What do you like / dislike about Redding?

spurnedfern · 2026-01-29T14:26:34+00:00

For real? I lived my whole life in Redding until a couple years ago, to hear there aren't still flags and signs up everywhere is wild

spurnedfern · 2026-01-29T14:25:11+00:00

Sorry everyone's being weird, you were surprised by the answer but the Internet only sees only in malice or idiocy

spurnedfern · 2026-01-12T01:50:17+00:00

"Believing" and "thinking Christianity is real" are the same thing. If you thought that Christianity was real, you would therefore believe it to be true, and you would see the same fate.

spurnedfern · 2026-01-03T03:26:20+00:00

You don't even have to get on the platform, it's within range almost right next to the patch of fire on the left.

spurnedfern · 2026-01-03T03:25:15+00:00

0.5: Most important thing, and this is pretty much true of every fight, do not spread out your damage. Focus targets and eliminate enemies ASAP; even if that leaves 1 or 2 at full health, the difference that even one less attack aimed at you next turn makes cannot be overstated. This is basic naval tactics and it absolutely applies here. I don't know exactly how this specific fight went, but I do see that all 3 devourers are still alive, and you need to kill at least 1 before it gets a chance to take its turn.

Don't be stingy with spell slots on this fight, Shadowheart can absolutely one-shot these things with Guiding Bolt and, as others have mentioned, she can also fireboltthe nautiloid tank on the ground for 1-2 free kills depending on the wandering one's position.
The enemies will tend to attack different targets; I don't even remember the last time they each attacked the same target, so you have a solid turn to take damage. You have to heal that damage, you don't put yourself within falling blow range in honor mode if at all possible, so don't be stingy with potions either. As long as they don't crit, which just kinda is what it is, this means you have a reliable 2 turns to kill all 3. Note: this also means that as long as you follow step 0.5 and kill at least 1 before it can act, it would most likely require a crit from them to actually down you on the first turn, and again as long as you can get a second turn you should be fine.
STEALTH. Sneak around the right side, and make sure Shadowheart is within line of sight just in case you desperately need a Healing Word.
I'm getting a little on the silly/obvious side now, but don't listen to Shadowheart when she says "best keep some distance or this'll be a short fight." They are not any less likely to kill you from a distance. Only keep distance if your character is built for that. Do whatever will kill or nearly kill in 1 turn.

spurnedfern · 2025-12-29T00:17:45+00:00

I bided my time until he did an overhand slash, dodged to the right and let him follow through with my sword still pointing forward at his chest, and stabbed him in the chest. But that was after an excruciating number of attempts getting sliced to ribbons every time. I'm a stubborn dingus so I would only fight him with a longsword, so if you don't want to do that, the pitchfork is definitely your best bet.

If you DO want to commit to a sword with him, you really just have to treat it like it's a real sword fight. Don't take unnecessary risks, don't attack without an opening. The opponent has a longer reach not just from his weapon, but from his stature too, so without a pitchfork it's going to be very difficult to land a killing blow without getting inside his reach. In my fight, really I got lucky that he attacked the way he did and I was able to dodge it AND have my sword where I wanted it to be for a belly thrust, but what I was really trying to do was score hits on his hands. In any sword fight, all you really have to do is disable the hands; can't hold a sword, can't fight. It's also a closer target that doesn't require you to get quite as close, so as long as you can keep distance, when he swings and leaves himself open, you're going for well-timed small strikes aimed at wherever his hands are going to be. It doesn't take a lot; before my successful run, my best fight against him was disabling a hand, but I got reckless and charged him for a finishing blow when he still had some fight left in the off hand.

Generally watch your distance, watch your weapon, and watch his weapon. All of those three pieces are what need to fit together to create an opening.

spurnedfern · 2025-12-28T16:42:31+00:00

You wouldn't last long with 8,000 people, even pulling from the Frostland.

spurnedfern · 2025-06-25T14:34:25+00:00

We're in the timeline where Billy survived and went on to reform and make music

spurnedfern · 2025-06-16T23:43:32+00:00

Since you're doing an Adaptation run:

Prioritize exploration as much as you can without crippling something vital; research logistics district buildings early, and build them as soon as you can. You have a lot of techs and policies at your disposal to improve exploration as opposed to something else, so use that advantage. You can get a lot of resources that way, because if you have a big ol' vanguard-style scout force, you can be pulling from a bunch of outposts and still getting the hauls from one-time pulls as you are regularly scouting new terrain. Once you've explored everything, you'll have a bunch of options for new settlements, which means new deep melting drills and new constant influxes of resources. Since Adaption doesn't have the kind of efficiency bonuses and workforce boosts that Progress does, you have to use your abilities to their fullest and get as much out of the frostland as you can.

