Logistics – Research

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This is an odd topic, so bear with me.

Logistic games function on the premise of making a factory grow. You generally start off hand mining some metal ore, and eventually build spaceships that shoot laser beams and ponies. There are steps to get from start to finish, and typically that comes through researching the next batch of things you can build. Conceptually, they all work the same way: construct a lot of basic things, put them in a kajigger, now you can make more complicated things.

The practical application differs between games though. Some games create intermediary products that are then processed, while others simply take the base items themselves. The former takes more planning as you need to build these products, especially if you need those intermediary products all the way to the end of the game. A key balancing piece is the ratio in that construction as well, some products are much more complicated than others. Some future research products need the first intermediary as well, creating exponential needs for products. Satisfactory has a system I personally don’t enjoy, as all research builds are temporary (best to put it in a box). Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program have a better system that scales to mega factories.

The next piece is the actual items that get unlocked, and their dependency. The worst case here is that you somehow research an item you can’t actually craft because you need to research something else first. Most games offset this risk by grouping unlocks, ensuring that if you unlock it, you have all the pieces available to craft it.

Factorio absolutely rocks this one, where if you unlock oil processing, you get everything you need to process oil. While I’m sure it’s possible, I have not ever found a situation where I unlocked a piece of research and was not in a situation to use it.

Satisfactory is middle ground of sorts, as the research packages unlock multiple items at once, and generally there are few of them. It’s generally well thought out so that you’ll only need to unlock one extra bit, reducing thumb twiddling time.

DSP is the worst case – you’ll have a dozen+ examples where you won’t have the dependency unlocked as typically you get one item per research. As a result, you get research paralysis, where you need to research a dozen items in order to get the actual product you want. Warpers a good example, where Particle Colliders are a pre-req. To build those, you need space structures, which are a completely different part of the tree with 4 extra steps of research. From yellow research to purple, the entire tree is filled with these cases, a balancing pass that hasn’t been done in years. This compounds if you have Dark Fog enabled, as the military buildings have their own dependencies. I get the design principle that each research step is unique and meaningful, but the fact remains that there are simply so many intermediary products and steps that it greatly diminishes the joy of meaningful progress.

The main issue with balancing the DSP tech tree is that you are limited in levers. If you group things together, you need to add the costs together, or you’ll just get them too fast. And let me tell you, when you get to green science, balancing research and productivity is not super simple. If you restructure the tree itself and build new (and proper) dependencies, you’ll end up with tiers, rather than a tree (closer to Satisfactory). If you truly wanted to balance it, you’d actually end up removing a ton of intermediary items, which means a near total re-balancing of all logistics, pretty much a new game at that point. And that’s without addressing the 6 super-not-obvious degree upgrades to even build a Dyson Sphere.

This is more a gripe about general game design than specific to DSP, and the concept of gradual reward for effort, while staying busy. I am fairly decent at logistics game, with a general eye for optimization. The ‘lulls’ in action felt here are more a result of smart early decisions by me, where instead of finding issues in hour 4, I solved them in minute 30. It’s a very weird balance where if you’re good at the game, there’s way less to do. If you’re so-so, then the time you’re spending fixing things is the time research ticks away. I’ll get into the reason why you can’t do much about this in a future post.

To sum, progress in these types of factory games is primarily gated through research. That system has it’s own balance of investment (resources & time) to feel meaningful. How you manage resources and time… well the factory must grow after all.

Dyson Sphere Program – Redux Redux

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DSP is, at a given point, a zen experience. Up until Dark Fog was introduced, there were very large stretches of simply waiting and enjoying the world around you. Especially when it came to the construction of the eponymous Dyson Sphere.

Dark Fog is an attempt at the PvE element found in Factorio. It adds a persistent threat that is relatively easy to defend on a planet’s surface and only supports brute force in space. There’s a passive research reward for participating, so you kind of want to set up a farm for it, which is surprisingly difficult to do. It also adds about 30% more ‘stuff’ with poor logistical intersections. I played it a few times, loved the early parts of it, and really didn’t enjoy the mid- to late- portions. There’s still no ETA on when the space portion will be complete, which would effectively make it 1.0 launch. Until then, Dark Fog is disabled in all my playthroughs.

