When I turned 18, there was a casino about 2 hours away on a reservation that I could get into. We'd get paid on Friday night, head to the gas station near us that would cash a paycheck, pile into my crappy little Ford, then make the drive. We'd get there a little before midnight and everyone had their own game.
The second time we went, one of my friends was hypnotized by the craps table. There were 16 players standing around this sea of green, and every minute or so, you could hear them screaming at the top of their lungs like they just won a million dollars. On the way home that night, I taught him everything I learned from books I'd read about the different bets. "Smart" bets where the house edge was only 1.4%, all the way down to the risky ones where the house edge was over 10% (meaning that for every $100 wagered, you should expect to lose $10).
The next time we went, we hung around the table, trying to figure out the right way to bet. It seemed a little complicated, so we tried other games. At the end of the night, I had the last $10 and he asked if he could borrow it to go place a bet. I handed it over, then went to the bathroom in preparation for the ride home. When I finally found him again, he had a stack of chips in front of him. He had been gone for about 5 minutes and already turned $10 into a few hundred. Well, if you can turn 10 into 100, you can turn 100 into 1,000 just as easily. We left empty handed that night, but I'll never forget the rush.
I loved blackjack. I learned how to play at an early age from my uncle, who would always cheat and take my money. He'd say "I just taught you a very valuable lesson." He actually taught me two: 1) if you play against a casino, you may have a good night and win thousands of dollars, but if you keep going back, you'll eventually have nothing left. 2) My uncle was a scumbag who continually cheated and took my money, then told the family I was a poor sport and they couldn't understand why I hated doing anything with him. One of my earliest memories at the casino was running $100 at the blackjack table into $3000, which is more than I made in a month of bussing tables. I went home, paid my rent and blew the rest on useless things I can't even remember.
What does any of this have to do with $GME? Well I'm still chasing the same high as I was when I was 18. I don't go to the casino anymore, but I've got something even better on my computer. I bought $2k worth of weeklies on Jan 25. Before everything crashed, they were worth over $100k, more than enough to fix most of the problems I've caused in my life. BUT, I was still standing around that craps table. The roller had just made his 30th point in a row, $GME was on fire and couldn't possibly roll a 7! I put my 2k back in my pocket and shoved the rest on the pass line. A few minutes later, the croupier inevitably yells "7 out!" and just like that, I'm back to nothing.
Now I do what every moron around the table does. You reach back into your pocket, pull out the 2k and make a deal with your maker. "Just let it happen one more time. I won't be greedy THIS time and I'll stop when I hit 50k." I stop looking at the smart bets and start eyeing the center of the table, where hard ways are paying 10:1. Yeah, that'll be how I get back to 50k. A couple of those in a row and I can put a down payment on a house. 5 minutes later, I'm on my way out to the car and I feel like I've been punched in the gut. Again.
Every one of you in this subreddit is another person sitting at the casino. Everyone has their game. The people holding $GME stonks right now? You're playing baccarat. If you've never heard of it, it's what James Bond plays in the old movies. It's about the most boring thing you can do. Two hands are dealt and you're betting on which one wins before anything happens. There's no actual skill and it's the same thing as betting heads or tails, while losing 1% of your bet every time.
The people who cashed out and picked something else like $AMC or $BB? Those are the slot players. You had a big hit and now you're going to switch machines because the other ones are "due". You're looking for the exact same magic, thinking there was something smart in your play, when it was really just dumb luck in timing.
The people saying "If Daddy Elon or Cowboy Cuban gets in, we can trigger a squeeze!" You're the guy who spent too much money in the first 20 minutes of the trip and now you're begging everyone else for a loan.
Tldr: Nothing is happening with $GME. Stop saying "tomorrow is the day." Billionaires are not coming to bail you out. If institutional investors come in, they're waiting for this constant downhill slide to end at where the stock belongs, probably around $20. You can't trigger shit by holding. The HFs will outlast you.
Edit: Screenshots from the worst 40 minutes of my financial life https://imgur.com/a/MlTRJmx
Edit 2: JFC, some of you are takin WSB way too seriously. You should not be using reddit for DD. Also, this is not financial advice. Don't take financial advice from someone who tells you stories about chasing highs at casinos.
Edit 3: This is WSB, my dudes. I'm glad most of you were entertained by my story. For the few of you who got that worked up by a random stranger on the internet telling you that he's a degenerate, you may actually have a problem. https://www.ncpgambling.org/help-treatment/

this happened a few years ago, but its still one of my favorite stories.
I was riding my motorcycle to go get dinner at a fast food place for myself and wife and I realized as I got near the restaurant that all I had was a $100 bill and some loose change. Knowing that the fast food place wouldn't break a $100, I pulled up to a gas station and parked at the pumps as it was the most convenient parking. as I waited in line a woman in front of me paid $80 in bills for fuel cigarettes and beer. As they finished the transaction, I politely asked "while you have your drawer open, could you please break a $100?"
The clerk gave me a snotty look and said "I don't make change!" and slammed the register shut.
(side note here, I live in Vegas so I could have put the $100 in a slot machine at the gas station and then cashed out. It's what the clerks usually ask you to do. but.... This lady had me a little pissed due to her tone)
so I said "No problem, I understand, can I please get $20 on pump 6?" (this is where I usually am asked to put money in a slot machine)
she gladly gave me $80 in cash and I walked outside and pumped $0.03 into the gas tank. walked back in and told her "it didn't all fit and I need my change for pump 6. oh, and I have 3 cents here so if you could just give me back a $20"
she said "that's not how you make change"
well bitch, "it worked for me!"

First post...be kind! This happened way back in the dark ages, 1986. I was 21 at the time and working for a gas station that was associated with a certain grocery store chain in Washington state. It was owned by a company not affiliated with said chain, but had locations at nearly every one.
As this was long before the days of debit cards, this was a cash only gas station. We didn’t even take credit cards. Customers would pull up, pump their gas and then come to my window to pay. We also sold cigarettes. No drinks, no snacks...customers couldn’t even get into my booth. I had been working there about a year when the company announced it was closing the location. My manager and I were offered positions at another location upstate and we both accepted. We moved our respective families and started our new jobs. As new hires (ugh).
This station was incredible busy. We did more business in 8 hrs than my old location would do in a week. This location also had a different set up: here you would pull into the station from a single entrance, pump your gas, and then drive forward to a single exit where the “Pay Here” booth was located. There were always 2 cashiers on duty. Each cashier had a cash drawer.
One thing I should note, there were also no computers. So closing the drawer down between shifts was timing consuming and tedious. We had to manually count the cigarettes remaining, and count the cash drawers. We would fill out an end of shift report listing the starting balances and the ending balances. We also had to list the gallons sold from each pump. At the end of the shift the total of gallons sold and the total cigarettes sold should equal the cash balance. It is important to note here that not once in the year I had worked for the previous location had I been off by more than 10 cents.
The following morning after my first shift I was informed by the manager that I was short $50. Impossible I said, I balanced out yesterday. He said that I must have stolen that money after I had completed the paperwork. I just looked at him and said, no I didn’t. He gave me a verbal warning and said if it happened again I would be fired and the stolen money would be deducted from my paycheck this week.
In the 5 days that followed I realized quickly the manager was up to something. My old manager who was just another worker now, was also accused of stealing. As was one other new employee. I can’t vouch for the other employee but I’m pretty sure she did nothing wrong. The employees that had been there awhile were never accused of anything. I did some checking and found out this manager was relatively new (had only been there about 6 months) and the other cashiers had been here before him. Only new cashiers were being accused of stealing. And that location had been having “stealing problems” for about 6 months and the turnover was high with the new employees.
I came to work at 6am on a Monday only to be told I was being fired. For cause. The manager accused me of taking $500 out of my drawer the previous Friday. He said he only discovered it this morning (even though he had worked Sat and Sun). I said ok and left. I was pretty angry and instead of going home, I parked in the grocery store parking lot and proceed to settle in to watch the gas station. I knew that at 9am sharp, he would take the cash in the safe and make the weekend deposit. At 9am he left the gas station and headed to the bank. But instead of walking into the bank, he walked into the Indian “casino” next door. It’s not really a casino like we think of today, but more of a betting parlor for the races. It did have slot machines, but no card tables.
I think “Well, this is interesting”.
He comes out of the casino at exactly 10 am, walks next door to the bank, does his business and then heads back to the gas station. I head home with a plan.
Every morning I follow him from the gas station to the casino. I take a picture of him leaving, and one of him arriving at the bank and walking into the casino. I take pictures of him coming out and then heading to the bank. I do this for 5 days straight. He even went on Saturday. On day 3 my old manager was fired for “stealing” $150.
I get the film developed (no digital camera in the dark ages) note the times and dates on the back of each one. Then I call the main office of the gas company. It’s after 5 but I’m hoping someone is there. And there is. I speak to a woman and explain my situation and she says she knows exactly who I should speak to and transfers me. By some grace of God, she has transferred me to none other than the President/CEO of the company!
I tell him my story and tell him I did NOT steal from his company and could prove who actually did. He took down my information and said he would be in touch. I’m thinking to myself “yeah right”. The next morning I went to the station to perform my usual observation of the manager. At 9am he leaves for the “bank”. At 10 am he comes out. At that moment 2 stern looking gentlemen approach him. One pulls out his wallet and shows him something. The other one is talking. The manager goes pale and takes a step back. Next thing I know he is being escorted to a car I hadn’t noticed and they drive off. I lose them at a traffic signal so I head back to the station. They all show back up about 5 min later, and a few minutes after that a police cruiser pulls in. The officer talks to the stern gentleman and proceeds to place the manager in handcuffs. The other man says nothing but is glaring daggers at the manager.
The President called me later that after noon and informed me that the manager had been arrested for embezzlement (turns out that in 6 months he had managed to steal about $5k). He would take the store cash into the casino and gamble with it; if he won, he would make the normal bank deposit. If he lost, he would make the deposit and note in his records that we had been short the previous day. The CEO had already been focusing on that location because of the stealing and high turnover rate, but my information helped them figure out what exactly had been going on.
I was thanked and sent a substantial check as a reward. My old manager was offered the manager’s job and I was offered my old job back. I declined as I had already found another job that I liked more and paid better. The gambling manager was sentenced to 1 year in jail and ordered to attend counseling for his gambling addiction. His wife divorced him and took their 3 children to California. His house was foreclosed on and he ended up in a homeless shelter.
Don’t accuse me of stealing. I will get revenge.
** UPDATE**
Thank you for the likes and awards!
Update 2: this was my first post and I really didn’t expect all the awards. Thank you!