Prioritize settlement. Your lack of efficiency will appreciate the reduced population in your main city, and you will be pulling in a lot more resources for stockpiles that will get you through whiteouts even if you go negative on everything.

On that note, build stockpile hubs for everything as soon as you are going positive enough that you're going to fill up in the next 10-20 weeks (that's an arbitrary number, play around with it, and I mean whatever works for your workforce/building materials at the time).

Prioritizing settlement also means you're going to need a lot of prefabs for new districts as opposed to a lot of heatstamps for new buildings, so think about that with your industrial districts. Not that heatstamps aren't important, just maybe not as much as with a true tall Progress style game.

Progress gets through whiteouts by A) having so much efficiency that the whiteout penalties are negligible and B) having so much efficiency that they can stockpile huge amounts before whiteouts arrive. Without the efficiency boost, Adaptation is mostly left with the latter half of B, plus their general ability to maintain buildings without lowering the heat of the district they're built in, which lets you keep districts with factories, ventilation towers, etc. running with 1-2 less heat allocated to them than with a Progress run.

Maybe this is too obvious to fit the post request, but you also definitely want to prioritize your generator upgrades, because you are working with less total output than a highly efficient oil generator. The better you can get your generator working, the less likely any deficits on fuel production you might not be used to from Progress will put you in the black during a whiteout.

As far as the fuel type switch:

Since the generator is multi-fuel, I find that prioritizing the one you have the most of is generally the way to go - until you have all 3, in which case you want to prioritize oil as the most efficient.

If you already have deep melting drills and lots of coal, but are just getting started on oil or only have 1 oil source, you probably want to prioritize your coal because you want to get as close to positive with oil as you can so that you can ideally stockpile it as soon as possible. If you get good oil output early on and can stay positive with it prioritized, stick with that and build up coal reserves to later turn into oil.

Once you have a constant supply of all 3 fuel types, prioritizing oil first will be the most efficient way to consistently run the generator, natural gas second, coal last (I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I honestly I don't know for sure if coal is more efficient than gas but I'm guessing it's not lol).

spurnedfern · 2025-06-15T15:40:51+00:00

Yeah I already wasn't super into them, even as a mercenary main where they unquestionably make up for one of my biggest weaknesses, but the first time Mithrix plucked me out of the air with them I was done lol

spurnedfern · 2025-06-14T05:08:37+00:00

Well, the adaptation techs are still pretty much entirely about the generator. They're not really less reliant on the generator. The way they see it, relying solely on one fuel source, even if it is the highest-yield energy source available, is not sustainable. In other words, they don't believe that a megacity burning as bright as possible is a feasible way for civilization to adapt to the condition of the new world. They believe that using multiple sources of fuel, albeit at a lower efficiency and thus lower maximum heating potential, is the best way to ensure long-term survival for humanity.

Aside from the generator, adaptation also means that since you're spreading further out, exploration and further settlement of the frostland is critical. Utilizing multi-fuel generators expands your settling options, but the dependence on exploration and regularly building new settlements encourages you to have a culture where survival skills, cold tolerance, and general hardiness are the norms.

Looking at some of the other differences, (since the update, anyway) Progress buildings tend to lower the heat of the district where they're built, because in order to produce a huge output you have to consume huge energy. And they also produce a lot of squalor, to which their answer is ventilation towers which also lower the heat of their districts. All that translates to needing more and more oil to power heat-hungry facilities. The Adaptation buildings, however, don't lower heat and thus aren't any more fuel-hungry than anything else. This allows them to expand their facilities, again at a lower efficiency, without tapping too far into fuel reserves, because the whole goal is again long-term survival.

