About this exploit, that many (some?) complain about. Mostly on Steam it seems, and it gives bad press to the game*. Just use the same event as in Aestival, for the event at the Surface, and that will be ok. You can take wounds…
(*The debate can probably be endless between people saying ‘if you don’t want to exploit the game, just don’t exploit it’ and people saying ‘knowing it is there is sufficient to spoil it for me’. I’m not too sure about myself…)
Fair enogh. That and maybe a little tweak to how often crew will try to open boxes and you’are done.
This opinion confuses me terribly. I simply cannot fathom how the knowledge that someone else is cheating on a single player game can ruin a game experience. Anyway.
Given the hassle of the mirrorcatch box exploit, if people are keen to cheat in that way, there’s a much faster way to do it (which I won’t share, but it takes, literally, seconds).
p.s. not for now, but how do I spoiler tags here?
edit: aha! Doesn’t appear in preview, so I thought it was someething else thank you Fretling!
edited by SporksAreGoodForYou on 2/14/2015
Bracket spoiler end bracket. Your spoilers here. Bracket slash spoiler end bracket.
Only one is permitted per post, unfortunately, which breaks spoiler-quoting.
I cannot see why people are complaining about this like its a game breaker. This exploit is nothing compared to what I used to be able to do back in early beta, where you could actually reload your game mid-story and try for different results since auto saves only occurred in ports.
Think about that? Simply fail and retry the riddles storylet over and over again until I got a free captivating treasure, or until I got ideal results on getting the rat star.
This exploit is super-easy to fix, and I;m sure FB will get to it, they’ve still got a fair bit of stuff to add anyway.
I feel obliged to point out that playing the game as it’s written and balanced is not, technically, cheating. If the game is unbalanced (which arguably Mirrorcatching is, sure), it’s still not cheating to sell sunlight if it’s specifically balanced and designed to allow it. It’s not like the devs misplaced a decimal point on the sell price or didn’t intend that you could sell sunlight.
Exactly, that’s another thing about it. I think people are just disappointed to find that its such an easy way to make echoes if you can dodge the Revenue men. But then, what would be the most valuable thing a world of darkness? Light.
I think its a bigger issue that you can fill a ship full of mirrorcatch boxes and fill em on the surface without much penalty and come back down for huge profits if you can sneak it in.
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That’s certainly still the case for me. I have to leave port and reenter to ensure I’ve saved everything before quitting. It saves occasionally during storylets, but not very often. I’ve only noticed a couple. It doesn’t even save on death, so you can just esc-quit-continue if you have a particular unlucky fight at zee, while the "lost at sea" dialog is up.
Er… what version of the game are you running? It’s supposed to save on every single interaction. Even the ones that are just like “Leave”.
Sunlight smuggling isn’t really an exploit, it’s just slightly unabalanced and makes most of the rest of the ways to get money seem pointless. Like it’s clearly intended for you to be able to smuggle sunlight and make money that way, just. Maybe not quite so much that it makes all the other money making options pointless in comparison.
(Wounding when filling boxes on the surface sometimes would do that, or reducing the profit you get selling them slightly.)
What would be an exploit is farming mount nomad in the starting ship :P
It doesn’t save when you die until you select an option so you can alt F4 (or if you’re more aware of when you’re about to die in a fight, reload before you actually die to jump back to port)
it doesn’t save purchases from shops, just storylets, so you can lose stuff that way accidentally if you reload and forgot to say, refuel.
Alexis has said in several places that the consequences of the mirror trade haven’t been fully implemented yet. I think folks don’t realize there are quite a lot of scheduled updates still to go for sunless sea and patching the mirrorbox trade is 100% without a doubt a confirmed fix in progress. I would apologize for popularizing sunlight farming, except no I am not sorry about it. Pointing out exploits and breaks is a great way to bring them to light and get a wider group to test and report them than I ever could alone. Failbetter Games has always been very responsive about these sorts of issues in fallen london, and I expect they will be with Sunless Sea too.
If something strikes you as broken, then the appropriate thing to do is to report it to the devs by sending a bug report to sunlesssea(at)failbettergames.com . They are very responsive and can usually assuage your fears and doubts within a few sentences of "yes we are most definitely working on that. Expect a patch soon, all shall be well".
edited by NiteBrite on 2/14/2015
I’m aware that it doesn’t save when you buy things from shops. I’m actually quite grateful for that, since I misclick easily ("shit, I meant to buy a candle, not a flare! crap, I clicked supplies too many times! wait, I wanted to sell that, not buy it!"). But Sporks is saying that it only saves "occasionally during storylets, but not very often", and even that they have only noticed "a couple". This is not how the current build works at all.
edited by Fretling on 2/14/2015
Let me just get to port…
1.0.01957. Steam, up to date as far as I can tell. I noticed this when I was tinkering in London before bedtime, and quit. It didn’t save anything since I’d docked.
To clarify. It generally saves during most officer storylets, but, for example, I abused it during the sigil ridden navigator one to see all three endings. I’m assuming it only saves when it actually says "saving" (and looking at the autosave file dates, it appears to confirm my suspicions).
edited by SporksAreGoodForYou on 2/14/2015
What exactly had you done in London that didn’t save?
Blind bruiser, dropping some port reports, speaking to the scholar, that sort of thing.
Yeah, those definitely save for me. And are supposed to save.
well, that’s odd.
Simple fixes, especially in games like this that rely heavily on story, are usually not good fixes. Increasing the chances of a negative event at zee will hurt Aestival more than it hurts the Surface<->London run. Causing wounds on collection doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless the rest of the surface is similarly dangerous, which atm it isn’t. (But maybe it should be.)
I think the best solution is to either
a) add an actual story to the mirror-catch boxes themselves, so you can’t just buy eighty of them in a single visit to port. Make perhaps 2-3 easily accessible and the rest require something more involved than an exchange of echoes, or maybe even be limited per captain (though I dislike this idea), or
b) implement diminishing returns and/or a limited market on the sunlight trade, similar to what exists for wine to Godfall, Coffee to the Surface, Sphinxstone to London, etc. It doesn’t really make sense that you can sell so much again and again in the same location.
Could also do something with the whole carrying-tons-of-mirrors-in-your-hold thing. That shouldn’t be any safer than carting around a ton of sunlight.
edited by Olorin on 2/14/2015
The saving issues is Also being addressed. The literal first thread on this forums asks for QA testing volunteers for a new fix/patch to the saving system.
I’m actually hoping they go back to the "sailors occasionally steal boxes/buyers occasionally don’t return them/etc" idea. Originally it had to be stopped because it was happening too often, but I liked the idea of taking prisoners for pilfering cargo (on rare occasions, though – I’m hoping about as often as other at-sea events).
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