The road to 500

Arzanot

By Arzanot
in Survival Mode

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cullam Pathfinder

cullam

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I just stupidly died on my road to 500. 155 days in, and having just decided to really settle down, and go for 500, I suddenly froze to death in my sleep. I'm not sure how. I must have left some clothes off, as I'd only just started ever taking them off, as a means of conserving resources, on such a long playthrough. 

It still bugs me that we can't be woken up either freezing or hypothermic. 

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TROY Pathfinder

TROY

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11 minutes ago, cullam said:

I just stupidly died on my road to 500. 155 days in, and having just decided to really settle down, and go for 500, I suddenly froze to death in my sleep. I'm not sure how. I must have left some clothes off, as I'd only just started ever taking them off, as a means of conserving resources, on such a long playthrough. 

It still bugs me that we can't be woken up either freezing or hypothermic. 

Welcome to TLD's School of Hard Knocks.  I can't tell you how many times this happened to me in the beginning. Forgetting to eat/drink or thinking I'd be fine with temp through the night.  I to am surprised that a "wake-up" has never been implemented. A person doesnt sleep through being that cold, or thirsty or hungry. You wake up. No matter how tired you are. This should be implemented, but the reasoning behind it, and defense for it being the way is, is that you need to be aware of your situation and thinking ahead. A good rule of thumb is never sleep more than 2 hours unless you are in a warm location, or sleeping beside a fire protected from wind and know it will last as long as you want to sleep. 

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JAFO Pathfinder

JAFO

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35 minutes ago, cullam said:

I suddenly froze to death in my sleep. I'm not sure how. I must have left some clothes off, as I'd only just started ever taking them off, as a means of conserving resources, on such a long playthrough. 

It would help if you gave the exact circumstances.. location, weather, significant actions you took beforehand, etc.. analysing what went wrong and how it happened can often be instructive. It's hard to learn from a death if you can't work out what went wrong, and maybe together, we can assist.

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JAFO Pathfinder

JAFO

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7 minutes ago, Arzanot said:

Huge fan of that show, up to Season 7 atleast.

Likewise.. and also of the books. Can't wait for the next book, or for the final season. It's all coming to a head.

(Sorry for the OT diversion, folks.. we now return you to the quest for 500 days.)

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Thrasador Pathfinder

Thrasador

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5 hours ago, JAFO said:

It would help if you gave the exact circumstances.. location, weather, significant actions you took beforehand, etc.. analysing what went wrong and how it happened can often be instructive. It's hard to learn from a death if you can't work out what went wrong, and maybe together, we can assist.

He said he was in the Mountaineer's Hut....that pretty much explains it.

You definitely want all your clothes on there....and I wouldn't sleep there without a fire. Sleeping there is almost as bad a sleeping outside. There's a hole in the ceiling, an open window, and the door has big spaces around it and a hole in it.

I doubt he lit a fire....and then slept for 12 hours straight. If there was a blizzard....or it just got REALLY cold overnight then he died....

Lastly there is MORE than enough cloth in the game to repair your clothes for 500 days....as long as you are waiting to repair things until 80 condition or so, or lower....

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JAFO Pathfinder

JAFO

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10 hours ago, Thrasador said:

He said he was in the Mountaineer's Hut....that pretty much explains it.

I somehow missed that.. and yes, it certainly does explain it. Even being fully dressed in the best gear there is no guarantee, if the temp drops too far.

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Thrasador Pathfinder

Thrasador

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So yeah basically for the record @cullam, you have to treat the Mountaineer's hut like you are sleeping outside in a cave. It's warmer and more wind sheltered than just sleeping outside in a snow bank, but not by much....lol.

There are a couple instances like that one when you should only sleep with a fire going over night, and even then you need to sleep in a couple hour increments if there is ANY chance the fire may blow out due to the wind...

One would be in a snow shelter outside with a fire going outside the entrance. The wind can shift direction and intensity every hour and blow out your fire. A blizzard can start any minute and blow out your fire....

