googoogjoob

I don't recall Rotghroths/Rotdhizons having any coherent speech- IIRC there are places where they moan a few words incoherently, but, while they may have the mental capacity for speech, it's presumably pretty hard to express yourself lucidly while your jaw is rotting off. I don't recall any instances of them talking, but I think it's reasonable to assume that War Tralls are capable of speech, given that they're developed from Battle Alphas.

Sucia was barred 100-200 years ago (there are conflicting sources in the game as to whether it was one or two centuries), and Shaper laws were apparently more lax then; and on top of that, the people who were running Sucia immediately before it was Barred were also seemingly bending the rules even farther than that.

It's worth noting that while each faction of Serviles wants you to do something different in the endgame, it's not exactly right to describe the endings as tied to factions- it's possible to get the Trajkov ending without ever joining the Takers, or to get the Obeyer ending having joined the Awakened, etc. What matters is what you do in the endgame, and which faction leaders are alive at the end of the game. Also maybe worth noting: While each successive Geneforge game establishes certain events from the prior game as canon, the canon series of events never precisely matches up with a specific potential ending of the prior game.

If you've either left Ellhrah alive and fought your way to Trajkov then helped him, or passed the Leadership check to join the Takers without killing Ellhrah, the Trajkov ending is actually, curiously, probably the best possible ending for the Awakened. I think it's also curious that Trajkov proves to be basically honest and trustworthy. He's built up across the course of the game, via others' testimony, as a brash, unstable brute who demands total loyalty. But if you side with him- it turns out that he really does keep his promises to you, and to the Takers. He makes you his right hand, and establishes legal equality for sapient creations. He does this via destroying the Shapers, and taking personal command of Terrestia, and maybe that really is his primary goal- but he doesn't go power-mad. What he does isn't all that different from what the Drakons of 3-5 claim they want to do- only, unlike the Drakons, there's never even a hint that he'll turn on his allies. I think there are maybe extra-universal reasons for this. I think that perhaps the reason the Trajkov ending is so unambiguously positive in these ways, is that Jeff Vogel didn't want any of the (proper) endings to be downers, after the struggle the player's made to attain them. And maybe, if he had decided to follow up on the Trajkov ending as canon, Trajkov would indeed have turned power-mad, in order to provide conflict in the sequels. But regardless of these external concerns, I think the game as it stands makes Trajkov one of the more interesting and compelling characters of the series: more sincere and committed than the Drakons are; the only character in the series to demonstrably be able to withstand the mind-warping power of a fully-powered Geneforge; and his wholesale disgust for the Shaper system, and his openness and eloquence in criticizing its injustices, makes him a more interesting and developed nemesis to the Shapers than we'd see again until Geneforge 4.

The meal quests (as with a bunch of other minor sidequests) in 1 and 3 are only in the re-remakes of those games, which I haven't played very much of. 5 doesn't have any meal-related quests, and I don't think any version of 2 does either.

There's never been a meal-related quest in any Geneforge... There's one in Avernum 4, and then obviously meal is very important in Avernum 6, but meal has always just been a minorly-valuable loot item in the Geneforge games. The only standing subquests of that type in Geneforge 1 are for Shaper records and Shaper equipment, and both are retained in the remake.

Signing an exclusivity contract with a console manufacturer can be a big advantage for a developer or publisher. First, and most obviously, the console manufacturer might offer money up-front, or a bigger cut of the profits on each sale on the console in question. But beyond that, console exclusivity can very well mean a bigger audience than a cross-platform release can: the console company will do marketing to hype up an exclusive game, in the hopes that it drives further sales of their console, and this type of super-powered marketing can result in more game sales, on one console, than the game would sell on multiple platforms without the marketing push. Fortunately, console exclusivity- or at least absolute console exclusivity- is diminishing. It's more common nowadays for a developer or publisher to make a timed exclusivity deal with a console/platform company, where the game is exclusive to a certain console or storefront for a certain amount of time (eg a year), and after that period is up, the developer can put ports of the game out on other platforms. Console and PC architecture have also become more similar over time, and consoles and PCs have become more similar in their capabilities, so it's usually easier to do ports now than it was a decade or two ago. Popular game engines like Unreal or Unity are natively cross-platform, too, allowing for developers who use such engines to release games cross-platform without having to either do porting work themselves, or hire someone else to do it.

