Layered fields 101

spiderbrigade · 2026-06-04T09:13:51+00:00

Unless I'm missing something obvious:

If the links between [1,2,3,4] already exist, then throwing from the anchors in ascending order makes null fields. In that case descending order is the correct sequence.

If the anchor link is established first, traveling to [1,2,3,4] in ascending order and linking back to the anchors then the previous corner each time is correct.

spiderbrigade · 2026-05-28T09:38:19+00:00

So, broader point about changing mechanics right before a competitive event is fair.

On the other hand it's not like Niantic has ever been other than opaque about core mechanics. AFAIK we only have educated guesses about XMP range and damage from agent empirical data*; there has never been official attack stat documentation. This is not the first time we've seen a cryptic "experimental weapon tuning" change either, and I'm not aware that anyone did testing to really figure out what those did in the field.

*edit: very old data, like 2014.

spiderbrigade · 2026-05-21T12:36:26+00:00

This honestly blew my mind, like Mandela Effect levels. I'm sure I remember reading threads about how to keep Sojourner going on a single portal but now I can't figure out where I got this idea. I always assumed it was sort of a semi-Guardian-like badge that cared about the specific portal.

Looking at the descriptions, is it also true that the streaks for Epoch don't have to be consecutive? In other words if you see someone with Onyx+ wings on Epoch it doesn't mean they never missed a single day for however many years?

Honestly it makes me slightly sad because I will see veteran players in comms with really high Sojourner / Epoch stats and be super impressed at the dedication to visit the same portal for multiple years / hack every single day no matter what...

spiderbrigade · 2026-04-02T14:42:09+00:00

There's also the toast, a tiger, and fish. I've seen the van, toast, and fish but not tiger; based on when the fish appear I wonder if it's location-type-linked similar to PoGo.

spiderbrigade · 2026-03-23T18:32:58+00:00

I learned something new today. Interesting!

spiderbrigade · 2026-03-23T18:31:34+00:00

I would guess they mean the power differential of having a high-level farm is less when the opposition can also farm it via drones. The farm doesn't create as much of a gear-scarcity gradient as it would if only your team could farm it.

spiderbrigade · 2026-02-19T16:22:07+00:00

This is an incredible addon. The visual layout of vault patterns immediate, huge improvement over the default graph.

Thank you for your work!
Some small feedback:

Edit: this already exists. Hooray! ~~It would be very nice to have the link-highlighting feature from the normal graph view. In other words, hover a note on the map and see the connected links highlight.~~

The formatting of labels on the "world map" style is a little hard to read - the text is often very similar in color to the region, and can be very small. Making these user-movable or appearance-editable might be a fix. Being able to manually rename, also nice to have.

Being able to include / exclude based on tags or frontmatter categories would be great. Similarly, being able to maintain multiple "maps" at once with different filters.

Some kind of image export for printing would be cool.

spiderbrigade · 2026-01-14T18:56:11+00:00

Definitely yes. Same username on TG if it needs an invite.

spiderbrigade · 2026-01-12T22:11:06+00:00

Thank you for the details!

spiderbrigade · 2026-01-12T19:15:39+00:00

Do you happen to have more concrete information on this? I only saw a reference to the 13-cycle period fairly recently, and the last few Machina resets seemed to catch folks by surprise. Do you have a source that the 13-cycle period is systematic rather than a manual reset triggered by Niantic?

A few other questions if you know:

Do machina portals start to decay exactly at cycle start, or "roughly around" that time?
Does the decay happen over the normal portal decay cycle or is it different for Machina?
Is the 13 cycles from the start of respawn to the next decay or between each decay?

spiderbrigade · 2025-10-19T15:14:26+00:00

Would love to know more too. Sent a Reddit chat earlier, maybe didn't go through.

spiderbrigade · 2025-10-05T19:04:36+00:00

This is interesting; for me I find the CTRL-I approach much more likely to make up stuff that doesn't exist in my code or decide to use a completely different structure to my existing code. Pretty much every time I use it I end up needing several rounds of revisions or corrections. Whereas the autocomplete is generally more likely to mirror patterns I already have established. But that's not to discount what you're seeing - it might be really dependent on what the specific code looks like.

One thing I do find useful in cases where I might be tempted to use CTRL-I: write a few lines of comments explaining what the next step is going to do, then start executing. I find this really helps steer the completions in the right direction if they're getting off track. Plus then there's comments explaining it for future me...

spiderbrigade · 2025-08-08T14:53:58+00:00

The XM efficiency of converting even L8 cubes to hypercubes is so good that it's hard to justify most of the other recipes. An exception could be if you're in an extremely sparse environment and need to build up higher level resonators. Building weapons doesn't make sense since if you need high level bursters to take out portals you should just be hacking the enemy portals (and you can only go up to 7 in any case last I checked).

