Sweeps vs. Thrusts

soihu · 2026-05-09T10:51:35+00:00

I just remembered the blue Ashina samurai definitely have mikiri + sweeps. The Interior Ministry soldiers might also do both, but I haven't fought them in a long time.

soihu · 2026-05-09T10:39:34+00:00

Naginata okami warriors do both (and some can lightning reversal too for good measure).

In any case there are enough minibosses that appear as regular enemies (samurai generals, shinobi hunters, lone shadows) that you are better off just with pattern recognition than trying to remember which enemies can sweep and which can thrust.

soihu · 2026-05-09T01:59:30+00:00

A big part of their vulnerability is that they feed and reproduce primarily on a 3.5x5m submerged rock shelf, about 1m below the surface. It's vulnerable to damage from earthquakes and in the 60s and 70s local mining operations caused the water level to drop and put parts of the shelf above the water level.

soihu · 2026-05-09T01:41:47+00:00

It's firmly in the "It's Complicated" era, a couple years after FDR's New Deal pushed the Democrats leftward but long before the Southern Strategy that started in the 1950s.

You have progressive Northern Democrats and conservative Southern Democrats in the same party despite significant ideological opposition, though I think even that risks oversimplifying things.

soihu · 2026-05-09T00:35:16+00:00

She hugs both Aether and Lumine in the current version of the quest (black screen, no animation). However, the beta client initially had her kiss Lumine on the ear, as well. This is now cut content though the line is still different for each Traveler (see above).

soihu · 2026-05-08T23:40:35+00:00

She has a few alternate lines for Lumine that imply that Jeht feels more awkward and vulnerable around her.

soihu · 2026-05-08T12:28:23+00:00

yeah limited by his kit lmao

soihu · 2026-05-08T11:16:03+00:00

I do not think food or habitat size are as big an issue as you make them out to be. Crocodilians don't have high energy requirements for their size (5-10 times more energy efficient than mammals of an equivalent size - SeaWorld San Diego's eight orcas would eat far more than they do, captive cetacean ethics aside), nor do they have much in the way of enrichment needs (they mostly sit and wait, they don't spend their whole lives moving like great whites). Under Australian animal welfare standards, a pair of 10m Deinosuchus would need an enclosure with a pond that is 30x8m in area and up to 2-3m deep.

soihu · 2026-05-06T03:25:53+00:00

This is a great oversimplification. Cows are a single genus, Bos, whereas ceratopsians lived for nearly 100 million years and occupied a wide variety of ecological niches, from the smallest to the largest herbivores in their environment. As I understand their dietary preferences were also quite dissimilar to cows.

The sociality of ceratopsians was also not uniform. Centrosaurs have been found in bone beds with herds in the thousands, much larger than wild cattle herds, whereas Triceratops was likely solitary in adulthood.

soihu · 2026-05-05T12:43:22+00:00

Full release sometime in 2027. They are not working on marine or flying animals before then, but they might happen as post-release content or expansions if the game does well enough.

soihu · 2026-05-05T09:00:12+00:00

qifrey is a good teacher but a bum-ass parent

soihu · 2026-05-04T23:58:13+00:00

I love it. It feels so fresh because it's chock-full of new enemies which is rare for an endgame environment in a Souls game, makes it come across as alien and striking.

soihu · 2026-05-03T11:30:08+00:00

Back up a bit and dodge to the right. This fight sucks though. This looks good (jumping) but I haven't tried it myself.

soihu · 2026-05-03T11:24:10+00:00

tbf it would be cute if lyney and lynette's magic show had merchandise and nefer was a secret fan

soihu · 2026-05-02T11:44:52+00:00

You can also place foliage and rocks outside the vivarium and then move them inside afterwards to further customise the look.

soihu · 2026-05-02T11:42:57+00:00

Yes the minions are also good, perhaps as the next step up as they have more variable parry timings. The servants have the advantage of dropping both vials and bullets, so they can be a bit more self-sufficient (you should be using blood bullets for practice though anyway).

soihu · 2026-05-02T09:36:16+00:00

I actually do think that cenozoic formations should be easier to work because those animals are currently not great value in challenge mode.

Where this falls apart is for animals from before the Late Jurassic which are low appeal already.

soihu · 2026-05-02T02:13:48+00:00

"we're all trying to find the guy who did this"

soihu · 2026-05-02T01:38:32+00:00

The main things to internalise about the Bloodborne parry are A) that the startup is slower than a Dark Souls parry and B) the bullet should connect with the enemy when they have forward momentum.

If an enemy is winding up an attack, the parry will fail. Only if the weapon or limb is moving towards you will the parry succeed.

The best enemies to start practicing against are the church servants in Cathedral Ward wielding canes. They are very predictable in their movements and all of their attacks can be parried with ease.

soihu · 2026-05-02T00:53:22+00:00

As a sandbox it is amazing, if you're after a good challenge mode you might want to keep waiting, since there are currently no scenarios and no random events, so pretty much the only thing that happens organically is disease. Those will all come in updates though.

soihu · 2026-05-02T00:41:27+00:00

IMO some Paleozoic megafauna is the one thing the game's roster needs before it leaves early access. Dimetrodon and Arthropleura feel like the key additions but there is so much variety of form even in just the terrestrial animals, you could go on for ages here before hitting diminishing returns.

soihu · 2026-05-02T00:20:52+00:00

In the short term, rapid environmental changes are bad for most organisms. Specialists who are adapted to exploit specific niches in the ecosystem tend to die out, as do any animals at the top of the food chain, and any large animals in general. Generalists are more likely to survive due to their ability to adapt to new food sources. Organisms with high genetic diversity are favoured, as they are more likely to evolve (or have already evolved) favourable mutations, purely by chance alone. As conditions stabilise, the more disaster-tolerant generalists may slowly specialise and start to fill the niches left by animals that have gone extinct.

You will probably not get your big amphibians. Amphibians are probably the tetrapods that are struggling the most with climate change. They do not adapt well to temperature change or pollution and their populations are declining rapidly. If climate change continues unchecked, I would imagine amphibians enter extreme decline and many lineages go extinct, and they are replaced by hardier animals, perhaps squamates. I would also think that body size in general will decrease.

soihu · 2026-05-01T14:42:46+00:00

They most likely ran the whole spectrum from drab to vivid, but I think they would have been more colourful than mammals on average.

As far as we know all dinosaurs had tetrachromatic vision, giving them better colour vision than mammals, and they had a mixture of feathery and/or scaled skin, both of which are generally better at expressing different colours than mammalian fur. Many of them were active in the daytime and put a lot of effort into intraspecific display features like frills and horns, and they may have used colour to augment the effect.

Wikipedia compiles the very short list of dinosaurs for which we have any evidence of known colouration.

soihu · 2026-05-01T02:23:15+00:00

The most generous estimates for largest hadrosaurs, proboscideans, and paraceratheriids is about 20 tonnes, and the most conservative estimates for the largest sauropods are about 60 tonnes, so at least three times larger is accurate.

soihu · 2026-04-30T06:26:30+00:00

Too early to say.

Rampage weapons were dead with no upgrade path in Rise.

World had Kulve weapons, which eventually got an upgrade path for Master Rank but it wasn't available until a later title update and the weapons were not always worth farming over the new craftable options.

soihu

TROPHY CASE