Hello internet. Welcome to part 4 of PPCCM. In part 3 I made the main street more of a thing and fixed up the first coaster. Now with all the flat rides research done, it's time to pay $2 to come into the first aid shack and puke in a bucket... and to get the fantasy quadrant of the park finished.

The first two rides going in are the Hammer Swing and Sun Flare. In my vague themeing ideas, I imagine the Hammer Swing being like some kind of trebuchet in the castle yard, and the Sun Flare to be a big castle tower/sun dial thing.

Originally I had thought about having a ride built inside the castle fully, but none of the rides I picked to go in the fantasy area were really suitable to fit. So instead, I put the Sun Flare into a large courtyard, just leaving the impression of a castle from the outside.

An interesting feature of flat rides is the 'ride sequence'. This is essentially a list of animations that can be added or removed to string together a ride of varying length and excitement. Most of the time, the default setup is fine. Some rides really don't have any options, like the Sun Flare which only has 'Spin High' repeated several times, but even those can be added or removed to adjust the ride length at the cost of queue times or how much people are willing to pay. The Hammer Swing however is a little more interesting because the default sequence only has 'Swing High' four times, but there is also 'Swing Low'. So I experimented with changing the third high to low:

Surprisingly, this is an improvement all round over the default sequence. Fear going up from 3 to 4 is considered and improvement because the Fear scale has a 'bad at both ends' arrangement, where too low Fear is considered boring. The only disadvantage to higher fear is it might be too high for some of the less thrill seeking family groups. The significantly reduced Nausea is good for my Handymen too.

Now not to belabour the less interesting things too much, here's a few images of the other scenery in the area. The drink shack was moved and upgraded to a food and drink barn, with a toilet building and a windmill, and the open space around the Hammer Swing was made into a training ground for knights and a blacksmiths hut:

Next ride to be built is the Kick-Flip, themed with a little farm area. It's clearly some kind of extravagant threshing machine. The Kick-Flip has unused ride sequence animations by default too, so I switched them in and made the sequence a little longer which made people happy to pay a pretty ridiculous amount to ride it. I also did a little terraforming to help block the view toward the main street, though the hill will probably have some trees on it too eventually:

Finishing up the fantasy quadrant flat rides are the Hellion Ring and Magic Twirl out in the spooky backwoods. I had planned to have the main path bridge through the centre of the Hellion Ring like some kind of magic portal, but I felt like the extra path length needed was spreading things out a bit too much:

Now once again, while I've been doing all the flat rides and themeing, I've been still sitting on another pair of coaster challenges which are rather nice and appropriate for what I wanted to build anyway: a fairly long wooden roller coaster through the woods, to make a transition toward the pirate themed area.

Regular wooden coasters don't invert, so most the Excitement comes from having a good number of airtime hills. So this is a good time to take a closer look at why the smoothing tool is very important to getting good stats on your custom coasters.

In this pair of before and after images, I'm working on the first big drop. In the before image, you can see that I've built the bottom of the drop in three track segments; levelling out, flat, and rising back up. The Nausea rating spikes heavily, caused by the two pretty severe points of G-force. After selecting the segments and spamming the smooth button a bit, you can see the G-force is lower and more consistent over the whole dip, which has significantly reduced the Nausea through it:

Before	After

Remember, the roller coaster stats are a continuous thing. Reducing the Nausea here at the start of the track effects everything after it, so you want to keep running tests all time while you are making adjustments.

And here's the full layout, with the Excitement heat map showing. It's honestly a little too long a coaster for it's own good, since the falling speed toward the end makes it hard to maintain the Excitement levels without cramming in a silly number of hills, but overall pretty decent stats:

To finish up this somewhat longer part I put down the themeing for the new coaster, known as Dragon Woods for obvious reasons. I also added a Street Fox Coffee and ATM shack on either side of the queue entrance, finishing off the little town area. After the first month of running Dragon Woods shows a decent profit of nearly $7000:

And finally, here's the overview of the whole fantasy area:

In part 5 there's a few little things to fix and a monorail to build.

