Happy New Year! General Game Discussion--January 2026

[Rolfil]

That's good to know, but how do they add up? Raising the temperature one degree is equivalent to how many new butterflies?

Ah, Wiki to the rescue! https://planet-crafter.fandom.com/wiki/Terraformation_Index

So, a butterfly weighs about a gram. One degree K is.... oh dear... 1000000000000 pico Kelvin. So, an entire degree Kelvin is worth so many butterflies that you're going to need to worry about gravitational collapse if you put them all on one planet.


There were quite a few people complaining about the small fonts. Be sure to give it a test before the refund window closes!

There's a lot after Fish

For example multiplier Fuses. You can either find these or buy them with Terra Tokens from the Trade Rocket. These can radically increase your terraforming, production or energy.

My goto for Terra Tokens is manufacturing Cloth and Pulsar. Cloth is very easy as you just put a load of silk production next to an autocrafter and then have a drone send it to your trade rocket.

Pulsar is a bit more complex to set up. You need T3 mines and about 3 methane producers that supply Containers next to an autocrafter then have a drone put those into another container. Then have that container supply pulsar and the trade rocket demand it.

Don't forget to tick the option to auto launch your trade rockets when full!

 

[Zloth]

My goto for Terra Tokens is manufacturing Cloth and Pulsar. Cloth is very easy as you just put a load of silk production next to an autocrafter and then have a drone send it to your trade rocket.

I'm dealing in chocolate chip cookies. And eating a sizable portion of the profits.

I've got energy coming out my ears now with 3 power fuses, so I guess it's time to build more terraforming stuff. I'm throwing frog stations all over the place now. I even found some lava frogs hanging out in a lava tube while I was exploring, so I set up a station for them in the desert. I've also filled up an entire locker with spare rocket engines, so I might throw a few more fish-rockets into orbit.

I think I've explored everything there is to explore now, except for one wreck that requires several access keys to enter. I tried going through a portal to get distant (procedurally generated) wrecks, but there's little there that I want - just the occasional access key or fuse. Most of the treasure is just saving me having to make my own mutagens or fertilizers.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Blue Prince is a really clever game. I'm about 15 runs deep and I'm unlocking stuff and discovering things each run that is extending and making the next run easier and revealing more levels to rooms Ive been in many times before.

I wont go into specifics because everything would be a spoiler, but the story is you are a relative of a rich old guy who just died and willed his estate to you contingent on you solving the mystery and finding your way inside a specific room inside his mansion.

The conceit is the layout of the mansion is different everytime you visit and resets at the beginning of every day. You have a limited number of 'steps' to investigate before your forced to start again, and entering each room removes at least one 'step'. Every time you open a door, you are given a choice of three rooms to draft, and each one will have different things inside to investigate, and up to 4 doors leading onwards or sideways . The only consistent thing is that there are 45 rooms laid out in a 5x9 grid, and the antechamber you are looking for is always the centre of the furthest row.

You start every day with nothing, all items you find will disappear at the end of the day, although there are ways to send a few things forwards using specific rooms, and some small bonus unlocks that are permanent.

There are a lot of layers to this one, things that seem meaningless will combine with random things in other rooms and suddenly puzzles will make sense. You need to manage resources to open up more rooms during a run but open up the right rooms in the right order and with doors facing the ways that will allow you to continue and find out more. The 'right' rooms dont always appear in the draft but somehow every run reveals some new knowledge or mystery that wasnt there before. Boggles my mind how intricate a puzzle box it all is, its like an escape room but a whole warehouse full of them an theyre interconnected.

Anyway I like it, and now you all know I do. Check out a video, maybe it will make more sense then I do.

 

[Zed Clampet]

just the occasional access key or fuse.

"Just"? I think maybe there's some confusion somewhere. Those fuses are the most critical items in the game for speeding up terraforming. I used every one of them I could find. That's the best treasure in the game, which is why it's on those end game repeatable wrecks.

 

[Zloth]

"Just"? I think maybe there's some confusion somewhere. Those fuses are the most critical items in the game for speeding up terraforming. I used every one of them I could find. That's the best treasure in the game, which is why it's on those end game repeatable wrecks.

Yeah, but it's not a great return.

If, say, your heat output is X, then the first fuse adds takes you to 10X. The second fuse to 20X. The third to 30X. To go beyond, you need to build a new fuse box and eight more heaters. And then you'll only get to 60X. Personally, I would rather go explore more or maybe build a vacation home.

I finally got to mammals, so now I can play with genetics! That tends to accompany a big change to some area in the game.