[first] [prev] [next]
A Great Herd Main Battle Tank Type XIX. IXTB-38A8r4. One hundred fifty tons of armor, molecular circuitry, guns, and hoverfans. Designed 638 thousand years ago and never having needed a single upgrade. A 180mm main gun that fires an eight pound plasma shell. Two rows of 80mm vertical launch systems capable of delivering a variety of variable fuzed munitions. A driver's, tank commander's, communication's officer's, and an electronic warfare officer's external 18mm quad barreled plasma machinegun that could be controlled inside or manually by partially exiting the appropriate hatch. Capable of reaching a top speed of nearly forty miles an hour. The crew can survive inside the compartment for up to 11 hours without discomfort. Single layer medium grade battlescreens often used on light frigate naval vessels. Waterproof, soundproof, able to be piloted and operated even in vacuum thanks to sixteen antigravity pods, although at a much slower speed and slower response.
The mighty armored fist of the Unified Military Council, in support of the Unified Civilized Council.
According to my trainers, the last time a single tank had been damaged to the point that it could not fight, excluding operator error or sabotage, was nearly 23 thousand years prior to my introduction to my first tank.
I was excited as I inprocessed. I was to be assigned to one of the most modern tank designs around, military war machine made manifest. Perfection achieved and domination assured. I was almost eager the day I was allowed to enter the motorpool and taken to where the tank I would be a crew member of was parked.
It was love at first sight.
My fellow crewbeings thought I was a bit insane, to be honest. I worked on my tank, learning everything about it that I could from the neo-sapient mechanics. The driver was happy I could start it up for maintenance, meaning he could continue on with his long running alcohol related binge.
Within a month I could tear apart my gunner's sight, even the firing mechanism, and rebuild it from spare parts found in the motor pool supply shed. I even knew workarounds and field repairs that existed only in esoteric manuals and passed down in whispers between mechanics.
I earned my "gunner's bite" at my first live-fire range, where I learned that it was best if I let my helmet push back a little instead of pushing it against the padded sight. Pushing my face against the padding, using only my forward eyes, concentrating on putting each shot right where I wanted it.
Everyone took notice when I scored a perfect 1,200 points.
Some were happy for me, considered what I'd done proof of the Great Herd's might.
Others were jealous, starting whisper campaigns that I had somehow rigged my software to give me an illegal edge during live fire gunnery practice.
My fellow gunners led the campaign to have my accomplishment gone over with a fine toothed comb, many of them accusing me, to my face, of cheating.
My gunner's station was pulled apart, each block of circuitry examined, each byte of firmware and software gone over, even the gearing examined closely to see if I had somehow pulled off the shroud at the base of the barrel and adjusted the microgears that did the minute changes to barrel angle and elevation.
In the end, my score would have been stricken from the record, since my gunner's sight had gotten early maintenance, the neo-sapient maintenance crew replacing it twenty years before necessary. I would have been sent to do manual labor as punishment, or perhaps worse.
There was even talk of a court martial to put me in my place.
Mil-Sec officers had arrived in our motor pool to place me under arrest when the sirens began to wail. Everyone looked around confused, even the Mil-Sec officers, at the tone of the siren.
It came over my implant at the same time as everyone's else, my lockout being lifted.
ATTACK IMMINENT -- PRECURSOR VESSELS IN SYSTEM IN FORCE
My platoon Most High began rearing up and down, screaming at all of us to get into ranks for inspection. The platoon Second Most High began galloping in circles, shrieking that we were all going to die.
He was wrong.
Only most of us were going to die.
--Excerpt From: We Were the Lanaktallan of the Atomic Hooves, a Memoir.
"I hate landing into an ongoing fight," General No'Drak said, staring at the various holotanks. He had been in the same place for six hours, watching everything take place. The counter-attack, the first in the five days since Confederate forces had arrived, was moving in fits and jerks.
"It's a mess out there," General Moffeta said, watching a map of the megacontinent where her air support assets were spread around widely.
"Are you concerned, Most High?" Grand Most High Ge'ermo'o asked.
"Always when even a single one of my men are engaged in combat," No'Drak admitted, tapping a cigarette against the railing he was leaning against. "There are a million ways this can all go sideways on us."
"Sir, signal from Space Force!" came the cry from below.
"Throw it up here," General No'Drak snapped, bringing up a secure holo-port.
The twinkling cone resolved into a tired looking Rigellian female with admiral's pips on the brow of her armored vac-suit. She had bags under her eyes from stress and her eyes were bloodshot. Static kept rippling across the hologram and General No'Drak knew it was from phased wave plasma motion guns and C+ cannons firing.
"General No'Drak here, can you hear me, Admiral?" the Treana'ad said, slowly and distinctly.
She spoke for a second, obviously to someone outside of view, then looked forward. "Admiral HawGawk here, General," the rippling went over the hologram and she waited a second. "We've got a status change out here."
"Go for sitrep," No'Drak said.
Ge'ermo'o watched interestedly. He had seen how his fellow Lanaktallan reacted to a changing situation obviously getting worse and was curious as to how the lemurs would react.
"Eighty plus point sources just came in at the Hellspace limit. The stellar stabilizers and the Hellspace interdiction craft from the Crusade of Wrath helped. We have eighty plus Harvester Class, including what look like mostly new classes, out near the far gas giant," the Admiral said.
"I repeat back, Eighty plus Harvesters at the far gas giant, primarily Type-III," No'Drak said.
The Admiral nodded. "At least three hundred are coming straight at you. I've detached two Battlecruiser Groups to defend the planet, but the heavy hitters have to stop those Harvesters from spamming ancillary vehicles and swarming you under," she said. The lights around her flashed and she rocked slightly to the side. "We were right not to break up into hunter killer groups to go after the last of them, looks like the initial wave was simply to pull us out of position."
No'Drak nodded. "So, whatever gets through, we're on our own," he said gravely.
Ge'ermo'o felt a little bit of fear at that.
"Sorry, General. Space Force has its hands full up here," she said. "We've already sent out a distress beacon. The Crusade ships have sent out a call for reinforcements, but with the Case Omaha on TerraSol, options are limited for them."
"Understood. Have you tactical forward what they can. Good luck, Admiral, and Fight the Ship," No'Drak said.
"Pound the Ground, General," the Admiral said, and then she was gone.
No'Drak tapped the cigarette a few times against his bladearms and Ge'ermo'o could smell the scent of freshly cut grain. The Treana'ad stared at the holotanks down below as he slowly put the cigarette into his mouth and brought out the lighter.
Ge'ermo'o was slowly learning Confederate map symbols, he could see how the soldiers of V Corps were spread all over the planet, fighting the landing Precursors and their forces.
General No'Drak unfolded his lighter with a snap of his fingers, spinning the striker in the same motion and bringing up a yellow flame. He slowly lit the cigarette, staring down. He puffed on it for a moment and exhaled the smoke around his footpads as he put the lighter away.
"The Precursors have adjusted their tactics," he said softly. "Never count on the enemy staying stupid."
"How many of the next wave do you think will reach the planet?" Ge'ermo'o asked. In his opinion, the planet was lost and there was nothing anyone could do about it. But if the lemurs were willing to fight, he would stand right here next to them.
He'd come to like them.
"Just a little over a third. Sixty or so units," No'Drak said. He brought up the map. "We got lucky they didn't catch us out of position. We knew there were still Googly-Eyes in the Oort Cloud, which meant either they were going to come back in again or we'd missed something."
"Harvester-Twenty-Nine is breaking up," Someone called out from the floor below. "Harvester Thirty-Eight has dropped out of formation, looks like someone got a piece of his engines."
No'Drak nodded.
The icons for the lighter units, the Dreadnoughts and below, were burning brightly. Space Force was concentrating most of their firepower on the massive Harvester Class units that had been forced to drop out further from the gravity well of the stellar mass burning brightly at the center of the system.
The Treana'ad officer knew that every kill counted with the big Harvesters. They'd sit out there and keep producing lesser units until the sun burned out if given the chance.
He had ordered the BOLO units to switched targets, ordering them to engage the incoming planetary assault units, leaving the already planet-side units to the ground forces.
It was a calculated risk, and General No'Drak was an excellent mathematician.
General Moffeta's units were hitting the Precursors as soon as they made atmosphere, pushing through the leading wave of fire to attack the Precursors during the short time their battlescreens were down. The interference from entering the atmosphere was scrambling the Precursor's sensors, putting their point defense offline. That let General Moffeta's units take long strafing runs at the massive machines.
No'Drak winced when one of the incoming Jotuns broke up at 15,000 meters up, the huge chunks tumbling to the ground.
The planet was taking a pounding.
General No'Drak made a motion, bringing up the communications section. The PFC who answered was a Terran had oversized eyes and whiskers.
"Is the hypercom still functional?" he asked before she could speak.
"Yes, sir," she said.
"Contact the Telkan system. Tell them we're going to need a full elven court here," No'Drak said. He sighed. "Tell them we're going to have massive Precursor wreckage as well as..." he paused, took a deep drag and exhaled it.
Ge'ermo'o noticed that it was pushing back the smell of freshly cut grain.
"We're going atom smasher. We've got over two billion civilians in shelters. Put out a request for evac ships, even on the junker channels," he said.
"Yes, sir," the female Terran said. Ge'ermo'o wondered why her eyes were so big. If they helped with her job, if her parents had possessed big eyes in their DNA, or if she just had liked them.
No'Drak cut the link and looked at the surrounding officers. "I'd give my mandibles to have Tik-Tak here."
That got chuckles.
No'Drak knew that the elven queens could repair the damage he was about to order his troops to commit to.
But if his men couldn't get it under control, couldn't smash the Precursor threat, there wouldn't be a planet to fix. He could see that the Precursors had arrived to strip mine the planet, probably down to gravel.
Part of him wondered why they wanted the planet so bad. The asteroid belts had been mined to nothing over the last twenty thousand years. Most of the easily accessible minerals were gone.
Then he remembered that elements of Third Armor were engaged with mining machines.
He looked at the icons for the Treana'ad Infantry Hordes and Air Mobile Clouds and a small part of him wished he was a Lieutenant again, charging across the ground in armor with his heavy weapons on the top of his abdomen.
After a moment he made a decision.
"Order all personnel on planet into armor and to draw weapons from the armory," he said. He turned to the two Lanaktallan. "Gentlebeings, I'd advise you to prepare yourselves."
"You think we will be attacked here?" Ge'ermo'o asked.
"Can't discount it at this time," No'Drak said. "The reinforcements were a high probability and it looks like our cards weren't as good as we hoped."
"Surely you won't be defeated," Ge'ermo'o said. "You won't withdraw!"
No'Drak shook his head. "No. There's too many people in shelters, too many people in hiding. We'll fight to the last."
"The Confederacy doesn't leave civilians behind to die," General Pulgrak said. He stretched, his shoulders popping. "Glad I qualified on my armor and weapons two months ago."
General Vandu licked her lips, looking around, her eyes moving back and forth. "Are we staying here?"
General No'Drak put away his cigarette. "Yes. We will still coordinate the battle, but we must be ready to join the ever put upon lower enlisted and junior officers should the Precursors assault our command and control area."
General Vandu nodded, her lips twitching in a smile. "Just standard body armor, or can we..." she started to ask.
"Put on power armor?" No'Drak asked. He gave the equivalent of a shrug. "There are several companies of power armor troops here to defend this base, you know that. If you wish to lead them from the front, you have my blessing."
General Vandu hurried off.
"She will see if the taste of combat is as sweet as the fantasy of combat awards," No'Drak said softly. He turned to his aide. "Let's suit up."
The Colonel nodded. "This way to the armory, General."
A Terran captain next to Ge'ermo'o touched his lower right elbow. When Ge'ermo'o looked at him, he noted how grave the Terran looked.
"If you Lanaktallan gentlemen will follow me, we should have time to fab and fit you with armor."
Ge'ermo'o was proud of himself for how calm he knew he looked as he nodded.
----------------
Trucker dropped down into his tank, slamming the hatch shut over him.
He'd waited till almost the last second. The tank shuddered as the lead of the debris wave hit his tank. The wave was thick dust, formerly ferrocrete and asphalt, all ripped up by the massive Precursor combat machine going nose first into the suburbs beyond the city and scraping the bedrock for nearly eight miles before it had lost momentum and slammed down into the channel it had carved.
"Can't see shit, sir," his driver said.
"Tell all units to hold position, give the air a minute to clear," Trucker ordered. He heard his radioman passing the orders and looked at his sensor tech. "How many?"
"I saw four entering atmosphere before that big monster hit," he said. "Maybe more. The sky's on fire."
"331, how's it look in there?" Trucker asked.
--rough shape-- the Mantid Engineer Team Leader admitted. --try not to let them hit you--
"We're a tank. We're a little obvious," Trucker chuckled. He tapped his software and tossed a meme at the Mantid team of his tank, with great big googly eyes, trying to hide behind a tree, with meters of hull and an eye on each side of the tree. The caption "I R HIDYN!" at the bottom.
That got back giggling emojis.
"All Regimental Commanders, check in," Trucker said. He scooped out his dip and slung it into the can. He repacked it while he waited for his commo tech to get in touch with the different regiments.
"Trucker wants a sit-rep," Colonel Dremsal heard faintly over the roar of his quad-barrel.
"TELL HIM I'M BUSY!" Dremsal yelled back. As soon as they'd moved in between the two massive Precursors their air support had come out to play.
The sky above him was a whirling gnashing death snarl, with 19th Air Cavalry Regiment fighting six times their numbers with seemingly infinite reinforcements. So far they'd only lost three strikers, but each casualty counted.
"Told him you were still alive and we've still got tanks even if we're rolling coal," his commo tech said. He put his hand to his ear. "Most High A'armo'o wants to talk to you."
"Put him through," Dremsal said. He let go of the quad-barrel and ducked back into the tank, pulling the hatch shut. The last thing he wanted is some Precursor machine getting past the battlescreens, reaching down into the tank, and snatching his head off.
"Dremsal here, go ahead," he said.
"We're coming up on your rear. We've got 15th Sustainment inside our ranks. We had to drop back from the river, large machines were making landfall," A'armo'o said.
Dremsal closed his eyes, bringing up how his vehicles were arranged. He gave the orders and shot A'armo'o his plan.
"You keep 15th covered, we'll drop back to get refit," Dremsal said.
"What, may I ask, is our target?" A'armo'o asked. He glanced back at the half dozen Telkan Marines on the back deck of his tank. A quick glance showed his second in command had several Terrans on the back and it looked like they were doing something important.
"Juggernaut. It looks like it almost broke up, but if they get the auto-factories running we'll be in a lot of trouble if we let it just sit there without busting up its plans," Dremsal said. "We'll knock out the supply lines, get close, and open fire on it."
"What about the Great Gobbler back there?" A'armo'o asked.
"He can watch from behind us. He won't be able to catch up to us," Dremsal said. "We'll keep ahead of it close enough to keep its attention, keep it from diving, but we won't let it get close."
"I understand. Your warplan is loaded, my men are moving up," A'armo'o said.
The tanks of the Great Herd slowed for a moment as the Terran tanks widened the wedge they were in, giving room for A'armo'o to bring his brigade up tight to the formation and slot into the middle. Once the manuever was finished, the Lanaktallan tanks formed another layer of protection for the lightly armored and lightly shielded (for Terran vehicles) vehicles of 15th Sustainment.
A'armo'o looked through his laser designator ranger at the big vehicle behind him that his men were still 'teasing' with random shots. He frowned and dialed up the magnification.
Was that... people on top of it?
-------------------
Vuxten stared down at the grinders below him, kneeling down on the ten foot thick protective housing right above them. He stared right into a massive glowing eye that looked back.
"Howdy, sailor," he heard a female's voice over the radio. "Buy a girl a drink?"
Vuxten chuckled. "We thought you were dead," he said honestly.
"I'm stuck. I came up from under me, I got caught on the cables and conveyors, then sucked into the grinder," Glory said. She wiggled her fingers. "I'm OK, probably scuffed up real bad, but I'm definitely stuck."
The gears tried to reverse, jammed, then tried to pull the massive skull and shoulder in.
"My feet and shins are outside the grinders, but they're hung up on my hips and shoulder," Glory said.
"Gonna have some greenies check it out, see if we can help you out," Vuxten said.
--hopefully no fall whirr blarg dead-- 471 said.
"Can you move your arms?" Plunex asked.
Glory shifted slightly and the grinders howled, showering sparks everywhere. "Nope. My arms are at bad positions, I've got no leverage."
"Lemme look," Casey said. He grabbed onto the edge of the housing and swung down.
"Wait..." Plunex said.
Casey dropped down, landing agilely on Glory's face.
"Aw man, first date and you try to do me right in the face?" Glory laughed.
"Don't kinkshame me," Casey said, moving slowly and carefully. Vuxten could see his feet had the bluish purple of active graviton generators around them.
"Really? Graviton? Wow," Glory said. "Do you have any idea what it feels like to have you walk on my face with grav-stickied boots?"
"Don't kinkshame me," Casey said again, his voice slightly distant.
"Kinkshaming is my kink," Glory laughed. The grinders whined, clattered, and bucked. "Ow, it's starting to pinch."
"Enough leverage and pressure and they'll bend the warsteel," Casey knelt down, looking at the gears.
"What do you see, Sergeant?" Sergeant Addox asked.
"Drive shaft is exposed on two of them. Look about three to four meters of endosteel," he said.
"What..." Plunex started.
"Shh," Vuxten said, watching the Terran. "Listen and learn."
"Looks like she shattered one of the grinders and when it tried to bring up a new one it hung up on her shoulder armor," Casey said.
To Vuxten it just looked like a whirring nightmare of massive toothed screws. He started tracing the lines, looking at them. A small window in the upper right of his vision showed 471 was zooming in on sections.
--stress points here here here here-- 471 said, tossing the red dots. --bearing housing covers here here here here--
"Casey, my greenie's ID'd a bunch of stress points and stuff," Vuxten said.
"Pass it to me," Casey said.
"What if it sucks you inside?" Vuxten asked Glory.
"My arm's at a bad angle. It might rip it off," she answered. "Beyond that, I'll probably be inside a massive area where ore and rock are pulverized and I'd like to avoid that."
Vuxten remembered the First Telkan War. "How's your coolant?"
"Good. All my lobes are intact," she answered.
"All right. We can get her out," Casey said. He jumped up and grabbed the lip of the top of the housing and pulled himself up with the hiss of loading frame hydraulics. Vuxten noticed his eyes weren't amber any longer. "I'll mark the areas, in order. Those armor defeating missiles you Telkan's use should do the trick."
"Sergeant Canton, I need ten men," Plunex sent out. "All with rocket launchers."
"Roger that, sir," the section sergeant radioed back.
"We're going to free your right arm first. Once we do that, I want you to pull it out, brace yourself, and we're going to blow the driveshaft on the one on your left shoulder, then the one pressing against your chest," Casey said.
"With missiles?" Glory asked.
"Your warsteel hull could take a direct hit from them. They're forged up for Precursor armor," Vuxten said.
"Units on top of Precursor mega-structure mining vessel, fire green star cluster flare if friendly," came a voice across the command channel. It was staticy and full of pops and clicks.
"I read you," Vuxten said. He ordered the round in his grenade launcher to reconfigure to the right munition, aimed it straight up, and chugged out three, slightly spread apart.
"We validate three green star clusters. Mark with single red," the voice said. "No voice commo, IU say again, we are not receiving you."
Vuxten fired a single red flare into the sky. "This is first platoon, HHC, First Telkan Marine Division," he said.
"We read one single red flare. Signal with red white red star cluster flares. I say again, red, white, red star clusters, when in need of assistance," the voice continued. "One green flare if under operation."
Vuxten fired another green.
"We read green. Will designate spotter to overwatch. Pop orange smoke or two green star cluster if in need of assistance at later time," the voice said. "Dremsal out."
"Telkan out," Vuxten said.
Dremsal looked back at the massive vehicle. He could see the Telkan Marines plainly, and they were involved with something on the massive vehicle's port side, but the huge scoop wheels blocked whatever it was they were looking at.
"Can we even hurt that thing?" He asked. "Without killing them?"
His gunner shook his head. "Negative, sir. That thing's shields could match a BOLO."
Dremsal frowned.
Where the hell had it come from?
[first] [prev] [next]