Hello internet. Welcome to part 3 of... let's just call it PPCCM right? In part 2 I actually built a coaster and started work on the 'fantasy' themed park segment. But with growing popularity and population comes the need to spend way too much money on syrup diluted into water. So it's time to pay some attention to the main street.

Before even that though, there's the small issue of block brakes for the first coaster to work out. While I was taking a break from playing, I thought about it a little more and fixed my original plan. All this means for this case is moving the block brakes before the U-turn they were originally after and setting up some loading options:

Here's some block brake tips:

• Since block brakes slow or stop the train, it would be best to put them at the peak of a hill, where the train is moving slowest anyway.
• ... But ideally you want to set up the timing and flow of the coaster so that the trains never need to stop at all, except during breakdowns blocking the station.
• If the train has to stop on the brakes, your Excitement rating will suffer since people don't like waiting around and you may also be lacking speed you would have otherwise carried through from before the brakes.
• You can only run one fewer train than there are 'sections' in your track. You always start with effectively two sections, separated by the station and the lift hill (even if the section between the station and lift hill is non-existent).
• The easiest way to get two trains running at once is to use the minimum departure interval/max waiting time to force the second train out of the station and onto the lift hill just before the first reaches the block brakes.

In this coasters case, it's slightly inverted since the lift hill is after the brakes, but more or less the same idea. Also bear in mind that the train has to be in the station long enough for all the people to disembark and the next set to load. For Loony Turns, that time can be very low, since each car is very small. This is where the Entrance/Exit planning for coasters also come into play. It's almost always best to load on one side and disembark on the other, since you can then have the Exit much more central to the train and reduce how long people are slowly walking along the station platform.

Small problem, a lot of text. But now here's some pictures again as we move back to the main street. First, it's time to use the 'box of OCD preparedness' to line up the new building. Originally, I was going to just build the new building from the box directly but since I'd already trained the staff of my stalls and didn't want to go through the hassle of splitting and recombining buildings, I instead used the box to align two sets of walls:

Then came a little fiddling around getting the shops in a decent position with even paths. It's usually a good idea to set the shops a little way back from your main paths to leave space for the queues of people:

I quite like the modern, Planet Coaster style buildings for the generic unthemed central street, so I reused the old buildings parts whilst making the new one and shamelessly stole design ideas from the premade blueprints. Here's the basic shape of the building finished:

And here's the fancied up and decorated product complete with sky-bridges to nowhere for now, and of course everyone's favourite mascot illuminated above his shop:

While I was building this though, I also began to realise that just having shops in the central street wasn't really going to work. The park was already getting quite spread out, and currently very one sided. The temporary rides in the main street are still keeping some population around, but having another shop out in the castle area will be worth it. So I made a little shack.

Meanwhile, the first coaster has been running smoothly with it's new configuration:

Monthly profit has risen to over $2000 from it's previous level of around $800, just from the increased throughput the block brakes allow. So with all that money flowing in I've also been busy with research. I've now unlocked every 'flat' ride, so to end part 3 here's a little arrangement of signs I built out in the field to help me figure out a reasonably logical way to partition the rides between the different themed areas. Some of them are obvious, like the Victory swinging ship for the pirate theme and Looper for the Sci-Fi theme, but many are a stretch or just plain whatever was most generic and left over:

In part 4 the rest of the fantasy themed flat rides get built, along with the appropriate scenery.

Side note/Edit: Just after posting this, the Planet Coaster Winter update hit. It sounds like a decent selection of fixes and new content, even a couple of new flat rides. Most notable things that I see in the patch notes are a new 'reputation/ageing' mechanic for rides, better staff management in the management window, syncing of shop prices toggle and some more subtle changes to coaster construction and simulation. Will be interesting to see how much those might change the stats of my currently running coasters, but most of the new stuff won't appear before the next couple of parts; I've already buffered a little ahead of here.

