Spore Post #8 – Steve

This post contains spoilers.

This Spore post is about the Centre of the Galaxy. It’s a giant purple black hole in, not surprisingly, the middle of the Spore galaxy. This also happens to be Grox territory. Getting there is a pain in the neck, because you have to travel a vast distance (even with the use of a wormhole key) and your travel range gets seriously stunted for some reason. You’ll also most likely have a ton of Grox spaceships shooting at you. Be prepared to lose your fleet, and stock up on energy and health packs before you leave.

When you eventually get to the centre, the Grox ships will leave you alone. You can take your time admiring the pretty colours, or you can jump straight in and see what happens. If this is your first time here and you haven’t cheated on this save, you’ll also get an achievement. I had a picture of me reaching the centre, but I must’ve forgot to save it once I pasted it on Paint. -_- Here’s one off Google Images instead (click to enlarge):

Once you enter the galactic centre (just like you’d enter a normal black hole) a cutscene will begin, where you get to meet Steve. I’m not gonna describe it, so you can watch this video instead:

You’ll get a new tool called the ‘Staff of Life’. It only has 42 uses, but it instantly terraforms a planet to T3.  Steve also mentions that you should stop by “the third rock from Sol” for a free breakfast or something, but no changes happen on Earth so this is probably just a hint about the Sol system.

After your meeting with Steve, you’re plonked back outside the galactic core. My advice would be to go to the nearest Grox planet and wait until you die so you’ll be teleported back to the nearest colony. If you’re after making a trail of colonies along the way though, this won’t get you far and you’ll have to attempt the journey back. The Return Ticket super power will come in handy here, if you have it.

Nothing really changes after this adventure, other than an entry on your timeline stating you’ve reached enlightenment. Once your Staff of Life runs out, you can’t go back to the centre to recharge it – 42 uses is all you get.

That’s about all there is to it. You might wanna read my post about Earth on Spore if you haven’t already.
-legoless

Spore Post #7 – Earth

Sorry this took so long, I was in the middle of my exams and I kept putting it off. But like I say, procrastination makes perfect.

As some of you will know, Earth – and in fact the rest of the Solar System – is present in Spore as an easter egg. I’m not going to provide you with the details on how to get there, as there are plenty of instructions and videos already. The star (our Sun) is named Sol, which is the Latin word for sun. The planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are included, and can be terraformed and colonised with like any other planet in the game. The Moon, Titan and Ganymede are also there. No other moons are, however, as there are too many of them. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, being gas giants, cannot be interacted with and are simply there for show. Pluto is not included, probably because of its title as a dwarf planet.

Anyway, I found it. It was actually just a few clicks away from my Home Planet the whole time.

Mercury

Nothing much there. It has a big crater on it, but otherwise is just a dry, hot planet when you get there.

Venus

Unlike its real life counterpart, which has a very thick atmosphere, the Spore Venus is simply a hot planet with a high atmosphere level since the designers couldn’t make it into a gas giant type planet. It actually has water on its surface at first, which in real life would be impossible with its current conditions due to the extreme global warming caused by its atmosphere. Other than these unrealistic features, there’s not much else on it.

Earth

When you find Earth, you get the “Manifest Destiny” achievement. If you destroy it with a Planet Buster, you get the “Oh The Humanity!” achievement. Those factors themselves make it a pretty important planet. It has all the continents, and a few geographic landmarks (but not many). However, it is only T1, and often doesn’t even have a completed biosphere (in my game it was missing a herbivore and a carnivore). Terraforming it to T3 gives it an ugly pinkish-brown colour, so you should probably leave it as it is. Since the planet had to be scaled down, placing a colony often screws up the map. I placed my colony on Antarctica. I kinda messed up the coasts, but other than that everything remained unaffected. Besides, no one really cares about Antarctica… You can also safely place one over Russia.

My Antarctic colony:

Map of Earth:

My hologram scout standing on Ireland:

The Moon

The Moon has a few craters and a very flat landscape (which can cause a bit of flooding during terraforming). If you use a Planet Buster on Earth and don’t intend to revert to a previous save after you get the achievement, then be prepared to lose The Moon as well, since it gets destroyed along with it.

