There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
That’s cool! Can you recommend any resources on this? I’ve thought a lot about this sort of thing. I’m guessing semiconductor fabrication requires a lot of complex upstream tasks and isn’t the sort of thing that’s feasible at home. Would love to be wrong!
“The Book”, is a book that uses illustrations to explain how to recreate civilization. Dunno if it is good. That said, you can also try “How Things Work”, which explains the workings of many inventions, with many wooly mammoths interspersed throughout.
Ha! Is that the one that explained buoyancy by saying the elephant/water was afraid of the water/elephant, so they had to build walls on the side of the raft so it/the water couldn’t see each other?
Man, that’s one of the books I most distinctly remember from my childhood. I’ve looked into getting a copy, but a quick look indicates the original edition is actually pretty pricey now, probably because I’m not the only one.
I think I can draw a pretty direct line between reading the logic gates section of it, and the CPU design project I still have going semi-separately from the bootstrapping. Although it’s possible I learned about gates somewhere else first.
Depends where you’re starting. If it’s sticks and stones, yeah, you’re going to spend a lot of time building up. Even getting to the prerequisites for the Gingery-esque machine shop will be a trick, and you definitely need machining first.
Sam Zeloof is the guy that actually did the semiconductors bit. He makes a transistor in the linked video series starting with a commercial wafer, some basic chemicals, a spinning piece of tape and an electric furnace. I read papers and just Wikipedia to get ideas for the parts he doesn’t cover. The standard ways of doing things are heavily constrained by scalability, which as an artisan you don’t care about, but will breeze past other things you really do, like ability to work in a small space. And, if you’re starting from scratch, using only common, locally available elements.