Spacegate

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Actually, I am wrong - retrieving something from Equipment Requisition is not a coinmaster; it is a creation method.
Puzzling. Pondering.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Revision 147 fixes the supplied planet data files to set the "DETECTED" bit for murderbots, spants, and ruins as appropriate. This should solve the error message when the terminal says one of those is detected and we had details of what was there, but didn't say it was "detected".

I have coded up manually collecting gear from Equipment Requisition. Should actually be faster; it visits the choice once and then selects multiple options in succession, rather than visit/select visit/select, and so on. But I'm out of turns for today so can't test it yet.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
That worked nicely. Revision 148 does this:

Goes directly to Spacegate Equipment Requisition to get the gear you need.
"help" tells about all settings - including VSG.ExtraMaximizerParameters
Skill books count as shinies

(Yes, if you find a "shiny", the script reminds you at the end, just to make sure you know. Shinies are:

primitive alien trophy items
rare exotic plant and animal drops
Skill books

The last ones are unlike the others, in that you can expect them to show up, by and by, but it's nice to be reminded when they come, since you might want to read (or mallsell) them.)
 

AlbinoRhino

Active member
Glad to know it will tell me if it finds anything interesting!

Hmm...

Code:
[COLOR=olive]> vsg visit random[/COLOR]

RANDOM coordinates     with difficulty (A-Z) -> YVJLKUA
[COLOR=red]VSG.SampleKit:     'none' is not a valid Spacegate sample kit.[/COLOR]

Am I doing something wrong?
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
I've come up with a solution for the Trophy Problem.

Which primitive alien trophy from hostile intelligent aliens are the only things you can't necessarily discover by simply exploring a planet; they are rare drops. My initial solution was to manually insert them into the planet data for all the planets that have been publicly announced as having them. That's not sustainable; I don't want to have to do that as future trophies are discovered and publicized.

I have split them off into a separate file.

There are three levels of data:

SpacegatePlanetsPublic.txt
SpacegatePlanetsAuxPublic.txt
SpacegateTrophiesPublic.txt

These are from the spreadsheet or the Spacegate thread on the G-D forum. There are definitely errors on the spreadsheet. For example, I visited a planet which supposedly had friendly aliens with a particular trade item and I found hostile aliens. There are also planets with Spants detected, say, but no artifact, drones, or soldiers listed. I.e., just what you can deduce by simply looking at the terminal.

SpacegatePlanetsVeracity.txt
SpacegatePlanetsAuxVeracity.txt
SpacegateTrophiesVeracity.txt

These are all planets that my characters have personally visited. I.e. (to my eye) perfectly reliable.

SpacegatePlanetsMine.txt
SpacegatePlanetsAuxMine.txt
SpacegateTrophiesMine.txt

These are the files that VeracitySpacegate creates for planets that YOU personally visit. Hence, reliable.
(The Veracity files that I release are simply my Mine files)

So, the new process for loading the data is this:

Load the Planets, PlanetsAux, and Trophies files for Public
Load the Planets, PlanetsAux, and Trophies files for Veracity
Merge (overwrite) them into Public
Load the Planets, PlanetsAux, and Trophies files for Mine
Merge (overwrite) them into Public
Merge Public Trophies into Public Planets - so the trophy data is in the planet data where existing scripts expect to find it.
Thus, SpacegateExplorer and VeracitySpacegate will work as before for planets with trophies.

This is in versions 150/151. With that, I release SpacegateTrophiesPublic with this content:

Code:
DECEIVE	primitive alien blowgun
MANATEE	primitive alien loincloth
QJYYPXQ	primitive alien spear
RATFINK	primitive alien necklace
TLSLSKX	primitive alien loincloth
ZDPZQGQ	primitive alien totem
ZDPZSCS	primitive alien totem
ZPFLMNZ	primitive alien totem
Which is all the trophy planets I know about. If others are announced by trustworthy sources, I'll add 'em. :)
 

zarqon

Well-known member
This is becoming quite excellent. Thanks for all your work on this.

Feature request: as you already do with murderbots and spants, add a [type] parameter for animals and plants. I wanted to use this to farm my remaining factoids but had to give up and go back to the spreadsheet to find a planet with the appropriate type of animal or plant I was looking to get factoids from.

Also I encountered a loop today at the end of combat with a spant drone. Aborting printed this:

CLI said:
Visiting Spacegate R&D
You acquire Spacegate Research (553)
Planet Sky: The sky above the horizon is a pale pink, speckled with puffy white clouds.
Planet Suns: The landscape is lit by a brilliant white sun.
Planet Moons: The planet doesn't appear to have any satellites.
Alien Image: sgaliena7.gif

Today's encounters on the planet at coordinates NEWYORK (Zeta Salisbury IV)

Cool Space Rocks: 5
Interstellar Trade: 1
Space Cave: 2
Spant drone: 68
Spant soldier: 2
Wide Open Spaces: 3

You turned in 553 pages of Spacegate Research today.