Hello internet. Welcome to part 2 of Playing Planet Coaster Challenge mode. In part 1 I dealt with the 'hard' part of playing challenge mode, so now it's time to use that money buffer and start getting creative (ish).

Also say hello to the box of OCD preparedness, here to help me align the building in the center of my park sometime in the future.

Speaking of which, I went through the process of ripping up the entire park and moving it all to more long term homes. Ideally, I want to have a main street with shops down the center paths and branches out into each of the 4 themed areas. I'm also planning to make a fancy entrance building over the entrance gates at some point, and a monorail station over that Y-junction:

This is the point where you should be thinking ahead with path widths. Too often I've seen people fall into the trap of just using 4m paths. You wouldn't want to make a guest black hole like some people. The carousel and Teacups are now in their permanent home, along the first branch toward what I'm planning on being the fantasy themed quadrant. I'm not planning on doing anything too exceptional with the themes and scenery, mostly just sticking to the four sets that Planet Coaster supplies. And that means...

It's time to start building a castle! Midway through building the first walls and gate, I had the idea that I could also sit the first coaster station up on the wall and have the queue go through. Being enclosed in the building gives 100% queue scenery very easily too, plus starting with a drop rather than a lift hill has some advantages which we'll get into shortly.

The other reason I specifically chose this little coaster (of the type 'Loony Turns') was because while I've been getting through setting the park going, the actual challenges have been waiting. The two coaster challenges I've been sitting on are two inversions and two sections of airtime, both very easy to do. The Loony Turns coaster is also suitable for all ages as well as being able to invert, so I won't even be excluding the families in my early park population. Here's what I threw together:

There's a little terraforming involved, to make the first drop just a little bigger and give a little more speed to bleed off during the early sections. Good enough to complete the challenges, but in need of some tweaking. Loony Turns has a single car formation, so I tried to put in a block section (just after the upper U-turn) and run two cars, but it was proving awkward and making the stats worse. I ended up removing the block brakes and running one car (for now...). I also used a little trick to get a bit more speed: since the first drop is directly after the station, I set the stations 'launch speed' higher, upping the overall speed the car travels through the track. Here's the stats after the tweaks:

Much more respectably green. Possibly a little high fear for families, but good enough. People are happy to pay $18 for this ride, but the single car somewhat limits throughput leaving it making somewhere around $800 a month. I'll go into more detail on coaster building in the future with a larger coaster, but here are some basic tips:

• As Yoda might say, Nausea leads to Fear, Fear leads to low Excitement, and low Excitement leads to not much profit. The three main stats are pretty directly dependant on each other. Once Nausea goes over 5ish for a while, Fear starts climbing. And once Fear stays over 7ish for too long, Excitement drops rapidly regardless of what the train is doing.
• This is what confuses people when they make a coaster with a bunch of loops and overall Excitement comes out at 1: the overall Fear of 15 (or 20!) has eliminated the Excitement.
• To reduce Nausea, have flat 'rest' sections in your track after major twists and turns. But not too long, or excitement will start falling again.
• To increase Excitement, add G-force. Sharp changes in incline are by far the easiest way to boost Excitement, along with 'airtime' hills where you get negative vertical G. But keep an eye on the heat maps. Going over 5G vertical or 3G horizontal starts to become too much and kills the Excitement again.
• Use the heat maps all the time. And remember that fixing an early section of your track might well lead to later parts suddenly becoming enjoyable if you've smoothed out a sudden Nausea spike somewhere.
• Use the smoothing buttons to reduce Nausea from sudden jerks. Select just the problem segment and spam the button a bit, don't just hit it once. Though over smoothing can remove G-force you were trying to keep...

To end part 2, I finished up the wall segments and gate, and threw down the first segment of scenery outside the castle wall, as a kind of forest/carnival/gardens area:

In part 3, the block brake problem gets fixed and the main street gets its first bit of attention.

Hello internet. It's Zeg. Alright, backstory...

