Video Games

Beer & Queso
804

This is why I love this game so much: there are so many ways to do things, you just have to make the leaps of logic. Here, a guy has a blueprint for a self-sustaining drone port that sits over a remote miner.

Late in the game, so many of the resources you need are in hard-to-get-to places where the chances of there being any infrastructure nearby is pretty much zero. So he designed a blueprint where a drone brings packaged fuel to run a generator and leaves with the mined resource. It just sits there - unconnected from everything - delivering the goods.

805

So today I found out that Liquid Biofuel is the best fuel for the jet pack. It burns slower and longer, which allows you to stay airborne longer and fly higher.

Liquid Biofuel is made, unsurprisingly, by taking solid biofuel and combining it with water. The only wrinkle is that it has to be packaged to use in the jet pack, which means you need plastic.

I wanted to check this out but, the thing is, I dismantled my biofuel plant as soon as I unlocked coal power because I wanted the space.

I had to start again from scratch. The production is pretty simple, and I set it up near my oil refineries so plastic was in ample supply. But you cannot fully automate biofuel production because it needs biomass made from leaves, wood and fungi, that can only be harvested by hand.

So there I was, scavenging for foliage like a fucking peasant. But the liquid biofuel is as advertised. Next new play through, I will make sure to locate my solid biofuel production in a place that’s convenient for it to be turned into packaged liquid later on in the game.

806

Can’t your run your jet pack on coal?

807

No. Weirdly, it will run on solid biofuel, but that’s only good for extended hops. You need a liquid fuel to get any kind of decent distance or height.

You can run trucks on coal, though. And you can run drones on processed nuclear waste, the downside being that any drone port that has a fuel store turns into a mini Chernobyl.

1 Like
808

That sounds like a problem for the snowflakes of tomorrow to deal with.

1 Like
809

You can make/buy radiation filters for your hazmat suit and stroll around with impunity.

810

I am in awe of people who can do this.

811

It’s going to be a long wait for GTA VI:

1 Like
812

Incredible visuals.

And that sounded like Steven Root in the opening scene.

813

Stephen Root confirmed on social media. I wonder if there will be any other notables on the cast list.

1 Like
814

The last GTA I played was maybe 3. Probably 20 years ago.

I might have to check that one out. Probably world need a new console though.

1 Like
815

Last one I played was Vice City. Having fallen in obsession with RDR2, I cannot wait to play another Rockstar open world game.

I imagine you’ll need a PS5 or equivalent X-Box. Now’s probably not the ideal time to get one, though.

1 Like
816

Yeah, no kidding.

Buy a console with a second mortgage.

1 Like
817

Until RDR, GTA had been my favorite, still a close second. I can’t wait for this new version, it looks like the loooong wait will be worth it.

1 Like
818

While I wait for Satisfactory 1.1 to come out of “experimental” (which should be in the next 2-3 weeks), I have been tinkering in my last play through. It’s completely pointless, but still satisfying to revisit factories and spruce them up a little. Much easier to do now that I am not concerned about a temporary cessation of production.

I have been trying out different ways to enclose machines and “decorate” factories. Like everything else in this game, practice makes perfect. For example, the simple act of putting a remote miner in a glass case of emotion helps me better understand how to put together walls and roofs, run power inside enclosed spaces and add lighting.

Lights, in particular, need a lot of space and have to have power. The alternative is to use display panels and crank the brightness up to 11, but these are not as controllable as lights which you can put onto a circuit with a control box that can change the settings for all of them at once (panels have to be configured individually).

One other feature I have yet to use in the game is the power switch. This is used to separate factories or segments of factories into individual power grids that can be shut off remotely from any switch on the same main grid. This level of power management allows you to shut down sub-grids if, say, you’re getting close to exceeding your power production and don’t want the grid to trip.

Even better, you can put sub-grids into priority groups, 1 - 8, such that in the event of power demand exceeding production, the system will shut down the lowest priority sub-grids first. Power production typically is not self-starting - you need power for start-up - so this allows you to keep the generating stations running in a situation that would otherwise have tripped the whole grid.

