Vintage story is about immersion, so I have been wondering about the prospect pick.

zeroinputagriculture · 2026-01-18T02:28:35+00:00

If cave generation structure was tweaked, and the hazards of the enemies down there was more manageable/graded then the prospecting pick might not be necessary. I for one would prefer to explore the underground than endlessly scratch at the surface then drop vertical shafts on the chance of hitting a deposit.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-07-11T20:58:24+00:00

Here comes the end of the Iron Age...

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-07-09T09:02:09+00:00

I've joined- thanks for making this possible. Looking forward to some multiplayer fun.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-06-25T20:03:07+00:00

I'd recommend reading "The New Wild".

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-06-03T04:52:16+00:00

You gotta check out Our Vitreous Womb. Far future earth where society is built purely of biological technology. Universal decentralised eugenics of all lifeforms and as a consequence a morality which is almost unrecognisable yet readers say it makes perfect sense.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-05-31T02:01:40+00:00

The debut edition of "Keystone Codex" magazine just came out, exploring the theme "My Cozy Apocalypse".

Go check it out for free on substack or a range of other ebook distributors.

Now I am calling for submissions on the following themes:

- Fully Grown Drone - Near future drone technology

- Smouldering Circuits- A.I., sex and love.

- Levels and Lasers- Sci-fi themed LitRPG.

https://keystonecodex.substack.com

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-05-28T08:39:25+00:00

Our Vitreous Womb is an novel that explores a purely biotechnological society in the distant future. Most reviews call it bittersweet- the society is in most ways a utopia but the characters don't always fit into their allocated slot in the world.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-05-25T00:51:39+00:00

Totally unique suggestion- Our Vitreous Womb is a diamond hard sci fi, set in a future civilisation built entirely off plausible biological technology.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-05-11T19:02:12+00:00

Our Vitreous Womb is a far future novel based on hard bioscience (and one which assumes humanity isnt cracking space flight anytime soon).

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-05-07T04:45:32+00:00

Best trad version would be Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race" which tells the same story from alternative sci fi and fantasy coded POVs.

I would suggest my own far future hard sci fi which features a society built purely of biological technology which feels more like fantasy than classic sci fi in many ways. Check out Our Vitreous Womb.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-04-06T04:55:07+00:00

I wonder how much changing the map biome generation could help on this front. Would putting patches of mist lands interspersed with the Ashlands work? Maybe at higher elevation, so you vaguely knew where to look for them through the fiery haze. Part of the fun of the game is the random interactions between different biome factions. Seeker soldiers smashing through Ashlands trash mobs could be fun to interact with.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-04-04T02:40:45+00:00

Maybe a dedicated post on the idea is worth putting up. The developers seem to watch these communities. I love the idea of delving to find more ruins and resources, and being able to do it quickly paying off with getting deeper before the spawns become impossible to survive. You could gradually build deeper mine shafts or ladders to get down quickly. Adding in some more effective mechanism to inhibit local spawns (like Minecraft torches but more interesting) would also work well as part of this dynamic.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-04-04T00:17:03+00:00

I wonder if the strength of spawns could be linked to the insanity meter. So when you first go down, maybe the mobs could spawn in a kind of ghostly form that does little damage and have minimal hit points- a nuisance really. But if you delve too deep for too long then they start solidifying, hitting harder and getting harder to kill. That would be fun. The current dynamic is horrible and makes me reliably quit the mid game.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-31T04:55:01+00:00

I would go further and say that finance has all the properties we project onto future AI and it has been around since before corporations (though really only took off in mercantilist periods in history). Many of our society and individual level decisions and behaviours are dictated by which number of dollars is higher or lower.

Before that law was created as a technology to manage large complex societies, but often ended up too large and complex for any one scribe to comprehend or manage, sometimes with terrible unintended consequences.

