Metroplexity

That does sound like a stat comparison of some sort, with the Yakuza losing it and you winning it.

Occasionally there are cases where the text differs from if you are using it or your opponent, but it seems like there might be a stat check of some kind going on for:

A blade emerges from your arm, suddenly overwhelming the thug for x stealth damage.

Vs. when Yakuza uses it:

A blade emerges from his arm, slipping past your superior force for x stealth damage.

Does expert salvager help with this?

From a fresh reset, salvaging 10 cats eyes gave:

tear
tear
seal
tear
tear
tear
tear
tear
seal
tear

And then with expert salvager

seal
{5 seals for 10 eyes}

Food and Eclipse only gave Eclipse Purist (chart updated above). Still to test Eclipse+Cyberware but no other drugs.

Any hints you can give us for old undiscovered content?

We've hit downtown! This is the source of the infection Eclipse! The suppliers for the Third Eye! I mean, we haven't gotten upstairs yet, but still! How challenging is it trying to build a somewhat lively part of town compared to the earlier more sparsely populated areas?

We're getting more at odds forces into the town! So many gangs for NPCs. How many more are we planning to be able to interact with?

Who do we have to bribe to get bacon and eggs in this dystopian future?

Fishing seems to be pretty popular on the outside edges of town, especially with Extreme Bass Pro. Shotgun Saints is popular with college kids. What's the major game played in Downtown?

Could we get some kind of monthly hint system that just gives us a few more clues relating to missing content each month until we actually find something?

Fighting the ghost inmate in the asylum with a paper opener (which is supposedly silver) doesn't seem to cause anything different. Obviously there's a different story aspect here than there was with the ghost ship, but is there anything hidden that we're missing?

Speaking of the asylum, how far off is that previously discussed rework?

Also, we've moved away from holograms and dorm crushing machinery the past few halloweens. Usually there's a newer thing added in, like the music system last year. Cybernetics seem the obvious choice this year… but obviously not every single student is going to be using cybernetic limbs. Especially since it's a pretty permanent body mod. How common are 'decorative' cybernetics like what the Fangs had?

Also, How are you holding up? Life sounds busy.

We seem to have a very limited number of resetters right now. I admit I haven't been doing it much as well, and with halloween coming it's obvious why most people wouldn't be doing it. Is that a sign of the current health of the game, or are we still heading along with a steady core?

Might take a bit, but I'm going to try to track the changes in what Griffin is offering based on the drinks he's been given. There's a chance the specific ones might matter, too, so I'll list the specific drinks in order I've handed them over, and when I start getting more options. Unfortunately it seems like aside from the first switch, from nothing to one piece, later increases have you wait a day to see the effects.

Martini, gin and tonic: 1 item
Martini, gin and tonic, flask of rum, office flask: 2 items
Martini, gin and tonic, flask of rum, office flask, grain alcohol, whiskey bottle: 3 items
Martini, gin and tonic, flask of rum, office flask, grain alcohol, whiskey bottle, pearl liquor: 4 items

So from this, it looks like you unlock an additional choice from Griffin at 1, 3, 5 and 7 drinks given. Since we currently know of 8 drinks that can be given to him, I'm thinking there's a 9th that we haven't found yet, which will get a 5th choice.

He doesn't seem to be interested in the over/under, Eclipse whiskey, dissolved pearl, apple rotgut, special brew, Roy's secret sauce, Wrecker, Metros light (far too weak, I'm sure), or any of the various drinks that've popped up from Christmas and Halloween.

Hi Kinak! Hope you've had a great summer.

Downtown questions!

• Are some patrons in the cellar door "immortal" or do they just happen to be a bunch of people identically dressed like spiders or demons?

• Is there any way to stare down the rude spider lady successfully?

• No hacked signal to be found in the Cellar Door yet — is that something that is coming?

Slags questions!

• The 4th floor of the damaged buildings is the only place where twisted hounds show up when you are sober. Is there something significant about this floor specifically we will be able to dig into later? We are close to the Source of the Incident obviously but why 4th floor and not 1st or 2nd?

• On a global scale, how big a deal was the Slags Incident? International-news worthy? Did Midgard try to hush it up and how successful were they?

• Dr. Johnson only shows up on the 5th floor if you are told about him; is that building big enough that he could reasonably elude detection if you weren't specifically looking for him, or does knowledge of him somehow reveal his presence?

Other questions!

• It seems we've made less progress with the dusty clipboard than the orbital watch; are there further rewards from the clipboard, and can we find them without the watch?

• Oldtown resets take me a week or more; this can be frustrating when new content comes out the day after I reset but I can't explore it for another week. Thoughts on:
  1. Giving a vague heads up when new stuff is expected shortly?
  2. Allowing dropping to "casual mode" where you can access all your stuff but forfeit rewards for that run, to quickly get to the end? (KoL offers this)

• Can you describe the process of creating an unearthly item or content release from vague idea to finished product? Eg. do you use pencil-and-paper, post-it notes, excel, others? How fleshed out are items before you input them in the database?

• And if you haven't mentioned it already, any hints on plans for the next month or two coming up?

• What has been your favourite Halloween?

Thanks!

Heya Kinak!

How were the trips to Japan and PaizoCon?

And then on to Metroplexity stuff!

• Think we'll be having Halloween in Downtown this year, or is there not an appropriate place opened up yet?

• Do you think any cyberware crafting will venture into Armory territory? Metal reinforced bones or the like?

