“When You’re About To Sneeze, But Don’t Want To Sneeze Like A Kitten In Front Of Your Crush”

I spent so long scouring the map looking for this dwarf... Turns out they got crushed by the trade post airlock bridges somehow... it was a ONE TILE BRIDGE. Explains why I couldn't find a corpse. I just decided to pretend they never existed for all dwarves that just disappear without a corpse after this. Just waiting to see if a ghost shows up to confirm they existed.

The whole team standing in front of an Adrien billboard

Factorio Space Age: Gleba

Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.

Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.

-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters

There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).

So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.

Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)

As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.

Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.

-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad

From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.

So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.

But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.

However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.

So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.

-Spore efficiency maximization

One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).

Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.

Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.

Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.

Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)

How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)

-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”

This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.

Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)

So I added a cipher to VFD

So the story called VFD actually needed an end cipher to it, and since I forgot it, here it is:

Omht xdt fv jsh ytrm hojxhn, fqjykzw gjtu juhix.

So happy solving. Or if you’re lazy here’s the key:

VFD

Not cool dude, but I understand, it was a hard key.

I’m “Tax Fraud” and I’m “a threat to national security” and we’re

As a college student in computer science, fuck generative AI. I’ve watched it suck the brains right out of peers, to the point they’re incapable of doing basic tasks. It’s mindnumbingly frustrating to be explaining something to them, just to get a “Oh let me just ask ChatGPT”. Like… if you didn’t get the explanation I JUST gave you, just tell me what part! I was teaching them how to set up a unity project for our SENIOR PROJECT, they said “I’m just going to ask ChatGPT,” and then did, in front of me. And then, ChatGPT gave them the wrong answer, and I had to correct them AND the AI and restate my original point. And this was for the install process for modules… I’d even linked the manual for it

Hey, you reblogged that AI post and I was surprised to see something so mean on your blog. "If you cant write unassisted, fuck you, youre a disgrace to the community." Is that really something you want on your blog?

Just in case this isn't a spam message:

Posting AI-generated content to a platform intended to be an archive for writers is not appropriate use of the platform. On a platform intended for human creation, it is rude and inappropriate to clog search results with AI-produced content which often plagiarizes the work of human authors.

Use of generative AI is also horrible for our environment, leading to massive waste of fossil fuel energy and water. We should not be doing damage to our planet for the sake of generating (robot-produced, often plagiarized) fiction, especially when the joy of fiction comes from the creation and emotion of real people.

Rather than giving a prompt to a generative AI, people should consider attempting to write their own work, or asking another writer from the fandom if they would be interested in writing it. Anyone who is capable of typing a prompt into ChatGPT is capable of writing a story. The first attempts may not be amazing, but that is true of any skill, and anyone can improve with time and practice - and while ChatGPT may give you big returns in your time, it doesn't give you practice, growth, or creativity, which is where the joy of writing should come from.

The Video Facial Discussion

Dib sat in front of his computer. He checked the time again, 3:37 PM, or 15:37 as they insisted upon measuring it. Honestly Dib actually did kind of prefer using military time as a system of measurement. It did result in notably less confusion than the standard everyone else went by. It helped to further reduce confusion when you worked the same hours that Dib did. In fact over the past week, Dib had spent arguably just as much time awake at night, as he did during the day, perhaps even more. He felt close to a breakthrough, though he wasn’t exactly sure on what. Regardless the time had come for another one of his progress reports, or “Verifiable Factual Debriefings” as they insisted upon calling it. Honestly he never quite understood all of the insistance of this repetition of these acronyms. Everywhere he seemed to look it was “VFD” this, “VFD” that. If they could figure out some way of phrasing it as a VFD they did. He honestly didn’t understand why they couldn’t just call it a video-conference or something. If anything, at this point the insistence on the VFD was more debilitating than anything else.