The game does NOT wake you if your fire blows out and you are freezing, so you really should check it at least every couple hours. So you have to sleep in like two hour increments...

Also, not all shelters are created equal, some buildings are warmer than others. In general any closed "home like building" is safe to sleep in without a fire, the Mountaineer's hut is one of the exceptions....because like I said it has a hole in the roof, open window, and the door doesn't have a tight seal. It's pretty much as bad a sleeping in a fishing hut.....which you also shouldn't sleep in without a fire.

I don't think the Mountaineer's hut has a loading screen when you enter right? It's like entering a fishing hut....or a cave without a loading screen....

So that's a good rule of thumb.... any shelter that doesn't have a loading screen like some caves, fishing huts, Spence Farm in FM, the Poachers Camp in FM, the Mountaineer's hut in TWM, and even most if not all of the Lookout Towers like the ones in ML and CH require an all night fire to be totally safe from all freezing to death risk.

If you don't have enough wood to equal the number of hours you wish to sleep, I wouldn't risk sleeping there....especially not longer than a couple hours at once....

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Mroz4k Pathfinder

Mroz4k

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As for what to do for 500 days achievement... I talked about what I do in long term games in a different topic recently, Imma find it somewhere... Yea, there it is!

On 4. 9. 2017 at 3:56 PM, TROY said:

A person doesnt sleep through being that cold, or thirsty or hungry. You wake up. No matter how tired you are.

Ummm...

I am not sure where you heard that but that is entirely false - if that was the case, people wouldnt die that way so often. Fact is, when you are getting really, really cold, you keep getting sleepy, which is a sign of mild hypothermia. You have to constantly battle the nuations to not just lie down in the snow because you would never wake up. That is why so many people are found in a fetal position as if they were sleeping when they froze to death. Human body has "alerts" to keep things like that from happening, but those are hardly perfect and they work even less likely when person is exhausted through cold, hunger or thirst. Drowziness and sleepiness is afterall one of the first signs of early hypothermia.



For starvation, being cut off from your source of energy means the body is trying to conserve it through other means - sleeping and resting all the time, becoming weaker and weaker - and those "internal alarms" I talked about, those are one of the things the body "turns off" to conserve energy. As stupid as it sounds, human body is far from being a perfect machine.

Thirst in itself is not a very good alarm for dehydratation. Fatigue often comes before feeling thirsty. So many people nowadays are unaware of how much fluids they need to drink every day.

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Not that these "references" are very solid but considering I studied human body once and had to learn these things again for my ski instructor classes, I am fairly sure they are correct.

And I am pretty sure that on Pilgrim and maybe even on Voyageur, you do wake up if something really bad is happening. At least you used to on Pilgrim, that I know for sure, and it should be like that unless they changed it recently.

On 4. 9. 2017 at 9:39 PM, Thrasador said:

Lastly there is MORE than enough cloth in the game to repair your clothes for 500 days....as long as you are waiting to repair things until 80 condition or so, or lower....

On top of that, beachcombing is a thing, and cloth is one of the most common items spawned through beachcombing :) Sometimes even clothes which can be harvested for cloth.
Also, if one wants to be sure, the only "cloth" item neccesary to repair long-term is the hat. It is possible to sleep in crafted leather clothes pretty soundly and "waste" those away, since during Day 500 you keep hunting a lot, you get to have a lot of extra hides and guts to use for repairs.

22 hours ago, Ruruwawa said:

I just started a fresh Interloper run to try this.  I figure even if I don't make it 500 days, it should be fun.

I like your determination. Good luck!

13 hours ago, Thrasador said:

So yeah basically for the record @cullam, you have to treat the Mountaineer's hut like you are sleeping outside in a cave. It's warmer and more wind sheltered than just sleeping outside in a snow bank, but not by much....lol.

Umm, not really...

