Celebrate this beautiful achievement or complain that it’s too long in here.
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But ACTUALLY I just wanted help with a transmission because I feel like I’m going crazy.
Transmission 303
I feel like this is incredibly simple, it’s just asking me to multiply v * t of the lower bounds and upper bounds.
2353 * 1989715 = 4681799395
2941 * 1989715 = 5851751815
I put this in the syntax
4681799395, 5851751815
both with and without parentheses and get nothing. I’ve like triple checked the math and have no idea what I’m missing. I’m convinced it’s a syntax or formatting problem and not a math or comprehension problem but I don’t see what it could be. Am I missing something obvious?
2 Likes
Yeah the game can be very… specific in what it wants from you.
Smallest nudge: Your math isn’t an issue.
Moderate nudge: So… 4681799395 what exactly?
3 Likes
fuuuuuuuu
I haven’t run into a syntax thing that stumped me like this until now, and it’s so basic. Maybe I was just too tired last night. I should follow Dr Doppler’s advice and get more sleep…
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Transmission 501, another stumper
I understand exactly what it’s telling me, but the syntax of the answer it’s requesting doesn’t make sense to me, mostly because of this statement:
ALIEN : ( LIFE PLANET NUMBER > 1) EXIST DO
Isn’t that exactly what they don’t know? They know there’s 1 planet with life, theirs. They don’t know if there’s more than one, that’s what the whole rest of this message is saying. But there’s no “known” here, so I guess it’s not about knowledge, but then I’m confused. The syntax I know is “subject : object verb do” so the sentence “alien : (x) exist do” seems to read like… alien makes x exist? That doesn’t make sense in the context of the rest of the transmission. I guess I dunno how to deal with intransitive verbs.
So the final paragraph, the one that requires a response, says, IF the aliens know humans exist, then they know life planet number is > 1, therefore… what? Human exists? Earth exists? Life planet > 1? Life planet = 2? None of these answers work. Drs. Collins and Akers, help me
Oh god I think I got stuck on this one for a bit, IMO when the grammar introduces “(” and “)” into things it becomes a bit of a mess.
I will say that the way it is written is odd in exactly the way you think it is and I never really grasped why it was that way. I will add in a general hint I was given that served me well in cases like this, and that is in situations like this it is often (but not always!) the case where you need to echo something in either the current or one of the immediately prior transmissions back at them.
Moderate nudge: One of the answers you tried is very close but is off just slightly.
The answer if you ever just want to know (disguised slightly to hide its rough length): It is probably going to annoy you that the answer is Human Is, but that is what it is.
500 messages is an insanely good run, and I still love this game, but now, for the first time, I will say: I call bullshit on this one.
Someone ended up just telling me the answer for this one FWIW so no argument from me.
Re: 501: in retrospect, it makes more sense when you get the correct translation later of what I had as “exists” in the screenshots, but that’s also the first and only transmission with that term in it until way later and that is a pretty rough way of trying to get you to define it.
I think I changed it later but I had a very similar translation for a long stretch of time, so I think it is what a lot of people get from that initial prompt.
What an ending!
This game is a better game than Project Hail Mary is a movie.
THANK AND GOODBYE
3 Likes
Project hail mary has absolutely nothing interesting to say about its sci fi conceit of communicating with alienkind, of course this game is better
Hilariously I kinda half-missed the intended definition for the last couple frequencies so… the final bit perhaps lacked the punch they intended :\
I think I translated “thanks” as “hugs” because I didn’t know what they meant specifically, worked possibly even better
I definitely wish we lived in the world where in 1973 benevolent aliens gave us the secret to cold fusion. Can I isekai into Message From Deep Space
I’m proud of my dictionary, I think all my definitions ended up being pretty choice, but when I had to sort of creatively name things, proper nouns, I got pretty boring and literal, mostly to avoid confusion in later messages when things got more complex. Anyone wanna compare?
I felt sorry for Akers so I named the aliens Akerians
And I came up with unique terms for limb death and body death that I can’t recall at the moment
What did you name the two main philosophies? I went with holism and particulism
I named their planet Pandora because it made me laugh >_>
My philosophies were named Samers and Differs even though it eventually did not fit as well as I expected by then I was used to them.
Taking a quick peek at my list I don’t think I ever settled on particularly great terms for -138 programmer and particularly -185 kelp
I just named them XT for eXtraTerrestrial… that short form made it easy to name all their stuff. Just XT[whatever]. And their planet was XTerra .
When it came to defining individuals of each species I started with XTguy and so the human version was just Guy… lol.
I refused to use the word “philosophy” to describe the competing ideologies, I named them “cultures” to emphasize the fact that they were social factions, since otherwise we didn’t get any hint of those and I couldn’t think of them as a social monolith. Besides, I had “philosophy” reserved for what the game really really wanted me to call “science” but I refused to give in on that too, because the transmissions made clear that that word was also for mental and moral investigations. It made me happy later on to see phrases like “philosophy of space” and “philosophy of energy” .
Anyway I named the factions symmetrists and specialists to match the words I chose that underlay their ideologies (symmetrical and specialization ). I feel both of your name-pairs get more at their spirits but I liked the underlying words and wanted to keep that linkage clear to keep things consistent in my head.
-138 can’t be programmer because that’s Bautista, not you! I just went with the name I input at the beginning! Although arguably it could just as easily refer to the whole translation team, but I liked the intimacy of one of them talking to one of us.
-185 was tough to pick because there’s no really great analogical earth underwater immobile animal but luckily it didn’t end up being too important. I ended up going with coral but it could have been like urchin or anenome or something. Actually given the later revelations regarding the XTs’ symbiosis I guess anenome would have been a good choice, given their real life symbiosis with clownfish …
Wait… -138 was supposed to be us? I thought it was his partners in making the meteor. Oops…