I make videos with a friend more or less fortnightly and upload them to a Youtube channel no-one watches. We made one for Planet Coaster around launch, then I played the game a bunch and beat all of career mode. I kinda wanted to make more videos of playing challenge mode, but while we usually record videos on my friends PC, mine is now getting a bit old and probably incapable of recording Planet Coaster in any sane fashion. So instead, I took a bunch of screenshots and intend to string them into some text. This might turn out dry and boring, or maybe someone can learn something from this.

So, starting challenge mode. I put it into 'hard' difficulty because honestly Planet Coaster is super easy, but all hard mode really does is make the early game very slow due to low starting money and no loans. It also does make guests a little more whiny and your rides break down a little more, but again, super easy.

Starting things off, we have a choice of two rides: the slow and generic Venetian Carousel, and the more exciting but lower capacity Wild Blue. Wild Blue is also slightly more expensive and I already know the real trick to making money. It's not the rides, it's the drinks (probably just like real life). So here's what $2000 will buy:

I've also refrained from hiring a Janitor and I'm just adding new bins as they get full. We'll need more bins around the park later, so it's still an investment. Adding queue scenery increases the amount people are willing to pay for a ride, so throwing in some cheap bushes will help get cash flow up a little faster. Then comes the long wait. This tiny park does make profit even if people aren't happy and don't stick around long. The other advantage to picking the carousel over Wild Blue is that family rides tend to break down less frequently, so I could avoid hiring a Mechanic for longer too.

A year and a half later, things have expanded slightly:

It turns out the carousel and Wild Blue make very similar monthly profit. Ticket prices can be higher on Wild Blue due to the higher excitement, but its capacity is low and ride time long, so it more or less evens out. I spent some money researching the first new Thrill ride, Insanity, because I know that it is always a big money maker with it's high capacity and excitement. I also built toilets, which charge $1 and make more money than their operating cost monthly even with this small a park.

Some time later I added the first researched Family ride, the Simlish pirate shanty noisebox of Whirly Rig. I also added the first Chief Beef shop, now that people are spending long enough in the park to get hungry, and fancied up the shops a bit with a basic building. Buildings also count for queue scenery, so Whirly Rig gets a decent bonus.

Since all we're building right now are 'flat' rides, here's a tip: Entrance and Exit positioning are more important than you might think.

• People exiting a ride walk slowly, so try and get the Exit near where people disembark to get them out of the way quicker and let new people in.
• But Mechanics servicing or inspecting rides also come in via the exit, so also try and get it close to the operators box (where the mechanical work happens). This two sided choice is most evident on Wild Blue, where the operators box is stuck way out and not very near the disembark point.
• The Entrance is somewhat less important, since people excitedly run to board rides, but still getting it closer to the load point saves a little time.

This all also comes into play (probably even more so) with Coasters, which we'll get to in part 2.

To finish up part 1:

I researched and added the Teacups and buffed the scenery on all the queues a little more. As shown in the upper left, profit is up to $3000 a month when I'm not running research.

In the ride profit list, you can see that Insanity is indeed the big money maker. Wild Blue barely keeps up with the larger family rides...

... and barely keeps up with food and drink stalls. Even in this small park, Cosmic Cow can get up over $1000 a month, though this month was less since thirst tends to come in waves with this small population. Remember to train your serving staff too! Even with such low population, level 4 or even 5 can be needed to keep up with demand.

Next time in part 2, the whole park gets torn down and moved inland, setting the stage for an actually planned park layout with themes and the first roller coaster.

I love my PCs. I've dabbled in some consoles over the years but PC has always been my preference. Over those years, I've either been very lucky or my careful choices and care of my PCs has in fact served me well.

My previous PC lasted 7 years... well, really only the motherboard and CPU, but still. It was a generic, but powerful, store bought model and by choosing the right model at the start and careful upgrades over the years, the core of it survived all that time and remained moderately powerful through most of it.

My current PC was a custom ordered build. Now maybe this is where the luck comes in rather than just my good choices, but compared to my friends glitchy and problematic PCs, my own has been entirely problem free and running perfectly for the first 3 years of its life.

Until now...

