Starbound is a 2D exploration and building game currently in development. Yes, yes, it’s like Minecraft, except 2D, and with actual art, and fun.

A recent update added wiring (or perhaps upgraded it into being useful?), which lets you wire anything into anything. A notable feature of Starbound’s wiring over Terraria’s or Minecraft’s is that logic gates are actual objects, not emergent behavior. So you don’t have to build everything out of goddamn NANDs. Also, the wires aren’t physical objects; they’re just straight lines connecting an input to an output, they take up no space in the world, they don’t participate in any form of collision detection, and they appear on a separate layer that you only see when you’re using the wiring tool.

There’s not a whole lot you can do with the wiring in Starbound yet. The devices you can control are, for the most part, lights and doors. Other players can just destroy anything you build, anyway. So it’s really only useful for visual effect right now, much like everything else you can build.

Still, there are a couple mechanisms of interest. Last night I built an airlock, and while it’s not an astounding feat of electrical engineering, I thought it was an interesting enough problem that someone else might enjoy reading about it. So here I am, blogging for once. I hope you’re happy.

Mel lives here now, and I want to spend time with her whenever I can, naturally. This is something I’ve never had in my life before, and it presents something of a complication.

Weeknights consist of an eight-hour solid block of free time. I’d usually spend half of that doing absolutely nothing, another hour or two trying to pick up my last-known-state for whatever I wanted to work on, and then finally get a couple hours of actual “work” done. It was hardly efficient, but it kinda worked. And this was all a single workflow, to me; the hours of time-passing made for some irrational mental preparation for sitting down and doing something.

Now, though, I don’t have solid eight-hour blocks; I’m instead affected by a regular human being’s schedule, which includes going out or talking or eating or what-have-you in the middle of the evening. That free time is now carved into multiple smaller chunks of a few hours each. For most people, that wouldn’t make any difference, but for me those chunks are almost entirely consumed by the time-wasting that would lead up to a context switch.

So, I’m having to learn very quickly to knock this crap off, or I just won’t get any work done on anything. Frustrating in the short term, but certainly beats the… system I had going before.