That's basically it- a publisher will generally have greater resources than most (indie) developers will have access to, unless the developer has had previous hits. Not just financial support per se, but marketing/PR employees, QA teams, porting teams, contacts with distributors, etc. Which are important in that, even apart from not necessarily having enough capital to support the developers throughout a game's development, many developers (both individuals and teams) simply don't have the skillset to do marketing for their game, or an existing fanbase that they can draw volunteer testers from, or the time or skills to be a good community manager. There are also some smaller "indie" publishers, which are relatively principled, and privately held (so immune to shareholder pressure), and which thus can and do allow developers great or total artistic control over their work- New Blood, Nightdive, and Devolver Digital are examples of this sort of publisher. So there are benefits to working with publishers, although many independent developers start to self-publish once they can- once they have the skills and employees and capital that they don't need a publisher. It's much easier for a developer to reach the point where they can self-publish these days, given that you don't need a publisher to get on Steam anymore, and that GOG accepts games based on what they think will sell, and so on.

I can't be sure about the Mac version of the game, but for the Windows version, AFAIK, no, there is no way to run the Steam version of the game without running the Steam client as well. It's possible to run Steam in offline mode, to turn off the Steam overlay, and to turn off Steam achievements and cloud saves and so on, but the only way to run the game without also running the Steam program at the same time is to buy it somewhere other than Steam. It's possible- although I'm not aware of Spiderweb's exact policy on this issue- that if you emailed the Spiderweb support address, and explained the situation, that they could either explain a workaround I'm not aware of, or provide an alternate executable that can run without Steam, or even just provide you with a DRM-free copy of the game entirely.

You can't. Firebolt is the only spell you can set to be your default attack in Mutagen.

The developer or publisher of a game sets the price Steam or GOG sells the game at. Steam or GOG then takes a share of the revenue generated by the game- Steam normally takes 30%, but cuts deals to take a smaller share of some bigger sellers; GOG, I believe, takes a flat 30% from all sales, but they might make individual deals like Steam does- but that's all behind closed doors. For comparison, the Epic Games Store normally takes a 12% cut, and itch.io does not take a mandatory cut at all. Steam just takes the same 30% cut they do as when the game is sold at full price. The developer/publisher makes less money from each sale, relative to a sale at full price, proportionate to the discount. Developers/publishers decide when and for how much their game goes on sale, and they can do this themselves. However, Steam also does daily/weekly sales, and bigger sales events (sometimes in collaboration with publishers). These generate more attention, and thus more sales, than a game just going on sale normally does, and Steam asks the developer/publisher if they would like their game to be a daily sale, or whatever. The developer/publisher still chooses how much it goes on sale for, but I presume that Steam mandates, eg, a game must be at least 50% off to be a daily sale, or the like. GOG is, I think, more restrictive in allowing devs/publishers to do their own sales- launch discounts are common, and sometimes a publisher with a decent-sized catalog on GOG (Bethesda, Paradox, etc) will do their own sale on GOG; but generally, GOG does weekly/seasonal sale events that it offers developers/publishers a slot in, rather than letting devs do their own sales on individual games. Neither Steam nor GOG can put games on sale without the consent of the developer/publisher. If you want to support the developer of a game- in the sense of ensuring that the largest proportion of what you pay for a game goes to the people (or at least the company) who actually made it- the ideal is to buy the game directly from the developer (who may sell the game on their site, or via itch.io); if that's not possible (and it often isn't), then directly from the publisher (who is normally going to also take a cut); if that's not possible (and again, it often isn't), then the Epic Store takes the smallest cut of the big storefronts.

