itch.io

Nice update!

Typos (you asked for them on reddit last time, I don't see a post from you this update though so I'm posting it here):

 Mechanics student > Bet I can get it flying: Univeristy -> University
Examine the clockwork isle: speheres -> spheres
Specular armillary description: mechanims -> mechanisms
Watch the production of alkahest (log entry): uinversal -> universal
> Ask about Alkahest: distainfully -> disdainfully;  enourmous -> enormous
> Observe filtration: flamable -> flammable
Examine the malachite hive > Look for a place to start: reparing -> repairing
Invite Gelee > The flowers: yeild -> yield
Victory message for maxing all the resources: gagues -> gauges

Is "cthonic" (hadean chronometer desc) correct? It's not a real word, but it's hard to tell.

This was a really nice game! (Fully mossed in 21:59.)

I found it really annoying going downward in bubble/cloud rooms, but I can tell that's mostly just be not being good enough at movement.

You need to get the kitsune to let their guard down, by not doing anything.

My game froze when I tried to do "Get chest milked (Megaboobs)" in the Milk Farm, with the error "Failed to load: img/enemies/x-BentOver-CockMilker11.png". This made it impossible to do anything and I had to reload the game from my last save.

Edit: This also seems to happen with just the cock milker.

Okay, after actually trying to get it, it seems like you need to wait for gin to leave and then not check up on him, then wait for cassie. Cassie doesn't leave right after waking up, so you need to go do something else for a bit and then check in on the abandoned base later. I think you can be safe by checking the apple spot before the fishing spot, but it's easier to just save before going and load if she's not there.

It still took a while though. My routine of getting 2400 from the devil's drink each day ended up letting me buy 1 of each thing in the entire underground mall by the time I got the second visit...  (P.S. this isn't the optimal money making strat, gold mine -> pawn shop is a bit less annoying.)

Is the only way to do Gin's thing to wait for a super rare RNG roll? It's kind of annoying wanting to start the new content but being unable to because this is gatekept more than everything else is.

You can find the hideout by going to the precise coordinates of the camp in the desert. Use your compass you got from following one of the maps you buy in town to make your way there.

The main thing about "only some enemies can use spells" is that you have no way of knowing what enemies you'll encounter before you encounter them. Because you never know when you'll encounter another Astraea that basically requires Sanction, it just makes sense to have it always available.

I suppose you usually have a chance to change your loadout before the fight starts, but I never trusted that that would be an option.

I think this game needs some sort of intro tutorial or signposting! I couldn't figure out how to get more juice past the starting 5.

Feels like the ctrl+Z should be mentioned somewhere ingame, it took a while to figure out how to not be softlocked. Great game though.

Icely's video finally got uploaded so I gave it a try. I recognized the game from when you asked for help about how to make a choose-one-of-three-boxes in sokoban. I liked the joke in the last level. Game felt particularly easy compared to hempuli's games (I usually get stuck on them for a while); would've loved to see some harder levels.

Decent game. I feel like the overall structure makes it too simple compared to your previous game; it felt like there were barely any decisions I could make that actually had a significant impact, since all of the upgrades reduce in efficiency fast enough that you are always simply aiming for forward progress rather than anything else. (I don't think this is necessarily actually the case, but enough information is hidden from the player to at least give the illusion that this is the case.) Compared to the previous game, being able to see how expensive things are (...except the base chest opening cost, for some reason) is really nice, but due to the simplicity I found it is pretty much never actually relevant to worry about such details.

(Won in 75 loops, 4:46:25. Could've done it in less time if I was optimizing for that; there were a few loops I should've just ended at the end of 8 to get more coins to max the equipment faster. And I didn't run A enough so my brooch level was low.)

There's a level with 4 multipush blocks and 3 targets; I had no idea what the 4th block was meant to be for. The later level that's the exact same but with the 4th block removed had the exact same solution.

Checked out what's here so far; definitely looking forward to seeing more in the future!

My RAM usage spikes pretty hard sometimes, even with the fast graphics setting enabled. I'm not sure if it just doesn't properly save across sessions or something, but I'm pretty sure it only happened when it was raining but only sometimes. It's noticeable since my laptop's bad so when it uses enough the game just freezes.