A crash and corruption

My PC almost never crashes. When BF3 first came out and was glitchy and desperately in need of patches, my friend had all kinds of bluescreens. I don't remember having any... BF3 would crash, certainly, but at least more gracefully.

For this nearly 3 years I've been pretty damn happy with how well my PC has been working. So it was pretty sudden an unexpected to have quite such a severe crash.

Playing Guild Wars 2, everything was working as expected. Then on a level transition the screen glitches out, square artifacts all over, locks up and then the monitor turns off thanks to 'no input'. All the signs of a pretty bad graphics crash. Rebooting, I discover that the corruption remains... and that takes things up a step of seriousness. Event viewer shows that it was a bluescreen (that I couldn't see of course) and that the graphics drivers have been corrupted. So I reinstall, reboot and everything goes back to normal...

PC Diagnosis might as well be ESP

So, I mentioned I love PCs and have used them for years, but that doesn't mean that I'm some tech wizard. Going into BIOS is still worrying to me, and half the options in there I have no idea what they're for. I might be better than average at preventing and fixing problems, but of course in the end it all comes down to google right?

Of course, even with the power of the internet, diagnosing specific problems is a tricky business. How do you describe 'graphical corruption' specifically enough to find a similar case? When event viewer only tells you there was a crash and the drivers corrupted, how do you get more information?

One thing I immediately suspect from the lack of information in event viewer is that a hardware issue seems likely. It's shortly given more weight by the same kind of crash happening in Kerbal Space Program. But once again, nothing is clear cut about it. Sometimes the drivers corrupt, sometimes they don't. Then I turn on my second monitor so that I can have other processes open to monitor things and the crashes mysteriously stop. Or do they. Intermittent problems are the most annoying thing to diagnose...

Now turning on a second monitor somehow fixing the problem is ridiculous of course. So in the mean time I've run disc checks on my harddrives, memtest on my RAM and even a vmemtest on my graphics card RAM. Of course, all of them come up clean. It's been a week since the last crash but I've got no real ideas what's happening.

Then finally, the crashes come back with a vengeance. Now even the Steam main page causes a crash. So that's it. I'm left with no other ideas than it must be a hardware problem with my graphics card.

What better time for an upgrade?

My graphics card is not underpowered by any means. It has been a while since I last had any new, amazing game to stress it, but I certainly wasn't at the point of thinking it needed upgrading. But apparently now I don't have a choice.

I quickly drive to a friends house to pick up a temporary replacement, which is somewhat older but still good. I'd like to also have it be a way to confirm that the problem is a hardware fault in my graphics card, but of course with the problem being so seemingly intermittent and the fact that I've removed the thing that was theoretically causing the crash, there's no chance of real proof.

I quickly make my choices and order a new graphics card...

So we're all good right?

Ordering a new part to replace something you think is broken and then still having problems is a nightmare scenario. I plug in the new card and my BIOS freaks out. As I said earlier, I'm not super familiar with BIOS, so I'm already totally worried. Fortunately, it seems to sort itself out without me having to change anything... maybe. I don't know what it was actually doing.

After booting and getting drivers reinstalled and such, things are looking good again. I run Borderlands 2, since I think it might be the most system stressing thing I have installed aside from Guild Wars 2, and it crashes... whee.

But this was a regular, dump to windows, error box kind of crash. After verifying the Steam cache it runs fine, panic over. Then I try to run Guild Wars 2. The launcher pops up, trying to download an update and my wireless disconnects. Now that's a confusing outcome. I try EVE Online and the same thing happens; moments after launching, the wireless disconnects.

My first thought this time is a power problem. But my power supply is huge and the new card only requires the same plugs, so it seems unlikely. I get on to google and the next suggestion is IRQ conflict.

It's getting all Sound Blastery up in here

Now IRQ conflict is probably a problem from before my time, or at least one that was significantly reduced by the point I would have been really getting into PCs. I don't know much about it, so this already seems crazy. Several message board threads of people with similar problems seem to disagree whether IRQ conflict is even possible in Windows 7. And if it is, it sure isn't easy to fix since the option to even assign IRQ manually is disabled. I do notice that although Windows isn't detecting a conflict, my network card and graphics card are in fact on the same IRQ.

