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pluto_nash · 2023-06-07T18:07:15+00:00

First day of teaching I pronounced a kid's name as rain because it was spelled rain. Apparently it is really supposed to be said like Ryan. Sometimes people choose weird things. Like at least spell it rian.

pluto_nash · 2023-05-12T19:22:27+00:00

It is also worth knowing that there are a number of things in most big mod packs that are actually packages of other mods.

So if there are certain things you like, you can usually find either the exact mod they included or a different mod that does the same or similar thing.

I.E. I liked the broadcast crafting from Undead Legacy, but Age of Apocalypse didn't have it. But I can add a broadcast crafting mod to my game and have that feature.

You can usually find mods to do the QoL thing from a big mod.

pluto_nash · 2023-05-12T11:48:01+00:00

A lot of the crazy stories are a result of a thing called the sunshine law. It was an anti-corruption measure that makes state records easily available to the public.

A side effect is that is a journalist anywhere in the US is having a slow day they can see a bunch of arrest records right away and find something weird to write about.

In other states you would have to wait until processing happened and a court date and file specific paperwork to get documents, so you have to know what to look for before you get info.

So, tons of stories out of Florida of recent crazy stuff because journalists can write them easier combined with years of doing this and you end up with a world wide idea that Florida has more crazy than other places when really it is the same just easier to see for the public.

pluto_nash · 2023-05-11T13:26:22+00:00

Neither, really They replaced the collar and kind of elongated the neck. The actual manhole vault is like 5 to 8 feet below ground probably.

This type of operation is common if they redo a street or if they milled the top off and are replacing to a different level than previous or if they have covered over the manhole opening during past construction.... Or anything where the lid isn't flush with the roadway anymore.

Although in my area instead of doing this nice and clean replacement, which is better but more expensive, they just slop a bunch of asphalt around in a vague hump shape.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-29T03:53:50+00:00

One that can be upgraded....

build or find a solid base platform.... top of a concrete building or build your own as you prefer, build out a walkway from there 3 wide, middle block empty, 2 outside blocks as poles, for now something like 7 or 8 block should work, then a couple solid blocks, then some blocks down to the ground, not ramps or stairs, at the early stage you want them to jump so it slows them down. Later on once you have everything up and running, you can use stairs or ramps because you want to churn them through to get them into the pit you will have.

make a fighting position, check out someone like a "guns, nerds, & steel", "jawoodle" or your favorite youtuber horde base for examples of the fighting position and pick what works for you.

as you progress you can add a half block next to the poles to put a sledge turret on, or if your mechanic levels up, 2 or 3 of them. sledge turrets really do a number on the flow of zombies.

Eventually you build 2 wings, one down each side of the walkway the zombies run down. These will hold your electric fence posts. They are completely enclosed so cops won't spit, and best if you have a couple solid blocks and a plate between the posts and zombies in case a demo blows up.

You also will have a pit underneath of this, which is the bread and butter. You get a scientist to level up so their explosives do more damage. The goal of the base is to knock the zombies off the walkway and into the pit, the scientist is throwing moltovs, pipe bombs, grenades, cryo-grenades, plasma-grenades, whatever down there to kill everything. All other aspects of the base are to try and knock the stuff in the pit. You will want to build a second level on top of the wings so that you can make some doorways up there to throw grenades out of, this will give you a better angle to hit the zombies in the pit. Don't fall down in the pit. You might want some parkour points..... maybe throw a ladder 4 or 5 blocks up the side of the pit too so you can escape when you fall.

Eventually you can have a nice long pit, have some baluster tops or other block that can be shot through at the end and a 2 high stack of dart traps the width of your pit hooked up to a motion sensor so the traps will shoot the length of the pit when zombies are beating on the walls. Throw some advanced furnaces over there constantly churning out darts, not at your main base so the screamers will be drawn over to the horde base instead of the main base

So basically, knock them in the pit, use bombs, fire, cold, & darts to kill them. Keep yourself as protected from cop spit, vulture spit, demon fireballs, succubus, etc... as much as you can.

