Survived 100 days (still living) - feedback and suggestions

[Christoph]

So this was actually only my fourth run after buying the game on steam. Let me say first, that I really do enjoy it. I am a professional games researcher (working at the university not games industry) and I rarely play games in my own spare time. Your’s I did play just for fun and really enjoyed it so far. It offers a simple and aesthetically beautiful survival experience. My fourth run was the first one with a female avatar. After 5 min she was attacked by a wolf and almost dead, so I thought: well, that’s it. Turns out it wasn’t. 100 days later she is still alive and well, even has lots of bullets, a couple of good cloth, water, wood, etc in store and could maybe go on for another 100 days. At this point I’ll rather wait for your next update though

For those who are interested in how to survive for a longer period in TDL I will explain how I did it. If you want to find out yourself, please don’t read on or you’ll get spoilered. After that I will try to give some feedback and suggestions for the devs, maybe they find them useful. Sorry for my weird English by the way, I’m not a native speaker.

So, first I drew a map of the are in my three runs before. After my lady survived the wolf attack I looted every single building on the map and carried it all back to „trapper’s homestead“. In this area I spent most of my time. I was lucky, since I found 20 bullets for the rifle, which I guess is a lot (I am not sure though). However, it turned out I don’t even need them (only used about half of it so far). It was important that I also searched for the secret bunker, which appears to spawn randomly around the outskirts of the map (I guess that’s no news for people having played the game before the steam release). There was tons of tools and stuff in there that is really important for longterm survival. It’s worth to risk a couple of sprained ankles searching for it.

After 10 days or so I had everything in trapper’s homestead, including lots of clothes and scrapped metal etc., some knifes, hatchets, the gun. From here on I mostly made fire in the evenings and cooked water or meat. In the nights and mornings I slept. And in the warm afternoons I collected some wood or went hunting.

Wood collecting appears to function in two ways: indoors (where you can only collect „received wood“, not worth the calories I think) and outdoors. I never used the hatchet, even after the update, when it only wasted 10% of its quality. It’s simply not worth it, since the bonus you get is really small. The trick is to find a warm spot outdoors while you collect wood, so you can collect for some hours every day even just wearing socks and a hat. In front of trapper’s homestead there is a little shed, which is the perfect spot for this. If you go in and take cover from the elements in the left part of it, it „feels like“ 0 degrees celsius even when it’s freezing outside. Okay, maybe this is bug-using, I know. I simply considered it to be a Lumberjack’s hut.

More importantly are hunting strategies. After having found my bullets I tried to maximize their effect. So I did what I thought a hunter would do and observed the animals carefully. Turns out wolves sometimes hunt deer, as you guys probably knew already. So I followed a wolf hunting a deer and then simply shot the wolf. This way you can get around 15kg of meat by using one bullet. Later I figured out that you can even scare a deer in a wolf’s direction and force the wolf to attack it. This became more challenging with the last update, after which wolves can get scared by you and – I think this is hilarious, but feels kinda wrong – they can get scared by the deer. However, you can now also approach a wolf and make him follow you, then run around a deer and let the wolf attack it. The point is, the wolf should kill the deer for you.

I wondered what I would do if I ran out of bullets, so I approached a wolf eating a deer until I was really close. I simply threw a flare at him and he go scared. I still had the deer with all it’s meat. Turns out, fluffy’s cousins are also scared by burned out flares. So yes, you can get 9 kg of meat with a burned out flare and pick it up again. If you do it right, this strategy provides you with an infinite amount of food.

The rest is routine, and as much as I like to play the game, it actually becomes a little too easy at this point

So my feedback and suggestions for the devs:

- Wood chopping/hatchet: please change the settings, so it’s really worth it to use the hatchet. I’d say it should provide the bonus it does now, but only use 1 % quality each hour you use it.

