Apologies for the length, I was just really enjoying the opportunity to write some slopping wet prose. I'll organize the journal entries by month and link them here.

Save file

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State of the fortress in brief

Everything’s going pretty much fine in the fortress. I reorganized the military and have the squads patrolling between the two cavern entrances in shifts. At any point the bridges could be raised, but I left them open to encourage fun.

One thing that I didn’t mention in the journal is that there are some warm walls in the lower caverns, which should indicate there’s a source of magma for future efficient industry and mischief.

There were only two dwarf deaths that I can recall, as well as a birth or two. There was one moderate wave of migrants. I mostly let the upper fortress run itself, save for a little shuffling and building of guildhalls. The Countess either has all her needs met or only needs a little more in her bedroom. I had thought about reorganizing some of the offices, but I didn’t really get around to that.

A number of rose gold coins have been minted. A small amount of bismuth bronze was made, I used some to decorate The Rose Chamber, which I intend to serve as a reliquary and landmark. It would also serve as a very fine temple complex for the local Stigilite sect, but it didn’t seem quite right for the roleplay and I didn’t want dwarves to be pulled up and down the fortress to visit it too much.

So far the military has been able to tackle pretty much everything the caves have thrown up and probably won’t struggle against anything that isn’t made of very hard materials or producing toxic gas. The elves might get pissed if tree-cutting picks back up, probably not a huge concern unless someone wants to maintain peace for whatever reason.

Suggestions for future players are to keep digging down, gain access to magma, and set up new industries like glass (if sand can be procured) or dyeworks.

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Diary of ~~Likut~~ Regolith Togalkulet, Militia Commander

Granite
Slate
Felsite

Hematite
Malachite
Galena

Limestone
Sandstone
Timber

Moonstone
Opal
Obsidian

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Hello to my fellow Americans, hope you are making the most of your long weekend. I finished my BG3 playthrough as "The Dark Urge". I think the Urge origin character is a very fun playthrough, and enhances the story a bit because now your character is intertwined with the main villians, rather than just some guy who happened to also be on the Nautaloid. I also used this playthrough to experiment with different playstyles, and I gotta say, having 2 paladins in your party is OP. Hope everyone is having a safe weekend

hello everyone and welcome to the virtual tour! i'd just like to show everyone what we've been doing on the server and what's to come

let's start off with the developing town of Serygrad/Chapograd/Whatever the fuck they are going to call it! this community is being built literally from the ground up by none other than master architect and engineer @Seryph@lemmygrad.ml @LittleSery

say hi Sery!

it currently has half a train station, a full library, a functioning depot and two gay parrots! i cannot wait to see how this place turns out

this is the first of our trains. this one connects Serygrad to the town of Shadehaven. let's take a ride. ALL ABOARD!

enjoy the first-class amenities in our one-car train and relax as the centrally planned rail system efficiently takes us to our destination

along the line, we have a cute little picture to mark the city limits. hi Lenin!

welcome to Shadehaven Station!

enjoy the gothic ambience of our first-ever train station

right outside the station, the cherry trees accentuate the gothic vibes of the city. it's truly beautiful at night if you get past the gangs of roving phantoms trying to murder you

this is Shadehaven! it was originally built from the bones of a village into the sprawling behemoth it currently is (#5 if you want to be exact),

entirely because of the efforts of the dedicated community. everyone on here is a legend and i appreciate them immensely

the users on this server are so talented, bringing technological advancements that blend the virtual and real world. hi @ashinadash@hexbear.net!

it's seriously so impressive. is there any limit to what we can't d- oh. fuck off.

anyway. this is our town square! i love coming back to town because it's such a relaxing atmosphere

can you believe this started out with like 3 villagers and a witch?

the natural build gave us a leg up and the infrastructure they left us has been built upon and improved immensely

i love this place.

we even have a castle! obviously the crown jewel of our town, it is a majestic beacon of progress

oh. @PurrLure@hexbear.net please explain this.

inside you can hear the groans of a villager and some kind of animal. this fucking sucks.

why are you here, you dweeb? just leave. fuck off

maybe it's not all bad. you know what they say, behind every closed door is

a stinky mule.

and that concludes our tour! time to rest outside my cabin. i'm just gonna sit here and ignore the fact that all of that bullshit is literally down the street from me

the server is intended for hexbear and lemmygrad users. to get on the allow-list and get the ip, just dm me. i do a quick vetting of acct so if ur acct is new or ur a lurker you’ll have to wait while i figure some stuff out (ill update this post when we’re accepting new users and lurkers)

the modpack were using is here

thank you to the owner of the server for being so generous and hosting us! and thank you to the two users who worked on the modpack!

happy minecrafting gaymers!!

Feel free to join up. We play with digital tools which mean you don't need to own any cards in real life to play. Link is open for next 7 days, if you see this post after then, send me a DM for a fresh link. https://discord.gg/7uwdVZCp

For those of you who don't care, I promise this is the last post about this. All further discussion can be relegated to the matrix space.

Matrix Space: https://matrix.to/#/!tyfTFjggYNboCPZPKo:envs.net?via=envs.net

The main base isn't anything special, at least for now, but it's enough to protect from the main planet's frequent boiling storms. If any comrades need to be picked up, you can use the S.O.S. channel in the matrix space. All four stars are yellow, so no special hyperdrives are required to traverse the whole federation.

Portal Coords:

Hexadecimal Transcription: 4 0 6 E F E F B 4 9 1 3

Atlas Transcription: Tepaavpe Dipedigu Teudzago

Feel free to join us! No other planets except the main one in System Alpha have been discovered, so feel free to name them how you wish, and build small outposts, huge bases, or anything in between! I can't wait to meet all of you in our marxist-leninist space commune!

edit: thank you for the pin!