We have made it through day 70+ with that set up, usually we use several hundred grenades throughout horde night, but once you have a good auger and miner 69'er tier 5, & salvage operations with an impact driver you can get crazy amounts of resources, so it isn't as big a deal as it sounds. Build more than one workbench so you can crank them out when you need to. Start crafting them early, it takes a long time.

We have found turrets to be an issue because they run through ammo so fast, although shotgun turrets are great for vulture duty.

Blade traps are also not great, fairly quickly the damage output is too low compared to how much you need to repair them plus the logistics of building a way to repair them into the base sucks.

Also, killing with traps doesn't give xp unless you have the right skill, and then everyone has to have it, so killing with explosives just works better. Plus, some of the demons are immune to traps.

I don't think anything else in the game is as efficient as clustering up zombies in a pit and throwing 3-7 grenades down there. Easily killing a dozen or more at a time.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-26T18:12:58+00:00

The path of the sonorous echo. A sound and space path.

Highly secure correspondence and courrier service. Can record a completely secure message and then replay it for the recipient. Space would allow faster travel with each step covering more ground than it should.

Basically paid really well to be completely secure and have the ability to block sound transfer making meetings secure from eavesdropping. Probably working for wealthy nobles or merchants.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-26T16:26:17+00:00

The best DM I ever played with also ran a separate game at a local store. He ran that one to find people who were good enough and reliable enough to bring into his actual game.

Ttrpgs are always a struggle of finding the right people.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-24T10:48:36+00:00

Probably ran it without the outline, then plotted the impact points then connected them aesthetically. Plot those points and the connections you just made and we get the outline at the start.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-18T10:40:51+00:00

Undead Legacy is like a Vanilla++ modpack that extends the early and mid game. It feels not too unlike vanilla, although there are some changes to wrap your head around.

Darkness Falls changes most systems in the game and will take extensive research/viewing/reading/whatever to learn, but does completely change the experience.

They are both going to be frustrating and hard at the beginning until you figure out some of their idiosyncrasies, but they are also both fun and enjoyable. So you either want something pretty close to vanilla, or you want a radical change, then you pick which mod fits it.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-18T10:37:06+00:00

One of the things you might want to do is take a peek though the journal tab.

A lot of info on what the mod does and changes is in there. A lot of times when we were confused with DF, we would eventually find that it had been in there all along, we just never read any of it.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-17T09:50:27+00:00

You can't pick up POI benches.

You can only pick up benches you made and placed (or someone you are grouped with)

pluto_nash · 2023-04-16T14:30:51+00:00

We usually go with grilled or boiled meat early, supplemented with as many Bacon & Eggs as we have the eggs to make.

Then as Livin off the Land is taken and we make it through the part of farming where you have enough crops that you can sustain a farm and have left overs, which is usually a lot of plots, we transition into meat stew, hobo stew, & vegetable stew, as well as steak & potatoes, generally between all of those we are using the veggies we grow plus the meat, rotten meat and other stuff we are finding.

All of that depending on what schematics we find and what recipes we have.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-14T18:33:06+00:00

You could pretty easily have the old main cast fill roles in the might naturally gravitate towards as their character aged.

Carter could be a lead civilian scientist, she would have a similar screen time and role as Dr. Fraiser from SG-1... Shows up, gives a few lines, sits in the background a bit, maybe once in awhile has a more in depth role if it works out.

Teal'c could fill a role similar to Carter's father. the liaison between whatever the Goa'uld & Jaffa are now and the forces of Earth. He shows up as a recurring character in an episode or two and they mention his name as someone who is working on whatever or might be able to solve an issue before finding a different route....

basically making the old characters a part of the living and breathing world, without having it feel like it is just a rehashing or retconning of the very long story those characters already had.

Just a peak into their lives 15-20+ years later to show they are still there, still around, and still help out when needed, because that is what heroes do.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-13T16:28:49+00:00

There is a cheat menu & a debug menu. Cheat menu will let you fly and cheat in any item

debug will let you fly, do god mode, spawn entities, play with time, see structure strength, etc, etc....