 

[Zed Clampet]

If, say, your heat output is X, then the first fuse adds takes you to 10X. The second fuse to 20X. The third to 30X. To go beyond, you need to build a new fuse box and eight more heaters. And then you'll only get to 60X. Personally, I would rather go explore more or maybe build a vacation home.

This is kind of like refusing to save money because the second time you put $200 in your savings, it doubled your money, but the 3rd time it only went up 50 percent!

That's cool if you'd rather build another base. I misinterpreted a couple of posts that sounded to me like you were ready to be done. If I didn't need a fuse, it meant I hadn't built enough machines. There's no other way to be fast. You build stuff and juice them with fuses, and you send up rockets. Or you hang out for how ever long and play with animal DNA and enjoy how nice the world looks now. Just depends on what you want.

 

[Rolfil]

Most of the treasure is just saving me having to make my own mutagens or fertilizers.

Ecosystem(s) + Recycling Machine gives you plenty of T1 Fertilizer and Mutagen.

I don't really like running wrecks either. But mainly that's because I keep getting lost in them.

 

[Pifanjr]

After playing a whole bunch of (supposed) deckbuilding demos, I decided today to pick up FrogComposband again. Apparently I still had a save for a Shadow Fairy Sniper, so I just continued with that.

The whole point of the class is to do massive amounts of damage in a single shot, but it takes 5 turns to fully charge, so it's important to be able to fight monsters one by one. This works great most of the time since I'm great at sneaking, but I'm having a lot of trouble against bosses that summon monsters or when fighting bosses in open areas where teleporting away is much less likely to actually get me out of range of their attacks.

I might just be stuck grinding for equipment that gives me speed boosts so I can fire multiple shots or at least have some more room to escape when things go wrong.

 

[Johnway]

Well, its a wrap. yakuza 5 is done. Story completed and although the game says only 50% of the content is complete, i argue the core gameplay is done and i've unlocked 80% of the achievements. i could play a bit more to grind out maybe the last few but its busy work for a game i've completed. i'll post my thoughts in the usual thread in the next few days once i've finished the Doom wad i'm playing. i have a lot to say about both games, but i'll try and condense it so its not so rambling.


I'll start downloading wildlands tomorrow evening.

 

[neogunhero]

Haven't gamed much at all in the past week, had so much stuff get thrown at me in life. Nothing bad thankfully, just busy as all get out! Can't wait to play something tonight, but I feel myself slipping off my current rotation. Do I pick something up new to re-ignite that interest or just vanquish in the vast expanse of my library? This game looks pretty awesome...

 

[Zloth]

This is kind of like refusing to save money because the second time you put $200 in your savings, it doubled your money, but the 3rd time it only went up 50 percent!

The thing is, while this is going up linearly, the demands have been going up by much bigger factors. The way to keep the numbers going mostly seems to be using whatever new thing shows up. When T3's show up, go build a bunch because each one does far more than the T2's.

That's cool if you'd rather build another base. I misinterpreted a couple of posts that sounded to me like you were ready to be done. If I didn't need a fuse, it meant I hadn't built enough machines. There's no other way to be fast. You build stuff and juice them with fuses, and you send up rockets. Or you hang out for how ever long and play with animal DNA and enjoy how nice the world looks now. Just depends on what you want.

I do want to finish fast! Except, then I start the game and suddenly I'm not in a rush anymore - until the next day. So, right now, I'm thinking I need to make sure all my fuse stations have 8 big heat/pressure/plant getting the benefits. In an hour or two, I'll be perched on the vacation home trying to decide what color I want to make all the cushions.

Ecosystem(s) + Recycling Machine gives you plenty of T1 Fertilizer and Mutagen.

OH! I've been just dumping the little wormies on the ground (where they stay seemingly forever).

I don't really like running wrecks either. But mainly that's because I keep getting lost in them.

That I've been good with. Thank you Descent's 3D mazes!

 

[Zed Clampet]

The thing is, while this is going up linearly, the demands have been going up by much bigger factors. The way to keep the numbers going mostly seems to be using whatever new thing shows up. When T3's show up, go build a bunch because each one does far more than the T2's.

My bad. I was assuming you had already run out of upgrades and were on the highest tier.

 

[Zloth]

Actually, I'm nearly done. Once critters opened up, TTi started flying. It wasn't hard to feed my pets T1 and then T2 food. More pets -> more genetic material -> even more pets. I went from about 1.4 TTi to over 3.5 TTi with just a few hours tonight.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Life is difficult as a f*****g idiot. Be glad you don't have to deal with it.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Actually, I'm nearly done. Once critters opened up, TTi started flying. It wasn't hard to feed my pets T1 and then T2 food. More pets -> more genetic material -> even more pets. I went from about 1.4 TTi to over 3.5 TTi with just a few hours tonight.

