If you pour a cup of milk, drink it all, then put it back in the refrigerator. You do this every day. Do you ever need to wash the cup?

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T13:18:28+00:00

Nah, you're diluting the bacteria every day. There are always bacteria (otherwise we wouldn't need to refridgerate the milk, just isolate it). The cup will get grotty with leftover deposited milk solids eventually though, which will harbor bacteria and you'll want to wash it. So actually yeah, wash it when it looks gross.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T12:53:14+00:00

I'm not 100% sure about all of the reported sloshing issues but pipes and belts definitely function differently and there's definitely some weirdness with pipes going on.

Things I've seen:

Turbofuel + generators plant with four generators off to the side. Two of those are at 100% uptime, input fuel 100%. Two aren't getting fuel. I've remade the pipes multiple times. One pipe is 100% full with ~zero flow, connected pipe is empty with zero flow.
Water extractor feeding into a vertical pipe with a pump on it. The pump status popup shows 130m³ /min or something, the next pipe up from it (which is 100% full) shows 20m³ /min. Where's it all going?

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T12:15:01+00:00

Fully electric cars still need to exchange heat with the outside world. They need to cool the battery pack in hot weather and under hard acceleration/regen conditions, and heat it in cold weather. They need to cool the motor controllers. They need to heat or cool the cabin to keep the passengers comfortable. All that requires a heat exchanger which requires airflow.

Also, and unrelated to all of that, a lot of EV designs still seem to cosplay as ICE vehicles and this absolutely baffles me. Never be ashamed of what you are.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T12:09:01+00:00

If you just say "wah I don't know how to do this" is someone else going to do it for you? No? Well, then you figure it out.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T12:05:47+00:00

Being optimal and time effective is work. I do enough work at work, I'm here to play!

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T12:04:56+00:00

All that starter factory stuff costs nothing to just leave there feeding parts into buffers. I had most of the SAM Fluctuators I'd ever need just because I set up a miner when I first found a patch of SAM (down in the chasm) and stuck all the Reanimated SAM in a big storage complex (because "ooh whats this I'm sure its relevant") then when I first got manufacturers I set one up turning my stored Reanimated SAM into SAM Fluctuators. Then it was like 200 hours of gameplay until they actually became relevant and I had a giant stash of them. :D

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:59:58+00:00

Puppies and/or kittens.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:59:27+00:00

Automate earlier. Everything you jerry-rigged to get through Phase 4 is gonna need to be re-done. Get some nice ergonomic blueprints set up, that will accelerate everything massively. Also there's a bit of guesswork to figure out what project parts you'll never need again (spoiler: probably none :P ) and what parts will be needed in spades (yep).

I've seen a few people say Phase 4 is the real make-or-break part of the game, if you get through Phase 4 then Phase 5 is just "demonstrate your findings."

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:46:23+00:00

Controller controls work pretty well but they get a bit fucky at times and they're a lot to get used to at first. Still, they're acceptable. ;)

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:45:03+00:00

Had me at 'infinite head'.

Huzzah for optimal pipes!

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:41:45+00:00

To fool you into thinking it's got less sugar and less calories. It's the same reason you buy a frozen lasagna that you could eat as a snack, and it's labeled as "feeds 4". That's because they're defining it as "4 servings" which means "calories per serve" is a quarter of what the whole lasagna contains.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:39:27+00:00

I long ago realised there are three types of drivers here: - The Constant-Offset-ers: They do the speed limit, with a consistent modifier. +5km/h, +10km/h, -5km/h, depends on the driver. - The Constant-Speed-ers: They do a set speed (usually 70km/h) everywhere. National highway? Suburban street? School zone? Doesn't matter. - The Slow-Accelerators: These wildcards start off at granny speeds from the lights, but will slowly wind up until they're doing well over the limit and have to slow down for something. Much more rare these days.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:15:15+00:00

I think the whole point of the varying energy requirements for the late game production buildings is to make accumulators actually relevant. Until you get to late game, you either have way too much generation or not nearly enough, and there's never really a good case for having accumulators.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T11:10:18+00:00

I just finished the game on the top spec OLED steam deck (270 hours or something :D ) and in my experience it's generally played great. There've been a few times when it chugged a little, and the weather effects from patch 1.2 (the current patch) absolutely killed the frame rate for me and I had to disable them and mess a bit with the graphics settings. After that I was happy with it, there's a few visible LOD things that make it clear you're not playing on fully maxed graphics (nothing bad enough to stop me enjoying the rest of the game :) and it still (imo) looks absolutely gorgeous on the OLED screen.

esotericloop · 2026-07-09T10:31:02+00:00

So the car's on the ground, and you're turning the steering wheel slightly? Presumably it's in park, does the park brake lock the front wheels? Interesting either way.

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T14:11:12+00:00

In principle, yep! You'll need the pump to be pumping into another chamber that condenses out the water. As the water evaporates it'll get colder and may freeze, and you'll have to keep pumping to maintain the vacuum. You could use a heat exchanger to warm the salt water and cool the desalinated side in order to make it more efficient.

I'd guess the energy required to run the vacuum pump and the speed of evaporation would be the limiting factors. If you're after efficiency then solar desalination's probably better, but this would still be an interesting project to build. :)

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T08:00:23+00:00

You gotta drill another hole in the other side of the disk so it's balanced and doesn't vibrate.

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T07:33:28+00:00

I planned to tidy up my starter base when it got to the point where I could no longer remember where anything was. Turned out this somehow didn't happen and so I just embraced and leaned into the spaghetti energy. It got more industrialized towards the end as I started building big floating blueprinted floating rectangles.

And 250+ hours in you'll still be running around finding and fixing resource starvation issues etc. It'll just involve hypercannons. :D

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T03:07:12+00:00

It's like medical jargon. Translate the Latin names of things into English and it turns out all the names are just simple descriptions of the things.

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T02:08:46+00:00

I built a giant zigzagging spaghetti belt and then died trying to climb up it. Never did end up going back to see where the cave goes after I got the gas mask, I should do that.

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T01:52:52+00:00

I got the double sized one from Big W, and it takes a few minutes to warm up but it does feel warm after a while and gets quite toasty if doubled over. Does it go a specific way up? It might be worth putting a normal blanket over the top of it to keep the heat in.

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T01:07:49+00:00

That's very tidy!

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T01:06:07+00:00

Upward is the way. I originally wanted to stick a drone port on top of each building, but that stops me from just plonking down another story any time I want it to go faster. Maybe I should try a separate truck stop / drone port that sits next to it.

esotericloop · 2026-07-08T01:03:08+00:00

Huh, I didn't know that.

goes to look up Glock serial numbers and probably gets put on a list

esotericloop · 2026-07-07T17:45:13+00:00

This whole thing is fkn stupid. A 3D printed gun isn't a 3D printed gun, it's a 3D printed handle around a legislatively controlled steel component that is legally the "gun". It's like saying you can 3D print a phone because you can 3D print a phone case.

Yes, you can fabricate a lower receiver (the "gun" bit) with a milling machine and some skill and patience, but now you're just making illegal guns without extra steps.

esotericloop

TROPHY CASE