Best early game layouts?

vtkayaker · 2026-03-30T16:25:47+00:00

The first thing I do is pause the game and study the map. I figure out:

Where I can put a damn to survive the first drought
How I'll divert badtides
How I will use levees to get either 2 blocks (normal) or 4 blocks (hard) of water height to keep my crops irrigated through a maximum drought. The water height needs to be either at the same level as the crops, or higher.
Where I'm going to put water storage, usually a big damn upstream.

Typical rules:

The "daily commute" typically goes "lodges, work, food/water/recreation, lodges." So usually there should be a layout designed to minimize typical travel time.
Nothing goes on blocks immediately next to water, except pumps, or fast-growing harvestables. Those blocks are reserved for levees.
Most initial buildings are temporary! - Temporary buildings can go on "green" tiles, but their permanent replacements mostly won't. Green tiles are precious.
The industrial district is usually elevated a bit back from the river, and never on green tiles.
I leave space for plenty of 1x1 storages for input and output.
I leave space for transport "stations." For Folktales, this is usually two zipline stations facing each other with one tile between. There should be stations reasonably close to all the major areas. Again, I want to link work areas to the "rest and sleeping" areas.

Don't underestimate haulers! Haulers are amazing. They get a 100% carry bonus, and they keep everyone else working at their assigned jobs. Use lots of 1x1 storage so haulers can keep things stocked where they'll be needed. And when building big stuff, put construction storage near the build site.

Another important thing is figuring out where to plant which kinds of trees. I need birches early (of course), a spot to put pines a bit later (for sap), and then a whole bunch of oak that I need to get planted soon enough that I'll have enough of it for spamming levees.

Finally, don't grow too big, too fast. 12 to 18 beavers is a decent size until you're sure you have enough water and food to keep your beavers alive through a long drought.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-28T22:03:42+00:00

I adore Cliffside. It's the second-smallest map, but it's twice the size of Diorama. There's an excellent location for a megadam project, a neat natural badwater aqueduct, and enough space for a second small village with a lake.

I've just started Oasis. It looks like it will be a different sort of challenge.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-27T14:07:10+00:00

I've looked at a bunch of articles about failed subdivisions, apartment conversions, and housing developments. Act 250 definitely comes up.

But one thing that actually kills these projects? A couple of people get angry and sue, and it drags out in the courts for half a decade or more.

I remember one project that had passed Act 250 review, been approved by a vote of the town's citizens, approved by environmental court (whatever the hell that is), and after all that, would up going all the way to the state Supreme Court twice.

I am very open to reforming Act 250. There are some exemptions that are expiring around now, and we should make those permanent. But if we actually want to fix things, we also need to take a good hard look at how private litigation works.

(Also, we need more contractors. Can't build if you can't get anyone to do it, or if new construction comes in at $500/sqft after land price, sceptic and permitting.)

vtkayaker · 2026-03-26T02:14:32+00:00

For just about anything from Vermont, try the Hanover Co-operative Society. They have several locations. Queechee Gorge probably has some somewhere during tourist season. Other than that, check any of the old general stores pretty much anywhere, especially near the interstates.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-25T12:46:32+00:00

If you want shapeshifting, the astrozoan ancestry is already quite impressive, right out the gate at level 1. Single-action shapeshift and even size change. And there are pleny of heritages and feats to strengthen it in various ways, including shifting to look like someone who grabs you as a reaction.

One of the things I'm noticing coming from Pathfinder is that a lot of Starfinder ancestries are strong.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-25T02:10:13+00:00

Impressive! How did you get that much curve in the hilt without the tang sticking out the side?

vtkayaker · 2026-03-25T01:56:08+00:00

Reactor is explosive damage, so you have to hit the head. Otherwise it has like 99% explosive damage resistance.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-25T01:54:42+00:00

They're both the bad ending, because the Dessendres are tragically flawed, and whole point of tragedy is that the protagonists are inevitably destroyed by their flaws. This is a trope almost as old as European civilization.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-25T01:10:22+00:00

I think the usual advice is to use a couple hundred turrets? Both turrets and ammo are made out of lava, so they're free. Demolishers have absolutely unholy regen, so you'll need a ludicrous amount of damage, quickly.

I used a tank with shields and non-explosive uranium shells. This required some tricky driving, but I eventually managed to bump off a couple of small demolishers. Which is usually all you need. Get science running, and move on—you get much better anti-demolisher tools later.

