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[Seriyu]

This sounds very interesting and I don't know why. I'll have to download it and see if I can't help you guys figure stuff out.

[Grakelin]

I'm honestly under the impression that nobody has ever actually figured out Iron Seed. The ones who do are just lying to us. This thread may be the furthest we've ever come.

[Xantalos]

PTW.

[Il Palazzo]

This game is a glorious mess. It's crude, it's ambitious, it's arrogant("no, we won't make it easier for you to understand, but here's a 'print' button to ease your pain"), and it's generally very much rooted in the design mentality of yore. In a word, lovely.

Is there any way to avoid people going crazy though? And when they do, what can you do to fix it? They just slowly seem to go down the drain. I had 3 of them CONSTANTLY giving me error messages, which made playing the game real hard...

There's the 'Psy Eval' button in the Psychometry panel. [Top Left-Most, then the button which is a Brain-with-stem] In that panel you can cycle through your crew and see their 'stats'. Basically, if the bottom bar is too low, they've got low mental willpower. Pump that up on every single one which isn't already, the loss of skill/performance is minimal compared to losing the sanity, and I find higher sanity levels increase experience gains. There is the 'encode' button on the top left of this menu, which allows you to save the member in their current state.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

All the things you change here move those little columns on the bottom near the portrait, what these columns represent? I have no damn idea. It shows 'Max' for the stats you're moving about, and then there's the gray bar.. Which moves on its own accord. But that's the opaque part of the mechanics.

If your crew member goes crazy you can reload their encode in the Medical part of the command cube, on the bottom right.

Here's what I've found out so far, about the psy eval part(reading the changelog helps a lot):

-Each character's natural(or "primary") stats are shown as the brownish bars beneath the red horizontal ones around the top part of the screen.
-The same part of the screen allows for adjustments in stats. I don't quite understand how it works. There appears to be some non-obvious interaction with the primaries. For example, sometimes increasing the stimulant level(or biorythm, or whatever that is) lowers the associated effective stat instead of rising it, so it's not a 1-1 relationship.
-The coloured vertical bars at the bottom-right of the screen are the effective stats. From left to right, there's skill(higher does better job), performance(higher does jobs faster, including researching), sanity(if it drops to 0, skill and performance begin to get eroded. If either of those gets to 0, primary stats go down. If any one of these reaches 0, the character goes bonkers), and stress(it erodes sanity).
-The above means that crew members with high(effective) performance should gain experience from researching more rapidly than others.
-Doing certain(or all?) tasks increases stress. Doing nothing, including researching, decreases stress. Psychometric officer's skill helps decrease the crew's stress. The changelog mentions that the medical officers performs skill checks after any officer's stats get adjusted. While I'm not sure, it kinda looks like failed checks mean the one being adjusted gets increased stress.


Another thing I've found about the game, is that the "time slice" option in the options menu regulates the game's speed(higher is lower). A balance has to be found between that option, DOSBOX's framerate(ctrl+F11/F12), and the fact that some screens cause the game to run much faster than others for no good reason(e.g., the creation screen). You might want to fiddle with these a bit, else you end up with your crew going insane while you explore the crafting options.

Oh, and do yourself a favour and change the font to something less unreadable than the one called "iron".

[Pnx]

I'm going to try this game out, and I think I'll do a quick LP of my experiences as I go. I'll post a link once I've started a thread for it.

Here you go, it's sort of interesting, though very awkward and esoteric to play.

[h3lblad3]

Oh, and do yourself a favour and change the font to something less unreadable than the one called "iron".

How does one do this?

[Il Palazzo]

Oh, and do yourself a favour and change the font to something less unreadable than the one called "iron".

How does one do this?

In the med section of the cube, there's an icon that lets you change options.

[drvoke]

Couple things I found out playing this game.  The first is that yes, this is basically the first result if you google anything trying to get some help for this game.

The second is that indeed, crew members get stressed doing research.  Found that out talking to my staff psychometrist.  I don't even know how I found the "stress" keyword.  I'm not sure it showed up in any of the dialogues I worked through.  It's what the grey bar in the bottom right box of the psych eval screen is.  Leading to the realization that my medic and my scientist are two of the most work-shy little shits I've ever encountered.  My scientist scans one planet and he's totally stressed out. My medic has literally done nothing except for research, and she's CONSTANTLY stressed out.  I'm not even a little anxious to see what it's like when she actually has to do anything.  High stress levels decrease the total psychometric stats, so your awesome 82/85/79 medic will turn into a (virtually) drooling 0/0/0 psychotic mess eventually.  How high is too high with stress?  Don't know, I just try to keep it at 0.

