The demo of Car Mechanic Simulator's latest iteration dropped the other day, and I just tried it out.

It's... well, it's Car Mechanic Simulator, so if you've played any of the previous versions, you know generally what to expect. A lot of the art assets, sound effects, and whatnot are carried over from Car Mechanic Simulator 2018. You do have a new garage, which seems a lot more spacious than the one in CMS 2018 (although you start with everything unlocked in the demo, so I don't know if, for instance, the main room is smaller before you unlock the second car lift, as is the case in CMS 2018). One new wrinkle is that you can actually go outside, which reveals that your shop is actually a complex of buildings along a highway in a desert somewhere. The test path (for testing brakes and suspension) and body/paint shop are separate buildings now, and they've also added a car wash and, as the demo intro movie proudly proclaims, "new dirt mechanics".

Although all of the stuff in the garage is "unlocked" in the demo, in that you can see it, most of it doesn't actually work. Clicking on the car wash, or the welder, or any number of other tools just gives you a dialogue box that says it's not available in the demo. What you do have working access to is just your repair tables (one for mechanical parts, one for body parts), tire mounting and balancing machines, shock absorber assembly tool, a couple of car lifts, the oil drain, and the all-important phone and radio.

Working on the cars themselves works much the same way as it did in the previous game, except for the addition of stuck bolts. Every now and then, you'll get a bolt that's highlighted in orange instead of yellow, and you won't be able to unscrew it. Instead, you have to right-click on it first, which causes a mysterious floating spray can of something that is completely legally distinct from WD-40 to appear and spritz the bolt, after which you can undo it. I'm... not sure this really adds materially to the gameplay, but it's cute.

Balancing wheels and repairing parts have now become minigames. The wheel-balancing minigame is OK (you just have to line up highlighted segments on a wheel diagram with a marker and click a few times), but the part repair one is seriously tedious. It's a timing/reflex game where you have to click when a pointer is in one of a few green areas scattered on a horizontal scale. (I assume skill unlocks in the full game will control how fast the pointer moves or what have you; how big the green areas are seems to be a function of the part's starting condition, the worse the damage, the fewer green boxes you have.) If you miss the green, you make the part's condition worse instead of better. If it's already as bad as it can be, you destroy it entirely.

This probably seemed like a great idea to the person who came up with it--it adds a bit of player challenge to what was, in CMS 2018, purely a function of the character's skill level. I don't like it, though, for two reasons: First, it makes attempting to repair parts take much longer, and second, in games with RPG-like elements, I really dislike mechanics that put the onus on the player's physical attributes rather than the character's. If I buy the full game, and I probably will, I doubt I'll bother trying to repair parts all that often.

Another thing I find mildly annoying in the CMS 2021 demo is the parts catalog. It works more or less the same way as the old one, but they've broken the parts out into more separate "stores" by category, meaning that if, for instance, you're in the main parts catalog but you want electrical parts (like spark plugs or alternators), you have to back up to the home screen and go into the electrical-parts store instead for those. Also, the search bar only works on whatever category you're in--e.g., if you're in the main parts store and have the "brakes" tab open, and you search for "fuel pump", it won't return anything. You have to back out to the "all parts" tab and try again. Search isn't cleared by changing tabs, either, so if you just searched for brake pads and then switch to the gearbox tab to get a clutch plate, it'll still be trying to search the gearbox tab for brake pads. It's a relatively tiny UI change, and maybe if you haven't played hundreds of hours of CMS 2018 like I have, you wouldn't even notice it, but I have, and it's irritating.

Other new stuff:

- Cars now have reservoirs for coolant, brake fluid, power steering fluid, and windshield washer fluid. If you pull relevants parts (for example, the power steering pump or the brake servo) without draining the appropriate reservoir first, you get the same message you got in CMS 2018 if you dropped the oil pan without draining the crankcase, about how you messed up and it'll cost you $50 to clean up the shop. I don't think there's a related part for the windshield washer one, that's just there to give you another maintenance task to do.

- Cars also have electrical systems now! Somewhere in the underhood clutter, there'll be a fuse box, and it has relays and stuff in it. Like air filter bases, the fuse box itself can be bad and need replacing, not just the relays mounted in it.

I assume if you pull a headlight without draining the fuse box first, you'll get electricity all over the floor and have to pay $50 to clean it up.

- One of the demo job cars is filthy, but since the car wash is not available in the demo, I don't know how the mechanic for fixing that works. Presumably you have to send it to the car wash building and then go do something with the hose.

