A hundred days of excess meat

[Hotzn]

On 7.1.2018 at 3:26 AM, mystifeid said:

I think it would be good to see spawn rates continue to taper off and do so much more rapidly than they do now.

Or... generally change something about the availability of animals and the ease of travel.

In days long gone blizzards would shred your clothing in a minute, so you basically HAD to find cover from them (now you can basically ignore them and just travel on). And since the weather could change rapidly without any premonition, any trip further off from shelter was a bit of a risk. I remember very well when the first bears were introduced - they could only be found in Pleasant Valley, and only on the fringes of the map. There were no caves at the time iirc, and therefore any trip out there to get a bear could end in disaster, or at least in a big adventure. But man - a bear meant so much meat, at the time a scarce resource! So you would go for it, hoping for stable weather, and often would find yourself huddled against a big rock maintaining a life-saving fire, praying the wind would not change direction. A couple of versions later, bears came to your porch to be collected like lettuce from the front garden. Ever since then, meat was abundant and things like parasites had to be introduced which never really felt good.

Now assume we had to travel greater distances to find game and hunt successfully, but would get more meat out of it. And travelling the distance would be more dangerous than it currently is... now that would turn every hunt into a story! Thinking about this further, it should not just be wolves that hinder our passage, as that would make them an annoyance over time. Wolf encounters should also be exciting adventures and therefore should not happen every 5 minutes. No - the hindering element must be the weather. And this is how I imagine it:

1. In a blizzard, there should be temperature drops which make shelter a necessity. Maybe not always, but sometimes. What I am advocating here is a condition loss which goes faster than our current 'maximum' of three 'arrows' down. Maybe up to five arrows down, anyway much faster than currently.

2. Also in a blizzard, gusts of wind should present a problem concerning orientation. They should just make us stumble and turn about, losing direction. One of the current problems is that you can just pin your direction to a certain location when a blizzard starts and then just walk straight ahead to reach that destination during the blizzard. This is too easy. The blizzard should mess with our orientation, force us to look down occasionally or knock us off path at times. It should be very difficult to walk in a straight line over the distance during a blizzard.

3. The length of blizzards should have more variation. Anything from 1 hour to several days. If you get caught somewhere out there with little resources and run out of luck (meaning a longer blizzard hits) - game over.

So my 2 cents - make travelling more difficult by making blizzards and other weather phenomena more dangerous. And put wildlife mainly in remote locations which require travelling but which cannot serve as a viable base. Wildlife could also be made more difficult to hunt (is more aware of player approaching, runs away and does not return). In return, the amount of meat gotten from a deer could be raised.

[cekivi]

@Hotzn: You just evoked some fond memories of Pleasant Valley hunting  

And yes, while blizzards don't have to shred your clothes they should definitely disorient you. For an experienced player blizzards are little more than a nuisance as I use them to navigate across large maps without having to worry about wildlife. 

[Pillock]

22 hours ago, mystifeid said:

There needs to some other mechanism that prevents the scavengers from joining their brethren on the meat pile.

I don't mind the ability itself to stack up a massive pile of meat so much. I'd rather see it balanced so that doing so would be a waste of time - ie. if you store the meat inside it spoils before you can eat all of it, while if you store it outdoors it gets nicked by scavengers.

I also think the custom settings could do with some refinement, so that players can be more precise with them.

Plus, what @Hotzn said x100

[mystifeid]

6 hours ago, Hotzn said:

1. In a blizzard, there should be temperature drops which make shelter a necessity. Maybe not always, but sometimes. What I am advocating here is a condition loss which goes faster than our current 'maximum' of three 'arrows' down. Maybe up to five arrows down, anyway much faster than currently.

Why blizzards?? Blizzards drive me nuts with that sound. If you want to make the game harder please think about something besides blizzards.

At the moment there is quite a bit of difference in the severity and average length of blizzards depending on the map with Pleasant Valley (of course) being the worst.

Why not just make all maps have Pleasant Valley weather in Interloper?

The air temperature seems to be consistently 10°C colder. When I go hunting there I am usually freezing even before I shoot a deer. If I light a fire to harvest the meat, it's odds on it'll be blown out before I finish. By contrast in Mystery Lake I can shoot and harvest an entire deer without ever lighting a fire and maybe just freeze a little bit at the end or not at all. This is a huge, huge difference.

And please try walking from say, the Crossroads to the Abandoned Cache after day 50 compared to walking an equivalent distance in Coastal Highway or Mystery Lake.

If blizzards alone are changed, Pleasant Valley will become unbearable. Even now the blizzard frequency there is higher than anywhere else in Interloper and it seems not uncommon to see a daily 10-12 hour blizzard. Blizzards that last days? I'd probably stop playing the game.

Blizzard temperatures are influenced by the time of day with dawn producing the coldest temps. I wouldn't mind seeing these temps reproduced independently from the time of day but sometimes I think we must all be playing different games when everyone is so blase about blizzards. If I happen to be going in wrong direction (headwind) I frequently have to abandon my target, turn around and go somewhere tailwind. And I remember thinking once that the predators must not be out there in the blizzard with me. Until I was killed by a wolf.

7 hours ago, Hotzn said:

2. Also in a blizzard, gusts of wind should present a problem concerning orientation. They should just make us stumble and turn about, losing direction. One of the current problems is that you can just pin your direction to a certain location when a blizzard starts and then just walk straight ahead to reach that destination during the blizzard. This is too easy. The blizzard should mess with our orientation, force us to look down occasionally or knock us off path at times. It should be very difficult to walk in a straight line over the distance during a blizzard.

It has been suggested before that this should just apply in general. Bumps in the ground, slopes, wind etc should all prevent me from switching on my walk macro and going and making a cup of coffee.

Obviously, the stronger the wind, the more pronounced this effect should become.

7 hours ago, Hotzn said:

And put wildlife mainly in remote locations which require travelling but which cannot serve as a viable base.

Unfortunately, there are very few places that are not close to either a building or a cave.

 

7 hours ago, Hotzn said:

Wildlife could also be made more difficult to hunt (is more aware of player approaching, runs away and does not return).

Again, detection range is an old can of worms and yes it would be great to see this increased particularly when crouched.

 

7 hours ago, Hotzn said:

In return, the amount of meat gotten from a deer could be raised.

Or lowered.

3 hours ago, Pillock said:

I'd rather see it balanced so that doing so would be a waste of time

It's a waste of time now. It's like a trophy on the wall: you never get to use it.

[Wasteland Watcher]

On 1/9/2018 at 10:37 AM, Revantulet said:

Well the game is screaming for a meat curing process.

Ruined meat should not be able to be revived, but making beef jerky should be added. 

I thought that the ruined meat we can eat is this game's beef jerky

[cekivi]

Welcome back @Wasteland Watcher

 

[Wasteland Watcher]

1 hour ago, cekivi said:

Welcome back @Wasteland Watcher

 

Thanks! TLD is one of the four games I have on a rotating schedule.

Love that spoiled meat