It did turn out to be the last adventure in the Spacegate for the day. Looks like every loop iteration (during which it did run my mood script) counted as an extra drone. I didn't get my last soldier factoid so I can try this particular planet again tomorrow if that's helpful.
 
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Veracity

Developer
Staff member
It did turn out to be the last adventure in the Spacegate for the day. Looks like every loop iteration (during which it did run my mood script) counted as an extra drone. I didn't get my last soldier factoid so I can try this particular planet again tomorrow if that's helpful.
That's puzzling. I assume that, somehow, I started with the wrong amount of energy remaining and failed to count down to zero and got the "out of energy" message repeatedly.

I'll make it recognize that message and stop adventuring - after prinint a message, since we don't expect to see that. If you see it, tell me what your last 20+ encoiunters were.

Feature request: as you already do with murderbots and spants, add a [type] parameter for animals and plants. I wanted to use this to farm my remaining factoids but had to give up and go back to the spreadsheet to find a planet with the appropriate type of animal or plant I was looking to get factoids from.
Not my use case, since I have all factoids, and if I want plants and animals, I want the exotic ones for the chance of the rare drop, but perfectly reasonable. I'll do it.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Revision 152 has several features:

- Save amount of research you collected via this script in _SpacegateResearch
- Saves the shinies you found in _SpacegateShinies
- Provides "status" as an action, like "suggest" and "visit". This simply visits the Spacegate Terminal and prints out the current state of your exploration today. For example:

Code:
[color=green]> set _SpacegateShinies="seal tooth|primitive alien totem|primitive alien blowgun"[/color]

[color=green]> VeracitySpacegate status[/color]

Visiting the Spacegate Terminal
Planet Name: Phi Trixrabbitus II (difficulty = 25)
Coordinates: ZIWTWNB

The sky is blue fading into green near the horizon, dotted by occasional wispy pale blue clouds.
The landscape is lit by an incredibly close blue sun.
Two crescent moons punctuate the sky.

Environmental Hazards:
  high gravity
  irradiated
  high winds
Elemental Hazards:
  hot solar flares
  scary noises
  lewd rock formations
Plant Life: none detected
Animal Life: none detected
Intelligent Life: none detected
ALERT: ANCIENT RUINS DETECTED (Space Baby 1: Time Enough at Last)

You fully explored that planet today.
  Cool Space Rocks: 7
  Space Cave: 9
  Time Enough at Last: 1
  Wide Open Spaces: 3

You turned in 494 pages of Spacegate Research

You found some shinies!
  seal tooth
  primitive alien blowgun
  primitive alien totem
And revision 153 has some more features:

plants [type] - where [type] is optional and can be primitive, advanced, or anomalous (default)
animals [type] - where [type] is optional and can be primitive, advanced, or anomalous (default)

Also, each time through the loop, check for the "Spacegate is out of energy" response.
This is not expected, so I print a message in red, but stop looping.

I also print how much energy we have available before looping, so if you get the red message, let me see:

The initial message with amount of energy
The encounters you see (from session log of gCLI
The red message.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
All right!

I think this script is done, modulo bugs and feature requests. It does what I need.

I'm working on SpacegateConsult.ash. I am not intending to release it. It will be what my multis need in order to handle any and all random planets.

Here is what it is right now, for use of my high-level Pastamancer:

Code:
void main( int round, monster mon, string text )
{
    static skill PASTALORD = $skill[ weapon of the pastalord ];

    if ( have_skill( PASTALORD ) ) {
	use_skill( PASTALORD );
    }
}

I set CCS to have:

Code:
[ Spacegate ]
consult SpacegateConsult.ash
and he went to a "Y" planet with murderbots and spants (and advanced his Space Pirate quest from 2 to 3 in the process) and he easily prevailed. Not going to be so easy with the unascended Accordion Thieves, but I'll work it out.

Given that, I do this:

- Let VeracityMeatFarm optionally call VeracitySpacegate with a (configured) command.
- set up my multis with restoration and CCS using SpacegateConsult.ash
- Configure those multis to call VeracitySpacegate with "random" via VeracityMeatFarm. Probably using "turns" strategy
And just let those 4 multis go to 4 random planets every day, ad infinitum.

Maybe I'll get back to my reverse engineering project in a year or so when I have 1460 new validated Spacegate planets.
And I will undoubtedly have picked up any number of skill books, rare anomalous wildlife drops, and maybe even some alien trophies by simply doing this spading.

Life is sweet.
 
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Magus_Prime

Well-known member
I must have missed something. I see a note in VeracityMeatFarm about calling VeracitySpaceGate but I didn't see a way to configure VMF to call VSG as there is with VGC. Love the acronyms. :)
 
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Veracity

Developer
Staff member
VMF doesn't call VSG yet. That is one of the few remaining things to do. When I said "Given that I do this", I meant to say "Given that I WILL do this".
I'll wrap it up this weekend..