According to the hype in the intro movie, there are a lot more options for painting things once you unlock the paint shop, but again, that's not available in the demo, so we just have to take their word for it for now.

Overall, after the hour or so of gameplay that's in the current demo, I'm not 100% sold on it. Not all of the changes have been improvements in my book. (The repair minigame, for example, or the way the car/job status screen seems a lot clunkier to me now.) Still, there's nothing in it that's so annoying it would make me decide, "Nah, however cool the new features that aren't unlocked yet are, they can't make up for this" and write off the idea of buying it when it's out. Depends on how much they're asking for it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I really dislike mechanics that put the onus on the
>player's physical attributes rather than the character's.

Same. Perhaps you could send them feedback about having an option for switching that off?

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

>>I really dislike mechanics that put the onus on the
>>player's physical attributes rather than the character's.
>
>Same. Perhaps you could send them feedback about having an option for
>switching that off?

It took me a while to find the "feedback to devs" thread in the Steam forum for the game, but when I did, I was amused to find that it was already basically three pages of users going "did you seriously make repairing parts and balancing tires into twitchy minigames?" and one of the devs going "yeah, we're thinking about making them optional, it seems like a lot of you don't like them." :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Remember when people actually beta tested this stuff, instead of just throwing it up on "Early Access" (or not even that, just pretending/selling it as a "finished" game)?

>Remember when people actually beta tested this stuff, instead of just
>throwing it up on "Early Access" (or not even that, just
>pretending/selling it as a "finished" game)?

Uh... yeah, this is a free pre-release demo. Like the first level of DOOM, back in the day. It's not Early Access and the full game isn't out yet.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON May-09-21 AT 10:59 PM (EDT)
 
>>>I really dislike mechanics that put the onus on the
>>>player's physical attributes rather than the character's.
>>
>>Same. Perhaps you could send them feedback about having an option for
>>switching that off?
>
>It took me a while to find the "feedback to devs" thread in the Steam
>forum for the game, but when I did, I was amused to find that it was
>already basically three pages of users going "did you seriously make
>repairing parts and balancing tires into twitchy minigames?" and one
>of the devs going "yeah, we're thinking about making them optional, it
>seems like a lot of you don't like them." :)
>

Well, good. I can't recommend a game if it says "screw you" to people who can't do twitchy minigames Because Medical Reasons.

Peter Eng
--
I watch game design videos. Accessibility is a thing, CMSim people!

>Well, good. I can't recommend a game if it says "screw you" to people
>who can't do twitchy minigames Because Medical Reasons.

In fairness, you don't have to repair parts to progress in the game. You can fit new replacements instead. It's more expensive, but cash flow is not really a problem in the CMS games in my experience. That's what I'm planning to do if they don't fix/make turnoffable the minigames.

(Meanwhile, the one for balancing wheels doesn't have time/twitch pressure in it like the repair one does, it's just "rotate the wheel until the thing lines up and click" a few times. Anyone who can physically manage the core gameplay in the first place should be able to handle that one.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I assume if you pull a headlight without draining the fuse box first,
>you'll get electricity all over the floor and have to pay $50 to clean
>it up.

This reminded me of an old Scrooge McDuck comic where he's in the Western US(could be Klondike) somewhere, around the time of electrification. In a saloon somewhere, the newfangled light bulb breaks and the proprietor calls on the handyman to come sweep up the shards of glass and make sure they don't get electricity all over the floor.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Just a note to say that I randomly noticed this is coming out on Steam this Tuesday. According to what I just read, there will be a 10% launch discount, and owners of a wide range of previous PlayWay games can get a 10% loyalty discount on top of that for the first week (assuming said games are in their Steam library and not on some other platform), for a total of 20% off—although it doesn't say 20% off of what, as the launch price isn't mentioned anywhere.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Aug-15-21 AT 10:46 PM (EDT)
 
I just discovered that it's possible, through a combination of carelessness and what I would contend is a missing gameplay mechanic (as it were), it's possible to screw a customer in this game without meaning to, and bankrupt yourself in the process. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure this would also be possible in CMS 2018, but for whatever reason I never committed the particular act of incompetence that brought it about in the many hours I played that version.

It went down like this: A customer sent in a car for repair that turned out to have a bad crankshaft. Now, in case you're not au courant with how internal combustion engines work, the crankshaft is at the very heart of the engine. It's the shaft that the pistons are attached to, so that as the cylinders fire in sequence they cause it to rotate, and this rotation is what makes absolutely everything else in the car's power train happen.

