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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   941 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread.

Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.

Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.

Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.

Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.

That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.

The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.

I've been playing Windrose. It's a pirate game. It's closer to a survival game like Conan exiles than it is to other pirate games like Black Flag.

The good

  • The base building in the game has a well working quick build mode. Usually I find it a chore to build bases in survival games but this turned it into enjoyable again.
  • Combat against same level enemies feels good. There is an element of danger and some amount of basic tactics you need to adhere to or you will get wrecked.
  • Sailing on the seas feels cool, the waves are big as hell out in the ocean. Its not a flat expanse of water. The waves add a challenge to the naval combat, where if you don't aim well your shot will hit the wave blocking enemy ships or pass over them as they ride a dip into the waves.
  • Story has a pirates of the Caribbean vibe going. With some weird magic creating the undead.

The bad

  • The combat is entirely gated by your character and gear level. You can fight maybe one or two levels up, but more is usually a slow suicide fighting a few levels down is just easy. This applies to ground combat and ship combat.
  • The map is totally blank until it is explored. And finding all the tiny islands is annoying.
  • The combat system works much better on open land. On ship boarding actions you can get screwed over randomly. The safe/optimal strategy is to take pot shots at the enemy from your own ship and let your own boarders slowly whittle them down. But that strategy is boring and takes a while.
  • The fast travel system has artificial limitations. Limited number of locations you can setup and a limit on where you can place them.

ugh. I want to check it out, but it looks like it suffers from terminal camera-off-to-the-leftism

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