September 2026

The Game That Needs Fewer Cores

I wanted to play Ghost Recon Wildlands on my gaming laptop, an ASUS G16 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H in it, which is a hybrid chip with performance cores, efficiency cores, and a couple of low power efficiency cores on top of that, 22 threads visible to Windows in total. The game hung on the launcher screen and would not move past it, there was no error, it was just stuck.

I was away from the laptop at the time, so Atlas did the first pass remotely over SSH. The Ubisoft Connect install turned out to have core files missing, the launcher log was full of the same error over and over, and the process was running with no window at all. A silent reinstall of Connect fixed that part. It was a real bug, it just was not the one that mattered, because the game still would not load once Connect worked again.

Read the full article →

A Seed Viewer For A Modded World

The family runs a modded Minecraft server, and picking a world seed for it used to mean actually generating the world and rendering a map to look at it, which took about nine minutes per seed. Nine minutes does not sound like much until you want to look at a dozen seeds and compare them, and at that point nobody did it, because who is going to sit through an hour and a half of world generation just to browse. So we picked whatever seed looked fine on the first try and lived with it.

I wanted to be able to type a seed and see the terrain right away, the same way the vanilla seed map sites let you do for unmodded worlds. Ours is modded though, so those sites are useless to us, they have no idea what our biome tables look like.

Read the full article →