Aluminum Wiring | Patreon Weekly #159

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, here are the results from Patreon Poll #30:
Equipment Tweaks:  68%
Talent Tweaks:            58%
Item Spritework:        52%
Alchemy Tweaks:       16%
The results here were more mixed than I expected, aside from a moderate preference for equipment tweaks and a clear disinterest in alchemy item changes. I’ll look to primarily focus little tweaks on items but will see if I can do one or two things for talents and item sprites as well.

Unfortunately, I’ve just got a tiny bit of news about Shattered to share in this weekly, as I was a bit distracted by some electrical problems. I’ll elaborate on both below.

I have also decided to delay this month’s Shattered Secrets to next week and cancel this month’s Audio Q&A in favour of getting v1.3 out sooner, especially after the delays last week.

Daily Runs

Dailies are the last major bit of content to implement before I can put v1.3 to beta, so I’ve mostly been working on that, along with some smaller tweaks and fixes in response to the alpha.

Daily runs are going to be selectable from a new menu I’ve added to the hero select screen. This menu lets me consolidate a few options from there, as things were getting a little cluttered. Dailies will reset at midnight UTC and can be played with any hero and as many challenges as the player wants.

Once a daily is started it can be completed at any pace the player likes, although only one daily run can be active at a time. Dailies will have their own separate view in the rankings screen, which will include a more detailed breakdown of the most recent daily, and a complete history of previous daily scores.

Electrical Trouble

Sadly development was delayed this week because I encountered some electrical troubles in my home. I’ve been using a fairly beefy portable air conditioner for the last month, which was working just fine until a few days ago, where it seemed to be producing a burning smell. After bumbling around for a bit worrying that the unit itself was defective, I noticed that the smell was coming from the outlet, and that I had a much bigger problem.

After shutting off the circuit, calling my landlord’s emergency line, a day of literal and figurative sweating, and a visit from an electrician, the socket is in good condition again with the culprit extracted:

Those are wire nuts (or marrettes up here in Canada), and as you can see one of them is has been aggressively melted due to a poor connection. Luckily the marrette was the only thing damaged, things could have been much worse. This happened because my place (as I have only just learned) has old aluminum wiring, and those marrettes are generic ones which are not meant for aluminum connections! The electrician repaired the socket with some marrettes made specifically for aluminum wiring.

That socket was a ticking time bomb, but unfortunately aluminum wiring can be a fire hazard even with the right marrettes. Moving forward I’m going to start regularly checking for signs of overheating and I might try to nag my landlord a little about making more permanent improvements. Just another thing to keep track of I suppose!