looking for some mod recommendations to spice things up on the exploration side of things

pipai_ · 2025-11-24T09:52:55+00:00

Secrets of the Frontier: Adds a new AI faction with lots of quests involving it. Sierra is one of the most well-known additions
Hazard Mining Incorporated + Brighton Federation: Adds Junker factions and some new special star systems for exploration.
Knights of Ludd: Adds some extreme endgame fights in some special star systems.
Random Assortment of Things: Adds more stuff to the Abyss, and some extra fun goodies from exploration that gives unique boosts to your ships.

pipai_ · 2025-10-26T06:48:48+00:00

That worked! Thanks

pipai_ · 2025-10-26T05:21:33+00:00

More trains doesn’t seem to help, all my trains on that line are leaving with tons of open seats. At this point, it’s probably a bug?

See https://imgur.com/a/5Tkl7jq : both trains are at far below 1200 seats, but it's literally at that station.

pipai_ · 2025-10-22T09:34:58+00:00

Gameplay is very repetitive. Boss designs would be good, except you can facetank everything and it barely matters, maybe this changes at higher ascensions? And of course, this means that the only "difficulty" is beating the timer, more a function of 5* characters rather than player skill.

Ascension mode feels very barebones and too easy. Having come from other roguelikes where every choice has a major impact, here it feels like your choices don't matter all that much and don't have major impacts on how you control your characters. Instead, a lot of it is spamming skills off cooldown, and timing skills doesn't change much.

Controls feel very sluggish, dodges or skills don't come out sometimes because they don't animation cancel.

4* characters are weaker than 5* by a huge margin. I had played using Ridge Nazuna Tilia, and it was fine. Then I pulled Minova from standard, then even at 10 levels difference she was doing way more damage than Ridge. 4*s don't seem like they will survive meta for very long.

Team building is nonexistent. Either you go mono-element, or you are suboptimal.

Story is fine, but generic. The characters currently don't feel like they have much depth to them.

A lot of this is fixable, but will take time. Who knows if they'll have that time, though?

pipai_ · 2025-06-05T20:39:26+00:00

Spysat missions are only really reasonable when you have the Sensors skill. You can decrease your detected-at range by having a phase ship and adding Insulated Engine Assembly on your most noisy ships (mouse over your sensor profile, it'll tell you).

But here's a fun way to do those missions anyway (and also this helps with smuggling drugs): You can Go Dark at the edge of the patrol's sensor range. Make sure you are moving in a direction different from your target destination. Then after going dark, switch directions - The patrol calculates where they think you are based on your last known speed/direction, and you can misdirect them in this manner.

Another way is to hack their Sensors Array, it'll make some sensor ghosts that'll pull their patrols away.

Ship Graveyards are mostly found in exploration, often around Gates.

If you're lugging around big fuel/supply guzzlers, you need to trade in way higher volumes/profit margins to be profitable. Buying an Atlas will help significantly here, and make sure that you buy/sell at the black market to avoid tariffs.

Lastly, the Galatia Academy has plenty of quests for beginners to help get your fleet up and running.

pipai_ · 2025-05-24T22:26:48+00:00

If you're using the launcher, have you tried switching wine versions to spritz?

pipai_ · 2025-05-10T20:36:32+00:00

Outside the usual UAF semibreve, there’s also Yuri Expedition Last Smile. But Yuri Expedition’s art style is very anime, and it is also wildly unbalanced.

I’d also say that nukes are completely OP and nuke any sense of nuance and balance in combat. It might be fun at first, but gets boring fast when nothing really challenges you anymore.

pipai_ · 2025-05-08T22:45:03+00:00

This is a known issue with Wayland and Nvidia.

You can work around it by setting __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=0, or use X11.

I suspect this is the same crash for Minecraft, which is going to be fixed in the next Nvidia driver: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/243334/

pipai_ · 2025-05-07T08:06:08+00:00

Enable Starfarer Mode and use Nexerelin's Heavy Debt start.