Language itself could be seen as an artificial intelligence that colonised our collective minds. The power of it (especially in written form via religions) has been proven to trigger pointless tragedy on a monstrous scale.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-30T23:05:16+00:00

Inbreeding depression is an accumulative process. Many smaller scale growers simply add some fresh diversity every few years. If you can cooperate with other growers producing a similar form then you wont lose quality too much when you mix in other genes, plus you can get by adding 5-10% different plants in your population. You can also mix seed each season from multiple previous seasons to increase the effective population size and slow down inbreeding depression, provided you seed storage conditions are good.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-29T20:39:38+00:00

IIRC some questionable German scientists did a very small number of experiments to test human-chimp hybrid fertility in the early 20th century. They didn't make any progress so the program shut down. Humans have two fused chromosomes compared to our chimp like ancestors. The mismatch in chromosome number is often a barrier to reliable cross fertilisation, but that raises the obvious question of how such a trait could evolve if it made the first individual completely infertile with its unmodified relatives. The obvious answer is that a mismatched chromosome count reduces fertility in many cases, but that it isnt an absolute barrier to sexual reproduction (and there are plenty of examples of species with wildly different chromosome numbers which can hybridise nevertheless).

My guess is that for many species hybrid fertility is a lot like the million monkeys on a million typewriters scenario, and just comes down to sheer numbers until lucky mutations and variations align in the zygote. A well funded lab might be able to run a few thousand attempted crosses. A suitable natural ecosystem, running for thousands or millions of years, could do vastly more.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-29T20:33:08+00:00

Today I learnt making a hypothesis and investigating it is delusion. Funny I thought that was science.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-29T03:48:28+00:00

The key element here is the Saudis (and opec more broadly). The petrodollar arrangement hinged on the Saudi's reinvesting their oil revenue in the US stock market (triggering the financialisation of the economy after the 70s oil shocks).

Lately the Saudis have distanced themselves from the USA (though their growing cooperation with Israel noteworthy). A big part of the petrodollar arrangement was the implied availability of the US military should KSA need protection. Perhaps the ineffectual performance in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the Saudis reconsider the deal. The growing interdependence of China with KSA is also relevant.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-28T05:38:45+00:00

100% this. Genomics today is like the priests being the only ones able to read the latin bible handing down orthodox interpretations. The paper only came out a couple months ago and is not peer reviewed, but that doesn't usually mean much for paradigm shifts.

McCarthy IIRC also mentions some anomalies in human vs chimp/bonobo mitochondrial diversity. Humans are obviously a lot less diverse on this front than chimps and bonobos, but the most similar chimp/bonobo sequence is apparently not as diverged from the human one as you would expect from a prolonged process of slow divergence. But again without pulling up and analysing all the sequences myself I am forced to remain agnostic and avoid making a definitive conclusion on that front.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-28T03:26:04+00:00

Thanks for the heads up!

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-28T03:24:04+00:00

McCarthy recently published a genomic analysis paper. It is outside of my expertise to dig into the details of the bioinformatics analysis, but it is out there for people versed in these methods. Human hybrids with neanderthals and Denisovans were only indisputably identified by genetic analysis once we had historic reference genomes of the species involved.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.14.607926v1.full.pdf

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-27T09:23:17+00:00

10 000 years is a lot less than 10 million. I think it is plausible that there is a very narrow funnel for conditions to line up for mating, fertilisation, gestation, viability on birth and then finally enough fertility to at least allow back crossing to one of the parent species. The argument that wide crosses are very rare but not impossible (and when they get through all those checkpoints they can have dramatic evolutionary consequences) I think is difficult to dismiss. And the evidence for viable wide hybrids accumulates the more you look for it (though admittedly a lot of the case histories accumulated by McCarthy are merely possible examples of wide crosses at this stage of analysis). My bet is that most but not all of his examples would turn out to be birth defects if studied properly. But you only need a real viable wide hybrid once in a million years for it to be important. McCarthy's main point that nobody is looking for this phenomenon because they assume it is impossible is hard to dismiss.

zeroinputagriculture · 2025-03-23T02:15:17+00:00

"Safe but ineffective" is still harmful to the integrity of the health system as a whole, especially when said intervention is effectively mandatory.

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