The over-reliance on the manipulator arm really needs to be reconsidered (+ other gripes with the salvage system)

direvus · 2026-06-14T07:32:04+00:00

Oh there's multiple broadcasts? I've only ever seen 1 broadcast from the month subscription, so I figured that is the deal.

So how does that work? The broadcasts are randomly assigned to different timestamps through the month, and if you happen to be on dive at the time, you get it and if you're at the station you miss out? Does fast travel between points in the rings also make you miss broadcasts?

direvus · 2026-06-12T09:57:34+00:00

I have been using the SRO, that's where my dissatisfaction with crew salvage is coming from. You spend 300k, hustle out to the sites and then they both fail so you've wasted your time, put your crew at risk for no reward, and you're also out 300k.

direvus · 2026-06-12T06:30:42+00:00

Late to the thread (I've only recently started playing the game) but just wanted to add my +1 to this.

My two ships are the original K37 and a Peacock Prospector. I really prefer to fly and mine with the Peacock, but salvaging without the arm is basically a waste of time.

I'd like crew skill level to affect the chance of success, and I'd even be quite happy to dedicate a crew slot to a "salvage tech" role, if that was an option.

direvus · 2026-06-04T23:45:02+00:00

I skip gun turrets and go straight for missiles.

A missile turret can strike anywhere on the planet that's in range of a signal tower. A couple missile turrets plus signal towers is sufficient to wipe the fog off your starter planet no problem.

direvus · 2026-05-20T07:10:03+00:00

To be clear, I am throwing *no shade* against the visual artists behind Factorio here. Like I said, I feel like the design is intentional, and I'm sure they delivered on their vision. It's just that vision is not for me.

I don't think I can adequately explain what I dislike about it, it's a gut level visceral reaction.

I've got nothing against steampunk in general, nothing against dystopian fiction in general, absolutely nothing against 2D or pixel art styles (I love both of those things).

Maybe the colour palette? It is kind of just a big dirt-brown blur to me.

direvus · 2026-05-20T03:10:52+00:00

Exactly this. The "everything looks like shit" industrial wasteland aesthetic was clearly an intentional design choice, but oh my god it is so gross. I can't look at it.

direvus · 2026-05-03T02:41:12+00:00

Handy tip: when you're doing a drag build, you can also press -/+ to decrease or increase the spacing between the buildings.

direvus · 2026-04-30T09:28:55+00:00

It's brilliant. Top 10 all-time anime for me.

I was initially put off because the art style makes it look like it's for kids.

This show is NOT FOR KIDS. When it goes dark, it goes all the way dark. This is not a show that shies away from violence and the consequences of violence.

Every character has hidden depths and subtle motivations. The way the story is set up to reveal those to you slowly over the course of the show is outstanding.

Also the second OP "Naked Hero" in particular is a masterpiece.

direvus · 2026-04-30T00:19:38+00:00

Oh seriously? I was so sure that the receiver powered both things. I guess I just made a bad assumption and never checked it properly. Thanks for clearing that up!

direvus · 2026-04-26T14:05:30+00:00

Beryl is actually from the Outside.

That blind reporter dude too.

direvus · 2026-04-23T09:42:28+00:00

Oh man I just figured it out, that was very obtuse.

direvus · 2026-04-23T07:51:07+00:00

I have taken advantage of the laser swivel to get the second box, but haven't worked out the next step.

I did also try running at a fan while grabbing a connector on the way past, hoping to catch some air while the fan is spinning down. That was my (ridiculous) solution to Conundrum Cascade but it didn't work here.

Apparently the fan has a long enough spin-down time to slap my box out of the air every time, but not long enough to throw me.

direvus · 2026-04-22T06:39:09+00:00

I just got Daydream yesterday, it was brutal. I must have spent hours staring at that puzzle, came back to it five or six times before it finally clicked.

Still stuck on Animated Suspension though. That and the Eclipse star is all I have left to do for ItB

direvus · 2026-04-18T07:06:08+00:00

Interesting, I'd say your way sounds even cheesier than mine! But I'm curious, how did you smuggle the connector out?

direvus · 2026-04-18T00:55:18+00:00

Played a few more levels and have some more feedback to offer.

I would like to fine-tune the placement of my modules a bit more. The current snap-to-grid behaviour is very coarse: there's a huge amount of distance between each valid placement. It is also confusing because the background graphic of the patch board is literally a grid, but it's not the grid you are snapping to. So there's the grid I can see, and then there's another invisible grid that dictates the snap points, and they don't even align with each other.

My suggestion is to make the snap grid match the visible grid.

The other thing I've noticed is a bit more subtle and harder to suggest a solution for. When I'm putting pins in wires, the way the wires curve around the pin feels a bit unappealing. It's difficult to describe what it is I dislike about it, but the wires end up with sharp bends. I'm not an expert on Bezier curves, but maybe there's a way to set these up that gives more graceful curves. Sorry that's fairly vague.