I have not. My understanding of the situation is that, while the 2011 translation is much, much superior to the original English translation, due to obscure publishing rights issues, it can only be released as an audiobook and an ebook (and there might be further rights issues from there, even though Lem's family prefers the 2011 translation). I don't listen to audiobooks, and I don't have an ebook reader. I've actually never read Solaris at all. The more-easily-available standard English translation from 1970 is a hackjob that retranslates a French translation of the novel into English, and Lem hated it. And my Polish is nowhere near good enough to read the original. If I'm going to read the book, I want to do so in a way that doesn't mangle it somehow.

Oh boy. More books: A Perfect Vacuum, by Stanisław Lem. Reviews of nonexistent books, which format Lem uses to strike out in different directions, some more fruitful than others. Some of these reviews made me wish dearly that the books they describe existed; others were excellent constructs in themselves; and some were just boring. Overall worthwhile. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. I feel basically similarly about this book as I do about Slaughterhouse-Five, although it wasn't quite as good, maybe. Lots of jokes, very little incident. But they're good jokes. Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town, by Thomas Jerome Seabrook. Flawed (too much focus on Lust for Life, not enough on Lodger, etc), but overall an excellent work of collation and organization into a coherent narrative, and probably the best book (for now) on the most creatively fruitful period of David Bowie's career. More Tales of Pirx the Pilot, by Stanisław Lem. This is the second half of the Pirx short stories, which got unnecessarily split into two books in English translation. The currently-in-print versions of these books are somehow from different publishers, too. Anyway. Better than the first half of the stories- meatier themes and better storytelling. While taking a shower when I was near the end of reading this book, I realized why Fiasco is a Pirx story, even though Pirx dies off-screen in the first chapter, and the protagonist of the bulk of the novel may or may not be (and probably isn't) Pirx. The Street Lawyer, by John Grisham. Loaned from my grandparents. A change of pace from all the weighty speculative fiction stuff. It was okay, I guess. I certainly managed to read over 300 pages of it in three days. The Hole in the Moon and Other Stories, by Margaret St. Clair. A recent anthology of 17 (mostly very brief) stories by Margaret St. Clair, a post-Golden Age, pre-New Wave pulp author of weird fiction. The collection curiously omits what I understand to be her best-known story (The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles, which I haven't read), but it does a good job of making a case for St. Clair as an overlooked talent worthy of rediscovery- she had a knack for breezy storytelling and freaky happenings. (Trivia: two of her novels were cited by Gygax as thematic influences on the development of Dungeons & Dragons.)

I think it's reasonable to believe that lock XP uses a related or derived formula to monster XP, but I'm dubious about it using the exact same formula, as it has to account for a much wider range of levels than the monster formula does. AFAIK there are no enemies in Mutagen that reach even level 30, while Randomizer's and stilltim's testing has documented locks that are in at least the 30s, and probably higher- that is, there are locks that should be giving you 30xp regardless of when you pick them, if it were using the same formula as for monsters, since you actually can't get within 5 levels of them, and there are necessarily more such locks in Mechanics-focused areas and on Mechanics-focused paths. But- and this is subjective, rather than rigorously tested- I found that lockpicking, even in Mechanics-focused areas, stopped being a reliable source of XP in the midgame. That's why I suggested a derived formula capable of accounting for a wider range of level disparity than is necessary for calculating monster XP, although I can't really work out the specifics.