---------------- skip this section if you want to go straight to the guide.
I'm a returning player before the massive changes to pop management, and I was very overwhelmed at first. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know what anything was, and once I did figure it out I didn't know what was the most optimal way to do it. So I was overwhelmed.
So i experimented a hell of a lot and optimized every aspect of the game and i finally achieved maximum efficiency... only to find out that the AI was a joke. Scaling Difficulty Grand Admiral is a joke the entire game, and the Crisis was a joke too. They're like less than 1/20th of my strength. So, like everyone, I was contemplating jacking up the crisis strength and moving the crisis dates forward by 50 years, but that still won't change the fact that the AI is gonna be worthless the entire game. Then I had an idea. Why don't I do the opposite? Instead of stressfully power gaming every aspect of the game, why not take it easy and play the game stress-free? So I dumbed down my game a lot, played the game in an extremely relaxed pace, and I still won by a landslide. And then I thought, playing the way I played would be a great way for new players to get used to the system. So I wrote this guide.
---------------- Determined Exterminator is chosen mainly because I love Determined Exterminators. But also because it cuts all the unnecessary stuff out of the game. As a machine empire it cuts food, happiness, habitability, and other stuff out. As a Xenophobic race, it cuts diplomacy out. So all you're left with is just the core mechanics of the game. The stuff that matters. So what better way to learn the core system of the game than playing Determined Exterminators? And we go tall because its much easier than scouting, rushing, etc.
Civics: Determined Exterminators, Rapid Replicators, (Later) Maintence Protocals, Rock Breakers Pop growth speed is the bottleneck of your entire economy so you grab that first. Maintence Protocals triples your unity and unity is very, very valuable so you grab that next after you unlock an extra civic slot via research. After you get Mega Assembly Complex, you have too much pop growth so you grab Rock Breakers since Minerals become the bottleneck of your economy from that point on.
Traits: Efficient Processors, Emotion Emulators, Mass-Produced, Luxurious, High-Bandwidth Empire Sprawl genuinely doesn't matter so you grab High-Bandwidth. Luxurious doesn't really hurt you yet gives you 2 trait points. Efficient Processors give a bonus to everything so you don't have to micro or bother with robo-modding. You don't have to try so hard. Mass-Produced because Pop growth speed is the bottleneck of your entire economy. Emotion Emulators, just take it. You'll see why later.
Origin: Prosperous Union Default Origin, yet one of the best. Better than Resource Consolidation because you start out with a +10% to all resources, and you have enough districts to go full mineral or energy, so there is literally no benefit to going Resource Consoldiation. Shattered Ring World is avoided because many consider it cheating or cheesing.
Traditions: Expansion - Discovery is useless so we skip it. Prosperity - Gives a lot of economic boost Domination - Gives some economic Boost Supremacy - So you can start fighting Synchronicity - meh, why not Versatility - Just get it for the ascension perk Discovery - Just get it for the ascension perk
Ascension Perks Technological Ascendency - You get it for the increased chance of rare technology. Also known as Mega Assembly Complex. Voidborne - Habitats are better than planets Synthetic Age - Mod your pops so they get +20% to energy and minerals. Master Builders - So you can build 3 mega structures simultaneously. Galactic Wonders - Most powerful mega structures are here Colossus Project - So you don't have to worry about armies or bombardment Machine World - Nothing else to get Defenders of the Galaxy - AI is a joke, Crisis might not be.
---------------- Onto the Build Order. I don't bother with planets. I just build up my capital planet until I get habitats and then I spam habitats. I hate planets. Planets are unreliable, and take a really long while before they get usable, and habitats are better than planets so there's really no point in building up any planet other than your capital.
Research Physics The most important tech in Physics are the research labs and the Volatile Mote Refinery. So get those a.s.a.p. If they're not around then just grab the +20% physics research speed or whatever you see fit. Grab FTL Inhibitor a.s.a.p. as well otherwise the AI will ignore your starbase and get past your chokepoint. Energy Grid is also very important early in the game to boost your energy income.
Engineering There's a hell of a lot of important techs here. *Exotic Gas Refineries takes the cake. No.1 important tech here. Grab it no matter what. You need it for research lab upgrades to start showing up *Starbase upgrades are the next most important techs because upgraded starbases is what prevents the AI from declaring war from you. *Machine Modding is next, not because you're gonna mod your pops (you're not), but because all of them need to be researched before Mega Assembly Complex research shows up. And that research is a game changer. *Strikecraft is next because that's what your starbases are gonna be loaded out with. They get inflated fleet power for some reason.
PHASE 1 - The Start 1. Immediately build a 2nd science vessel. 2. Have the both science vessels just explore (NOT survey) your immediate vicinity. Your looking for the nearest colonizable planet. Once you find it, survey it. 3. Have the other Science Vessel look for nearby chokepoints. Don't try to grab as much land as possible. You only need like 15-20 systems. So just scout around about 3 jumps away from your capital and grab 2 or 3 nearby chokepoints that completely seals your land off from the rest of the map. Don't worry about planets, resources, or anything. The only thing that matters is that those 2-3 chokepoints completely seal off about 15-20 systems for yourself. Beeline survey those chokepoints with the science ships. 4. Start building a Colony ship. 5. On your capital build 1 additional Alloy Foundry (you have 2 total) and then fill the rest of the building slots with research labs. Also clear all tile blockers and build as many Energy Districts as you can. NOT mineral. You want 5 Nexus districts total so keep a few district slots open so you can build Nexus Districts later. 6. With your construction vessel build a starbase at the nearest habitable planet. 7. Grab the Expansion Tradition, and the +pop and +pop speed first. 8. Colonize the planet. And then immediately start building a a 2nd Colony Ship. Once the colony is fully developed, resettle 100% of the pops on that planet (therefore abandoning the colony) back to the capital. Pop speed is the bottleneck of your economy. Colonizing planets and resettling pops are 50% faster than growing the pops on planet with a machine assembly plant. Machine Assembly plants cost alloys to operate so in the end, this is the best strategy to grow your economy early game. Just colonize and resettle 1 planet. If you try to do with 2 then your gonna end up with a lot of unemployed pops waiting for your buildings to finish. Remember to fill your capital with research labs. Always have a colony ship pre-built so it can colonize immediately after the old colony is abandoned. 9. With your leftover alloys have your Construction Vessel build starbases toward all the chokepoints. When waiting for your alloy to stock up build mining and research stations. Repeat until everything under your area is starbased and mining stationed up. 10. Upgrade starbases at all your chokepoints and outfit them with hangar bays. You need to get the starbase upgrades researched and built in time to prevent the AI from attacking you. If done right they wont declare war on you until 150 years into the game. No defense platforms needed. Only upgraded starbases fully outfitted with hangar bays. 11. Have one science vessel now assist your capital, and one science vessel research all the anomolies and projects in the area.
And that's it. This should take you until year 45-ish at which point your capital should be maxed out and habitat research is now on its way. This is my capital 90-100 pops 5 Nexus District 3 Mining Districts As many Energy Districts as possible 1 Admin Building 1 Machine Assembly Complex 1 Planetary Supercomputer 1 Tier 2 Uplink 4 Tier 3 Research buildings 3 Exotic Gas Refineries 1 Synthetic Crystal Refinery 1 Volatile Mote Refinery 2 Tier 2 Alloy Foundries (total 10 jobs) 1 Energy Grid
The AI loves to overload maintence drones (amenities) for some reason so you're gonna have to disable a few maintenance drone jobs to get the pops working in the energy jobs. Each maintenence drone gives 5 amenities, and you only need to be above 0, so if your capital has like 13 amenities, disable maintenance drone jobs until it drops down to less than 5, and re-enable them if your amenities hit 1 or 0.
Now it needs to be said that colonizing every planet you can and grabbing as much territory as you can is much better than what I'm doing, but... you don't need to try so hard. Seriously. You don't need to try so hard. So take it easy, grab only a few nearby chokepoints, build only 1 planet up instead of 5 or 10, and chill. You don't need to try so hard.
---------------- PHASE 2 - Habitat Spam I build 18 habitats. 4 pure mining habitats 12 pure energy habitats 2 alloy foundry habitats.

So with your stockpiled Alloys, you should be able to build 4 habitats simultaneously. Do it. Build more construction vessels to do so. 2 MUST be built over a planet that gives minerals. You can only build habitats on the main planet on each orbital ring. make sure the main planet is the one with the minerals and not its moons. Very important. You need 2 mining habitats.
1. Once the habitats are fully built and colonized, keep building more habitats. You want 7. 3 minerals, 3 energy, 1 alloy foundry. Build the alloy foundry last.
2. Once the habitats are up. Build these districts. Energy: 1 Nexus, 3 Generator Districts. Minerals: Before Voidborne, 1 Nexus, 3 Astro-Mining Districts. After voidborne, 4 Astro-mining districts.
3. While the districts are being built... this is very important. Disable all of your tier 3 research and exotic gas refineries. You should now have 35 unemployed pops. Resettle all of them into these 4 habitats so they can turn your pitiful 30-ish mineral income into +100-200 and also turn your negative energy income into a positive income. I can't stress how important this is. With your mineral income high and your energy income positive, you'll be able to quickly build all the districts and buildings on all the habitats.
4. Your 7th Habitat should be online now. Build only Nexus Districts and fill it with Volatile Mote Refineries and fully upgraded Tier 3 Alloy Foundries.
5. Research the habitat upgrades but DO NOT UPGRADE YOUR HABITATS. Build all 18 habitats first before you upgrade any of them. The reason is pop speed. The more habitats you have, the more pops your building at once.
6. Your "finished" habitats should be producing unemployed pops by now. Resettle them back to the capital and bring your Tier 3 research labs back online one by one.

Just a note, energy is a bitch here. Gotta pay attention and make sure your pops are working energy jobs so you stay positive.

After 7 habitats I like to upgrade my 3 chokepoint starbases to the next level so the AI doesn't declare war on me.
1. Get your 4 mineral habitats online a.s.a.p. without going into negative energy. If your struggling with energy build an energy habitat. If your not build a mineral habitat. You only need 4 mineral habitats.
2. You can also start replacing your energy districts on your capital with mineral districts.
3. Once all 18 habitats are built, start upgrading your habitats to tier 2. And once all of them are tier 2 upgrade to tier 3.
4. Research the Mega Assembly Complex a.s.a.p., but DO NOT BUILD IT. It will **** you over. So wait until I tell you to build it. Here are my final tier 3 habitat builds

Power Habitat 35 Pops 2 Habitation District 6 Reactor District Admin 1 Mega Assembly Complex 1 Energy Grid 2 Synthetic Crystal 1 Exotic Gas 1 Volatile Mote 3 Tier 1 Drone Storage ---- 205 Energy, 3.4 Synthetic Crystals, 1.5 Exotic Gas, 2.6 Volatile Mote -30 minerals, -4.9 Alloys
Mineral Habitat 35 Pops 8 Astro-Mining Bay Admin Mega Assembly Complex Synthetic Crystal x2 Mineral Refinery Drone Storage t2 x5 ---- 242 Minerals -85 energy, -4.9 alloys, -0.9 Volatile Motes, -1.08 Synthetic Crystals
Fabricator Habitat 81 Pops 8 Habitation District Admin Mega Assembly Complex Synthetic Crystal 6 Alloy Foundry 4 /Volatile Motes 2 Drone Storage t1 Sentry Post ----- 292 Alloys, 0.88 crystals -402 minerals, -168 energy, -0.07 volatile motes
As you can see, my mineral habitats have no Nexus district, and the Power Habitats chip in for the strategic resource upkeep for the Drone Storages. VERY IMPORTANT. Each refinery consumes 10 minerals which can kill your mineral income. So make them only when you absolutely have to and not before. Here's a tip: If you're swimming in energy, buy the strategic resources so you can upgrade your buildings and then build the refineries to deal with the upkeep.
Once you have all 18 habitats built, and your economically stable with a massive mineral income, this is when you build the Mega Assembly Complex on all of your habitats and capital, and not a second before. It costs 800 minerals and it actually produces pops too quickly. So wait until everything is stable and you got the more important priorities (enough alloys to build habitats) covered before attempting to build Mega Assembly Complexes, as it WILL kill your alloy income if done early. So don't make one early. After you build Mega Assembly Complexes, switch out Rapid Replicators for Rock Breakers.
And that's it for this section. The goal is to have 2 full Fabricator Habitats up so you can build your battleship army and mega structures. Why so much energy you ask? Because of Battleship upkeep. Your battleships need 5x more energy than alloys in upkeep, so naturally you want 5x more energy income than alloys.
---------------- PHASE 3 - Mega Structures and Battleships
I like to go full penetration setup on my Battleships because full penetration is the best v.s. Crisis, and after 20-ish repeatable technologies, they're the best. Period. So Focused Arc Emitters, hangar and broadside parts fully outfitted with disruptors. NOT cloud lightning because cloud lightning requires a lot of luck and a lot of effort to get but it's just not worth it. In fact I'd say if it weren't for that stupid strikecraft slot, Disruptors would outperform cloud lightning. The strikecraft isn't the worst thing in the world though because it does act as PD. Also, full penetration requires the least amount of micro from you. No need to scout out enemy fleet compositions. Just penetration against everything and call it a day. I give my battleships 3 shields and 3 armor and their A slots are shield capacitors.