What this means is that, to get it out and replace it, you have to remove the engine from the car and completely dismantle it. To accomplish that, you have to take off whatever drive mechanism the car has (in this case, it was a front-wheel-drive car, so that means removing the drive shafts and transaxle, or, as they are called in CMS games, the front drive axles and gearbox). By the time you're actually in a position to remove the crankshaft from the engine block, you've taken off pretty much every oily slidey bit the car has and put them all in your inventory.

Another of the gameplay mechanics in the CMS games is that you can sell off the contents of your inventory. After you've been working for a while, you've amassed a huge pile of broken, worn-out scrap parts, and they just clutter up the inventory screen. (I think there's a maximum number of items you can have in there, too, but I've never hit it.) To alleviate this, and make a bit of extra money, you can sell everything in the warehouse by clicking the appropriate button and setting a condition slider (e.g., setting it to "sell all parts with condition less than or equal to 99 percent" will sell everything that isn't absolutely brand new). You don't get anything like as much money as the equivalent new parts are worth, of course. (In fact, you don't get full value back if you sell a new part, if for instance you accidentally bought a part you didn't need. Which is realistic, if nothing else.)

Anyway, I think you can probably see where this was going. I got right to the midpoint of the crankshaft job very late last night and decided to come back and finish it in the morning. When I started the game back up today, I forgot that I was in the middle of a job and decided to start the session off with an inventory cleanout.

And here's the gameplay thing I think should really be there: It didn't stop me from selling parts that weren't mine. Things you've taken off a customer's car just to get them out of the way, but which will have to go back on, are in the same inventory as stuff you bought from the store, leftover broken pieces from previous jobs, and everything else, and the game doesn't flag them as not being your property. So I unthinkingly sold all the customer's running gear for scrap. Transaxle, drive shafts, all the bits of the engine I hadn't put back on, the works.

This meant that to return the customer's car in a complete and running condition, which is the only honorable way to finish a job, I had to buy brand-new replacements for all of those parts, and I haven't been playing long enough to build up the kind of surplus fund balance that would make it possible to eat that kind of loss. I couldn't even afford the gearbox, let alone all the other bits and pieces. After buying what I needed to finish rebuilding the engine, I was damn near broke.

At first, I didn't know what to do, or if there was even anything I could do. The game runs in what strategy gamers know as "ironman" mode, meaning it autosaves and you can't go back. I was about six hours in, so it wouldn't have been the end of the world if I had to wipe the save and start all over, but still, shiiiit.

Ultimately, what I ended up doing was stashing the customer's gutted car out in the yard to free up the garage bay, then very carefully scrutinizing the new jobs coming in and taking only the ones that looked like I could get them done without spending much money. In the new game, you occasionally get seriously penny-ante jobs--I had one that was literally just "refill windshield washer fluid," which, I'm one of the laziest and least handy people I know and even I would not hire a professional mechanic to do that and only that to my car. But it's cheap to do, about $10 worth of fluid, and it makes a small profit.

Earning $20 at a time is a slow way to make a couple of grand, which is what I needed to unfuck the crankshaft job's car, but at least as I built up more of an overhead, I could take more ambitious jobs and start making cash faster. Although there was peril in that, too, because the game doesn't always tell you exactly what's wrong with the car before you take the job. Someone comes in with a car that needs brake work, you think Hell yeah, brake parts are cheap, let's go, and then it turns out one of the things they need is a $950 ABS pump and oh nooooooo.

It was touch and go for a while, but I did eventually manage it. I'm not entirely sure, since the bills aren't itemized, but I think the game was able to take into account the fact that the crankshaft car didn't actually need a replacement gearbox and didn't bill the customer for it, because cash flow was still tight for a few jobs after I finally got that car back to its owner.

The whole incident was a surprising disruption to a style of game that can be pretty routine after a while, and it reminded me of something I think I said in the CMS 2018 thread. Namely, I think it would be cool if the game had a more detailed, RPG-like "career mode" available, where you could choose whether to be an Honest Mechanic or screw people over, with a reputation system of some sort to give those decisions consequences. Such a system would have made an incident like that even more tense, but with the right RP mechanisms in place, it would've been possible to play it so that your shop comes out of it poorer, but with reputation enhanced, which would be kinda neat.