The experience you get from cracking a lock does appear to scale relative to player level, but I don't think it's logical to conclude that it uses the same formula as monster XP does. You get (evidently scaled) XP for lockpicking in the original games, too, and they definitely use the lockpicking formula I posted above, and definitely have locks with levels substantially higher than the player can ever attain. The XP scaling thus has to be more complicated than for monsters, who always have player-comparable levels: it'd have to be something more like "1x XP for picking a lock of greater level than 5x your level, 0.5x XP for picking a lock with a level less than 5x but more than 4x your level," and so on (though I'm not proposing those as the actual figures, just as a general approximation of how it might work). (I imagine that the range of levels each multiplier applies to might change as the player character levels, too, at least in the later games where the player levels faster, and the level cap is much higher. It'd take a lot of testing to figure this out, though.) Rare in the early game, more common in the later game, generally- by the later game, players will generally be more specialized, and the design can afford to be stricter about forcing the player to specialize to be able to take certain routes. (The Geneforge games also often have locks with disproportionately high levels early in the game, as a way of signalling "you should probably try to find the key that opens this lock, or do the quest that gets someone to open it for you... but you can also come back much later and brute-force it if you don't want to do either of those things.") Assuming nothing has changed relative to the original games- and I don't think there's any reason to assume anything has changed, although it's possible- all uses of Mechanics apart from lockpicking are flat pass/fail checks: You need X Mechanics to defuse this mine/deactivate this Power Spiral/disarm this trap/use this console/etc. That said, the Dante's Guile trinket added to Mutagen has an unclear, AFAIK-as-yet-untested effect on operating machinery. It might simply reduce the Mechanics necessary to use certain scripted machinery?

I don't think there's any strong reason to assume the formula has been changed relative to the original games, although I think some locks have been changed to have substantially higher levels, to encourage the player to find the key, if not making it mandatory. If it has been changed, the new mechanics definitely aren't "1 Living Tool = 2 points of Mechanics," given how the number of LTs needed scales relative to your Mechanics and to high-level locks. This... isn't remarkable? Every Geneforge game so far- if not Mutagen- has used the formula I posted above, and every Geneforge game has had locks with levels of, like, 50 or higher. You aren't supposed to get a Mechanics level that high, obviously- the idea is that every character can use Living Tools to crack locks, but that raising your Mechanics skill, in addition to letting you pass other checks, makes the Living Tool economy much less restrictive. A character who doesn't invest much in Mechanics can save up 20 LTs to open a difficult lock that has something they really want behind it, or a character who does invest in Mechanics can spend 5 LTs on the same lock, and use the 15 they've saved elsewhere. This is tricky. You could find out each lock's level accurately by trying to unlock it with 1 Mechanics- but that'd be kind of a pain, and also not necessarily very informative. Just giving a totally subjective, "don't expect to get through here unless you have a high Mechanics," would maybe be better, but wouldn't necessarily be very helpful either. The "requires X LTs at Y points of Mechanics" has blind spots to it, but might be the best compromise, as I think most players can sort of intuitively work out what that means, relative to their own Mechanics score and how many LTs they have.

Your speculated formula is very close, but approaches the problem slightly backwards, because of a little quirk in how the system works. Assuming that Mechanics/Living Tools work by the same rules in Mutagen as they do in the originals- and I haven't seen anything to indicate that they don't- the way it works is this: Each locked lever has a set level. If your Mechanics skill is equal to or greater than the level of a lock, you unlock it without having to expend any Living Tools. If not: ((Lock Level) - (Your Mechanics)) / (Your Mechanics) = Living Tools required, rounded up. Or, put another way, ((Lock Level) / (Your Mechanics)) - 1 = Living Tools required, rounded up. That is, the quirk is that the formula isn't just resolving how many LTs it'll take to reach 0, but rather how many it'll take to get below the moving goalpost of your character's Mechanics value. In the original Geneforge 1, you have to use Living Tools manually, one at a time, which makes these workings a little more obvious, I think, although not explicit- using a LT on a lock reduces its level by a value equal to your Mechanics skill, and you use Tools until the lock is weak enough that you can crack it without using any Tools. In subsequent games, including Mutagen, though, you just use the LTs automatically up-front. (NB, though: the original G1 usually tells you that a lock will take one more LT than it actually does to crack it, because it erroneously calculates how many LTs you would have to use to reduce a lock's level to 0, rather than to a value equal to or less than your Mechanics.)

You need to have spoken to... I forget their name, but one of the Serviles in the same area as you get the gloves and bracer instructs you in how to use the pools. This conversation sets a flag that lets you use the pools- simply having the gloves/bracer isn't enough. Once you know how to use the pools, the item you want to dip just has to be in your possession- it doesn't matter whether you have it equipped or in your pack.

