The games in the Kitfox publishing stable have a long history of producing beautifully absurd patch notes and bug reports thanks to the absurd intricacies of their systems and simulations. Dwarf Fortress has been responsible for classics like "Undead dwarf contracted were-chameleon curse" and "Cats dying for no reason - alcohol poisoning?" Shortly before its 1.0 release, a Caves of Qud update included this exciting feature addition: "You can voluntarily amputate your own limbs."
This week, another Kitfox game secured its place in that cherished lineage. Ostranauts, the early access hardcore space sim from developer Blue Bottle Games, just released Update v0.14.5.18, which included this magnificent line in its patch notes:
- Corpses should no longer become hotter than the Sun and explode the ships/stations they are on.
That's the good stuff. A patch note like that can speak volumes—it both communicates the sorts of temperature simulation Ostranauts must be modeling for corpses to inadvertently go thermonuclear, and implies that some number of players have watched in confusion as a dead body triggered a stellar combustion event and vaporized its environs. And evidently, this had been going on for a while.
"With the help of some player saves, we were finally able to figure out why some stations were becoming so hot they exploded from pressure," Blue Bottle founder Daniel Fedor wrote in the update notes. "It turns out that our body heat code had a blind spot, which if left unchecked, could cause temperatures to rise indefinitely."
That's bad enough on its own, but Fedor explained that, in cases where this spiraling temperature bug occurred inside EVA suits, it would "heat up the air inside to temperatures hotter than a star. And when that helmet was removed, all air in the station would superheat, expand, and cause the station to explode."
What beautiful worlds we create.
While I'm a big fan of Kitfox's portfolio of sicko games, I haven't yet spent much time with Ostranauts—largely due to my own incompetence. I can turn a budding Dwarf Fortress into a metropolis and brave the wastes of Qud, but I worry that even my tolerance for impenetrably dense systems might be outmatched by the demands of Ostranauts' Newtonian flight physics.
Now that I've got a better sense of what Blue Bottle's cooking with, however, it's clear I'm overdue for a ship salvaging run in the boneyard. Now, at least, my body won't cause a thermal catastrophe if things go badly.
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