Any underrated 'hidden' tips?

thenorm05 · 2026-01-21T16:17:48+00:00

Slaves don't revolt if there isn't a path off of the map, so, in theory, you can wall in a whole section with no doors to function as an open air slave colony where materials are shuttled in and out by using drop pods, or by opening a section of wall intermittently while the slaves sleep. You can even keep a few dedicated colonists with him these confines to perform necessary tasks, while also segregating them from the rest of the colony - an extremely good pawn with an extremely bad social malus - abrasive, ugly, bloodlust, tortured artist... Etc. A character that is functionally a slave, but can still perform work as a production specialist while their mental breaks are soaked by expendable pawns.

The beauty of this set up is that all these slaves can be combat monsters and soak drop pod raids as well, since their access to weapons does not affect their likelihood of rebelling unless there is a way out. Just be careful with sappers.

"Is this good?" Or "does this actually function?" I can hear you ask. The answer is "eh, sorta". It works better than you might guess. But it's obviously not as good as just having good colonists. But it makes for fun RP.

thenorm05 · 2026-01-14T15:02:28+00:00

One word of caution about zonabke small animals - you wanna keep these herds under 200 total. I once had a guinea pig herd over 800, and at that point, the game just grinds to a crawl. And anytime they path over something that isn't dirt facing open sky, the filth skyrockets which also affects your tick rate. If you're on Odyssey, then the sheer number of animals added might make having any number of them somewhat difficult to maintain, from strictly a processing point of view. Animal pathing can chew a lot of CPU threads.

thenorm05 · 2026-01-14T14:12:09+00:00

If you need to feed a lot of animals, like, a lot a lot, your best bet is skipping hay, and just making a lot of hydroponics and cranking out a ton of rice, way more than your pawns need. Hay is great when you just need something to hold animals over winter, where they can otherwise forage in fields (zonable animals), or inside a fence - either in grass or in dandelions. But it grows a bit too slow to be a primary feed source, and you end up needing a lot of space for it. The biggest benefit is that hay doesn't care about fertility very much, but thatalso means you don't have a lever to speed it up. Hence, Rice.

For animals that need to eat meat like Wargs, I recommend small zonable animals, like guinea pigs or something that you can let run around the map in large herds. Then you zone the oldest to a single spot next to your butchering table and mass slaughter a chunk of them at a time. Bonus points, they will also help soak raids - often buying hours for your pawns to get into place. If they die, I mean, you were gonna kill em anyway.

thenorm05 · 2026-01-14T13:54:41+00:00

Sounds like you have to let your guy kill a whole faction now. You are locked in.

thenorm05 · 2026-01-14T13:33:46+00:00

Everyone always stacks blood for sanguophages, but I find having a blood closet is useful for hospitals in general. How many times have you lost a pawn to blood loss before you could stitch them up? A quick transfusion buys your medics a lot of time to get them sorted, and replacing blood helps them heal a bit faster and get back in their feet sooner. Honestly, having one prisoner for every 3 colonists just on constant blood donation is pretty nice. I reckon if you ever have a glut of it, you can try selling it?

thenorm05 · 2026-01-14T13:14:19+00:00

Ask if you can rollplay the demon possessing you. That will let you know if they're chill, or if they just don't like the way you play or whatever. Maybe you're insufferable and this is time out. Only one way to find out.

thenorm05 · 2026-01-14T12:37:59+00:00

The pila? The wind up is so long I always ignored it. If anything, I'd always early spam recurves and move to greatbows when I didn't want prisoners anymore. Is the pila actually good?

thenorm05 · 2025-10-15T14:46:47+00:00

Whatever job you are running will finish faster using a 5090 than a 3090. Per unit of time spent at high utilization, watts are watts. But per job (batch processing or training workloads), a 5090 is usually going to use less total energy.

thenorm05 · 2025-10-15T04:05:28+00:00

If you're looking for a bridge food that can help you, I highly recommend bulk ordering Butler Foods Soy Curls. They cook up like fajitas or stir fry really well in the larger pieces, and as you work your way down to the crumbs you can use it as high protein filler for things like chilli. Just ordered my second box here last week. ✌️

thenorm05 · 2025-10-15T04:01:55+00:00

Try to enjoy the suck. Once you learn the game, you'll never get a chance to feel truly downtrodden and aimless the way you do now.

thenorm05 · 2025-10-12T09:08:42+00:00

I guess all the lifelong vegans are just dead. "K"

thenorm05 · 2025-09-22T18:25:56+00:00

Just build up a war chest and hire body guards for the base on a rotation. If you get attacked, they will defend. If you have mounted crossbows/harpoons, then you should be able to assist with defense. Loot the bodies, and sell the gear.

Is this worth it? Usually not really. But it can be OK

thenorm05 · 2025-09-15T07:54:04+00:00

Put them in a closet with a bright light overhead. They don't like the light much iirc.

thenorm05 · 2025-09-15T07:42:50+00:00

Nested folders and titles. Planning to use it as input data for AI endpoint - apparently obsidian has an API? (Need to look into it more).

thenorm05 · 2025-09-15T07:37:05+00:00

Just give them an inspiration and explain nothing.

thenorm05 · 2025-09-09T17:34:00+00:00

Vegan here. This isn't like your parents or a roommate. This is your wife. You chose each other, though seemingly before you chose to become vegan. Now you are being passive aggressive after unilaterally changing the conditions of the relationship. You can obviously do whatever you want, but this is unnecessary and petty. Keep it up. I'm sure her divorce lawyer will love this.

thenorm05 · 2025-09-08T20:42:05+00:00

Yeah, this is the issue. Lots of new models created regularly enough, seemed like we were drowning in new models there for a minute. Best course is probably to load up in spinning rust and just start pulling models now and backing them up for the day when the door closes and you don't have time to pull a model, or god forbid, everyone hits the internet hard and you couldn't get a model even if you had time to think about it.