EDIT: Holy shit thanks so much whoever made the $19.17 donation

I'm hosting a project zomboid server with a few friends and would love if more people played. We use a bunch of mods so I recommend modchecker to see what mods to download. IP: 173.0.151.92 Port: 17100

Here are some educational resources/explanations for the games community about emulation and other game-related tools.

Note: Check my top-level replies in this thread as I ran out of text in the post

[Informational Resources]

Reddit's ROM Megathread - Unaffiliated with this site

Emulation Wiki

[Emulation as a field]

Emulation is the process of re-implementing the functionality of something (hardware and/or software) in a separate software environment. You're probably most most familiar in the term as it relates to game system emulation- like the Dolphin Wii and Gamecube emulator, but it's actually much broader than that.

While emulation does cover physical systems, it can also cover things that strictly exist as software. If you've ever played on WoW or any other MMO private servers, the actual underlying software that was being run was likely a server emulator (or in rare cases the actual official server software itself may have leaked or released).

These server emulators are created by analyzing the network information exchange (packets) sent from the game client to the server and those received by the client from the server. A painstaking and brutal process of analyzing these packets allows server reverse-engineering projects to then re-implement the functionality of the official servers, and then we can point the game client towards our reverse-engineered private server (that speaks the exact same "language" as the official servers). This then allows the private servers to provide additional or changed functionality (for example, more exp per quest) which allows a much more customizable experience.

Emulation can also be used to re-implement vendor solutions like the Steam API which provides various utilities like DRM (which the emulator could choose to ignore). A great example of an emulator in this regard is the Goldberg Emulator.

Let's say you've acquired (through legal purchase only of course) the clean steam files for a game and want to run it offline. Normally you wouldn't be able to because the steamworks DRM check wouldn't be able to authenticate against the official steam servers. If we instead replace the steam_api.dll (this could also be named steam_api64.dll depending on the game) with the one provided by the Goldberg Emulator, when the game makes the check for the steamworks drm authentication status, the Goldberg Emulator's implementation of steam_api.dll will simply return true and let us play our game offline. The game itself just knows that it asked for a DRM verification check to a service, and the Goldberg variant of steam_api.dll looks (to the game) exactly like the "real" version, except that it always returns that the steamworks DRM has been verified.

Refer to the readme within the Goldberg project for more information about what to do with specific games. Also take note that this only works with games that only use steamworks drm (most of them) and games using other/multiple DRM solutions won't work with this method only for offline play.

[Console Emulators]

All of the emulators listed below are my personal per-console pick. Each is at least in the recommended section of a great general emulation resource, the Emulation Wiki

Game Platform | Emulator Name | Emulation Platform | Comments

Nintendo Consoles

NES | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

SNES | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

SNES | bsnes-hd | Windows/Linux/Mac | Widescreen modifications for some SNES games

N64 | Simple64 | Windows/Linux | N64 emulation has a lot of viable candidate emulators, check the page here

GC | Dolphin | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Wii | Dolphin | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Wii U | Cemu | Windows/Linux

Switch | Ryujinx | Windows/Linux/Mac | Has a free multiplayer-enabled build called LDN 3.1.3 on Patreon

Switch | Yuzu | Windows/Linux/Android | Killed by Nintendo 3/4/2024

Nintendo Handhelds

GB/C | mGBA | Windows/Linux/Mac

GBA | mGBA | Windows/Linux/Mac

DS | MelonDS | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

3DS | Citra (PabloMK7 Fork) | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android | Fork by longtime former contributor of Citra receiving additional development from GPUCode (another longtime contributor)

Sony Consoles

Playstation | DuckStation | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Playstation 2 | PCSX2 | Windows/Linux/Mac

Playstation 3 | RPCS3 | Windows/Linux/Mac

Playstation 4 | ShadPS4 | Windows/Linux/Mac | Heavily experimental and not for casual use yet

Sony Handhelds

PSP | PPSSPP | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

PSVita | Vita3K | Windows/Linux/Mac

Sega Consoles

Sega Master System | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

Genesis | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac

Saturn | Mednafen | Windows/Linux

Dreamcast | Flycast | Windows/Linux/Mac/Android

Microsoft Consoles

Xbox | Xemu | Windows/Linux/Mac

Xbox 360 | Xenia | Windows

Apple Phones

iOS 2.x | TouchHLE | Windows/Mac/Android

[Graphics Packs]

A lot of emulators have texture replacement capabilities built into them. What this means is that users can manually and/or AI upscale textures from the game into higher resolution or outright replace them with other textures. There aren't currently (that I'm aware of) area that have consolidated links to these things, so you'll unfortunately have to search individual project forums and look for texture or graphic packs links.

Some known graphics packs repositories:

Dolphin Forums

Citra Forums Killed by Nintendo 3/4/2024; waiting for the dust to settle for recommendations

[Graphics API Translation Layers]

Sometimes there are scenarios where a game may only use DirectX to draw it's rendered graphics to screen and we may not want this. This could be for performance reasons (maybe the Vulkan graphics api has better performance, maybe DirectX isn't available on our OS, or maybe the DirectX version is really old and not properly supported by our OS/GPU/Driver combination). In these instances we can use translations layers to translate DirectX graphics api calls into Vulkan calls using utilities like DXVK . Explaining which files to copy over depends on a per-DirectX version basis, so you'll have to use a combination of the PCGamingWiki and DXVK documentation to figure out which files to replace.

[Graphics Post-Processing]

With a utility called ReShade we're able to inject various post-processing effects into the final stage of the graphic rendering pipelines of games. This allows you to adjust color curves, inject path-traced global illumination (a method like ray-tracing), and add a bunch of other effects to DirectX9/11/12/Vulkan games.