Recently read books: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. Very good. There's so much that's been said about this novel that I don't think there's much I can add to the discourse. I enjoyed it, and especially the sly way Vonnegut works his themes into the text both plot-wise and stylistically. The Isles: A History, by Norman Davies. I think Davies is very possibly a brilliant historian, but in that particularly British way (eg Taylor or Hobsbawm or Trevor-Roper or Carr- Taylor was his mentor) where his idiosyncrasies and biases and iconoclasm are so apparent that it's hard to recommend him broadly. Anyway this is a history of the "British" Isles (deliberately avoiding that term for good reasons). He's excellent at the big sweeping aspects, but sometimes fumbles the details. Memoirs of a Space Traveler, by Stanisław Lem. This is basically just the stories that got cut from the English translation of The Star Diaries, translated by different translators, and then reassembled into this hodgepodge. It's uneven enough that, frankly, removing these stories from The Star Diaries makes it a stronger work, while this is basically a curio, although some of it is great. The Show that Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, by Dave Weigel. A weird misfire. Lots of information, synthesized poorly, with no real thesis or arguments, and little in the way of explanatory power. Disappointing. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. Typically stylistically brilliant and elusive in the standard Calvino way, although I felt that ultimately this might be less than the sum of its parts- there are passages that are gold, and then passages that, while clever, are merely serviceable- in a way that perhaps illustrates why I have thus far preferred his short fiction to his novels. It also gives me a greater appreciation for what Lem means by his backhanded compliment, in A Perfect Vacuum, that Calvino is the artistic descendant of jewelers rather than of sculptors. Currently: A Perfect Vacuum, by Lem. Next up, in some order: His Master's Voice and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot, both also by Lem; The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair; Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut; Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Hope they're good.

If you have the Control Rod, you shouldn't need the Mechanics to disable to machinery in the Power Core- you just need to survive long enough to reach it (there are two things you need to disable, both located in the western half of the map). I don't remember where the crystals are, precisely. The atlas has the crystal in the Power Station as in a box in the central-northwest section of the zone.

Unless this is one of the crystals in question (I don't immediately recall how they're described), then I don't know what it is. I guess it might not be listed if you already gave it to the Mind? By giving him all of his crystals back. It depends on what class you are, but using Essence Shield is helpful here. If you have Creations, I wouldn't recommend attempting the Power Core until you have Mass Restore and can spam that to keep them alive, and either the Control Rod or a high Mechanics (10) so you can disable the machinery that renders the zone dangerous.

There are four stones total. One is in the Power Station- the other three are in the Power Core, to the west of it.

The trick is- as Iguana noted- while you helped the Takers by killing Ellhrah, killing Ellhrah isn't exclusively in the Takers' interests. It also benefits the Obeyers (who have been quietly working to keep the Awakened weak and contained), and it's also something a hardcore loyalist Shaper might do, as the Awakened are all clearly irretrievably rogue. Both the Takers and arch-loyalist Arixy can give you quests to kill Ellhrah (although not simultaneously)- and performing the same action can hardly swing your reputation both ways at once. (You can also kill Ellhrah on your own initiative, purely for the experience and loot from doing so, with no real ideological convictions behind it.) From the Takers' perspective- they want to know, on the one hand, that you're willing to burn bridges with other factions to gain their favor, but also, on the other, that you're sympathetic to their cause, and ideologically reliable, so that you'll be a suitable ally. Freelance homicide doesn't do much to illustrate the latter. Unlike subsequent Geneforge games, it's pretty easy to join each faction in 1 in turn. (It's particularly possible given that which faction you join doesn't limit your options in the endgame, and faction membership has no bearing on the endings.) But doing so requires deliberately gaming the system, and the ability to do so should, I think, be regarded as a "gamey" mechanical thing, which the workings of the game happen to allow for, rather than something that particularly makes sense in-universe.

Learned Darian, in the Peaceful Vale, can enable you to join a sect, regardless of your stated opinions- but he can only do this once. If you've already used this, then you're probably locked out of joining the Takers- opinion-affecting dialogue options are mutually exclusive, and you cannot redo conversations to take the opposite option.