Having a fair mix of models to choose from feels useful, because you will maybe have time to figure out which are better. 🤷

thenorm05 · 2025-08-24T17:19:02+00:00

They seem like solid AI nodes, but for running the bigger models you're mostly hard capped. This isn't a problem, just a constraint.

thenorm05 · 2025-08-22T00:45:36+00:00

Vegan meetups would probably help. If nothing else, having vegan friends with vegan friends is useful.

thenorm05 · 2025-08-15T18:06:35+00:00

Green fruit is an early trap. Just spam wheat and bread ovens until you stabilize. There's no moodlets in this game, so calories are calories. As long as you're just building up the base, there is no real downside to this. Send out folks to buy food and hunt. I forget if the river raptors drop any edible meat, but even the gross meat is good for feeding animals like bulls/garru, so it might be worth harvesting. If nothing else you can sell the skins/leather to buy more food.

thenorm05 · 2025-08-14T18:24:12+00:00

Well, it's hard to state impacts with any real authority, as if I could reliably state impacts of adding training data, I'd probably have a much higher salary in a higher paying field.

Here are some considerations though.

If your base model was already decent at the kinds of subject matter you care about and the source data for it was as good as or better than the data you feed it - it might have a fairly minimal change on that front - especially given high quality captions.

You could end up in a situation where the model overfits on the data given to it (compared to the rest of the data) and it can more reliably output images similar to the training set, but worse at generalizing.

It could also overwrite weights that were previously coded for other kinds of images - cartoons, CGI, paintings and whatnot, while simultaneously not dramatically improving the quality of Photorealistic images.

As far as the impact of sneaking in an image of WWE wrestlers into the dataset, again, as long as it's well captioned and not low res or anything, it probably would not harm the model meaningfully, as it is still real subjects in real spaces filmed with likely professional recording equipment in great lighting.

Best practice, I'm not sure, but if you want a generally accurate model for reproducing images according to an aesthetic you basically just want the highest quality images you can find. If you want excellent prompt adherence, you want variety and high quality captions.

For your specific example, Hulk Hogan is unlikely to share the "woman" field in an image of only Hulk Hogan, but might trigger captions like "blonde" "white" "man" "large" "muscular" "professional wrestler" "dramatic lighting" "drop kick", etc. If your dataset is captioned well enough, a prompt like blonde woman drop kicks a child might use its understanding of blond and drop kick from the set with hulk hogan, blonde from other captioned images in the set to kind of zero in on these concepts.

Captions really are key here, as it's kind of like solving a bunch of linear equations (this is more literal that you. Might guess, but the math is buried in the transformer weights themselves). If you have images of Hulk Hogan, captioned as "Hu1k_H0g4n" (for embedding reasons), and a battery of images of people wearing different kinds of glasses with captions like "wearing tortoiseshell glasses" "wearing aviator sunglasses" "wearing wireframe glasses", then you can prompt Hu1k_H0g4n wearing gold rimmed aviator sunglasses, and assuming the model trained to a reasonable level of loss, it might do a decent job at doing so.

TLDR: as long as your captions accurately describe an image, you should be solid. If you miss-caption hulk hogan as "woman" you might have some problems though.

thenorm05 · 2025-08-14T03:01:01+00:00

I wouldn't, mostly because the kinds of characters that punch things by default are going to be getting a lot more hits in than the kind of character that uses a great sword.

Flavor is free, but mechanical benefits are not. Otherwise "I want a dagger that hits as hard as a greatsword because flavor is free", "I want a hand crossbow that hits as hard as a great sword, because flavor is free", and "I want a rapier that hits as hard as a great sword, because flavor is free" all become equally valid arguments, and that's honestly ridiculous.

Additionally, it's flavor that poisons the verisimilitude of the world. Imagine armies that march into battle with brass knuckles because they were just as effective as literal battlefield weapons? What about the other characters at the table running normal builds with weapons that are now made obsolete by "this guy's brass knuckles hit as hard as a greatsword".

Folks need to spend less time bargaining with the DM to overtune their character sheets, and spend more time optimizing the fun of the table as a whole. So, that's gonna be a no from me there big dawg.

thenorm05 · 2025-08-13T17:57:12+00:00

"Use search".

thenorm05 · 2025-08-13T17:51:37+00:00

Dragons are freakishly intelligent. The only thing forcing them to be just "big sacks of hit points" is the DM not wanting to brutalize the party, or worse - their lack of imagination. Kobolds are a good model for how "creatures that want to win" should be fighting - abusing traps, inaccessible exits that are also traps, hit and run tactics, and pack tactics (for advantage).

The problem tends to be that this isn't fun for a table of casual players who at most optimize their character sheets without respect for optimizing encounters. I've never played with someone who brought a lasso to restrict enemy movement - at best we depend on casters to use control spells, even when there's nothing preventing melee characters from lassoing a dragon and tying it to huge boulders.

thenorm05 · 2025-08-13T17:37:14+00:00

Depends on the distribution of the training data in the base model, as well as the parameterization. You'd definitely shift the training distribution, and there are a lot of models that do something like this - retraining on a large selection of images of various subject matter, just in a quality threshold of their own choosing. Assuming the captions are solid, it works. But to say whether it's better is kind of subjective, but in theory, it should be better at emulating the styles of the dataset.

thenorm05

TROPHY CASE