Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.

I had hamsters and gerbils, my hamsters weren’t bitey. I guess we socialized them better, they just liked walking from hand to hand.

Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.

You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.

Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.

Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.

All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.

It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.

I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.

hamsters are cooler than mice. it’s fun to hand them seeds and watch them stuff their pouches. Face luggage.

Very, very light spoilers:

This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.

A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”

Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.

Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.

The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.

The…Atlantic Ocean?

Both of your guesses I would put into Resignation. “I can’t do anything about it, so why bother?” Why bother checking the fuel for contaminants, it’s always clean anyway. Why bother standing up to the aircraft owner, I’m gonna have to fly the mission anyway whether or not I think it’s safe.

The other is Impulsivity, the tendency to do things at the spur of the moment without thinking anything through. Jumping into the plane to fly off somewhere without planning the flight, reacting to a problem by instantly doing the first thing that comes to mind instead of working the problem, etc.

I can also say I’ve had my fun with the game and move on.

Recall the core was supposed to be the business end of a nuclear bomb, it was supposed to be near criticality so that a nuclear explosion could be triggered. They were measuring just how close to criticality it was. I don’t fully understand why they were doing that; could be anything from refining nuclear bomb design to developing safety procedures, aka “Don’t store this next to this much beryllium.”

In the first case, Harry Doghlian was stacking bricks. The instruments read he was close to criticality as he started to place one last brick, so he had achieved the goal of the experiment, and then he dropped the brick. Doghlian died from failure of imagination, his experimental apparatus did not account for clumsiness. Also in the room was a military private named Robert Hemmerly acting as a security guard, who was also exposed and died 33 years later from leukemia.

In the second case, Louis Slotin was closing a hemispheric shell. As designed, there were supposed to be shims that wouldn’t let the shell completely close. He removed these shims and instead used the blade of a screwdriver. Which slipped. Once again, the test apparatus did not account for clumsiness…or it did, but the safety measures were defeated.

Slotin was apparently prone to bravado, he had done this test/demonstration about a dozen times for small crowds; there were seven other people in the room with him including someone looking over his shoulder. While part of the scientific method is repeating experiments, I’m not convinced he wasn’t just showing off.

In the human factors chapter of flight school we teach about the five hazardous attitudes. Slotin demonstrated three of the five:

Anti-authority. The removal of the shims was not authorized, but he did it anyway.

Macho. Most accounts I’ve read make a point to mention the blue jeans and snakeskin boots he wore, suggesting a cowboy attitude.

Invulnerability. Slotin knew Doghlian personally and had visited Doghlian in the hospital as he lay literally falling apart at the cellular level…and then went to work to take the safety shims out of his radiation test apparatus. What kind of man does that? One who thinks it can’t happen to him. How’d that work out?

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look up what the other two hazardous attitudes are.

Further experiments with the demon core were done via robotic remote control with personnel a quarter mile away. Somebody finally said “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing criticality experiments with our bare hands.”

I graduated high school in 2005, one out of some 300 of my graduating class. Had plenty of friends. Went to community college, several folks I knew from school went to the same community college, met plenty of new folks. Had plenty of friends. Transferred to university, had plenty of friends, got to know my roommates pretty close, that kind of thing.

Out of college, I disappeared into what I thought was going to be my career for a few years. When I came back up and looked around, I found myself in a different world with people that aren’t people anymore, there are walking talking eating shitting cell phone stands.

I don’t try to socialize for the same reason I don’t go hunting for Carolina parakeets: Interpersonal relationships aren’t a thing that exists in the world anymore. We killed them all and the corpse of the last one is on display behind glass at the Raleigh museum of Natural Sciences.

Both of my grandmothers are dead, but I did teach my aunt to use Linux. She had a laptop that “ran” Windows 10. It would take 30 seconds to open the Start menu. One SSD, one RAM upgrade and one install of Mint later it’s a whole new machine. She can Firefox and Mahjongg just fine.

The Demon Core was a sphere of plutonium intended to be used as part of a nuclear bomb dropped on Japan. It wasn’t used for this purpose, and instead nuclear physicists used it in various experiments. Two of which involved approaching criticality.

One experiment involved stacking bricks made of some neutron reflecting material, like beryllium or something, around the core. Reflecting neutrons back at the plutonium would cause more fission events to occur; if it hits a certain threshold called criticality it it will release a considerable amount of radiation and heat. The goal was to get close to, but not exceed, that limit. The scientist was about to place one more brick when his instruments told him it would go critical if the brick was placed, so he started to back off…and dropped the brick.

The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of dazzling blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the brick away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.

A short time later, another scientist started a similar experiment, this time enclosing the core in two half-spherical metal shells. If the core was completely surrounded by the shells, it would go critical. He used the blade of a flathead screwdriver to almost, but not quite, close the shells. Then the screwdriver slipped and the shells fully closed.

The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of blinding blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the upper shell away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.

Decades later, youtube hair and beard model Kyle Hill released a video detailing this story, and it has since become something of a sensation on the internet. Images of the demon core in its “closing the shells” configuration is often used as shorthand for something that is exceedingly needlessly reckless. Some of the humor comes from if ya know, ya know, some of it is based in the justaposition of teh high intelligence required to do nuclear physics, with the negligent stupidity of putting nothing between you and a long ugly painful death but the blade of a screwdriver.

I’m sure in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drug store.

I would end up with a farm that took all day to water, and never enough time to go down in any mine far enough to find iridium enough to make sprinklers out of, and then stop playing.

Or, they knew what they were doing.

pretty okay, just had a shower and I’m chilling on the couch with my cat. She is steadily purring. comfort level is around a 7.8, maybe 7.9.

I bought HL1’s GOTY edition when it came out.

writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.

A grill should run on charcoal. It needs to get very hot and that’s literally it.

There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.

“I run Arch btw” became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. “Look at my l33t skills.”

Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical…well…petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They’re increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole “Not Invented Here” thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they’re still clinging to.

For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.