Project Zomboid Blacksmithing: what each level actually unlocks
Blacksmithing's own crafting table tops out at level 4; the forge chain behind it is gated by magazines and Pottery, not by your Blacksmithing level.
Games
Breakpoints, hidden formulas and patch changes that long, systems-heavy games never write down — turned into calculators and tables you can run against your own save.
Latest posts
Every ESIC, Valve and tournament CS sanction, in one table
37 rulings, 2014 to 2026: ESIC's 33, Valve's 3 and one tournament organiser's, each row checked against the issuer's own statement.
Dota 2 and StarCraft II match-fixing rulings, by who issued them
15 Dota 2 and StarCraft II match-fixing rulings from six issuers, checked against primary statements: who banned whom, how long it held.
How many finished Blood of Dawnwalker in its first 11 days?
19.4% of Blood of Dawnwalker owners finished the story eleven days after launch, up from under 1% on day two, and every achievement now has at least one unlock.
Dawnwalker: Russian Steam reviews gained ground, Japanese did not
Eleven days after launch, Russian Steam reviews for The Blood of Dawnwalker tripled and rose 16 points, closing most of the gap we flagged at launch.
Songs of Syx V71: 94 patch notes, and law gets five
The update named Reign of Terror gives five of its ninety-four notes to law. The full section breakdown, and the three costs the release post states.
Dawnwalker's minimum GPU is a decade old. That is deliberate
A September 2026 AAA release shipped a 2016 card as its floor, and lowered its specs once already. Beside X4 raising its floor, the two say opposite things.
X4 is raising its GPU floor. Can you check if you're under it?
Egosoft cites Steam Hardware Survey data for its Vulkan 1.4 minimum-spec change — but the survey never reports Vulkan. What you can verify yourself.
Project Zomboid's 2026 security year, branch by branch
Four disclosed security events between March and August 2026, which branch each one patched, and the two Lua methods deleted from the modding API.
Tarkov's language gap is still about servers, not culture
All-time Steam totals re-queried 2026-09-13: Simplified Chinese sits at 23.3% against English's 62.4%. Seven languages pool near 28%, the rest near 60%.
Mistfall Hunter: Traditional Chinese now trails Russian
All-time Steam totals re-queried 2026-09-13: Traditional Chinese is now lowest at 34.4%, Russian at 40.3%, Portuguese (BR) leads at 69.7%.
Project Zomboid's Chinese-English review gap, re-measured
Steam's full appreviews totals put Chinese at 86.1% positive and English at 93.5% positive — a 7.4-point gap, not the 44 points one small sample implied.
Blood of Dawnwalker time limit: what to spend 30 days on
Time only moves when you let it. A pre-release budget planner for deciding which quests are worth an hourglass, based on what you actually want out of the run.
Tarkov's summer: an in-game store, then a seasons system
Every official Tarkov announcement from June to August 2026, dated, and what the review corpus says about the in-game store that arrived mid-way.
Six games' Steam reviews: complaints, language, hours
Six games, re-queried 2026-09-13. Leading complaints mostly differ, Tarkov's language gap runs 39 points, and X4 swings 68 points from first hours to best.
Tarkov reviews: 200 hours is still the dip, sample or not
1,000 recent Steam reviews, re-queried 2026-09-13, plus the original 1,200-review bucket set. The median review is 33 characters; the 200-hour dip holds.
Songs of Syx reviews: flat everywhere, and the interface is why
900 fresh reviews by playtime, 1,200 by month. No playtime band drops below 86%, but June — the month V71 launched — is still the low point.
Corsair Cove: most reviewers are done, and still positive
1,500 reviews re-pulled six weeks in. 68% of reviewers have stopped playing and rate it 80.5%; Simplified Chinese still trails English by 14 points.
X4 reviews: playtime, language and the June 9.00 dip, in one page
X4 reads 22.9% positive under two hours, 90.5% past two hundred. German is the second-largest review language, and June, when 9.00 shipped, was the worst month.
Mistfall Hunter reviews: the dip past 50 hours held up
1,000 recent Steam reviews, re-queried 2026-09-13: approval keeps falling past 50 hours, down to 25.8% over 100 hours, and the key-versus-store gap has closed.
Project Zomboid reviews: newcomers, not veterans, are unhappy
1,500 fresh Steam reviews by playtime and language. New players under 2 hours score 40% positive; Chinese-language reviews trail their own average by 17 points.