Anyway, the psych stuff was the only thing I was really, painfully stuck on.  But there's absolutely no guidance anywhere.  I just push everyone's "emotional" up to the max and don't touch anything else, and check the psych screen ALL THE TIME.  When someone is stressed out, I take them off research and don't use them for anything.  With my scientist being such a lazy dick (philosophers...), that makes scanning planets incredibly tedious.  I usually just use "time burst" from the medic face of the command cube between planets until he's well rested.  My engineer is ALWAYS crafting, and she rarely gets stressed.  My psychometrist is kind of lazy, too.  I think just idling on the psychometry screen stressed out my psychometrist, but that could be me being over-sensitive.

That's all I've learned that's useful.  I have some theories I still need to test.  And again, I'm incredibly shocked at the lack of information there is about this game on the internet.  It's seriously just.. right up my alley.  Speed-of-light-obeying interstellar travel, transhumanism, a focus on exploration/discovery, tactical (seeming) combat, crafting, crew management, randomized loot, etc...  It just needs a bit more documentation.  I'm all for being opaque about your systems because I like to discover a neat trick myself once in a while just as much as the next tube of sentient goo, but there's not enough information to go on to even come up with any rational plan of action in the "offical(?)" documentation.

Is anyone still even trying to figure this game out?  Does anyone know why days are only 20 hours long?

[Il Palazzo]

From what I remember figuring out, changing crew stats needs time to fully take effect, during which both the crewman in question and the medic canwill get stressed. You should probably adjust stats bit by bit and not of everyone at once.

Most crew members should not research and do proper work at the same time. Leaving science officer on research while simultainously scanning a planet is a sure way to the madhouse.
Also, scanning with multiple probes is faster, but more stressful than with one. You may want to keep that in mind if you're already having trouble with science officer's stress.

Performance(skill) of the psych officer, at least according to 'the manual', is used to reduce stress among the crew. It seems possible that doing so also increases psychometrist's stress levels, so it'd be good to turn off their research if many of the crew are stressed out.


Also, keep it mind that the game, despite having some great ideas, is really badly made. Combat is a suicide at first and a "can't lose" no-brainer once you get a few good upgrades. There's no middle ground, so there's no real challenge to them - your ship is either good enough, or not.

This'll make you grind to avoid having to reload after any of the random battles that may pop up. Jumping from system to system resets planetary repources available for mining, so in principle it's possible to spend forever flying between two systems and collecting resources while your crew researches, until you can produce all you need.
The game turns tedious, as you are simply wasting time on resource grinding, scanning, and battles, all of which have little fun factor, in hopes of finding that particular alien race needed to advance the plot among way too many identical-looking systems.

The story is also badly stitched, as you can get to find aliens referencing parts of it that you haven't encountered yet.

In my opinion, the gradual figuring out the obscure rules is probably the best part of the actual game experience.

[drvoke]

I'll apologize in advance for any autocorrect errors in this post.  Bored at work.

Those are good stress level tips.  Pumping up emotional and leaving everything else was a terrible strategy, so I equalized everyones psychometrics and now both the medic and the scientist don't peg out their stress levels nearly as easily.  I do always try to remember to turn off research before I do a job with someone, but it seems much less critical now.  Everything, including research advances, seems to come a bit quicker now as well.

It's a shame to hear about all the faults in this game, as the concept is quite compelling.  My only experience with combat involved no shooting.  I ran away, which was tedious, since I had to get over 100000km before I could escape back to the main screen.  I have had the resources to build a second dirk and a reflective hull in the meantime, so I expect to try my hand at some shooting next time the opportunity presents itself.  And everything seems to be moving along at a decent pace with engineering research buoyed by several fortuitous artifact discoveries.

I'm working out that maybe unless you don't know how to construct something or you need it for some specific purpose, it's better to break everything down to its constituent materials since the integration option will work out how to build the intermediate bits out of constituent materials and do all that automagically for you.

As for the story... well, I'm content to leave it alone for now.  The biggest draw of this game, to me, is the exploration and resource gathering.  Seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly exploiting resources where none have been exploited before and all that.  Also the crew management.  But I'm also someone who saw screenshots of Aurora and said, "Yeah, that looks just my style," so.... (I haven't actually played it yet other than getting as far as the map screen, but it sounds good in theory, much like this game)

Other than combat, maybe, psychometry represents the only truly opaque game mechanic at this point for me.  Everything else is fairly straightforward.  I guess I will be disappointed if i play for another 10 hours and don't trip over a new mechanic or at least a novel use for an established mechanic.  Still curious about that 20 hour day, though...  and does anyone else's game crash if you stay on the detailed cargo list too long?  As long as I'm just looking at the simple cargo list, it's fine.

