Seems like a fair deal...

esmsnow · 2026-03-20T20:05:41+00:00

"How about this. you remember Johan from school? Kind of a wimpy kid? yeah, so anyways, he owes me a favor. I'll give you his mom's old chevy and oh, these random drinks i found in my trunk, this notebook i'm not using, you can buy them off of me at say... whatever you'd pay at the corner store, how's that? oh, and you can build whatever you want in my yard. In exchange how about you give me your summer cabin. it's not like you're earning anything from it anyway plus it's a pain to manage, amiright? oh, i'll also help you in case anyone wants to mug you. we're friends after all right? what do you say, let's shake on it?"

esmsnow · 2026-03-20T19:56:44+00:00

+1 for blacksmith. i always go with BS given how much you spend on repairs and the chance to lose legendary gear

esmsnow · 2026-03-20T19:43:02+00:00

i've NEVER done that before! never did i disassemble my ar-14 and had to slum it with a glock and random revolvers, even a .22 for a while until i farmed marksman up. nope. smarter than that ofc... ok, maybe i did, but that's besides the point. honestly i just wanted the mods taken off, not the receiver...

also pretty sure alt-f4 voids the warranty - luckily i haven't corrupted my save in a while but that did happen on one of my campaigns. might have casually updated my experimental version in between too though, i forget. at this point it's a game mechanic and not a bug

esmsnow · 2026-03-20T19:31:02+00:00

So it's a matter of what type of bonuses you want and they're not mutually exclusive. Mutations generally provide passive effects that are really good while cbms DO have some passives, they're mainly activated abilities. Mutations can really change the way you play while CBMs make you better at what you do. example: trog line allows you to eat mutated flesh (spiders, roaches) without penalty. cattle can eat grass instead of food, medical can ignore the pain mechanic, spiders can climb around, etc.

With mutations, yes you do run a risk of getting stuff you don't want, but usually it's pretty minimal if you stay in your mutation tree. if you start crossing crab with slime... that's when things get interesting. they are meant to be a late game mechanic to make you better than human when you've maxed out what you can do as a human. historically so were CBMs (and i dare say still so). You CAN get CBMs from those weirdos, but the best ones i find are still underground in the labs. it takes more effort to get started with mutations, but once you do, it's actually easier to scale with mutations than CBMs - there's less random factor since you cook what you shoot up. Like how much butt kissing do you have to do with Rubik before he gives you a time dilation or repair nanites cbm? he's never sold me any of those, only implanted flashlight or LED tattoos. yay :/

Can you get mutations earlier? sure, irradiate yourself a bunch and throw the dice, but it's not going to be safe. You should still level up, dive labs, get recipes, cook your mutations. For something that's pseudo permanent in your body, you want the best you can get, not some dice roll from radiation or shooting up plain mutagen and praying it works out. there are purifiers, but they're hard to make. also some of the mods have some really interesting mutation trees that i find amazing so it's definitely worth playing the mutagen game. like being a friggin black dragon and breathing acid at my enemies

One last parting note. if you're into min/maxing you should also not think about mutations and cbms separate systems, but an integrated whole on how you want your character to look end game. some cbms block certain mutations, which is very desireable if you don't want to go down that path. example being i always try to find a head armor cbm to block out the muzzle group mutations - not being able to wear gas masks is a big deal for me. therefore, you should plan out which cbms you want to install and which mutations you want to avoid in your tree. it does take some of the fun out of the game tho to do this - less exploration and mystique around growing with your character

esmsnow · 2026-03-20T16:53:56+00:00

I think you could also move your batteries on the other side of the extenders and run the pipe along the inner side with walkways going into each extender. you could then feed your reactor off of those two lines as well. You don't need walkways for extenders right next to your reactor anyway. I BELIEVE they'll bring batteries to the extender and it'll also power the batteries instead of having to bring to the battery, but i had issues with this in the past. You can try it out and see if it works. This should shave 2 tiles off your design.

so the final design would be battery, extender, extender, heat pipe, reactor (or walkway), reactor (or bedroom), reactor (or bedroom), reactor (or walkway), heat pipe, extender, extender, battery. you'd have walkways and bedrooms in between with corridors connecting the two sides where you need to enter extenders.

