Now That Atlas Is A Thing

I made my first mod for dwarf fortress, which adds asbestos that is weavable into cloth and i got this lovely comment

“When you’re about to sneeze, but don’t want to sneeze like a kitten in front of your crush”

INTRODUCING: DIPPER THE CUTE PATOOT

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.

Honestly this works for every ship that isn’t Allurance

VLD season 8 in a nutshell, everyone

Idenbebmal

Granite 15th, 500 We've arrived at Paddleglens to establish our outpost, and I'm... pleased with the surroundings. The hills are decent, as we've settled along the foothills of our home mountain range. We've got dolomite, chalk and mudstone exposed along the surface of our new home. In addition we've got a decent supply of trees along our northern area, though much of our new outpost lacks any greenery along the southern portion. It's all a rolling grass plain around the river. The river itself is a small thing, barely deep enough to provoke a risk of drowning. I'm happy to report one of the hills is decently large and tall to support our initial outpost and I've begun laying out our plans to delve into the hill to carve out our lodgings. I've already begun to plan how to carve secure entrances on the hill for access to the fort for ourselves, traders, and potential invaders. We look to have a bright future ahead of ourselves... though my cohorts have admitted their skills are... lackluster in many of the departments we will need. We have no miners, woodcutters, or farmers. Just 2 bards, a noble, a carpenter, a soldier, and a cook. One of the bards is a fisherdwarf at least, and before I could talk with them, they were already running to the river... As for the other bard, they have skill with thread, but in the meantime, I've set them to work with an axe. Our cook likewise has been given an axe and set to work, and the pickaxes were given to our noble and soldier.

Granite 17th, 500 First major incident in the fort... one of our bards got into a tussle with a kingsnake. Both seemed to have run away mostly fine, but I admit this is not a promising beginning.

Felsite 4th, 500 Wow, Slate just blew right past huh. We've begun to carve out our lodgings and such out for our initial home. We've established offices for our nobility, and I've begun work as a manager. Our lone soldier is operating as the town sheriff, and the last noble should be sitting down to count all our stocks any day now. Without a mason of any kind, we're relying on our carpenter for most of our furniture right now. Tables, chairs, beds, doors and blocks. I'd prefer stone blocks for our workshops, but we're going to have to make due with birch blocks. The little stone we have that isn't economic stone is going to have to be saved for building some furnaces and such, in case one of the other leaders needs them before we reach magma. Regardless, on this fine day, I'm optimistic for where we're heading.

Galena 3rd, 500 We got our first batch of immigrants in! Two miners, a glazer, an administrator, and 2 peasants. The miners and glazers are both ironically better administrators than the noble, so the glazer's got the job as our broker now, taking that responsibility off me. The miners will join those we'd been having mine prior. The peasants & admin are going to work our fields for now. As well we're putting one of them to work as our stonemason for the time being.

Limestone 1st, 500 Well Autumn has come, and I feel rather poor on the outpost's condition. We have an internal storage area, but so little has been carved out from what I planned, and the outpost liaison will be here soon. I fear we have little impressive here, and while I sent one of the miners off to begin an exploratory delve below us, we have yet to find much aside from a small amount of cassiterite.

Limestone 13th, 500 I don't know what the next leader is going to want, so I'm requesting imports of materials we either don't currently have, or may not have at all. A few stones, copper bars and ore, as well as some crops, as it might be a nice supplement. I don't care if they buy what I asked to import, but I will try to produce the exports asked, which are primarily amulets and scepters. For my remaining time as the head of our fort, I'm going to be trying to set up some manufacturing of those goods, so we might have something to sell next autumn.

Sandstone 20th, 500 Well we got our final migrant wave this year, I'm pleased about that. Trading could have gone better, and in the mean time, I've sent our miners to go prospecting for gems along the hillsides. Our cook has made his first masterpiece, and I don't know if I should be concerned or not. I think he got inspired by the rumor of planepacked, and decided to planeroast some apples. He's shoved so many different ingredients into his apple roast, I suspect he actually was just grabbing individual apples and shoving them in. He put in almost every piece of fruit we had lying around, considering he made 255 servings of the thing. Why he decided to do this AFTER the traders left, I'll never know. I guess he wanted to eat his roast all by himself, but I could have bought some real nice flour and dyes with that kind of money...

Granite 1st, 501 Well... the years over. I managed to delve deep enough to get us some gold with some prospective mining to the west. I smelted the gold and had a set of coins forged to celebrate our first year. 500 gold coins, minted by our cook funnily enough. He chose to put a rendition of The Tin Rock, a finely designed image of a jug on one side, and an image of a millstone on the back. I'd also set up connecting our trading depot by tunnel to our lodgings, and carving a more defensive entrance into our outpost. I'd used the rock we had from mining to get our mechanics to work making mechanisms and set out to build as many rock fall traps as I could on a zig-zagging little path. Likewise, I had a bowyer make us 10 crossbows to get us started defensively. I know metal would be superior, but we don't have any military grade metal to work with at the moment. I'd also managed to set up some production of trade goods like goblets and amulets. Hopefully whoever follows me can find some metal we can use to create a few weapons to wield, otherwise we're limited to the wooden crossbows, and a bronze sword I bought off the caravan...

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)

Shooting The Star

Rating: T+

Characters: Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines, Bill Cipher

Word count: 1,604

Summary: An AU taking place in Take Back The Falls where Bill really does kill Mabel. Watch out because I made sure to make this INCREDIBLY feelsy.

