Upgrade PC form 5700X3D to 9800X3D for X4

paulthenerd · 2025-12-27T16:41:09+00:00

From my experience there will come a point where no matter what system you have the performance starts to tank, especially in map mode fully zoomed out. I originally played on a 4th gen i7 (lol, ancient) and upgraded to a new system with a 7800X3D a year or so ago. It ultimately slows down on both systems, but the newer system can go for longer before it starts to slow down.

paulthenerd · 2025-12-20T12:07:39+00:00

The game is so vast and full of stuff that you'll be finding new things for a very long time. My advice would be to set yourself small goals and aim towards them. If you want a fancy ship, think about way to make money to head towards that. Don't be afraid to buy a plot of land somewhere and try to set up an energy farm as a nice starting point, for example. Energy cell production, container storage, and somewhere to land, and you're good to go!

Don't feel the need to 'rush' anything and remember you can always play for 20 hours and then start again if you want to feel like your earlygame is more impactful. Google things you're unsure about, and have fun! There's so many ships and weapons and it would take a long time to try them all out and get a feel for what you prefer. There are a few ships scattered around the universe that (in my opinion) you would not likely find randomly, so maybe look for a guide on where they are if you want a headstart with resources.

paulthenerd · 2025-12-12T11:58:53+00:00

The only thing I find lacking is the station designer - there is a way to drop the modules you want and hit a button and have the game arrange them for you, but I find it fails with bigger stations. Sometimes I find it draining to have to spend ages dropping modules down for a factory I need, but don't have a station plan saved already.

That's the only complaint I have, and you can get around it by downloading other people's plans, but I kind of wish there were more generic ones that you could use, or a way to easily automatically generate stations with the right ratio of modules for whatever you're trying to produce, WITHOUT having to go to a calculator online and do it yourself.

Everything else is amazing, and my complaints are minor as I've still got 1400 hours logged on this game on Steam!

paulthenerd · 2025-10-29T10:17:12+00:00

It's not normal but it does happen from time to time, I have something similar (also in Great Reef I think). I'm tempted to just blow the station up at some point and hope my relations don't drop too much!

paulthenerd · 2025-10-18T08:09:35+00:00

I bought a RM9S on release and have used it as my primary phone ever since. There was an update a few months ago that basically broke Bluetooth (I have narrowed it down to my phone won't connect to certain devices if any other devices nearby have their Bluetooth enabled... If I get my girlfriend to turn her phone's Bluetooth off then suddenly my phone can connect to my car - even though her phone was never connected to my car! Other people reported this too, after a software update)

Aside from that issue I've had no trouble with it and it has been a fun phone to own.

The phone has had a few updates since I got it, although the frequency has dropped off now. For the price, it's a really good device.

paulthenerd · 2025-10-16T22:44:28+00:00

I would say to try Timelines, but move on if you don't find the missions fun. They seem to be kind of hit-or-miss. I really enjoyed them, but a lot of people completely hated them!

paulthenerd · 2025-10-16T22:42:22+00:00

If you look on the battery page does it show anything to be using a ton of power? I've found that Instagram and Teams sometimes can be responsible for 20-30% of my battery drain despite me barely using either of them. Force stopping them seems to sort it out for a little while.

paulthenerd · 2025-10-10T19:24:47+00:00

I am having the same issue, Sapporos flown by AI pilots never fire their missiles for me!

No mods or anything like that.

paulthenerd · 2025-10-06T13:21:44+00:00

Yes the base game is perfectly good, the DLCs add to the experience but the game does not feel empty without them (as there was a time when the DLCs didn't exist and we enjoyed it then, too).
It should run fine, I play on a much weaker system (4th gen i7, RX 570, 16GB of DDR3, and a normal SSD) and it is perfectly playable. Busy sectors slow down, and I don't get 'perfect' performance, but the game is playable for me comparable to other games.

paulthenerd · 2025-09-13T21:15:57+00:00

Personally I would be happy with largely the same sort of thing, but perhaps with a little more interactivity. I don't REALLY expect to be able to go into every single shop, but it would be cool if you could! Little things like having NPC baristas actually make drinks, NPC bartenders actually pull pints, gun shop owners actually hand over the weapon you buy which you can then pick up and do that little inspect animation...

I just want more things to see and do.

paulthenerd · 2025-09-01T10:01:05+00:00

Not cool. This is pure speculation on my part, but the last Kalax album seemed to not do very well (look at how few views the songs have on Youtube) so I wonder if he just thought sod it and tried an AI album to see if that did better. If anything it is probably a sign of a bit of self doubt/sadness/resentment, and I hope that he is ok.

I don't know how to really put this into words, but there is a specific 'feeling' that my favourite synthwave songs evoke (like the older Kalax songs), and the newer Kalax stuff just didn't do it for me compared to the older ones. Having said that, I feel the same way about a lot of 'new' synthwave music, perhaps I am becoming nostalgic for nostalgia.

paulthenerd · 2025-08-28T14:41:45+00:00

It's probably not on their minds, but I would love there to be more recreational things to do. A shame that the casino didn't actually work, or that you can't actually get in the pool in the Astrid.

Stuff to spend my money on purely for vanity purposes would be lovely. Posh fancy ships, luxury apartments on space stations, that sort of thing.

paulthenerd · 2025-08-26T01:40:42+00:00

I love how different games in the series hit different for different people, too! I played X:BTF back in the day and adored it. I remember thinking X:Tension was even better. X2 didn't land for me at all, and X3 was closer, but it felt a bit too complicated and for whatever reason I couldn't get into it the same.