Even better would be to make would chopping generally more challenging and rewarding. It would be great if you could pick up received wood as actual objects in the landscape, though I guess this might be hard to implement. Even better would be if you could actually cut trees down with the hatchet. This works perfectly as a source of productive pleasure in games such as the forrest and minecraft.

If this is not possible, you might want to consider that an ingame character actually has to change places every hour in order to find more wood. My strategy of simply hiding in a shed and collecting wood for 5 hours every day seems rather unrealistic. This made my routine too repetitive and easy. The same goes for collecting wood in buildings. It’s a nice idea that you can find some wood by breaking old chairs or so, but there is an infinite amount of it. I would have long destroyed tapper’s homestead considering the amount of would I collected inside of it (before I figured out it's not worth the calories anyway).

- Food Poisoning: I could not have made it for more than 70 days probably without using „loading“ to avoid „food poisoning“. Some might consider this playing the wrong way. However, I got fp regularly even when eating meat having more than 90% quality, one time even from meat with 99% quality. It seems rather unrealistic to me, that you can get food poisoning from meat that you have hunted hours before and just cooked a couple of minutes ago. My suggestion: Split food poisoning in two types of it. The first one you can get by eating food between 50-90% quality. It is a rather mild sickness which can be cured by sleeping and drinking water (maybe it doesn’t affect your health percentage but slows you down like a sprained ankle). The real „food poisoning“, that can be cured only by antibiotics, should in my opinion only appear when you eat food below 50% quality or so.

- Hunting: Wolves shouldn’t get scared by deer. It should be more of a danger to attract a wolf’s attention and make him follow you (he could probably become faster the longer he follows you). Wolves shouldn’t get scared by burned out flares. Wolves should be highly attentive even while eating deer. I have never seen a wolf in real life but being an avid watcher of bbc documentaries I know they are watching there surroundings regularly even while eating (or what do the forum’s wolf experts say?).

However, I think it would be great if hunting strategies such as the one’s described above would still be possible. It is really exciting to observe wolves and deer approaching each other, hoping for the wolf to be hungry (and not scared). After that it is a real challenge (and I think you should use this more explicitly) to follow the wolf hunting the deer. Sometimes this is easy. Other times they run far away. However, there are never tracks of them in the snow. It would be really nice if you could see the tracks, maybe even using a tracker’s/hunter’s skill you could implement in the game.

Such a skill also could be used to let animals spawn more rarely (which would be more realistic), still giving you the chance to find them. This way the player (surviving longterm) would be forced to move longer distances. In my 100 days it was kind of boring, that I could actually stay in this one place. If the deer and wolves wouldn’t have been in front of my house I would have had to search for them. In turn, I would have been forced to divide my supplies more carefully around the map, so I can maybe live a day or two in another house while hunting. I think this would greatly enhance the games overall dynamic during longterm survival.

oh, and some bugs, of course:

- A couple of dead deer kind of restocked their meat supply every couple of days (just 0.5-2kg). You could go there and simply loot them every other day.

- At „unnamed pond“ there is a tree you can walk through.

- Animals often get stuck beneath a fallen tree near unnamed pond.

- Wolves can fly above deer (I think someone has mentioned that in the forum already)

Thanks for a great game! I am looking forward to play the other maps and especially the story mode.

[Dark]

I second that analysis from Christoph, because i have discovered the same technics and etc, with the only exception of the burned out flare, and the shack to collect wood. Also i would add that there should be no respawn of wolfes, deers and meat on the dead frozen carcases of deers.

And i stopped to play on the 46 day my survival trip, because it got only too repetitive.

[Sioux]

Those are some good points and suggestions you've put there. I'm sure the devs will further tweak wolf and deer behavior to fix some of the situations you've described. Also I agree on making using the hatchet more worthwile. In fact, I hope they'll give us a new woodchopping mechanic, so no more black screen. And there should be a save on exit, so reloading doesn't reset your stats, imo.

I have to tell you, I'm impressed with what you've done, you used all opportunities to their fullest. And I also cannot get the picture out of my head; of you collecting wood in the snow, wearing only socks and a hat, lol!