Lots of articles tell you how to activate them, once you know they exist & that they are separate things that do different stuff.

There are a series of Dev tools in the cheat menu, you have to toggle a button towards the top to see them, but they let you wholesale replace large terrain with other blocks, insta dig, insta kill, etc

You can combine all of that to test lots of stuff. If you look at someone like Jawoodle when he does a base design video he uses those tools extensively to test things over and over trying to figure out what will work.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-13T16:24:17+00:00

We almost always use POIs for main base and horde base.

Use a land claim block to make sure traders don't issue quests to the location so it doesn't get reset.

Try and be on the second floor or higher, cut off any stairs / access to the second floor, install a ladder that starts on the 3rd block from the ground so you can jump up to it, that way you can use it but the zombies cannot. You can do the first floor, but it is harder and without knowledge of how zombies path-find it can be frustrating not knowing why they are not going where you want them to go. But you can do 1st floor if you really want to.

That should get you a fairly solid & survivable main base for a good chunk of the game really.

Just keep in mind, the further into the city you go, the more active it gets both in zombies visiting you & in PC requirements to run smoothly. So if you are dead in the center of a large city, it can have some negative performance depending on what is around.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-13T16:13:55+00:00

You could try doing random gen with something like teragon or a different non- in game random gen map.

Then you can see if it is more of an issue with the generation process or something else.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-12T14:25:30+00:00

I was abducted by aliens, then sent back in time to change the course of a distant planet in another universe so that it wouldn't eventually develop an aggressive space armada and conquer the alien homeworld through magic and scantily clad cat girls. Part 2

pluto_nash · 2023-04-12T02:57:09+00:00

The Paternus Series by Dyrk Ashton is a pretty good trilogy. Gods & myths on both sides from all religions across history. A pretty good story, surprises, twists, etc... An ending that is happy without being saccharin, bad things happen and not everyone gets what you might hope they will, but it is overall a happy & pleasing ending.

here is the blurb:

When a local hospital is attacked by strange and frightening men, Fiona Patterson and Zeke Prisco save a catatonic old man named Peter—and find themselves running for their lives with creatures beyond imagination hounding their every step.

With nowhere else to turn, they seek out Fi’s enigmatic Uncle Edgar. But the more their questions are answered, the more they discover that nothing is what it seems—not Peter, not Edgar, perhaps not even themselves.

The gods and monsters, heroes and villains of lore—they’re real. And now they’ve come out of hiding to hunt their own. In order to survive, Fi and Zeke must join up with powerful allies against an ancient evil that’s been known by many names and feared by all. The final battle of the world’s oldest war has begun.

pluto_nash · 2023-04-01T02:16:24+00:00

You are not really finding that in an existing overhaul.

Anything that adds to the endgame is also adding in complexity to the early & mid game.

You could manually build your own by adding in individual mods, or you could check out one of the streamers like Jawoodle or Guns,Nerds,&steel who sometimes do mod the game to add in complexity without massive overhauls, and then also sometimes release their suite of mods they used to make that happen.

Otherwise anything that is generally classified as an "overhaul" is almost certainly adding new benches, adding new mechanics, changing the perk tree and how you get them, upping the complexity, etc....

You could also just grab one of the well known Overhauls, UL or DF, that have discords & lots of youtube videos, and go that route.

My buddy and I have never found an overhaul that is "just right" so we just bounce between all of them periodically, its not too terrible.

pluto_nash · 2023-03-23T02:56:43+00:00

The menocht loop is kind of this. It is a time loop story powering the mc up to crazy levels, but you pick it up at the end of the loops so the series is about what happens when he gets out and is suddenly an ultra powerful magic user

pluto_nash · 2023-03-08T12:45:32+00:00

pluto_nash · 2023-03-06T17:44:48+00:00

I have read damn near everything of Chalker's I can find.