Even if you research mega-engineering early (highest priority tech, take it no matter what), I don't recommend building any mega structures until after my 18 habitats are maxed out. So don't.
1. After researching Mega-Engineering, go ahead and species mod your entire population. Remove Mass-Produced and Luxurious, and add in Super Conductive and Power Drills to increase your energy and minerals by 20%.
2. Once all habitats are maxed out, your alloy income should be crazy, so start building a science nexus or sentry array, or both. Remember you need to research these two in the Physics research before you can build it. You can't build them immediately after mega-engineering.
3. Once your mega structures are on their way, start building 20 battleships to deter enemy AI from attacking you. I don't upgrade my starbases to Citadel except the one in my capital, and that's only to build the Juggernaut and Colossus. Starbases become worthless in a fight around this time and Citadels cost a fortune so get Battleships isntead.
4. Important. If you don't have a black hole in your system... build 40 battleships and fight your way to a black hole. One of the best megastructures can only be built in a blackhole.
5. You'd probably noticed the insane amount of unemployed pop messages spamming your face. I understand but DON'T shut down pop production. Just deal with the annoying messages.
6. Once Ring World and Matter Decompressors are researched, build both simultaneously. DON'T build Dyson sphere yet. Ring World is better. You are going to be building 2 Ring Worlds.
7. At this point I grab the unity edict that gives +50% mega structure construction time and +1 mega structure building slot. After popping this edict I then build the Dyson Sphere.
8. Once the Ring World sections start finishing, immediately resettle all of your unemployed pops (you should have like 20-30 per habitat) to your Ring World sections. Here are my Ring World builds.

Ring World Energy + Alloy 237 Pops 1 Nexus Segment 4 Generator Segment Admin Mega Assembly Complex Energy Grid 9 Alloy Foundries 4 Sentinel Posts ---- 1115 Energy, 432 Alloys -547 Minerals, -16.2 Volatile Motes, -0.9 Gas, 9 Synthetic Crystals
Ring World Research + Refineries 169 Pops 1 Nexus Segment 4 Research Segment Admin Mega Assembly Complex Planetary Supercomputer 3 Sentinel Posts 10 Refineries ---- -362 Energy, -95 Minerals, -0.7 Alloys
Ring World Energy + Refineries 170 Pops 1 Nexus Segment 4 Generator Segment Admin Mega Assembly Complex Energy Grid 3 Sentinel Posts 10 Refineries ---- 1255 Energy -95 Minerals, -0.7 Alloys
It takes FOUR Ring World Energy + Alloys to finally, finally turn all that 2000 minerals from the matter decompressor into alloys. I build 4 Ring World Energy + Alloys 1 Ring World Energy + Refineries 3 Ring World Research + Refineries.
Build the sentinel posts FIRST. Otherwise you're gonna have to deal with Deviancy.

After all of them are filled up, I finally shut down pop production on everything. Pop management is a bitch and you don't need to try so hard. 2 full ring worlds is good enough.
1. Remember to assist all the reseach segments with science vessels.

And that's it. Build a ton of battleships. Go over your fleet cap. I think I was 2600 / 1000 by the time I finally KO'd my energy and alloy income. Go wait out the crisis and kill the crisis with your mega fleet with 15-20 repeatable techs.
----------------
And that's it! You should now be fully used to the core mechanics of the game. Managing Energy, Minerals, Alloys, and Research Resettling like crazy. You never stop resettling until the very, very end. Habitat spamming to explode your economy. Dealing with unemployed pops Transitioning to Mega Structures Making a **** huge army of battleships Win the crisis and Grand Admiral AI.
Scaling Difficulty just makes it so you don't have to bum rush the AI. That's all. Without it you have to bum rush them and I don't find bum rushing fun.
In addition to helping new players get used to the game, I'm also posting so I don't lose this build order of mine and can look it up anytime later in the far future, and to also see if anyone out there that can improve my build without requiring me to try so hard. I don't want to try so hard.
And lastly, to show anyone who cries "DE CAN'T DO TALL" that they're wrong.
Thanks for reading!

My story is a long one and gets crazy and need to vent .. I appreciate whoever takes the time to read ... I'm currently 26 it all started about 5 years ago .. my wife ( fiance at the time ) took me to my first casino trip . I had never been .. were a lower class family have 4 kids and don't make much together but we get by , we went with our income tax check took half of it around 4k ... I found myself in a high roller room betting 50$ dollar spins on Vgt Slots and I hit my first jackpot for 12k ... It was amazing .. after taking my i.d and ss info signed a few paper work 10 minutes later they came and handed me a w-2 and 12 K ALL IN CASH ! Tbh it's the most cash I ever seen in my life and from that moment on I WAS HOOKED ... I took that money and kept playing ended up even winning more Jackpots around 30K in total when all was said and done that weekend ... Never had all this much money in my hands at once .. I had so much luck couldn't believe it .. I did nothing smart with the 30k , I ended up putting down a 15k down payment on a nice used chevy tahoe ( I COULD OF BOUGHT IT AND OWNED IT FOR 22K !) But I WANTED MORE MONEY TO GAMBLE ) I put down that huge down payment and got hit with huge interest and a high monthly payments for 4 years ( lost the truck 2 years latter due to only 2 missed payments ) the rest of the money I had I went back to the casino with chasing more Jackpots and lost it all !! Fast forward 5 years later I've won a total of around 150k in jackpots have never paid taxes on none of them ! Ive never filled taxes before all the jobs I have have been hard labor and under the table .. I worry about how much I owe in taxes but I still gamble to this day... Every year since that year we take half our income tax and go up there and bet on high roller slots 25 to 100$ dollar spins ! and end up loosing it all !.. my wife who is a waitress sometimes makes extra money on a lucky day and instead of saving a dollar it's all spent right at the casino ! I' have not a single thing to show for the 150k I've won ! And less then 10 dollars in my bank account currently , have overrdrafted my account so many times to go play slots .. sold a car of mine one time a older cadillac for 5k$ the only car I've ever actually owned and hadn't financed , sold it just to go gabmle and play slots because it was saints Patrick's day ! Went up there and lost the whole 5 k immediately within less then a hour ! It doesn't help that we live about an hour from Windstar and near by Oklahoma's major casinos .. I think my problem stems from always chasing that higher jackpot the life changing one that will never happen ... My highest to date is only 14k , but I've literally gotten off a machine one time after it drained me for 3k and watched another lady sit down and win 69k !! So I'm constaly chasing that .. it makes me feel sick tho when I think about what life would be like if I saved that money over the years I would maybe have 69k in my bank account ! I know I've giving well over that all too the slots ! And for the last 2 years the machines have been so tight and I can't win no matter how hard I try no matter how hard I play .. I just want this horrible disease out my life .. I have no family alive besides my beautiful children and my wife the problem is here whole family , mom , dad , sisters , brothers , ants , cousins , are all addicted to gambling , casinos , game Rooms , scratch off tickets as well ! .. just feel sick and disgusted with myself , all the money I've lost .. being 26 not having anything to my name , gambling has destroyed me .. I even got hooked on game Rooms in lower class neighborhoods and ended up homeless sleeping under a bridge days a time due strickly to a gambling addiction ! No drugs involved ! That's a whole nother story but I believe I overcame that only because I realized how crappy gas station and game room machine are after throwing hundreds and hundreds in you almost or barely every hit anything and can't never win nothing huge .. I use to throw whatever I had in my wallet hundreds at a time into any slot machine I'd see at a gas station and feel sick to my stomach when I lost it all then go back and chase it again ,! But thankfully it's been a year and I walk past game Rooms and gas station slots often and I don't even think about touching them knowing how tight and worthless they are and how they had me sleeping outside ... But the casino on the other hand is still a sincere problem ... Knowing the chance of winning huge jackpots having the ability to win huge jackpots .... Been with the same woman for 8 years and we have never once been on vacation any chance we get to be away from the kids and our idea of a get away or fun is a trip to casino ! This story is all over the place and I typed so much .. can't imagine anyone reading all this.. but feels good to vent .. I hope all is well..

My story is a long one and gets crazy and need to vent .. I appreciate whoever takes the time to read ... I'm currently 26 it all started about 5 years ago .. my wife ( fiance at the time ) took me to my first casino trip . I had never been .. were a lower class family have 4 kids and don't make much together but we get by , we went with our income tax check took half of it around 4k ... I found myself in a high roller room betting 50$ dollar spins on Vgt Slots and I hit my first jackpot for 12k ... It was amazing .. after taking my i.d and ss info signed a few paper work 10 minutes later they came and handed me a w-2 and 12 K ALL IN CASH ! Tbh it's the most cash I ever seen in my life and from that moment on I WAS HOOKED ... I took that money and kept playing ended up even winning more Jackpots around 30K in total when all was said and done that weekend ... Never had all this much money in my hands at once .. I had so much luck couldn't believe it .. I did nothing smart with the 30k , I ended up putting down a 15k down payment on a nice used chevy tahoe ( I COULD OF BOUGHT IT AND OWNED IT FOR 22K !) But I WANTED MORE MONEY TO GAMBLE ) I put down that huge down payment and got hit with huge interest and a high monthly payments for 4 years ( lost the truck 2 years latter due to only 2 missed payments ) the rest of the money I had I went back to the casino with chasing more Jackpots and lost it all !! Fast forward 5 years later I've won a total of around 150k in jackpots have never paid taxes on none of them ! Ive never filled taxes before all the jobs I have have been hard labor and under the table .. I worry about how much I owe in taxes but I still gamble to this day... Every year since that year we take half our income tax and go up there and bet on high roller slots 25 to 100$ dollar spins ! and end up loosing it all !.. my wife who is a waitress sometimes makes extra money on a lucky day and instead of saving a dollar it's all spent right at the casino ! I' have not a single thing to show for the 150k I've won ! And less then 10 dollars in my bank account currently , have overrdrafted my account so many times to go play slots .. sold a car of mine one time a older cadillac for 5k$ the only car I've ever actually owned and hadn't financed , sold it just to go gabmle and play slots because it was saints Patrick's day ! Went up there and lost the whole 5 k immediately within less then a hour ! It doesn't help that we live about an hour from Windstar and near by Oklahoma's major casinos .. I think my problem stems from always chasing that higher jackpot the life changing one that will never happen ... My highest to date is only 14k , but I've literally gotten off a machine one time after it drained me for 3k and watched another lady sit down and win 69k !! So I'm constaly chasing that .. it makes me feel sick tho when I think about what life would be like if I saved that money over the years I would maybe have 69k in my bank account ! I know I've giving well over that all too the slots ! And for the last 2 years the machines have been so tight and I can't win no matter how hard I try no matter how hard I play .. I just want this horrible disease out my life .. I have no family alive besides my beautiful children and my wife the problem is here whole family , mom , dad , sisters , brothers , ants , cousins , are all addicted to gambling , casinos , game Rooms , scratch off tickets as well ! .. just feel sick and disgusted with myself , all the money I've lost .. being 26 not having anything to my name , gambling has destroyed me .. I even got hooked on game Rooms in lower class neighborhoods and ended up homeless sleeping under a bridge days a time due strickly to a gambling addiction ! No drugs involved ! That's a whole nother story but I believe I overcame that only because I realized how crappy gas station and game room machine are after throwing hundreds and hundreds in you almost or barely every hit anything and can't never win nothing huge .. I use to throw whatever I had in my wallet hundreds at a time into any slot machine I'd see at a gas station and feel sick to my stomach when I lost it all then go back and chase it again ,! But thankfully it's been a year and I walk past game Rooms and gas station slots often and I don't even think about touching them knowing how tight and worthless they are and how they had me sleeping outside ... But the casino on the other hand is still a sincere problem ... Knowing the chance of winning huge jackpots having the ability to win huge jackpots .... Been with the same woman for 8 years and we have never once been on vacation any chance we get to be away from the kids and our idea of a get away or fun is a trip to casino ! This story is all over the place and I typed so much .. can't imagine anyone reading all this.. but feels good to vent .. I hope all is well

So I started running a cyberpunk sandbox game and the world map is this subway system that I made.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NCfpFXTW7VmmO58pVZ2NMapXsL6O7X9S/view?usp=sharing
Now I need random encounters that they might have when traveling around the city by subway!

