Biahoihanoi

A player has already managed to reach peak medieval suburbia in Manor Lords, with an outrageous population of 3,220 residents and just one market to sustain everyone, and somehow, it’s all working out well. 

Reddit user desman2k6 posted a screenshot of just a section of their Manor Lords metropolis to r/ManorLords. “The aim here was not to build beautifully, but to push the game to the limit,” desman2k6 says in the thread. “In the end, the bottleneck will be the food and the trading post because they are not replenished quickly enough!” 

It’s incredibly impressive to have a Manor Lords town with over 3,000 residents, especially with all the problems we’ve previously seen with trader traffic and harsh export and import prices. Feeding and organising a town of this s…

Good news for anyone who won’t be watching the Hemsworth-helmed Witcher Netflix show: Author Andrzej Sapkowski has confirmed that he’s working on a new book in the original series, and he thinks it’ll be ready soon. No word yet on whether it will be suitable for Americans and young people.

In an interview with the fantasy writers over at Ukrainian YouTube channel Fantastic Talks (translated by Witcher fansite Redanian Intelligence), Sapkowski revealed that he is “quite diligently” working on a new book in the Witcher series and that it “may take a year, but no longer”. As someone who continues to wait stoically for the arrival of The Winds of Winter, I have no idea how to process this kind of accelerated time frame, but I’m glad at least one fantasy audience out there is eating we…

There’s now a Starfield mod that puts the in-game terminals in “dark mode,” with light text on a dark gray background, just like the many official and unofficial “dark modes” we use in browsers and other applications. 

I assume that people are still hacking unofficial dark modes into software in the year 2330, when Starfield takes place, which means it’s reasonable to imagine that Dark Mode for Terminals creator Animandan could be a character in Starfield—hanging out in Neon, perhaps, making their next terminal plug-in on a dark screen.

Animandan says they’ve even made an effort to keep their terminal colors Web Content Accessibility Guidelines compliant. Assuming those haven’t changed in 300 years, that makes the mod even more realistic.

The Dark Mode for T…

Brace yourselves, Star Wars fans: A new trailer for Ubisoft’s upcoming Star Wars Outlaws is set to debut on April 9.

Ubisoft described the reveal as the “story trailer world premiere,” which is interesting because a world premiere trailer that provided at least the outlines of the story rolled out in 2023: Kay Vess, scoundrel, freighter-owner, friend to furry creatures who don’t speak English, finds herself entangled in the war between the Empire and the Rebellion as she seeks to dig her way out of a bad situation. Sounds a little familiar? Hey, it’s Star Wars.

The new trailer will presumably offer a little more clarity about exactly how Kay ends up in whatever trouble is chasing her, who she’ll be dealing with on her adventures, why people in the cantina are shooting at her…

Can’t work out how to build the Research Institute in Frostpunk 2? After you survive the prologue and its whiteout, you’ll find yourself back in cheery New London. However, all is not well, and the city is currently experiencing a period of turbulence as coal stocks diminish and the weather is getting worse.

Your initial objective will be to construct a Research Institute to investigate more ways of producing fuel and making what little coal there is last. That’s easier said than done, though. Here I’ll explain how to build the Research Institute and progress the story.

How to build a Research Institute

China might finally be relaxing its tech crackdown, but the government isn’t stepping away from the sector entirely. Rather than the strict approach that saw Alibaba fined billions, tech CEO Jack Ma temporarily disappear from the public eye, and game approvals slow to a trickle, the Financial Times reports that the government is switching tack, and moving to take “special management shares”—or “golden shares”—in many of China’s leading tech companies, including Tencent.

These golden shares are relatively tiny—around 1% ordinarily—but confer rights over particular business decisions and appointments made at the companies in which they’re taken. The golden share that the government is hoping to take in Tencent is still being discussed, but sources spoken to b…

Watch On

The AI arms race is heating up. Adobe is bringing its generative art tool, Firefly, to Google Bard. This will allow Google’s experimental chatbot to generate images based on user prompts, much like OpenAI’s Dall-E tool. 

Adobe Firefly’s beta launched in March. Aside from being your typical text-to-image generator, it allows users to edit images on the fly. Also coming to Bard is Adobe Express, a free photo editing software that’s popular among mobile users because it comes with pre-made design templates you can use to make social posts.

This means that you can generate an image from text with Google Bard, then edit and save it in one place. According to the press release, Firefly will become the “premier generative AI partner for Bard, powering and highlighting text-to…

Destiny 2 is getting pretty generous in the run-up to The Final Shape. Alongside Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, and Witch Queen becoming free to everyone for a month, we also now have a new easy way to unlock seasonal weapons from this year for crafting. Unless you’re a pretty active player, it’s likely you haven’t unlocked every single gun from the seasons of Defiance, Deep, Witch, and Wish. It’s a total of 24 weapons, and though some have been edged out of the meta in terms of perks, there are still a lot of decent guns.

If you’re a new player, it’s a fantastic opportunity to get a truckload of craftable weapons, and it’s a bit of a steal considering you previously had to earn these through a lot of seasonal activities, or one weekly deepsight weapon at a time through the seas…

Skytech’s prebuilt gaming PCs often hit us right where we like them to: in the easy-on-the-wallet market segment for mainstream PC gamers. None of this “spend an extra $500 for more RGB” nonsense. Just solid value budget and mid-range builds.

This RTX 4070 Super Skytech Shadow gaming PC is one such build. It’s currently $1,350 on Newegg, that’s $550 (28%) off. And make no mistake, this machine’s RTX 4070 Super is definitely its primary selling point for this price. 

The RTX 4070 was already a decent graphics card for 1440p and even some 4K gaming, but the RTX 4070 Super solidified its place in the midrange to high-end GPU market. This graphics card had the biggest boost to its CUDA core count out of all the Super cards that launched this year, up from 5,888 to 7,168.&nb…

Nine months ago, we reported a problem with SD cards being ruined by the ROG Ally handheld gaming PC. Back then, Asus said that heat was the issue and released a BIOS update to adjust the fan speeds. How successful that fix was is unclear but Asus has now announced a 12-month warranty extension for the device’s SD card reader, which suggests all is still not well.

News of the change (via Notebookcheck) hasn’t been overly well received, with a fair number of negative comments on social media. The main focus of the ire is the fact that the extension only applies to customers in the US and that Asus is claiming that “a small number of SD card readers…may not perform as expected.”

Under dispute is the ‘small number’ part, though exactly how many customers have experienced…

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors, broadcast journalists, hosts, voice actors, and other media professionals in the US, has voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike against videogame companies including Activision, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Take-Two Interactive. The vote does not mean that a strike will be called, but the union hopes it will provide “added leverage” in its negotiations for a new Interactive Media Agreement.

The terms of the current Interactive Media Agreement were reached in 2017 following a nearly year-long strike by voice actors. That deal was set to expire in 2020, but was eventually extended until November 2022. 

Negotiations for an updated agreement have been underway since October 2022, but SAG-AFTRA said signatory game companies “…

Need a hint for today’s Wordle? Then you’ve come to the right place. Scroll a little way down the page, and you’ll find a fresh clue to help with the March 15 (634) puzzle, and if you’re still stuck, the answer’s waiting just below that. 

Is there anything more cruel than carefully narrowing down the possibilities, entering what you’re sure is going to be the winning guess, and then seeing four, not five, letters turn green? I was in no danger of losing today’s Wordle because of this mis-guess, but it was frustrating to see it take an avoidable extra go. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, March 15

The most common use of today’s answer is to describe the act of brushing a floor (or a chimney) to remove dirt and k…