Thrasador, what difficulty we are talking about? That will be the chief factor in play. If it is Voyageur or anything less, as long as you are sleeping in at least crafted clothes, you will most likely not need to build a fire in Mountaineers. It is more "brutal" to survive there then in an indoor location, but it is definitedly not as brutal as you are making it sound like. I actually measured the differences in between the blizzard on Mountaineers and non blizzard behavior - in pre-Cartographer I spend 200 days living in Mountaineers on Voyageur, it is not that difficult. Difference between blizzard and non blizzard on normal day temperature was about 2 celsius. What was more dangerous was "early morning temperatures" when it went down by like 4 degrees. 



So, if your "feels like" temperature on Mountaineers is just above zero, you want to sleep in 2-3 hour intervals, in case the temperature drops. If it is at 10 degrees, you should be okay even if a blizzard during morning comes. But sleeping in such a cold location without clothes on is just asking for death through freezing.

And if you are going for the "long term", I fully reccomend to make yourself at least 4 pieces of every craftable clothing, and alternate between them, and dont bother taking those off, you can take of everything except for the crafted clothes, and a single headpiece if you wish to avoid accidental frostbite on your head (hmmmm, I wonder, does sleeping in beds prevent frostbite or not... something to test next time I can...) And with that, you can easily live on Voyageur in Mountaineers even without starting fires. I doubt Cartographer or Wintermute changes anything significantly in this aspect.

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cullam Pathfinder

cullam

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Sorry for being checked out for so long. I'll try to cover the various responses/questions. 

I was playing on Stalker (I've never managed to survive more than a week or so on Interloper, as of yet). All of my 100 day+ games on Stalker, I've generally died from, well boredom. Once things get mechanical, it's easy to mentally check out when playing, then I end up doing something stupid, like assuming I can find my way around in a white out, or putting the game down for a few months, then coming back, and misremembering where I was keeping crucial supplies, or even just my way around the maps. Or in this case, presumably forgetting to wear enough clothes in the mountaineering hut.

I've never had any issues with freezing there overnight, once well dressed. Obviously, it's quite different on Interloper. But on Stalker, it's never been an issue, so I haven't needed to keep a fire there, over the previous ~2 months of game time. So my guess is that I went to bed, only dressed in about half my clothes, and not realizing that I'd forgotten to re-dress. And then a cold snap was all she wrote. 

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Mroz4k Pathfinder

Mroz4k

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Please pardon me guys, but I will be quoting a couple of survival experts, both tv show ones and some I met via internet:
One of the biggest survival killers is boredom. Like, the thing we all end up doing in TLD is something people will do in real life too - get bored, doing something stupid because they arent thinking, and dying cause of it.

To prevent that, one needs to learn to plan ahead, and then take that plan, and separate it into tiny little achievements. Its very similar to a learning method for university exams, actually - you separate what you have to learn into segments which you then learn, and cross it in your head as tiny little achievements for every segment you have already mastered - this can keep you busy without ever sinking into that boredom part.

That is kind of what I was saying in that previous thread - you have to find something meaningful to keep you busy, and you have to turn it into a bunch of little "minigames" where each task completed feels like a tiny yet somewhat significant victory. 

Example:

I decide to go out today, for firewood. Now, I live in the PV, in Farmstead, for example. Where do I go, then? I know the area around the ruined shack has wolves. So I think - better would be to venture up the mountains, by the fishing pond.


First achievement to be set: reach the hill without running into a wolf. So I go about my business, there is a wolf, I throw a rock to lead it away, I throw another one just for a good measure. Fine, I am by the hill. Great! First tiny victory!
Second achievement: Reach the pond without running into a wolf: This one seems easy, because for whatever reasons, there are no wolves up there. 
Third, a bit random achievement: On my way there, I came across a bunch of birch saplings! Unplanned for, I took them to turn them into more arrow shafts later. Okay, I am by the pond, another victory!
Third achievement: Collect 30 sticks. I go around, I see a wolf, it charged at me but I threw down my cooked venison, and he went for it... right up till he got an arrow in between his eyes.
Personal achievement finished! Downed a wolf which was going to be a threat in the area. I decided to put aside my stick duty for now. I took up a bow and harvested a kilo of my dead wolf, to use for a fresh bait. 
Third achievement changed - make area safe for wood collecting. I do several circles in the areas around the pond, but it seems safe enough - the wolf was probably a loner. I harvest the rest of the wolf, because I hate wasting resources. I stash it by the fishing hut to have a snack next time I go fishing.
Fourth achievement - collect those 30 sticks. Easily finished, now with the area being safe. 
Fifth achievement - get 20 more sticks, and stash it all in a container in the fishing hut for later - again, easily done, and finished. 

