malymin

DogOnline notes:

1. The Dog cap has increased, though I don't know by how much? You have to pay a fee for every dog past dog #3.
2. Speaking of, I got two new dogs. Sitara was originally a Husky, but was changed with a D20 into a "Temple Dog", a new Anubis-like breed. Maplesweet was adopted as a Calico Dog, and is going to stay that way.
3. Halloween items and breeds were dropped, but also some new non-Halloween stuff was dropped too. Some of the new breeds can show up in the Pound - the Scruffy Grey and Scruffy Brown dogs are definitely new. The Temple Dog is another non-Halloween new breed, though IDK if it shows up in the pound.
4. Bat Dogs, Headless Dogs, Mummy Dogs, and Pumpkin Dogs are all associated with the candy corn transformation item. I've been saving Magic Candy Corns to give to a friend if she joins, because she likes bats.
5. Once you've had a dog read "Deep Frier Desires" and unlocked "Dogre's Dungeon" in the dungeon-crawling Lonely Tower game, Dogre's Dungeon is a decent places to grind for cash. You get Onions from Dogre himself, and Odd Oil from several random encounters - the two ingredients in Onion Rings, which can sell for $5,600 to $6,720 a pop at the Auction House. Dogre's Dungeon is also one of the three floors that can give you some nice rare books.

As much as I once loved Flight Rising, I feel like it's collapsing under its own accumulated weight right now. The constant output of new breeds, genes, and apparel feels draining, rather than exciting, when much of the gameplay has remained tedious, unrewarding, and difficult to get back into. Gathering food still sucks, Coli still sucks, the Fairgrounds still eat up too much time for too little pay. They released a breed that was Extremely My Shit recently and I barely even cared.

Speaking of virtual pets, Reflet on the hacking/modding Discord has made impressive progress reverse-engineering and re-implementing Petz! They showed off the rebuilt game being opened, playscenes and toys being interacted with, etc the other day. They said the living room mice (simple animalz in anatomy and behavior compared to the adoptable catz and dogz) should be implemented pretty soon, and that once those work it'll be swift progress to start implementing actual petz. Petz, a game that relies on real-world calendars for aging, pregnancy, determining if a pet has been neglected... is affected by the Year 2038 problem, because it stores that information in a 32-bit integer. People have set their computer clocks to 2038 to test it out and the game just Stops Being Able To Run in that year. Anything that allows us to continue to run the game with minimal fuss past that year is going to be a lifesaver, even aside from the modding opportunities that will open up when the project is done.

Place all of your items in storage except for:

1. A stack of 6 cheese
2. a stack of 6 of any other item
3. a stack of 6 of any other other item

Polished Frisbees are the best choice for one of your "free choice" stacks, as you will need some way to deal or deflect damage while all of your best weapons and trinkets are locked in storage.

Next, go to the Lonely Tower, and enter any floor.

You'll know you did things correctly if you see no title for the location, don't see the dog icon that indicates your location, and don't see any light grey areas that indicate where you can move. If you look at your arrow buttons, you will notice that you can move, however.

Navigation is tricky - the dungeon is many times larger than a normal one, with both twisting dead ends and vast empty voids. Here is the shortest possible route, plus the one treasure that doesn't require a prolonged detour to acquire.

Navigating the Nameless Floor

( It's a whole lot of bullshit )

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...this is the one "rare" enemy in the Lonely Tower you have no hopes of encountering randomly, and so is the biggest obstacle to maxing out Bravery on a dog. I hope this helps.

For my birthday. It was nice... I forgot to take photos, I was just too enraptured.

