There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
I’m really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name, but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.
That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.
Wait, I work in cleanrooms professionally. Fabricating my own semiconductors at home always seemed like a cool idea, but really out of reach. I kind of always wanted to keep old machines from the labs I worked at, but with such expensive things they never threw anything away (of course)!
Isn’t it prohibitively expensive and/or noisy? What type of projects do you do?
Have you seen the Sam Zeloof videos? He’s the main person I’ve seen actually build a chip in a garage.
He buys his wafers, which is critical. Given a hot furnace you could refine your own metallurgical silicon in a crucible, but cleaning it will be a whole thing. The machine needed would probably be based on spinning band distillation, which you could make in a pre-existing machine shop. To avoid toxic gases and explosion hazards - which are the two things chemists have told me not to mess with - you’d want to use SiCl4, which is a bit different from the standard approach which uses hydrogenated species. The Siemens process back to silicon and monocrystalline casting is all that’s left, and I wonder if they could be combined in a step if scalability isn’t a concern.
If only I had space for a workshop, so it’s all theoretical ATM.
Which machines are noisy? Polishers?