I feel like using the april fools gacha slightly spoiled my experience, since it means you can completely ignore a lot of the progression measures (it gives you like 10 times the items you'd obtain in the same amount of time without it) and it wasn't telegraphed that it'd do that (since you get access to it before you see how much stuff you can get normally). But I ended up barely using items in combat (a few MP heals when a battle begins and I was at low MP, and some health pots for Astraea are the only important ones, I think) since combat is easy anyway, lag from the above issue aside.

Combat balance is a pretty tricky topic that I'm sure you'll need to finetune more in the future, but I spent most of my time running Holy/Sky. Holy felt like a must-take, perhaps partially due to game mechanics not being telegraphed enough--I'm not sure if "you can only counterspell a sanctioned enemy" means it just hits you without you getting a chance to counter it, but I assumed that that was the case and thus always started every battle with sanctioning the enemy since not getting hit is useful. And then Sky is just absurdly OP compared to everything else, of course; I think it definitely needs its wounds infliction reduced.

Well, have you gone to the bathhouse with Bell? The event unlocks after you finish the quest in the bathhouse.

Pick the right actions at the end of the alien base. You can also get it after by talking to people in there.

Nope. I only know them out of having played the game enough (and reading patch notes) to learn them. Though I suspect they'll add one at some point.

I'd like the ability to enqueue multiple copies of a perpetual action to the queue when on the "complete all" mode. As it is now you can only have two copies of the action on the queue (one current and one queue) which is a bit annoying when you need to complete an action like 10 times.

The game has an icon to tell you whether an action is a dead end or not; it's pretty useful to know what actions need to be explored further.

You can get there early enough in the loop (if you do the entire shadow realm instead of going for one of the low stats actions) that it was literally the second thing I went for (after Foxified since that one's earlier in) in the loop. You just kind of have enough stats with only putting a tiny amount of effort into getting more. Obviously doing it even earlier is better, but you get it *really* early.

As I said, I think getting +1 is fine. +2 is the one that comes way too quickly for how much work it takes to get. (+3 is interesting because going for it early involves wasting the absurdly good sleep action, but it really means you should start grinding long tasks in the midst of doing it and not exploring much. It's interesting and I think this one's okay; it just feels like this is the sort of consideration you could have for +2 instead.)

It feels a bit weird having domain-specific things be Shadow Comprehension-boosted since there's a chance you just never did that particular bit of content before reaching however much comprehension, though I wonder about having special nodes that require a specific Epithet or something instead.

I didn't actually kill the Demo Lord (not that I was trying to; I'd be savescumming immortality if I was trying). I mostly meant you can stall for ages on the ones preceeding them for long enough to kind of just do everything on the map before fighting them. I got past IX just from doing normal exploration and not putting any thought into beating calamities (that greenhouse is expensive) just out of the fact that Vagrant's Sword allows (and encourages!) doing everything in the map to delay the calamity... and it turns out exploring the entire map actually gives you a lot of stats.

Lemonade stand being a thing you do passively makes sense. The main thing that made it tricky for me was that I only entered the lemonade stand because I wanted to get more Vagrant's Sword delay (this was an exploring run and not one I expected to make grand progress), only got my screaming mandrake late in the run, and didn't know if I'd survive the next calamity or not, so I was out of things to do.

Would it be possible to get an export/import save system for transferring saves between different devices? I'm not sure how much longer my current computer will last. (It's also a good idea if you want people to be able to continue their browser saves into the steam version.)

Nice update! It feels weird having Vagrant's Sword able to make every run absurdly long; I went for way too long without a calamity because you can just keep delaying how long it'll be before it shows up. (Maybe if the first few upgrades to it weren't so easy to get? At +1 it still helps but not as much as the +3 you can get pretty quickly does.) Sure, once you finish the last calamity the Demo Lord naturally takes forever, but it was literally just the fact that you can stall the previous one for so long that I was able to finish it at all.

The lemonade minigame was a lot more bearable when bootstrapped with screaming mandrake money. Though it still takes forever... I like the secret benefit of having a 0.5s perpetual leisure action to train stats with Foxified though. I have a feeling this is the optimal way to train agi/cha.

I didn't expect this to be what the newspaper meant! Though it does make sense. I feel a bit more bad for her than the other heroes.

