u/BlakeTheDrake

In-game OR out here, either will do. I finally got around to checking that place out, but I never played VotV, nor am I planning to, so I'm having some trouble orienteering myself. I found my way to the main building, talked to Hudson, and he just goes "Head to the substation, it's just out the carpark and the to the right." Five minutes later, I'm lost in the forest and stumbling into one half-finishing satellite-dish after the other. =_=

I've reached the endgame, and crafted all the weapons and shields in the game... including the two off-hand weapons. Cool! I'm looking forwards to trying out the Mystagogue Gauntlet in particular! Except... all the good weapons seem to be two-handed, denying me the use of a shield. All three Hard-Light Weapons are two-handed. The Laser Katana is two-handed. The sniper-rifles and Magbow are two-handed. All the shotguns are two-handed. Both of the magnums are two-handed. The Quantum Pick is two-handed. The flamethrower is two-handed.

Basically... what one-handed weapons are worth using in the endgame? I really wanna get some actual use out of some of my off-hand weapons and fancy shields, but I think the last one-handed weapon I used was the Exor Flail, and that was a while ago...

So... in order to enter Residence Sector without immediately dying from the unnatural below-zero-Kelvin temperatures, you need to first touch the Sun Disk. Just having +3 Cold Resistance won't help any. A'right, cool, I get it!

Except... what about all the OTHER people that are hanging out around Residence Sector? I mean, most of them do seem to have some justification. There's a bunch of Gatekeepers, but they presumably have their own mystic defenses against such things. There's a few Order Assassins, but considering their status, the odds that they indeed got to touch the Sun Disk before heading there are pretty high. Same thing goes for Hasta Tria, for the brief moment he spends in the area. Then there's Abe and Janet, but they're sitting behind some kind of weird red forcefield and dressed for the weather besides - presumably, that forcefield takes the most severe edge off the chill, so they can manage. There's a few others that are hanging out inside Fragments, but that place is weird, so I don't suppose the preternatural chill of the rest of the sector extends there anyway.

Buuut that leaves three outliers. First, of course is Dr. Cahn, who's standing around in a highly exposed area, wearing his normal clothes, and seem entirely unbothered. How strange. Between that and getting himself accidentally locked in a containment-cell, he sure does seem to find himself in a lot of strange situations! :P (So, yes, we all know why the cold never bothered HIM anyway...)

Stranger is Moira Shepherd. You find her just standing around in a corner in the Security Barracks. Wearing a puffy coat and complaining about freezing her ass off, sure, but there's no weird forcefields involved. She's pretty close to the center of the freeze, too. How the heck is she surviving that?

But the weirdest is Ulrich Thule. Sure, he's all the way over in Executive Residences, but that area is STILL hypercooled, and he isn't even wearing winter-clothes - just like Cahn, but with far less of an explanation, he's just standing around in those impossibly frigid temperatures, wearing his normal lab-coat and complaining about how he wants a hot cup of coffee. (That's putting aside the fact that he's on the far side of a glacial wall that you need to melt with the flamethrower to even reach him, of course... but ALL the NPC's seem able to move around by routes that aren't available to you, presumably due to being more familiar with the facility and having actual security-credentials instead of relying on a keypad hacker for everything.)

I'm sure you know who I'm talking about. Krasue. Leyak-chan's frigid big sis. Having largely finished exploring Residence Sector and started in on Fragments, I feel like it's time I got her a room right next to her sis. Trouble is, I don't quite have a solid grasp on how she works, outside of Residence Sector itself.

I know she only spawns if you're somewhere cold, regardless of whether you've nullified that chill using equipment/consumables or not. But what happens if you LEAVE that chilly location after she's spawned? Does she continue to chase you, or vanish? See, my main base is in a Homeworld, so I set up containment for Leyak just outside the gate, where there's an outlet. I even specifically thought ahead with the setup, so there's battery-capacity and outlets for a second containment-cell there. Now that cell is in place and fully charged with delicious milk, but I can't seem to get her near it! I figured I could just hang out in the inexplicably icy server-room until she turned up, but I've tried that twice now. Each time, she arrived, apparently, and I got the 'feeling a chill' countdown, but I couldn't actually SEE her anywhere - and as soon as I stepped out of the server-room to look around, the countdown stopped, and she was nowhere to be found.