TLDR: I fucked up and sold a bunch of parts I contend the game shouldn't have let me sell, and nearly made my save unsalvageable and had to restart, but was barely able to squeak through with some strategic job selection.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>The whole incident was a surprising disruption to a style of game that
>can be pretty routine after a while, and it reminded me of something I
>think I said in the CMS 2018 thread. Namely, I think it would be cool
>if the game had a more detailed, RPG-like "career mode" available,
>where you could choose whether to be an Honest Mechanic or screw
>people over, with a reputation system of some sort to give those
>decisions consequences. Such a system would have made an incident
>like that even more tense, but with the right RP mechanisms in place,
>it would've been possible to play it so that your shop comes out of it
>poorer, but with reputation enhanced, which would be kinda neat.

Give a little "Charisma" skill that lets you BS customers into believing that you didn't just hock the bulk of their drive train for scrap metal prices and you're just waiting on parts to come in from your supplier. Might be a couple weeks, we'll give you a call when we have them.

One of the new things that's been added in CMS 2021 is the ability to add a car wash to your garage complex. In CMS 2018, cars couldn't be dirty, but you could buy a piece of equipment that enabled you to spend a nominal amount of money (I think it was $100) to detail the car, which restored the interior textures that weren't replaceable parts to 100% condition (the converse of using the Welder to restore the car's frame condition to 100%).

In the new game, the detailing kit is part of the car wash, along with a pressure washer, and washing a car and detailing the interior are free. Which is nice. A little bonus service for the (theoretical, never-seen) customers. Presumably it'll be a bit handier when the time arrives that I'm buying and restoring my own cars.

Also, the new game has electric cars in it. These belong to made-up brands and are Legally Distinct from real-world models, in the same way that, say, the Salem GW 500 is totally not a late-model Ford Fiesta. I think, in order to capture the proper experience of being a small, independent shop being asked to repair an electric car, the devs should have made it so you couldn't buy parts for them from the store, but had to use some kind of sketchy-ass grey market where everything costs a damn fortune and may or may not arrive in 100% condition.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I think, in order to capture the proper experience of
>being a small, independent shop being asked to repair an electric car,
>the devs should have made it so you couldn't buy parts for them from
>the store, but had to use some kind of sketchy-ass grey market where
>everything costs a damn fortune and may or may not arrive in 100%
>condition.

"Oops! We're sorry, we don't have that in stock. Please speak to our associate, the guy in this back alley who smells pervasively and specifically of elderly pigeons. He will give you some nails and string. It will help. Do not question it. Do not question him. Do not question why the string is wet. Do not question why the car runs better. He offers a discount for anyone who will eat bird seed with him. Pigeon Man frightens us. He will frighten you too."
-- Definitely-Not-Tesla Automotive Parts Department

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

... Was this recorded at the Tesla dealership in Night Vale?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The Hierarchy of Angels has forbade passing comment on their electric vehicle purchases.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

When Arthur C. Clarke famously said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", he failed to elaborate that it meant said technology would be mysterious in function, unfathomable in construction, and require ministration from acolytes who understood the arcana of its function.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

>When Arthur C. Clarke famously said "Any sufficiently advanced
>technology is indistinguishable from magic.", he failed to elaborate
>that it meant said technology would be mysterious in function,
>unfathomable in construction, and require ministration from acolytes
>who understood the arcana of its function.

Having just recently rewatched the Lewis & Ben Save the World streams of Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, I feel like there's an Omnissiah reference to be made here, but I'm not in tune enough with the franchise to make it. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The best way to explain the Omnissiah is like this; take a crotchety old truck that never wants to start, so you have an almost-superstitious ritual of tweaking the choke just so, jiggle the key a certain way to get it to slot in all the way, and then step on the gas exactly 4 times as you crank the motor in order to get it to fire up. In the 40k universe, the Omnissiah is the force you're placating with that ritual, and if you don't, the capital-m Machine will not obey you.

tl;dr- all machines in 40k act like printers.

There's a bunch more behind the Omnissiah / AdMech storywise, but that would be getting wayyy off track

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

LAST EDITED ON Aug-17-21 AT 00:33 AM (EDT)
 
>tl;dr- all machines in 40k act like printers.

I gathered from L&B's capsule summary when they started playing the game that this was the case. They presented the backstory as essentially a heavy metal album cover take on A Canticle for Leibowitz. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

So I picked up CMS 2021 yesterday and have a few observations from my own play in the first couple hours:

- The new reservoir mechanic (brake, power steering, radiator, wiper fluid) is neat in that it gives you more of that realism I remember fans of the previous games complaining was missing (though there's still no pipes or wires). My only gripe is that the view of the fill markings gets obscured in some vehicle bays, forcing me to either pull off parts or just guesstimate.