Figure I should post this here for anyone who wants to give it a go: 204 in 1 is possible! You need to hardcode solutions to the test cases in a level or two, before you get enough tools to allow you to do slightly less hardcoding.
(Thanks to vpumeyyv for figuring out the main trick that makes it work. If you want the solution idea: Gur pubfra jbeq vf Ercynpr. Vg pna or hfrq gb uneqpbqr Genafyvgrengr, gura lbh pna znxr jbeqf yvxr Gnp hfvat pnershyyl cynprq punenpgref naq n genafyvgrengr vagb (()). (Lbh pna oernx vagb gur Qb-yvxrf jvgu Noqhpr.))

The hardest to find of the initial Alyssa actions is the one for changing Cassie's outfit a bunch. For the others, just go do everything around the safehouse.

For a useless example, here's a solution to Caesar: (narcissus) 3 dip 3 dig (16) (23) between do

A definition of Narcissus that makes this solve work is: 3 zap(3 zap(?)(3 caesar)zap copy format)(3 caesar)zap copy format

You could imagine applying this to something with a long solution like Thirteen to save some symbols on Thirteen, though of course at the cost of making Narcissus longer. You can also construct an even better definition of Narcissus that can detect the input (especially for levels where it is significantly different than those in Narcissus) so you don't need the between.

If you haven't solved Narcissus yet on the savefile, I'm pretty you can just put some code in and it can be used in other levels despite not actually being a quine, so you could just throw a "3 caesar" in Narcissus' textbox with no problem. Once the level is solved once this seems to not work anymore though.

P.S. I removed a bunch of the solutions you added to the side because this isn't a resource for casual solves; it's specifically for symbol optimization. The multiply solution was cool though, so I optimized it a bit and left it in.

Talk to the all-knowing hobo in the slums and give them some food every day. The one that unlocks passes in the shop is the fifth one.

Made a solutions sheet for least symbols used (the metric shown in the logbook) highscores on every verb. Has full solutions freely visible, so only look if you're fine with spoilers. Editing is allowed, pls no grief link

Thanks, and useful hint! Saw the FINIS now.

When you clear one of Hero or Leander, the code in the expected output of the paired level is wiped, which makes it impossible to have both complete.

Also wtf is Thirteen can i have a hint lol. I'd LUT the level but 400 characters isn't enough to fit an LUT.

Is the test case in Filterling that must exceed 400 symbols intended? It feels like a weird edge case to require (and is the only one where I hardcoded a test case's output since I have no idea how to change my solution to work properly on invalid input).

zap is (0) till cat, so you don't actually need an explicit word for that at all.

Also I just realized you didn't even include something that can do Same and I have no idea how you managed to replicate it...

Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/93wuIKQ

This game is incredibly laggy, even the downloaded version on steam.; it pauses for like half a second every time an action completes. It wasn't this laggy in the ch1 version; I'm not sure what you changed in this one, but it's pretty much unplayable with how much the game lags.

My game crashed and i lost a day of progress :( I think the game should try to save more often.

It crashed when I tried pasting something that isn't text into the game.

Not every level is possible to solve with only the words you have. You should use Choice in your definitions, but you can't define it until words from later sections.

I'm at 15 right now. And I don't see anything as being "cheese" for an optimization challenge like this, anything that the game allows is fair for me. Like, I have a proper solution to behead, but there's no reason why I'd pick behead as a fundamental word (as you did) over between when between exists.

Simplest Box I know is ((?)) format. (edit: wrong word lmao) (well, for the golf metric it's something else with fewer chars, but you're not going to define split without some sort of box already defined.)

Actually, Tac is just ?? format. I suppose that one can be used in place of cat as a fundamental.

Kind of curious what words you ended up going for.

do, maycopy, zap, swap, buryd, cat, between (you can define head ((1) (1) between) and behead ((2) (99) between) easily, so there's no reason to use anything else), same (or equivalent? pretty sure any of like replace or the substring searches can pull it off too) are all seemingly obvious choices, but it feels like nothing else should actually be necessary and making everything is awful. or is it possible to go without even all of those (or equivalent that ends up being the same amount of words)? I also haven't unlocked all the words yet, so there might be something useful in the later ones that can replace multiple of these.

Or some weird behavior you can't replicate using these somehow; I haven't made all the earlygame words either, since I was too lazy to work on fundimentals and just wanted to find the silliest solutions to the words that don't use loops... but I'll probably have to give this a go sometime. Or I might've just forgotten some behaviors you need that are pretty obviously not replicable with that list (I added the Same equivalent in an edit lol)

Saw someone mention this elsewhere: it's possible to make 1/10. It's a more interesting challenge than the actual provided goal.