How can I get her near the cell to capture? Is there a way, or do I have to wait for a Cold Snap? That could take a while, after all - I already had that first one that you're almost guaranteed to get once the option is unlocked, but I wasn't ready for the capture at that point.

First of all... no Level 20 perk? Apparently, that used to be the case for both Cooking AND Fishing, but by now Cooking got one, so it's just Fishing that's left as the odd one out. Why, I struggle to understand. It's not like there isn't a BUNCH of things that could go there and make things better. Obvious possibilities include: Better chance of catching Rare Fish, better chance of fishing up rare Junk, one fewer struggles when catching fish, chance to catch Rare Fish without bait, more bait per craft... the list goes on.

What makes this worse is that the Fishing Skill itself is completely useless. All it does is make your line less inclined to break if you fumble the minigame... which you're maybe going to do once or twice when you're just starting out, meaning you HAVE no Fishing Skill. Once you get the hang of it - and it really isn't complicated, let's be honest - the strength of your line stops being relevant, and thus, so does your Fishing Skill. It's essentially and advantage that you only need at a point when you don't have it. All of which means that while you'll want it at 15 for that final perk, the last five levels are COMPLETELY irrelevant - and indeed, the first fifteen are irrelevant too, save for the actually useful perks that are dotted along the line.

So, rather than just saying "It needs a Level 20 Perk, how does it not have one yet?!", I instead wanna say, the Fishing-skill as a whole should probably be rethought. Like, it should do something USEFUL, such as gradually shortening each struggle, improving your chances of catching fish instead of junk (since you get the Mud Waders for when you WANT to catch junk) or improving your odds of catching rare fish/rare junk. (Mind, I don't necessarily mean 'rare fish' in the sense of the rare VARIANTS, but stuff like having a better chance to pull up an IS-0098 or... hmm. Okay, yeah, no, that's about it, IS-0098 is the only straight-up hard-to-find fish in the game currently.)

Well, here's hoping that a fishing-skill rework is somewhere in the plan, 'cuz the current version is badly thought-out and incomplete.

Having finally obtained the resources to make telepads, I've gotten started on a project that's been in the back of my mind since I first started training up my Fishing- and Cooking-skills... establishing a fishing-outpost near every location with unique fish in it, so that I can go grab a fresh specimen of anything I need for cooking or crafting, without any hassle! I got my first one set up in the shack on the pier in Canaan easily enough, but as soon as I tried to establish my SECOND one, I ran into trouble...

I'd planned to set up in the small room right on the edge of the coolant-pool in Power Services, right before the elevator down to Reactors - it seemed the perfect spot for it! Only, when I got there, lugging around a Crafting Bench, storage-box, telepad, battery and plug-strip, it turned out there isn't a power-outlet down there. I never even LOOKED for one, I just assumed there'd be one 'cuz it seemed like that sort of place, with computers and stuff! So I wound up having to scout for another location while severely overburdened, which was a whoooole pain in the ass! The only option I found nearby was the overlook where Waterbot hangs out, which seemed too narrow and cramped and lacked a good place to put down a Tackle Box - so I ultimately wound up making my way through the portal above the pool, and setting up just inside of it, along with putting down a Rope Plant on the platform for easier access.

Now, on the bright side, that location DOES make for a great place to fish for Antefish and Portalfish, along with having easy access to the coolant-pond for Silken Betta, but the point is, I wanna be sure I know where I'm going before I try to set up any more fishing-bases. >_> So, I thought I'd see if there were any fellow fishing-afficionados around here with suggestions for good places to set up near appropriate bodies of water?

As I said, I've already got the Gutfish Eel covered, along with the Silken Betta and the very common Antefish and Portalfish. I also know for a fact that there's an outlet right next to the Pool of Ink in the Night-Realm for Inkfish, and right by the Core in The Encroachment for Gem Crabs, so those should be easy enough! But, I need a good spot near the Hydroplant Reservoir for Darkwater Fish, a place close to the fountain in Flathill for Chordfish, somewhere near an underground lake for Moonfish, a place with pools of radioactive waste for Radfish, somewhere in Royal Range for Frigid Queenfish, and somewhere in Shadowgate for Penumbra... when I get that far!

If you're playing solo, the Convection Oven probably USED to be plenty... but if you're cooking for a bunch of pets as well as yourself, or you're in a multiplayer server and cooking for your friends too, a SINGLE oven-slot just ain't enough! Worse, with its large footprint and unstackability, putting down multiple Convection Ovens take up a TON of space in your kitchen...