It is early afternoon, time to really start going at it for the firewood. 
Sixth achievement: Harvest up all the fir limbs in the area. I do that, it is early evening. Wood is rather heavy but I can still sprint. 
Seventh achievement: Collect all the remaining sticks around - I did that partially already while going for the fir limbs. I am getting tired and cold, and weather is getting worse. It was snowing for most of the day, but not very windy. But now, clothes are getting a bit wet and things are already starting to freeze. 
Eight achievement: Get down the hill safely. Easily done, but on my way, I sprained my wrist.
Ninth achievement: Do not waste a painkiller material to treat your sprain, and avoid wolves while going home. This proves a bit of a challenge because I cant throw rocks now to redirect the wolves, so I take a way around the duo I distracted by the stone in the morning. My gloves froze constantly and I got a frostbite risk and hypothermia risk, but I reached the home at early night without being bit or losing too much condition. 
Tenth achievement: Set newly acquired wood to its place. I grab my readied lantern, light it up, drop logs down where i have the rest, and put the sticks into a container for better storage. 
Eleventh achievement: Eat up, drink up, go to sleep. I easily do my chores, and I go to sleep.

While sleeping, I have determined it would be best to go out fishing tommorow, my lantern fuel is starting to get low... And so it goes, an average day in Martin´s life on the Great bear island.

Survival is all about the little things in life, and how happy you can feel from each individual tiny victory.

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Thrasador Pathfinder

Thrasador

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11 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

As for what to do for 500 days achievement... I talked about what I do in long term games in a different topic recently, Imma find it somewhere... Yea, there it is!

Ummm...

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I am not sure where you heard that but that is entirely false - if that was the case, people wouldnt die that way so often. Fact is, when you are getting really, really cold, you keep getting sleepy, which is a sign of mild hypothermia. You have to constantly battle the nuations to not just lie down in the snow because you would never wake up. That is why so many people are found in a fetal position as if they were sleeping when they froze to death. Human body has "alerts" to keep things like that from happening, but those are hardly perfect and they work even less likely when person is exhausted through cold, hunger or thirst. Drowziness and sleepiness is afterall one of the first signs of early hypothermia.

 


For starvation, being cut off from your source of energy means the body is trying to conserve it through other means - sleeping and resting all the time, becoming weaker and weaker - and those "internal alarms" I talked about, those are one of the things the body "turns off" to conserve energy. As stupid as it sounds, human body is far from being a perfect machine.

 

Thirst in itself is not a very good alarm for dehydratation. Fatigue often comes before feeling thirsty. So many people nowadays are unaware of how much fluids they need to drink every day.

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Not that these "references" are very solid but considering I studied human body once and had to learn these things again for my ski instructor classes, I am fairly sure they are correct.

And I am pretty sure that on Pilgrim and maybe even on Voyageur, you do wake up if something really bad is happening. At least you used to on Pilgrim, that I know for sure, and it should be like that unless they changed it recently.

On top of that, beachcombing is a thing, and cloth is one of the most common items spawned through beachcombing :) Sometimes even clothes which can be harvested for cloth.
Also, if one wants to be sure, the only "cloth" item neccesary to repair long-term is the hat. It is possible to sleep in crafted leather clothes pretty soundly and "waste" those away, since during Day 500 you keep hunting a lot, you get to have a lot of extra hides and guts to use for repairs.

I like your determination. Good luck!

Umm, not really...

