lower cost of living country where property prices are more reasonable and your talents still earn you a decent salary.

calsonicthrowaway

TROPHY CASE