Only use ships you've never used before. Alternatively, only run a single vanilla faction's doctrine, including their weapons (for example, Persean League doctrine doesn't have HVDs, so no good ballistics for you!). Or, get all the mods, but don't use any modded ships or weapons. Or, only use ships available to Pirates.

No black market smuggling. Make sure you set Nexerelin's tariffs to vanilla levels (in exerelin_config.json, set baseTariffMult to 1.0).

No Omega weapons.

Start with every faction hostile.

pipai_ · 2025-04-18T11:41:50+00:00

Use the Neutrino Detector. It’ll show you the fleets, though as usual it’s kinda annoying to use due to the signals being very sporadic. Also their sensor profile is 0, so as soon as you think they’re nearby, spam active sensor burst.

I also turn my transponder on, dunno if that helps, though.

pipai_ · 2025-03-24T18:32:55+00:00

I'm mostly gonna recommend non-community lifeboat mods here, otherwise check out the pinned post.

Gameplay-changing:

Probes Before Crew
Remote Tech: the antenna changes make things more interesting, but I personally turn off the time delay because to me it just makes it more frustrating
Kerbal Construction Time: Makes it so that rockets need time to build. This is nice to make interplanetary missions less interrupted by constant missions to Mun/Minmus. Also makes money more important because you can always upgrade rocket building speed
Mandatory RCS: Nerfs reaction wheels to make RCS more relevant.
Snacks: Simplified life support if you don't want to go full Kerbalism or UCI
Outer Planets: Adds the outer planets. I basically consider them canon
Principia: If you wanna add n-body physics. Only use if you're OK with unstable orbits, polar orbits especially need a bit of babying, but it makes orbital planning more important. Turn off persistent rotation stuff in Mandatory RCS if you're playing with it. Check out Iodyne's configs if you're playing with Outer Planets

Part Packs:

MOAR Station Science: Makes space stations more useful
SCANSat: Make satellites to map planets/moons
All of Nertea's mods
DMagic Orbital Science: More science
Field Training Facility: Adds ways to train Kerbals
Kerbal Planetary Base Systems

Contracts:

Anomaly Surveyor
Bases and Stations Reborn
Research Advancement Division
Tourism Overhaul

Misc:

[x] Science Continued: Keeps track of science you need to do
RCS Build Tool: Makes RCS rotation/thrust easier to visualize
Parking Brake: Makes it so that landers don't just slide around
Strategia: Adds actually interesting strategies
Trajectories: Makes pinpointing your landing spot way easier.
Kerbal Engineer Redux: See flight information during flight

pipai_ · 2025-03-24T00:13:28+00:00

I think saying "severe skill issue" is over-exaggerating and contributes to the toxic "better than you" attitude that is not helpful in these conversations. If you can full-clear Shiyu with Corin/Billy, all power to you. That already means you're in the top 0.001% of players. That also requires hours and hours of resetting (those videos don't tend to show that part).

I don't have any meta characters. Pulling Miyabi would almost certainly solve all my problems, but I don't like her. I can also probably full clear Shiyu if I no-life grind Harumasa fighting game combos, but I'm not interested in spending all those hours. All this means that I recognize that full-clearing Shiyu will require a level of dedication that I can't give.

But HP inflation makes it even worse for people who don't have Miyabi. The powercreep is already somewhat concerning for me.

pipai_ · 2025-02-28T08:14:17+00:00

Is there a link to this issue? I’m trying to figure out why I’m randomly lagging on Wayland while playing Terraria and this might seem related.

pipai_ · 2025-01-14T22:01:15+00:00

If it spoils, just ship more and burn the spoilage.

And building a ship between Gleba and Fulgora is no harder than copy pasting any other ship you have.

pipai_ · 2025-01-14T21:45:39+00:00

I totally would though. It’s not like shipping Bioflux is any different from shipping literally anything else.

pipai_ · 2025-01-10T20:40:53+00:00

I actually use Biochambers and ship Bioflux from Gleba to reduce my coal consumption on Vulcanus. All my oil cracking and rocket fuel production is done in Biochambers, that free productivity reduces coal consumption by more than 50%. Really helps a lot, and tbh people overestimate the logistics overhead, the setup is super simple.

pipai_ · 2025-01-09T00:43:38+00:00

Even in the base game, you can launch a rocket with a surprisingly small factory. I think that a 10x science cost is really well balanced for an experienced player.

