cera

(the following will contain spoilers for the Barnacle Goose Experiment. the game is great, but this piece isn't about that. it's about my descent into goblinization. if you're remotely interested, just play it before reading this because i'm going to spoil a lot)

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The Beginning

i've had a sore throat for a few days, so i've been taking some time to rest. what this means is that i've been spending most of my days playing games that are in my "i should play this soon" backlog. so, i ended up playing The Barnacle Goose Experiment because i thought something low-intensity like an idle game that doesn't demand high execution would be perfect. (foolish)

i "beat" it in a few hours, but i was also curious about the items i was missing from the in-game collection log. i loved the writing in the game and wanted to see more of it, but i also didn't want to sit for hours grinding out a completionist goal. i Could have theoretically looked this information up online, but where's the fun in that?? now at an impass, i set out on finding a solution. (note for the rest of the story: i don't have a screenshot from during this time, but i believe i was somewhere like 115/147 items discovered?)

unlike most idle games, you never fully hand over the keys to TBGE and let it drive itself. user input is still required for a lot of things (such as destroying enviroments, disassembling things to their components, etc.) and there's no way to say to the game "just make everything for me."

at least, not directly.

Automation

there are three objects in TBGE that can craft items For You, as long as they're in a space where they can see the materials they need to work with (this last detail will become VERY important later). for this piece, we're going to primarily focus on two of them for now: Students and Research Assistants.

Students will start random experiments (aka: making something) every so often if they're "off cooldown" and have materials available to them. Research Assistants will do the same, except that they will prioritize the most complex experiments available to them. for both of these groups, they can start experiments, including those you have not discovered yourself, if they have the necessary materials available to them.

by the time i reached the end of the game, i had a few students and research assistants, maybe 10 altogether. not only this, but i had amassed quite the stockpile of items to experiement with. many of these items also generate more items. i was using my Lecture Hall (which grants a 1.5x bonus to "People Objects" that make things while in the room) as my stockpile.

as a quick note, many of the objects and places in TBGE have the option "Talk To (object/place)" or "Love (object/place)" when you have them in your inventory. at first i assumed that this was done purely for flavor reasons: when locked in a dome for long enough, all of us will eventually need to talk to or love something. also, if a game gives me an option to talk to a river, why would i ever pass that up??

however, once i reached the end of the game, i curiously clicked around a little more and discovered that talking to/loving things reduces the rate at which they produce things that they automatically churn out on a timer, allowing you to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to acquire things, including objects (for example, students) that are normally a pain in the ass to make because they take so many materials and so much time.

as a result, something like the Lecture Hall that normally takes three in-game days to automatically make a student can get as low as uh.... five minutes given enough time and clicking

Infinite Monkeys, Infinite Typewriters

following this realization, i came to conclusion: why slowly use thoughtful deduction and careful work to complete my crafting log when i could just generate an unyielding torrent of students who would do the work for me. surely they'll end up crafting everything for me given enough time, right? it's time to go Full Idle Game. open the floodgates and let these eager little college-aged tryhards run wild.

the students began to slowly trickle into my stockpile. nothing really too notable happening here, just a slow ramp up. i let the game run in the background. i poked around on discord. i started drafting Magic with my weekly cube group. in the middle of the draft, i clicked back to the tab.

holy shit. i couldn't believe this plan was working. not only this, but it was working so well! i'd have a full collection log in no time. i stopped paying attention and just focused on playing Magic at this point, content to letting the little worker bees do all the heavy lifting for me.

after a while, i came back to check on the status of the collection log and discovered a few things:

THE GOOD

• i was at 142/147 collection log!!!

• that's it

THE BAD

• the students and research assistants had burned through all of my useful materials, leaving only small pockets of trash that either doesn't craft into much or needs to be disassembled manually

• research assistants prioritize the most complex things they can make, which are often the Letters that you need to beat the game. you may think this is useful, but it is actually the worst thing they could be making because they are VERY costly material-wise and you can't disassemble them once crafted

• the students had started making a lot of Locations, which are a pain to deal with because it requires me going through and destroying each of them to assemble them to their components. however, some of these locations are either indestructible or have their destructability locked behind something i didn't know about. most pressingly, these stupid nerds loved to make fucking Libraries, which are, of course, indestructible. the lecture hall i Talked To for days on end wasn't good enough for them anymore, they had to continue expanding

• one particular fascination the students had once the materials were running low was a combination of Iron or Telescopes or Books (which i had quite a lot of) and Students (which i had an ever-increasing amount of), which resulted in So Fucking Many Research Assistants Being Made, by far outnumbering anything else useful being made

• most pressingly, i had created a room full of academic pirhannas that would swarm and snap up any materials that happened to be within sight of them. when an experiement completes in TBGE, the resulting object gets placed in the room you're currently working out of. often times, the instant that anything completed its crafting time, it would disappear as it was snatched up by the sea of overly-eager helping hands who would then turn it into garbage

whoops!! i made a Virus that had learned to self-replicate in the short-term but not the long-term!! this was all really bad. i was rapidly approaching a point where i would have to start from square one in terms of rebuilding my stockpile. not the worst thing in the world though, right? if only it could be so simple...

to put it plainly, the game was starting to struggle to run at this point. some hitching here and there, but nothing too bad. there's a lot of calculations going on at all times at this point. i Get It, this is not a developer fault. i am being a fucking goblin poking at the seams of this experiment. however, this problem was quickly starting to ramp up, as all the libraries that the students had crafted automatically make books, which automatically make paper, which causes the game to run slower as they're using more memory. this isn't just limited to these objects, most objects do this in the background. this memory consumption would only get worse.