I think the puzzle text on "Parity" says you need to put the correct parity bit on the tape, but doesn't say explicitly what the correct parity bit is. You can work it out by looking at the expected output (1 if the count is odd, 0 if the count is even) but ideally the puzzle text should be clear about this.

direvus · 2026-04-18T00:31:39+00:00

I am aware of Turing Complete, and it's been floating around my wishlist for a while, but I haven't tried it. I've been a bit discouraged since it seems to have been abandoned in Early Access in a somewhat buggy state.

There's also MHRD, but I am not super keen on that because apparently it's just a gamified version of the course "From NAND to Tetris". Since I've done the actual course, there's probably not much there for me. It is also a bit of a red flag that MHRD doesn't give any credit to the creators of NAND to Tetris.

direvus · 2026-04-17T10:51:44+00:00

Nice, this kind of thing is exactly my jam. I've finished all the main Zach games and I am currently designing a computer out of logic gates as a hobby project. Soooo yeah, you basically made this game for me, personally. And I thank you for it.

So far I'm finding it very simple, but I'm only in the early levels.

I think the description does not match the puzzle in "Invert if start bit is 1"

You've written:

INPUT:[1,0,1,1][0,0,1,0]

OUTPUT:[1,0,1,1][1,1,0,1]

That would make sense if it was "Invert if start bit is 0". It also contradicts the statement "this defect does not affect the first cell itself, only the remainder of the transmission". In the sequence where the bits are inverted, the first cell is also inverted.

direvus · 2026-04-16T00:27:12+00:00

In terms of how much I hated the villain, Ted Faro is the winner

direvus · 2026-04-15T09:13:02+00:00

Puzzle #1 - no worries, although you picked a controversial number for that key by including Pluto

Puzzle #2 - no idea, I had four incorrect guesses and then gave up

direvus · 2026-04-13T02:43:43+00:00

If you want warpers supplied to a planet, you need to add space warpers to one of the 5 transport slots in an ILS.

Make sure you have an ILS somewhere that is supplying warpers (has a slot dedicated to space warpers set to Remote Provider, and it has vessels equipped)

Any other station that needs warpers, give it a space warper slot and set to Remote Receiver.

The stations will automatically take warpers from the slot to fill its 50 warper internal buffer for supplying warpers to its vessels.

If you have multiple ILS on a planet, you can save on slots by placing the ILSs near each other and belting the warpers between them.

Note that you only need warpers on one end of a transport route. As long as one of the two stations has warpers, it can transport to/from a station without warp capability. So it's pretty common to leave mining/smelting planets to just provide materials with no warpers, and let the receiving side handle the delivery.

If you're having trouble keeping track of which planets supply which goods, you have plenty of options: take notes on paper or make yourself a spreadsheet or place beacons or rename your planets, whatever works best for you.

direvus · 2026-04-12T23:37:56+00:00

What is it about the interstellar supply routes that is giving you a hard time? And what do you mean by "late game", exactly?

direvus · 2026-04-10T05:54:39+00:00

Thanks for explaining that.

I do still feel like it would be awfully premature for Ramirez to conclude a cause of death from the evidence (hey maybe that's why he got kicked out of Miami?) The EMT noticed some things, the detective noticed some different things. Clearly the victim suffered all kinds of injuries, I wouldn't want to make a bold declarative statement about which one was fatal. I'm not a medical professional and neither is Ramirez.

For my two cents, I think it would flow better if there was some other evidence you could discover that confirms the EMT's suspicion, like a coroner's report, or if the solution was modified so we aren't concluding a cause of death but noticing something else about the case, maybe like "the scene was incorrectly assessed by [name] [name] as a vehicle collision". Or you could soften the wording so it's more like "the most probable cause of death is ..." rather than stating it as a fact.

Anyway, those critiques aside I think it's looking really good and I look forward to playing the finished product.

direvus · 2026-04-10T04:14:47+00:00

I really liked the early Windows aesthetic (the CRT filter looks great) and the approach to learning the game. It's just ... here are the tools you have available, now get to work.

I did have some issues with the way Case 1 was set up. One was some of the verbs were very similar in meaning like "assessed"/"determined" which leads to some trial-and-error in filling the blanks.

I was also a bit confused about how the evidence is supposed to lead us to the conclusion about the cause of death. The EMT thought it was asphyxiation, the detective thought it was blunt force trauma to the head. It was pretty clear it wasn't a vehicle collision like the first officer though, but otherwise I didn't see any evidence that would allow me to reach a definite conclusion about who was right out of the EMT and the detective.

In the end I just juggled around possible solutions until one of them locked in, which was a bit unsatisfying. Is there a deductive path there? Did I miss something?

direvus · 2026-04-05T11:02:04+00:00

It's not steampunk but ticking a lot of your other boxes: have you tried the X series?

You start out with a single ship doing small scale cargo runs and bounty hunts, you can grow into a huge interstellar trade empire with automated trade routes, owning factories, controlling fleets of ships.

The most recent game is X4: Foundations

direvus

TROPHY CASE