I've been wanting to do this for twenty years. Haven't been since I was a prepubescent child. There's a lot of stuff they have now that they didn't when I was a kid. There's two major aquariums within driving distance... this one is the more "kiddy" and "touristy," less "mature" of the two. Honestly that's a bit of why I wanted to go to this one in particular. I like the sort of kitschy, childish atmosphere of the place. It's my self-indulgent birthday and I want maximum self indulgence, lol. My parents (who handled transportation) wouldn't let me go inside the tunnel part of the penguin exhibit though, LOL, even though we saw some other whole-ass adults doing it. I did get to touch a jellyfish, though! They really do feel... gelatinous. o_O

...I like aquariums more than zoos. I love zoo animals, but the pleasure of a zoo visit is so very dependent on the weather. (It went from sweltering outside to raining during our visit! When I played Zoo Tycoon as a kid, I always covered the guests' paths with observation areas as sun/rain protection because I would be grateful if a zoo covered its walkways.) Aquariums, in my experience, are mostly or entirely indoors, in air conditioning. But in addition to the convenience, there's something about the... atmosphere. Often, the guest passageways are dark - not completely, but enough to feel dark, in a way I have always found enjoyable, since I was a little kid. (I loved to stare out of the window when my parents were driving late at night, drinking in any natural or artificial light like it was something beautiful and special.) In these dim caves, your eyes drift to the diffuse light that glows from within the tanks. Watching an aquatic animal swim at eye level in even a small, home tank is somewhat unreal... in this large tanks, watching large fish float in "midair" is magical. I especially love shark tunnels, and floor-to-ceiling viewing areas. The latter are like... big movie screens, to me. You sit, close or from a distance, and let the massive window envelop you in its world. I could have sat there for an hour, watching all those stingrays slowly glide around like wonderful, alien birds.

When I was a kid, my selfish (aka, not "ending all suffering") fantasies about "what I would do if I was rich" were largely built around creating a zoo or aquarium in my home city, so that there wouldn't be an hour-long drive to go see one. My fantasies about what kind of expensive house I would have were never much about the house being a massive mansion full of expensive goods so much as having... a big garden with lots of beautiful ferns and trees, with peafowl (or fancy chickens, or guinea fowl, etc) roaming about. A walk-in aviary full of flying birds, with all the room they could ever ask for. A koi pond. A massive indoor aquarium, floor-to-ceiling, with amphitheatre-type seating arranged in a half circle around the "movie screen." When I play games that involve any amount of home-decoration or landscaping (the Sims, Stardew Valley, etc), trying to realize these childhood fantasies is often the limit I brush up against.

Even in Zoo Tycoon itself, I can't really realize the kind of "indoor space" environments I like so much properly. The tanks are all outdoors. Their marine expansions are kind of more... they prioritize SeaWorld-style animal shows as their unique mechanical feature. Even aside from the known ethical issues with orca and dolphins shows I just... watching an animal do tricks under full daylight, so far away from you that you can't see the pupils of its eyes, doesn't interest me. I want to see that same animal, silently suspended in the water, a faint glow on its side, darkness on mine. Only glass and water between me and it. Just being alive, and native to a world where it's easy to fly.

Today I noticed that my library has many books on autism (including older books that use "Asperger's"), both in terms of adults and in terms of parenting/childcare advice... but I couldn't find any books on Down's Syndrome in those sections, or on intellectual disabilities in general. I have autism (of the sort that used to be called Asperger's, even!), and not any intellectual disabilities, but I find the lack of books on any developmental disability that isn't autism... concerning? Especially because any increase in positivity towards autistic people has felt... hand-in-hand with erasing it as an actual disablity, as though we must prove our worth by being smart and useful. Many autistic people are smart and studious scholars, wiki-editors, etc... but also, many autistic people are intellectually disabled, or their special interests don't manifest as something "useful" to broader society, and it feels like those people get erased to make autism more palatable. And I don't see much visibility for people whose disability involves cognitive impairments outside of autism, either.

Because even in liberal and leftist spaces, that are supposed to be so progressive, there is a serious hatred for "stupid" people that troubles me in ways I don't know how articulate. People don't even bother to self-censor for the sake of appearances. Insults related to brain damage, illiteracy, etc, get thrown around like candy. I've seen people laugh when someone mentions actually having an damaged brain, or being born with cognitive impairment, or having been failed by their education to the point where some basic task is difficult for them. Because all the words for talking about those things are associated in their minds with, like... insulting Donald Trump, or bitching about people having bad takes in fandom, or dunking randos on twitter.