A T3 Moon with Earth in the background:

Mars

Mars on Spore, in my opinion, is pretty realistic. It has some landmarks such as Olympus Mons, but doesn’t have as many craters as it should. It’s also at the right temperature (it just lacks an atmosphere) on Spore, while in real life it should be colder. I used the Staff of Life on it (more about that in a later post) because it seemed fitting. It’s gone kinda pink now, but I don’t want to colour it in green because the green land colouring tool doesn’t look natural to me.

Terraformed Mars:

Ganymede:

Ganymede is the only moon that orbits Jupiter which appears in Spore. Not much else to say.

Titan:

Titan is the only moon orbiting Saturn in Spore. Again, not a lot here other than the weird purple terrain colour.

As you can see, the Sol system has a lot of planets in comparison to other solar systems in the game. I still havent terraformed all of them, but that’s because I haven’t even opened Spore for two weeks. Good luck finding Earth yourselves! If you have a ton of cash and an Interstellar Drive 5, you’ll have no problem getting there. Rushing back to save it every time pirates attack is another story, however…

Pictures yay!

My next Spore post (whenever I get around to writing it) will be about the Galactic Centre.

Don’t hold your breath, though.

-legoless

Found Earth on Spore!

I’ll update this post with the details tomorrow.

Title says it all. It had been in a star cluster only a bit away from my Home Planet. No wonder I couldn’t find it. I’ll try to get some good pictures, but my Spore screenshots always come out crappy so don’t expect much.

-legoless

Edit: This might take longer than I thought. >.>

Finished! Two weeks late, though… Click here to go read it.

So, you think you know Maths? Answers

Guest Post by Jamie

Here are the answers. The first few don’t need an explanation, but the additional question does:

1) 2.0085482698775510204081632653061

2) 90090090

4) 49

5) 137.2953021774598

(Question 5 uses Pythagoras’ Theorem, which you can find out about here)

Click here to see the original questions.

legoless: Don’t forget to read my Scratch eBook Review too.

Scratch eBook Review

I’ve been asked to do a review on a new programming book published by Packt Publishing and written by Michael Badger. Normally I’d probably have multiple heart attacks over anything to do with programming, but this book teaches people how to use Scratch. Some of you older readers might remember me blogging about this a couple of times (in fact, my very first post writes about it). I’ve been using Scratch for a few years, and even though I don’t actively play around with it now, I’d recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning how to program.

Anyway, on to the review. This book covers everything from installation to using things such as a PicoBoard to bring the real world into Scratch. Quite literally. It walks you through all the different features of Scratch at an appropriate pace. I liked the fact that it didn’t go into so much depth that you were lost in tech-speak land, but it explained it enough so that you understood how the commands worked.

It covers all the major commands and treats them each as a separate ‘experiment’. It would be a good idea to have Scratch open while reading, so you can simply switch windows (or if you get the actual book version, just look at the screen) and try it out for yourself. The book also explains the basic concept of how Scratch is layed out (sprites, the background, blocks, etc.) which I feel would be useful to a beginner. Sometimes screenshots of blocks are used instead of words to explain things (mostly examples). These are useful if you get stuck, but I like to try to figure out how to do it myself first.

After a while, you’ll move on to entire projects. These get harder and harder, and I found myself discovering new ways to use blocks that I had never thought of before. I also found some useful notes about new blocks that I had no experience with, as I had a very old version of Scratch and hadn’t updated it in a while. My favourite addition is probably the list feature. It opens up a ton of new project ideas that usually would have needed complicated variables and a lot of fine tuning to get right.

This book is very content-rich, and would be a great help to learn how to program, whether you’re an educator or simply someone wanting to know a bit of programming. Younger readers probably wouldn’t be interested though, as it seems to be aimed at a higher age. (But that doesn’t make it any harder to learn!) One problem I had with it is the eBook format. I found it very hard to read from, as I constantly had to scroll down to the next “page”. Books are books. You can’t turn them into downloadable webpages – it just doesn’t work. However, this is just Adobe Reader’s bad layout. But I’d recommend getting a real book anyway, even if it is more hassle having to order it.

Overall, this is a good book to learn from, and it doesn’t have that “school book” feel that most educational books do. The author doesn’t strive to make every sentence contain at least one 15-letter word, and the language seems very laid back.

Click here to be brought to the Packt Publishing website if you’re interested.

-legoless

Don’t forget to read my Poptropica post and Jamie’s maths post if you haven’t already.