- Speaking of realism, I like the idea that you're this young aspiring mechanic who's set up shop in an old gas station, if only because it teases you with possibilities from the start. When you get in the door the first time, you find an old bus and a bunch of junk sitting atop what is obviously the spot for a second lift, instead of starting in a "hole-in-the-wall" shop that seemingly balloons out whenever you buy an expansion.

- I both love and hate the examination system now. It groups parts into subsections (ex: engine, suspension, exhaust) that you only have to click and hold the mouse button until it examines all the parts in that section. But unlike CMS 2018, there are certain parts that aren't in those sections and you can't just examine them individually without just ripping them off the car itself. Found that out when the second story car had four items listed as "unknown" and didn't become obvious until I moved on from the engine to the brake work.

- And this last observation isn't unique to CMS 2021, but one of the drawbacks I've noticed over the years for simulator sequels is that if you got pretty comfortable in the old game after unlocking most/all of the upgrades and features, then it can feel like a real chore starting all the way back at the beginning. The good games can make that initial grind seem worth it, while the bad ones can frustrate you to the point of quitting. 2021 is similar enough to 2018 that my major gripe right now is getting up the skill tree again so unbolting things isn't such a chore, but I'm still only taking off bad parts and slapping on new ones. I've still got a bit before I'm deciding whether to restore a car or scavenge it for parts.

If you're on the fence about picking up this game, I'd say it's worth at least checking to see if the demo's still available and giving that a go. If you don't like it, then I wouldn't recommend getting the full game. But if you like what you see and want more of it, then $30 isn't too much of an ask for a good time killer. And if you already played 2018 and want more of it but with some improvements, then grab it while it's still on sale.

>- The new reservoir mechanic (brake, power steering, radiator, wiper
>fluid) is neat in that it gives you more of that realism I remember
>fans of the previous games complaining was missing (though there's
>still no pipes or wires). My only gripe is that the view of the fill
>markings gets obscured in some vehicle bays, forcing me to either pull
>off parts or just guesstimate.

When you're filling up a fluid, watch for the bottle to tilt down closer to the the horizontal. When you see it do that, you can stop--it'll be full enough for the game's purposes, unless your reaction time is significantly faster than mine.

>- Speaking of realism, I like the idea that you're this young aspiring
>mechanic who's set up shop in an old gas station, if only because it
>teases you with possibilities from the start. When you get in the
>door the first time, you find an old bus and a bunch of junk sitting
>atop what is obviously the spot for a second lift, instead of starting
>in a "hole-in-the-wall" shop that seemingly balloons out whenever you
>buy an expansion.

Agreed! It's also nice to be able to go outside (and you can go around back and speculate about what those other building sites are for). Judging from the sign out front, you seem to be somewhere on the hot-and-dusty part of old U.S. 66. I think probably New Mexico. :)

>- And this last observation isn't unique to CMS 2021, but one of the
>drawbacks I've noticed over the years for simulator sequels is that if
>you got pretty comfortable in the old game after unlocking most/all of
>the upgrades and features, then it can feel like a real chore starting
>all the way back at the beginning.

Mm. This is one of the main reasons why I haven't started a new save in Stardew Valley, even though I've accomplished pretty much everything there is to do in the old one. I don't know if I could handle going back to being as bad at everything as your dude in that game is at the beginning. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

RE: Stardew Valley, if you’re comfortable using a mod, I’m reasonably certain there’s one that’ll unlock all of the basic skills, but maybe that would also defeat much of the purpose of a new save?

>RE: Stardew Valley, if you’re comfortable using a mod, I’m
>reasonably certain there’s one that’ll unlock all of the basic
>skills, but maybe that would also defeat much of the purpose of a new
>save?

I don't think there are mods for the Switch version.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ahhh, Switch, no, no there aren’t, I assumed PC.

>I don't think there are mods for the Switch version.

I don't know if there are or not, but it wouldn't be unprecedented; I know people have modded Breath of the Wild on switch.

It requires custom firmware though, which is a whole series of adventures.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

>When you're filling up a fluid, watch for the bottle to tilt down
>closer to the the horizontal. When you see it do that, you can
>stop--it'll be full enough for the game's purposes, unless your
>reaction time is significantly faster than mine.

