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I consider myself new to these forums (even though chronologically I think I've been here for like a year now) and I never bothered attempting reading the megathreads from the beginning or introducing myself. That's not how you do forums. You just lurk for a little bit to get a feel for the social norms (which you can bypass by listening to the podcast - I found the forums through the podcast and was glad but not surprised to find they share the same tone) and then you start posting like you've been here the whole time. And then you forget to keep up with the forum for weeks at a time and check in to see if anyone is talking about a game you just started playing and want to talk about. Or at least that's how I do it. I don't feel like this forum is especially cliquish. I mean sure a bunch of you know each other and are friends but that's generally how online communities work, you build a shared history together and that's normal anywhere, but like, I never felt like my own contributions were overlooked or that my activity here or in the slack was at all unwelcome, so. (edit: I registered march 14 of last year. So pretty much exactly one year now! That's.. not a lot of posts in the space of a year.)

Yeah the energy bar thing was frustrating to me too, especially with a larger field. Until I discovered the field snack recipe that Neonrev noticed - pine cones, acorns, and maple seeds are easy to come by and it only takes one of each to turn them into a field snack. I also started paying attention to which foods replenish energy in general - berries generally restore around 30 energy, and maple syrup (which you get every few days from a maple tree with a tapper applied) gives you a lot of energy too. I restarted my game after about two weeks into spring and concentrated on saving up funds to sink them all into strawberry seeds at the egg festival (the only time of year you can buy them!), and had a huge cash crop to get me going pretty fast. Built a silo before building a coop or doing much clearing, so all the grass I clear out of my field becomes hay, and I can sell the surplus hay to Marnie. Mayonnaise makers are cheap and easy to build and mayonnaise sells for four times as much as an egg does. I'm super cheesed at myself right now though because first day of summer, I planted an apple tree, and then forgot what it was when I was clearing fields. NOTE TO SELF: put up a fricking fence around any trees I want to keep so that I don't accidentally chop them down. That thing was expensive and now it's too late to have an apple tree ready by the start of fall! I also have basically no interest in talking to people which isn't making me popular in town. Too busy spelunking.

I got two Mews where before I had none. And while I am excited to have them, I'm annoyed they come preloaded at level 100.

So far I haven't seen anything about this game that has significantly challenged my assumption that it's a 3d first-person Starbound. You've got your matter manipulator, your resource collecting to upgrade the exploration range of your spaceship, your AI mobs with their own beefs and agendas that you can work with or against, your tons and tons of procedural worlds peppered with prefab set pieces intended to advance the story, and the entire mess being shared online with other players. And that's cool! Starbound is a lot of fun, if at points unnecessarily difficult.

Sculptris is a free 3d sculpting application that's also available through Pixologic, and Sculptgl is a web-embedded thing that tries to ape Zbrush's core sculpting functionality, right down to having the same hotkeys for a lot of the commands, if you wanna try sculpting anyway!

Here's a thing I did not too long ago!

I live way out in the middle of goddamned nowhere in the north end of California but it looks like there's two thumbs within (what is for me) a reasonable distance!

Also, good use of the dot space TLD: astroneer.space

I only arrived on the idle forums in the spring of this year, is this a thing? Like is Christmas occupying these boards for the entire fiscal fourth quarter a thing? Or is this weird case of christmas herpes that Idle Banter came down with new for this year? I don't like it. I'm confused and I'm scared and I'm angry and I don't like it.

A friend linked this mashup of the Tem Shop music on twitter and I can't stop listening. I love the huge amount of fanart and creative response that this game is generating.

The number of times I have been defeated at the end has completely erased my interest in trying to finish this fucking game and I think I'm just gonna watch all the endings on youtube. So, hooray for that, I guess. Edit: Okay after a very frustrating hour and a half I finished with the neutral ending. Other non-spoiler thoughts: I would have liked to have the Temmies be a more significant portion of the main story, and Mettatron much less.

I'm not sure I understand what you're driving at. Are you trying to logically disprove my tastes? And anyway the art in that one screenshot is not at all representative of where the bar is set for most of the game, which is single-color sprites on a black background. I'm allowed to not dig that!

I just started playing last night and I haven't gotten far so I don't really have a whole lot to contribute just yet but my visit with Toriel gave me a case of the Emotions. I'm not like super super into the visual style of the game at all, but I understand that it is the work of one dude and pixel art is kind of a thing in indie games where you need to manage the scope of the project. And anyway, a compelling story covereth a multitude of sins.

I've heard the same thing about tea and am trying to get into the habit of drinking green tea instead of diet sodas. D: Dropped six pounds in September, though. Been really good about logging and minding my calories and doing my hour of elliptical!

This is kinda what I figured, re: getting a gradient, but I didn't know for certain. I wondered if just having a different material ID for each color you want to use might also be a solution, but that still seems like it would be relatively inelegant compared to the tiny texture flat color method, with any difference in performance being negligible when weighed against the speed of the workflow.

Quadsphere with a tennis-ball unwrap is a method I've seen advised elswhere.

Yeah the 'vector style' tagline is kind of disingenuous because of course if you're working in 3d the outlines are going to be resolution-independent, but there's no way to get the infinite zoom on curved surfaces that you get with 2d bezier curves that I'm currently aware of. I mean unless someone's invented an engine that dynamically subdivides based on a control mesh as you zoom in. I also have no idea if vertex colors are better or not, having never tried to use them mysef, so I'm also curious to know if there's any advantages to this technique over vertex coloring.

This technique for lowpoly 3d art is really interesting - using a super small texture map (16x16 pixels in this case!), and then treating that diffuse map as your palette for the entire game, relying on the geometry and UV space to determine the flat color for individual elements. Here's another example of the same workflow -

Hah! that's rad, Zerofiftyone!

Snagged it! Thanks for the heads-up!