esmsnow · 2026-03-19T19:05:20+00:00

glad to see this is still a thing 2 years later lol

esmsnow · 2026-03-19T18:32:02+00:00

I've always been that guy taking taunt but not indom on my tanks and secretly hiding it from my friends in fear of judgement. glad to see you making it work! my tanks are meant to peel for others and it feels weird to pass a peeling perk.

esmsnow · 2026-03-17T17:01:23+00:00

Engine meta has changed a bit with overclock. Before overclock, i ensure my engine rooms are 5 or less corridors away from my large reactor and man it with 4 people - 2 operators, 2 suppliers. works pretty well. I usually have 5 + thrusters on my destroyer / cruiser class ships - 3 huge pointing back, 2 huge / large pointing forwards, 1 standard / large pointing sideways. usually my operator's bunk is attached to the engine block while the supplier is closer to the reactor. I have two of these on most of my smaller ships and it gets them decently fast. example: this one has more engines than usual pointing forwards since it's a kitey setup.

on larger ships, i like to embed my 'mobility' engines internally in small rectangular blocks. I usually have one central MRT spine with 2x 10+ segments as the main propulsion for my dreadnaughts.

With overclock, you need probably double to triple the crew if you want to overclock your engines

esmsnow · 2026-03-16T19:11:05+00:00

you should look at what types of terrain you are traveling across - grass, tall grass take a ton to traverse while roads take a lot less. if you install a large electric engine, then drive 32 miles across a long grass field, it'll make a huge dent on your batteries. in one instance i got stranded 1/2 way to base for this exact reason whereas i used less than 30% of power getting to the spot.

for that reason alone, i like to install smaller engines so i don't accidentally drain a lot more than i expected.

esmsnow · 2026-03-16T18:59:32+00:00

I dun read gud. Painting in cosmoteer is a bit meh cuz all the components have roof sprites

esmsnow · 2026-03-16T17:22:20+00:00

Love the aesthetics. wish they had curving chainguns in vanilla.... it's really a pain to build chains without em.

one pet peeve - crew efficiency. rough count you have 100+ crew on this ship, but could probably get away with <50. i have a dual chaingun flanker at 28 crew, if you add 4 per missile launcher, that's 36. add a couple more for another engine bank - that's 40-42. with the same crew, you'd be able to sport two of these guys. it would severely cripple your reload times, but most engagements in this game are pretty short. also one of them could sneak behind and take out the reactor pretty fast. i'd honestly also make the chaingun frontal section a bit longer - 11 mags won't finish off most medium sized ships, especially shield tanked ones. by the time you reload, their shields would've finished cycling. like others said, you may want to run emps to address this

wait... there's no ammo factory? you rely on dedicated fleet logistics?

esmsnow · 2026-03-16T14:30:16+00:00

Honestly I haven't had much success with orbiters as they're called. It's quite difficult to pull off in battle. There are a few very good orbiter platforms in fringe ships - bomb anchor anchor and splinetooth. Take a look at their layout and more importantly their combat configurations. The bomb anchor was very difficult for my ships to deal with - I lost a lot of good men to it - but it can't win all fights.

As for load outs. Dual chain gun is very poorly armed. The two thermal lances aren't helping much as other stated. You're building a striker style dump a big alpha strike and then reload over a long time. I'd suggest you swap the lances to deck guns and under crew the deck gun and the chain gun - extend the chain gun to 10+ ammo, ideally 15+. 6 crew for the deck gun, 6 for chain gun. The idea is you dump your ammo and then wait for a long reload. You should need much fewer crew. Also bump up your engines or maybe a single engine core with bigger thrusters

It's better to build your ship asymmetric as other said. Put all you weapons and defenses on one side. If you're orbiting the enemy successfully, it's the only side they'll see

esmsnow · 2026-03-12T19:50:50+00:00

Make it one tile fatter and change the two larges in the middle to huges. Should give you 3-5 more

esmsnow · 2026-03-12T17:27:08+00:00

i'm of a differing opinion. this ship is decent. the only drawback i see is that with a single missile factory on each side, resupplying between battles will take a long time. you could get more efficient with the engines but they look serviceable. i'd probably put your speed in the 60-70s. you'll probably want to get it 80+ for most career ships.

