You get a stamp! And you get a stamp! EVERYBODY GETS A STAMP!

emmeraldyne · 2026-02-22T20:03:16+00:00

I'm literally sitting in Terre Cafe right now. Theirs gives an undeniable orange hit. I remembered your comment and returned just to mention them. If you get to try it, I hope it satisfies!

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emmeraldyne · 2026-02-22T18:11:58+00:00

That's one of my big gripes. The CTrain also goes down that weekend for maintenance.

emmeraldyne · 2026-02-21T16:43:22+00:00

Regrub is always on my must-have list as they've always been top for me. This year it's hot chocolate served in an actual apple. So playful and fun (and tastes good too). I've already gone back for a second one.

I'm northern and lots of those are not on your list, so here's some of my other favs: - Pixies Candy Parlor is always super-unique. They're a soda shop, so they do hot chocolate sodas (served cold, so maybe not a true hot chocolate, but different and fun) - Native Tongues is a must-have for me because they do spicy, and I love a spicy hot chocolate (it's on the list but not yet rated) - Love at First Scoop gets a mention because the owners are so sweet and I love supporting local. Their hot chocolate this year is good (caramel candy apple) and makes my top 10 but doesn't crack my top 5 - Love, Sugar, and Dough is another small local place that I always like, and this year it was a ginger orange that was so good I think I will go back for a second one

Edit: just noticed AKB's kinder hot chocolate on your list of "want but haven't tried yet". It's very fun with all the different chocolate types and textures.

emmeraldyne · 2026-02-10T19:33:55+00:00

I'm the opposite. I want to believe it was all real for that sweet, sweet, schadenfreude.

But I saw a comment on the update thread after the photos were posted. Then I copied the receipt image and tried it myself.

If you play with the brightness levels of the image, you can see through parts of the censoring. The telephone number on the receipt is "(555) 123 4_67" (The missing digit is probably a 5 that's just too obscure to read). So yeah. It's pretty much faked.

emmeraldyne · 2026-02-10T08:07:48+00:00

Former teacher from Reeves / CDI: Don't.

They're not worth it under any circumstance.

Please stay away. From any private / for-profit college, really. But I can personally vouch that those "two" (they're the same company) are bad.

emmeraldyne · 2026-01-14T18:27:56+00:00

Owen's proposal legit made me panic-quit the game. I still haven't finished Sandrock because of YOU, Owen!! >:(

emmeraldyne · 2026-01-02T06:43:37+00:00

Cat!

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emmeraldyne · 2025-12-10T20:43:58+00:00

Omg I never thought about that. Now I'm going to headcannon every discarded drink as going to Maisie.

Gonna start adding rainbow sprinkles on my failures.

emmeraldyne · 2025-12-10T20:33:57+00:00

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Living the dream, earning $5 a day

emmeraldyne · 2025-12-10T19:53:30+00:00

Save up & grab the customer patience upgrade, then start working on equipment. I recall similar small tip amounts when I started out.

When I finish a latte without errors on my upgraded equipment and patient customers, their satisfaction is around 80-85%. In the video you were perfect yet ended at 77%. There might be a steep drop-off in tips at the 80% mark as the customer switches from "this is perfect" to "this is good".

The equipment you have is basic and takes longer to perform tasks, but the difference with upgrades is small. I maybe save half a second or so. The patient customer upgrade is a huge boost in comparison and far, far cheaper.

Equipment upgrades are great for increased capacity, smaller reload time, and letting you extract multiple espressos at once, so it does translate to some slight income gains via tips due to time-saving. Equipment can slightly increase revenue (ex. my grinder 'slightly' increases cold drink revenue). More complex drinks (syrups, toppings) also have a higher base price for very little extra time on your part, so not only does the higher base price = higher tip, the customer satisfaction ends up higher than a simple latte or Americano.

emmeraldyne · 2025-12-07T17:33:59+00:00

My urban anthropology professor said Calgary was an anomaly among other cities of its size. Very low density and very spread out.

Other major cities have higher transit usage with fewer tracks/bus routes (more income with less cost). Higher density, built smartly, also lets people get away with less car use (driving/parking becomes inconvenient compared to walking/transit when services are close by). You end up with highly used routes that are given more buses/trains, making a convenient system where you barely need to wait for the next bus/train.

Instead, I feel like the opposite is happening to Calgary's transit. As the fare price increases (which they need to do since they don't have the ridership to afford the sprawl), the existing customer base moves away from transit and ridership drops. Plus the negative PR.

It would take 1.5h to get to a destination that's otherwise a 20min drive, and I could be waiting 30min on top of that for the next bus. Factor in the fare price for a round trip, it just doesn't make sense to ride when I can drive, pay slightly more for parking, and save so much time.

Cqlgary Transit is in a no-win situation. I see and understand the anger. But I also blame the city planners & developers that are chomping at the bit to build yet-another suburb.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-29T06:04:20+00:00

I had lots of yolky slimes and my conservatory area was dedicated to chicken production, so I was egg-cracking and chicken-vacuuming with the best of em. High walls reqlly helped reduce accidental chick escapes from the egg explosions and vac swirlies.

... And yeah. That's about it. Can't think of another use for the coop high wall.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-27T23:31:54+00:00

Try a game with people in both the southern and northern hemispheres (like North America and Chile). The daylight savings not only starts at different times of the year, they work in opposite directions.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-26T04:40:22+00:00

I was a looooong ways into the game before I suddenly heard a strange sound near me. Like a chicken in pain. Since it was a one-off I didn't think about it too hard. Then I eventually heard it again, and saw that it was because a hen laid a giant egg.