i had to do something before the game eventually bricked

Quarantine

i removed what i could from the Lecture Hall and transferred it to the Floor, the game's neutral starting zone. this would be the foundation where i would begin anew. eventually, i had isolated the students to the lecture hall.

now, all i had to do was keep going by myself to finish these last 5 experiments and be done with the game... except for one issue. the crafting queue was still FULL of Research Assistants and Students waiting to be done crafting, who would, given the chance, immediately start crafting more Letter, Students, Research Assistants, or Libraries from my very limited stockpile of materials.

okay. i figured i just had to sit in an empty room and wait for the queue to clear. annoying, but simple enough. i set aside one location to be the airlock separating The Stockpile from The Academic Plague. not only this, but i would kill any student or research assistant that ended up in this room to make sure that they couldn't start crafting with anything else that happened to complete if i wasn't paying attention AND because i thought it would help with the amount of memory the game was using (wrong lol). for this task's location, i chose the Hut, later named "The Killing Floor."

(only 5 more experiments in the queue!!)

while i was waiting for most of these experiments to finish, i set about rebuilding my stockpile, stopping to cleanse the room of any dreadful academics that happened to appear. the students gave me a lot of Meat when disassembled, which helped build back up my stockpile but presented a new issue. all this meat was making flies... which made plastic... both of which take up memory and are hard to get rid of when the amount you have of them is in the thousands.

i started choking down all the meat i could. i imagined how this looked in the context of the game.

Dr. Branca sets out on an experiment that ends up with her slamming piles of meat she gets from the endless assembly line that churns out humans in stacks of 305 at a time and creating piles of shit, surrounded by libraries from which she has no escape from. wherever she hides, the students find her, eager to work more. she Talks To them, to try and get them to understand her plight, but it only makes them more eager to work. they craft endless letters from her collegues and loved ones which they drop at her feet like a cat would a dead bird. there is no end to this.

i was in a race against time. the game was freezing for 5-20 seconds at a time at this point. there were moments where i didn't know if the page was going to ever become responsive again. not only this, but the actual clicking and menuing was struggling.

i hurried. i grabbed a stack of two of each object that i had in my stockpile and started cross-referencing my journal to see which of the uncompleted experiments i could make would be most likely to result in something new.

this worked very well! i was easily able to get to 145/147 in a relatively short time. i was closing in on the finish line. i dumped all of my materials back into the stockpile, being careful to watch the experiment queue to make sure no students or research assistants could weasel their way in. i checked the journal to see the two recipes i was missing. both of them only had ONE possible combination (as opposed to most items that have several) and required several materials.

i counted the asterisks of each missing material:

• the first recipe was 2x [four asterisks], 1x [five asterisks], 1x [six asterisks]
• the second recipe was 4x [seven asterisks], 4x [eight asterisks]

i cross referenced the journal and created each of the materials with the proper character lengths that i was missing. success!! i created a Boulder, but i was still missing the second recipe.

i banged my head against every combination of 7s and 8s that i could, but some of my stacks of materials were only 2x or 3x. you must remember that for all of this, i have been in a feverish state. i was really tired, as i had completed my Magic draft going on in the background and it was around 1am at this point and i honestly just kind of wanted to be done, which is no fault of anyone but my own. i could have Opened the Airlock Door but...

i'm not going to let that fucking 146/147 be Dr. Branca's legacy

you fucks wanted to force her into an experiment against her will? i'll give you the greatest experiment you've ever seen

Absolution

i made this bed and now it's time to sleep in it. the only way out is through.

i gathered all of my devoted followers, i gave them one final speech before our judgement day, which of course did nothing, because i had already Talked To the lecture hall as much as i could earlier. it's the sentiment that matters. my plan was to drop every student i had in there, let the game idle while i slept, and check on the status in the morning.

i grabbed students in stacks of 305 at a time and airdropped them into my stockpile. as soon as i dropped the first stack in, the game froze for 30 seconds. it was in this moment, i realized that i should probably download my save in case this broke something irreversibly.

once all of the students were in the stockpile, i sat and watched the factory work for a little, both proud and horrified. this pride would last around three minutes.

fuck.

my stupid, learned children can't do anything right.

i reloaded my save. the one stack of students i had dropped in had already started crafting letters and some of the in-game songs (for the game's delicious soundtrack played through the in-game radio you build) which would need to be disassembled by hand because none of the songs can be combined with anything to craft... wait....

that's weird, right? everything crafts into something. even the letters become The Way To End the Game when you have all of them. do all of these only exist to be played or destroyed into their components. also, all of these names are either 7 or 8 characters long...

oh my god

i had written these items off as a problem (past the first one that gave me access to listen to the song) for so long that i had stopped even remotely considering that i should be making them. i had closed my mind, whereas my legion of zealots had been eagerly crafting them entirely by accident in a way that helped lead me to the answer.

i created the missing songs. bold blue text.

and there ____ was

it turns out it was ____ i was missing all my life. i touched ____.

here was the third object that crafts things for you.

once you touch ____, ____ begins uncontrollably crafting things randomly for you with whatever it can see. unbound potential, creativity, and will. the world's greatest student

i finally opened the airlock door. i watched everything i had made from my shit and tears and blood and rot and dreams disintegrate in front of me

i release you, my children