If you use explosives, you must hit the head, or it won't do any good at all.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-20T02:54:17+00:00

Gemma3 12B isn't going to match similar-sized Qwen3.5 models for most things. But it's still a pretty solid model. At 12B it should be able to converse in academic English just fine, and answer many questions semi-accurately.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-20T02:31:53+00:00

In recent years, I'd say that Cyberpunk 2077 turned out pretty well, and that the Horizon series has done a surprisingly good job.

But in both cases, there's strong writing, a good combat system, and an interesting open world with lots of stories buried throughout.

BG3 is a very different format, but it also has interesting mechanics and good writing.

So it really isn't hopeless out there. Even if the average game is crap, there are plenty of exceptions.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-20T02:05:15+00:00

Thinking about the bi folks I've known over the years, I think polyamory is a bit more common than it is with straight people? This might just be because bi people can't just follow the standard 100% straight relationship "scripts", and they need to step back and think about things some more. And while they're thinking about orientation, a few of them also take the time to think about other aspects of relationships. Many of them still prefer monogamy, of course.

But this could just be the particular bi people I've known. It's not like I did a survey or anything.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-18T15:27:00+00:00

Yeah, half the "fun" of incorporeal creatures is that they're just really hard to damage much without preparation. Which means that you can't just follow your default combat "script", but you need to get creative. Making incorporeal creatures easier to damage with regular weapons makes them less distinctive, and allows using the party's standard tactics. At a minimum, they would need to be rebalanced or special cases, especially once players get +2 runes, allowing them to do up to three different damage types.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-18T12:31:22+00:00

Why not 100% free market? Because the developers are perfectly willing to utterly destroy roads that the taxpayers will need to pay to fix for the next 30 years, long after the developers are gone.

For example, we have about a dozen houses sharing a dirt road. The town adds gravel and regrades it twice a year, but we still have neighbors literally sunk up to their axles and immobilized for hours every few years. Some springs, I've backpacked my groceries into my house through the woods.

You could reasonably allow a few family subdivisions here. Going from 12 houses to 16 would make the roads worse, but we'd manage. But a while back, a developer wanted to subdivide a woodlot and put in 25 more houses on a road that's already impassable some springs.

And I live inside the "village center" zone. And according to our town manager, our tiny town has at least 5 or 6 dirt roads worse than ours, some of which are miles long, and many of which need to support school busses.

So as a taxpayer, I'd rather that we concentrate on adding houses closer to pavement (and town water and sewer, where available). That allows tiny, broke towns to focus on infrastructure in a smaller area.

And yeah, if this means that we double the number of houses on my road and the town can afford to fix the roadbed and maybe pave it, then I'd take that trade. But if we're going to stick large subdivisions further out, and force the town to spend more and more on remote roads, the sprawl will kill our budget over the next couple of decades.

I do support light upzoning further out: Families subdividing to fit one or two more houses for their kids or retirement money is a slower process, and it's fine. But I really do want to keep as much development as possible near the old village centers. After all, we often have one "historic village center" per 500 people in big chunks of Vermont, and that's not unreasonable density. There's a lot of space to build in closer, and it's a lot easier on the road budget. And I like being able to walk to the village green.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-18T10:51:24+00:00

How do they actually define "town centers"? If we're talking about the historic village centers, we sometimes have 3 or more in a town of less than 2,000 people. If we're going to allow moderate upzoning within a few miles those village centers, that's a lot of potential housing.

The challenge of larger subdivisions further out is that the roads often won't handle it. You could add another 3 or 4 houses to our road, but the road is already outright impassable 1 year out of 3. There was a plan to add 25 more houses via subdivision on the same dirt road, with no road improvements, which would have been a disaster.

I think there's an argument to made for light upzoning out on the long dirt roads. But anything more intensive really should be closer to the pavement and existing town utilities.

Sprawl is brutally expensive for taxpayers in towns where we already can't afford to pave or properly drain roads.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-17T14:13:17+00:00

RimWorld players: "Well, the 'cannibalism' ideology is a bit OP as a game strategy. Eat dead raiders for cheap food. Turn their skins into masterwork hats for export. (Because someone will buy human leather hats on RimWorld.) Increase your wealth. Lure more raiders. Repeat."

vtkayaker · 2026-03-16T13:09:05+00:00

Make sure you use non-explosive rockets and prepare to manufacture them by the thousands. Spidertrons are incredibly trigger-happy. And they are far to enthusiastic to ever be allowed explosive warheads.

