Too Long For A Reply, But I Hope You Don’t Mind The Answer To It:

Plance shippers don’t say “I love you" they say "don’t you touch her” and I think that’s beautiful.

*re-reads my own story*: Damn this is some good shit

*gets to the part where I stopped writing*: WTF WHERE'S THE REST OF IT HOW DO I GET MORE

Brain: You're the author, if you want more you have to write it

Me: *flips tables*

That sure is a .

Honestly this works for every ship that isn’t Allurance

VLD season 8 in a nutshell, everyone

Winter for a Pine Tree

Disclaimer: Hey this gets dark real fast (0 to 60) and was written primarily to “Balance out the forces of the universe” After a friend of mine took a join project I’d been involved in and taken it off the rails into Wendip Territory (The stories ended up splitting into 2 stories written by two authors each instead of 1 story by 4). Anyways to balance out the force of the universe (and yes, I’m looking at you Graviti and Futur) I wrote this.

It gets dark so I tagged it as Depravity Falls, and spoiler alert, it involves death. So you’ve been forewarned.

It had been three days since Dipper had last seen anyone in his family. The thought was still fresh in his mind as he hollered into his walkie talkie hoping for Mabel to respond. It had also been three days since he’d last eaten as his stomach was reminding him. And well somewhere nearby he could hear some of Bill’s monsters roaming around, possibly planning on eating him. Unfortunately for Dipper, he quickly recognized the creatures coming up behind him as eyebats. With them coming from behind him, his only option was to exit the alley he’d been hiding in and hope that there was a shelter he could hide in elsewhere.

Dipper made a break for it, and saw on the other side of the street the Gravity Falls mall, which fortunately was an indoor mall, so that’d likely slow down the eyebats. After a quick dash across the street, and having to ignore a very annoying monster, Dipper made it inside the mall without being eaten or turned to stone. The mall looked terrible, there was a huge hole in the skylight, the whole place had graffiti everywhere, and the carts, tables, and chairs were all over the place. Everything looked so ruined and abandoned. Except for a single table with a plate of nachos sitting on it under a working light.

Oh thank god Dipper thought, it felt like weeks since he’d last eaten, even if it’d only been a few days. Dipper forgot about almost everything as he ran towards those nachos in complete bliss over being able to eat again. He ran over and grabbed the nachos off the table. Then he noticed the wire that got pulled with the nachos. He didn’t even have to time to scream before he saw the shotgun fire.

The gun had been aimed to hit an adult in the lower crotch to upper leg area. Wendy had figured when she set it up it’d stop just about any attempted bandit or thug from getting to her, and teach them a good lesson too, hopefully without killing the target either. However Dipper was decidedly not the height of the average adult and had instead been shot right in the chest. He screamed out in pain as the power of the blast knocked him of his feet to the floor. He knew right away that regardless of what happened next, he couldn’t survive this. Even before weirdmaggedon his injury was enough to be fatal.

He heard footsteps run into the room and saw none other than Wendy run into the room. Dipper’s head was still ringing from the blast, and he couldn’t clearly hear what she was saying as she entered. She seemed to look pissed, was probably screaming, and had a crossbow drawn in her hand. He then saw as her anger quickly turned to confusion and then horror upon seeing him lying there. Wendy ran over to him obviously upset over something, but Dipper couldn’t make out the words. She was sobbing as she picked him up. The whole world was beginning to get fuzzy, and the pain was beginning to lessen. Dipper was beginning to feel really warm. Really warm and comfortable. Before he lost consciousness, he heard what Wendy was saying to him “I’m sorry Dipper. I’m so sorry.”

Dipper lay there and his last thoughts churned away at those words. He couldn’t make sense of what they meant. What was she sorry for? He really couldn’t remember anymore. His eyes felt heavy but he never built up the strength to close them. Wendy watched as the last signs of life left Dipper’s eyes.

Please tell I’m not the only one who instantly thought of this

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)

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.