Regardless of his thoughts on their over reliance of the same acronym, they were due to call him in exactly 5 minutes. He wasn’t to get on the frequency earlier than 15:42. Well in 3 minutes now. He supposed that time could really get ahead of him when he wasn’t thinking about it. In fact it seemed like 2011 had just been a bust year for him. Dib hadn’t unrooted anything major conspiracy-wise, He hadn’t tracked down anything supernatural that was out of place or dangerous, and he hadn’t unveiled any secret plots by their enemies or even found any of their hiding allies. All in all, 2011 had been quite the terrible year for Dib. He still was no closer to unraveling the murders of the early 2000′s, or even finding out what happened to Zim.

He checked the time again, 15:41. He supposed he didn’t really have much time left to wonder about where Zim went uninterrupted. It wouldn’t be long before he had to get on the channel to discuss his progress with his superiors. And it was 15:42 right now, and just like that as he joined the channel the entire group of his superiors, all six of them appeared onscreen. Except that they didn’t really. All he could see, just like always, was their faces covered entirely in shadow. It was never any different.

“Agent Mothman. What is your status?”

It was technically the lead in rank asking him. He was always the first to ask, and it was always this exact same question. Dib knew best that he had to respond. “I haven’t found anything particularly new, revealing, or dangerous during my work here.”

Another voice spoke up,“Jeez then what did you even find Dib?”

This voice Dib actually recognized as his own sister Gaz’s voice. He could see her silhouette on his screen as well. It’d been a while since they’d been together in person, Dib wanted to say about 7 years or so, and her hairstyle hadn’t changed much in that time. “Like you’re one to talk Gaz. I’ve never seen you pull your attention away from a videogame long enough to make your own discovery.”

“Mothman. These attacks against your sister aren’t appreciated. You know exactly why she isn’t assigned to fieldwork like you are.”

Did mulled this over, it was about the 15th time they’d told him this in this year alone. Gaz was found unsuitable for fieldwork because she simply didn’t care enough to be out in the field in the first place. Instead they sorted her into the higher ranks with the idea that she’d be better in those positions because she wouldn’t have to actually do much. Then if anyone tried to pull her away from what she was doing, then she’d show them her scary side. He supposed this tactic worked well though.

“Mothman. Why are you even still out there?”

This came from the third voice, yet another man’s. Dib didn’t particularly like this man. In fact of his six supervisors, Dib only particularly like two of them, and they’d been rather quiet this time. Dib would have to admit though, he did know them best of all his supervisors, excluding his sister, though that relationship wasn’t exactly a good one. Gaz only really tolerated his existence at best. Those two however, in fact funnily enough they were married as well, he felt were they only people above him who respected him. In addition, they were pretty much some of the only surviving members from when he originally joined who hadn’t gone crazy, missing, evil, dead, or all four. Though his current leader was technically one of those.

“I’m on to something big here. Just give me a little bit more time.”

There was an audible sigh from the fourth voice, one of the supervisors he actually liked. “Dib, you’ve been searching here for the past 8 months. What really makes you think that this ninth month will be so much better?”

“It’s got to be, I can feel just how close I am to this one.”

It was time for her husband to speak up this time, “Look Dib, in all honesty it’s been really quiet here for a long time. We haven’t had any major incidents since” ----sssshcckck

At this point Dib’s screen went to static, and after fiddling around with the machinery for a bit he got the signal back. At this point most of the members just nodded at his return, assuming he more or less understood where the conversation had been going. Dib then held up a small rectangular box with a black screen and held it in view of the camera. “Why don’t we use these anymore? They are way more reliable than using the internet, and they’re more secure as well.”

It was the first guy again this time: “Agent Mothman, we no longer use the Farnsworth devices since the understanding of them was lost. Without agents able to replicate them, we can’t use them unless all members were able to have access to one. Since only a limited number of them were ever produced, as well as the fact that several of them have fallen into enemy hands as well, just serves to make them highly impractical overall.”

“Well Mothman. Do you actually have anything important to tell us or has this entire checkup been a waste of our time?”

It was the sixth of his superiors. Dib hated this one almost as much as he hated the first one. He never had anything nice to say to him, though none of them really did excluding the couple, and he always said it in such a cruel tone too.

“You guys were the one to assign me this checkup in the first place you know. And no, I haven’t found anything important enough to report back either.”

