December

The most important fact first: we made 170 dumplings this year (follow the tracks to prior years’ numbers!). There were five of us, because the little daughter brought along a gentleman acquaintance, so we had to limit ourselves to 34 dumplings each (hehe, joke, we had leftovers!).

That’s about it. Well, it’s been nice being off from work. And it’ll be nice being oncall tomorrow and Wednesday and Thursday, because I will do that from home in a relaxed and comfortable manner. Unless Something Goes Wrong. Which I’m sure it won’t.

I’ve been playing a lot (a lot) of the game Satisfactory, in which one is dropped onto a scenic alien world, and has to construct things to build machines to make things to build more machines and factories and power plants and eventually hoverpacks and monorail trains and things. It is great fun!

That is an aerial view of a power plant that I built, that converts crude oil to fuel, and burns that fuel for energy. (It also generates “polymer resin”, which is carried by the conveyor belt at the bottom there to another factory, which makes that into plastic and rubber for other purposes.) It’s gotten quite a bit bigger since I took that picture.

This is my second time through the game; this time I am building much nicer-looking factories, and also vaguely intending to get to the end without mining any uranium or making any nuclear reactors, because those make nuclear waste, which is annoying either to store or to reprocess into something that can be safely disposed of. (I think the designers may be teaching a subtle lesson there.)

I have also been listening to various YouTubers in the background. The algorithm first took me from I think it was Paulogia (an ex-evangelical who now debunks various evangelical things) to Emma Thorne (who talks about creationist things, and also MLM and other general things, and has the most adorable British accent) to Rachel Oates (similar but different adorable accent) and eventually to Jenny Nicholson (no British accent, but very funny, mostly reviews of various bad movies, bad books, bad fanfiction, and other bad things, as well as a fascinating (and very funny) description of the history and status of Brony fandom). So I’ve been listening to those in the background more than my usual vaguely-cop shows like NCIS or CSI or Bones or Lie To Me or whatever.

Which is perhaps a good thing, because as someone pointed out probably on Twitter, not only are the cop shows obviously copaganda, but the medical shows are similarly an attempt to make it look like the US medical system is all good and wonderful and fair. While in fact it isn’t.

How about that worldwide pandemic, speaking of which? This Omicron variant may keep me from getting back into the city for another week or three, and I am not pleased! At least it seems somewhat less deadly than Alpha and Delta, and that’s good. I’m on the Review Panel or whatever it is on our local NextDoor (for my sins), and the number of delusional Covid Truthers that apparently live not all that far from me is truly saddening.

Ach, I think I will go build more factories on an alien planet while listening to people debunking creationism in the background for awhile. It seems to be comforting…

Entirely Satisfactory

So I’ve been playing Satisfactory a bit.

I fact I’ve been doing little else other than play Satisfactory, and do the work required to pay for the electricity and food required to play more Satisfactory.

In fact why am I writing this weblog entry when I could be playing Satisfactory? I need to make 1,000 more motors as just one small part of what the Space Elevator demands to reach Tier 7!!

It’s okay, though; through the miracles of automation, the Assembler that’s making the motors is automatically fed Rotors and Stators from two other Assemblers (all via Mk.3 and 4 Conveyor Belts), and those Assemblers are in turn provided with their parts by other Assemblers, which are in turn provided with Iron Rods, Screws, Steel Pipes, and Wire from my various Constructors, all powered by my seven power plants (two running off petroleum fuel and five off coal, all supplies entirely automated, including the cute little tractor that continuously ferries the coal from the automated mine), and those Constructors are supplied by the Iron Mine (Mk.2) and various appropriate smelters and things.

Except for the Wire, come to think of it, which is copper, and the copper mine being sort of far away I just keep a bunch of Wire in a Storage Container… omg what if it runs out???

brb going to run a long conveyor belt from the copper processing area to the Stator Constructor. Or maybe I should program another little tractor.

Sure, there is enough wire (bottom left) FOR NOW, but…

Anyway, it’s great fun. The graphics are amazing, all of the machinery moves in lovely and hyper-realistic ways (watch a portable miner come to life!), and the alien world it’s all happening in is gorgeous and exotic. Also lovingly hand-crafted, as I understand it; none of this haphazard procedural-generation stuff!

The oil processing area, in a cavern in a mysterious quasi-subaquatic area.

That second picture there is the oil processing area, in a cavern in a relatively distant area of strange aquatic-looking plants and rock formations. Before I ran a train line out to it, getting out there was an adventure involving significant getting lost and attacked by monsters.

With the train in place and automated, not only is there a constant flow of plastic and rubber and polymer resin into my main area, but it’s a safe and scenic ride out through the more and less Earthlike areas, along the edge of the infinite misty abysses for awhile (it’s a notable planet that way; what’s down there?), to the train station by the ol cavern.

It’s an extremely open-world game, in that you can build essentially anything anywhere. If you give the Pod and the Space Elevator the things they want, you’ll get cool new technologies that not only let you build new stuff for FICSIT, but also let you get around better and faster and safer. Which means that you’re both better at sending more and fancier resources offworld, and also better at surviving longer and more distant exploring junkets, which are great fun.

(The game is usually in a first-person view, although there are mods to enable more third-person. The character model of the player, the FICSIT Engineer, is probably female, and either quite pear-shaped or with lots of internal suit equipment located in that area. Or both. Which is kind of nice, there not being lots of pear-shaped representation in video games.)

Some people glory in making huge efficient factories; I’m sort of the opposite.

The #Satisfactory community is like "Here's my eightfold symmetrical arrangement of power plants and factories inside an attractive building, minimizing conveyor-belt length, with the colors arranged to form my country's flag", and I'm here like: pic.twitter.com/0lxaZgjfVU

— Dale Innis 🌹 (@DaleInnis) April 11, 2021

The fact that the game equally-well supports both (and all) styles, is one of the many excellent things about it. For a game in “early release”, it’s amazingly well-polished, playable, and visually amazing.

The oil-field end of the current train line, when the blue moon (sun?) is up.

There are about a zillion more things I could say about it (and I haven’t even joined the reddit sub yet), but there is production to oversee, and a train to ride! :)