Considering that you eventually get an upgrade from the Portable Stove to the Super Cooker 2000, why shouldn't there also be an upgrade to your baking-abilities available? With room for two, or even FOUR, loaves of bread! Though, honestly, I would suggest just having two spaces, but making it easily stackable so that you can put two on top of each other if you need more.

Give it to me straight... do they fully regenerate if you die? Like, I get that you're not supposed to go in that direction, but I accidentally aggroed the Defense Bots while exploring nearby - you know how RIDICULOUSLY long their aggro-range it - and then wasted a ton of ammo wearing them down before they got me. I didn't want it to go to waste, and hey, I need those CPU's anyway, so I went back in there! Only, even though I rushed back, they were already back up on that mound with the Jotun, somehow. I provoked them with a sniper-shot to resume the fight, but this time, the Jotun aggroed too, and I died even quicker - but not before throwing even MORE ammo at those two Defense Bots. I went in a third time, this time just getting close enough for the bots but NOT the Jotun to aggro. I threw more ammo at them in the ensuing fight. I died again. Somehow, they don't even look DAMAGED.

I know Defense Bots are ridiculously tanky, but still, this is getting STUPID. Are those two Defense Bots 'special' somehow? Like, do they auto-regenerate if nobody's actively engaging them, or do they just have some absurd amount of bonus health? Either way, I think I just wasted a huge pile of shotgun and sniper-rifle ammo... >.<

EDIT: Okay, exploring the REST of the area reveals one closed gate and three doors that 'cannot be opened from this side', with no other apparent means of entry. Apparently, you ARE supposed to fight 2X Defense Bots and a Jotun, with the weapons available at this point in the game?!

Why? It's certainly a fun change of pace and a great homage to Super Mario 64! Well, because of the coin atop the giant snowman. As far as I can tell, and indeed search my way to, the ONLY WAY to get to that one is either to randomly have brought a Jump Pad, or to be on a second+ run with the Jetpack. So, if you're doing your first run of Space Queen, and ISN'T the type to carry a Jump Pad with you everywhere, you can spend ages getting to 8/8 Crowns and 24/25 coins, aaaand that's your lot, no special awesome secret for you, good day sir!

Not only is it annoying and frustrating, it also makes no sense. It's supposed to be a 'game within the game', so why would there be a coin that's impossible to collect with 'in-game' means? One you can only obtain using 'out-of-game' tools? That's just dumb.

But of course, I'm mostly just being harsh on it because it's going to ABSOLUTELY SUCK to have to collect those 8 crowns and 24 coins again after the next Portal Reset, just so I can finally get that last coin. =_= It's not like I even need the gold.

EDIT: Okay, I managed to get the bonus, turns out you can just... go back and finish the job, as long as it's within the same portal-cycle. :P I'd been led to believe that it had to be done all during the same visit! Also, as it turns out, getting a Jump Pad didn't even help, you'd need that AND a LongJump Pack or Jetpack in order to reach the coin in what appears to be the designed manner. Instead, it's easier to just use one of the nearby 'built-in' jump-pads, along with the Gravity Cube, to land on one of the snowman's arms, which is possible despite them just being 2D cutouts. From there, you can reach the top, and the coin, with a regular double-jump! So yeah, that coin is still ridiculous - I'm really not sure if standing on the arms is how you're meant to get there - but I'm feeling a bit less sour about the whole thing now. ^_^;

I'm really not sure if this is a bug or just a mechanic I'm not understanding, so I thought I'd ask before making a bug-report.

Basically, I have some fairly simple defensive setups around the edges of my base, featuring a line of objects: Tesla Coil - Lever - Makeshift Battery - Bench Press/Exercise Bike. The basic idea is that I'll charge the batteries while waiting for food to cook and whatnot, and visiting traders sometimes do so too - then, when an Assault Event happens, I throw the levers and activate the defenses, which can easily last through the attack on a full battery.

Problem is, every time I boot up the game, the batteries are empty, even if they haven't been used. Is this just how they work when they aren't hooked up to the actual power-grid? Or are they bugged? Anybody else have similar setups where it DOESN'T happen? It's rather annoying - I'm aware that I could probably solve it by just hooking those batteries up to main power, but that would mean a lot of long wires, making my base messy (well, messier), and it'd make the exercise-equipment feel a bit pointless.