I found exactly one book while shelf-reading the nonfiction isles, in the math/science section. It was a resource for teaching people with Down's Syndrome mathematics. I'm grateful we have that, at least, but...

The Deltarune Wiki, while much better than many wikis (on account of not being a Fandom.com wiki), doesn't really lay out information about armor and weapons in a way that allows for quick comparison. I started working on a means of comparison, when I realized that, uh...

A lot of the stats for Kris and Susie's weapons are... basically the same?

Every character starts out with a weapon that gives absolutely zero stats. Ralsei's upgrades are an outlier and don't follow a consistent pattern, but Kris and Susie share the following pattern in terms of upgrades available:

• +2 Attack weapon in Chapter 1
• +4 Attack weapon in Chapter 2
• +6 Attack weapon in Chapter 3
• +8 Attack weapon in Chapter 4 (with a minor but useful ability)
• +10 Attack weapon in Chapter 5

The main difference is that Kris gets alternate, "defensive" swords every other chapter:

• BounceBlade (+2 AT +1 DF) in Chapter 2
• JingleBlade (+7 AT +1 DF) in Chapter 4

These "defensive" swords, which are 1-2 points lower in AT than the 'standard' for the chapters they're obtained in, are the best thing for Kris to equip when the player isn't touching the FIGHT button, because DF is useful for both peaceful and violent battles. Susie, meanwhile, doesn't get any "defensive" axes. (The Chapter 4 "offense" sword's minor ability, a small passive increase in money gained after a battle is won, is also more generically useful than the Chapter 4 axe's minor ability, which requires Susie to use the FIGHT action to activate. You can intentionally fail the attack minigame and still get the healing ability to activate, giving it a small pacifist niche... but, like, you could also just spend that turn doing something that actually progresses the fight.)

Shadow Crystal Boss gear-drops, of course, break this standardized progression. Susie's JusticeAxe, at +12 AT, is equivalent to what we'd expect from a Chapter 6 axe, but is obtained in Chapter 4. Kris' BlackShard, at +16 AT, is equivalent to what we'd expect from a Chapter 8 sword, but is obtained in Chapter 3... in a game that won't get a Chapter 8. (BlackShard also has a situational-but-powerful passive ability attached, though it's only useful for violence.) And then there's Devilsknife.

The Devilsknife is interesting. This is the reward you get if you FIGHT Jevil until his HP reaches zero. (The pacifist reward, Jevilstail, is an armor that provides +2 to AT, DF, and MG - powerful when you first get it, but less and less relevant with each new chapter released. Worth noting that Jevil finds violence fun.) It's +5 AT, +4 MG, and reduces the cost of casting of "Rude Buster" from 50 TP to 40 TP. It's only "ahead of the curve" in AT value for the first two chapters, and then starts to fall behind. However, it's the only MG-boosting weapon for Susie in the entire game so far. This makes it uniquely good for boosting Susie's spellcasting!

It's really interesting how, while the game doesn't directly tell you, the Roaring Knight fight in Chapter 3 is designed to be specifically won with Susie. It is very literally, carefully designed so that the path of least resistance is to use Susie's unique damage-dealing spell, "Rude Buster", and everything about how the fight is framed assumes that Susie is the MVP of the encounter as a result. Hear me out.

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1. Impenetrable Armor

Let's assume, for ease of comparison, that all characters are using the highest-damage "regular" weapons available from Chapter 1 to Chapter 3: the Saber10, the ToxicAxe, and the Ragger 2. (ie, they are not using secret boss reward weapons.) Let's also assume, for ease of comparison, that none of the characters are wearing any Attack-boosting armor, and that every hit is doing maximum damage because the player is always timing the attacks perfectly. Not realistic, but hey.

