spears! pleeeeeease?

[Tbone555]

please let us be able to craft spears in the future, hinterland! watching the edge last night, it had just occurred to me how useful that would be for self defense and hunting. given the range of a spear, it would be a very useful tool for fighting off wolves and bears, and even for sticking small game if you can get close enough to them. it would be an extremely useful new tool/weapon for us to use, maybe crafted from a cured birch sapling and cloth, requiring a hunting knife. anyone else favor the idea?

[Boston123]

Believe me, there are plenty of threads on this forum asking for spears, as well as clubs, slings, etc.

Unfortunately, they haven't even been addressed. A common view (if not one held by me) is that they would make the game -ahem- "too easy".

Which is nonsensical. Survival is all about doing things with the least amount of effort, aka the "easiest" way.

[SteveP]

Not having a spear is kind of stretching the limits of the "reasonable suspension of disbelief" and it is incongruous to many people. It could negate the primary risk factor of the game unless there is a counter-balancing increase in risks of some other type. You can't entirely negate the risk of wolves however we've suggested wolf pack behaviour which is the same strategy wolves use when taking down an elk or a moose; they work as a tag-team. If this were "turned-on" at the start of the game during the time when you have little or no defense weapons, it could cause a problem in early game. Maybe this behaviour only gets enabled once you gain the spear or once the wolves learn to adapt to the spear. Another way to deal with balance for the spear would be to let individual wolves adapt to the spear by circling rapidly and feinting. I don't know if they want to make the game more melee oriented; seems they have resisted that so far.

This is how I mean by addressing the big picture. Maybe when we propose an enhancement we have to take into consideration the big picture of both risks and rewards for the odds of survival in the game. It's like balancing accelerated wood harvesting with the risk of longer storms and again, those storms might not kick in until a certain time in the game or until a certain time after you acquired the ability to harvest more wood.

I like having more wood so that the fishing mechanic risks would go down. Many times I've had close calls and deaths while overnight fishing expeditions, trapped by storms.

It would be nice to have an ER diagram of the risk reward relationships along with tuning factors such as spawn rates and probability functions. It would also be nice to see the resource crafting relationships too. For example flint knapping, forging, cordage and pitch could all be used to enable hafting of points to spears and other darts (atlatl & bow)

As well, wishlist items or proposed enhancements can push the game in certain directions such as melee, tactical, exploration, crafting, knowledge acquisition and others. I think there is a huge appeal for games like Kerbal Space Program that actually impart useful or interesting knowledge! I'd like to see TLD do more in that direction such as teaching techniques for shelter making, cordage making, fire making, forging tools, hunting, ballistics, fishing and knapping. Enhancements along each of these lines leads to all sorts of interesting directions such as tying fishing lures or using the Eskimo Bow Drill to start fire. It's interesting to have a tree of techniques that advance as each type of resource is consumed. It's also good to provide more spare time for the player to do the "interesting" things of primitive living such as cleaning, repairing, art, beads and decorations such as claw or teeth necklaces and amulets.