 

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Thrasador, what difficulty we are talking about? That will be the chief factor in play. If it is Voyageur or anything less, as long as you are sleeping in at least crafted clothes, you will most likely not need to build a fire in Mountaineers. It is more "brutal" to survive there then in an indoor location, but it is definitedly not as brutal as you are making it sound like. I actually measured the differences in between the blizzard on Mountaineers and non blizzard behavior - in pre-Cartographer I spend 200 days living in Mountaineers on Voyageur, it is not that difficult. Difference between blizzard and non blizzard on normal day temperature was about 2 celsius. What was more dangerous was "early morning temperatures" when it went down by like 4 degrees. 

 


So, if your "feels like" temperature on Mountaineers is just above zero, you want to sleep in 2-3 hour intervals, in case the temperature drops. If it is at 10 degrees, you should be okay even if a blizzard during morning comes. But sleeping in such a cold location without clothes on is just asking for death through freezing.

And if you are going for the "long term", I fully reccomend to make yourself at least 4 pieces of every craftable clothing, and alternate between them, and dont bother taking those off, you can take of everything except for the crafted clothes, and a single headpiece if you wish to avoid accidental frostbite on your head (hmmmm, I wonder, does sleeping in beds prevent frostbite or not... something to test next time I can...) And with that, you can easily live on Voyageur in Mountaineers even without starting fires. I doubt Cartographer or Wintermute changes anything significantly in this aspect.

 

 

 

@Mroz4k, we have already covered this debate ad nauseum.

If people go to bed warm and toasty, they wake up when they get too cold due to shivering.

People die from freezing to death when they go to bed ALREADY freezing and when they ALREADY are suffering from hypothermia....then they don't wake up.

Your myth has already been busted if you went ahead and did any REAL researh on the subject matter instead of passing along the same baloney everytime it is brought up by someone else....

And not lighting a fire in the Mountaineer's Hut is a risky gamble on any playthrough, if you don't light a fire because you are soooo awesome at The Long Dark, then good for YOU!

I was giving a new player advice because he/she died in his/her sleep there already....

https://www.woot.com/blog/post/the-debunker-will-sleeping-in-extreme-cold-kill-you

Unfortunately they refuse to implement this reality into the game, because you are supposed to screw up and then die in The Long Dark.....

 

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JAFO Pathfinder

JAFO

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7 hours ago, Thrasador said:

If people go to bed warm and toasty, they wake up when they get too cold due to shivering.

People die from freezing to death when they go to bed ALREADY freezing and when they ALREADY are suffering from hypothermia....then they don't wake up.
...
https://www.woot.com/blog/post/the-debunker-will-sleeping-in-extreme-cold-kill-you

Thanks! I'd been trying to find that article, to respond to Mroz4k..

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Mroz4k Pathfinder

Mroz4k

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I didnt really wanna go into an argument over it, and when I am wrong I will admit it...

This is something where I will stand behind my word.

These "factors" that are supposed to wake you up are extremely unreliable. Again, emphasis on EXTREMELY. Not going to get into how they work, frankly I dont remember much of it down to specifics anymore myself, but the twitching itself is a result of neural stimulations. However, these stimulations are first caused by a hormonal change, which in the best circumstances is a long, slow process. Then the neurons send a signal into your body and it starts shiverring, generating heat through movement, and gradually also waking you up. If everything happens to work "properly", that is, and you dont lose enough core temperature by that point to be in heavy hypothermic state, at which point, you are most likely not going to wake up.

Ever "woke up for no reason" in the middle of night, when for example your hand or leg jerked? Wanna know why? Same reason. Again, your brain has been fooled by incorrecly working hormones, which sent out a signal that you are in a mortal danger, and your brain reacted to it, giving an order to wake you up by jerking your limb quickly. Nothing is wrong with you, but that primitive hormonal warning system thought othervise, and now you are awake and pissed off.

It is great that you want to correct me so desperatedly, but even if that nurse was speaking on a convention about survival, that does not mean what she said was the truth. Medical knowledge is something that changes almost every year, still, survival teaches us not to take anything for granted.