[Toronagga Darklake]

Gratz on the achievement dude.

You've highlighted some very good points here, most notably (IMO) the food poisoning problem.

I can imagine it took some real dedication to reach the 100 day mark though, after 50, I expect the days until 90 were pretty dull. Realistic for being lost in the wild I guess.

[TattooedMac]

Nice. Be interested to see how you go from 100 days onwards. Be nice if you could post you Player Experience logs to have a look at ??

Found here PC

C:\Users\YourNameHere\AppData\LocalLow\Hinterland\The Long Dark

and Mac

~Library\Caches\Hinterland\The Long Dark

with the Tilde denoting Home Directory

[Christoph]

Sure, here are my logs. I just saw that there is a new update, maybe some of the issues are fixed already. At least the wolves seem to be not scared of deer anymore. It was my best laugh in this game though, seeing the wolf run away from the deer

log_100days.txt

[Beanie]

You can do the foraging for wood exploit to a lesser extent at the Camp Office too. No building to hide in, but if you go around the back there is a little nook which is sheltered on two sides by the office walls. Not nearly as good, but better than standing out in the wind!

[Ruhroe]

I'm curious if you gamed the starvation system too? It's one of my bigger flaws with the game right now, as I think it's one of things which draws it out unnecessarily.

I have a game at 50 days and I know I could go much longer, it just gets super boring and I haven't felt like logging in to finish it.

[Christoph]

I'm not sure what you mean by gaming the starvation system. As I wrote you technically have an unlimitted supply of food, at least in the last version of the game. I agree though that it becomes pretty dull playing on after a few weeks of ingame-living. However, I think longterm-survival could still be fun when the game would force you to go out to search for wood and to search for deer etc. Right now you're fine once you've figured out where to go, so there's no "endgame" in TDL so far as the MMORPG-players would call it. If the dev's would combine the necessity to go out and scavenge around the map again and again with a more strict saving-loading-mechanism (for example, no loading button but saving when logging out and continuing when logging in) you would have a challenging and long lasting endgame experience I think.

[Ruhroe]

I'm not sure what you mean by gaming the starvation system. As I wrote you technically have an unlimitted supply of food, at least in the last version of the game. I agree though that it becomes pretty dull playing on after a few weeks of ingame-living. However, I think longterm-survival could still be fun when the game would force you to go out to search for wood and to search for deer etc. Right now you're fine once you've figured out where to go, so there's no "endgame" in TDL so far as the MMORPG-players would call it. If the dev's would combine the necessity to go out and scavenge around the map again and again with a more strict saving-loading-mechanism (for example, no loading button but saving when logging out and continuing when logging in) you would have a challenging and long lasting endgame experience I think.

Starvation bottoms out at -1500 calories. While starving you also lose condition slowly. You can literally go almost two days without having to worry about eating at all. During this time, since calories don't matter, you can do whatever and not have to worry about it--outside losing condition more quickly. Especially just hanging out sleeping.

While you can get unlimited food, I am guessing you had to use up more clothing outside tracking the wolves down, though they do jump deer there? The starvation system would allow you to get twice as much out of each kill, and cause less wear and tear on hunting knifes, clothing, antibiotics, etc.

In my 50 day run (that I never finished) I think I have used 3 bullets out of the 15 I have? I still have two hunting knives, almost all the clothing, and never even went to the damn. I find you can easily get away with one hat while in the trappers cabin.

[Christoph]

I actually wasn't aware that you can game the starvation system in that way. And yes, I used up most of my clothes while hunting. However, it seems the devs have already fixed one of my hunting techniques (wolves are not scared by burned out flares anymore), which might make the game more challenging again. Let's hope for an altered kind of food poisoning, an altered starvation system and that they take the load button out of the game or at least implement an hardcore mode without it. Then, I guess, it can be a real challenge to do the 100 days run.