Which is a weird thing, as it actually reverts the gameplay back a significant amount. From late blue science to early yellow, you’re just sitting and waiting as the research itself takes a while to complete. You can certainly add more research buildings, and fill your planet with wind turbines to offset the power requirements. There’s no real elegant option for power until after yellow. Thankfully this period isn’t complex.

I will note that there are some fascinating design decisions here that differ from Factorio, while trying to adhere to the spirit of it all.

  • You pre-fab buildings. If you ignore the combat buildings, generally the types of buildings correspond to the work they do. Very similar to Factorio here. Wildly different than Satisfactory. I much perfer this model.
  • Belts are everywhere. You need inserters. You can stack on belts (eventually). You can’t reliably add two items to a belt, but you can ‘pull/push’ from 3 belts away. Has some minor design implications later.
  • The game is 3D and belts can go up and down. This works really well in theory and in practice. Gone are the Satisfactory clipping issues.
  • A main bus is still the simplest way to build pretty much anything up until mid-game, and even then it’s worth keeping. The bus takes a decent chunk of space given the intermediary items you need to pass through. Some items are used once, but in high volumes. More on mega bases in a bit. This is the model I use for all logistics games, and it works relatively well here.
  • The world itself is grid based, each on a sphere. You can only place items on the grid, and depending on which part of the sphere you’re on, things may or may not fit. This is a cool math problem, but it also means that blueprints are a pain as they only fit in specific locations. A Factorio or Satisfactory ‘grid’ blueprint doesn’t apply here. This is actually a great distinguishing feature for DSP.
  • There are no pipes or fluid mechanics of note. No pressure. No head lift. Glorious!
  • Research has an intermediary step, associated to colors and technology levels. The net benefit here is that you can easily see where research bottlenecks are present, can dedicate areas to their construction, and focus productivity benefits. I personally prefer Factorio’s modular builds for research, though this is certainly an option for late game SPM.

Automated Logistics

This deserves its own section, as there are some nuances here that are really not obvious. It’s a weird system.

There are 4 types of automated logistics

  • Local: These operate as a sort of bot system from Factorio, where you apply a piece on a storage unit, then put in some bots, and connect it to a local network. The throughput is ‘ok’, and primarily meant to keep your inventory up to date, as well as move infrequently-used items around a planet in small volumes. These are exceptionally useful, though also quite simplistic. Also, you need to research 5 levels of distance to cover the entire planet.
  • Planetary: This has shuttles that transport stuff across your planet. 50 drones, 4 types of things. Can connect to other Planetary stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. I cannot for the life of me find any use for this. This would only be useful if it could contain more types of things.
  • Interstellar. This has shuttles that transport stuff across all planets. 10 shuttles, 100 drones, 5 types of things. Connects to all other stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. Can set groups, priorities, queues, volumes. These are the lifeblood of any mid/late factory.
  • Gas. These harvest gas from, well, gas giants. Connects to Interplanetary stations, can put 20 per gas giant. You want these.

So the Local portion is primarily used on a main bus, so that you can get all the pre-fab buildings going. No real use outside of that as they can’t manage volume.

Interstellar… eventually you get rate limited, as the storage limits are too low. You are presented with 2 options here. Create sub factories on other planets and only ship end products (core of mega basing), or you create a hub/spoke model where you have 3 or 4 stations collecting across the galaxy that are pulled down for local distribution (the step before mega bases). Creating groups of stations allows for targeted distribution models, so you can (and should) have a dozen stations holding Titanium bars in order to support a massive factory.

Mega Basing

The definition here varies, but generally you’re looking at over 500 SPM to be considered in this space. Just getting here requires a decent throughput of Artifical Stars in order to power the whole thing. You reach a point where a single planet can no longer fully support the construction requirements to build research items. Instead, you’ll have factory planets that focus on a single type of research, with dedicated construction channels on a single output. That’s likely 5 planets, and a final one where you have your Dyson Sphere (as you need material generated from it).

Interestingly, nearly all the updates over the past 2 years have focused on mega base optimization. Multi-threading, CPU and GPU optimization, pilers, throughput monitoring, and a slew of other bits. Prior to these items, getting 1000 SPM meant frame rates under 10. Now, you can build multiple Dyson Spheres and ridiculously large factories across multiple solar systems.

