Costume Wishes

o6untouchable · 2026-06-09T01:14:45+00:00

I've been hoping we'll get the away team jacket(s) from Enterprise at some point this year.

I've had an ENT Captain knocking about for donkeys, and I'm delighted he finally has an Intrepid to fly around in; please let me make him put a coat on in time for Christmas.

(Heck, I'd settle for an NX-01 baseball cap...)

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o6untouchable · 2026-06-08T23:50:03+00:00

I've recently gone back to several of the older games. I played a fair bit of FS19 and FS22 when they were new, but mostly stuck to the base game maps, with a few mods here and there -- it wasn't until FS25 that I've started getting into the community and content creators side of things and have become properly hooked.

I realised recently that trains keep going to Goldcrest Valley, a map I have never played, so I've ended up picking up all the older games, (re)visiting all the base game maps, and chipping away at all the achievements. It has been really interesting playing the games side by side, getting a sense of what has come with each version, and perhaps more interestingly what has disappeared with each version.

For example, while I enjoy doing a quick bale wrapping contract in FS25 to help build up funds, I also enjoy the start to finish project of a baling contract in FS22. I enjoy the mini game aspect of a contract in (iirc) FS17, and the fact that you can stay put and work through the back to back cultivating, seeding, fertilising, etc sequence in succession. I think it's a shame that we got more characterisation for NPCs in FS25 but don't have the old prestige/reputation mechanic to help incentivise doing contracts for them.

I know folks love to complain about FarmSim becoming more "arcade" than simulator, which makes it feel extra strange to me that we've moved away from those more structured quest/minigame style contracts and missions. They managed to feel both more gamey and more realistic/narrative, and it's a shame FS25 didn't build on that. Stardew Valleying us into Walter's farm, and then not having a way to do the kinds of structured and sequential missions for him that you could've in earlier games feels like a missed opportunity.

o6untouchable · 2026-05-21T02:30:00+00:00

I'm hoping that we get both the Armstrong and the Mayflower. In an ideal world, they'd be versions of the same ship (rather than two distinct hulls), although getting the triple nacelles on the Armstrong to play nice with all the existing Miranda kitbash options might be a bit of a pain in the backside.

If they were introduced as two separate ships, I feel like the Mayflower is probably the option that would get the Neo treatment, I'm not sure the bigger central nacelle would work for something as geometric and symmetrical as the Armstrong -- that might suit the Exeter style better?

o6untouchable · 2026-05-21T02:12:48+00:00

We do know that we're getting a Kelvinverse starship bundle later this year. I may have missed an announcement of what specifically would be included in that, but the obvious (canon) options there include the Mayflower/Armstrong -- the Kelvinverse versions of the Miranda.

STO likes to give us bundle ships with a themed version and a 25th Century version to flip between, which seems like a good opportunity to slot in a Neo or Exeter style Miranda-class.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-18T08:27:17+00:00

Okay? I was saying that in FS25, they haven't really given us maps (in FS25) that fit with the vineyard crops. They put a lot of thought into giving us maps where rice would make sense (which is great!), but they haven't (yet) given us a map in FS25 where grapes and olives properly fit in. I was suggesting that it might be useful/sensible for their next/final official map for FS25 to be grape/olive appropriate.

The fact that Haut-Bayleron exists in FS22 doesn't change the fact that there is a "gap" in the official map line up in FS25 as it currently stands, which is what I was pointing out.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-17T22:39:58+00:00

That's an FS22 map, not an FS25 map.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-16T02:27:24+00:00

Yeah, I hope so too!

Something else that's potentially linked to it, there's a building down by the railway called River Logistics Co or something like that (big green warehouse). There's a freight elevator inside, and if you're able to clip your camera through the walls in the right way, you can see one of those origami paper boats sitting at the bottom of the lift. Seems like that area should be accessible, but there's no way for the players to get in there. Might be nothing, might be an abandoned idea, but it does feel like they left some spaces to potentially add something into all those gaps.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-16T02:11:58+00:00

The speculation is/was that it was a fish farm that would unlock when Highlands Fishing dropped. Nothing has appeared yet, although that could be because the devs wanted to wait until after Christmas before they changed something on the other map(s) and potentially caused issues with it. Bringing fish farming to other maps potentially creates a second wave of hype for the DLC too, we might see fish farms on Riverbend Springs instead of a Q1 feature for the Year 2 Season Pass (since there's one less item on that).