Under these conditions, against a normal enemy? Kris deals 150 damage, Susie deals 180, and Ralsei deals 128. Together, the Fuck Squad can do a total of 458 damage in one turn. We don't usually think about this, of course, because we don't usually FIGHT in Deltarune - only rarely is it the "correct" or "mandatory" answer to a battle.

Against the Roaring Knight, however... FIGHT attacks have their damage heavily reduced, to a mere one-fifth of their normal values. And on top of this universal reduction, Kris' attack damage is then additionally cut in half through the whole fight. While Kris' unique damage reduction is removed if one party member goes down, and turns into a x2 multiplier if both party members are down, this is pretty... risky.

On Turn 1, this what the attacks against the Roaring Knight turn into:

	Damage (Normal)	Damage Reduction	Knight Turn 1
Saber10 Kris	150	DMG * 0.2 * 0.5	15
Toxic Axe Susie	180	DMG * 0.2	36
Ragger 2 Ralsei	128	DMG * 0.2	26
EVERYONE (sum)	456	---	77

Now, you might notice that this sucks real bad. The reduction gets a little less severe with each turn, but not by a lot. By turn 16, after which no further improvement can occur, the damage has improved to:

	Damage (Normal)	Damage Reduction	Knight Turn 16
Saber10 Kris	150	DMG * 0.35 * 0.5	26
Toxic Axe Susie	180	DMG * 0.35	63
Ragger 2 Ralsei	128	DMG * 0.35	45
EVERYONE (sum)	456	---	134

The Knight has an an effective HP of 1460. That's a LOT of HP to burn through, with this hefty damage reduction in place. It would take many, many turns of everyone attacking to get anything done. Even more if someone needs healing (wastes one person's turn) or reviving (wastes two people's turns). And God FORBID you mistime your attacks too, when even perfect attacks do such microscopic damage.

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2. Rude Buster

( Piercing the Armor )

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I hope you enjoy my Deltarune meta, despite it mostly being about math. Let me know if there's anything about the formatting you think I should tweak or fix!

I did it! I beat the Roaring Knight. :)

(I mean, narratively speaking, the Fuck Squad still get their asses kicked... but we caught them off guard, chipped their sword, and got the shadow crystal! Gameplay-wise it's a 'win' though.)

I feel really proud of myself for doing it on my own... Kris survived the final attack with 1 HP (out of 160), Susie with 27/190. Ralsei was SWOONed, a unique kind of KO to the Roaring Knight fight - one of the things that makes the fight really difficult.

I'm putting that save file in a zip folder for safe keeping.

...I think I might have noticed a bug going into Chapter 4, though...

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Anyways, checking the save, this is the setup I went in with:

• Kris: Saber10, ShadowMantle, TensionBow
• Susie: Devilsknife, SpikeBand, Dealmaker
• Ralsei: Ragger2, FrayedBowtie, FrayedBowtie

And My inventory contained...

• Four Revivemints, One Revivedust
• One TensionMax, One TensionGem
• Three DeluxeDinners
• One Execbuffet, One Spincake

By the end of the battle, one DeluxeDinner was all that I had left.

I'm really glad I got the Devilsknife instead of the Jevilstail this run. I don't think this would have been possible for me without the reduced Rude Buster TP cost. This tumblr post I found explains why Devilsknife is awesome better than I ever could.

Decided to skip the Roaring Knight for now, to work on Gerson in Chapter 4...

Only to, uh, realize.

My laptop's keyboard is genuinely awful for trying to do the diagonal directions the fight requires. Both the "up" and "down" keys are half-size (as if cut into hamburger buns) and sandwiched between the left/right keys. I was anticipating a square layout like Undyne's in Undertale (which *is* doable for me with my keypad), not an octagonal one. Trying to press an up/down or left/right key at the same time leads to me accidentally pressing the wrong up/down key 50% of the time.

The number pad works (as does remapping to WASD), but I have no muscle memory for using either of those keys for directions, at all. I genuinely do not use them in games enough to not get disoriented trying.