Moving Forward

There are still no dates for the next content update, which will include vehicles and space combat. Game optimization is pretty much at the max right now, at least in ways appreciated by the wide majority of players. It is without question a better game today than it was a year or two ago. Factorio remains the gold standard, but DSP is the next in line under the concept of ‘the factory must grow’. Fingers crossed we can get a date for the next big thing…

Factorio 2.1 – Overall Thoughts

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While I’m not done with it, I do think the rest of the summer has other bits that need to be handled. 2.1 will be in experimental for a bit, likely waiting til the fall to get out. There are still a few quirks to work out, in particular around quite a few QoL changes that obviously are much more complicated that you would think. Still, general thoughts are that 2.1 is really amazing and addresses a lot of my concerns in 2.0, with one exception – Quality. More on that.

  • Research – that you can queue research based on available packs is extremely helpful in the midgame. Gleba packs expire, so you want to take full advantage of them. It works on infinite research too, which is awesome. I have a weird display bug, but the functional parts are fine. This isn’t all that useful at late game, where you’ve generally figured out logistics, but for about 80% of your time getting there, it’s awesome!
  • Visuals – planets in space are cool. Assemblers and rocket silos have a glow up. It generally looks better, which avoids needing more mods.
  • Fluids – Measuring pipe volumes avoids the need for storage on most planetary builds, better logistics too. Being able to pivot fluid connection points allows for much tighter designs too, so that’s nice.
  • Space Rocket Logistics – Hell yeah! The game is smart enough to ship less things to you, or break them up into better packages drastically reducing the need for rockets. When you haven’t gotten logistics fully sorted out, this is a really big deal!
  • Military Science – What? This isn’t in 2.1! You’re right, and I have a gripe with that. Of all the sciences you can craft, all of them have have been optimized in some fashion in Space Age – except Military Science. Grenades and Walls still have shitty ratios on shitty crafting paths. I was hoping for something better here… at least in QoL. Oh well.
  • Shipping between platforms – I leave a space platform above Aquilo that makes too much ammo and rockets, which then feeds my transport ships, without the need for rockets. The less time any ship spends around Aquilo is a good thing! While there are bugs to work out here, it has saved me from losing ships.
  • Space Casino death – I still don’t quite follow why this took place, as I was rather easily able to build equivalent chains on Vulcanus. Granted, you need more ground space and therefore more foundations + power, but it’s certainly doable. Blue Chip + LDS shuffle remain absolutely viable, so if anything, it adds a small hurdle in late mid-game. Your bottlenecks will remain legandary quality + productivity materials anyways.

Quality deserves a special mention here, as most people will see 2.1 as a sort of reversion on the concept, or at least making it more difficult to acquire. I don’t necessarily have an issue with legendary material, but I do on everything between it and normal. Aside from space platform material (normal collectors are kinda bad) there are no real reasons to use anything but normal or legendary due to the logistic impacts of sorting through all the junk. You may end up using some buildings as a temporary measure (like Biolabs), but your goal is 100% to get to legendary as the benefits are ridiculous. Noting you can absolutely beat the game without any legendary mats, just that your final ship is going to be bigger and slower as a result. And for a variety of reasons, it’s not really practical to mega-base without legendary. This is one reason I prefer mods that simply give legendary outputs based on the volume of inputs, like say 100x the inputs to get 1 output. You’re skipping the lottery part and frankly, the view of destroying 98% of all your outputs.

What I think I find the most interesting actually is that the genre as a whole has emulated/replicated every single aspect of Factorio by now. Maybe not all in one game, but the pieces are everywhere. And yet none, not a single one that I have seen across dozens of variants, has opted to implement a concept of quality. I think that alone is argument enough.

Factorio still rocks, and if this is where the swan song is, then holy crud have we been blessed.

Factorio 2.1 – Space Casino Alternatives

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In the previous 2.1 post, I ran some tests regarding Space Casino alternatives, notably those specific to maintaining a space platform. The sum of it is that the removal of Quality Mods from crushers effectively made anything space related obsolete, with some caveats.

  • The rate of asteroid collection cannot be improved in any meaningful sense. Once you are moving between planets, the rate at which you encounter asteroids is relatively fixed.
  • The rate of crushers vs. recyclers is substantial. Crushers return 80% of the material, Recyclers only 25%. Seen another way, it takes 1250 items crushed to get 1000 out. It takes 4000 items to get 1000 recycled.
  • It takes about 4 steps to go from normal to legendary, each one a gamble. To get 1 legendary asteroid, it takes about 30,000 from recycling.
  • In pure math, it takes about 7x more material to get the same results, and you cannot practically increase the amount you put in the machine. Well you can, you just need to build multiple platforms.

