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I don’t know how many there are, but every time I see one, I say “fiducial!” out loud and keep going.

It helps keep me sane.

This is a dark game. It includes elements of radiation, progressive biohazards, existential dread, and potentially, eventual death. It is quite direct and minimal in the depictions of hazards in general. It would be… jank to insert confusing new names for something there’s already a very easily understood shorthand for. So there’s that.

At the same time… Dr. Kel’s symptoms are in actual fact much more consistent with (comically rapid) acute radiation exposure syndrome or even radiation burns, which tend to be the things that kill you at short timescales. It would be rather nice if we could call it that. If he’s taking any medications, they are things like potassium iodide and chelating agents, but most games hand-wave over the details of how radioactive contamination actually works.

For examples of how this is approached with at least diegetic effectiveness: see the Fallout series.

Cancer is the thing you get later if you survive all that, but Dr. Kel is not at the base long enough for such to develop. Unless it’s some kind of weird violently accelerated alien cancer. Then you might as well call it Bao disease for all the help that man will give you, I guess.

The base radar is much too intolerant of sporadic contact loss. I have to toggle the alarm off with snd.radar_alarm to stop it yelling constantly after a certain point in story mode. Filtering by entity type has no effect on which types of entity trigger the alarm; it only affects which ones are visually displayed on the radar map.

The radar seems to “lose sight” of certain contacts/entities for a single sweep and then reacquire the same ones again on the very next sweep. Every single time this happens, it triggers an alarm as though it’s a new entity. At the maximum radar sweep speed from base upgrades, which is something like 2-3 Hz, my radar log is filled with the entity count going down and up by exactly one every few seconds at all times. If only the radar would persist lost entities for just a sweep or two before discarding them, it could stop doing that entirely and the radar alarm could be infinitely more useful.

It’s profoundly annoying.

I thought it was something else until I realized it was following the ecliptic every day and started showing itty bitty phases.

The first time I saw the moon, it was literally just a black dot in the sky.

I don’t want to take things from there. Those invisible jerks beat me up and steal my shrimps.

The power washer is somehow worse and slower than the mop at cleaning those windows. It will only clean the exact spot where the water jet intersects the window, whereas the mop will affect a small area around the mop head. This is annoying because if you point the same power washer at an Ariral wall graffito, the whole window-sized decal will go away all at once.

One of the cheeky aliens left a “big sponge” the size of a dang watermelon outside the base where they like to scatter strange brownies and graffiti. I haven’t tried it yet because it’s a full quarter of poor Dr. Kel’s inventory – and frankly also not sure if it will explode or tempt me to eat it instead.

You do realize that to mod a game, it needs to actually have support for the API you’re using, right? This isn’t Game Genie, here.

so much stuff happens I love it

Empty cans seem prone to having their prop interactions broken. A moment ago I just removed a bunch of empty cans from the trash bin you see there; when I removed one too many and didn’t have space for it in my inventory, it immediately dropped the empty can.

But instead of falling to the ground, it fixed itself in place where the prop was spawned out of my inventory. Now I can’t interact with it – it can’t be grabbed, held, used (well I guess it can; it says it is empty, so that technically works), or collected. The can is not being grabbed. It is hovering in place at mid-height above the ground.

There are others in my base that I’d tried to put into an open container, one of those little blue plastic bins you happen across sometimes, but three clipped out of the bin and did this to themselves there.

Is there, uh, some way to clean up these “stuck” empty cans?

For pity’s sake. Asked and answered. Read.

Learn to live inside of the assumption that is true.

Garbage bag roll, which should be about the size and weight of one (1) burrito, is prohibitively voluminous. The equivalent twelve filled garbage bags, on the other hand, take up relatively little inventory space.

Surely, this is a backwards.