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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Outer Wilds might not work well if you play sporadically, I think a big part of the joy is piecing together everything you’ve seen and grasping the connections and bigger picture… But who knows.

    Mindustry might work well though, it’s much simpler on the factory mechanics, but ties them into tower defense and RTS, needing to supply towers with ammo, and later supply factories with the right materials to create units. It’s FOSS, available for free from some official sources. And importantly, sectors are mostly isolated, meaning you can take it one mission at a time, bringing a few resources to kickstart things and building a new setup every time.

    Also, hard read on the tycoon games, I love playing OpenTTD with friends, though I lament the lack of something better than cargo distribution to require us to provide supply to the actual demand (as opposed to being paid to shunt passengers/cargo to the most convenient location). That said, I never really did any calculations in that, especially since supply and demand can change rather dynamically.


  • It’s not being made “as painful as possible”, it’s just manual. Arch isn’t a distro that’ll preconfigure things for you so everything’s plug’n’play, it’s a distro that’ll give you access to everything and the power to use it however you like, but with that comes the expectation and responsibility to manage those things.

    Installing arch manually is simply a good lesson in how your system is set up, what parts it’s made up of, in part because you’re free to remove and switch out those parts.

    And sure, there’s no magic bullet to make sure a new user understands everything they did, but I think in the end, if you’re not willing to read, learn and troubleshoot, you might just want a different distro.


  • I haven’t properly tried satisfactory, I tried the demo back when that first came out, was asked to run around collecting leaves to put into a power generator for half an hour, and bricked my game trying to put it into borderless or something… And then I switched to Linux, the game was epic exclusive despite promises otherwise, and I passed.

    I got the impression it’s got a tedious early game, having a prebuilt map might make replaying less fun, and it sadly seems to have a very point-to-point, purpose-specific-device approach to logistics. I also like the performance of Factorio, it’s really lightweight on the GPU, and well optimized for CPU (though with the entire map and tons of individual entities loaded at all times there’s only so much you can do), which I imagine isn’t as great for the modern 3D game Satisfactory is.

    I don’t want to rant too much about it, but I think the splitter taking in and outputting two belts in Factorio is brilliant. There’s only a few types of logistics, but they are versatile and nuanced. Being able to belt items onto the side of an underground belt lets you filter out belts by side, the mechanics of belt sides and how they interact with inserters let you create compact designs or maximize throughput if you spend time on it. There’s no dedicated buffer machine, no separate splitters and mergers, all the neat things you can build come together out of component parts in an organic way.

    I will also mention that I like to try to plan ahead specifically to avoid starting over, but when rebuilding is necessary (and when laying a rail network) robots are a must-have.

    On the topic of the DLC… If you’re not drawn into the base game, might be best to pass on it, but they did a good job giving each planet some interesting unique challenges, including organic items that spoil after a certain amount of time. There’s plenty of straight content expansion mods, big and popular ones, but they mixed up the gameplay quite a bit in Space Age.

    All in all… Yeah, different people, different tastes. I’m currently doing a second playthrough of Space Age with friends, but one of them might’ve been felled by Gleba. If you want some more unsolicited gaming takes, I can recommend Mindustry and Outer Wilds ;D


  • it’s also very shallow

    You take that back!

    In all seriousness, if you’re talking about something like the fact that all machines are functionally doing the same thing, that’s kinda fair, but there’s a lot of complexity in all the options available, made even greater with DLC and mods. Just the logistics of getting items to the right places have many different approaches with various upsides and downsides, and I love all the emergent mechanics that come from belts having two sides and splitters handling two belts.

    It’s not a game for everyone, but calling Factorio shallow seems really odd. If anything, I feel like it allows you to explore its mechanics deeply, instead of having a breadth of shallow mechanics that don’t leave anything to be discovered.