Right, so you’re stuck with less elegant options. The good news is that you only need coal, iron, and calcite. The even better news is that you need very little calcite as it’s used for stone, which is in turn only used for buildings, not actual products.

One important bit of context in this post. It assumes that you are only using normal quality science products. If you want to do legendary science, odds are you’re well outside the intended audience here.

Raw Upcycling

This is the act of taking any material, applying quality to the first step, and where you don’t get legendary, you recycle it until you do. As pointed prior, this gets you on average 1 item per 30,000. It is stupidly inefficient, if only because the throughput is so high. On top of that, every time you process something in a production building, you increase the odds as you at least get 100% of the output back, and with productivity, potentially more.

For example, if you were to process something with a max 300% productivity boost, you would only need about 7,500 raw items to get 1 legendary. Research improvements are very helpful here. There’s different math when it comes to adding quality mods, and where.

Intermediate Upcycling

The idea here is pretty simple. You want an intermediate product that you plan to recycle in order to get legendary material. The practical application is quite hard, as you need a decent supply of those materials first, in order to make that product. The general idea is:

Input base products -> Create intermediary with quality mods -> recycle anything that isn’t legendary –> use recycled material to make more things.

The main issue here is that you will end up with items of varying quality throughout and need to make different quality products from them, with some interesting filtering on belts. It’s about 10 regular production stations to 2 uncommon, and 1 of each rare, epic and legendary. If you do it once, it’s pretty easy to understand the flow for any additional time. The more of that item you need, the more space you need to orchestrate it all.

Quality Mods

There are three paths, one of which doesn’t actually count.

  • Path 1: Tier 3 normal quality. This takes Superconductor rods, and gives 2.5% bonus. Only make these to start Path 2.
  • Path 2: Tier 2 legendary quality. This requires green, red, and blue circuits, an upcycle, and provides 5% bonus. Insert Tier 3 normal mods until you produce your first rare or better, then replace away.
  • Path 3: Tier 3 legendary quality. This requires legendary Superconductors, which is it’s own thing, and gives a 6.2% bonus. They are a pain to make, and should only be used once you have fusion power everywhere.
Q2 Legendary Upcycler. Dirty, does the job. While this is on Fulgora, it actually works better on Vulcanus due to red/green chip production.

Iron

Raw ore is not really an option as only Nauvis has any in decent quantities, and you’re likely using that for something else. Vulcanus can give you infinite iron plates relatively easily, for very little calcite cost. Foundries also have a native 50% productivity, with 4 mod slots, making it a small footprint to output a full belt of iron plates.

Recycling them is one option, but if you were to turn them into iron chests with a 4 mod slot assembler, you’d be even more efficient as those are super fast to create and give/take 8 iron plates.

Iron and Stone Upcycler, fits in a 50×50. The top has coal too. I’ve made further mods to this to make it tileable.

Calcite

Right, this one is either super complicated or super easy. Calcite is used in only 3 things – fuel, artillery shells, or cliff explosives. Those last 2 have multiple sub-products and are difficult to produce at scale. In this case, it’s better to just do a raw upcycle as you have so much available on Vulcanus.

Now, since calcite is only used for stone, you’re likely better just making stone instead. This can actually be quite simple… copper foundry directly into a recycler. You’d need to get rid of the copper fluid mind you – which is achievable through an extremely simple decider configuration.

Set a decider output to the following, connect to a foundry, and voila… no more liquid copper.

Coal

This one is a big ‘it depends’. Coal is primarily used in the construction of plastic, which can be a bottleneck as it’s used for a ton of things. Plastic Productivity helps a lot here, as Chemical Plants can only take 3 mods. You’re gonna need a lot of coal!

If you’re on Vulcanus, you’re likely sitting on Coal deposits that are in the millions. There are two options present – raw & grenades. Grenades will give a 20% boost and some iron plates as an output, but they take 8s to craft each using 10 coal. 10 coal can be recycled in less than 2 seconds. Given near infinite supply and throughput options, raw seems the best option.

Closing Thoughts

I think it rather obvious that getting legendary anything through infinite inputs is not hard. Space Casinos essentially put it out of mind and let you concentrate on the more complex builds, while giving new ideas to creating items in space. By making this be planet bound, it actually increases the scalability as it’s way easier to create a new production line there than build a new space platform.