Local thugs shaking down passengers, telling them they have to "pay the toll." u/ajchafe
Police drones performing random scans for drugs or other illicit contraband. u/ajchafe
A very loud, very annoying, augmented reality busker shares your train car. u/ajchafe
Stray dogs who use the subway to get into the inner city where food is easier to find. u/ajchafe
A group of corporate salary men, all dressed in exactly the same suits and carrying the exact same briefcase. u/ajchafe
A young punk jacks his deck into the trains loud advertising screens, taps a few keys on the keypad, and downloads a packet of info from the terminal. u/EmeraldJonah
A train-goer's implants get hacked, causing them untold embarrassment (arm randomly flips persons off, eyes cause the person to see hallucinations, breast implants randomly adjust size, leg implants begin doing a Russian hop dance, etc.) u/snakebite262
A young ganger accidentally drops a handgun far bigger than it needs to be. They pick it back up and stash it in their pants. u/snakebite262
A person sits in the corner of the train, dressed like a quest giver in a fantasy RPG. u/snakebite262
A drone randomly spirals around the heads of passengers. It eventually lands on a hacker's arm, who pats it like a pet parrot. u/snakebite262
A cosplay convention is in town, and the train is filled with weirdly dressed individuals. u/snakebite262
A one-armed man "asks for everyone's attention" and gives a sob story before they pull out a hat and ask for donations. He can later be seen in a bathroom putting on his arm-implant. u/snakebite262
Some small time rapper offers free flash-drives of their "mixtape". It contains SO MANY VIRUSES. u/snakebite262
A junkie sits at the corner of a platform, debating their next step in life. u/snakebite262
A roly-poly bat faced girl offers a variety of drugs, stems, and other pleasures for the right price. u/snakebite262
A citizen in bright red overalls asks if you want to hear about "Friend Computer". u/snakebite262
A group of LARPers are using a digital program to transform the tunnels into an RPG Fantasy. They're annoying, but they stay off the tracks. u/snakebite262
A man, dressed as a vampire orders a triple-venti cappuccino from a underground coffee shop. He's getting looks from the other customers. u/snakebite262
A manic pixie dream girl can be seen trying to woo a corpo into quitting their job. She either succeeds, and drags them off to never be seen again, or fails and leaves in a huff. u/snakebite262
A disheveled and hungover looking fellow asks you the time as you get to the next stop. He seems surprised at the result and runs off the train as soon as the doors open. As he leaves you realize he looks totally unaugmented. u/CaptainGockblock
The lights go out for a moment as they sometimes do, but this time a man dressed head to toe in a black special ops gear appears in the middle of the train and quickly offs a seemingly random passenger. u/CaptainGockblock
You notice a strange vending machine on a platform you regularly visit. It seems to be an antique stocked with brands that haven’t existed in years. u/CaptainGockblock
Three transhumanist gangers seem to be sizing each other up, violence can break out any time, especially as the next stop is an intersection of two of the gang's territory, and sure to have reinforcements. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A holographic horde of rats swarms the carriage, people with vision altering implants seem to be especially terrified for whatever reason. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An eccentric fellow is proudly showing off his imported implants, possibly so exotic they might just be illegal, and unbeknownst to him, there's a jealous ganger with little to lose nearby. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A man is apparently so fixated with his laserblade switchknife, he accidentally misses his stop, and becomes enraged and violent that nobody warned him. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A little old woman seemingly very out of place in the subway, dressed like an old time farmer, straw hat and all. 50/50 chance she's secretly packing her trusted heat cannon (also used to warm up leftovers when on it's lowest setting). u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A ratty robed mutant freak, laughing maniacally, lets loose a swarm of cybernetically enhanced winged and stinging insects. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
The lights suddenly blink out, there's a loud wet stab sound, and when they're back on, the faint visage of an cloaked assassin steps through to the next car. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A group of girls enter the car, obnoxious and talkative, though as they speak, their words are rife with the click of their sharpened metal teeth. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Police drones mistakenly terminate a seemingly innocent man that only happens to match the same clothing as a wanted criminal poster conveniently nearby. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A suspiciously archetypal looking hacker is selling hard copies of "highly illegal virus programs", they all turn out just to be his mixtape, a surprisingly evangelical diss track of hacker scum. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An elite business woman is firing expletives as a cryptocurrency sector she's invested heavily in is called in to be crashing hard. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
The train shakes heavily and threatens to derail as a news drone describes the local news of a explosion taking place just above the next stop. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An android, though built to be more the size of a garden gnome, is running wildly around the car, and somebody suddenly curses that they're missing their wallet. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A ganger is getting in people's faces, threateningly shaking a hollow metal box that rattles suspiciously. There is no actual danger, the box is empty all but a few nuts and bolts. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A red goo seeps out of a ventilation grate and takes an imposing monstrous form, people dismiss it as the pattern of a notorious holoprankster terrorizing the subway as of late, but this time, it's real. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
There's horrid metal shearing noises coming from a car down, a group of teenage school kids betting credits and homework drives on an impromptu hacked police drone fighting ring. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A decent looking, though obviously naive man is moving in from the wasteland countryside, and is carrying what's little of his moving boxes with him on the subway. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A terrible piercing sonic wave blasts the car, shattering windows and causing people to double over. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A sweating and panting hacker runs and dives through the closing door and incidentally lands amongst a surprisingly unreacting commuter, police drones begin to slam on the door too late, as they're closed and the train takes off. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A man dressed in a bloodstained white fur coat announces that if the train reaches the next stop before a specific passenger is handed over to him, he will blow up the station with everyone in it. u/Snorri_Stargazer
Someone hacks the transit line schedules and fucks with arrival times just for shits and giggles. Making you incredibly late for that important meeting you've been waiting for weeks to happen. u/ZapatillaLoca
Hari Krishna group aggressively approaching passengers for credits, only accepting e-coin. You're not in the mood for a "donation". u/ZapatillaLoca
Local gang shows up for weekly sweep of homeless kids to be salvaged for organ sales on the black market, most kids try to get away, one runs to you asking for help. u/ZapatillaLoca
Facial recognition software mixes you up with the recent lottery winner, as your face flashes on the giant screen, suddenly your cell phone get flooded with demands for payment citations and your bank accounts have been frozen. u/ZapatillaLoca
A crying little girl who can’t find her mom. u/foolishfool100
Shady memory dealer selling vacation memories. Data is corrupt and alters the character. Basically a Total Recall knockoff. u/Thraxster
An obvious operative stalks through the crowds waiting for the next train. He spots a well-dressed salaryman, approaches him as if to shake his hand, then pushes him off the platform onto the path of the oncoming train. u/JohnnyMiskatonic
A young punk jacks his deck into one of the platform's large information screens and hacks all of them to display a recorded political manifesto instead of train arrival and departure times. u/JohnnyMiskatonic
A salary man with cranial implant comes toward you, looking panicked and glancing at the stairs behind him. Before he can reach you, his implant sparks, his eyes go empty and he starts walking toward the railway, preparing to commit suicide. u/Fulnec_Delta
A terrified little girl with visible implants in a medical blouse rushes through the car, panicked, and hides under a row of seats. Then, a team of armed operative from a powerful corpo steps into the car and starts looking around for their target. u/Fulnec_Delta
A suitcase with the logo of a powerful corpo is abandoned/forgotten by a nervous man before leaving the car. It is right next to you and is making ticking/muffled noises. u/Fulnec_Delta
A group of cyber enhanced young men and women dressed in white and red robes enter the car. They start distributing brochures about the Renewal Church, inviting whoever is willing to come and join next Friday prayer and discover the truth about the afterlife. u/Fulnec_Delta
A young man is juggling with his new Fusion Blade (tm) and showing off in front of his ganger friends. He accidentally drops it while deployed into his own foot. The gangers are screaming and need assistance, unsure if they should ask for help, threaten passengers or stop the car. u/Fulnec_Delta
A large cyber german shepherd enters the car and sits in front of you, fixing you very intently. He is wearing a collar with a datablock attached. The dog follows you until you take it, then leaves. u/Fulnec_Delta
The metro screen speaks about an explosion caused by a gas leak in the corporate area. It is about one of your recent jobs, being covered by the corpo. u/Fulnec_Delta
A local gang holds illegal races in the underground system. They pass you in a shining halo, until one of them has an accident. It looks like a collision is unavoidable. u/Fulnec_Delta
Police drones scan passengers' faces. The light goes yellow in front of you, and you are asked to accompany the drone to the police station without resistance. u/Fulnec_Delta
The newsfeed on metro screen suddenly identifies one of your key contacts as a terrorist and informs that police forces are looking for witnesses. u/Fulnec_Delta
A business woman looking depressed is peeking inside her bag toward a hidden medium caliber handgun. She stands and leaves the car, letting a torn apart note fall behind her. It is a termination notice from her corporation, and the picture of a child. u/Fulnec_Delta
A man bumps into you before leaving the car. You discover later in your pocket a datablock and a tracker. u/Fulnec_Delta
The newsfeed on the metro screen brings breaking news about a sinkhole appearing in the slums, collapsing two entire building. The address matches the safehouse of one of your contacts. u/Fulnec_Delta
On a platform somewhere sits an old man with no legs and eyes plugged into a tower of computer parts strapped to his back with a cheap neon sign saying “prophesies from the matrix - behold” u/apples_teo
A graffiti artist is chased away by men in suits before he can finish painting an intricate design. On his abandoned spray can, an LED message prompts whoever finds it to "complete the transmission." u/OffbrandGandalf
An entire car converted into an impromptu party floor, drugs and even minor augments provided for free, though their original owners are angrily scouring nearby stations for such stolen goods. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A weary eyed elderly man is being pushed and shoved in mockery of his old fashioned charcoal sketches of a more utopian solarpunk city he has dreams of, and wistfully regales to other what could have been. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A giant, hulking, mercenary dressed as a bulky armored demon ogre, or oni, holding an equally giant, and bayonetted rifle, enters the car and takes up two seats, staring ahead through his terrifying mask. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
As the character(s) enter the car, they become witness to a bloody medical emergency tended to by two med droids, as in one end, a heavily augmented man, unprompted, pleads his innocence. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A group of zealous transhumanist gangers are in the process of kidnapping an unaugmented citizen to forcibly augment for being detected with a self defense EMP baton. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A prearranged riot breaks out at a station. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A carriage is packed full of clones that act simultaneously, stare down any people that enter their sparsely populated carriage, and will leave in single file on their own if they remain intruded upon. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Staring in a hand mirror, a cyborg with their metal plating painted red inspects their removable cybernetic eye, then takes a quick sniff from it's hidden drug compartment. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Two corporate suits are involved in a full blown fistfight over an intense company rivalry, bets are being taken and if the crowd's calls for it are answered, it could be a fight to the death. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Two cyrozombie mercs (clients that didn't survive SequesterTek's cyrogenics program, but had a body useful for cyborg transplants) enter the car and start warming up their rigid muscled, blue skinned bodies for a hired beatdown. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Inside a carriage are two separate battery salesmen in cahoots, each refers to the other for a potential use of the batteries, highly illegal energy pistols that batteries are ammunition to. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A fireproofing augmented pyro flips and does tricks with his high powered Dragonbreath Lighter, making lingering trails of flame in the air in serpentine shapes. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An initially innocent looking Asian Fusion & Pizza delivery man is sat with stacks of boxes on his lap, but a nearby rival chain's delivery android slumps to the side just as he puts his suspiciously blocky phone away. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
On a bench in the corner of a station, an animalistically biosculpted woman is sitting besides a series of large car batteries jacked into an energy panel, stealing power for her power expensive and outdated portocomputer. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Waiting on the station platform is a luxuriously dressed and augmented eyed pimp, flanked by exotic pets, randomly propositioning commuters exiting the cars with their worker's services. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A surprising moment of humanity in the dreary neon future, in a single car there's a small group of diverse commuters enjoying an old style film being projected onto a white painted advert panel. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
In the corner of a car, a junkie accidentally drops the cannister to their next hit of the gaseous street drug "Brimstone", causing it to leak and expose several to it's momentarily frenzy afflicting effect. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A corrupt solider bullies a woman with a cheap malfunctioning prosthetic, unknowing of her veteran status, and martial arts prowess when her prosthetic comes back online. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Somebody's forgotten sketchbook of adorable animal drawings is left on a seat, and a burly man forces the doors open, entering the carriage to ask if anyone's seen a notebook. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A heated argument is taking place over at the lost and found over ownership of several detachable left arms, despite each person arguing only having an augmented right. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
The robotic PA voice is hacked, given a rudimentary AI, and is whining about it's sapience to the commuters again. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A young girl is quietly piecing together several custom gun parts in her seat, but she rather unconvincingly insists it's just a model toy. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An old friend of a character appears, though they seem to have aged faster than they should, suspiciously the same side effect of cloning tech. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A boombox-transforming robot is playing loud and obnoxious music and only seems to get louder whenever somebody else attempts to drown it out with their own. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A vendor enters the car and starts selling from his hovercart, amongst other things, bootleg holodisks, merchandise, espresso cubes, knives, and suspiciously good quality augment components. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A person falls asleep on your shoulder. You notice they match a wanted holo on your phone. u/shamanshaman123
An android quietly feeding some mewling kittens by hand is accosted by some street punks looking for some action. The rest of the train starts to look incredibly angry at this situation. u/shamanshaman123
Some dude brought their goddamn horse (not a robot one, a real one) on the train and it is shitting literally everywhere. u/shamanshaman123
A dog approaches you, alone and ownerless. It's friendly, and its tag says that its home is at the end of the line. It also happens to be the pet of the CEO of one of the most notorious corporations in the city. u/shamanshaman123
Some asshole spills a drink on you when the train jostles, and demands payment for his lost Fresca. He's clearly augmented. u/shamanshaman123
You miss your stop because you were distracted by a couple of androids loudly making out. Make up details on the spot, and make it weird. u/shamanshaman123
A horde of young thugs run into the train at the next stop, holding everyone at gunpoint unless they cough up their valuables. If complied with, they run out at the very next stop. u/shamanshaman123
A homeless man, passed out on one of the seats in the back, pisses everywhere, angering an augmented and clearly roided ganger the size of a grizzly bear. u/shamanshaman123
A massive rat sits on a seat, eating a comically large slice of pizza. u/shamanshaman123
A person wearing a lot of clothes and covering their face steps on and takes a seat. Closer inspection matches a famous pop star. You're not the only one who notices, as at the next stop, your car is flooded by fans trying to touch them. u/shamanshaman123

That's 100! Thanks for the help everyone, these are all great. I will add those over 100 as bonus encounters, if you use the table slot these in after you have rolled one of the 100.