Sorry!
 

zarqon

Well-known member
Thanks for the rapid implementation of my request! Just a few more factoids left to get and I'll be on to farming research for the tattoo on my main. Without this script, the Spacegate was just too fiddly for me to do more than get the skills and unlocks (which left quite a lot of factoids un-gotten, sitting there in the Factroid display taunting me).
 

zarqon

Well-known member
Either I'm entering the parameters incorrectly, or I've found a parsing error:

CLI said:
> veracityspacegate suggest spants soldier (A-P)

cruft at end of command: '(A-P)soldier '

Also another small feature request: Can you allow the singular version of the parameters as synonymous with their plural versions? Though upon review all the monster type parameters accepted are plural, I have mistakenly typed the singular version more than once.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Those are the same issue:

Code:
[color=green]> VeracitySpacegate spants soldier[/color]

cruft at end of command: 'soldier '

[color=green]> VeracitySpacegate spants soldiers[/color]

Considering 1547 known planets.
After filtering on 'spants soldiers', 194 left.
There are 57 planets with non-hostile plants.
There are 57 planets with non-hostile animals.
There are 18 planets with non-hostile plants AND non-hostile animals.
After filtering for non-hostile plants AND non-hostile animals, 18 left.
After filtering for planets with no murderbots, 5 left.
After filtering for planets with no hostile aliens, 3 left.
After filtering for planets with alien trade, 1 left.

I suggest that you visit the planet at coordinates CAPALDI

[color=green]> VeracitySpacegate spants soldiers (A-P)[/color]

Considering 1547 known planets.
After filtering on 'spants soldiers', 194 left.
After filtering on planet difficulty (A-P), 133 left.
There are 45 planets with non-hostile plants.
There are 39 planets with non-hostile animals.
There are 15 planets with non-hostile plants AND non-hostile animals.
After filtering for non-hostile plants AND non-hostile animals, 15 left.
After filtering for planets with no murderbots, 4 left.
After filtering for planets with no hostile aliens, 3 left.
After filtering for planets with alien trade, 1 left.

I suggest that you visit the planet at coordinates CAPALDI
I'll allow all the life forms to be singular or pluralized
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
OK, in Revision 160, the following are the "canonical" goals:

murderbots
murderbot artifacts
murderbot drones
murderbot soldiers
spants
spant artifacts
spant drones
spant soldiers

But, in all contexts, you can use spant, murderbot, artifact, drone, soldier in either singular or plural and the script will canonicalize it.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Revision 162 allows the following as goals:

primitive (or simple) plants (or animals)
advanced (or complex) plants (or animals)
anomalous (or exotic) plants (or animals)

As before,

plants -> anomalous plants
animals -> anomalous animals

And I did not delete (although I'd like to):

plants (primitive, advanced, anomalous)
animals (primitive, advanced, anomalous)

I'd like to deprecate those in favor to the goals that have the adjective in front of the life type.
I'll delete them, by and by.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
I went to random planet today:

Code:
> VeracitySpacegate status

Visiting the Spacegate Terminal
Planet Name: Pacmanicus Shatner VI (difficulty = 20)
Coordinates: UNUPGVV

The sky is blue fading into orange near the horizon.
A bright yellow, almost Sol-like sun hangs overhead.
The sky is moonless.

Environmental Hazards:
  toxic atmosphere
  high gravity
  magnetic storms
Elemental Hazards:
  scary noises
  lewd rock formations
Plant Life: advanced (sgplantb9.gif)
Animal Life: primitive (hostile) (sganimala17.gif)
Intelligent Life: none detected
DANGER: Murderbot frequencies detected (data cores)

You fully explored that planet today.
  A Complicated Plant: 8
  Recovering the Satellite: 2
  Space Cave: 8
  small hostile animal: 2

You gained 2 pages of Spacegate Research
Notice that there is only one type of "rocks" encounter. My theory about rocks is that every planet can have all three types of rocks and it is random which of the three any given rock encounter will be. Given that, it would be unusual to have 8 rocks and they are all the same type.

I may have to visit this planet again and see what is there next time.

I save encounters in _SpacegateEncounters and trophies in _SpacegateShinies but otherwise did nothing with that data - which would be useful for analyzing that type of thing.

Revision 163 saves those daily settings in a file: SpacegateVisits.NAME.txt

This is a map of this structure:

Code:
record spacegate_visit
{
    string coordinates;		// ABCDEFG
    string encounters;		// "|" delimited list of encounter
    string shinies;		// "|" delimited list of items
};
indexed by today's date. So, that planet above looks like this:

Code:
20181209	UNUPGVV	A Complicated Plant|Space Cave|small hostile animal|Space Cave|Space Cave|A Complicated Plant|Space Cave|A Complicated Plant|Recovering the Satellite|Recovering the Satellite|Space Cave|A Complicated Plant|small hostile animal|A Complicated Plant|A Complicated Plant|Space Cave|Space Cave|Space Cave|A Complicated Plant|A Complicated Plant
 
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