I got 14 when I started up the game, though this is somewhat misleading as I moved my game installation between disks last year which wiped achievements (since they were tracked per-installation apparently); I've actually achieved most of them over my 371 hours of play time. Many of them twice, since a fair bit of that was on my laptop which also tracked achievements separately. It's great to see them finally sync and be recorded on Steam. Time to dive back in and get them again! :)

Quoting: appetrosyanQuestion: why do people care about achievements?

Why do people care about taking photos of weddings? Why do people frame their diploma and hang it on the wall? Why do people keep sentimental mementos of any sort? They provide something you can look back on in the future and bring back memories associated with the event (happy, sad, angry, bittersweet, whatever).

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPYeah, I think the standard time zones for most here are GMT (which is the same as UTC, I think?), EST and PST.

Yeah, I'm in AEDT, which looking it up is UTC+11. And before I was in HST, which is UTC-10, so I'm used to living in relatively low-population timezones. :)

Quoting: Liam DaweHey, sorry! I can try and remember :) - I want as many people in as possible :)

No worries, and thanks! I figure in this day and age there must be a pretty simple solution out there—even if it's just linking to www.timeanddate.com or something.

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Thomas Was Alone -for which it isn't entirely clear if it supports Linux or not-

Thomas Was Alone definitely works on Linux—I just checked, it runs fine without Proton. :)

Also, Fed Square, huh? That's only half an hour away by train. Maybe I'll have to check out the ACMI whenever it's on next…

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Quoting: mahagrEU4 DLC used to be 66% off on sales, but now they are only 50% off (in EU at least), which is crazy for everyone who is just starting to play the game.

Huh, you're right: the base game is 75% off now, but all the DLC are only 50%. That does change the math a bit. :(

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I've always found it weird how Plague Inc's model is considered so "realistic" when any mutation you apply to your disease instantly happens to every single one of your pathogens simultaneously, instead of how it would happen in reality where it would happen in a single one and would then have to spread (and out-compete its un-mutated brethren!) all over again. This lead to the meta of focusing on infectivity while downplaying lethality until you've infected the entire world while flying under the radar, then cranking up lethality and dropping all of humanity in a few weeks, which doesn't happen in reality. (Assuming we're not talking about the nanites pathogens, where such simultaneous changes might actually make sense. :)) And I understand a simulation will never be completely realistic, but this seems like a glaring deviation from reality.

Like, nothing against it as a game; I've never played it, but I've watched some Let's Plays and it looks like a pretty fun game. :) Maybe I'll finally pick it up while it's on sale…

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For those of us who can't easily do conversions from UTC in our heads, would it be possible in future articles to include a little widget or a link to somewhere than can do the time zone conversions? That'd be a nice quality-of-life addition. :)

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Having grown up on a small family ranch, I actually avoided Stardew Valley for almost two years after it came out for similar reasons. I've been hauled out of bed in the middle of cold, rainy, winter nights because "The animals escaped again!" enough times that I didn't find Stardew Valley's well-trained animals who return to their buildings at the end of a day (or who politely don't eat your delicious crops!) very amusing. (I've also manually dug enough fence post holes to last at least six lifetimes, so I really appreciate when your spouse gets up and fixes all the fences before dawn! :D)

When I finally picked it up, however, I realized that, for all that it's nothing like real farming, it does manage to capture the spirit of some aspects of farming like that warm feeling from giving friends your own home-grown crops and eggs. ^_^

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Interesting! Looks kinda like a 3D version of OpenTTD, which I've played a lot of with a friend. We might need to check this one out. Do you have options besides trains? It's hard to tell from the trailer. (Though I did see a blimp…)

Also that map is clearly the Big Island of Hawaiʻi (where I used to live), which is really cool, though it's a bit surreal to watch trains effortlessly cresting 4 kilometer peaks. :P

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Amusingly in hindsight, I chose Leah in my first solo game about two years ago; I say "amusingly" because, totally unsuspected by me at the time, I'd be taking up painting as a hobby IRL about 7 months later due to a chain of events that hadn't started yet. (Then, in her new 14-heart event from last month's update

Spoiler, click me

she teaches you to paint,

which I thought was both hilarious and adorable.)

I'm not entirely sure how luck works, but the fortune teller gives you an idea of how it'll be on any given day. It affects things like, e.g., the chance of finding a ladder each time you break a stone in the mines, or the average time between fishing strikes, that sort of thing. So you generally want to save your mine trips for high-luck days, for example.

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That's a pretty ridiculous sum.

And the usual response, of course, is: "Yes, if you buy it all at full price." (This isn't directed at you Liam, by the way, since I know you enjoy Paradox games, it's a response to this criticism in the abstract.) Pretty much anything later than the two most recent expansions will regularly go on sale for 75% off; apply that to the price and you get £63.74 (or about $83.5 USD for my own convenience). And of course, if you drop all the cosmetic DLC that price would drop another $20 at least. Now compared to all the $10 indie games running around out there even I'll say that's not exactly cheap, but in terms of what you get I think you'll get a lot more than 8× the playtime out of it if you like that kind of gameplay. I actually have bought most of EU IV & DLC full price—but I've also put 1,154 hours into it and expect to put many more in the future once the big game-changing Europe update comes out this year, so my actual cost-per-hour is less than $0.28/hour, making it a better deal than almost any other game in my library (and most forms of paid entertainment out there).

Um, actually on topic, I've occasionally thought that it would great to be able to just pay a subscription service to Paradox. They'd get a moderately more stable cash flow (especially if they did the usual thing of offering discounts the longer you subscribe for), and if I just got DLC I was interested in as it came out without needing to buy it (perhaps with a small discount, again, for subscribing) I'd be pretty happy. Realistically I'll probably end up buying anything they put out for the games I play anyway, eventually (I don't play all games equally at all times). Like other have said I wouldn't want that to be the only option, but I think it could potentially work as an option.

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