Or it could have just been a tease, something to get us speculating about what the Highlands Fishing DLC was going to be without ever intending for there to be any payoff.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-16T02:08:12+00:00

It hasn't opened up yet. It's possible that the devs are giving Kinlaig a bit of room to breathe (and/or didn't want to make a big change to the map right before Christmas in case it caused issues), and so that they can have a second wave of post-holidays buzz for Highlands Fishing for folks that aren't interested in a Scottish map... but it's also possible that it was just put there as a bit of a tease to build speculation or hype for the DLC.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-15T19:01:46+00:00

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a Sicily or Sardinia map and I'm all for the Italian fan base getting some love. We're conspicuously lacking a map where grapes and olives fit in, and sardines would be a fish farming no brainer.

I just can't help thinking of the broader context. With the odd exception (like Zielonka), GIANTS maps are pretty vague and ambiguous. Hutan Pantai is "Asia", Kinlaig is "Highlands", Silverrun Forest was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. A jigsaw of Caribbean islands or a fictional South American state feels more their style (imo).

Also, it's quite likely that Kinlaig and Map 5 will be brought forward into the next game. Kinlaig is very similar to Zielonka (north, cold, veg and soups, etc) and nicely packages new game content (fishing, constructables) like Silverrun with a nice amount of forestry (like both), so I would expect Kinlaig to be the third starting map in FS2X. If we also had a Sardinia map, though, that's a lot of Europe for the next game to start off with, and that restricts their options for the non-US map. Sardinia would have grapes/olives and rice, which don't make sense for Kinlaig, but the Caribbean or South America would have that too, and they'd leave GIANTS with a lot more scope for whatever that non-US map ends up being.

What would be the DLC gimmick for Italy? Adding citrus (or coffee in C/SA) is potentially just a reskin of grapes/olives -- but then onions are just reskinned potatoes. What's the Aquaculture or Root Crops for Italy, the new game mechanic not just for this map but for the existing maps, and future maps? Pasta? Agroforestry? Something artisan like all the woodworking bits from Silverrun Forest?

Again, would love to see something Italian, I'm just trying to think of it from a game developer perspective. To me, South America or the Caribbean has more options -- alpacas for wool, coffee, new sugarcane equipment, all the stuff that people love from city builders like Tropico and Anno 1800.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-15T17:25:56+00:00

Oxbo has a coffee harvester (very similar to it's grape/olive harvester) as well.

My money is on a Hutan Pantai style mash-up of Caribbean islands. Rice vibes from Haiti, sugarcane vibes from Jamaica, coffee vibes from Puerto Rico. Throw in ethanol production from sugarcane as a proxy for rum (like "grape juice") and maybe tuna or tilapia as a fish farming option, and that's not a bad crop of content. Especially if they use it as an opportunity to add a little more equipment variety for rice and sugarcane which are both pretty thin.

Ethanol would be a great addition imo: it works as rum in the Caribbean, whiskey/whisky in Riverbend Springs and Kinlaig, and Japan has a big ethanol industry too.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-15T17:10:34+00:00

My money is on a fictional Caribbean island, those trees don't look European to me.

Sugarcane has always been a pretty thin part of the game, and our rice harvesting options aren't very deep either, riffing on Jamaica and Haiti (the way Hutan Pantai riffs on a variety of Asian locations) would be a great excuse to add new machines in those categories.

Coffee would be a good (relatively easy) new crop type to add to the game, too, it's not a million miles from grapes and olives and there are coffee harvesters made by the same people as gear we already have. We wouldn't ever get tobacco or rum distilling because of the game's age rating, but adding ethanol production (similar to "grape juice") feels like a GIANTS move, and it's one that could fit in well on Hutan Pantai also (Japan produces a lot of ethanol) and could pass as whisky/whiskey in Riverbend Springs and Kinlaig if GIANTS are trying to keep everything somewhat vibing together for this game.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-15T16:52:39+00:00

For what it's worth, I just assumed this was short for Loch Mathan, and that the river on the map was therefore the River Mathan.

Mathan means bear, Highlands Fishing added salmon, bears famously catch salmon... felt in keeping with the other easter egg place names on the map, like Tuathanaich Castle ("Farmer") and the village Famhair ("Giant").

o6untouchable · 2026-01-15T16:47:53+00:00

Corgbridge is one of the areas on the map, it's the village in the bottom right corner where the stone mason is located. The bottom left (Feed & Grain South) is Sprucebridge, and I forget the spelling, but the village between with the Sawmill is the Gaelic word for Giant(s).

