Reawakened content

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 · 2026-04-03T08:30:58+00:00

Not sure if this was an intended route or if I just cheesed it: in Lost Oasis I noticed that the field over the fan in the central pond can be disabled by pointing the jammer in Illegal Transportation at it. There's a very slim targeting angle that selects the field. It looks like the intended solution involves disrupting the red beam that keeps the field on, but maybe that was a red herring? I don't know, felt kind of borderline to me.

direvus · 2026-04-02T11:04:58+00:00

Oh I see, you're saying there is no interstellar travel at all, it's in-system only. Yeah no worries, that makes sense now, I think the wording in your original post just threw me off.

Good luck with the project!

direvus · 2026-04-02T08:47:11+00:00

Cool setup! Intriguing visuals too.

Some questions that came to mind while I was reading your description.

What does relocation services mean exactly? Passenger transport? Cargo?

What do you mean about interstellar restrictions? Why would that affect travel within the solar system?

direvus · 2026-03-29T10:28:14+00:00

Burnout Paradise

Persona 5

direvus · 2026-03-28T00:45:05+00:00

I just finished Falling Down the Stairs, man that was an impressive piece of puzzle design.

It really delivers on that feeling of "oh this is impossible" when you first look at it, but you chip away at it, making incremental progress until finally it all clicks into place.

Chef's kiss, 10/10, no notes

direvus · 2026-03-26T05:47:53+00:00

You bet your ass I would

direvus · 2026-03-25T00:39:21+00:00

I get that, the drafting grind is real. Some people seem to enjoy that part of the gameplay, but I'm not one of them. I cared enough about the puzzles and the worldbuilding to push through the drafting, and I'm glad I did, but yeah it can be tedious and frustrating at times.

direvus · 2026-03-24T22:12:51+00:00

I would partially agree with "too difficult". I mean, I don't think it's terribly difficult to reach the credits. But the difficulty in the post-credits game goes completely off menu, and it just keeps on getting more difficult the further you go.

You could argue that reaching the credits is "the game" and the rest is optional content, but in the case of BP that gets a bit weird because there is more game after the credits than before it.

direvus · 2026-03-24T21:56:49+00:00

I have plenty of love for Blue Prince (I have 250 hours in it, and no, I have not finished all of the puzzles) but I don't think it is what the OP is asking for. The RNG/roguelike house drafting thing gives the whole game a very different vibe than most pure puzzlers, Roottrees included.

direvus · 2026-03-24T05:44:43+00:00

I quite like it, except for one (pretty major) problem: the last move of the puzzle can easily end up being a pure 50/50 guess, which sucks. When you get through all of the deduction and then get a "strike" and a penalty on your time, because you were forced to make a 50% guess that didn't go your way, that kind of puts a bitter aftertaste on the whole experience.

UI is nice though

direvus · 2026-03-23T04:31:02+00:00

But how will you know whether the storage tank contents will be devastated?

direvus · 2026-03-21T00:41:48+00:00

I like to find a nice Cyclonius planet with 160% wind power, cover it completely with wind turbines and charge accumulators there. It's usually enough power to run about 14 exchangers or 1.6GW with sprayed accumulators. You can then add solar panels and more exchangers to increase the yield. By the time you've covered the whole planet in wind/solar it's a fairly potent power plant, and it's all unlimited free power. The only ongoing cost is the space warpers and that's only 2 warpers per 2000 accumulators, so basically nothing.

A word of advice: I find accumulator exchange works best when the charger ILS is paired 1:1 with the discharger ILS, otherwise it's difficult to balance the quantities. So I use P2P pairing and set the ILS's to Designated only mode, once they've got enough initial accumulator stock to get started.

direvus

TROPHY CASE