As a completionist, I of course had to get a complete collection of possible pets. And then, of course, I had to level them all to 20. In so doing, I've had the opportunity to learn a few things about doing so efficiently, which I will share here, in the hopes that it will benefit others. But first, let's just sum up three fundamental facts that inform my conclusions...

Firstly, you pet ONLY gains XP by being fed. Whether it's joining you in pulse-pounding combat, or spending the rest of its time snoring on a Pet Bed, is irrelevant - only mealtimes matter!

Secondly, while I could be wrong about this - I haven't tested it that extensively - it seems like the XP your pet gains from a meal is purely linked to that meal's Hunger Fill. Meaning, Thirst Fill is irrelevant, which also means that most soups, stews and so on make poor pet-food, since they tend to be balanced in that regard.

Third, your pet will get hungry every 8 in-game hours, regardless of how filling their last meal was.

So, from this, you can draw a simple conclusion - you need food with the highest possible Hunger Fill, if you want to level them quickly! Which leads us to an unfortunate detail about the Cooking-system. As you level up Cooking, you get a rather hefty bonus to Hunger and Thirst Fill for anything you fry or bake, but ONLY for that, and this benefit is COMPLETELY non-transferable. So, anything you prepare at the Chef's Counter isn't affected by your skill, even if it uses fried or baked foods as ingredients, as many such meals do. Now portionable food - cakes, pies, casseroles, etc. - DO allow this quality to transfer to the actual portions that you eat, but unfortunately, none of those portions have high enough Hunger Fill for this to really matter.

What this means is that a LOT of cooking-options just kind of plateau - they may be a decent fallback, or useful in particular situations, but they never get better. Cosmato Salad Wrap, for instance, often gets mentioned as an excellent source of food for you OR your pet, since all the ingredients can be farmed - but it has 51.7 Hunger Fill, and that is all it will ever have. Still, it can be a good fallback, since you'll never run out! By the same token, some of the more high-end portionable foods - Simple Pest Pie, Carrot Cake, Salted Honey Pie - will, at high Cooking-levels, reach a Hunger Fill rate of around 50, making them comparable while being highly resource-effective thanks to the Serving Seconds perk, and able to stack up to 6 instead of 4 as with most food-items. This may also make them useful if you're planning a long expedition and need to bring enough food for both yourself and a pet, while fitting it all in a single cooler-space!

However, the real take-away is that for optimum leveling, you need fried or baked foods with high Hunger Fill and no portioning. There are three stand-outs on that front - the shared 1st Place goes to the Fr-eyed Rice and the Egg & Peccary Tartine, with a close second being the Stuffed Roast Peccary. All three can easily clear 100 Hunger Fill at high Cooking-levels. Of course, none of those can be made with purely home-grown ingredients, but it isn't really far off! Rice, Egg, Tomato, Mushroom, Greyeb, plus Wheat and Milk for Bread, can all be grown at home - just make sure to tame a Peccary Sow for milking, and potentially a Mushroom Peccary for Mushrooms, allowing you to grow those even before you reach Canaan and get the ability to craft an actual Mushroom Farm.

What you'll be missing is Canned Peas, Salt, and Meat. Salt is easy enough to get, by several different routes, and if you care about cooking at all, you'll be grabbing it everywhere you go regardless. If you need a lot, though, Darkwater Fish make a good, renewable source! Canned Peas, meanwhile, is something you just need to make a habit of collecting any chance you get - there's a bunch in Flathill, right near the start, for easy collection after every reset, and a couple in the Witch's Hut in Canaan which you're likely to repeatedly visit for... other reasons, anyway, so why not grab those two while you're at it? You can also trade Root Beer for Canned Peas at the Security Station in the Office Lobby, so make a point of emptying every vending-machine you come across of Root Beer - and of course, you can also grab a can every time you take down a Security or Containment Bot! Considering all of that, you can easily get a huge stockpile.

So, all that remains is to just make sure to kill and butcher every Peccary you meet, for Drumsticks to stuff and Peccary Chops that you can grind into Sausage. Or, if you really want to optimize, just stick with the Fr-eyed Rice, which needs only home-grown veggies and Canned Peas, along with the Egg & Peccary Tartine, in order to avoid having two dishes compete for a limited supply of Peas - especially since the Stuffed Peccary is slightly inferior to the other two. Just means you can leave all those Drumsticks to rot, I suppose!

