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?

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    2 hours ago

    High vacuums are tricky. The first high vacuums were achieved with mercury-based Sprengel pumps, but mercury isn’t available everywhere. Maybe you could make a small, slow turbomolecular pump work if it was mandatory (it’s all about the bearing) but it seems anything that needs sealing is going to struggle without either that or a massive petrochemical industry to supply the needed high-quality synthetic oils. If you’re doing technology all over again, I’d skip the vacuum tubes stage because of this.

    If you can get away with a low vacuum, like seems like would work for at least some kinds of VD (maybe you can help clear it up), a piston-type pump with castor oil as the sealant will do.

    (although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).

    1 micron features is as ambitious as I’ve bothered to think about. For basic computing, like to run a CNC machine, that should do.