All 65 robot hacks are done :D
I've put together a giant post over on the blog covering every single one of the hacks, including lots of demos.
Many of the demos I've shared in previous SITREPs as they were developed, though there are a few new ones, too, that and you can check out a bunch of graphs breaking down hacks by various categories, as well as see the design spreadsheets used to assign costs.
Whew, that was a big system, and of course it's not even out yet and there's already a forum thread about how to expand it xD
Simulcasting 0b10
Speedrun races continue, having now gone through two weekends of the new format with simulcasting hosted by b_sen. Week 1 is up on YouTube. Week 2 hasn't been exported yet, but you can find it on Twitch here. In it Valguris breaks the Cogmind world record, long held by zxc, with a win in only 635 turns.
I don't have a chance to spectate these because time zones, but b_sen commented that Valguris' win during the race was doubly impressive, because "he was using consistent speedrun strategies instead of 'throw many many runs at the RNG's mercy' strategies." I heard he was using some interesting indirect hacking techniques to find exits, and Malthusis pointed out that he was throttling flight units for max speed, running fairly hot.
These runs are generally organized over weekends on the Discord if you're interested, and there are more participants than just those streaming so everyone's free to just join in on the side and share results.
Backseat Cogminding
Armchair Robotics threads continue to provide an outlet for topical strategy advice. We've got two so far:
- Week 1: Propulsion Type
- Week 2: Movement Tactics
- (The third should be coming up soonish)
Even if you don't have anything to add yourself, stop by if you have any relevant questions since lots of the best players participate in these discussions and are happy to provide input. That and just from browsing the posts you'll probably learn some helpful new tactics to improve your game :)
10k March
Development recently passed the 9,500-hour mark, and is set to hit 10k by the end of the year!
The monthly hours graph is decent, if not nearly as stable or high as before my concussion last year (arrow).
This has been slowing down Beta 7 a bit, but at least I'm staying ahead of the head issues which is good for the long term!
On that note, with robot hacking complete there's just the usual fixes and little features to do before preparing to release it into the wild. I have a massive list of other things I wanted to do with Beta 7, but as usual aside from fixes (which always get top priority) I'll just have to pick and choose some of the other items and push everything else into future releases. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you build a literally endless TODO list, one that gets longer rather than shorter as you work on a game xD
Still can't give a date for it, but I'll probably have a pretty clear idea come one week from now, and prerelease testing will likely start within two weeks.
Creative Endeavors
I'm not the only one making stuff around here.
Azimet the Banished has shared an electronic composition, a tribute to Arc Projectors. Azimet says:
Arc projectors are weapons that deserve some more attention. I really love the idea of heavy disruption, which can lead to new allies. Because of this, I made them sing a song.
And Zyalin created a fun mashup of hand-drawn art and ASCII item art from the game:
A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example Beta 6 here.
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.