My rough math says that for each Casino I had, I’ll need roughly four times the space to collect a similar amount through alternative means. The main issue is the sheer amount of Quality Modules needed to get this running well. Vulcanus can easily build an upcycler for Q2 modules at 5%. Legendary Q3 require fusion + trains + upcycling of capacitors on Fulgora… that’s a long term thing.

It also means that collecting materials from space to do anything non-space related (e.g. fuel or ammo) is pretty much gone. The domination of Vulcanus for nearly every late game production is even more cemented. The only hiccup I now see is that you’ll need multiple fusion power plants and a decent amount of foundations to expand sufficiently.

Factorio 2.1 Experimental

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I’m giving a new playthrough with the experimental build of 2.1. There are things that work well, others are more frustrating. Quick thoughts…

  • Mods: None work, which is less. I really miss having the Burn Stack mod which allows burning gas/fluids.
  • Mod Toggles: You can disable quality, if you want. I opted not to, though didn’t invest in quality until I was heading to Aquilo
  • Blueprints: 98% of them work as expected. 2% seems small, but there are issues you will need to troubleshoot. Chasing gremlins.
  • Fluids: Measuring volume in pipes is great! Being able to flip Pumpjacks is also a very nice QoL bit, allowing much tighter builds.
  • Landing Pads (extract directly from them): For regular builds, no real impact. For Aquilo, or massive SPM builds, this is a fairly significant change that speeds up a LOT of activities.
  • Radar: Scanning the entire galaxy is possible now. I’ve yet to find a practical use for it, in fact, turning it on in my blueprints caused issues in reading too much stuff I didn’t actually have. What really sucks is that you can’t change a radar setting while on another planet (yet).
  • Labs/Biolabs: You can set research based on available research packs, based on priority. Primarily useful for Gleba, as you waste time when that material isn’t available. It does help with Aquilo research later on. By the time you reach Prometheum, this doesn’t mean as much as you’re effectively always researching with every component.
  • Rocket Logistics: The game will automatically distribute the amount of items based on weight to meet demand. So if you need like 2 collectors and 8 crushers, that will come in 1 rocket instead of 2 with a ton of excess. This is an absolutely massive QoL change for the mid-game… I figure it’s cut the distribution load in half, at least. Any ‘first landing’ logistics request is going to be super fast, and shipping stuff to Aquilo long-term becomes ridiculously efficient.
  • Space Logistics: You can now request items from ANY planet or from another platform. Shipping from any planet rarely makes sense, as rarely are you producing an item at volume across all planets, so that’s actually caused way more issues. Shipping between platforms, that has extremely niche use cases – like having a space platform above Aquilo making extra rockets for another transport ship. There are many odd behaviours here though.
  • Visual Uplifts: I do like this. Assembler and Rocket Silos look a whole lot better.

Space Casinos

Bye Bye Space Casinos. Important to note that a major piece of Space Age is that all materials are either infinite in harvesting, or infinite through alternative means, your challenge is in the design to get infinite output. Space Casinos leverage the infinite material nature of asteroids, along with quality modules that result in legendary base material (iron ore, coal, or calcite).

So let’s math this out a bit.

  • Asteroid Reprocessing has an 80% output chance, with 2 mod slots (12.2% chance). Rough math, 9.76% chance per event to move up a piece. When you get a legendary asteroid, you can then process it for up to 300% output. At legendary levels, this thing spits out material.
  • Recyclers have a 25% output chance and you can add 4 modules to these (24.8% chance). Rough math is 6.2% output from harvest to end. Same end result of 300% productivity. The net effect is 50% as efficient as crushers, per step. This part is important!

The good news is that recyclers are significantly faster than crushers, so you should need much less of them (rough math is less than 10% of the previous crushers), which is good as each recycler takes 100% more quality modules to work. The footprint is tiny.

This means that existing Space Casinos can be repurposed using recyclers instead of crushers, needing only a fraction of the modules to function. New Space Casinos can theoretically be built with a much smaller footprint – the tradeoff being less collectors and less input of asteroids… so it may end up being a horizontal line as a result.