AO3 version

Keep reading

Forget the question of...

"is Azula truly evil?"

"Is she sympathetic?"

And focus on...

"is she compelling?"

"Is she well-written?"

I can add a small bit of info on her. I believe she’s lived in my fort since 106-107, but I’m not exactly sure, I’ll try to crack open legends later to search for her & Kulet later. I’m pretty sure the 2 other older kids are also born in the fort?

As for the small potrait/fort sprites, in my experience DF Premium only generates a dwarf sprite for a creature if it visits one of your forts or is encountered in adventure mode. In my experience I can’t say I’ve seen a creature in adventure mode and then checked them in a fort without them being there, like a relative. As far as I know all my “living relatives” for my dwarfs that have sprites all migrate with them.

Ustuth has a few relatives and such that are historical figures without sprites, and I’ve never seen a creature in fort mode that wasn’t a historical figure, only in Adventure Mode have I encountered non-historical figures with sprites. Presumably because all figures at a Fort automatically get names in case you click them and therefore are saved as historical figures

Did you find your missing baby?

Not yet. Kulet is still missing. I admit my schedule has been rough for playing DF as of recent, and my most recent time has been spent on a new fort (The Sea Adventure, a Sinister Ocean/coastal embark). Kulet is from my 4th Fort (Idk the name it was too long). Short summary of my forts though:

1st Fort, Bustmoment: -Tutorial embark. Went fine initially, set up large bedroom complex, good dining hall, and food/alcohol production. Decent traps for surface entrance. Lack of understanding of how Fortifications work lead to bad usage of them, and ultimately made the surface defenses scary to operate. Meanwhile I breached the first cavern layer and only the first, and got involved in a nasty war on Olm people, that kept dragging my dwarves into the lake. Eventually after losing a major military engagement, I dropped the save and made a new world. (I didn't know about Retirement at the time)

2nd Fort, Steelfortress: -The infamous war on birds started here. Embark was a neutral badlands with high savagery & a light aquifer. Aquifer posed no challenge and I was within a year having settled with all three caverns pierced, and a decent magma forge set up. Traps and such were more aggressively deployed, and there were more than a few battles (Internally referred to as the "Great Cavern Wars" against Ant-People) to carve out certain areas underground for farming. Ultimately what drove me to abandon this fort was a 9 month long battle against giant flying agitated wildlife. During that I built up a decently large and armored military, which while incapable of fending off the birds, was apparently itching for World Domination. (More on that later. Though also on another post of mine)

3rd Fort, "Lake of Something" (Name forgotten again): -Having felt a High Savagery was too much & Light aquifers too easy, I searched for a heavy aquifer and got a lake location I liked. After starting the first year, and trying to dig down, I almost immediately hit the heavy aquifer and got stuck for over a year trying to get things stable, and set up a method to pierce the aquifer before beginning to build the fort proper. Unlike the previous forts which had surface trading depots, I decided to move this one underground. Like other forts before and after, I then began to quickly dig towards the bottom, and set up small areas within each cavern to work in, or blocked them off after discovering them. Ultimately nothing particularly notable happened that sticks out in memory, but the fort was ultimately abandoned due to the Cave Adaptation fix update rolling around. Knowing most dwarves had likely developed it in this fort, I decided to take a break from Fortress mode, and play some Adventure mode.

(Which I decided to retire my second fort, as my save of it was in the worst condition of the three, and I originally wanted to retire the fort by "Succumbing to internal invaders" or similar but a standard retirement was an option and I viewed as more desirable)

4th Fort, Desert Mines of Good (or something): -After playing around in Adventure Mode in the 2nd fort's world, I got an itch to start a new fort again, and was talking with my brother. We ultimately came to pick a fort in a Good and Neutral biome cross between "Desert?", badlands and Grasslands. Among world history, as it shares a previous fort, I decided to embark from that Civ again. Just to find out when the Liason came by, that 2 of my 3 dwarven neighbors were at war with me. Going through Legends mode further told me it was my Civ that seemed to have started the war, with all attacks coming from my prior fortress after I retired it. The whole time I was trying to rescue kidnapped children from Goblins in Adventure Mode, it turns out my fort was just attacking EVERYBODY. I played this one until around 1-2 weeks ago, when I began wanting to try messing with some mods for the first time.

4.5th fort, Some volcano Fort I think?: -I had a friend over and I was talking about DF, as you do, and he got curious about the game and wanted to see what it was like. So I booted the game up, showed world gen, we picked an embark, and then retired it to go to it in Adventure Mode. We then made an ideal character for him, and then foolishly rolled up a Worm Man with over 100 pet worms, and crashed the game. I haven't talked with said friend yet, and was gonna play in that world when talking with them.

5th Fort, The Sea Adventure: -That leaves us with our current fort. It's a sinister oceanic embark, and I brought a few adventurers there, including a Dwarf-me, a dwarf-version of my brother, and an anomalocaris (one of the mods) woman of one of my roommates (And their cat as a pet cat, who died to Goblins). Originally the plan was to grow Sliver Barbs & catch Precambrian Arthropods for an aquarium, but I don't know how to do the later half. The Roc attacks have been on this fort.

OH!

I WAS WONDERING WHAT WAS CAUSING THIS. THANKS DFHACK FOR THE ANSWER