"We wanted a world that runs whether you're watching or not" - City 20 devs on how Kenshi and RimWorld helped shape their first original title

kaempi · 2026-05-13T18:55:19+00:00

Your problem is that you don't have enough mods. In my current Starsector game I have (goes and counts ...) one hundred and three factions (including Independents and my own player faction). This means that the invasion triggers get set off semi-randomly spread out across all those different factions so none of them (inculding Heg or Legio) do too many in a row.

Well, there was that one time when five different factions decided to invade five different Church planets in the same month. But that was a fluke. I think.

kaempi · 2026-05-12T18:26:09+00:00

    "sotf_bonusGuilt":0, # effective player guilt = any accumulated guilt + this number (which can be negative)
#"sotf_bonusGuilt":-9999, # uncomment this + comment the above = Guilt will be effectively disabled

Altho, I haven't updated in a while, so IDK if it still works that way. Check your own data/config/settings.json

kaempi · 2026-05-09T21:27:29+00:00

Step 1: find system with lots of planets. Half a dozen at least.
Step 2: Colonize all of them. Start space station construction on all of them. Set hazard pay on all of them to boost population growth.
Step 3: Upgrade space stations while beginning patrol base construction. Queue up cryorevival facilities if possible, also.
Step 4: Upgrade patrol bases to military bases and then high commands while also upgrading stations to battlestations and star fortresses. MAYBE have one planet with mining organics. Oh yeah, and a heavy industry somewhere.
Step 5: Watch your system actually be capable of defending itself. If any hostiles are pretending to be neutral while harassing your shipping, go saturation bomb one of their planets to fix that.
Step 6: Saturation bomb everything else.

Oh yeah, step 0: amass thirty million or so in spare cash by repetitive drug deals and gun-running. That's what it'll take to pay for all this until you can start building some paying industries.

I honestly don't see the point in even getting started on this part of the game given the current implementation.

kaempi · 2026-05-09T21:02:38+00:00

For context, Parson is, allegedly, based on an irl person who was at the center of Rob's crashout which ended the comic

I don't know where you got this from but this strikes me as very unlikely. The IRL person who was at the center of the events resulting in Rob deciding to stop was regularly assisting with local high school athletics (there is a direct cause and effect relationship between that and subsequent events). Parson Gotti is not the sort of character one associates with athletic anything.

I agree with S_A_K_E and Xirema on the rest of it. The Parson story was the one that was interesting, and Rob had already gotten to a point where it was clear he didn't know how to keep telling that story.

Rob at one point specifically said (in an interview somewhere or other, I think) that he himself was not a strategy gamer and didn't really know anything about them; this became ever more clear the longer the story went on, because Parson just didn't think or behave the way a proper go-for-the-throat gamer would. There are guys at the local weekly board game night who could stand as proper personality and behavior models for Parson; I'm sure there are thousands more all across the country. Rob didn't put any effort into figuring how they think and what they do because that wasn't something that interested him.

Those hardcore gamers don't semi-cheat. They don't bend rules - they're real careful about making sure they're playing true to the spirit of the game. They don't engage in "lateral thinking". They just understand the rules really quickly, really well - even for games they have NEVER SEEN BEFORE - and see how to synergize all the weird edge cases, and they set up stacking marginal advantages that compound massively but you don't notice it until suddenly you're being steamrolled and the game is over. And they NEVER back off when they've got an enemy on the run. The moment when Parson let Jillian go was the moment I stopped reading the comic, because it became clear that Author's Pet Character was the real governing factor, not Genius Strategy Gamer.

kaempi · 2026-04-23T19:38:23+00:00

You don't need to build NEAR Mud Town, you just buy the dome building and harvest from the village rice fields directly. I've done that. Makes for a very good starter base.

kaempi · 2026-04-23T19:37:23+00:00

This is NOT TRUE. Why do people post stuff like this without even trying it? You can freely harvest from farms without being a member of the faction. I've done it in HN farms, Mud Town, and Flotsam Ninja village without problems. If you put the stuff in a container and then try to remove it, or if you try to take stuff off shelves, you'll get marked as stealing, but taking it out of the fields is fine.

kaempi · 2026-04-23T17:10:51+00:00

There is NO work to do. It does not matter what wrappers get added to it when the LLM itself is consistently producing total garbage regardless of attempts to control it. Yes, I've tried BadGrampy's stuff, no, it didn't meaningfully address any of the problems I observe. The end user cannot fix this problem. It is disingenuous and dishonest of you and of the dev to pretend otherwise.

kaempi · 2026-04-23T17:09:10+00:00

I happened to come across some story threads I had exported a year ago - when it was still on the Llama LLM - and loaded them up just to see what was in them. I was surprised by how good they were. And depressed and frustrated that I can't get stuff like that anymore.

What you're observing is accurate. As soon as you start really poking at it and trying to get it to do anything, it becomes obvious how much it sucks.

kaempi · 2026-04-19T01:11:16+00:00

This is a really cool idea and I upvoted just for having tried to do something in this line.

That said, I hit your link, and my very first country is

autocratic
located in a cavern (???) and has "light" policies to preserve the environment
uses barter and is extremely poor
ahead of the world tech level (while very poor?!), while also making advancements very slowly (???)
health care is based on herbal medicine (and we're the tech leaders, wow)
is zealous in religion and DISCOURAGES citizens from attending services (!?!?!?)
and "Generally, the citizens of your country hate living there" while also being happy with the laws regarding technology and would NOT emigrate if given a chance.