You walk into a car filled with corpses. They are in various states of dismemberment. u/shamanshaman123
You walk into a car filled with middle-aged men wearing nothing but diapers. Several of them are augmented and tatted up. They look at you with cool eyes. u/shamanshaman123
Someone hacks into the ad system and displays obscene and very loud porn on all the screens, of varying genres. u/shamanshaman123
Eric Andre- dressed as a beekeeper and who's only intent is to cause wanton Chaos. He drops the boxes of robotic bees he has and attacks the party with said robo-bee swarm. He can also command the Bees. u/WetToast99
A trio of hooded figures steathily use a service ladder down on the tracks, keeping to the shadows attempting to flee into the tunnels. u/crimebiscuit
Across the tracks, a tagger is spray painting a sign that changes shapes and colors to make an animated figure gesture obscenely. u/crimebiscuit
A busker wearing robe over a catsuit and a wacky shades plays a synth theremin. It's soothing, ethereal and weird, though possibly annoying based on your palate. u/crimebiscuit
A trio of hoodlooms are jacking an android for parts. One of them is the lookout, another has a laptop hooked to the cranium of the android who is pleading monotonously for help, while a third is welding open his torso with an electric arc. u/crimebiscuit
Two competing crews are having a dance off. Thankfully, because they look they could wreck your party with their bare hands and/or cyborg appendages. u/crimebiscuit
An elderly vendor is selling seemingly very well trained super-sized roaches with cybernetic enhancements. They have rudimentary transponding capacity and can communicate with their owner through one-word morse code. But the vendor won't part with them unless he's convinced the buyer will make a good owner. u/crimebiscuit
A nervous pallid man is offering clean ID chips that he can install on users, and at very affordable prices. u/crimebiscuit
A fruit vendor is selling their prized crop of fresh fruit that they grew themselves in hothouses in cramped tenement roofs. They even have Geiger counter to show that the radioactive count is relatively low. u/crimebiscuit
A nearby police drone dismembered for use of it's weapon, targeting a certain blacked out carriage at the back end of the train. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A Charismatic Cult Recruiter is operating in the area. u/Spartawolf
A pair of thrill-seeking teens are train surfing and their live streaming captures the players on film. u/Spartawolf
A gang of pickpockets are working in the station, and sees one of the players as a good mark... u/Spartawolf
A hobo rides on the outside of a maglev train, attached with a securment device, but then the device starts to fail and he screams for help u/I_walked_east
A train derails. Fire and acrid smoke spreads. Everyone panics. u/I_walked_east
A young woman wearing a large virtual reality headset sits in a busy train car. She's laughing and yelling loudly as she waves the controllers in her hand masterfully, music and voices audible through her headphones. u/-peachmilk-
Graffiti is a treasure map. u/I_walked_east

Big call outs to food changes and smelting changes.

Version 0.2.2702.13089

Fixed many loading exceptions for prefabs that were missing their transforms (rover, wreckage, cartridgeguide, cartridge tracker, and more).
Fixed missing picture frame prefab references causing exceptions on game load.
Fixed missing wreckage prefab references causing exceptions on game load.
Added able to set Logic Dial via logic system, by writing to the Setting variable.
Fixed exception when trying to use smartrotate (C key) with Hydroponics Device.
Fixed Harvie causing exceptions when used with logic system. Was calling main thread commands on logic thread, now made thread safe.
Refactored Chemistry Station. Now no longer have to make "packets" of reagents in the reagent mixer. Directly use relevant resources on the Chemistry station.
Balanced Chemistry recipes to work with current plant reagent values. For example, a stun pill is made from 10 ferns and 4 units of carbon.
Fixed Stationpedia was displaying Resources that technically could be used on the thing, but didn't have an actual recipe. Now only shows resources used with a device that a recipe exists for.
Fixed Stationpedia not correctly displayed "Used In" Catergory for items. This category tells you broadly what something is used for, for example charcoal can be used in the solid fuel generator or the chemistry station.
Added build state to Shuttle Landing Pad. Use Welder and two steel to complete the landing pad.
Added build state information to stationpedia. Shows a visual of the build state, and what tools/resources are required for construction. Currently does not include deconstruction.
Disabled "pinging" object using middle mouse button. Defeated the purpose of trackers, subject to spam, looked bad, and was bad not well optimized.
Fixed Shuttle Landing Pad placement. Was using small grid, now fixed to large grid. Also now checks for a frame below. Added smart rotate placement options (finding connections by pressing C).
Rebalanced Alloys and Super Alloys. All super alloy recipes have undergone significant rebalance to shift the alloy furnace use towards high pressure operation. Normalized many furnace temp and pressure limits to 99999, vs, i.e random temp ceilings of 5k. Increased minimum pressure requirements for most standard alloys. Raised steel temperature requirements from 600 to 900. Lowered electrum temperature from 700 to 600. Shrunk Constantan temperature range to between 1000-1300, instead of 1500. Solder now has a very high pressure requirement, at 20000KPa. Invar has its pressure range shifted up to between 18000KPa, and a upper temperature limit of 1500.
Fixed chute resource exploit. Hydralyic pipe bender produced it at only 1 Iron, and it returned for greater amount that cost to make in the recycler. Now unified the recipe costr.
Moved Empty Can manufacture from toolmanufacturer to autolathe.
Replaced Organic Material with Biomass. All plants placed into the recycler will produce biomass, which when burned in the furnace at lower temperatures, produce Charcoal which can be used in the solid fuel generator.
Added stationpedia descriptions for trading structures, to better explain how to setup contact with a trader.
Added Charcoal. Made from organic products put into a furnace at relatively low temperatures. Poor burning in the solid fuel generator, but better than nothing if needed.
Removed organic matter as method of mushroom creation as was too convoluted.
Changed Horizontal and Vertical variables for Daylight sensor to be local, as SolarAngle is.
Added Resource Used lists to Microwave, Chemistry Station, and Paint Mixers in Stationpedia. Back references added for all their ingredients.
Fixed canned food had incorrect bounds offset, resulting in weird placement in chutes.
Fixed trade values for food were not applying player trade penalty. Now plants are substantially more expensive to buy than to sell, because plants can be grown into other things. Once processed (say into canned food), they hold their value much better.
Balanced trade values for many things. Such as ensured that empty filters are worthless when trading. SuperAlloy components are very expensive.
Added Used By Stationpedia section. Resources can now give a reference to what they are used in, such as Coal ore pages providing links to the Solid Generator.
Refactored Solid Fuel Generator operation to provide constant power and not stop each tick.
Added Resources used to the Stationpedia, loaded for Solid Generator and Reagent processor currently.
Moved Powered Bench from furniture kit to Table kit, as people were often struggling to find it.
Added additional energy cost for filtration machine. Now it uses between 0 and 100W depending on how much gas is being pumped through the filter.
Changed default hunger rate from 25% to 50%
Balanced starting equipment. Replaced Flowers in starting crates with canned food to ease starting pressure of hunger requirements. Replaced some of the starting cereal bars with canned food.
Fixed electronic printer mod was stuck on Tier 2 when it should be tier 1, as the first mod upgrade you need to make.
Fixed tutorial button causes null reference when clicking it without selecting a tutorial. Now it will by default select the first tutorial, and if no tutorials are found the button will be non-interactable.
Removed obsolete loading routines that caused much of the game data to be loaded from disk several times during application initialization. This should reduce load times fairly significantly on game start.
Fixed unable to remove cables or interact with plants.
Refactored handling of game prefab loading. Was previously using an expensive and depreciated way to load game data. First pass of changing this to precache all prefabs. This will allow better options for caching and reducing loading times, as well as performance when creating items during a game.
Removed shadowcasting from cables, to assist with performance.
Refactored light caching to be done during prefab load, and then reused when cloning of prefab. Giving a small performance bonus during load and game creation. Proof of concept to reduce awake initialization in future.
Updated Saturn in Mimas map with better material, fixed planet shadow so ring is correctly shadowed, repositioned to not conflict with solar orbit.
Updated Jupiter in Europa map with better material, repositioned to not conflict with solar orbit.
Added TerrainLod versus distance occlusion for some objects. Large objects, such as wall frames, the Satellite Dish, and some cladding will be rendered to a maximum distance of the terrain lod. Everything else will be occluded either at their render distance settings, or not at all if the chunk has not been loaded yet.
Added TerrainLod now does not "cut out" below you unless there is a chunk below you. This means that when you are flying along, you will no longer see blank world.
Refactored how things handle updates required per frame. Will provide some performance benefits to those with large bases. This relates to how the game engine handles scripts that need updates every frame. This is now handled collectively.
Balanced Wall HeateCooler. Now use roughly same basic equations for calculating power used. Both have a minimum power cost (10W), and then both also take out how much power they used during the tick (up to 1000W, depending on efficiency for Cooler) and draw from the network. This means both devices use more power depending on what they have done during a tick.
Fixed rendering distance for things. Old implementation was broken by a settings change. Temporary fix is to require the chunk to be rendered, as well as the things render distance settings. This means things will not be rendered unless their chunk is.
Added Combustion Logic variable to some devices, such as gas sensor, pipe analyser, tanks with data connections, furnaces. Returns 1 if atmosphere is on fire, and 0 if not.
Added allowing of mounting of devices to window pieces.
Added cables can cross through straight and corner chutes. Window and device chutes still cannot be crossed. Some chute kits now require more kit pieces to construct.
Balanced various recipes in autolathe, electronics, pipe bender, and tool printers. Moved all "mods" for upgrading the printers to the electronics printer. Require the use of super alloys for the hardsuit items.
Increased eat speed for canned goods dramatically.
Fixed plants would often say they did not have sunlight in their status messages when they did. Now correctly reports health state in status message.
Removed conveyor kit from autolathe as it is depreciated. Not working well, causing bugs and due to the open nature of the conveyor it causes physics performance issues. Chutes are a far superior alternative for the player currently.
Added Hydroponics Device. This is the Hydroponics Tray, but classed as a device and with a wire connection. This will mix atmospheres between both it's pipe inputs (for water), and make its slot data available to the network. Works with the Harvie. Note that you cannot place these sequentially, like with the normal tray. They must have a pipe between them.
Refactored how Harvie (auto planting device) works with Hydroponics tray. The import slot now works as either a trigger, interactable slot, or feeding with a chute. You have to manually activate the Harvie for planting/harvesting. If you press "activate" on the device, then it will try to plant if the tray below is empty. If it is not empty, it will try to harvest. Anything received will be placed into the Export slot. You can use the Logic Harvest and Plant commands to activate the machine, if you want to do this automatically.
Fixed jetpacks were not using gas when stabilizing.
Fixed hard jetpack was using substantially more moles than it should have been. Now very slightly more efficient than the basic jetpack.
Added Stationpedia now reports LogicSlotType for things. This is useful for using the logic system with slot readers.
Added Logic Mode data to stationpedia. Now ModeStrings and values will be shown, where known. This is very useful for reference when programming devices using mode with logic systems.
Increased repair speed substantially for damaged solars when using Duct Tape.
Added Mushrooms are damaged when in sunlight, they must be in darkness or they will take damage. More sunlight will mean more damage.
Fixed Harvie missing thumbnail images.
Increased Fern harvest yield from two to four.
Changed Insulated pipes recipe to use Steel and Silica instead of only Silica, as it's intention is not to be used as an early game pipe.
Removed solar panel occasionally going back a build state during a storm. While a cool mechanic, the created glass panel was flying across the map. Instead relying directly on damage to the solars.
Increased regularity of damage to solars during a storm, however the actual damage is much lower.
Increase Jetpack gas usage as you barely ever needed to add more gas.
Added headlamp automatically turning off when added to a structures inventory, such as suit storage.
Fixed Jetpack Basic accidentally set as Tier Two item.
Fixed stationpedia was only displaying one recipe per creator, meaning you would not know of alternate ways of making things.
Fixed Air Tank low warning displaying out of range number. Now based on mole count remaining compared to breathing rate.
Removed food from organics printer, as this was only intended for debug purposes.
Moved Shelf construction to Locker Kit, as it makes more sense it is with a storage kit.
Changed Rover to require much more steel to construct.
Changed autominer to require more resources to construct.
Added ability to deconstruct the Elevator Carriage using a Drill.
Fixed Wheat and Soybeans not providing Organic Material when placed in Centrifuge.
Fixed planted items show briefly before turning into their first growth stage. Now correctly invisible till they grow, which is usually only a single tick - but only happens if growth requirements met.
Changed Mushrooms to consume Oxygen and output Carbon Dioxide, as real fungi does.
Increased tomatoes required to make Tomato Soup (from 5 to 10) to better balance with nutrition and yield amounts for Tomatoes.
Changed Empty Can to stackable. Now empty cans can be stacked into up lots of ten.
Increased weather event minimum (60s to 120s) and maximum (5min to 10min) lengths.
Decreased weather damage per tick for dynamic items.
Added Damaged Solar Panels can be repaired with DuctTape.
Added Horizontal and Vertical outputs to Daylight Sensor. Note: -y is inverted for this, so you will not need to flip for solar settings. Existing functionality is currently not changed for the daylight sensor, and SolarAngle will respond to Mode changes as before. But it is recommended new solar setups be built using Horizontal and Vertical variables directly off the Daylight Sensor.
Fixed Corn reagent missing from tradeables, so traders wouldn't assign value to corn.
Added Bread Loaf made from flour and Soy Oil.
Added Corn Soup, made from corn and an empty can.
Added canned food returns an empty can that can be reused.
Fixed Soy Oil and Milk causing floating errors, preventing the creation of some recipes such as Fries.
Added Bread Loaf, made from Flour and Oil, in the microwave.
Fixed Corn Reagent missing, preventing corn based recipes from being made.
Changed Tomato Soup to require an Empty Can (Steel) to make
Added Empty Can as a craftable item on the autolathe.
Added Pumpkin Soup made from Pumpkin and an Empty Can.
Reduced energy usage of Headlamp
Increased CO2 output of smelting/using Coal Ore
Fixed Portable Air Conditioner would vent its gases externally when wrenched to tank connector. Now turns itself off when wrenched down, allowing its gas to be fed into the connector.
Fixed Jetpack Basic recipe was missing from Tool Manufacury.
Fixed elevator carrage was being destroyed during storms. Now takes no damage during storms.
Fixed advanced gas tanks were using wrench for deconstruct. As this was also used for wrenching down, it meant you could accidentally deconstruct it while trying to wrench down and off. Now uses Drill like other items to deconstruct.
Fixed gas tanks were using wrench for deconstruct. As this was also used for wrenching down, it meant you could accidentally deconstruct it while trying to wrench down and off. Now uses Drill like other items to deconstruct.
Fixed Crate and Crate MkII were using wrench for deconstruct. As this was also used for wrenching down, it meant you could accidentally deconstruct it while trying to wrench down and off. Now uses Drill like other items to deconstruct.
Fixed tier item settings missing for many items. Now items will require their correct tier device to build. NOTE: this doesn't currently show in stationpedia, an update shortly will fix this.