[EuchreJack]

Protip: Might as well use the best people possible.  Ironically, the people you know the least about are among the best.

To clarify, I mean the mechanic and medic that have "no data available" as their description are among the best in their field.

I believe the following is the list of the best crewmembers:
Anka
Vestin
Jenna
Wolfe
Lady
Nina

[frostshotgg]

Can someone walk me through getting this actually running? I've gotten as far as downloading the source, the patch, and d-fend like someone said earlier. I'm stuck from there. I don't really run any DOS games, except for xcom which I got already set up.

[drvoke]

Can someone walk me through getting this actually running? I've gotten as far as downloading the source, the patch, and d-fend like someone said earlier. I'm stuck from there. I don't really run any DOS games, except for xcom which I got already set up.

Hi, frostshotgg!

I can give you step by step, and if that doesn't help, I can make pictures.  This is just one way, and the one I find gets me up and running with games the quickest with the fewest hassles.

Have you installed D-Fend Reloaded and extracted the Iron Seed "source" into a directory where you want the game to live?  Once that's done:

1) After you have everything set up in the directories you like, open up D-Fend Reloaded
2) Open the "Add From Template" dialogue by looking at the menu bar at the top and navigating to "Profile" --> "Add From Template" --> "Complex DOS games (VGA, 32MB memory, full sound support, 80486 ~66Mhz)"  For other games, you can choose the template that best matches the kind of computer the game was meant to run on.  In this case, Iron Seed's user's manual gives a clear indication that this was a game meant for machines with at least 66Mhz, so I pick that.
3) Once the profile editor opens, you must name the profile, and tell D-Fend where the game's executable is.  It is the is.exe file in the game's root directory, so use the folder icon next to the input box to navigate there and choose that file.

If your machine is a fairly typical modern (post-2006) desktop set-up, that should be all there is to it.  If you click "OK", D-Fend will create this profile and it will be available on the main screen, and you can run it from there.  I don't know anything about how DOSBox performs on laptops or anything, in case that is a concern.  There are a ton of little options in the profile editor to change what kind of emulation it performs, how much memory it's pretending to have, etc... that you might want to play around with if you're having issues.  Of particular interest, if you play in windowed mode primarily, is the "graphics" section under "hardware".  There you can change the scaling of the window, since DOSBox doesn't support resizing the emulator window on the fly that I know of.

Hope that helps!

[frostshotgg]

That did indeed help, I have it running now.

Well, sort of. I got my ship fully repaired and I scanned the planet, and now I can't figure out what else I can do. I tried going to engineering crafting thing screen but the menu was too obtuse for me and I think what happened was that I didn't have any materials. Am I just supposed to go somewhere else in the sector with the astrological map thing?

[drvoke]

Once you do a scan of a planet, you can click the little "ANOM" button on the left hand side, and then click on each of the flashing green dots.  Those are "anomalies" which can be anything from basic materials for crafting to alien artifacts you can research in engineering for research credit (allowing you do build more complex stuff).  In the bottom right is the.. uh.. zoom box?  I don't know what it's actually called, but you have to be zoomed in and make sure the anomaly is in the center, then you can click "Retrieve" and it will put whatever it is into your cargo hold.  Once you've depleted that planet of anomalies, you can use your science officer to target the next planet and repeat the process until you've scanned all the planets in a star system.

Until you gather (or maybe just scan?) all the anomalies from the first planet, you won't be able to leave the system.  It has a buoy that gives your astrogator the coordinates to the next nearest star system, and once you travel there, you'll have access to quite a few other systems.

Crafting is simpler than it seems.  You can construct ("integrate") or deconstruct ("decompose") items.  You never lose anything from deconstructing items into their constituent parts, so don't worry about making mistakes or anything, unless you deconstruct something you don't know how to create.  But if you really need those radioactive materials to make a fuel module, sometimes you have no choice.  On the "integrate" screen, any items you have all the parts for will be highlighted white.  Each construct requires three parts.  If you've got a particular part, it'll be listed in green.  If you haven't got it but you have the bits to make it, it will be highlighted yellow.  If you haven't got it and can't make it, it will be red.  If you make something that has parts highlighted yellow, the engineer will go through all the intermediate steps to make those parts for you before starting construction.