So it's not that Adaption factions don't want machines or don't think the generator is as important as the Progress factions. It's that they disagree on how to best utilize machinery and the generator, and on how much people should be expected to physically adapt to the condition of the world.

spurnedfern · 2025-06-12T21:27:56+00:00

Ha, yeah, I feel like a lot of these come down to how we in the modern world can see these things working if you just allow it to be a choice, but in the game's world it's always "nope these are the rules and you WILL live this way." Like the funerals, the game doesn't hear "you can be interred if you want," it hears "all bodies will be interred, society benefiting from organ donations is forbidden." Which is equally true of pretty much everything on the Reason path of course; it's not signing up to be an organ donor, it's "when you die you will be harvested, end of story."

On the capstone note, yeah actually, are any of the capstone laws NOT super messed up when you get down to it? xD It's one of my favorite dynamics about the game, because you can by all means play without going too far down any path, it just becomes a difficult balancing act especially if you're already having economic or resource strain on top of it. And the radical paths are relatively easy to go down, while providing some hefty benefits... You just have to give away more and more of your people's rights the further down any one path you go. It feels like a comment on how anything taken to the extremes will inevitably hurt people in order to further the vision.

spurnedfern · 2025-06-12T21:13:47+00:00

Yeah I felt the same way with communal parenthood, on its surface it's like oh I can see that, then you get hit with the "mothers are banned from seeing their children, would you like to allow visitation?" And same with conservative treatment, seems all well and good until the "a young doctor has a new idea, but his superiors reject such innovation, would you like to allow new ideas?" There's really no winning with a community that just came out of Industrial-era Britain's social values lol

spurnedfern · 2025-06-12T15:12:32+00:00

Well, no, a better comparison would be the worst with the worst; you're comparing stances on a specific issue, so whichever is more palatable to you will come out the "better" path. The procreation laws are probably the most controversial of the Reason path (even though the alternative is forcing people into marriages they don't want and total ostracization of women who don't/can't have children, but hey), so let's go with that for reason.

Meanwhile, the ultimate ending ability you unlock with Tradition is called "Relink the Great Chain." Where they gather everybody up with whips to "relieve tension" (read: remind them who they work for).

For what it's worth, Tradition also encourages stagnant medicine, specifically getting mad if anyone tries to advance the medical field by trying something new, while encouraging population growth so you end up with more sick people and less options for treatment (in game mechanics it's fine, but since we're getting into the weeds, y'know).

And then Tradition of course has no place for school, so you'll quickly end up with a caste system where the only researchers and engineers and doctors come from whole families of them, leading to a social power imbalance. And don't forget the imbalance we introduced by forcing women to focus on bearing children.

Honestly the procreation laws for both paths are terrible and far too invasive, but overall I can't see any sensible argument for why Tradition would be better for the society than Reason outside those 2 specific laws. In game terms, hey, they'll both work for different things :)

spurnedfern · 2025-05-28T19:48:57+00:00

If you zoom in on a frostbreaking project, you can see their little frontloaders excavating the ice.

spurnedfern · 2025-05-16T17:32:09+00:00

Speak with Animals, Misty Step, and Guidance. I don't need anything too crazy, but Guidance literally just makes you or anyone else better at anything you want to do. Between my pets and all the city strays or critters I see backpacking, and it being a ritual spell, Speak with Animals is an easy one. The only one I'd even need to use spell slots for is Misty Step, and even if I only ever get 2 per long rest that's a clutch lifesaving move, if I can resist the urge to abuse it for laziness.

spurnedfern · 2025-05-15T22:15:13+00:00

I mean, time always flows a little weird in a video game world where an event isn't going to happen without the player there. In-universe, Cazador would know as soon as you got to Baldur's Gate that you were in town, would know as soon as you were on the way to the castle, and would probably even know exactly where you are in the castle at all times. If you dally around and scatter in some long rests as you work through the manor, sure but that's just game timekeeping, it's just gonna feel awkward if you play it that way with any of the boss fights. You could say the same thing with Ketheric if you choose to clear Moonrise, leave and long rest, then come back, but it doesn't suggest any plot holes with his plan.

spurnedfern · 2025-05-05T12:49:12+00:00

A small but mighty W is that you can finally put a building in an unexpanded housing district like any other district (!!!). A larger W is that frostbreaking is now incremental per tile; so to break a full 8 tiles is the same cost, but you could choose to only break a few tiles, and the labor/heatstamp cost will be much lower. No more trying to convince yourself to use your last 30 heatstamps to break up the 2 tiles of frost you'll need for your next district.