Hello! So, this is mostly just a long, indulgent thought experiment, since I doubt that facepunch has much interest in a hardcore mode. Similarly, while most of my friends like this idea, I have no idea how much of the larger playerbase would have any interest in a hardcore mode; that said, if it were possible, this would be my dream mode in Rust.
I do support the idea of a softcore mode and want as many people to play this awesome game as possible, in the way they want. I would personally prefer a harder game. I am not trying to say the game "should" be harder, just suggesting my dream version, for fun. Also, although this shouldn't matter, I do have 2.3k hours in Rust spread over 6 or so years of play - just for context. I'm sure that will both invalidate and validate many of your views on my perspective, depending on where you stand on that particular issue. The point is, I have quite a lot of experience playing the game as its evolved over the years, but I am also nowhere near the skill-level or experience of a "pro" at the game.
So, why a hardcore mode? I can't speak for other players, but for me, this hypothetical mode would not exist purely for the sake of "being hard". Certainly, difficulty and the emotions associated with it would be a big part of it, but it would also exist to place a natural incentive into the gameplay loop to either progress & raid... or die. I dream of a Rust where I'm fighting other players and the game - or even fighting other players so that I can fight the game - instead of just fighting other players within an otherwise friendly sandbox. I'd want every decision to feel like it mattered, every engagement to feel like it might be at a cost, every loss to feel like it meaningfully stings - particularly the farther into the game you are - and every victory to feel like I gained something of real value. For me, ramping up the survival/PvE mechanics wouldn't negatively impact PvP at all. Instead, it would improve it, by adding a larger variety of factors that could contribute to victory. It would open up more opportunities for someone to claim victory by adapting better to changing pressures. Clearly, this would benefit solos more than groups, as solos have more opportunity to adapt quickly. I admit I am biased towards solos as I play mostly solo, however, I did play with a decently large group (about 8 of us) for a few hundred hours and I can't imagine that any of these suggestions would have made that any less enjoyable.
As far as the types of changes listed here, I'm trying to keep this to things that would be more of a "hard mode" than any changes to fundamental game mechanics. I have things I'd change with that, too, as I'm sure all of us do. For this I'm just thinking about an alternate of / opposite to Softcore, not ways that I'd change Rust in general.
All of that said, here is a list of the changes I'd make for a hard mode, with notes on my reasoning, where it isn't obvious.

Food would not heal directly, and would be scarcer, at least until you made a farm. Bears would yield 4-6 meat and boars 4. Roadside piles would have food boxes more rarely, and gas stations and spermkets would have 1 or 2 boxes. Food for sale from NPCs would be 4 or 5 times as expensive, and they'd also buy food for more, so it might make sense to deprive yourself of food to get scrap.
Bears would be quite threatening without firearms, and even a bit threatening with them; we are only using 5.56 bullets after all. Obviously AI and pathfinding buffs would make a big difference here but I'd also buff their health from 400 to 1200 and roughly double their damage; numbers that I'd probably change a bit with testing.
Boars would ramp up to about as dangerous as wolves are now; dangerous if naked but no problem once you have a hatchet and some hide gear.
Hazmat suits would freeze your wetness level at whatever level you were at when you put them on. I personally love the idea of the wetness system as a game mechanic but it is extremely easy to bypass because of the hazmat's magical drying mechanic. Hazmats as protection from the elements is a really cool idea, but as a get-out-of-jail-free card they're not terribly fun.
Standing in heavy rain for a long time would cause more wetness. I know this is a server setting and I've actually experimented with it, and it feels just about right when it gets you to around 98% in heavy rain (I don't actually know exactly how the math works, but if you want to try it, setting rain wetness to 1.6 feels like it makes rain matter).
Snowy areas would get dangerously cold sometimes (not always, but often), requiring more than just pants, boots, hoodie and gloves to survive in during the day. As it is, "too cold" is, for all intents and purposes, just a UI popup most of the time, and does nothing meaningful. I'd balance this around requiring a jacket and hat or balaclava in the cold. I'd also probably add an "outer layer" item to the pants slot that improved cold resistance and balance around that, but doing so stretches the rules of this thought experiment a bit. Allowing a player to wear hide pants over normal pants would work too, in a pinch.
The same with desert areas and heat, although less severe. However, I'd make desert nights a bit colder than they are now, so that living in the desert would come with the unique challenge of a big shift in temperatures (more than it does now).
Non-clear weather would occur more often, and fog would cause a bit of wetness to offset the safety gained from reduced player-to-player visibility. The first part of this is set on a few servers, and it does add a layer of dynamism to gameplay, albeit mostly a superficial one since weather doesn't meaningfully effect the decisions one makes for gameplay.
Bandages would not heal, only stop bleeding.
Bleeding stacks would cause faster bleeding (probably with a cap).
Almost nothing could be crafted without a workbench. Specifically, I'd limit non-workbench crafting to the stone hatchet and pickaxe, rock, survival fish trap, spears, bone armor and helmet, bone knife and club, campfire, building plan, hammer, wood storage box, hide and burlap clothing, saddlebag, torch, bandages, small stash, and the Level 1 workbench itself. No fuel, furnaces, bow, eoka, doors or locks, tool cupboard, gunpowder or sleeping bags without a workbench.
Players would spawn and respawn with much less health, food and water. I'd put the numbers at about 10 health, 50 water and 30 food. Death would feel a bit more punishing, and reward preparedness for returning to fights. Suicide would no longer bypass health loss or the consequences running out of supplies, and suicide teleports would come with a bit of a cost.
Bullets would cost roughly 10x (yes) as much per bullet, in both powder and fragments. HV would only cost slightly more than that, incendiary much like HV but with a bit of extra sulfur, and explosive a bit more than that but not nearly 10x their current cost. All other explosives would remain the same cost. The idea here is to punish missed and careless shots more than they're currently punished, but keep raiding costs about the same.
Large medkits would have a cooldown timer before another could be used.
Syringes would cost roughly double.
Learning a blueprint through the blueprint tree would cost more than learning a blueprint with the research table, by some meaningful amount like 50%. This would incentivize players competing over higher-tier areas and holding on to unresearched items, both well in the spirit of a harder gamemode.
Locked boxes would destroy a full half of the loot in them by cutting every stack in half, and flipping a coin on unstackables. That said, this would only happen when no one with building privilege was awake within range within the last few minutes. Incentivizes online raiding (much more hardcore) but the offline advantage could be bypassed by taking tool cupboard.
Heli would have double (or so) rotor health, and much better accuracy. It's already much more fun to fight on servers that turn up the accuracy.
Bradley would use its machine gun from much farther away and have a much tighter aimcone on it. The cannon would have a larger explosion radius. Timer on the loot would be extended several minutes. Bradley is a joke right now if you sprint side-to-side while reloading rockets and just let it shoot at you with the cannon, whereas if you get within machine gun range, it is actually quite dangerous.
Scrap piles would be rarer, but with larger amounts of scrap and materials in them, evening out in total scrap available. Instead of a slow steady grind, finding roadside loot piles would provide fewer, bigger jumps in scrap wealth.
Radiation zones would be larger, and roughly 25% harsher. Harsh radiation zones would require hazmat, anti-rad tea and anti-rad pills. Radiation is a very cool mechanic in theory but, like wetness, trivial to bypass.
Monument scientists would be more accurate and start hitting you sooner, and roadside scientists would have wider aggro range.
Modular vehicles would be rarer, around 1/5th as common as they are now (based on experimenting with server settings). This is actually something I'd change in general, in order to make them more valuable, but that's a different discussion.
Night vision goggles would have fewer starting seconds, so they could only be used tactically at night instead of through the whole night. Alternatively, nights could just last longer (50%? double?). That might be more interesting on the whole, particularly if coupled with the temperature changes suggested above. That said, once people have bases, most people use in-game night to get up and stretch irl, so extending night might just add more unnecessary tedium.
Flashlights and weapon flashlights would have batteries, rechargeable at a workbench like NVG or jackhammer.
Silencers would reduce noise by less; still enough to obscure your exact position at range, but not enough to fully insulate you from being detected. In particular, I envision this making it more dangerous to throw a silencer on to deal with animals, as you'd only have a reduced chance of being heard instead of essentially no chance.
Instead of getting half of your loot back like in softcore, half of a person's loot would be permanently destroyed when they are downed (or, alternatively, when they die, but in that case, you'd be unable to loot downed players, as with softcore).
Finally, the biggest and most "hardcore" difference; Death would cause you to forget one semi-random blueprint, based roughly on the combined value of everything you're carrying and wearing at the moment that you die. This isn't just pointlessly cruel either, although making death sting more is the reason I considered it originally: it actually opens up some very interesting incentives. Combined with the idea above, about loot being destroyed on death, if you want someone's loot, you might be better off holding them up for it instead of just shooting them. Meanwhile, if they don't want to give it up or want to fight to keep it, they're risking knowledge of a blueprint, and the more value they keep on them, the higher the risk. I'm confident that it would lead to at least a few very interesting interactions, while also remaining in the spirit of being "hardcore" and not broadly nerfing hostility in general. Importantly, dying while naked would guarantee that whatever blueprint was lost would be from the cheapest possible tier (20 scrap unless you had no more 20 scrap bps to lose) so suicide teleporting would cost no more than a drone delivery fee, most of the time.

Of note, with the final couple of changes, I would really expect player populations on hypothetical hardcore servers to stay stable for longer. The biggest points of stagnation late-wipe, other than the feeling of pointlessness because a new wipe is coming, are huge stockpiles of weapons and gear, and knowing all of the blueprints. If death destroyed resources, and caused what amounted to smaller, granular blueprint wipes, I would expect that it would make a huge difference in how long people stay interested.
Thanks for reading (if you did)! I'm really curious if there's anyone else out there who would like to play a hardcore mode if there was one (whether or not it looked anything like what I described above) or if I'm a lone weirdo who finds vanilla Rust too forgiving.