Just for fun, I automated pet food production.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Why does every PC accessory advertise itself for e-sports? According to that industry report I used in the genre thread, esport players are below RPG, Action-Adventure and Survival players in numbers, making up only 14 percent of PC gamers.

 

[BeardyHat]

Why does every PC accessory advertise itself for e-sports? According to that industry report I used in the genre thread, esport players are below RPG, Action-Adventure and Survival players in numbers, making up only 14 percent of PC gamers.

I really think it's a seperate bubble for us. I feel like I've seen so many Youtube videos of eSports guys, but I know absolutely none of them and couldn't possibly care less about them. But it must be huge given how much money stuff like DOTA has brought in for Valve and the massive flourishing of eSports style games about 10 years ago.

I've been playing more Zelda: Wind Waker on my Deck. It's fun, it's cute, I like the art style of it, but I'm not sure it's one that I'll continue playing much more of. I do have fun with it when I play, but it's just doesn't capture my interest in the way a lot of other games do.

I started playing Civ 6 again on my Android tablet. It's still fun, though I do find it slightly irksome that it runs in such low resolution, with all the pretty details turned off. I'd actually like to get it running on my Surface Pro, but it runs like ass at the like 2456x1824 (it's a very weird resolution) the Surface works in. Turning down the resolution causes bizarre issues where either it's "fullscreen" but condemned to a weird, not fullscreen window in the corner or if I change my DPI scaling to fix this, the game just breaks. It's still technically running (I can hear it), but the entire screen is frozen and the only thing I can do is Ctrl-Alt-Del to sign out of Windows and force it to shut down.

So I'm thinking of installing Debian again on my Surface and seeing how that works. I had one annoying issue with it previously, but since I'm not playing that particular game anymore, I'm curious if Linux will solve these weird issues the Surface is having with Windows.

 

[BeardyHat]

Oh actually, I did also start playing Strategic Command: War in Europe

Save 60% on Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe on Steam

Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe is a deeply immersive turn based strategy game covering the greatest conflict in modern history!

store.steampowered.com

I've owned it for quite awhile now, but never put any significant time into it. This scale of wargame always feels pretty overwhelming to me and I have zero idea what I'm doing. But my friend mentioned the other day that it has a play by email function, something I've never actually used in a game, so I set it up and we've been going back and forth over the past couple of days taking a turn here and there, which has been fun.

He's playing Germany in 1939, so he's absolutely steamrolling me. I'm trying to figure out if there's anything the Allies can actually do to slow the advance, including as Russia, where I didn't hold-up my end of the bargain and also invade Poland. I think it's going to come back and bite me in the butt though, because Russia has basically no troops at the moment, so nothing really stopping the German tanks from rolling in. I'm kind of hoping I can get France moving and start rolling in to western Germany to gain some footing.

 

[neogunhero]

Why does every PC accessory advertise itself for e-sports? According to that industry report I used in the genre thread, esport players are below RPG, Action-Adventure and Survival players in numbers, making up only 14 percent of PC gamers.

Maybe it's easier to market? Esports players care about speed, performance, agility, reflexes, and all of that is easy to market towards when you're improving your technology to be faster and more capable than previous iterations. A new mouse sensor able to provide much higher DPI is more desirable to a person who needs that sort of speed compared to someone who just plays singleplayer RPGs. I'd like to see more products catered for these kinds of gamers over esports players, but what would that even look like? A heavier mouse over a lighter one? Wait a minute... was the Logitech G500 the perfect mouse for singleplayer RPG players??

 

[BeardyHat]

Maybe it's easier to market? Esports players care about speed, performance, agility, reflexes, and all of that is easy to market towards when you're improving your technology to be faster and more capable than previous iterations. A new mouse sensor able to provide much higher DPI is more desirable to a person who needs that sort of speed compared to someone who just plays singleplayer RPGs. I'd like to see more products catered for these kinds of gamers over esports players, but what would that even look like? A heavier mouse over a lighter one? Wait a minute... was the Logitech G500 the perfect mouse for singleplayer RPG players??

You made me think about it as just a general marketing stunt. We know there's a massive amount of people out there that generally play multiplayer/competitive multiplayer stuff, Fortnite, Arc Raiders, whatever and always looking for the next multiplayer fix.

So they market stuff as great for eSports because your general player probably fancies themselves such a competitive, hardcore gamer that they maybe think that stuff could make them better? I mean, we see this generally in everything marketed to us, but just as stuff "The Pros use."