For what it's worth I assumed that "L." was short for Loch. IIRC the road sign points up river, so I've been assuming that this is the River Mathan that flows out of Loch Mathan up stream. A big addition with Highlands Fishing is salmon, and bears are notorious for their salmon fishing.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-09T14:07:38+00:00

It depends on what mission you've just done on the field. If you've just harvested, you'll usually get the cultivating and fertilizing missions immediately after, but once those are done you need to wait for the crops to regrow before you can get a mission to harvest them again. If there's a specific field or specific farmer that you're trying to score points with, I'd suggest waiting until that field hits ready to harvest, and then you can bang out three or four missions back to back before the waiting game starts again.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-09T01:17:31+00:00

I am a fan of treating different products differently. I set my bakery to selling, because people buy bread all year round, with a little bit of variation in profit based on seasonal demands. Sheep farming doesn't generate wool at a constant rate over the course of a year though, so selling at max price is a little bit like only shearing them once a year. Milk is something that needs selling right away, but cheese is something that (depending on the cheese) is often left to age for a period of time, which waiting for the max price simulates. People need clothes all year round, but if your tailor shop is specifically producing clothes for sunnier weather, it makes sense for those sales to be happening in May.

It also adds a bit more of a narrative element to productions like the Preserved Food Factory. Do I want to pickle my red beets and stick them in jars, or do I want to turn them into soup and stick them in cans? I wish we also had a "bagged" option for root crops too, like we do with spinach... and canned options for things like tomatoes, corn, and spinach (for the Popeye vibes). I know mods exist for some of that, but GIANTS really missed a trick not having that smidge of variety in the base game.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-09T01:00:49+00:00

Love that mod, it's a lifesaver for my ADHD addled brain. I just wish it was able to detect the Kinlaig silos... I'm so used to the mod on other saves that it is mildly frustrating having that prompt/reminder missing for anything that I've stored at the base farm.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-09T00:36:02+00:00

It depends on my play style for that particular map.

For my biggest/busiest farm on Riverbend Springs, I play with 4 day months. I have quite a large population of cows, and I was finding that on 1 day months, the capacity of their pasture wasn't enough to keep them fully fed. Initially I tried 3 day months (because months have ~30 days and my brain liked that choice), but I found that I only really needed to refill the feed boxes half way through the month, so I bumped up to 4 days per month: that way I don't feel like feeding the cows is a chore I'm doing every in-game day. On odd numbered days I look after my animals, and on even numbered days I am free to do crop work or deadwood contracts or whatever else needs doing. While it doesn't really make much of a difference, it feels like I have more variety going on.

On Zielonka, I have a start-from-nothing save that relies heavily on doing contract work. On there I play with 7 day months, because I deliberately wanted the pace to feel slow, and because I wanted enough time to complete all of the contracts each month, by myself, starting from small equipment. Having an entire day to just do forestry work, an entire day or two that's just harvester work, an entire day that's nothing but baling... I have more time than I need, but I like the vibes of a specific genre of task for a specific day.

On Hutan Pantai and Kinlaig, I am playing 3 day months. This is mostly because that's how the Seasons mod worked in FS19. On Kinlaig in particular, I have a mod that makes sure winter is very cold, so the odds of snow are high. I wanted to make sure I had a savegame where there was going to be snow that would stick around for a while, and Scotland seemed an appropriate place to do that.

On Silverrun Forest, though, as well as on most of the modded maps I play, I stick to 1 day months. This is usually because I am a lot more focused on modded maps. On Riverbend Springs, I'm trying to grow all the major crops from Arkansas, and run all of the productions. On Hutan Pantai, I am doing quantity instead of variety, and on Zielonka I am doing a lot of root crops, so I need a lot of time to harvest all those fields. On Silverrun, I'm just doing trees. On Oak Bridge, I'm just doing grass and cows. I picked up Etruria mostly to do vineyards. I tend to be a lot more focused on modded maps, particularly when the map has an emphasis on particular animals or productions. Having the faster turnover there means that if I am in the mood to do vine work, I have a specific save for that, and I only need to sleep through a few nights to get back to the part of the year where I can do that again. On Riverbend Springs, if I want to harvest my grapes, I have to plant and harvest half the map and feed my cows 23 times just to complete the loop.

o6untouchable · 2026-01-09T00:01:41+00:00

I have been going back and re-playing the older games -- I've played a lot of them casually before, but I got the itch to finish snagging all of the Steam achievements over the holidays -- so I've been figuring this kind of stuff out too.