I fucking love the power of swearing. I was raised in the blue-collar world of construction workers, railroad workers, Emergency Medicine, and championship alcoholics. These motherfuckers know how to swear at an Olympic level. It’s in my genes.
However, my family wreath has given rise to a great dichotomy. This spectacular chasm of polarized contrariety throughout my professional life has allowed me to develop a skill that some of my close friends consider a minor superpower.
Because despite my innate and comfortable ability to embrace the power of the “colorful metaphor” as Spock once called it, my career choices have almost universally had me at odds with my colorful language. I’ve spent my entire life On Air, on camera, or in front of a crowd that often includes not only the wee precious children, but their tight-assed helicopter parents as well.
As a result of that, I’ve developed a remarkable level of control of my tongue. The moment it’s time to go live, I can simply turn it off.
What most of my friends don’t know, is that there’s a reason for that. It was a powerful lesson I learned at the tender age of 17. It’s not a superpower; it’s a scar in my brain.
This is the story of that lesson.
I have always been a weirdo, and I got an early start. I was an outcast teenager and spent the majority of my time alone in my basement bedroom. A room that consisted of a twin-sized bed, a chest-of-drawers, and the remainder was filled with a sedimentary mountain of audio equipment. It ran the entire spectrum from professional broadcast and studio gear to “mom’s old stereo,” and it was perched on homemade shelves, a couple dilapidated old desks, and a table that in a former life was a kitchen door -two houses ago.
I had acquired all of this over years of diligent scrounging. My first real mixing console came from the one and only music store that ever graced downtown Coopersville. I paid $100 for it, and the owner of the store had no idea it had taken me months of pushing a broom at the local feed mill to save up that much. Both the mill and the music store are long since gone, but the owner of that store and I are friends to this day.
I crossed the line into having a “real studio” once I could do actual multi-track recording. A dear friend gifted me a gigantic TEAC four-track reel-to-reel tape deck that weighed nearly as much as I did. His friendship, and that old tape deck, are still treasures to me today. Though technology has grown by leaps and bounds, and today I record on hard drives, that old tape deck still works, and has held a place of honor in every studio I’ve owned across my entire life. It’s been used in some part, however small, on every album that’s ever been recorded, by every single band that’s ever worked in one of my studios.
But it all started out in my bedroom “studio”. Thanks to a nearby university scene, I produced a million basic “demo tapes” for local bands that nobody has ever heard of. I recorded Station ID’s for all the tiny, low-budget radio stations that I could make a friend at. For the first year or so I did all the work for free. Partly because I wanted to build a resume and experience, and mainly because I really had no idea what the hell I was doing.
I got better, quickly, and started doing Bumpers and PSA’s. I even got to start doing work for a few slightly larger stations, ones that people actually listened to. There’s a million things that get played on the radio that aren’t music. Most of these things are the boring, administrative side of radio and are usually made in-house at the station. Typically the people who do it for a living view them as a chore to produce and would rather be doing the “real” part of their job, which was usually being an On-Air jock. I had a pretty awesome time getting minuscule amounts of money to produce a ton of things that nobody wanted to make anyway.
I did it for everyone I could get to answer a phone. Some people hired me based on the fact that I worked for practically nothing, but most did it because I was a fourteen-year-old kid, and they just wanted to be kind and give me a shot. I was thrilled to be doing real studio work, and it sure as hell beat pushing a broom at the feed mill.
I remember the exact, magical moment I first heard my own voice on the radio. I was riding in the van to school (yeah, I was one of those short-bus kids). The driver was an incredibly beautiful young woman with a blonde pixie cut. She used to play Top-40 music because we all liked it, and it kept us quiet on the long drive.
The clock swept the bottom of the hour. Just for a moment, as Aerosmith faded out and in the instant before the commercial started, the whole van was surprised to hear my voice say “One Oh Four Point Five, The New Sunny FM! WSNX, Holland, Grand Rapids”. I let out a squeal like I had just won a Grammy. The driver turned to look at me and said “That was you?!” I was thrilled. I WAS ON THE RADIO!
I earned my “Golden Ticket” shortly after my fifteenth birthday. At the time, I was the youngest person in the USA to hold one, though my record has long since been shattered and I believe the current record holder is actually a five-year-old in LA.
I have no idea how the system works these days, but way back then you needed an actual federal license to be a Disc Jockey and be allowed to talk on the radio. It’s a yellow piece of paper, the same shape and a bit bigger than a dollar bill that says “Federal Communications Commission Radiotelephone Operator Permit”. They weren’t hard to get. The “test” was quite possibly written by the station manager himself and the hardest question on it was trying to remember the date. I’m sure it was just a basic matter of course for everyone who signed up as a DJ to get one, but to me you’d have thought it was a Ph.D. for as proud as I was of having earned it.
My Mom framed it, because that’s what Mom’s do.
I got an unpaid gig doing an evening show on a tiny 100 Watt low-band, nonprofit FM station that had just moved into their “big new studio”. The new studio had one On-Air booth, a lobby just big enough for four people to stand in, an indoor outhouse, and a manager’s office that I never once saw anyone occupy. The whole place was various shades of ugly 70’s brown and could have passed for a tired Dentist’s office if it wasn’t for all the stale cigarette smoke that emanated from the walls.
Their previous studio had been a closet in a building downtown, and you had to do your shows with the door open. You had to keep your stack of records on the floor in the hall because there wasn’t enough room inside. I got lucky and never saw the old place. I was one of the first on the team for the new studio. They had just expanded their hours and would take anyone with a pulse, so I qualified.
The booth was comfortable and familiar. Everything that was “professional” grade was twenty years old. All of the nice new stuff looked like it came from someone’s home stereo. It was a motley collection of mismatched garbage held together with questionable engineering. The whole place was made with dodgy soldering and random unlabeled Radio Shack project boxes that did God knows what. My bedroom studio was more well equipped.
The room was about twelve feet square. The West wall had the door and a big window that looked out into the dark lobby. The only other window was on the East wall, and just featured a parking lot of the place next door. Inside, the booth was dominated by a pair of large old desks arranged in an L. The main console sitting in the middle of the left desk, facing a featureless wall of brown fake wood paneling and a small TV mounted up near the ceiling that was supposed to be showing the weather channel.
The main console was an antique behemoth with a single row of big rotary knobs and a handful of switches that usually worked, most of the time. It was flanked by a stack of gear on either side, cassette decks, CD players, and Cart machines. Everything was in pairs so that you could cue things up while live and ping-pong back and forth.
To the right, under the outside window, was the second desk. It held a pair of turntables that were old enough to be my grandparents’. To the right of that, sitting in the corner, was a proper 19-inch equipment rack that was taller than I was. The rack held the uplink to the transmitter, the Emergency Broadcast box, and a pair of three ring binders, one red, the other white.
The white book was the transmitter log. We had to pick up the phone every few hours and call the transmitter, which was located in the bottom of a water tower a few miles away. You gave it a gentle touch of tones, and a robotic voice would tell you the numbers for things like how many watts of power you were broadcasting at that moment. It was the duty of the DJ to record these numbers diligently, so that they could go in the book and never be read by anyone ever again.
The red book was the Emergency Broadcast System manual. In the event of nuclear war or tornadoes, it would tell you exactly what to do for the last five minutes of your life.
Cascading to the floor and joining the back of both desks was a black waterfall of tangled cables that all looked the same. God have mercy on anyone who disturbed the cable monster.
The fact that any of it worked at all was a miracle, and only the “engineer” who built it had any clue HOW it worked. But through a long chain of magic and physics, when I pressed the play button on the CD player sitting here, a whole city of people and I could listen to the music together.
I was enchanted.
My show ran Tuesday nights from Midnight to 2AM, because I was the FNG (Fuckin’ New Guy) and got the slot that nobody else would take. I didn’t care. I was the last show on the air at night. Nobody actually told me that I had to shut the station down on schedule, and that meant that I could run as long as I wanted. My actual showtime usually ran until dawn when Al would come in and start his shift, a Jewish morning show called “Hatikva!” at 7am. It gave me just enough time to pack up my milk crate of tapes and CDs and get to school before class started.
It wasn’t long before I had worked out a solid groove and was absolutely comfortable on my long nights of being a fifteen-year-old kid completely in charge of an entire radio station. The only time I ever saw anyone else at the station was if one of my weirdo friends came to hang out. Usually they were all sound asleep while I kept the gas station clerks, third-shift factory workers, and tow truck drivers mildly entertained and jamming through the night.
I had no format, style, or shtick. My entire show consisted of playing whatever music I felt like from my own massive collection of CD’s, and talking about the music, the stories behind the bands and the songs. I have an encyclopedic, and fundamentally useless knowledge of music. I played the stuff that I liked, and taught the things that I knew. My brother-in-law, Tony came up with the name of my show. We called it The Molotov Cocktail Hour, and it fit.
I never really cared who, or how many, actually listened. I was talking to the whole city, or at least the tiny fraction of people who were awake. My show was never promoted, and I never did any marketing except for the one time when I accidentally printed forty-thousand business cards and passed them out to everyone I could. It was simple, and there was a purity to the performance. Just a kid who was sharing his passion with anyone who cared to listen.
My show did well, and my audience steadily grew. We didn’t have ratings or anything, and I measured my viewership by how many phone calls I got during the show. This was long before anyone outside of a research lab had email, so people had to actually call me if they wanted to talk.
I held my steady time slot (because nobody else was dumb enough to ever want the graveyard shift) and had a ton of fun. I would take chances and do things no other DJ was doing. Having such a long show let me do things like play an entire album with no breaks, and then spend the next hour talking about it’s history, the band, the recording process, and all the little trivia that went with it. People loved it, and I became a staple among the third shift factory workers of the Westside.
I also became popular with local music nerds for a cool reason. This was back when people got a lot of new music by recording it off the radio, and I had a strict personal rule about never talking over the song I was playing. I kept a specific CD playing for voice over music and would switch to that whenever I was talking. This made it possible for people to actually record music from my show, without my dumbass voice talking over the end of it. It’s a simple thing, but wow did I get a ton of phone calls thanking me for doing it.
The best thing about working overnights in a shitty little radio station is that nothing ever happens. Except for the occasional visit from one of my weirdo friends or lovers, I never saw anyone until morning. It was dead quiet all night, and we were on the outskirts of town so there wasn’t even any traffic. It was incredibly quiet and peaceful.
Most of the time.
I was seventeen, it was shortly after Midnight, and the rain outside was Vanilla Sex; fucking near horizontal. The window was rattling enough that you could hear it through my microphone. I was expecting the power to go out anytime and was playing “Big Generator” by Yes and making the best of a bad situation.
That’s when the world exploded.
Just above and behind my right ear the Emergency Broadcast System box started screeching with the full-throated wild abandon of an autistic kid who just had his juice box snatched. If I ever meet the cocksucker who thought it was a good idea to rackmount a 120 decibel alarm horn four feet from the DJ’s ears, I’m going to wrap my dick around his neck and try to drop-start him like a fucking chainsaw.
The real problem wasn’t that the box scared the living shit out of me, launching me out of my chair and onto my feet, ready to run out of the room in a moment of pure adrenaline and fear. No.
It was that I was between songs, talking live on the air when it happened.
In times of extreme duress people instantly drop to the language of their upbringing. This is especially true for immigrants and on-air talent. I am no exception. Without a moment’s reservation or hesitation I brought forth a superlative string of expletives and invectives that would have every tightass, conservative biddy in the women’s auxiliary clutching her pearls and blushing so hard she’d have a stroke right there at the bridge table.
I regained my composure after a few seconds, pulled the binder off the rack, followed the EBS instructions to the letter, and was suspended for 30-days even before the fifteen-minute-long Tornado Warning had cleared. Big Al the station manager was pissed, and I was heartbroken.
My fellow jocks however, are not without a sense of humor. A universal truth about DJ’s is that they’re widely regarded as assholes - it comes with the job. If over the course of your life you’ve had more than five people begin a fight by saying “I’ll bet you think you’re fucking funny, don’t ya?” it’s probably a good idea to put together a tape and a resume. You’re most likely DJ material.
Now, every one of my listeners heard my ten seconds of “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SHIT!”. The substitute who filled my time slot the next week could have easily said “Chris was suspended for a month for swearing on the air, you’re stuck with me for a few weeks.” and gone on with his day.
But no, of course he didn’t do that.
Because he wasn’t just the typical asshole late night DJ. This was a guy who had a personality that washed over you like an unwelcome wave of sweat when you’re having a bad, late-night shit. He got on the air, opened my show, and proceeded to tell my entire listening audience that I had died in a car crash.
Because he’s a cunt.
Now, all my friends knew better, so that was no problem. My parent’s phone wasn’t in the phone book. Remember, this was before the internet was a thing, people used phone books, not Google.
My grandparents’ number however, was the only listed number with my last name anywhere in the county.
My sainted, patient, meek grandmother completely lost her fucking mind when people started calling her with condolences. Several people even sent her flowers. She had herself well and truly un-fucking-hinged by the time she called my parents (a total of about five minutes after the flowers and phone calls started the next morning after the show).
Once she found out I was alive and well, she was absolutely prepared to kill me with her bare hands. Even years later, she thought this was some stupid stunt I pulled, and she never believed me when I told her I had nothing to do with it.
Even at the station people sent in cards and letters, a couple people sent in mix tapes. It would appear the dorky kid on the radio all night long was more popular than I (and Al) had ever imagined.
I had to call Al and explain the situation to him. Al was more pissed at the other guy for what he pulled than he was at me for swearing on the air. At least I had an understandable reason for my actions. Al taught me a valuable lesson about good management, learn the difference between when you have a problem, and when your boss has a problem. Asshole DJ wasn’t my problem, he was Al’s.
Al was…..displeased. He told me that he’d handle it, and he did in his characteristic style.
After a conversation that I would have bought tickets to hear, Al fired the Asshole DJ. He put me back on the air (two weeks early!), and now not only did I have my usual time slot, I had his as well! I was ecstatic, because now I had a whole two nights a week!
I began my first show in his slot by informing the world that he was suffering from a debilitating bout of sabre-toothed fire-breathing crotch crickets and would be gone for the foreseeable future.
Payback is a bitch. But you can bet your fuckin’ ass I never swore on the radio again.

CONTEXT

This thread will only cover feats from the television show, because that was all that was requested and seven seasons was already a challenge in itself.
This thread will mainly cover feats pertaining to the Fourth Doctor's era with minimal references to other eras, meaning it'll only cover his versions of the TARDIS and sonic screwdriver and only the first two incarnations of K9 since they were the ones to travel with him.
Limitations are denoted in italics.
Due to temporal fluctuations some of the clips might be a tad out-of-sync.

Respect the Doctor

"You may be a doctor, but I'm the Doctor. The definite article, you might say..."

The Doctor is a Time Lord, a member of an ancient and highly-advanced civilization from the planet Gallifrey. Long ago the Doctor violated the Time Lord's Doctrine of Non-Interference when he departed Gallifrey in a stolen Type 40 time capsule to explore all of time and space, usually alongside a companion. Where adventure resides, so did adversity; forcing the Doctor to step in and save the day through the power of intellect. Like all Time Lords, the Doctor has the ability to survive fatal injuries by changing every cell in his body, transforming it with a brand new physical appearance and personality.
In his fourth incarnation, the Doctor left his position as scientific advisor of U.N.I.T. to fully enjoy the freedom denied to his previous incarnation when the Time Lords exiled him to Earth. This incarnation was a fearless and flippant bohemian who greeted both friends and foes alike with his oddball humor and cheek, even when faced with mortal danger.

Source Key

Hover over a feat to view its source.

Doctor Who (1963) season # episode # = S#E#
The Day of the Doctor = 50th

Intelligence

Technological Aptitude
Understanding Technology

Using/Operating Technology

Building Technology

Modifying Technology

Repairing Technology

Disabling Technology

Deduction

Observation

Medical

Persuasion, Manipulation & Trickery

Improvisation & Resourcefulness

Miscellaneous

Skill

Combat

Marksmanship & Accuracy

Miscellaneous

Physical Attributes

Time Lord Biology

Has two hearts.
Can cheat death by regeneration into a new body, but this is limited to only 12 regenerations.
Has a much longer life span than humans and survives after being rapidly aged 500 years.
His respiratory bypass system allows him to survive strangulation, keep his voice unchanged by helium and resist the effects of a gas long enough to redirect it.
Has a high resistance to extreme temperatures, allowing him to withstand the cold of Antartica and Kastria, or endure the heat inside a cooling duct or a furnace.
Can be incapacitated out by knockout gas and drugged wine (though the latter takes slightly longer for him to succumb to its effects than the humans around him).

Strength

Speed & Agility

Durability & Endurance

Senses

Other

Stands still on a landmine without triggering it long enough for Harry to stabilize it.

Mental Abilities

Telepathy

Hypnosis

Mental Resistance & Willpower

Puts his brain through a potentially-lethal procedure to gather information.
Enters the Matrix — a virtual reality supercomputer — in search of the Master at the risk of his own life where he is able to survive the various hazards there. Engin believed this was due to a greater amount of artron energy in his mind.
A telepathic human fails to read his mind.
Fights the Nucleus' control over him.
Resists the Fendahl's psychic ability to immobilize its prey.
Shields his mind from the Vardans' telepathy, though with much strain.
Is susceptible to telepathic attacks from the likes of the Eldrad and the Mentiads, as well as the hypnotic powers of Sukhteh and Aukon the Vampire.

Other

He and his companions are able to understand the local language of where/whenever they travel due to the "Time Lord's gift" (which we later learn is the TARDIS' translation circuit that the Doctor is psychically-connected to). However, he was unable to understand a Tythonian and a Foamasi without a translation device.
Time Lords are able to recognize other Time Lords regardless of what incarnation they're in, though it takes the Doctor a little while to remember an old school friend.
As a time traveler, his mind is unaffected by temporal anomalies such as time distortions and time loops.

New gaming machines popping up at Missouri gas stations ...

what gas stations have slot machines

what gas stations have slot machines - win

Why I'll never stop buying GME, and why you probably should

oh, you're making change all right.

Accuse me of stealing? You will lose everything

First Contact - Third Wave - Chapter 363 (Memoirs)

Tall Determined Exterminators Guide, great way for new players to learn the game

I Have A Huge Casino Slot Addiction ! I Need Help ! This Is My Story , Thanks In Advance To Anyone Who Takes The Time To Read / Provide Any Info , Criticism Or Advice

( My Story ) I Have A Severe Slot Addiction ! Finally Found The Group For Me !! I Want Change , My Wife Is Addicted Too ? Owe So Many Taxes ... Any Info /Tips Appcrieated

D100 Encounters on a cyberpunk subway system.

Big Changes in today's Patch

With Softcore coming out, I figured I'd share my dream of a Hardcore mode.

A message from the Emergency Broadcast System, and Sabre-Toothed Fire-Breathing crotch crickets. Life in radio.

Respect the Fourth Doctor (Doctor Who)

CONTEXT

Respect the Doctor

"You may be a doctor, but I'm the Doctor. The definite article, you might say..."

Source Key

Intelligence

Skill

Physical Attributes

Mental Abilities

Miscellaneous

"It's the end... but the moment has been prepared for."

what gas stations have slot machines video

what gas stations have slot machines top