Vigilant Flame first thoughts

[JohnDoe60]

Hi,

Look'n good, well, what little I've seen of the new area anyways. First try was in the middle of the night, pitch black, got scared by wolves before finding any sticks and ended up running off a cliff in the dark - didn't kill me though. It was almost starting to lighten up before I saw any firewood but ended up freezing while trying to start a fire with too few sticks to have make a difference. The second run was much better, saw some landscape but couldn't gawk because night was a couple hours away. I managed to find food, a rifle and 6 ammo, a hatchet, and was closing in on a second deer carcass just as it was starting to get dark when the wolves attacked - ended up bleeding to death because I was too slow with the bandages. After a couple more frozen deaths in the dark I figured it may be best to come back with some equipment, or at least figure out the new fire stuff first.

 

I really, really like the new fire/cooking system, and here is how to make it better...

• need a smaller fire option

More realistic use of a campfire is great, but it doesn't look like I can build one in as small a nook as before and that could be a problem.

 

• finer grained activity times

Fishing, reading, etc., in 1-hour chunks doesn't work well with <whatever> minute cooking times. Smaller chunks of time appears to be necessary, maybe 10 or 15 min.

 

• do <something> until <process finished> synchronization option for activities

If some timed process is happening the user should have the option to perform an activity until it finishes. Present the player with a list of all ongoing activities to sync with along side the finer grained variable time, then fish/read/etc. until the food is cooked.

 

• create a minor/hidden skill for estimating cooking time

The first time you toss a chunk of meat onto a hot rock then turn your attention to something else you'll likely end up with over or under done food, after a couple months of doing it you'll have the timing down to a minute or two. Would be a good tweak-able parameter in a hardcore realistic mod as well. Maybe only makes sense with a do-until time management option.

 

Now that we are hanging out around fires watching food cook, maybe there are things we can do when nothing needs mending and the instruction manuals have been read:

• Layout projects at the workbench, sew/craft them up while hanging out at the fire. It should take longer, maybe a little wasteful, but working on new boots would beat the boredom out of watching a tin of water boil.
• Reading material would be nice, novels and poetry kinda stuff, maybe a joke book. Could also mitigate cabin fever - an easy burn now, or keep from going nuts during the next 3-day blizzard. Different books could provide different amounts of diversion (reading times), but thick novels should also burn longer then... maybe getting too hardcore. <shrug>

 

Oh, the "use"  thing, it sucks.

"Use" water - am I going to  get the option to use it to wash clothes (slightly warmer and wear slower than dirty clothes) or dishes (slight buff to condition related stats because hygiene is good)?

"Use" raw meat - I'd use it as a decoy, to make a carnivore lure for hunting, and for cooking, but the absolute last use I'd have for it is eating!

Having both USE and ACTIONS buttons on the same item doesn't make sense unless there is an unambiguous use for the item, in which case you may as well say what that use is. Unnecessarily hiding specific meaning behind a generic term creates an unnecessary mental indirection, we don't need an obfuscated UI. Hmm, even if all items had multiple uses I'd still want a shortcut button for the most common use, i.e., what was there previously - so, you may as well revert your use of "use" until there is an actual use for it.

 

Surprises:

• Dropping a can beside a fire opened it and started heating up the contents!  Dropping was a specific and well defined action; now what happens may depend on what you are dropping, how far away from hot surface you happen to be, and may not actually involve dropping.

 

You devs generally just keep making TLD better, but the dropping cans issue and use of a generic "use" for everything are steps backwards with the UI because they make it less clear what the players options are and what will result from an action. I wanna play the game, not decipher the UI.

 

Take care,

- JohnDoe60

[Mesha]

Yeah, I have to agree, I got a nasty case of food poisoning trying to use my raw rabbit while at the fire.  But to make water I have to "use" a tin can while near a fire.  I have no idea how to cook rabbit.  Let's see, I have a slab of raw rabbit meat, a stick, a fire.  

I also had no idea how to cook the rabbit after I started a fire in a barrel.  So the barrel has a grill on top, the fire is hot.  I can put a tin can on the grill but if I use the rabbit meat I know I am just going to eat it again and get sick.

 

 

[Avelyan]

Use the radial menu, RIGHT click on the raw rabbit and then place it on the cooking surface.  Put your cursor over the cooking rabbit and it will tell you how much time remaining until it is cooked.

[happybjorn]

5 hours ago, JohnDoe60 said:

Oh, the "use"  thing, it sucks.

You are right, but it's actually worse than you think.  Depending on how they have text files implemented it might actually be untranslatable in many languages.

[Patrick Carlson]

6 hours ago, JohnDoe60 said:

do <something> until <process finished> synchronization option for activities

If some timed process is happening the user should have the option to perform an activity until it finishes. Present the player with a list of all ongoing activities to sync with along side the finer grained variable time, then fish/read/etc. until the food is cooked.

 

Thanks for the detailed feedback! Just a heads up -- you can select a cooking item and choose "Pass Time Until Ready", which will advance time much like the previous system, until the meat or water is finished. 

[Moonraker]

6 hours ago, JohnDoe60 said:

Surprises:

• Dropping a can beside a fire opened it and started heating up the contents!  Dropping was a specific and well defined action; now what happens may depend on what you are dropping, how far away from hot surface you happen to be, and may not actually involve

It's an intended mechanism with the new Cooking to allow the Warming of cups of drink and canned food besides any coking fire source (campfire, fire barrel etc.) hence why placing a can in close proximity to one of these fires starts the opening process, as it then Warms the contents,. It's possible to pick up any of these items at anytime.

This doesn't require using one of the cooking slots so it's a useful way to heat those items alongside other cooking.

I posted more details and some basic tests in this thread for info.

[JohnDoe60]

2 hours ago, Moonraker said:

It's an intended mechanism with the new Cooking to allow the Warming of cups of drink and canned food besides any coking fire source (campfire, fire barrel etc.) hence why placing a can in close proximity to one of these fires starts the opening process, as it then Warms the contents,. It's possible to pick up any of these items at anytime.

This doesn't require using one of the cooking slots so it's a useful way to heat those items alongside other cooking.

I posted more details and some basic tests in this thread for info.

The can of peaches I dropped ended up on a cooking spot, but you've explained why I was able to place a second can in the same spot (cans overlapped with the top of one appearing as a crescent) and scratched an item off the to-try list. Thanks.

[JohnDoe60]

2 hours ago, Patrick Carlson said:

Thanks for the detailed feedback! Just a heads up -- you can select a cooking item and choose "Pass Time Until Ready", which will advance time much like the previous system, until the meat or water is finished. 

Ya, found it and was happy, should make for shorter/easier real-time work of cooking up a moose.

I really want a slow cooking method now though, something a bit more forgiving, with hours of time to collect the result instead of minutes. Smoked fish, moose and deer jerky would be naturals, and maybe a good way to evaporate some meat by trading significant processing losses for a little longer storage time.