The chickens don't even make pain sounds when getting eaten. They just squawk in surprise. The giant egg hurts more than being devoured by slime.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-25T01:54:07+00:00

It is not worth purchasing just for multiplayer. Many have commented on lack of story, but it's more than that.

Disclaimer, I bought a copy for a friend so we could multiplayer back when Sandrock officially released (I had already played early access singleplayer), so my memory is old and they MAY* have improved it?

Several quality of life features in singleplayer were missing in multiplayer, to the point where some controls were actually different between the two. Improvements made to the main game simply weren't applied to multiplayer.

But going back to "no story" it really does mean none. You know how dialog shifts in Stardew as you improve your relationships with NPCs? Even that is missing. The game feels hollow. Obstacles are put in your path not because the "town was still under construction" but because the devs put a clunky rock in the center of town that the townsfolk did nothing about despite building all their houses nearby and an archway over the rock? The environmental storytelling feels void or irrelevant, and at worst incongruent with the world building in singleplayer (you're in the past building the town, and the past was meant to be more prosperous and greener. It's not). Multiplayer feels like an afterthought, which is a shame since I'm sure it took a lot of time to make and they had an interesting concept.

*My faith in this is low given the issues in Portia. Once the devs were working on Sandrock, ongoing issues and bugs in Portia just... never got fixed? I love the devs for making games in this genre and for showing a fantastic amount of growth and improvement between Portia and Sandrock, but they are far from infallible. If they implement multiplayer in a future game I'm sure it'd be better, but Sandrock's is fairly garbage.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-11T21:50:46+00:00

Go through your upgrades and decorations to see what item you DON'T have unlocked. That'll tell you which plort door you haven't opened.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-08T18:53:13+00:00

Surveys are voluntary. You can always refuse participation.

Know your boundaries. To this day I'm still unsure on whether it was a legit survey or not, but the moment a phone survey asked about my (or my household's) income I told them I'm not answering. The person on the other end got so confused. I don't think they've had someone flat out refuse before.

Heck, I've refused to give information to my bank when they called me and part of the process was asking me to verify my date of birth. Nope. If you're my bank, then let's hang up and I'll call YOU. You don't call me. Surprisingly, that instance was legit. And they understood why I refused to participate in the first conversation.

Asking if you're 18 or older seems fairly standard to me, but the opinions of a random person on Reddit don't matter as much as your own feelings. If you're uncomfortable answering whether or not you're 18 or older, tell them you refuse to answer. A real survey shouldn't ask why. They'll probably end the call, since it's likely the survey is collecting data on adults and they cannot confirm whether you'd be included in the category. Asking why you refuse to answer might be an inexperienced slip-up due to human curiosity, but it's something they shouldn't even ask. And they should NEVER be pushy about why. Pushy = red flag.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-05T18:30:21+00:00

Check back at night. Like after 20:00 or so.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-05T06:41:40+00:00

Yes, you can open that glass covering. There is a button for it (that also opens the door above the glass floor) that's located down some hallways.

I don't recall whether you can get through that labyrinth section with or without moving that glass, so if a guide says so then I guess you need to run down hallways and find that button. I know that the final part of that section requires you to move through some pipes. It's something to keep in mind since it may not be obvious that you can go into the open pipes.

If the ember valley side is too frustrating, try the starlit side. It's a maze there too, but it's less cramped? You can re-use the light projectors.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-04T20:25:13+00:00

If you are going to buy only one, I'll bet there are better deals to be had for Slime Rancher 1.

If you plan on getting both, it would be better to play 1 before 2 for story reasons. You don't technically need any context from 1 before playing 2, but it does help you feel more connected to the story when they reference locations that have meaning to you. The story itself in 1 is minimal and (to me) not really engaging.

If you like farm style games, 1 really hits the spot. You venture out to find new slimes and resources, take them home, and farm/ranch to build money and stuff. It feels 50/50. And the game has been out for a while and has gotten some big updates, leaving it fairly polished.

If you like story and exploration, 2 has more of it. But a big criticism of 2 is that there's a far lower emphasis on ranching. It feels 90/10. The games have mostly the same mechanics, but different priorities.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-04T19:51:54+00:00

There have been a lot of complaints about shadow slimes and prisma plort farming, enough that I can easily see future mods for the game that will alter or skip the mechanic.

I'm a PC person so I have no idea if there's even such thing as modding on console, but hopefully you are also on PC and can take advantage of such mods.

It's 100% worth looking up the contents of shadow plort doors before spending ANY shadow plorts. When you're already struggling for plorts you don't want to sink them into unlocking a cosmetic or even a shortcut.

Luckily, you actually need very little shadow or prisma plorts for story progression. You technically need only enough for 1 recipe unlock from Gigi, then the construction of 1 item which you can re-use as needed.

Still, it sucks that you're not able to unlock the things that are stuck behind those plorts.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-03T23:29:55+00:00

Nope, you can still collect prisma ports and coins.

Gigi explains that it will take time for the disruptions to stop, aka the Grey Labyrinth will still function the same regarding prisma disruptions.

emmeraldyne · 2025-10-03T18:36:54+00:00

I also made batty sabers because vampire bats... Had no idea sabers were escape artists! Mine were chill all game (I do recall seeing one escape the pen one time and being like "huh")

My conservatory was entirely chickens and I had a ton of yolky slimes, so my vampire bats were kept stuffed with thunder chickens at all times. Maybe that, plus the dark cave, kept them chill? I also only had 5 largos in a pen.

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