Yeah, I realized that that was the route to go when I pulled the dipstick on the oil for the first time after my previous post and realized that "bottle goes horizontal" roughly translates to "smack bang in the middle."

>Agreed! It's also nice to be able to go outside (and you can go
>around back and speculate about what those other building sites are
>for). Judging from the sign out front, you seem to be somewhere on
>the hot-and-dusty part of old U.S. 66. I think probably New Mexico.
>:)

I can only assume that I'm just that awesome a mechanic that my reputation alone brings people out to the-middle-of-nowhere to get their cars fixed, especially considering the number of junkers that keep appearing on my jobs queue. That tow truck outside is probably due for its own overhaul with the amount of usage it's seeing day to day.

>Mm. This is one of the main reasons why I haven't started a new save
>in Stardew Valley, even though I've accomplished pretty much
>everything there is to do in the old one. I don't know if I could
>handle going back to being as bad at everything as your dude in that
>game is at the beginning. :)

Yeah, I just checked my Steam timeline and found that I haven't touched the game myself since April of last year, which is sort of an indication of how much of a hell my life's been the last 18+ months. Long story short, between COVID, changes in management, changes in ownership, staff shortages, and veritable hordes of mouth-breathing morons ignoring all basic survival instincts, I've had little free time to do much beyond catching up with the waking world in-between work shifts. I think the only thing that's kept me (relatively) sane is mobile games, which I keep meaning to do write-ups for since I think folks here would find them interesting. Amusingly, CMS 2021 has been the first game in months able to actually peel me away from my iPad for longer than an hour.

>Balancing wheels and repairing parts have now become minigames. The
>wheel-balancing minigame is OK (you just have to line up highlighted
>segments on a wheel diagram with a marker and click a few times), but
>the part repair one is seriously tedious.

Now that I've been playing the full version of the game for a while, my attitude toward the part repair minigame has softened somewhat. I still disagree with the idea of structuring checks around player ability in a game with RPG-style character skills, but the minigame itself seems substantially less annoying in the finished game than I remember it from the demo. For one thing, in addition to the red "failure" and green "success" spaces, there are now grey spaces in the bar the pointer slides across. If you hit one of those, you spend a little money on the attempted repair, but nothing else happens. I don't remember the "neutral" spaces from the demo. For another, the way they structured the skill tree, buying levels in the repair skill does two things: it unlocks different tiers of parts you can attempt to repair (for instance, at level 5 you unlock the ability to repair fiddly components like fuel injection rails), and it increases the chance that you'll completely repair a part with a single success.

Under the old system, you just got a flat "chance to repair" with each repair skill upgrade, and all you could do was click on the part. The RNG would then determine whether you improved its condition or instantly ruined it. Now, each time you hit a green bar, you'll either fix it a bit or fix it completely, while hitting a red only ruins the part outright if it's already in very poor condition. I haven't done the math, but the upshot seems to be that even with my old-man reflexes, I have a better success rate (with fully upgraded repair skill) in CMS 2021 than I did in CMS 2018, and trying it is more interesting.

Besides, if you really can't be bothered with it, by the time you're skilled up enough that it's worth trying to repair parts, you should have enough money that you don't really need to fix them anyway. You can just buy all new ones. I like to try to salvage as much of my own barn-find and junkyard salvage cars as possible for RP purposes, but in practical terms, apart from costing more, buying all new parts has no in-game effect that I've noticed.

TLDR: I still think it would be nice if they had included a way to shut off the repair minigame, as one of the devs noted in the Steam discussions on the demo that they were considering, and just go back to the 2018 system if desired, so that players would still have at least a chance of repairing parts if they can't be arsed to play the minigame, but the minigame itself isn't so bad.

(Also, now that I've gotten good at the tire balancing minigame, I can mount and balance a set of four tires way faster in the new game. People defended the balancing minigame as something to fill the time that used to be spent just sitting around waiting for the balancer to work automatically, and it is that, but it's also much faster once you get the hang of it.)

Oddly, there still is one "automatic repair" tool in the game: you can buy a brake lathe for your repair shop, and it works completely on its own, like the tire balancer in CMS 2018 did. You just put a brake disc on it and wait for it to stop animating, then take a fixed brake disc off. No minigame.