So, before I go and even try assigning IRQs, there's fortunately a quicker way to test it. If I physically swap my sound card and network card over in their PCI slots, then the sound card will be on the slot with the same IRQ as the graphics card instead.

Having opened my case again, swapped things over and reinstalled drivers, I can finally test it... and the exact same wireless disconnect happens. So it's not IRQ conflict... another fun waste of time.

Wireless signals... ESP... it's all in the air, man

So I'm out of ideas again. This problem seems bizarre. But then I notice a post I had idly dismissed the first time reading through a forum thread, suggesting that maybe its some interference from the monitor cable messing up the wireless signal.

Now, on my previous graphics card, the antenna for my wireless was actually squeezed directly between the two monitor cables joined to it. So surely that can't be it...

But naturally...

Turn the antenna 90 degrees away from the cable, everything starts working. Damn it.

The end?

So everything is fixed now. Or at least I hope it is. Of course there's no real way to tell. Just have to wait and see... or hope not to see that graphics crash again...

And so here we go again. Maybe I have a problem. I can't just play Sim City, I have to poke at it and try and discover why and how things work, just as I did with Sim City 4.

I don't claim to be entirely obsessive about detail, or actually picking apart the game on a deeper level than just what is surfaced or can be inferred. However...

The data problem...

This is probably the trigger for the subsequent craziness below. Sim City has a whole lot of fancy overlays for all kinds of data. You've probably all seen it. That whited out cityscape with bold colours and bars stuck all over it. But what I quickly came to realise is that many of those overlays effectively give you no useful data at all.

The primary problem with most of these overlays is that they are real time. If you look at the school overlay during school hours, surprise, there's a giant bar of 'enrolled students' sticking out of the school. If you look at the industrial freight overlay the majority of the time there's just 'delivered' bars over the factory, unless you happen to catch a freight truck actually leaving to make a delivery at that moment. And even then, once it makes the delivery, there's no indicator at the other end saying 'this building recently received freight'.

Maybe the most silly example of all is the traffic overlay, which by the way, isn't actually in the overlays panel; it only shows up when you have the road tools open. It shows you in real time the amount of traffic on a road, fading from red for stationary down to green then clear for empty roads... see why that's dumb? Because you can see the cars on the road anyway. And if it isn't rush hour, then you can't and the overlay can't either.

Maybe some 'last 24 hours' settings for the overlays, eh guys?

And how about some numbers!

So fancy graphical overlays are all well and good (when they actually have data to give you anyway), but how about some good old fashioned numbers. I know not everyone wants them, that probably most people don't care at all. But this is what got me: Sim City does give you some numbers... but they barely make sense.

You click on the population window and then the detail tab, and finally there's some numbers. It tells you how much population, how many jobs and how much shopping there is of each wealth level. It tells you how much freight is being demanded and how much is being shipped. The problem is that those numbers are sitting on top of this ethereal system.

If you click on a building, that gives you no numbers. So you can see what your city population is, but not how many live in an apartment So if the jobs count says I have 100 jobs free, how do I know how much new housing to zone or let develop to higher density? This is where testing comes in...

Testing things... because I have to know.

So the basics of low density, low wealth zones are quite easy to test. Make a new city and drop things in slowly while constantly referring to the population window:

1. 1 block (the larger, avenue sized block) of Residential gives a low wealth population of 150, 100 of which are workers and 50 of which are students, demanding 50 commercial products (or shopping opportunities in other words).
2. 1 block of Industrial gives about 100-120 low wealth jobs and produces around 540 freight.
3. 1 block of Commercial gives about 150 low wealth jobs and produces around 130 products, demanding around 1000 freight.
4. The Commercial and Industrial buildings also give a few medium wealth jobs, but for now lets not worry about that.