I was told that Gerson was easier than the Knight, but I might actually need someone else to fight Gerson for me at this rate even if I beat the Knight, because I have been having a *worse* time progressing the Gerson fight than the Knight one.

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I've put both my "Got Devilsknife" and "Got Dealmaker" Chapter saves in zip files in a seperate folder. It really does feel like, ironically for being gotten from FIGHTing, Devilsknife is meant to shift into being Susie's Healing/Support Axe around the same time it starts dropping off as a pure offense tool:

When it comes to decorating spaces or designing characters in games, I strongly prefer working within limitations.

There's an intrinsic pleasure to arbitrary restrictions, sometimes. A satisfaction at succeeding within them. I don't really like adding a bunch of mods (particularly of the breed that simmers call "CC") to Spore, The Sims 4, Stardew Valley, etc because they kind of feel like... "cheating"? When playing with legos, and you don't have an official dragon minifigure, it's more fun to build a dinosaur than to just throw in a non-lego dragon. I've always liked the challenge of trying to make a specific character (fandom, OC, etc) in a dollmaker, or as a Flight Rising dragon, because of the way you have to work with specific predefined parts not intended for the job you['re setting out to do.

I like Watsonian analysis, not as a serious mode of literary analysis, but as a similar sort of 'play.' If I refuse to directly contradict the text, what imagined possibilities can I conjure in the gaps, from implications? If those imagined possibilities don't necessarily match what the author intended, but still fit within "what is known", that's fun, in the same way people building fucking Gundams in the Creature Creator in Spore is nifty, or creating the illusion of a restaurant or highway inside a storage shed in Stardew is cool, or...

(I don't really like outright throwing canon details away, even when subverting the message or themes. Often those specific, frustrating details are part of what get me thinking about where I and a text I love even disagree to begin with! It's more fun to put what we see in a different frame, shine a different kind of light on it.)

Have I ever shown you my favorite house I've ever seen in the Sims 4?

It's the Underhill Eco Home. Made on the smallest possible lot (20x15) one can build on in the game, it uses only base game and Eco Lifestyle assets (and the later very minimally), to create a Tolkien-inspired fantasy aesthetic without using any purpose-made "fantasy" related expansions or CC. (So no Realm of Magic, no Werewolves or Vampires, no Enchanted by Nature - that one didn't even exist yet!)

In the hole in the ground there lived a... Sim!

This Hobbit-like home is perfect for 1-2 Sims wishing to experience the cosy comfort of ecological living.

This mod seeks to challenge what type of aesthetics are connected to sustainable houses in Sims modding. The most dominant trend among eco houses are ‘clean, sleek modern designs combined with a connection to nature’. A downside of having a popular imagery connected to sustainability, is that people who do not connect with the imagery, would possibly also not connect to the topic of sustainability. This mod seeks to challenge the ‘clean and sleek’ design trend in favour of a fantasy-inspired look.

EcoLifestyle expansion minimally used.

The creator designed two other houses related to imagining alternate aesthetics for eco-friendly homes (in The Sims and IRL) beyond the sleek, modern aesthetic that the Eco Lifestyle expansion uses - a solarpunk live-in greenhouse and a witchy Wiccan house - but they don't compel me as much as the Underhill home. The simplicity and purity of the hobbit-hole's self-imposed limitations (the use of only one expansion instead of multiple, the tiny building space) are more charming and exciting to me. Sometimes I place it in a world just to look at it...

Like, just look at the screenshots! It's so cute, isn't it?

( video embeds )

These look like the same video... but one is unlisted, and has a different ending.

New video is going to premier in 54 minutes.

EDIT: Yesterday evening, the newest video had this description:

( Text from 10:14 PM, 7/6/26 )

Today (7:44 pm, 7/7/26), it has this description:

( it's only slightly different, but... )

Can't tell if this is Sepiatone's known shenanigans with changing video descriptions as part of the narrative, or just them being unsatisfied with the original wording.