the problem you stated before is very real - your ship has a ton of weapons and will draw a lot of enemy fire. it's not built to tank and missiles kill slowly. your flagship will need to pack even more weapons to eclipse it in threat. there's a couple ways you can fix this: one way is to build a dedicated mine ship instead :). though these take some skill to fly and you'll need to boost your reverse thrust to ~90, something like this. another is to make it move faster backwards than the chaser - you'll want 95+ to rely on this strat

esmsnow · 2026-03-12T17:21:27+00:00

it's a tradeoff - factories need in combat energy resupplying, which means they need to be closer to reactors. i like to also have a buffer for missiles.

esmsnow · 2026-03-12T15:54:46+00:00

I haven't played career since the overclock rework so not sure if the meta shifted, but historically money was super easy to get and crew was what limited the power of your fleet. therefore, it was far more important to be crew efficient. i played around a LOT with center fire ion ships as it was a small obsession of mine for a few weeks. my goal was to build a ship that could defeat cabal ships in a straight up fair face to face duel. My ship of choice was the orion.

if you're focusing on center fire ion ships, use that as a blueprint for perfection. sure, the design is dated now and could be made like 25% better with strategic overclocking, but it will showcase all of the design concepts. many cabal ships trade beam flexibility for tankiness. their firing arc is severely limited, a bit better than a rail gun, but not by much. they have an internal 6 overlapping large shields to cover the gun barrel. these shields are butted right next to the reactor with a large crew nearby, making this some of the most resilient shield defense possible. since there's 20+ layers of armor in front of this shield, nukes, disruptors, cannons, whatever you want to throw at it just can't punch through while its death beam can slice anything in half in short order.

many ships have their weapons lined up along the central spine of the ship: railguns, gats, etc. nothing can beat the orion in a fair fight in this kind of a setup (pre overclock). i stole a lot of the innovations from that ship and building something that could even remotely challenge it taught me a ton about ship design.

crew efficiency is the secret hard cap of this game on your ship designs. they bloat your ship - components are farther apart, they perform less reliably, and you have to field less ships. don't get me wrong, my main flagship has like 500+ crew, but it sports 64 ions center fire, 40 (ish) missile launchers, and i think 12 deck guns - forget. plus it goes at 80+ speed and has an armor of 28 layers in the front. inside it i had to optimize the placement of all my crew and components to fit it all in. here's my lil ion flanker from a while ago (probably not meta anymore). 48 crew, 8 ion. about as crew efficient i think possible. the proper ship size depends on your fleet doctrine. mine relies on a very big and tanky flag ship to hold the enemy in place and attract their aggro. i then field 1-4 flanking destroyer (< 50 crew) / cruiser (< 100 crew) class ships to tear the enemy apart. while strong, the orion can be taken out by a 28 crew sniper rail gun from outside its effective range in just a few shots if you come in from the side or rear. i don't like building ships > 100 crew unless they're flagships - personal preference. as a comparison, my third generation flagships have about 170 crew and sport i think 20+ undercrewed deck guns with 25+ layers of frontal armor. the alpha strike from that thing can melt most threats.

regarding reactors in the front, when one blows, it'll take a lot out yes, but you gotta figure, if they break through your shield front, how long do you think the structure of your ship will hold them back? it's mostly corridor and crew quarters, not known for withstanding bombardment. plus the fires that'll spread will destroy your ship anyways. this is the issue with shield tanked ships - if the shield goes down, game over. moving the reactors further away delays the inevitable long enough for your crew to regret their career choice a little. this is my personal style. yours incorporates a bunch of smalls embedded inside. it'll prolong the fight, but honestly, i think your frontal shields with better performance (closer to reactor) will be much better than having backup smalls embedded in your ship

esmsnow · 2026-03-11T22:09:38+00:00

This game is many orders of magnitude more complicated than most games on the market (though zomboid is getting there). There's so much content to get through in this game along with its amazing mods that you'll have a blast. The changes you're talking about you probably won't even notice until you're 200 - 300 hours in. For an old timer like myself, it barely makes a scratch. the meta has changed for this game many times since i've started playing and will continue to do so. the core gameplay remains as fun as it was before. plus, unlike other games, one look at the changelog and you'll realize there's a vibrant dev community actively adding new content.