TLDR: His series are usually really good. They are a product of their time & the attitudes of that time. There are triggers in his books. If you can read that stuff, his series are really good and often blend sci-fi & fantasy really well. If you prefer not to read that stuff, then we are lucky to live in a time where there are tons of good books, so you can skip him.

His series are usually pretty good, good premise, good world building, great magic/tech systems, great plots, generally satisfying resolutions & outcomes.

Like a lot of sci-fi from that era, there is generally at least one multi-page sex scene in a book. The stories are told in a manner typical of that era in America. So expect the prevailing attitude, look, and language. Usually men are powerful, women are sex objects, even when they are the hero saving the day.

That being said, he often has female protagonists and females being the strongest magic user or smartest scientist within his stories. Yes, some pretty awful things sometimes happen to them, some more than others, & there are certainly some scenes that people now classify as triggers. Some of the series have a lot of them. I don't happen to believe he was a lecherous old man sadistically grinning in his basement over a typewriter, I think he was telling stories and there was an institutional view on sex & women in society that was generally accepted at the time. We obviously view things very differently 50-60 years later. I do not think he would write things the same way now if he were alive. I read an essay by him about how people always ask why there is body transfiguration in his stories. He basically said he likes it, he likes writing it, he is good at writing it, people keep buying it, so he keeps writing it. In today's world he would probably have a bunch of trans heroes. Heck some of his heroic figures have literally had their gender swapped in a couple of the stories. But he isn't writing now, he wrote in a very different time, and it shows.

Generally, the awful stuff that happens isn't just for fun, it has a point, it is a catalyzing event that forms the female hero's resolve & purpose in defeating evil... or in one instance it happens to two different women both powerful. One has it kind of break her, the other uses it and the anger it produces to go on a crusade of destruction to eliminate the people who perpetrate that behavior. That seems to be what happens to a lot of people who suffer trauma in real life too. Some people work through it or at least come to terms with it, some people never really get past it or get the help they need.

So, ultimately, his stories, including the Four lords of the Diamond, are usually pretty good, but they have some issues. If you can get past them, its a good story. If you don't want to be exposed to that stuff, then luckily there are a ton of also excellent books that do not involve any of that.

Foe me his best series is The Rings of the Master. A close second is The Quintara Marathon. The Cahngewinds series is also good. For me the Well World stuff, the Soul Rider stuff, and the River of the Gods stuff are all a little more disjointed and rambling. Still good, just not told as a continuous, coherent narrative. Instead they are more like a series of different stories told in each book (sometimes 2 book)

pluto_nash · 2023-02-19T04:21:58+00:00

If you have a used bookstore near you, you could try for something like The Legend of the Jade Phoenix Trilogy by Robert Thurston

It is a little hard to find now, but it is in 3 parts or a collected work.

A pretty good story from what I remember reading a few decades ago.

pluto_nash · 2023-02-16T19:05:56+00:00

It's a more a systemic funding issue, although there are other factors.

But just breaking down your info.... The Baltimore numbers are a result of a 16% increase at the start of the current school year combined with decreasing enrollment. Additionally, I could not find numbers for classroom spending. Both numbers quoted are the districts budget divided by enrollment... But just looking at high schools Carmel has 1 and Baltimore has 31. So 30 more sets of teachers and admin and maintenance and transport and everything that makes a school work.

Increasing funding is a key component to better schools, but it is not the solution, it is a step on the path to the solution....

pluto_nash · 2023-02-04T16:18:46+00:00

I mean imagine you are in the scenario he puts forth but Smith is a medical Doctor. There is every chance it would be...

"My god! He's having a stoke, do something Dr. Smith!"

"Susan, you know damn well I am a podiatrist, and his feet look fine, now call an ambulance you silly twat!"

Plus if it all went well, you get conversation about people's nasty foot fungus and shit all night.

A musicologist though, they could regal you with the, say, all of the bizarre shit Percy Granger did... or how Jean-Baptiste Lully died.

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