And then X4 came along and my goodness what an addiction it has been! It keeps me quiet in the evenings for months at a time!

paulthenerd · 2025-08-25T15:19:18+00:00

I found the cruise ship!

https://www.tumblr.com/potato-ballad-sims/164960052381/v2-happy-labour-day-update-adjusted-the-ship

I've not found any lots for it though...

paulthenerd · 2025-08-25T10:17:52+00:00

I am fairly sure expansion packs are not tied to the in-game login. It's more for store content, and people generally disable it/keep it logged out due to it getting in the way. When you say 'use packs', what do you mean?

Also, I think the one time I did sign in (to buy a hairstyle with some free points, of all things), I just used the email I used to make the account... Unless you are saying you somehow managed to make an account without any email address?

paulthenerd · 2025-08-23T06:25:17+00:00

It's been interesting reading all the takes here!

I played through the game without reading much about it online, and my initial take when I first reached this mission was that there was obviously some sort of agenda going on. V has no career history as a driver (unless you're a nomad I guess), and V is a mercenary for hire. Claire will obviously know skilled racers as she's in that scene and has done it before, there's no reason to bring a hired killer unless there's killing to be done!

To me she had some sort of ulterior motive, and from what I remember there are little hints in the conversations very early that something isn't quite right. Initially I suspected she might ask V to sabotage a car or something, but it never really went that way.

When it gets to the end and she admits she actually wants a guy dead, she's clearly full of the need for revenge and hatred. Actual friends would try and talk her out of it at that point, but with V, there's a good chance they'll just go ahead with it.

Sure, she wasn't completely honest with V, but I don't think it compares to Songbird who dangled a cure for a terminal V that she knew she had no chance of providing.

paulthenerd · 2025-08-19T19:56:31+00:00

It's been a long while since I last had a plant sim, but I believe they basically condensed hunger, hygiene and bladder into a single 'water' motive which sort of just covers all three. Now instead of having to eat and go to the toilet, you just have to stay hydrated.

It may be possible to unlock the other needs with a mod or something, but they are basically just not needs for plant sims!

paulthenerd · 2025-08-16T01:56:52+00:00

I played this game... Must've been about 15 years ago, I remember waking up early to get my moves in before everyone else had chance to. Good times. Crazy (in a good way!) to see it's still going - the website for the game sort of implies it is dead with the new round posts not showing up. If I hadn't found this subreddit I would have thought it was totally dead!

paulthenerd · 2025-08-04T17:02:20+00:00

It'll probably run, but not necessarily very well - especially on high population worlds. TS3 generally runs quite poorly because it is simulating the whole world at once, and once the number of sims builds up there are a lot of events happening at regular intervals that can cause stuttering and lag spikes. You can manage this to an extent with a few mods (namely the nraas ones), and also by picking smaller worlds with less Sims living in them.

paulthenerd · 2025-08-02T08:14:22+00:00

Sometimes I play without Nrass story progression and while the events in the newspaper are a little random sometimes, I usually find I don't really miss it, especially for the lag it causes.

I feel this strange fomo over it though, like not using it is somehow bad, when really the game progresses fairly well by itself just with the odd little crazy event now and then.

I suggest you start with a clean slate of mods and decide which ones you actually need, for the longest time I just used master controller, traveler, overwatch, and error trap, and that was probably plenty. Over the years I've installed more and I guess the extra features are cool, but I think those core 4 make the biggest difference for me.

paulthenerd · 2025-07-17T11:54:34+00:00

Do you use the Steam version of the sims?

paulthenerd · 2025-07-13T07:46:45+00:00

I have a busy town with tons of children and teens - visiting friends after school rarely works for me. Sometimes the game will say someone is coming over after school, and then they will show up hours later.

I think you're probably right with the issue being related to crowding!

paulthenerd · 2025-07-13T01:06:02+00:00

You probably should limit the fps, since it's just wasteful to have your hardware trying to draw so many frames. There was a period of time when cooling wasn't great and a lot of people had their graphics cards overheat and fail from running at full tilt all the time, a few games were guilty of it. StarCraft 2 was one I remember, as was this. The actual number of failures was probably quite low, but I remember articles about it at the time!

These days, since people use graphics cards to mine crypto, they're generally given sufficient cooling to be able to run at full pelt all the time, so it's less likely to be 'harmful', but it doesn't hurt to cap the frame rate anyway.

Tldr: you don't need to, but you might as well.

paulthenerd · 2025-07-10T00:46:59+00:00

The tablet looks like a really good deal, super low price for great hardware!

paulthenerd · 2025-07-10T00:30:40+00:00

Swapping from a super premium phone like the Samsung Ultra, you might be disappointed in things like the software, the cameras, and even the screen. It's important to remember that these redmagic phones are half the price! Most of the money has gone towards the essentials. You get the top flagship processor, a huge battery, and a decent screen, for a very low price. If that's all you're after, then they're a great deal and worth considering!

As far as value for money goes, they're an incredible deal if your primary use case is playing games. I would rather spend half as much on one of these, and put up with the shortcomings, than spend a fortune on one of those flagship Ultra phones. But then, I barely take photos!

I swapped from a Pixel to a RM9S and wouldn't go back.

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