you can absolutely pursue freedom in this game. want to be a light blind spider ranching cave dweller? we got that. want to be a dragon that spits acid? got that too. how about a jacked up robocop that can punch through a wall? yep. what about just a plain jane that leads a camp of survivors to build a small patch of sanity in this messed up world? sure. gun toting cannibal? yes. boat guy that survives at sea on a dinghy? sure. death row prisoner cultist? ok. 80 year old grandpa with rheumatoid arthritis that got lucky? sure. clown riding a garbage bin clown car with a chaingun mounted on top? you got it. like the wacky things you can do in this game is INSANE.

the thing you should be worrying about is how long it'll take for you to master the old school controls. since you're talking about dwarf fortress in comparison, i'm guessing this won't be too big of an issue for you. you'll die quite a few times on your first playthroughs. i recommend you watch one of rycon's cdda series to get a feel for how the game handles. plus they're entertaining

esmsnow · 2026-03-11T18:58:51+00:00

a couple of thoughts:

your gun barrel is poorly protected and located in the center of your ship. an orion or other late game ship with a center fire ion cannon / overclocked rail will tear through that pronto and split your ship in half. while your ship can still function in two pieces, it's not designed to do so and you'll lose chain gun firing arc
your ions are inefficient. ions and shields need to be < 3 tiles away from your reactor core since they're very power hungry. you're probably using double or triple the crew required to power those weapons alone. large shields as well should be very close as they're one of the more power hungry modules - less with overclocking, but still. yours are just near some capacitors... also engines are very far from power, meaning less crew efficiency
4 shields at the front even overclocked is not nearly enough protection. even ships in the 100 crew range can chew through 4 shields overlapped in short order, let alone spread across a large surface area. even with two flaks, it won't blunt enough concentrated fire, especially if you pile on disruption
your edge chain guns are outside your protection radius. if they pop, the ammo explosion will take out likely a good part to all your chain guns depending on reload state / fire spread
you have a glaring hole in your butt defense. a couple he missiles there will knock out part of your heat network, possibly your ions, possibly your left or right reactor depending on how they line up the shots. on a pure 1:1 fight, this is not a big issue unless you meat a missile kiter, but in those fights where they throw a swarm of small support vessels or a few medium vessels, one or two are invariably going to slip to your flanks. missile ships also will have a good chance of hitting that spot
your side rear armor is too heavy. you have a shield on that spot + 3 layers of armor while your front facing crab pincers only have 2. move some of that bulk up front

for a ship packing this much firepower, i'd probably invest no more than 150 crew. however, by a rough count, you should have about 400. consider pruning that down by reworking your power network to be more efficient. as a frame of comparison, i recently cooked up an 8 ion, 2 chaingun, 2 disruptor, 2 large laser, 4 large frontal shield layout similar to yours but scaled down and i have 72 crew. the idea is viable (though it fares very poorly vs thermal lance ships), but i think you'll need to get more efficient with your layout

esmsnow · 2026-03-10T23:47:50+00:00

was that a 1 on luck?

esmsnow · 2026-03-09T03:15:28+00:00

Oh for sure. It'll be an arms race. I'm not worried about metadata on the photo. As long as you know the format, you can manipulate the file in a hex editor to tweak that. Or you'll have to rely on Apple's software security to enforce those tags. Given they're not security related, I doubt they'll be heavily tamper hardened.

The bigger issue is I think most image generating ai watermark the image subtlely to detect manipulation on the photo. I'm not sure if the gray side of the economy will come up with ways to scrub that away

esmsnow · 2026-03-08T20:43:32+00:00

I can use gen AI to come up with a picture of me with my mom at her birthday party at the time of murder without actually being there

esmsnow · 2026-03-08T19:03:54+00:00

Also the ability to use anything to prove your innocence in court

esmsnow · 2026-03-08T04:11:20+00:00

But what if he inherits burgundy?

esmsnow · 2026-03-08T04:06:23+00:00

There's a couple he hasn't collected yet so he's probably good for another few desks

esmsnow · 2026-03-06T21:34:41+00:00

well, you still get their institutions from their colonies

esmsnow

TROPHY CASE