Hope - full sentience

[N8Raid]

Interested in playing modded endlessgames, my question is: will hope reach full sentience no matter what im doing or is there any way to prevent her from doing this so that i can play endlessly on the guardian scenario?

I really do love the robotic enemies, its so sad that they only appear in this scneario

[76561199056944839]

Hey N8Raid!

Hope's sentience will increase when she does Research and Observation tasks, so keeping her away from those will keep her Sentience from going up. That's one way for you to prolong the scenario, if you want to.

[CobraPLCH]

So what if I did all the observation and reasearch tasks, and she is not sentient yet? how can I finish the game?

[76561199056944839]

Originally posted by CobraPLCH:

So what if I did all the observation and reasearch tasks, and she is not sentient yet? how can I finish the game?

There are certain Balloon Expeditions that will let her increase her Intelligence. You can also use the VR Machine to help train/increase her intelligence.

[Jarcionek]

Originally posted by JensErik_Frontier:

There are certain Balloon Expeditions that will let her increase her Intelligence.

You are talking about Tachyon Source, which sometimes ends up being an Alien Learning Machine, right? I am afraid it's bugged. I have used it to get Hope's Intellect from level 9 to 10, her Sentience reached 100%, and nothing happened. No victory, no Steam achievements ("Teaching Peace" for maxing her Intellect while being incapable of Combat, "Saving Hope" for just finishing the scenario, and in my case "Roll with the punches" for completing the scenario on Hard difficulty).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094443998

Originally posted by JensErik_Frontier:

You can also use the VR Machine to help train/increase her intelligence.

VR Machine cannot increase Intellect. There are six games that increase the following skills:

• FPS - Combat
  
• City Builder - Construction
  
• Cooking Simulator - Cooking
  
• Survival - Crafting
  
• Farm Manager - Farming
  
• Hospital Simulator - Healing

The only thing that can increase the Intellect is musical instrument.


This whole scenario is terrible and comes down to constant micromanagement of a single character. Unused skills decrease while the character is sleeping, while letting her do Research only results in -15 happiness for "Not enough tasks" and -9 for "Few fun things to do". Unhappiness leads to Meltdown which greatly decreases all skills... Add to it permanent damage from consecutive lightnings, which I didn't know was incurable, that gives permanent -18 happiness for "Acute pain"... I got to the point where my base is so big and I have so many Bots and Drones that my computer is struggling to handle it :/

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Jarcionek:

The only thing that can increase the Intellect is musical instrument.

Note quite true, the Arcade machine also raises intellect. Not the VR machine, the upright, old-fashioned style Arcade machine.

If you haven't yet gotten 10 breakthrough technologies on the save, you can also run explore expeditions over and over trying to unlock more so that you have more to research with Hope.

Every exploration has a chance of giving the result that unlocks another breakthrough tech. It's limited though and will not show up once you have 10 total unhidden breakthroughs (including ones you have already researched).

You also have the option of raising her sentience with a skill other than intellect. Whichever choice you made for "database" is a skill that will also give her sentience (and intellect xp). No researching required. To keep her happiest, the best thing to do is to have her do a mix of both researching and that other skill, every single day.

If you're open to using mods, my Taskmaster mod makes it very easy to set her up with priorities and a schedule such that she automatically changes tasks throughout the day. I completed that scenario five times now without ever having to micromanage her thanks to the more advanced scheduling options that the mod provides.

[sugarskull]

I'm having trouble finishing the Hope scenario. Things were going well at first but now I have finished almost all the research thanks to also having Quin and Daniel join my group, and I've already observed everything I can find. I still need to plant energy crystals next spring to unlock the last 2 research and I'm hoping that will be the last of it (and will disable Quin and Daniel from researching those).

What's worse is her sentience has actually DECREASED. Is that a bug? It was at 91% and without any intelligence tasks for a while she's actually got about 88% now. It's aggravating!

I have really enjoyed the scenario otherwise, but it needs a bit more balance.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by sugarskull:

What's worse is her sentience has actually DECREASED. Is that a bug? It was at 91% and without any intelligence tasks for a while she's actually got about 88% now. It's aggravating!

You lose skill xp when a skill is not used, and the total intellect skill xp you have acquired is what determines her sentience level. So yes, having it decline is normal if you aren't making sure to have her gain intellect skill xp every single day.

