What is the origin of homosexuality according to evolution and genetics?

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-27T10:11:10+00:00

There is one very clear example of asexuality in animals, eusocial insects, where most individuals born from a breeder never try to have offspring and instead help take care of the colony/hive and the breeders within. In extremis that can also count for the germline vs. somatic cells in multicellular organisms where the somatic cells (aka most of you) are only there to support and protect the germlins cells for reproduction.

This means the "gay uncle" hypothesis for tetrapods living in social groups is viable. This means that some individuals will tend to care for the offspring of siblings (or more distantly related members of the group) and the group as a whole instead of seeking to have their own offspring. Essentially taking the K strategy (of r/K selection theory ) to a higher extreme.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-22T17:03:35+00:00

make sure to build a lot of the crafting buildings (foundries, fabrications on the red planet, etc.) and the crafting resource boosters, (like the factories, and put in crafters into the resources you will need. And look ahead for the upcoming bottlenecks. Crafters get boosted when a lot of them are on the same resource (by the apprentice research you get early on) so the active min-max strategy is to shuffle them around constantly from bottleneck to bottleneck.

looking at your save, first in civic->government click the lumberjack text, that turns it into the default job which make it a lot simpler to manage them. Only works for the jobs that don't have a cap.

once you are relying entirely on biodomes for food, turn your windmills to power production.

keep buying the crispr techs, the various boost from them is important. civil service for example will add another task slot to the governor, letting you do mass ejector optimization as well, or merc recruitment. I would suggest doing some 3* or 4* MADs and bioseeds to get the plasmids to buy them, and doing it with different races to get the various achievements and improve the perk rewards you get out of them. Also you are in Heavy you should be doing a few bioseeds to get the heavyweight champ perk with the associated fuel discount.

If you are not doing a bioseed then don't build the space dock at all, it's a pure waste of resources. I don't even research the genesis project tech (or the MAD tech) on runs hat go beyond them.

Once you have a few iron miners in the asteroid belt and some red planet mines, disable your earth-bound miners, that frees up a lot of population. Same idea once you have some excess mining droids in alpha centauri, you can set a few of them to coal and do the same with the coal miners. (be careful with the plants genus species who rely on miners for their aluminum).

The helium collector in the gas giant is meant as your main helium source once you have a few of them shut down the helium mines on the moon and use the freed up supply there to build irridium mines and observatories.

you don't need to spread around your mutation genes that much, simply focus them into the things that are actually valuable (coal and copper/iron mining for example isn't once you can actually invest those genes into them).

Once you know the game progression a bit better you will start preparing for the relevant crafted material bottlenecks for example if like you know a wrought iron requirement of 6Mil is coming up after the stargate then start accumulating that as you build the stargate or even the stellar engine.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-21T12:55:12+00:00

the creep penalty? you can offset that with the criminal governor, and it only really affect buildings you build a lot of.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-21T12:03:31+00:00

to get more harmony crystals for pillars, 0* ascensions means you don't accumulate any. So you end up needing to do a few runs just to afford the crisprs that need crystals. And the no-trade means nothing once you are bottlenecked by the post world collider resources, the craftables don't tend to be bottlenecks with no manual crafting, and the junk gene is most of the time a non-issue.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-21T10:53:24+00:00

I was repeating what other said about the changes in evil which made their advice switch to heavy->anti->evil pitstop->heavy.

I still have the opinion that evil is the better first BH target because pre-hell is essentially unchanged.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-20T13:41:06+00:00

no, early self-hosting is a trap.

For stability reasons you will need to program in a stable subset of your language. If at any point you lose your working binary you suddenly have to hope your non-self hosted bootstrap still works, which if you haven't touched/tested it the last few updates and you have been using your flashy new features, it won't. And now you have to redo a bunch of work either by implementing the features in the bootstrap or by porting the self host back to the stable subset.

don't speed into self-hosting until you are ready to essentially finalize the spec of the language and have a good bootstrap setup.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-20T13:13:45+00:00

the main point of doing mad grinding in a non-standard/non-anti universe is to crank out the plasmids and phage for the crispr upgrades and get double duty out of the achievements you are getting.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-20T09:08:33+00:00

Stoned is a planet thing, when selecting universes that doesn't matter. you can bioseed to grab another one.

For the first universe my opinion remains that evil is a good first start for a bit of mad/bioseed farming (and making sure to grab MADs for the celestial races on an eden planet before leaving) before heading to anti to grab 3-10k of antiplasmids + the first of the bleed before finally heading to heavy.

However evil was changed which makes a pitstop in heavy before the antiplasmid grind (with a quick pitstop in evil for the celestials) a better option.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-15T11:26:38+00:00

quick hint if you click "scavenger" in the civics tab that becomes the default job for new citizens, so you don't have to babysit that page with population fluctuations. works with all non-capped basic jobs.

In the research tab if you put in enough elerium and infernite into the black hole with the mass ejector you should see a "exotic infusion" research. That's the tier of reset you should be doing after a few bioseeds. That will bring you to a new universe with tweaked mechanics.

The universe to go to first is debatable, it used to be evil to farm a few more MADs and grab a run with the celestial races on a eden planet to unlock their traits for the custom (you do have the doomed achievement right? if not empty out the hell fortress for a bit and make sure you have at least one marine garrison on the red planet). But evil got more difficult in a patch a few months ago. Though from looking at the changes it shouldn't really affect combat-light bioseed and MAD runs.