Finally, here's a strange thing I noticed earlier. When the game came out, the confirmation dialogue that came up when you clicked on the pressure washer in the car wash asked, "Do you wanna wash this car?" A tiny update dropped quietly on Steam today, and now it says, "Do you want to wash this car?" I guess someone didn't like the informality of the original wording. :)

(I don't know why the car wash and detailer even have confirmation dialogues, to be honest. Neither costs money to use, and I doubt any customer is ever going to complain that the car came back too clean.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>TLDR: I still think it would be nice if they had included a way to
>shut off the repair minigame, as one of the devs noted in the Steam
>discussions on the demo that they were considering, and just go back
>to the 2018 system if desired, so that players would still have at
>least a chance of repairing parts if they can't be arsed to play the
>minigame, but the minigame itself isn't so bad.

I kinda prefer the minigame to the the CMS 2018 system because I find I'm repairing most everything repairable and most of my misses were really only when I first unlocked the table. By contrast, having a lot of valuable scrap end up junked because I failed to make the proper prayers and offerings to the RNGod could ruin an entire play session.

>(Also, now that I've gotten good at the tire balancing minigame, I can
>mount and balance a set of four tires way faster in the new
>game. People defended the balancing minigame as something to fill the
>time that used to be spent just sitting around waiting for the
>balancer to work automatically, and it is that, but it's also much
>faster once you get the hang of it.)

I honestly haven't messed with that minigame much, which I think has to do with the game mechanics not thinking that people would want to have their tires rotated and balanced along with an oil change.

>Oddly, there still is one "automatic repair" tool in the game: you can
>buy a brake lathe for your repair shop, and it works completely on its
>own, like the tire balancer in CMS 2018 did. You just put a brake
>disc on it and wait for it to stop animating, then take a fixed brake
>disc off. No minigame.

Technically two, since there's still the battery charger which costs you $550 despite most RL examples costing half or less than that. But I do like the lathe because it's a 100% guarantee that if a brake disc/drum is at least in the orange, then I can reuse it for free. IIRC, in 2018 you could try at the repair table, but RNGesus might punish you for your sins by making you buy a full set for what otherwise could have a $5 repair.

>(I don't know why the car wash and detailer even have
>confirmation dialogues, to be honest. Neither costs money to use, and
>I doubt any customer is ever going to complain that the car came back
>too clean.)

Nah, the real mystery is why does it cost you nothing to detail a car in the car wash shack, but still costs $100 if you detail it while it's on the lift?

>I honestly haven't messed with that minigame much, which I think has
>to do with the game mechanics not thinking that people would want to
>have their tires rotated and balanced along with an oil change.

Occasionally you'll get a mission in which a car needs a set of new tires, but I'm using the tire tools a lot mainly because as soon as I could afford it, I mostly stopped taking random jobs and switched to flipping junkers. They always need new tires, and often new wheels, so I routinely have to mount and balance an entire set of four at once.

>Technically two, since there's still the battery charger which costs
>you $550 despite most RL examples costing half or less than that.

I noticed that in CMS 2021, they stopped having a configurable unit of currency and just set everything to cost "credits", which I assume is mostly to explain away that kind of thing--and to avoid the extra hassle of programming the game to take differences in currencies into account. This can be a problem sometimes--for instance, in early beta, the default unit of currency in King of Retail was the Danish krone, which trades at around 7½ kroner per Euro, but if you changed the unit the game was using, it just changed the symbol without recalculating the value, so suddenly you had a bottle of bleach going for $80 or whatever.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The other day, just as I was wrapping up a play session, I decided on a whim to check the available jobs. I don't do many of those any more, having gone over almost entirely to restoring cars from the junkyard and the salvage auction. (This will turn out to be important.) One of the available jobs was a Morena Bizzarini (one of the game's fictional cars, which in this case is Totally Not a Lamborghini Diablo) that needed some engine work.

When it arrived, it was in appalling condition, as the "job" cars often are. The job was one of those "repair with parts of minimum condition: 30%" ones, where the customer clearly doesn't really give a shit as long as it runs. I decided not to tackle it then, saved, and quit the game.

The next time I played, I forgot that the Bizzarini in Bay 1 was a customer car with a specific list of things that needed fixing. Instead, I blithely went ahead and did what I would normally do with a junker: I completely restored it to 4×100 (that is, 100% condition in all four categories the "Car Status" screen measures, Body, Interior, Frame, and Parts). To do that you have to tear the car down until you're working on individual automobilium atoms, refurbish all the parts that are refurbishable, buy replacements for all the parts that aren't, and then put it all back together. For an exotic like a Bizzarini, it costs thousands upon thousands of credits to 4×100 a badly deteriorated car, and that doesn't even allow for the hundreds of man-hours of labor such an undertaking would represent in the real world.