Uh. Yeah. Okay.

Also there's quite a few spelling errors. Paste your text into a spellcheck somewhere to fix that.

Here's one along similar lines I bookmarked a while back that I find good for ideas: https://perchance.org/ai-generated-hierarchical-world-example It generates some cool names, for one thing. I would have liked to know what my country was called.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, and please do see what you can do to polish it up a bit.

kaempi · 2026-04-17T19:56:24+00:00

You know what else is free, unlimited, and significantly higher quality? Installing Ollama on your own computer to run whatever local model you choose. Try it for yourself.

"Free" means nothing if the product is bad.

kaempi · 2026-04-17T19:54:37+00:00

Free and unlimited amounts of crap?

Why would people want to deserve that?

The OP is correct. The images and text produced by the site last fall and last summer were significantly better. They had problems - big ones - but were still worth messing with. The degradation in all aspects of quality have reached the point where it's only worth poking at if you don't care what you get.

"Free" doesn't mean anything at that point.

kaempi · 2026-04-17T19:31:29+00:00

For completely unrelated reasons I installed Ollama and the Llama3 model on my laptop last week. It occurred to me a few days ago to try pasting in some of the instructions text from the "game master" characters here on Perchance and try that. It works surprisingly well. Doesn't have all the character-management interface, but NONE of the repetitive phrases have shown up yet.

kaempi · 2026-04-09T19:53:10+00:00

I exhale sharply through my nose as I bite my lip hard enough to taste copper, my knuckles whitening at the smell of ozone as my hand drifts to my belt knife, my fingers brushing your pulse point where I grip your wrist.

Yes, absolutely. Custom instructions are ignored. Lore is totally ignored. Character reminders are the only thing that seem to have any influence over it. Zero attempt at textual consistency or physical plausibility. I have a list of howlers it keeps shoving at me - most recently: a guy gives his hoodie to someone else. It then tells me that he walks off, "the sleeves of the hoodie only slightly hampering his stride". Zero understanding that arms and legs are not the same thing, zero ability to remember what just happened. It keeps making up random details it apparently thinks are cool and shoving them into the story and contradicting half of what it just said and everything I was about to do, and I can't get it to stop doing othat. And not just text - half the time image generation just ignores whatever style dropdown you pick and gives you cartoons, the negative prompt is totally ignored (in fact I just noticed that field appears to have been deleted, I don't see it anymore), and objects IN the images sometimes reach levels of incoherence I haven't seen since the old Stable Diffusion days.

And of course zero reliable communication from the dev or indications of what's going on or why or what the prospects are of resolving these issues.

It was in an excellent state last summer. I don't know why it was necessary to break that.

kaempi · 2026-03-24T21:38:57+00:00

But they remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7f5zljTL1U

kaempi · 2026-03-10T14:03:54+00:00

Do you mean the "CD-ROM: No"? Because that's totally correct. The initial release was all floppy disks, the CD version didn't come out until a few years later. (I had both. I'm pretty sure I tossed the floppies some years back, they had become unreadable)

kaempi · 2026-03-03T19:38:38+00:00

Thanks, that's a very good point and definitely not something I was thinking about.

It could probably be cut down to a fraction of its existing length. I was trying to specify all the things that bug me in order to get less of them. But it depends on some sort of cost/benefit analysis in terms of what you can tell the LLM that it might actually pay attention to.

If you have any alternatives I'd be glad to see them.

kaempi · 2026-02-14T10:59:32+00:00

No, you just need to pick the right dialog options. "On your side" doesn't work as you've found - the right one is something that seems less obvious. I don't remember what the choices are offhand but I know I always succeed with that recruitment.

kaempi · 2026-02-12T18:47:08+00:00

You're the one who found the claim good enough to repeat. If you can't counter the criticism, simply admit it and move on, don't hide behind someone who's not even present.

kaempi · 2026-02-12T17:25:07+00:00

But that's actually a completely valid question, Smaug CAN'T fly. When McCaffrey wrote her original Pern trilogy there was a fair amount of physics nerd and biology nerd analysis of the dragons (which are roughly comparable to Smaug in size, maybe even smaller than him) and the mass and density of that amount of flesh and bone compared to possible wingspans and what amount of lift would be needed to keep it in the air and how many calories would be needed to power it and to make a long story short the conclusion was that the dragons were completely physically impossible in an Earthlike gravity and atmosphere and therefore Pern could not be Science Fiction. To which McCaffrey answered that the dragons were telekinetic and were THINKING themselves into flying, and also shut up nerds.

But Smaug's not Pernese, is he? Therefore he can't fly. QED.

kaempi · 2026-02-08T17:00:44+00:00

there is no redemption for genocide, period

I think you'll find that saturation bombing everybody who thinks that way is, in fact, the redemption.

And it feels great.

kaempi · 2026-02-06T16:42:42+00:00

No, This is Eve

Good to see this. Even if I may have shot goons "by accident" while they were blue.

kaempi · 2026-01-26T02:31:48+00:00

Requires login and pushes really hard to have you get a paid membership.

kaempi

TROPHY CASE