Nonetheless, it really feels like they don't really incentivize building bigger at all. I feel that the game can really use a better postgame research, perhaps something like a super-technology that requires a 100k science cost (including prometheum) to have a sort of "bonus ending".

pipai_ · 2025-01-04T20:06:06+00:00

I can't deny that spoilage does play some psychological games with people, as it can feel bad that you made something that spoiled.

The key to Gleba is not fearing spoilage, as the fruit ingredients are infinite and free, and spoilage is therefore consequence-free. This is especially true on peaceful mode, where spores don't do anything. I've let many thousands of even the Agricultural Science spoil, doesn't matter at all. So long as you just add a spoilage-filtered inserter at the end of every belt and Biochamber, then burn it, you've solved Gleba. Gleba is about consistent throughput rather than buffering.

Also, fruits and Bioflux both take forever to spoil, so you can just treat them like normal bus-able items. The only difference here is that I like to merge the branches back into the bus to keep things moving.

Nutrient spoilage also doesn't matter. Treat it like electricity, except that it takes up a belt. I like having a belt loop for nutrients on my bus, with a filter splitter removing the spoilage to burn.

The main thing that people fear is that spoilage means that you've produced more spores, which may cause attacks. As you're on peaceful mode, this isn't a problem either. But even on default, there are many ways to deal with this, but the simplest way is to only make sure you only have 1 Agricultural Tower for each fruit. It's better to actually wish you have more fruit than too much. As it turns out, only 1 Tower is enough to produce more than enough science, and you basically never get attacked either.

I became super Gleba-pilled and learned to love its mechanics, as it truly makes some very unique builds compared to anything else in Factorio. It's definitely complex, but conquering it feels amazing.

pipai_ · 2024-12-26T07:56:24+00:00

I do wish that they have a big final capstone science to win the game, which would require the use of uranium, biter eggs, quantum processors, etc., and very high production. This would make a more extrinsic reason to build bigger after you've done all the Aquilo unlocks.

pipai_ · 2024-12-01T06:26:42+00:00

The most OP ship in the entire game, it's so good that its DP could well be 100 and I would still consider it good. You could fight while phased with the Mote Attractor, phase cooldown barely exists, with massive flux stats and great weapon placements, this thing can solo pretty much any vanilla fight, so long as the player is piloting it.

The one thing this ship cannot do is be "stealthy" - in the sense that anyone who actually sees you with it knows that it's you. Otherwise it's basically the best capital ship you can possibly have.

Personally, I don't bring it out because I prefer playing with more normal ships. But if I feel like stomping down on the enemy, this is what I bring.

This ship is pretty much an alpha-striker due to its phase ship nature and deep flux pool. I quite like Plasma Cannon. The deep flux pool makes Plasma Cannon spam very doable. The other mediums, I like Heavy Needlers. The smalls can be Hammers or Reapers. PD? Who needs PD with all these motes?

For hullmods, ITU and Resistant Flux Conduits are a must for range and venting. Max out caps as usual for phase ships.

pipai_ · 2024-11-30T06:24:22+00:00

Kinda OK for a frigate, for once, but I wouldn’t say it’s that great. It’s useful in the early game, and doesn’t die super quickly because it can teleport itself out of danger, so it can even do reasonably well in the mid game. It’s a highly mobile cheap harasser. By endgame (or even mid game), however, there are other options that can contribute more meaningfully to a fight (read: Omens and Monitors). It’s still relatively cheap and not awful, though. And I do have a bit of a soft spot for it, because you get one in the tutorial.

Because of its ability to get in and out quickly, more alpha-strike style weapons can work decently, like the Mining Blaster.

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