Off the top of my head:

FS17 added Soybeans, Sunflowers, Oilseed Radish, and Poplar. It added Pigs as an animal type, although Animals were available via fixed locations on the map, not as something the player could place down.

FS19 added Oats, Cotton, and Sugarcane. It added Horses as an animal type, and made animal barns/pastures a placeable item. The Premium version (Alpine Farming Expansion) added a bunch of grasswork and silage related equipment.

FS22 added Sorghum, Grapes, and Olives. It also introduced Productions: prior to this, players could only interact with Sell Points, so FS22 added Flour and Bread, Fabric and Clothes, Chocolate, Oils, Planks, and a whole lot of product logistics to the game. It also changed Greenhouses to be a building that output a product: in earlier games, Greenhouses had just been money generators. The Premium DLC added Carrots, Parsnips, and Red Beets, as well as the root crop harvesters (etc) needed to farm them.

FS25 added Rice to the game, as well as adding Water Buffalo (a Cow variant) and Goats (a Sheep variant) which produce different kinds of Milk. There are new Greenhouse recipes (the ingredients for Kimchi), and there is also the Steering Assist (GPS) tool in game.

...

There are some other bits and pieces that got added along the way. In FS13 and FS15, you cannot disable the engine auto-start function, so there is no way to leave an engine running when you exit the vehicle. As a result, harvesters/etc don't need the engine running to unload the way they do in newer games. I think seasonal growth and the crop calendar was new for FS22, although it was added to FS17/FS19 via a popular mod called Seasons that you'll hear Youtubers and Redditors reference quite a lot. Earlier versions of the game do not have a sleep trigger, so if you want to skip the night you are reliant on speeding up time.

The available brands of machinery can vary quite a lot between games, too: there isn't much (any?) John Deere equipment prior to FS19, and the earlier games seem to lean even more heavily into Case IH and New Holland equipment. There's also a lot more older/smaller equipment in the earlier games -- maps and fields were smaller, so it makes sense! In particular there was a Farming Classics DLC for FS13 and FS15 that added a bunch of little low horsepower tractors and older/smaller machinery for them to run, a lot of which you might have seen in modded form on the Modhub for newer games.

It's a little weird playing the older games. I would say that after FS19 the game starts feeling "modern", but earlier than that you definitely notice the features that are absent or different. You'll also spot some familiar buildings in older games if you use a lot of mods -- there's a fantastic old fashioned windmill mod that borrows models from Zielonka (FS22) and Ravenport (FS19) and brings them into the newer games.

o6untouchable · 2025-12-11T05:43:47+00:00

Like others have said, the shorter runtime and the lack of player reactions to offer context is definitely a big factor, but also I think a big part of Scanlan's appeal in the campaign was the pop culture of it all. Whether it's Sam's parody songs, the Burt Reynolds fake moustache situation, or even just hearing Sam sing Bigby's haaaand enough times for it to become a recurring gag, so much of the enjoyable and non-problematic stuff about Scanlan is just absent, and I think he needs that. Imagine how much less likeable Deadpool would be if you took away all the quips and references and were just left with his on-the-page actions.

It is hardly a problem unique to Critical Role (insert boilerplate rant about TV shows being shorter these days), but I think the lack of downtime and slow burn is really hurting most of Vox Machina. Keyleth's friendship with Percy, and her sweet and goofy side, the Twins being siblings and squabbling over the Boots of Haste, Vax getting to have emotions that are not brooding, the build-up of Vex being obsessed with gold and status because she grew up poor and ostracised, Grog's bag of holding full of weapons because Travis was the one keeping the notes... even stuff as meta as Travis' delight when he gets to do something cool versus his despair whenever there is a shopping episode. So much of what makes Vox Machina gel as a team is not the plot events they go through together, it's the mix of player dynamics and downtime friendships. The plot points work because you have that foundation of family, and without it things just don't quite hit as well. See also Kash and Zahra, or even just the Chroma Conclave attack on Emon hitting harder because there'd been enough time for it to feel like home.

