xkcd: Escape Speed | Hacker News Reader

xkcd: Escape Speed

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73 pointsbenley23 comments

On my, under-powered, desktop, the tab crashed. Has anyone made/extracted a map yet?

Found these items before my tab crashed: a pretty leaf, a secret glade, a holographic Charizard business card, 11 squares packed into a larger square, an orb wren, a tumbleweed, a marsh wren, a DVD of The Core (2003), a broken smoke machine, The Long Now Foundation's nickel paperweight containing , an archive of every published Animorphs book, a sunken treasure, an asterisk, a satisfying set of waves, a secret leaf, a stick, a sterile neutrino, a pair of squirrel goggles, a steam calliope, a dna base pair, an eye in the sky

It was a fun excursion.

You found a lot more than me! Mine are:

-a cool bug

-a pretty leaf

-a rock with neat stripes

-a friendly jumping spider

-a hot dog

-a normal-sized apple

EDIT: ok this was fun:

- The Long Now Foundation's archive of every Animorphs book

- a broken smoke machine

- a first of its kind

- two Andalites, one canonical

- a friend

- baby shoes (and baby)

- a baby hedgehog

- a tiny pteranodon

- a piece of coronium (iron)

- a hydrogen ion

- a piece of pumice

- a sparkling gem

- some tin from the pantai remis mine

- a whale shark

- the Principality of Sealand

- some microbial life

This is what I got (after 2 days) :

You've found:

    a cool bug
    a pretty leaf
    a secret glade
    a DVD of The Core (2003)
    a glass of heavy water
    a sixth lagrange point
    a 5G seagull
    a sensible cheese platter
    a swatch pop-out wristwatch
    a relativistic bowling ball
    $30 in Yahoo
    a brightly-lit billboard
    a hot dog
    a normal-sized apple
    a bottle of Coke Absolute Zero
    the gold crown Archimedes stole
    a necklace of element samples whose symbols spell out your name
    a smooth green snake
    an eye in the sky
    a dna base pair
    a steam calliope
    a sterile neutrino
    a secret leaf
    a stick
    a large hadron
    an asterisk
    a sunken treasure
    a strangely heavy subway token
    a podcast episode
    a friendly bee
    a spiral-cut diamond
    a golden radio tuned to 1.618 MHz
    a burrito
    a cool pair of shoes with flames on the side
    a scroll lock key
    a primordial black hole
    a tree-filled grove and a nice spot for quiet contemplation
    a festive but somehow unnerving holiday card from Junji Ito
    a single caffeine molecule
    two Andalites, one canonical
    baby shoes (and baby)
    a friend
    an icosahedral d10
    a piece of pumice
    the Principality of Sealand
    a whale shark
    a sparkling gem
    some tin from the pantai remis mine
    a rock with neat stripes
    an orb wren
    a marsh wren
    a single grain of salt
    a holographic Charizard business card
    Voyager 1
    a wayward Roomba full of moondust
    a curious humboldt squid
    a bathyscaphe
    a delicate music box
    a spider-silk scarf
    a friendly jumping spider
    a friendly cat
    a first of its kind
    a pair of platonic solids, not quite touching
    a really cool data point
    a block of scandium
    a beige electron
    11 squares packed into a larger square
    a piece of space shuttle food
    the 3 million point line
    a sunspot
    Voyager 2
    a baby hedgehog
    a tiny pteranodon
    a guitar pick
    a pair of squirrel goggles
    some microbial life
    a hydrogen ion
    a piece of coronium (iron)
    a broken smoke machine
    The Long Now Foundation's archive of every Animorphs book
    the platinum cylinder formerly used to define the kilogram

(And reached the ends)

Well this is fun. There's a lot out there once you figure out how to get off of Origin.

I played too much of this. Got enough upgrades that I could fly out of the chasm without cheating using the cracks and collision bugs.

https://rot13.com/

Tbg bhg gb gur rkgrevbe fhesnpr... gurer'f whfg grkg bhg gurer gung fnlf "GUR RAQ GUR RAQ GUR RAQ". Qbrfa'g frrz gb or nalguvat ryfr bhg gurer.

edit: there's more after that.

I played for quite a while and found a dozen different worlds. Hitting the outer ring at speed usually ends up trapped but one time it followed a crack to the outside. This was a high gravity area and it could only scoot along the surface. Eventually there was a drop off and while plummeting chrome crashed. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

I would just love to have a map, even if it only shows places you already discovered. I guess my sense of direction is too bad and I just got too lost to keep playing after getting off of origin

It doesn't work for me in Brave on macOS. Holding the up arrow just flickers the thruster and the ship doesn't go anywhere. I had to switch to Safari to get it to work.

We're looking into this, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to fix. You probably ought to use Safari/Firefox/Chrome for now, sorry.

FWIW on Chrome/Windows it took me a refresh of the page to get everything to properly load or render, it was a blank starscape until then.

E: I managed to crash the tab while bumping along the 'border' of the playable zone!

Error code: SBOX_FATAL_MEMORY_EXCEEDED

Doing so lost all my found items :(

"Welcome back. We saved your progress." after F5 is hideous, when you are stuck inside gravity well of some large planet.

Click the home button in the lower right of the frame, it will reset your position!

Yeah, thx, I got it. I just thought that this 'hidious' feature was actually funny when I first tried to reset the game.

How do you get off origin?

https://rot13.com/ - for spoilers.

Nppryrengr jura lbh ner ng gur pber bs bevtva. Lbh ragre gur pber guebhtu gur ebyyre pbnfgre, be orarngu gur Fg Ybhvf nep.

vairfgvtngr gur nepu pnershyyl.

It took me a little while to realize. :)

Didn't go far enough. I was creeping along the surface looking for a pickup because it said something about finding a warp drive.

Vaivfvoyr jnyy haqre gur ebyyre pbnfgre, tvirf n cvcryvar geubhtu bevtva gb gur bgure fvqr. Sybbe vg gb gur bgure fvqr naq lbh trg rfpncr irybpvgl.

Is an 'escape speed' even possible without a square girlfriend?

Found 78 items so far. Then it crashed and I lost all my progress.

Mine crashed, lost none of my found items, but lost all the efficiency, tank size, and thrust improvements. To make it worse they were still missing from the world so I couldn't find them again.

Ick. I think the save game functionality is a bit buggy. I wish they'd just have an option to base64 the whole state (findings, upgrades, location, facing, and velocity) into a URL parameter so you could just save the game as a shareable URL.

Seems to work best in Firefox.

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