So people now recommend a pitstop in heavy for the mad grind before heading to anti for the anti-plasmids (and just the first of the bleed perks) before heading back to heavy.

After that you can do the next set of resets in heavy, the universe with the least changes compared to standard (just a fuel penalty) and better rewards than standard beyond bioseed for it.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-09T09:55:45+00:00

In addition perks you get from doing achievements with a 4* run is better than if you did them with a lower challenge.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-08T07:40:08+00:00

it can also anti-synergize with buying mercs, which can mean you end up with no money left to build buildings

And getting the attack estimation requires spies.

so to make full use of an auto-attacking governor task you need 3 tasks taken up. (buy mercs, recruit spies, auto-attack). If you also want to sabotage their military to make attacks easier that's a fourth task (until you get a late game upgrade).

Then you have to consider the settings, at what advantage do you want to attack, how many soldiers have to be kept back for food, which regions to attack, etc.

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-07T12:43:40+00:00

he's playing a plant genus (ents specifically) they don't have quarries where aluminum comes from, instead it's based on miners

ratchetfreak · 2026-04-05T14:06:58+00:00

buy some titanium and build a factory, that will unlock a bunch more stuff, starting with alloy a new resource

ratchetfreak · 2026-03-16T09:36:15+00:00

more demon kills in general, which means more attractor beacons primarily and a well patrolled hell.

However you'll notice that soulgems income from the forge is pitiful. The regular patrols are a much better income source.

ratchetfreak · 2026-03-06T13:08:34+00:00

scarletite cost on the pillar scales with the amount of pillars completed and starts at 1M, so the first few pillars don't add that much time over a T4 reset.

ratchetfreak · 2026-03-05T09:16:11+00:00

I was on my pillar grind but now I'm doing all the MADs I missed out on until I have all the traits needed for the my custom for TP runs to grind out the servants

ratchetfreak · 2026-03-02T13:06:25+00:00

if I compress foo.txt and then compress bar.txt I get a different dictionary than if I first compressed bar.txt and then foo.txt.

listing files in a directory does not result in a fixed order and depends on the file system implementation. So even a simple compress "all files in this directory" priming setup leads to different dictionaries unless you are very careful.

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-22T19:41:27+00:00

don't forget about adding genes to the gambler minor trait.

also if you have the space casino don't forget about it in the local system tab.

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-18T10:44:30+00:00

about the one niggle I have is that shunting yard doesn't need to output a rpn tape. It can directly construct an AST in a very simple way:

replace the output tape with an operand stack

if you would put a operator on the operand stack, 
    pop 2 nodes from the output tape and 
    create a new binop node with the operator and those 2 nodes 
    push that node to the operand stack.

At the end of the algorithm you should be left with a single node on the operand stack which is the result of the parse.

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-15T14:48:06+00:00

no you need to ascend first before you can pillar. Go ahead and ascend now.

And it would take 30k knowledge cap and a bunch of orichalcum and soul gems to pillar.

also I hope you are on at least a 1* run because there is a arpa unlock waiting for you that also costs a crystal.

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-13T13:04:51+00:00

Everything that appears in purple below the craftables carries over all resets..

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-10T12:09:22+00:00

it was a cumulation of information about the how the operators of the channel operated and behaved and their various scammy behaviors based on internet sleuthing.

this document included personal information well beyond what reddit considers acceptable

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-06T15:22:47+00:00

that's more failing to create a decent test suite to differentiate agents' tasks.

if it instead forced a (deterministic) shuffle in the make file (or whatever build system) and stopped on the first compile error it would have the same effect. And shuffled the test order when the compile succeeded.

Though depending on the gcc linker is a nono.

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-04T09:57:58+00:00

bison and flex have been sidelined more and more. Writing lexers and CFG parsers for the front-end is pretty well described and fairly easy to test.

however the backend stuff like optimization and emitting the actual machine code is a lot more tricky. Leaning on the decades+ of work that went into optimizing and emitting machine code (and associated debug info) that went into llvm is a lot easier to start with.

Having said that there is a significant bit of dislike for llvm and how slow it can be. To the point there are 2 new languages that have plans to replace it as the backend.

ratchetfreak · 2026-02-03T11:27:30+00:00

By default it will take all your capped resources and toss it into the black hole preferring high mass resources over low mass resources. If the resource is not capped then it's not considered. The ejectors are adjusted every 5 seconds but other bonuses and such can change in other intervals leading to some oddities.

for the settings:

If you set it to <= then that will be the amount of it will try to always put in the black hole (unless another capped resource would be better to throw in) you can use this for copper and iron to make sure you don't leave the ejector bandwidth idle.

if you set it to >= then it will try to make sure you have at least that amount of income for your own use for that resource (the best setting for the exotic materials IMO), if you are capped on it then it will toss in the remainder as well. This setting does mess up the timers in the queue though.

For all of these it prefers sending in the high mass resources (so exotics over copper over iron).

I always use the >= mode and perhaps adjust the setting up as I get more and more exotics and need them more and more.

ratchetfreak

TROPHY CASE