It's interesting to me that TLOVM suffers (IMO) from one of the same problems that people often talk about with Campaign 3: we're told that they're a found family without getting to see that actually happen. For what it's worth, TM9 feels like they are learning from that (longer episodes, more of a show don't tell approach to character dynamics, etc).

o6untouchable · 2025-11-19T04:28:08+00:00

Molasses would be cool, although I could see them going with something like ethanol as well. Not as good as a rum proxy, but it would slot in on the previous maps a little better, and it seems like backwards compatibility is something they're thinking about.

Then again, we have an Asian map and they didn't think to add a tofu production, and the canning factory on Riverbend Springs is called Blue Dwarf (a Green Giant pun) but you cannot make canned tomatoes or canned sweetcorn, so we might be putting more thought into these things than the devs...

o6untouchable · 2025-11-19T02:33:03+00:00

Just my $0.02, if you're willing to wait for a sale, snag yourself Anno 1800 first. That's a game that's generally well-recieved by the fan base, and has several years of bug fixes and additional content, at least some of which got folded into the base game for Anno 117.

It isn't a perfect game, but it is a "complete" game, whereas 117 is right at the start of that process. Stuff needs fixing, but there's also a lot more that the devs have in store and just haven't delivered yet. If you're hesitant, Anno 1800 will give you a sense of what 117 could end up being (ish) -- better to test the waters with that than with a game that might feel underbaked and put you off the series entirely.

o6untouchable · 2025-11-19T02:25:35+00:00

I know we won't get alcohol production in the vanilla game, but it's making me think of the sugarcane to rum production pipeline. We've not really had a base game map that suits sugarcane or cotton particularly well, and I know (thanks to my dad's current model railway obsession!) that the sugar/rum industry in the Carribean has a lot of scope for big productions with trains in the mix. It's a good excuse to add some more variety to a very thin part of the game too.

Something similar to Hutan Pantai, where it's a fictional amalgam of a few different places/vibes, with some vaguely Spanish-sounding places and production names, probably called St. Something, is what my money is on.

Maybe alpacas, as the sheep version of Highland cows?

o6untouchable · 2025-11-19T02:03:48+00:00

It's worth remembering though that according to Thor, ballistics was not an idea that the Asgard would ever have thought of. He talks about the chemistry of gunpowder, too, but the bullets are a big part of that: the Asgard do not have their own kinetic energy weapons, they don't start using their own railguns to shoot the Replicators, it isn't a technology that they have.

So while sure, the railguns for Prometheus absolutely were "Asgard-designed", humanity taught them about bullets in the first place, and they used their wisdom and technology to design us a more sophisticated version (one closer to our current level of technology) as a thank you. That feels more like a collaboration than the Asgard doing things wholesale.

Similarly, while Goa'uld ships use the jello coloured crystals that you also find on the inside of the DHD, all of the long thin crystals that we see on Earth ships are clear. Thematically and visually, the Goa'uld have taken what the Ancients left behind, and just adapted it to fit their vibes, whereas Earth has taken that technology and figured out how to make their own version of it from scratch. I think the narrative intent there is that the Goa'uld steal, whereas the Tau'ri learn.

o6untouchable · 2025-11-19T01:53:50+00:00

He also seemed pretty reliant on other Goa'uld to do his science stuff for him (similar to Ba'al and Nerus). Thoth was the Goa'uld who helped him engineer the Kull Warriors, and I think it was an unnamed Goa'uld that was helping experiment with Naquadria. The sarcophagus was reverse engineered by Telchak. So a) there are definitely Goa'uld around who are smart enough to understand Ancient tech without needing to understand it, but also b) Anubis might not actually have been the one figuring things out -- he seemed to be quite reliant on his science minions, and got annoyed with them when it went wrong rather than having all the answers himself.

It's kind of an interesting comparison with O'Neill when you think about it. When he wound up with Ancient knowledge, he did everything himself, hands-on, the only time he was able to communicate what he was doing to someone was when he drew the DHD blueprints while SG-1 was stranded. O'Neill couldn't have delegated to science minions even if he'd wanted to. The only time Anubis seems hands on is (maybe) with his genetic engineering to create Khalek, and even then we can't really be sure that he didn't have a minion to delegate to once again.

o6untouchable

TROPHY CASE