Retro

Got talking with my tiki advisor and newly excited for that novel. So many basic questions to solve yet. Take world-building. What kind of world am I after? What kind of world-building am I using (that is, how much of the Gernsbakian explain-the-tech stuff is appropriate for the style I'm after)? How much world-building at all?

I mean, I don't even know if there are aliens.

Minor work on my personal tiki shrine -- aka, things I can have around me while I write. Found a nifty (plastic, but it looks okay) mp3 player shaped like an old transistor radio. Have tiki mugs. Thinking rattan mats...maybe even a palm.

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Also retro is the new LORA I tried out in my SD install. Broke Automatic111 again (which is good) but finding it easier and easier to do a clean re-install so it is working again (which is bad). I'm only doing stuff for my own amusement and all I need in my life is another time sink.

But anyhow. I'd been bookmarking some "look like an illustration" LORA but not using them because I didn't quite see the point. Now I do. There's an unreality about AI creations which is rather off-putting. Well, turns out that making it look like an illustration and not a photograph eases past the worst of the Uncanny Valley. 

That, and this library is just really deep, and seems very good at interpreting. That could be the new model; tried out SDXL, now using a fork off that. It is much better at parsing prompts, though things like color words do have a tendency to go wild and spam over everything (the "man on a beach with a white shirt" problem).

I was having very little luck txt2img with the new LORA and was about to give up on it. See, most illustrations have story in them -- even if the "story" is just "proud engineer points at the new car." And I am all about story. Well, AI can only associate pixel patterns. That's one of the basic problems. There's no underlying logic outside of "this pixel pattern is often found near this pixel pattern" (which is why a wire will turn into a panel line half-way across a control panel, and vice-versa).

And there's no understanding of function, which is not just "the wire needs to be connected at both ends" (and not turn into a painted border in the middle), but the underlying logic to, say, a pose.

But it can inherit that given a proper reference. Turns out between the model and the LORA my local SD install has become really, really good at "reading" a source image and reconstructing what is actually going on. Well, things like humans holding swords or which part of a torch is actually on fire, it still has trouble with. But enough of the original logic of the source image is getting preserved that there is some decent mimicry of, well, story. 

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And speaking of time-sinks. Still feeling so lousy that Satisfactory is all I feel up for some days. My last video just reached 1K views and a bunch of likes, which is a huge surprise. I guess people like my aesthetic.

But I am contemplating another build, this time heavily modded and with most of the alternate play options switched on, like free materials and no spiders.

One of the mods allows you to replace your trains with more historical-looking ones. With that and a texture mod, could maybe perhaps do something that isn't modern brutalism-plus-neon (which is practically the default look for most of the extreme builders. Called by one of my video commenters "reminds me of Portal."

Moving Day

I am...not sure about the changes in Satisfactory 1.0

I know they play-tested the thing, but that was with a closed beta (unlike the Early Access through version 0.8) There are several things that radically change the paradigm -- and are possibly in need of more balancing than they saw.

One of the biggest crunches in pre-1.0 was getting yourself and building supplies around the map. The two major strategies were either a really good bidirectional network (so you could run out to a remote factory and stock up on some necessary part for the new build) or depots, whether centralized and massive, or more like the "construction shack" buildings I was making that produce locally all the parts you need to build your new factory.

Or simpler "plop" factories, which I've been using a lot in my latest play-through. These are one-blueprint compact things that you set down and leave churning away filling a storage container of basic things like concrete.

To really make a good construction site depot you needed to add facilities to handle trucks and/or trains. Which made the depots more elaborate. And that in a large sense is the greater purpose of the game. Basically, you finish the game in order to get an (in-game) coffee cup. So making things work efficiently, or look cool, or be impressively large (or all three) is the real purpose of play and the reason the game is so addicting.

Yeah, so that changed.

1.0 added the Dimensional Depot. Stock gets teleported from wherever you are manufacturing it, straight into your interdimensional pockets. You don't need to run across the map (much) because you are almost done installing lights in the new factory but ran out of quartz.

They can't be hooked into a production line, at least. So those complicated supply lines are still there for major manufacturing sites. For the process of new construction, though -- these have streamlined it to the point of making it completely different.

And dimensional depots change another paradigm -- when you include things like the way they nerfed the deliverables for Tier 5.

Used to be, you couldn't get past early game on hand-crafting and plopping down a single Manufacturer and a bunch of spaghetti conveyors as the absolute minimum to reach your deliverables and unlock the next technology tier.

Yeah, well that changed. You can skip the hassle of conveyor belts and trains and all of that just by physically dropping by your machines at intervals and refilling them out of your own interdimensional pockets. And that's not the worst. With the addition of Somersloops, you can sloop the parts (it is a two-for-one return for the same amount of supplies) and that brings the targets well within what you can do with a couple of machines and a few containers plopped down on the ground without walls or even a foundation under them.

Basically, most of the reason to build a factory at all just went away. I've unlocked ALL the tech now, and I've just started building anything actually nice looking.

Okay, there was a bit of scale involved. I'm getting better with blueprints and I used saved blueprints from the last game (including some mega-blueprints made with a mod that isn't even installed on the new save) that could create a fairly large factory without anything but hooking them up to power and raw ore.

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Other than that.

The desert start was a good one. I started this time right at the little oasis, which I carved up with a chainsaw and fed to a huge array of biomass converters for early-game power. Iron copper and coal are all over the place in that part of the world, and there's quartz sulfur and caterium not that far away.

Well, I'm finally at the point of the game where I have all the tech unlocked all the way to the end of the tech tree, all the Awesome shop unlocked, and all the key alternate recipes. And have (mostly with plop factories) enough supplies to build as much as I care to build.

I'm just...not quite as enthralled about building. The new multi-modal railroad system just doesn't look as nice as I'd hoped. And there's a few other odd changes, such as adding new fuels to the tier that mean you can keep expanding and altering your fuel generators and never go nuclear at all. 

And even drones. Used to be drones were restricted by having to use batteries, which were so hard to build you had to ship them (often using a second set of drones). Well, now the little guys will use local fuels. Ouch.

Oh, so here's my second video, messing around with the elaborate transit network I was talking about as a way to handle the personal logistics of a 0.8 build...