Honorable mention goes to the Silky Fish Florentine - the third-place finisher. It tops out at just shy of 90 Hunger Fill, which really isn't bad, though it also comes in quite late, since the Silken Betta is one of the last fish you're likely to catch. Still, you can make two Florentines per fish, and the rest of the ingredients are home-grown, so if you caught a bunch anyway - perhaps while trying for that elusive Gossamer Betta - you can do a lot worse than turning it all into a smorgasbord of Florentines. Just keep in mind that it'll be competing with the Egg & Peccary Tartine for Milk, and with the Stuffed Roast Peccary for Mushrooms...

I've been coming back to Canaan regularly to collect the Lodestone, pick corn and apples from the fields, pick up some silver at the marketplace, fish for eel from the pier, etc. But what bugs me is how ISOLATED the Swamp is! The rest of the area has plenty of shortcuts and stuff you can unlock, but the swamp is at the end of a stupidly long and winding route, and unless I've missed something, the closest thing to a shortcut it has is that one zipline across the broken bridge - which is one-way only, of course. I'm plotting out a future portal-network as I go, for when I'm able to craft Teleporter Pads, and it honestly seems like it I want convenient access to both the swamp and the rest of the area, I'd need TWO just for that one Portal World! Which seems a bit unreasonable...

My question, thus, is whether there's any way to make the Swamp area of Canaan easier to reach, short of Telepads and maybe the Jetpack? I recently unlocked the Longjump Pack, but it doesn't really seem like it can go up high enough to clear the broken bridge from the lower end. Maybe it's possible to 'rebuild' the bridge using ramps and bridges? I haven't really used those much, or AT ALL, so I'm unsure of their limitations. Or, have any other clever-clogs come up with a convenient way of reaching the swamp without a huge detour across a bridge, down a ladder, fighting through multiple unavoidable enemy encounters, through a cave, across the water, and up a bucketvator?

As my flair suggests, I'm playing as a Paratheoretical Physicist. Which means I get bonuses to thrown weapons! However, Throwing is by far my LOWEST skill at this point, because I just can't seem to find any practical throwing-weapons to use - not since Throwing Darts stopped being relevant - and I'm at the Hydroplant now! All the options currently on my table eat up resources that are way too much of a pain to farm, basically.

Thermite Molotovs? Eats through Anteverse Gel, meaning more time spent raiding the Fungal Zone, especially since it's needed for a BUNCH of other things too - including the Boiling Distillations, nowadays. Electron Grenades? Eats through Capacitors, which - while hardly rare - are bothersome to acquire in that sort of quantity, since the primary source for them is hunting Electro-Pests. Throwing Quills? Uses Magnetic Alloy for some unholy reason, HARD PASS! Grenades? Only obtained through drops, so way too rare for general use. Throwing Crystal? Easy to make, but too weak to be worth using even when they first became an option.

Honestly, it seems like Mugnades are still the most practical option, somehow, and those are a pain too since the only real way to get the requisite mugs is to just stand at a coffee-machine and feed a ton of ones to it. Would be nicer if you could pick up coffee-machines and move 'em to your base, but as it is, it's kind of a hassle! Meanwhile, the single most renewable throwable resources - Kerespheres - is COMPLETELY useless, if not actively an obstacle. =_=

Chemistry seems to offer a batch of new throwables, and I haven't experimented extensively with those yet, but none of them seem promising? I tried making some Concussive Flasks, but as it turns out, they do zero damage and basically just bounce enemies around a bit.

I finally got around to making a couple of Pest Wheels - mostly just 'cuz they seemed like a good place to stash some of my growing collection of bespoke Pests, granted. By the time I accessed the recipe, they already looked like an inferior solution compared to just... using batteries, y'know? But, at a glance, they seemed like they'd have some niche applications, maybe powering a base if you just NEEDED to put one somewhere that doesn't have an outlet nearby. But that was when I assumed that they generated energy continuously.

After making a couple, and hooking them up to some base defenses, I quickly realized that the little buggers will only spin the wheel for a few seconds, generating a brief burst of power, then revert to lazing off - and seemingly the only way to get them spinning again, is to take them out of there, then stuffing them back inside. Even charging up a Makeshift Battery like that is a huge hassle. Indeed, they seem so bafflingly useless, that I have to consider the possibility that I'm missing something obvious...