I’ve built a few processing plants for legendary material. The math here per step is substantial. To get to legendary material, on average, you need to run through 4 upgrades (uncommon, rare, epic, legendary). With each step being 50% less efficient, that 0.5^4 which ends up being around 3% of the prior model. I ran a test, with legendary modules (25% total per recycle) between Gleba and Vulcanus four times. Zero legendary. In fact, it took 10 trips to get 1 legendary item. So this model doesn’t work anywhere close to prior.

The old Space Casino design
The new Space Casino design (the legendary quality mods are on the way up)

I also tried to pre-process the items in crushers and then recycle, for higher volumes. Legendary productivity modules means you need 3 recyclers for 2 crushers (yay!), and you need stack inserters too, or the belts stop working. Reprocessing asteroids is an option if you’re overweight on any given type.

About the limits possible without belt jamming.

And to clarify, you don’t need more crushers, you can see that even just having 6 is enough to saturate a belt. I guess you could build another first recycling line, but the results remain very similar. The output is simply atrocious. Maybe 2 legendary items per run.

So seems pretty clear. The previous space casino model is broken. Getting iron, calcite and coal… the volumes are cut tremendously. Iron has other options. Coal and Calcite, you may just need to manage expectations for a bit and run multiple versions of these space harvesters. More investigation required!

The Odyssey

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I am a very large fan of ancient history and in particular the bronze age. That covers 3300BC to about 1200BC. This is the age of myth, with very little writing, as that came mostly in the iron age. What we know if that time is quite limited, and what is written is often written centuries after occurring. It was a time of gods.

The Odyssey is a great example of this. What we know of it is generally attributed to Homer (800BC) about an event that happened a heck of a long time before (1200BC). Think about that for a second. If I asked you to talk about a story that happened in the year 1600, but gave you no books and only people to explain it, what would you actually understand? Heck, even Homer was an oral poet (as he was blind), so the written versions are solely interpretations, many years later.

The Odyssey is not a factual retelling of actual events. There is no proof that there was a Trojan Horse – in fact it’s barely mentioned at all in this story, and what we know of it came from the Aeneid written by Virgil in about 30BC. That’s 800 years after the story was told, and 1200 years after the actual even took place.

What the Odyssey is, is a story. A story meant to convey the storyteller’s principles and values in an entertaining medium. We experience that daily today. A thousand years ago, theatre and books. Two thousand years ago? Three? This story is thematic, and nearly all adventures today replicate the structure of a nearly 3,000 year old tale. It is enduring and impactful.

In the past 100 years there have been nearly a dozen retellings of this story in film & TV. I can still remember the version with Armand Assante, where he basically had sex with everyone on his journey. The most recent interpretation from Chris Nolan is in theatres now, and I did have the chance to see it in IMAX. I have thoughts.

First, and importantly in all Nolan films, is the artistic elements. There’s very little CG anywhere, which is frankly mind-boggling when you think of the scale of things. The sound and picture framing are simply ridiculous, it’s a purposeful loudness and structure. Truly this can only be fully appreciated in IMAX – the environment and presentation is so important. Don’t watch this on a phone! As is often with Nolan, the narrative structure is broken and non-linear. By seeing Odysseus at multiple simultaneous points in his journey, you can better appreciate his growth. There isn’t much artistic liberty taken in the story, as the main beats are hit in the order they normally are, and the themes all remain in various formats. There is liberty in the cast and weighting of the various themes, but that’s the point – I’d watch another version or read a book if I wanted something done before.

What I did enjoy in this interpretation was the weight applied to humanity. There is no direct involvement of any Greek god here, simply the fall out of prior items. The Cyclops (which is wildly impressive) is present and is still Poseidon’s child, but Poseidon himself is not here. The journey of Odysseus through all of these events therefore is a human burden, and the growing realization of the impacts of his decisions. What may have seemed small is in fact epic in scope. The journey in the literal sense is also figurative – that’s why we have the word odyssey after all.

The net result is that this film is an event. Event with a capital E. Whether you enjoy it or not, there’s a likely line in the sand of ‘did you see this or not’, similar to things like The Matrix. Go see it!

Dave the Diver: In the Jungle

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This is more of an expansion pack than a DLC, surreal amount of content here and strongly recommended if you have the base game.

Dave the Diver has a solid gameplay loop. Dive, find fish (or fish like), farm, run a sushi restaurant, and embark on a zany quest with bosses. I spent many an hour exploring the depths. In the Jungle takes that model and then goes ‘watch me’.