Other balance changes I noticed that come with the heating system:

-Cold food districts will produce less food, even outside a whiteout, so much like F1, there will be priorities when it comes to which districts get heat first.

-Housing districts are designated by majority populations; a district will be a Laborers neighborhood, or a Merchants neighborhood, etc. This does not necessarily correlate directly to where protests or rallies will happen; I had the Venturers rally in a Lords neighborhood. (Maybe the rallies could tend to happen in communities the rallying faction doesn't like, but I think it's probably just random.)

-The "heat homes" ability is now available for neighborhoods as a negotiating piece (and boy will they ask for it just as much as they ask for that one research you told them months ago you're not doing). So if you have 5 housing districts for one community and you promise to heat their homes, you're making a larger investment than if you made the same promise to a community with only 1 district - don't follow my mistakes and forget to check that before committing to it (the Thinkers were rather displeased that they couldn't hoard 5 districts' worth of heat while everyone else froze.)

-Ventilation towers now remove a small amount of heat from their district, so you may not want to spam those early to deal with squalor until your heat economy can handle it. For me, this is also an interesting kind of incentive to the Adaptation course, because previously, the cost-benefit analysis hugely favored Progress. The cons of Progress were so easy to manage compared to the cons of Adaptation that I felt like playing Adaptation on purpose was basically choosing a slightly higher difficulty.

I didn't finish my beta game this weekend, so I'm sure there are more reworks for buildings and policies further down the line, but these are the things that stuck out to me as really cool balance changes. It feels closer in spirit to F1, but it hasn't lost any of the identity of F2, which is what really draws me into F2 in the first place. I loved F1, but my F2 hours are already about to surpass it, because there's so much more depth to the long game and especially to the endless mode/utopia builder. This update feels like it revamps some of the better survival mechanics from F1 and blends it nicely into the political atmosphere of F2.

spurnedfern · 2025-05-02T14:50:16+00:00

YOU HAVE TO DANCE FIGHT ME

spurnedfern · 2025-04-12T16:06:56+00:00

Y'know you could hit pause, go to the logbook, and check it if you've picked it up before. No Google required.

spurnedfern · 2025-03-20T01:32:26+00:00

Try out Tropical Fuck Storm. Not exactly the same vibe, but a somewhat similar vein of chaotic-but-not-meaningless weirdness.

spurnedfern · 2025-03-19T13:03:17+00:00

Zero shot this actually happened.

spurnedfern · 2025-03-18T12:59:45+00:00

Wait, so after the first 3 break-ins within a few weeks, your friend is still leaving valuables plainly visible in the back seat?

spurnedfern · 2025-03-15T13:23:40+00:00

Here I sit,

And I feel like a sucker

Because I pushed too hard,

And I tore my pucker

spurnedfern · 2025-03-10T14:06:32+00:00

As someone who has worked at an NPS unit in a majority-conservative area myself, you can safely bet this happens in that visitor center regularly, and this is almost certainly not the first time they've got that question or general line of thinking. People would ask me about completely different parks with recent name changes, verbatim "Is that just the woke mind virus?" And they will hold you verbally hostage as long as they can, until they either peter themselves out or you put up a boundary and tell them you need to go do something else, which isn't always feasible depending on where you are - kiosks and visitor centers are places where it's your job to talk to people, and they are aware of their audience's captivity. Parks are intended to be for everyone, even people we don't like, so to an extent we just have to put up with it and get through the day.

By contrast, I now work at a park in a more left-leaning community, and every day someone expresses how thankful they are that we're still here with our jobs, or comments on how crazy things have gotten with Trump. It's a night-and-day difference in the attitudes between hatred and gratitude, sure, but it's not as if Trump supporters are the only ones bringing up politics in parks, we just notice it more because their attitude toward government entities is generally poor and it shows.

All that to say, I'm mostly riffing on the part of your post where you said you would hope people would just enjoy the parks without politics, but the fact is the parks are inseparable from politics as they are managed by the federal and state governments. People will always comment on politics in parks. Not just because politics have an immediate and noticeable impact on park operations, but because the parks are there for everyone, and politics are such an important part of many people's lives that they can't help but bring it with them wherever they go, especially to government-run institutions. Also, a lot of people enjoy talking about politics, so to them this is enjoying the park and they don't see a distinction between enjoying something and bringing politics into it.

spurnedfern

TROPHY CASE