I studied pharmacy in a university, part of my first year was molecular biology - in humans, because the aim was to know how individual medications influence humans. Section of that study included studies of hormonal and neural systems. This was done on a Faculty of pharmacy in Hradec Králové, which falls under Charles Univesity - a worldwide known and well respected university when it comes to medical proffesionals. 
But that is not all. Since those studies turned out to be brutally hard, I failed, and now I am studying (so far succesfully) on a different university - Technical University Ostrava (whole name Vysoká škola Báňská Technická Univerzita Ostrava, if you want to look it up) - which doesnt have a great reputation in general, but the faculcy hospital is one of the biggest, the most modern institutions in our country.

Reason why I am mentioning that is because during my university studies in 2016, I took a Ski instructor class. This included several medical lectures as well. These lectures were hosted by a Chief doctor of Chirurgical department of the faculty hospital of Ostrava. (I cant remember his name, sadly, and I tried to find him but I couldnt, the hospital has several chirurgical departments) but an entire lecture was focused on hypothermia. In here, we were explained that while the body has alerts left in place to wake itself when cold, these alerts are highly unreliable, and he reccomended to attempt to stay awake till help arrives if at all possible.



My medical knowledge is fading now since I study Economics these days, but I still consider myself decently knowledgeable to know on which "horse" I would place my bet on - the combined knowledge of my former university proffesors who taught me molecular biology, and a Chief doctor of our faculcy hospital with decades of experience of human anatomy, over a world of some nurse, experienced or not. I mean no disrespect to nurses, but they dont usually have a very deep knowledge into how human body works. Their field of study mostly focuses on "practical" things (as shown in an example of that particular article too - instead of explaining "why" the shivering happens or why it will wake you up, or how it works, she jumps straight to the practical things - "do some jumping jacks, then go to sleep, everything will be OK. The fact you guys take that argument so seriously worries me.

So while you are not techinically wrong, you are far from being right. So chill that attitude, @Thrasador. It sounds incredibly ironic, coming from me, I know. 

Do you think that people who live in cold climates are crazy for taking precautions against scenarios like black outs while sleeping? Because, they went to bed all warm and fuzzy, no chance they will die of cold because their heater stopped working... the shivering will wake them up.
Because statistics seems to dissagree with you (though I admit, most people that die of freezing in their homes are going to be elderly people, more succeptible to cold then your average young person)

TLD itself teaches us, do not ever take things for granted. 

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Mroz4k Pathfinder

Mroz4k

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As far as the argument with Mountaineer hut goes, I gave you my opinion on an experience. As someone who has more then 400 days total spent surviving inside of the Mountaineers, I would guess that counts for something. It is possible to safely sleep over in Mountaineers without a fire, in fact it is really not that difficult, really. Despite having some major holes in it, the Mountaineers does maintain pretty stable temperature, only its basic indoors temperature is pretty low to begin with. But with blizzard coming in, the temperature does not spike as hard as Thrasador thinks - in fact, it spikes much more during the mornings, and even more during morning fogs - those are the most dangerous for temperature.

Again, easy solution is to sleep in two, three hour intervals. You can never die that way even if you got cold - the cold kills fast but not that fast. 

Talking Voyageur of course, harder modes will have more brutal "indoor temperature", but I doubt the spikes will be much more on different modes.

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ChillPlayer Pathfinder

ChillPlayer

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1 hour ago, Mroz4k said:

Talking Voyageur of course, harder modes will have more brutal "indoor temperature", but I doubt the spikes will be much more on different modes.

In Stalker you can get feels like of -25 to -30 °C with poor cloths so only sleep there when you have a warmth bonus at least of 20.

In Interloper though? I never sleep there for long without a fire and always have a huge pile of wood stocked, especially after day 50 when sometimes a blizzard may trap you for days and without a fire it's too cold to survive even with the best Interloper cloths available. Remember, if the hut can't keep you warm, the next free cave is a long walk away :wolf:

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