Things look a bit odd over here, don’t they? No two-column layout, no randomized header image (yet, maybe).
Here’s the thing: Hemingway was a very good website theme, I liked most everything about it, but it’s long in the tooth and was eventually going to become fully obsolete. The inevitable march of technology, or something. So upon the advice of professional website designers, I’m… using the new Twenty Twenty Five default WordPress theme.
(And yes, using WordPress is a fraught choice in and of itself nowadays, for certain reasons we’re not going into at the moment. At least I’m self-hosted.)
I have a lot of fiddling and fussing to do, so expect things to look a bit odd for a while. Or, like, forever, depending.
Wish me luck making sense of this bold new scheme.
The core focus of Satisfactory is on automating the production of things. Iron products, steel products, aluminum products, all of these things need factories to extract the raw materials and turn them into fun and useful objects. In the process, however, you end up with leftovers and other unwanted fillers of inventory, such as plant matter and the remains of hostile creatures. Once you’re past the early game stages and no longer need biological gunk to power your empire, nor do you need spare ingots and whatnot, what do you do?
You sink them for Awesome Shop tickets, of course. And the best way to do that is with a fully automated waste management factory.
I later changed the sign’s text to “Trash 4 Tix” because I’m clever like that. Also please note that this bin faced the wrong direction at the time of this screenshot. Whoops.
I completed such a build this weekend, and here’s how it went:
I’m not going to go into all the boring technical details, but today I faced an immediate need to change a particular local account password across hundreds of machines, ASAP. For all the computers still in our old management system, that was easy (albeit tedious) since I’ve already built the rigging for that, years ago.
In the new system, though? The one we’ve only started migrating clients to in the last few weeks? I had nothing.
By pure luck, however, earlier in the morning I’d found a way to use Conditions in Policies to trigger scripted actions on a faster timetable than the “once per day at a precise time” scheduling option otherwise available. Handy! Thus I incorporated the technique into the password-change system. The flow goes something like this:
Create a new Custom Field, single line of text, to be populated by the password change script once the needed steps are completed. Value will be in ‘YYYYMMDD’ format, so 20241108 for today’s event.
Create the script that does the thing. Test it. Test it some more. Fix the things that turn out to be wrong once you put it into production. Hmm, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway.
Go into the Policy for the type of system (Windows Workstation, for instance) that you need to do this for. Add a Condition, which is the mechanism for triggering an alert state. Set it to see if the new Custom Field value is not set to the current day’s event value, and if the condition “triggers” then have it run the script.
And weirdly enough, that’s all there is to it. For future events all I have to do is edit the script to change the local account password and update the Custom Field with a new event value, then set the Policy’s Condition to look for that event value. As machines check in online and “trigger” the Condition, the script will run. Fully automated.
This is the fun part of my job. Mind you, having to do it under high-pressure conditions in a hurry took a lot out of me today, but… I did get it done.
Some games come and go with the seasons, like most of the “gacha” type mobile games. Others fit a very specific niche in one’s life and can stick around for ages. Case in point for the latter: Gems of War, which is celebrating 10 years in operation. I started playing shortly after it launched, which means two entire residential addresses ago.
Dang.
Unfortunately, the team behind the game seems to be phoning it in lately. The “improvements” tend not to be such at all, they’re getting more obvious about just wanting people to pay them money for no meaningful reward (in or out of game), and… well, then there’s the quality control:
“Anniversay” Week, eh?
Come on, y’all. At least try.
Adding insult to mockery is, of course, the fact that this reward system relies on a bunch more in-game grinding to get absolute scraps of “rewards.” At no point have they done something like, say, gift the playerbase a nice chunk of in-game currencies to thank us for ten years of loyalty. Nope, it’s just “glad you’re still here, now grind for a pittance. GRIND, WE SAY.”
I had some time off this week and… ended up not spending much time in Satisfactory because we had trouble with the furnace and then I had trouble with my internal systems. (We’ll just leave it at that.) This evening I eked out a couple of hours of progress, though, including the revival of an idea I tinkered with in a previous save but never implemented: A power control building.
The asymmetry is deliberate. The other design choices remain as haphazard as ever, of course.
I’ll be clear, this is a slightly ridiculous creation. If I want to put a power control switch in charge of a building’s state of on/off-ness there are much, much easier ways to go about it. Simply putting the switch by the main doorway and making sure that’s the only point at which power enters the factory building would do the job.
But… I have a Blueprint Designer and so far all I’ve done with it is create railway structures and light fixtures. Clearly I’ve been limiting myself. Why not have some fun?
Using the 5×5 Mk2 Designer space I set out a 3×3 bed of concrete foundations, then created “stairways” where the front/back doors go. For purely silly aesthetic reasons I walled the interior with the “half-pipe” foundations making a floorway bounded by curved floors that become walls. Just off-center inside the building is the point of the exercise, a power control switch. I perched it atop a small piece of decorative steel beam for “didn’t just want it sitting on the floor” reasons.
I ran a set of concrete pillars horizontally along the “wall” closest to the power switch as a way to hide most of the power cabling. This gives me a power wart at each end of the building, easy to reach.
This was taken about ten seconds before I realized that I could make those floors shiny by switching to the coated concrete foundation pieces.
Then, through the power of nudging, I surrounded all this with windowed walls and slapped some glassed roofing on top. To finish it off I put steel walls all around, used some more beams (regular and painted) for trim, and saved the blueprint for later deployment in the field. Huzzah!
I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t terribly practical. It eats up nearly as much space as a two-platform railway station. But it’s fun and that counts for a lot when you’re busy making factories for your corporate overlords. Don’t we all need a bit of self-indulgent fun in our lives? And hey, it doesn’t look too shabby:
The two concrete pillars on the “power” side of the building simply get extended (“zooped”) down to ground level, and on the other side I chose to use a huge support pillar to give the illusion that this structure looks like it belongs here.
Once you hit a certain point in your progress in the game called Satisfactory you find yourself in need of a way to track things outside of the game. The game gives you several tools such as the equipment codex and the mathematics calculator feature and the To Do list and the Notes sidebar but those can only carry you so far. You’ll see jokes online about how you’re not a real Satisfactory player until you start making spreadsheets and… well, that’s not wrong, honestly.
Maybe just not in the way you might think.
This image has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but by golly it looks neat, so here you go.
Let’s get into the note-taking aspect, the part of the game you engage with outside of the game.