• A bit of a long one, to give context. Argeth recently found that counterculture cyberware can prevent you from peacefully entering the front doors of the Midgard records vault, and I assume that will affect other corp buildings, like the Midgard one downtown. Since Ocean's Touch also counts for that purpose, you have something doing that which can't be removed. For now a reset will do that, but eventual skill perming might make that a problem. I know the Kingdom of Loathing devs have said it's a design decision in that game not to have skills that will hurt people if learned permanently; what are your thoughts on that?

• It's still a few months away, but any chance of some clues on finding snow snakes this Christmas?

• There are a number of different methods controlling the rate at which techniques are learned, but it feels like lately for a lot of techniques as long as you meet the trigger condition and have all known instances of the technique in your active deck, you have a 100% chance at learning a new instance. Do you think this is likely to continue to be the case going forward?

• Normally skills and techniques learned are permanent, until a reset. But in order to learn Starry Gaze you have to trade in instances of Evil Eye. And to learn Stellar Appreciation you need to trade in Art Appreciation. And it's a bit different, but there are the Time skills from the orbital watch. Do you have any ideas in mind for other things that will use similar mechanics, where skills or techniques might be traded in for other things?

Have some questions burning a hole in your pocket? Need infuriating hints at what's up next Downtown? Still bamboozled by last Halloween?

Well, wait no longer! Ask questions! Receive answers! (Actually, this part involves waiting.)

As always, try to keep your questions as succinct as possible and don't answer each other's questions, because I read them live and it's easy to get confused.

Cheers!
Kinak

"Cyberblade" at least includes the Inteternal blade. The unsealed cyberblade and sealed cyberblade probably count too.

It looks like if you harvest some cyberware from folks, triggering the Yakuza combat encounter, killing that Yakuza does not prevent this encounter from continuing to occur.

I don't think I have all my original data anymore, but basically the number of food messages is limited by the water level.
0 water, no food messages.
1 water, 1 food message (nutty)
2 water, 2 food messages (earthy, dumpster)
3 water, 3 food messages (dark mud, morass, stink)

Once you hit the highest level message for your amount of water, it doesn't matter how much food you put in, but if you put in more water it will then jump up to the highest level the new water and food levels can accommodate.

I'm also not 100% convinced that it's entirely integer based, though. Like… right now I had the soil looking more like sand after draining water for a bit, added some water once and it immediately jumped to damp.

Also, the descriptor seems to be capped by the amount of water.

OK, so let me try a table of how the label seems to depend on current water/food, because I think we are describing the same thing but your words say the exact opposite of what happens

BTW, I don't see this anywhere on the page, but it seem to me that the reward (peer at) state on the tree depends on how much food and water it had after rollover.

Normally, it eats 1 food and 1 water on rollover. Sometimes it only eats one of them. It's not clear to me whether it just randomly chooses how much it eats and then derives possible illness from the state afterwards, or first picks an illness and that decides how much it will consume.

The tree seems to get ill if it has too much food or water, or too little.

Roughly, too much water results in fungus, too little water results in mites… but too much food seems to result in grubs, which may take priority over the others.

I'm not actually sure what happens if you have the right amount of water but not enough food.

Also, the descriptor seems to be capped by the amount of water. If you add a whole bunch of food at once the descriptors won't change, but if you then add in water step by step you'll see the new messages that you could otherwise get by adding food step by step when there was already a lot of water.

The tree seems to mostly use up one level of food and water per day, but then sometimes it skips a day, which is the tricky part in trying to keep it healthy. That may or may not have something to do with whether or not you trim.

Looks to me like

"dark mud" is for food=1, morass for food=2, stink for food>=3

when restricted to water and food levels 0..3: each level of water has one descriptor for water + food < 4, another for water + food = 4, third for water + food = 5, and there's a final descriptor for water + food = 6

(those descriptors are (by my shortened labels): sand, dry, damp, thin mud for not "<4"; nutty, earthy, dark mud for "=4"; dumpster and morass for "=5" and stink for "=6"

you can put in more water and food (I only tried going to 4+4, though), the descriptors don't seem to change then

I guessthink that
1) each desccriptor has one result for when the tree is healthy and another for when the tree is ill, and
2) there's some condition (that I don't understand yet) that makes the tree ill in some situations (I believe I have gotten two different stats from the same water/food combo (0 and 0), and the tree being ill is the only thing I can think of that could make a difference)

I also hypothesize that certain paths through the different labels (or stat rewards) across days will lead to different bigger rewards, kind of like feathercloak's encounters. Or the crystal spine. Or maybe the domino mask too?

Salvaging 100:
You salvaged: 61 handfuls of polysteel

You salvaged: 30 clumps of artificial muscle fibers

You salvaged: 32 artificial bones

You salvaged: 21 cybernetic interfaces

Salvaging 10 after the cyberware revamp still give 10 ballistic plastic.

11 salvage results w/es:
- cybernetic interface
- artificial muscle fibers, artificial bone
- 2 artificial muscle fibers
- artificial muscle fibers, artificial bone
- artificial muscle fibers, artificial bone
- cybernetic interface
- artificial bone
- artificial muscle fibers, cybernetic interface
- 2 artificial bone
- artificial muscle fibers
- artificial muscle fibers, cybernetic interface
- artificial bone, cybernetic interface

Salving 8 with expert salvager gave:
You salvaged: 5 steel ingots
You salvaged: 4 artificial bones
You salvaged: 3 clumps of artificial muscle fibers
You salvaged: cybernetic interface