It was the same man who replied this time: “Well then Agent Mothman this call is over. And there won’t be anymore in the future unless we decide that we actually have a use for an agent as useless as you, because from this point on, your on your own.”

With that there were four clicks and everyone except the couple hung up on him. “What, Wait! You guys can’t just leave me like this! Man, I really hate that guy.”

Another sigh from the woman and then she spoke up: “Dib you know you can’t say that about your superiors.”

“I know, but he can really be such a jerk sometimes.”

It was the man this time: “Dib you can’t let him bother you. You have to be a professional agent. They debated just outright calling you back in and leaving you as a teacher of the new recruits.”

“I’m trying the best I can! You know exactly how powerful our enemies are and just how good they are at hiding. We wouldn’t even have the membership problems that we do have if they weren’t this good!”

“Dib what did I just say about being professional. I know that you’re a new agent, and me and my wife have been plenty patient with you and your progress. Unfortunately the council has not been, and you’re lucky that we managed to convince them to just let you go off on your own. And that wasn’t an easy argument to win either. Consider your freedom from the council, as well as your new freedom to investigate this as you see fit an early Christmas gift from us.”

“But I don’t have access to any of our equipment or resources anymore. Who am I even supposed to contact in the event I actually discover anything!?”

It was the woman who answered him this time. “Us. You know exactly how to contact us, in addition to where we live. If you find anything that you think needs to be reported, then call us.”

“Thank you. Are your kids going to get involved with the organization anytime soon?”

The two answered together with a firm “No.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, I’m just saying that I wasn’t much older than your kids are now when I first started in VFD. And they are going to join eventually. It’s kind of fate at this point to join VFD. I mean they could join alongside you guys now, it’d be more or less the best experience they could get.”

The woman sighed again before she answered. “Look Dib, I get that Dipper and Mabel are old enough to join, and we really do want them to. We just want them to do that when they are ready to join. We don’t want to just rush them right into. Anyways we have to go now. Bye Dib.”

With that the conference ended with a final click. Well he’d just been fired, and he was left with only two real contacts left. He couldn’t even call his sister since she insisted he didn’t know her number, since after all “Being your supervisor is bad enough already Dib.”

Since he no longer worked for VFD truly he didn’t have to worry about any of their restrictions they’d given him impede him. Without these restrictions he could finally go where all of his investigations seemed to point him. “Well it looks like I’m headed to Gravity Falls, Oregon now.”

Omht xdt fv jsh ytrm hojxhn, fqjykzw gjtu juhix.

The Video Facial Discussion

Dib sat in front of his computer. He checked the time again, 3:37 PM, or 15:37 as they insisted upon measuring it. Honestly Dib actually did kind of prefer using military time as a system of measurement. It did result in notably less confusion than the standard everyone else went by. It helped to further reduce confusion when you worked the same hours that Dib did. In fact over the past week, Dib had spent arguably just as much time awake at night, as he did during the day, perhaps even more. He felt close to a breakthrough, though he wasn’t exactly sure on what. Regardless the time had come for another one of his progress reports, or “Verifiable Factual Debriefings” as they insisted upon calling it. Honestly he never quite understood all of the insistance of this repetition of these acronyms. Everywhere he seemed to look it was “VFD” this, “VFD” that. If they could figure out some way of phrasing it as a VFD they did. He honestly didn’t understand why they couldn’t just call it a video-conference or something. If anything, at this point the insistence on the VFD was more debilitating than anything else.

Keep reading

the IRONY of this being one of the only books they'll put on a fucken shelf

oh

and a coat.

Here’s a thing I like about the train.

It seems like it comes to people who are looking to escape their lives in extreme ways. And it puts you through trials and simulations apparently meant to help you get the personal growth you need to return to your life, which is fairly positive.

And yet. Time doesn’t pass any differently on the train than it does in the normal world. So it’ll help you through your character arc, but if you don’t or can’t learn a lesson you’re stuck there. You could live out your entire life and die there on the train. Or finally crack it and return forty years later, your youth gone, the world changed and with everyone who ever knew you sure you’re dead.

Loving that creepy mixture of benevolence and indifference, mmm-hmm.