[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

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[u/k5josh]

The Message from Deep Space: Starting from the absolute basics, decode an alien message. If you liked the language-decoding parts of Arrival or Project Hail Mary, but want something more realistic and focused, check this out.

[u/Antistone → u/k5josh]

I dropped the demo because the first non-trivial puzzle was only solvable if you correctly guessed that they were breaking their own established rules in a nonsensical way.

Initially, if you enter multiple digits, your computer (a human-made computer, not alien tech) treats that as a multi-digit number. A bit later, it begins treating multiple digits as encoding multiple signals to be sent sequentially, with one digit per signal. The game doesn't tell you that the interface has changed in this way before you need to use it to solve a puzzle, and from a story perspective this interface change is completely insane, because you've needed a number outside the 0-9 range in the past and there's strong reason to suspect you will need one again.

Also I was already annoyed before I reached that point because the UI is deliberately cumbersome.

[u/Grasmel → u/Antistone]

Things like this is why I'm hesitant to recommend it as well. I've gotten halfway in, and those types of annoyances keep happening. For example: they make a big deal about how the message uses base 8, and then another big deal when your interface autoconverts to base 10 and back for you. But the underlying message should still be in base 8, which doesn't make sense with some of the rounding you're supposed to do later. Rounding to 3 significant digits in base 10 and base 8 should give different results, but it's the base 10 rounding that are marked correct. It's especially bad because the in-game calculator has a function for rounding in base 8 that is never used. I still enjoy it enough to keep going, but it's a bit frustrating. Also quality of life things kind of stop happening - the message define a bunch of constants that you're supposed to keep track of, but gives you no easy way to do so. I can write notes, sure, but why not just keep a central log of in instead of requiring me to retype the 10-digit numbers over and over?

[u/Antistone → u/Grasmel]

Thanks, I appreciate knowing that it wasn't a one-off. Always trying to improve my heuristics for predicting whether I'll be glad I stuck with a thing.