Saying it's "What the Pros use" is just so empty, but anyone can easily fill in the gaps in their mind, while the company selling the product doesn't need to back that up with anything.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I really think it's a seperate bubble for us. I feel like I've seen so many Youtube videos of eSports guys, but I know absolutely none of them and couldn't possibly care less about them. But it must be huge given how much money stuff like DOTA has brought in for Valve and the massive flourishing of eSports style games about 10 years ago.

Supposedly only 14 percent of PC gamers, but not sure how they got that. The top 4 PvP games on Steam have 2.1 million players right now. The rest of the PvP games are probably drops in the bucket compared to the juggernauts. There are 9.6 million people in games. All the rest of the PvP games combined probably don't take it to 2.5 million. So that would be 26 percent of Steam players. But Epic is probably approaching 100 percent. Game Pass is probably closer to 0 than 100, but who knows. And if you are using the EA launcher, your an idiot and don't count, but that's probably up there. Last time I used Ubisoft, I tried to download a game, but it would only download a demo....I assume there are still tons of people playing League of Legends and Hearthstone, but have no guess as to how many. The big question here is Game Pass's 30 million users.

Maybe it's easier to market? Esports players care about speed, performance, agility, reflexes, and all of that is easy to market towards when you're improving your technology to be faster and more capable than previous iterations. A new mouse sensor able to provide much higher DPI is more desirable to a person who needs that sort of speed compared to someone who just plays singleplayer RPGs. I'd like to see more products catered for these kinds of gamers over esports players, but what would that even look like? A heavier mouse over a lighter one? Wait a minute... was the Logitech G500 the perfect mouse for singleplayer RPG players??

I guess people relate esports to high performance, so there's a "if it's good for esports, it's going to be good for Powerwash Simulator" thing going on.

----

@Zloth Good luck with Terra Invicta. Supposedly there's a tutorial, but all I got was a world map and a bunch of mysterious buttons. I'm doing things, but whether they are good things or not I couldn't say. And I had a missions toolbar when I started, but that's disappeared, and I have no idea how to get it back.

 

[Rolfil]

I've finished Terraforming Prime on The Planet Crafter now. I'll probably build a Travel rocket and head off to Humble next.

I might try either Eden Crafters or StarRupture before that, although both of these are still in Early Acccess.
I've also been going back through my Epic games and found JotunnSlayer. Never really played a roguelite before but it's quite fun when I only have a short amount of time to play.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I've finished Terraforming Prime on The Planet Crafter now. I'll probably build a Travel rocket and head off to Humble next.

I might try either Eden Crafters or StarRupture before that, although both of these are still in Early Acccess.
I've also been going back through my Epic games and found JotunnSlayer. Never really played a roguelite before but it's quite fun when I only have a short amount of time to play.

Don't take my word for it, but I actually started playing Humble this morning and my suggestion is to look for ice right away. I crafted the initial stuff and then headed to higher ground to make my base. There was all this stuff lying around that I figured was ice, but it wasn't. There was no ice anywhere near me, and I died of thirst. I took off on a long trip in search of ice. I saw an ice formation, but I was out of oxygen, so I built a temporary base. I died of thirst again, but I was in the base, so it didn't matter. I went over to the icy area and found one ice. I had to quit at that point. It's possible that there was ice closer to the spawn area, but I wasn't looking for it at the time.

 

[Rolfil]

There was no ice anywhere near me

Spoiler: Ice Ice Baby

There is tons of ice near and inside a cave pretty near to the starting location.

 

[Pifanjr]

We continued our Barotrauma campaign again and finally bought a brand new tier 3 scout submarine. It's a lot more compact than our previous ship, but that's only because whoever build it just made everything overlap, which kind of sucks and feels like a really cheap way to keep a sub small while also letting you fit anything you'd want in it. However, as the captain I'm mostly just sitting at the helm anyway, so it doesn't really matter how the ship is organised.

It is nice that we now have two, fully functional big guns along with two smaller ones, instead of having three small ones and one railgun that was controlled with a shuttle computer instead of a periscope. And we only had a couple of deaths during our session, so I can't complain too much.

---

I also continued my FrogComposband game as a sniper. I found out that you can enchant your arrows at one of the shops and it was way more affordable than I thought, letting my damage go from an average of 350 to 550 per shot, which is obviously a huge improvement. I had been avoiding doing the dungeon bosses simply because I couldn't do enough damage, but after enchanting my arrows I managed to get a critical on one for 1406 damage, instakilling it.

Now I just need a proper piece of gear to give me resistance against confusion, so I don't risk getting stunlocked.