Over the course of this year we noticed that some of Vyx’s potted flowers on the deck were attracting hummingbirds. I hadn’t even considered that any of those lived around here, but sure enough, they became our most frequent guests. When the flowering plants ran their course going into autumn, we replaced them with a flat hummingbird feeder and waited to see if they’d appreciate our offering.
It took them a week or so to realize what was up, but once they did, hoo boy! I’d start hearing their clicks and clacks and seeing them darting between the rails to sneak a sip or two all through the day. After a while they got to the point of just hanging out for up to half a minute, chilling out and sipping that tasty, tasty sugar-water.
This weekend I realized, oh hey, I have a GoPro HERO9 Black. And it can record 240 frames per second in high definition. A project was born!
Since the inception of the Final Destination site project in my current solo Satisfactory game, I knew I was going to make “content” out of it. (Sorry, Patrick Willems.) There was always going to be a tour, it was just a question of what format the tour would take. I went back and forth on whether to make it a long post with lots of pictures or just record a tour video and put text bits in it. Both options have merits and downsides, and the internal debate allowed me to put off doing anything for several weeks even after (more-or-less) completing the build.
Yesterday I woke up and decided, it’s time to record a video. Thus, the following:
On Tuesday, the 14th of November, 2023 the 8th major update to Satisfactory arrived in Early Access, after spending months in the Experimental branch to shake out the worst of the bugs… most of them, anyway. We have a few things to talk about with “U8” but today we’re going to focus primarily on the new engine’s support for something called “Lumen” and how that makes an already-pretty game even prettier.
I took this screenshot within the first two minutes of enabling Lumen while at the Final Destination site. Just a purely random view and it shows off the new lighting so well! Dang this game’s pretty.(more…)
I needed to get OBS Studio and Davinci Resolve installed on the new computer anyway, and what better way to incentivize myself than the wild hair of an idea which led to…
I haven’t written much about my current solo game progress, largely because most of it’s been very, very boring. That’s not to say I’m having a dull time of it, just that there’s not much to report here which is worth the reading.
I didn’t route this rail line directly under Mothra’s flight path on purpose, it’s just a happy accident.
I’m making progress, though.
To sum up:
I’m working on what I’m calling the “Final Destination” project, a factory which makes all four of the last space elevator shipment products in one location. (This may not have been my wisest decision.) Remember the flowchart? Yeah, I’m referencing that a lot.
To do this, I needed to make a whole bunch of new factories making enough of things I already made but in too small of quantities previously. For instance, I lost most of September to building a high-output Battery facility.
The rail network needed expansion and better interconnection to effectively route materials to-and-fro.
Building the FD site the way I’ve chosen to has resulted in the occasional “whoops, that’s not gonna work,” so I spend a lot of time figuring out some other better way.
Today I can happily report that the initial production run of Magnetic Field Generators has commenced. Delivery is a whole other issue, as the receiving drone ports at the Space Elevator simply do not exist yet, but when the time comes I’ll have a bunch of parts ready to send up.
Catching the rays of the evening sun out in the Dune Desert, here’s the “barn” in which one of the final shipment products gets made.
Next session I’ll need to decide which of the other three products to proceed with. Part of me wants to jump right into the Nuclear Pasta because that’s what uses those super-cool Particle Accelerators… but given their positioning (up above the other three production areas) it’d be smarter to complete the other two first. So I’ll probably do that.
I’m honestly not sure what I’m going to do once this project is all finished. Maybe it’ll be time for a fresh start. Maybe something slightly less dependent upon rail networks.