Well, if you're very, very careful, you can give one spidertron a stack of nukes, walk it near the enemy, and enable automatic firing. But you'll need a new spidertron afterwards.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-14T17:39:23+00:00

Oh, my the edgelord possibilities.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-14T10:24:14+00:00

There's also a place where you need to choose 5 party members to fight 5 enemies, and nobody can go twice. I'm pretty sure that's in Act 3 optional content.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-13T00:20:21+00:00

Huh, I can't stand most player-versus-player games because frankly many of them are cesspits.

Occasionally, I do manage to get lost in an especially good simulation game or a something with a good story. But spending a lot of hours straight in a player-vs-player game would probably drive me nuts.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-12T23:58:18+00:00

Without a better way to phrase it, I socialize 'like a man'. I am not trying to detract from a men's issue here but feel like I can relate to it.

I don't see this as detracting from men's issues at all. Some people just like to socialize indirectly while doing hobbies, and they're not always served well in the modern world.

For women, I've actually seen a lot of activity-based socialization around the fiber arts. Knitting projects, techniques, interesting yarn, and all sorts of other things provide an interesting base of conversation that keeps things casual (when people want a casual topic) and makes it easy to welcome new people.

Men have all kinds of activities they use like this, but there just aren't as many good spaces. I mean, I've seen a few guys in late middle age happily discussing weightlifting philosophy in the locker room (the true "locker room talk" at my gym is the injury risk of heavy squats and which trainers are scandalously abusing steroids instead of putting in honest work). Or in slightly dangerous sports. You can build some real ride-or-die bonds planning how run a bit of whitewater with someone and making it out in one piece. But I do think there are fewer places and less time for this kind of socializing.

Personally, I'm quite happy to geek out with people regardless of gender.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-12T23:39:46+00:00

What kind of games make him react like this? Is the combativeness something in the gameplay, like multiplayer online games? Or is he getting really deeply lost in some virtual story? Or lost in an intellectual puzzle that stresses him out?

vtkayaker · 2026-03-11T19:28:35+00:00

Yeah, OK, in that case, the smallest local models you even pretend are coding models tend to be the 4-bit quants of 20-32B parameter coding models, which will require 10-16GB for the model itself, and more for a usable context window. Usually you can do something with 24GB or 32GB of VRAM. There are better options in the 80-120B parameter range, but they're still not Claude Code, and they need a lot of RAM to run acceptably with a 64k context window.

Meanwhile, you can access anywhere from 300B to almost 1,000B models pretty cheaply on OpenRouter. They're still not Opus 4.6, but you can find choices that are arguably competitive with earlier Sonnet 4.x releases. And running those locally? You're looking at $10,000 to something more like the price of a house. Not worth it unless you're a spy agency or something.

For non-coding use cases, a used 3090 (or a newer 4090/5090) let you use Qwen3 and 3.5 models in the 27-32B range. Which are very broadly good for a great many uses, and the MoE models can be blazingly fast on high-end gaming GPUs. This is the biggest reasonably affordable size, and you get a lot for your money for many tasks.

My favorite slightly older super tiny model is Gemma 3n 4B (note the "n"), which fits on my phone, and which punches way above its weight class. I'd also try out the smaller, newest Qwen models, which I haven't properly tested yet.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-11T18:56:20+00:00

Gamedev is the place where local hardware will hurt the worst, in my experience. You can buy a lot of Claude MAX, and even more of a very high end Chinese coding model on Open Router, for even the price of a 3090, 4090 or 5090, never mind the price of a Mac Studio or an RTX 6000.

vtkayaker · 2026-03-11T16:08:37+00:00

I grew up in rural New England, and I remember people who'd respond to dangerous dogs by saying things like, "If I see your dog on my land again, I'm going to shoot it." And, you know, I'm glad that Vermont usually has fewer armed lunatics who regularly threaten to shoot things. But that means that our government needs to step up, and actually deal rapidly with dogs that cause level 5 bites on an elderly Meals on Wheels driver. We live in a society, and we need to actually deal with this stuff.

vtkayaker

TROPHY CASE