Fortunately, CMS2021's "job" system isn't sophisticated enough to have things like, you know, customer expectations. I haven't tested this scientifically, but I suspect the payment for the job is set at the beginning and doesn't take into account how long it takes you, or whether you buy parts you didn't need, et cetera, so I just ended up taking a huge loss on the mission rather than randomly presenting a customer who was expecting an oil change and a replacement exhaust manifold with a $100,000 invoice for the complete museum-quality restoration of his long-neglected supercar. And since I've been doing really lucrative things like restoring and reselling junked classics and supercars* for quite a while now, I have a fund balance built up in-game that can absorb that sort of thing easily. So, no actual consequences.

Still, it's pretty funny to imagine the owner's reaction. "That... that's not my car, is it?" "Yeah, sorry, I got a little carried away." :)

Hell, I can afford it, maybe I'll just start taking occasional jobs and doing them that way on purpose, like some kind of car mechanic Secret Santa.

Oh yeah, also, a while back CdrMike said:
>Nah, the real mystery is why does it cost you nothing to detail a car
>in the car wash shack, but still costs $100 if you detail it while
>it's on the lift?

They fixed that! (Possibly at the same time they added the window tinting cart, which I almost never remember to use.) Detailing the interior is free in both places you can do it now.

--G.
* I have restored more Pagani Zonda Revoluciónes than were actually made IRL
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Still, it's pretty funny to imagine the owner's reaction. "That...
>that's not my car, is it?" "Yeah, sorry, I got a little carried
>away." :)
>
>Hell, I can afford it, maybe I'll just start taking occasional jobs
>and doing them that way on purpose, like some kind of car mechanic
>Secret Santa.

This is one of those things I can imagine happening in New Avalon. Some, mechanic in it for love rather than money just utterly rebuilding people's junkers.

>This is one of those things I can imagine happening in New Avalon.
>Some, mechanic in it for love rather than money just utterly
>rebuilding people's junkers.

Heh, yeah. It'd have to be someplace that doesn't advertise--people just stumble across it serendipitously (or seem to, anyway) when they have the greatest need.

As an experiment, I took a job to do some minor engine and exhaust work on a truly bedraggled Bolt Cargo (which is Legally Distinct from an '80s Chevy Econoline), minimum repair condition 40 percent, and totally restored the whole vehicle to factory new stock condition (i.e., standard tires and no performance/tuning parts). The overhaul cost me a total of cr12,548, including new tires, but since I was able to repair all of the body panels I didn't have to repaint the van (that would've been another cr1,000). When I returned it, I got paid cr4,591, which seems like more than just doing the minimum required for the job would have earned, but is quite a lot less than my actual cost for the work, so while my hypothesis that it's a predetermined reward seems to be wrong, it's still unclear to me how the game calculates the payoff for customer jobs.

In retrospect, probably what I should have done was take the job, save the game, do the minimum required on the job and see what it paid, then quit without saving, reload, and 100% the van to see what the difference was. Maybe I'll do that with some other vehicle later on and see what happens. It's of no importance, but I'm curious.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>In retrospect, probably what I should have done was take the job, save
>the game, do the minimum required on the job and see what it paid,
>then quit without saving, reload, and 100% the van to see what the
>difference was. Maybe I'll do that with some other vehicle later on
>and see what happens. It's of no importance, but I'm curious.

Also grab it, stick it in storage for several months, equivalent, and see if that makes any difference compared to just doing it and handing it back, I would think would be interesting.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

>Also grab it, stick it in storage for several months, equivalent, and
>see if that makes any difference compared to just doing it and handing
>it back, I would think would be interesting.

There's no time as such in the game, so I don't think that would do anything, other than tie up one of the spots in the driveway (you can't send a car you don't own to storage).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>Still, it's pretty funny to imagine the owner's reaction. "That...
>>that's not my car, is it?" "Yeah, sorry, I got a little carried
>>away." :)
>>
>>Hell, I can afford it, maybe I'll just start taking occasional jobs
>>and doing them that way on purpose, like some kind of car mechanic
>>Secret Santa.
>
>This is one of those things I can imagine happening in New Avalon.
>Some, mechanic in it for love rather than money just utterly
>rebuilding people's junkers.

Wasn't that a gag in a cyberpunk novel (possibly HEAD CRASH by Bruce Bethke)?

I vaguely recall the protagonist leaving his car in a poor neighborhood, and when he got back to it, someone had broken in and installed a better radio out of pity.