The core loop of diving + restaurant still exists. You still have weapons (though the interface is much improved). But now you play in semi-real time, need to manage friendships, collect and battle bugs (ala pokemon), explore with a turn-based RPG, actual fishing (!), Duck Hunt, and decorate a tiny shack. The whole game takes place in a different area, so aside from your diving gear items, nothing else transfers here. There’s a solid 10 hours of extra content though, which puts this in expansion territory.

The new stuff:

  • Friendships: You need to feed them certain meals or give certain gifts. They end up coming to the restaurant and at max friendship, give you some rather useful item. I like that there are more than 6 characters this time, makes the world seem much more alive.
  • Bug Battles: Rock / Paper / Scissors with a stupid amount of RNG. This is the only part of the game that is not fun as the random is too random for my tastes.
  • RPG: This is very weird. Super Mario RPG like actually. I mean it sort of works, but it has no real long-term value.
  • Fishing: Basic enough and provides some fish you can’t get elsewhere. About time I say! (Also, don’t bother upgrading your rod, trust me).
  • Duck Hunt: Pretty much exactly what you think it is. Gives bird meat, which is a mid-tier ingredient.
  • Decoration: No in-game value other than looking neat.

The old (but improved) stuff:

  • Diving: You still have the RNG of the map but the fish themselves are always present. You want a caiman, it’s going to be top right 100% of the time.
  • Gear: You start with a purifier for the dirty water and the minute you upgrade it, you no longer need it. If you’ve maxed it all in the base game, then this seems very strange.
  • Weapons: Ahh, this is so much better. You get access to all 4 weapon types from the start now, at the same time! Upgrading them is the same structure as before. The large area wave gun is life, prioritize that if you can!
  • Restaurant: Some minor tweaks here and there. You need to shoo monkeys away from time to time, making one of 2 servers mandatory. Cooking skewers has replaced the Wasabi mini-game where you are needed. Recipe ingredients are harder to come by as dispatching gives less and there’s no real farm this time. From a practical perspective this only means upgrading recipes takes a lot longer.

The way some systems are presented, this seems like the foundation for more content. The ‘bones’ here are generally improved from the base game, so I’d certainly welcome it. Give it a shot!

The Incident at Galley House

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I like puzzle games, particular those focused on deduction. Return of the Obra Dinn remains top of list for me. A recent addition to the genre is The Incident at Galley House, which is a remake of a text only gamed called Type Help.

The challenge with describing any of these games is that the plot and the mechanisms to uncover the plot are so intertwined that they can’t really be talked about without spoiling the other. Going in blind is all but required to fully appreciate the art. In that respect, I’ll try to avoid as much as I can.

The GODOT engine can do a lot of things, and puzzle games is one that it really does well. Voice acting, interactive buttons, simple animations. Puzzles are about how your brain perceives data, so generally less is more from a visual aid perspective. Well… more is more I suppose as if the effort was made to visually present something, there’s a reason for it. That is certainly the case here, as the presentation is extremely well done.

The game starts off simple enough, you’re sent to investigate a slew of deaths at Galley House and through various presentations of key data, you piece together a timeline of characters, locations, and events. A few times I thought I was playing ‘And Then There Were None’, as it feels as though the characters all have something to hide, yet have a common thread. The act of discovering a name, or an avatar to show the character is as much fun as figuring out how they all interact within the timeline.

This timeline acts as a branching spiderweb of sorts, and some are hubs connecting to a half dozen threads, while others are simply dead ends. The good news is that you don’t have to discover all the threads, just piece enough of them together to get the major beats from start to finish. My obsessive part wanted to find all the bits though, and there are handy indicators when a thread is left to be found. In fact, the UI itself is a really an amazing tool as compared to the text only version. The visual aids are a tremendous help when you’re trying to keep track of key bits of data – it even comes with a search feature! I wouldn’t consider it difficult in any way, and if you do get stuck on any bit there’s a free hint system too.

By the time I closed the book on the mysteries of Galley House, I was somewhat amazed at how the story itself was constructed. All the logical breaks actually made sense, and seeming dead ends turned into new roads. Time, memory, and perspective are all key pieces of any puzzle, and they are wonderfully done here. It’s good to have closure.

Also worth noting, it plays great on the Steam Deck. Strong recommendation!