You had an event where you got to choose a "database" skill, using that skill will give her intellect xp as well. You need to make sure she is spending a minimum amount of time, every single day, on both research AND that other skill you choose to prevent sentience loss.

Using energel plus can help a ton with sentience gain, because it increases skill xp gain. And, as I already mentioned, sentience IS skill xp. If you do the scenario again I recommend prioritizing getting energy crystals and getting energel plus researched. Switching her to energel plus for food makes a massive difference in her sentience gain.

You can very quickly perform the switch to energel plus, because the robot enemies drop a lot of weapons that give power cells when dismantled, and power cells dismantle into energy crystals.

[sugarskull]

I had no idea I could dismantle power cells, I'll give that a try. Thanks!

[sugarskull]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

You also have the option of raising her sentience with a skill other than intellect. Whichever choice you made for "database" is a skill that will also give her sentience (and intellect xp). No researching required. To keep her happiest, the best thing to do is to have her do a mix of both researching and that other skill, every single day.

I chose the crafting database. Hope is the only one tasked with crafting and yet her sentience is still decreasing. I'm not sure this is working. She doesn't have the "not varied enough tasks" debuff either.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by sugarskull:

I chose the crafting database. Hope is the only one tasked with crafting and yet her sentience is still decreasing. I'm not sure this is working. She doesn't have the "not varied enough tasks" debuff either.

With crafting, you only get the xp reward when you complete the crafting task. And it's not all that much toward intellect xp.

You are, perhaps, crafting things that take a long time to finish such that the xp loss is greater than what little intellect xp you get from it.

You're better off, for her Sentience, to be crafting recipes that are quick so you can complete many of them in a day. The amount that the recipes show for xp is NOT what you get for intellect xp/sentience, so don't even look at that. Just the time to craft.

[sugarskull]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

You're better off, for her Sentience, to be crafting recipes that are quick so you can complete many of them in a day.

I do appreciate you trying to help. I'm at 85% sentience and can't seem to move the needle significantly. I've exhausted all research and observation. She's got 9 intellect and 10 crafting, and I can't force her to use the arcade machine.

I've got her pumping out the Energy Gel Plus (or whatever it's called) which she can do quite quickly with her crafting bonuses. I saw the sentience bar tick up 1% once very briefly but overall it's a losing battle. I also got 5% sentience when she fell in love with Quin, but it's not enough. I've been spamming the Exploration action to try to find an event that would help, but nothing special has popped up.

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to start the scenario over, which is a huge bummer after I've invested so many hours.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by sugarskull:

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to start the scenario over, which is a huge bummer after I've invested so many hours.

Sorry to hear that you got in that pickle.

In my own playthroughs of the scenario, I found the crafting database to be inferior as well, when I chose that option. Though I still was able to complete the scenario.

The farming database works way better (imo) for helping to raise her sentience, and the construction one, though not as good as farming, was decent. In both cases you get a lot of little xp boosts toward her sentience, because construction and farming tasks are both quick and many.

The only database I did not do at all was healing. I can't even imagine that. It's not common enough that you need to use healing unless you are intentionally sending your survivors out to fight the wildlife barehanded.

[sugarskull]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

The farming database works way better (imo) for helping to raise her sentience

I had brought Laara to do the farming for me, so I hadn't even considered that option. I will pick someone else for my next game and try the farming angle for Hope. Thanks for your advice!

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by sugarskull:

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

The farming database works way better (imo) for helping to raise her sentience

I had brought Laara to do the farming for me, so I hadn't even considered that option. I will pick someone else for my next game and try the farming angle for Hope. Thanks for your advice!

Just keep in mind that winter will suck for her, if you play on Sobrius. Try to plant a good variety of crops that have low temperature tolerance so that she at least gets out planting whenever the temperature gets warm enough.

Place the fields, have her plant, then change crop so she just has more to plant, to get xp gain, even though the plants won't grow in the winter if you have to (I didn't have to do that because I played on Desertum the time I had her go into farming, but it's a thought I had in case i needed to).

[sugarskull]

Thanks. I think the nail in my coffin, so to speak, was picking up so many research-based characters. Quin showed up early on and they split most of the research. Later, I got Daniel and he powered through a bunch with his breakthroughs. I even got Krista near the end, although I had already finished research by then. My map seed really set me up for failure there. :)

Now I know to not let any other survivors do any research so that should make a big difference.