So this far, it all seems nice and obvious. But wait, those numbers don't add up:

• 2 blocks of Industrial will supply freight to 1 block of Commercial. So we need about 4 blocks of Residential to give 400 workers.
• But those residents demand 200 commercial products, which is more than the one block of Commercial produces.

Now obviously there should always be some amount of imbalance in the numbers, to give the player incentive and direction to grow the city. But here's where the ethereal nature of the numbers beneath these numbers comes up: the population window declares 130 satisfied shoppers, 70 unsatisfied, but 1 block of Commercial is actually capable of supplying at least 6 blocks of Residential.

Here's what I've gleamed from the simulation. The shops are supplied with an amount of product when they open every day. Shoppers then travel from their homes to buy the product. I'm yet to get to the point of pausing and counting the numbers on the product bar of each individual shop, but it appears that the numbers in the population window are either wrong, or there's some other mechanic interfering such as not having to shop every day. I've noticed as I added more blocks that the further away blocks were taking longer to successfully shop and become happy, but eventually at least 6 blocks will.

So okay then, what about the industrial freight. That makes sense right?

Well, kinda. Industrial buildings become happy when their freight is shipping well. But Commercial buildings don't actually appear to need freight at all. Shops appear to work just as well, satisfying their customers regardless. And then it gets worse...

How about we take those numbers and totally screw them up!

Already it seems the 'satisfied shoppers' number is not all that helpful, but I quickly ran into a couple more things to make the numbers in the population window even less useful.

Firstly, if you place a park, 1/3 of it's stated capacity is added to the 'available product' number. It is suggested in a loading screen tip that if people have no money, they can visit a park to become happy instead. So maybe it makes sense to add that number, showing more 'shoppers' satisfied.

But say you build only parks and no Commercial, then all your residents will be saying "Where's the shopping in this town", because most of the time they actually will have money. Considering that the actual number of low wealth shoppers you can satisfy per commercial building is already pretty unknown, and that all parks will add to the number, even higher wealth parks that you have to build to increase land value, the low wealth satisfaction number rapidly seems to become worthless.

So secondly, if you place a trade depot with a freight yard (which comes as standard), that generates about 1000 demand for freight. If you add further freight yards, each one adds 1000 more. The tooltip suggests that this is so that industry will always have somewhere to ship freight and thus avoid going out of business. But freight that gets delivered to the trade depot actually just vanishes every few minutes. It's just a freight sink. But I guess you might say who cares, since apparently Commercial doesn't actually need freight anyway...

And then some.

There's more I could say. But this post is already hella long, so let me drop a couple more strange things quickly:

• As I mentioned earlier, even low wealth Commercial and Industrial gives a small number of Medium and High wealth jobs. Aside from being 'realistic', does filling those jobs actually do anything? I could imagine it might improve the quality of service, but good luck finding some way to see that effect.
• If you build a sewage plant, it says it has a flow capacity of 70ish (which is how fast it can pull sewage in) and a treatment/storage capacity of 50ish. 70 is not all that much. So you might think, you can upgrade it. But the only upgrade for the building only gives it another 50 storage. And you can build up to 7 of those. Why? If it can only pull in 70 max, isn't any more than 2 entirely pointless?

An Ending.

So anyway. Despite this lengthy post and despite my problems with the strangeness of some elements of the simulation and the surfacing of data, I'm still having fun. It's just as always, I'll have that desire to poke at it more, to try and find out how the thing works and optimise to the underlying systems.

If anyone else has any interesting data or mysterious/strange problems, maybe we can poke at it together.

Doing just what the title suggests. I've never written a guide before, so who knows how useful or even readable it might turn out. I have vague ideas and plans for sections, but for now I've just put together an initial bunch of techniques that might be useful to someone. I hope.

Link, in case just going to SpaceChems page is too much effort: http://www.giantbomb.com/guides/spacechem-guide/2236/

Let's start this off short-ly. Which is to say short.

Everything is new and shiny and confusing. Maybe I will write more, maybe not. You never can tell with my laziness. I'm sure I'll attempt some kind of output.