Chrono Cross

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Do I need to explain this game? It’s from 1999, so I guess there are folks that don’t recall it. I picked it up again on a Steam Sale, like less than $10 type of deal. Nostalgia I guess.

It’s a sort of Chrono Trigger in 3D, a spiritual successor with next to no thought on the lore conflicts between both games. In order to collect all the possible characters, you need a minimum of 3 playthroughs. The difficulty level isn’t really there (aside from 2 specific fights), making it a rather weird game in the SQUENIX repertoire of JRPGs.

There are 40 characters to start, which is an absurd number with very little meaningful purpose. Feels like every NPC with more than 2 lines becomes someone you can recruit. Each character’s set of abilities is determined by their elemental grid. Some have a lot of low level slots, some more near the end. You can more as you level, which is realistically only occurring when you defeat bosses… so no point in grinding for levels! Combat is a mix of melee + magic. The first playthrough favors magic, in fact the ‘perfect’ ending requires it. Eventually you become so strong that a small knife attack is enough (the final boss is balanced for level 48, you can max at 99). This could have been a rock/paper/scissors type of system, but it lacks the mechanical depth to do so. I mean, how could you with 40 characters and find any semblance of balance, right?

The story is convoluted and hard to follow, especially with the final twists and turns. In fact, I’d argue you are better off not having played Chrono Trigger to make sense of it all as there are too many conflicting plot items as a result. Time traveling, fate, destiny, and warring reptiles all play a big part. There are some interesting, though short, side quests throughout. That part is actually a lot of fun to run through! The thing about RPGs is that the plot needs to have some sense… but this feels more like ideas were thrown on the wall without any thought. Which is a real shame.

The good here, is that it plays really well on the Steam Deck and is bite-sized enough to playthrough in small sittings. My 3rd replay was maybe 20% of the time of the first one, just because I knew what I was doing and there was no real combat challenge.

The less good is that the plot makes little sense, the meaningful moments are hidden in a diluted cast, and that we’re unlikely to ever see a Chrono Trigger 3.

Rose-colored glasses were certainly part of the purchasing decision. I have spent more on a bad coffee, so no real complaints here. In fact, it’s a great marker in the SQUENIX journey of RPGs. This experimental game worked in some areas, didn’t in others, and the next game out learned a ton of lessons.

Life is Defined by Loss

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I’ve been away on a break for a few weeks, hence the quiet blog. Where generally folks use New Year’s to ponder their annual goals, I do that during the summer break as a mental reset. And this year was an interesting one. Within about a week two meaningful events occurred.

First, a great friend’s father passed, a man I knew for over 30 years and treated everyone as his best friend. It was relatively quick, and he went out with a giant grin. He was a man with infinite energy and boundless optimism. Truly a fascinating character and no matter how bad a day you may have had, he was enthused to make it a good one. He embodied the adage that ‘a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met’.

Second, Belghast passed away. A year to the day that he lost his wife, and nearly 6 months from when he shared he had cancer. ‘Pillar’ is a term that is thrown about, and in this case it’s certainly apt. Blogging is everywhere and in today’s age, one of the most archaic forms of sharing if you’re not using some sort of AI tool and recipe hunting. Bel found a way to bring more people under the tent (Blaugust) and somehow found time to share his passion for gaming on a near daily basis. His was one of the few blogs I checked on a near daily basis… and as a habit I still do, until it hits that we won’t see anything more. He’s frankly the reason I played FF14 and enjoyed the time spent in there with him and the guild.

It’s an interesting thing this concept of life, as ephemeral as it is. I’m at that age where there are way more funerals than weddings, way more divorces than baby showers. The absolute certitude of youth is replaced with a sort of melancholic acceptance of loss of control.

It reminds me of a sci-fi trope that immortality is a curse, where true appreciation is bound by the loss of something. The act of procrastination or deference to a future date is pushing out the ability to enjoy what you have today. There are so many things that can happen tomorrow that you can’t control, and if you can do something today, you generally should.

My friend’s dad lived every day like it was going to be his last. Nearly his entire life that way. Bel shared what he had with what tools he had on a near daily basis, spreading the good word of community and gaming as a way to bring people together. Neither made excuses, they just appreciated and moved forward.

If there’s a resolution or attempt I want to spend my energy on, it’s exactly that. Appreciate the day. Appreciate the gift of the people around me. Cause tomorrow is another day that may not bring that gift.