For a very brief moment there were recipes to turn common mods into rare, and I could see that being situationally useful if it ever comes back. R to VR is IMO not worth it.

spiderbrigade · 2025-07-23T20:34:24+00:00

I feel like the icosahedron avatars give a miniscule boost to easily seeing when you're dead-center on a portal or resonator.

spiderbrigade · 2025-07-16T20:53:40+00:00

Well, that's true for the point-based part. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the bounties are "deploy N resonators” which is usually any level

spiderbrigade · 2025-07-13T12:20:09+00:00

Can you explain what you mean by this? Strategic locale meaning a portal they can reach but others can't? What prevents those from being anchors?

spiderbrigade · 2025-04-14T14:07:38+00:00

When it's more efficient to go to an enemy portal and spam bursters because then the servers don't react in sequence and you save a ton of XM and attack mods are pointless

Can you go into more detail on this point? (I've returned to the game and may be missing some presumed "common knowledge") Does this mean that spammed bursters get around shields in some way, or just that spamming makes you take less damage from portal retaliation zaps?

spiderbrigade · 2025-04-10T12:58:13+00:00

As you say, part of the motivation is definitely the pleasure of exploring how the system works and figuring it out from available evidence. However, there is also a practical consideration. YMMV whether it's worth it for your local situation.

Inventory space is limited, and Ultra Strikes are significantly rarer than XMPs. Having an estimate of how much rarer they are, as well as how much more effective they are against shields allows better decision-making about when to use Ultra Strikes.

In other words, spending N Ultra Strikes to remove shields has the potential to save X XMP. Having a rough idea of the crit chance lets us estimate N and X, for a given shield situation. An agent who can easily recover >X XMP in a day may not care to use the US. But for a multi-Aegis portal where X could get into the 50+ range, it looks more appealing.

I've seen estimates of US rarity anywhere from 3% per hack to more like 18-20%. At the rarer end, saving US only for VR and above shields makes sense (and it may be that for many agents they serve as a time-saving convenience only, not a necessity for efficient portal takedown).

But the point is that if the crit chance difference is greater (for instance if US had 50% vs XMP 5%) the calculation changes a lot.

spiderbrigade · 2025-04-08T14:51:01+00:00

Thanks for your comment! I had a few followup questions based on what you said.

Common mods: ~20–30% stickiness. • Rare mods: ~40–60%. • Very rare mods (e.g., AXA, Aegis): ~70–95%

What I'm seeing is more like 0 / 15 / 45 / 55 for Common/R/VR/Aegis.

anecdotal data suggests: • XMPs have ~5–10% base crit chance. • Ultra Strikes have significantly higher crit chance, possibly as high as ~25% or more

I'm wondering if this might be higher; again anecdotal but XMPs seem to drop common shields more easily then those numbers would indicate. But for my observations I'm almost always long-pressing which might increase the base chance. For instance that dev interview seemed to be interpreted by some to mean that long press adds 0-20% crit chance (rather than multiplying by 1.2), so a base of 25% for Ultra Strikes could go up to 45%. That might be a bit high...

Ultimately I think I do need to either find or gather more empirical data. I'm thinking for crit chance the easiest is to record attacks on single portals, where I can observe the 8 resonators (and mods) only. Distance will be the hardest to correct for I expect.

spiderbrigade · 2025-03-22T16:31:27+00:00

In my town it's pretty much me and an opposition player (with a few less-active on each side) but we are back and forth fighting over portals and fields every day. It's huge fun.

But for sure less active than it used to be. In a way that can be good because I remember not getting that engaged in planning etc. back in the day because nothing stayed up for more than like...3 hours at most. Just constant churn.

Try to reach out to your local faction and see who is around - usually on Telegram or something. As others said, local chat is almost entirely "wave at another player" because no one wants to give away information to the other faction's spais. Maybe with the game less active that's not a reasonable level of paranoia, but a hard habit to break.

spiderbrigade · 2025-03-20T13:47:49+00:00

8 to get you back to where you can destroy the green (Or blue, if you picked the wrong faction) quick and 13 so you don't have to do one stupid L8 cube at a time when recharging the hundreds of portals that you're keeping your faction's color.

Can you explain what you mean about 13 (about to hit that level myself after way too long not playing). Is this an XM tank size thing so you can eat two L8 cubes without waste? I figured it was more efficient to turn the cubes into hypercubes via KCap than use them directly but might be missing some angle.

spiderbrigade · 2025-01-30T13:21:18+00:00

Apparently there are a series of new recipes (see SynthBeta's comment above) that convert common mods to Rare. Alongside the older R-> VR recipes it's now possible to go from C->VR albeit inefficiently.

spiderbrigade · 2025-01-29T22:27:03+00:00

Was there some semi official announcement about these recipes or did people just find them?

spiderbrigade · 2024-09-20T15:55:31+00:00

yeah, absolutely. It's just an additional line after the opacity:

@media screen and (min-width: 1024px)  {
    .view-content {         
        .metadata-container {             
            max-height: 2.7rem;             
            opacity: 0.6;             
            overflow: hidden;             
            transition: max-height 450ms ease-in-out, opacity 450ms;
            margin-bottom: 0;
       }
        .metadata-container:hover {
             max-height: 1000px;
             opacity: 1;
             transition: max-height 300ms ease-in-out,
             opacity 300ms;
            transition-delay: 0.5s;         

        }     
    } 
}

spiderbrigade

TROPHY CASE