Restarting a worldwide grid is an absolute diabolical pain. If everything is connected openly, as soon as you re-start one power generating plant, everything will try to pull that power and it’ll trip again. So, without power switches, you have to travel your entire world disconnecting everything from the grid, then go station to station re-starting power production, and then go back around to reconnect the factories.

Luckily, I have so massively overbuilt my power production that I have not had to do this. But, next time, I am going to dive into the world of nuculer, and that is so complicated that I can see there being myriad ways that the plant will shut down.

Also last night I had a hankerin’ for some western action, so I booted up RDR2. I went to Van Horn just looking for a quiet drink, but some asshole picked a fight with me and now the entire town is dead. Not sorry.

819

Inspiration! Biomass is the only self-starting power in the game. If I set up each power generating plant with enough biomass capacity for a cold start, I should be able to remote start each station following a trip.

Biomass isn’t self-sustaining - you have to feed it wood and leaves by hand - but you can feed such from storage boxes. Biomass generators only kick in when they are needed, so storage boxes can be loaded with fuel and it will sit dormant until the station goes dark.

I’m going to need a biomass cold start blueprint…

inspiration x2! I don’t need a biomass cold start unit at every power station. I need one to cold start the coal-powered plant, and then I can use coal power to cold start the fuel generating plant and so on up the chain.

820

Satisfactory 1.1 is coming out of “experimental” on June 10.

If you have an inkling to play it, this would be a good time to start. There are numerous “quality of life” updates that will benefit all players and, even though newbies wouldn’t know any different, the game will be better than ever.

Meanwhile, I finally could no longer take seeing my basic steel parts factory - the oldest factory that I had not updated - so I updated it. It was a horrid mess with a fucked up logistics floor, ugly ramps and mostly just floating in mid-air. Also, it was hugely inefficient (mostly Mk 1 logistics which is all I had at the time) and pretty much zero redeeming features.

The only thing cool about it is that it is right by a sinkhole that was water at the bottom, which I had used to build a small coal-fired generating plant. The hole has resources nodes around it and some down inside it, and I wanted to keep these features.

I obliterated the entire plant, rebuilt the power station (with slightly more capacity now that I can milk more resources with upgraded equipment) and built out an entire new factory using “realistic” physics (i.e. no longer floating), cable-managed power distribution and everything interconnected with catwalks.

Screenshot20250527-10200400000
Screenshot20250527-102004000001920×471 123 KB

821

If you have an inkling to develop a heroin addiction….

3 Likes
822

The fact that I’m still fucking around with my old game making upgrades that serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever other to to scratch an itch, tells you all you need to know.

5yq7kl
5yq7kl1890×1063 153 KB

3 Likes
823

Case in point:

One other thing I did over the weekend was improve my rail network by double-stacking block signals coming out of intersections. This was a YT tip and it works because trains “look” two block signals down the tracks to see if things are clear; if they are not the train will slow down expecting to stop. If there’s a long run to the second signal leaving an intersection, and it’s not clear past the second signal, the train will slow down and be slow to clear the intersection. By double-stacking block signals immediately out of the intersection, the train will keep moving/accelerating through the intersection, clearing it for other traffic.

Well during my tinkering, I noticed that one of my late-game parts production lines was cold. This is completely irrelevant because the game is over, but still…

One part delivered by train was not coming in and that was tripping the whole line (welcome to Satisfactory trouble-shooting 101). I checked the source, and the train was stuck at the pick-up point, saying that there was a signal error. This meant that it could not self-drive the delivery route.

So I ran the entire route driving manually and the signal error persisted along the whole route. Other trains were leaving the same pick-up location and delivering to the late-game production factory, so it was something unique to this one line. It had to be the drop-off point because at no point along the route did the error clear.

And there it was: one of the block signals I had added going into the specific platform used by this train was placed on the left side of the rail. Why is this a problem? Because signals have to be placed on the right side of the track to which they apply. This simple error derailed an entire factory.

Why is this relevant here? Because in 1.1 it doesn’t matter which side of the track you attach a signal.