Condition recovers too quickly v.2

[Kayosiv]

About 18 months ago I created a thread about how I felt condition recovered too fast in general and especially while sleeping. In summary, I think that recovering condition should take longer to give animal attacks more menace and increase game immersion.

If you'd like to take a look at the original thread, it is linked here.

However in the last 18 months there have been many updates to The Long Dark, most notably Custom Game settings. Before we talk about that though, I want to give some general knowledge to those who might not know the specifics on condition recovery so we're all on the same page for this discussion.

On all game modes, including interloper, Condition recovers at approximately 1% per hour if your hunger/thirst/fatigue/temperate gauges are are more than 0. If any of those gauges are at 0, you lose condition. Hunger and fatigue being at 0 cause you to lose about 1% condition per hour, thirst 2% per hour, and temperature 20% per hour. This is universal across all game modes and changing values in the custom settings will only cause your gauges to decrease slower, once they reach 0 the effect on condition loss does not change.

Also universal among all difficulty settings is the amount of condition you recover while sleeping, which is about double of when you are awake, or 2% per hour asleep, with slight bonuses for being in excellent beds or for sleeping for multiple hours in a row. Interestingly enough, condition recovery while sleeping is highest on Interloper difficulty, with the idea likely that some damage taken during the day on the hardest setting is inevitable and the player will need to recover more every night.

These default settings for condition recovery mean that with a 15 hour day and a 9 hour sleep, it is possible for a player that has 4 non-empty health gauges can recover 35%+ condition in a single day, meaning that the effect of any injury or disaster sans frostbite can be completely recovered from in about 2 in-game days. I still feel like this is horrible for immersion, tension, and touch decision making creation, and also ruins several in-game mechanics.

Clothing is more valuable then your body. When the worst thing that happens from a wolf attack or a bear attack is that a piece of clothing is ruined, rather than your body being decimated, this creates for a immersion breaking situation.

Starving yourself is the most efficient method of survival. Staring for a 15 hour period will do 15% condition damage. Eating just before bed and sleeping for 9 hours will gain you 18%+ condition back. Therefore the odd but currently most successful way to survive is to eat nothing all day and take damage, while recovering all that damage at night and spending fewer calories while asleep to boot. If condition recovery wasn't so generous, this would possibly help you survive longer, but would never be a long term solution to survival like it is now.

Herbal Tea serves no purpose. The 12% additional condition gain from Herbal Tea doesn't fit into the 2-day recovery system currently in the game. The difference between say, 90% and 100% condition is almost meaningless, and since all injury can be recovered in 2 days anyway, skipping herbal tea's benefits  is easy to do. Increasing the healing power of Herbal tea is also not really a viable option because it would essentially have to heal the player to 100% no matter what in a single night to be meaningfully different than it is now.

Now I have to give some massive credit to the Hinterlands team because they actually gave me exactly what I wanted, at least halfway.

If you set condition recovery to "low" in the custom game settings, it is the exact same 1% condition recovery per 4 hours or thereabouts, just like I requested in my original post from 2017. However the problem is with the sleeping condition recovery gain. The two lowest settings for sleeping recovery are "none" and "low."
None, quite literally, means none, so you regain 0% condition at all times when sleeping, which make sleeping give you less condition recovery than being awake. The current "low" still grants you about 1.5% condition per hour of rest, making it possible to heal 15%+ in a single night's sleep. I personally would love there to be a "very low" that sets the condition recovery while sleeping to 1% per 2 hours, a "no bonus" to just have you recover at your regular waking hours' rate, or a "double waking recovery" so it would be universal whatever you chose as your conscious condition recovery time.

Right now you don't have a lot of options for condition recovery and I would like that to change. Currently you have the options of the following.

None.
3-4% per 24 hours (no condition recovery on sleep)
15-20% per 24 hours (condition recovery of all types set to as low as possible without being 0)
35-50% per 24 hours (default in all game modes)
Full health every 24 hours (if you set things to be super high)

Right now I'm not satisfied with the 3-4% per day because that truly is too slow. Being mauled by a bear and being reduced to 10% condition would require an entire month of recovery time in game, which while realistic, does slow down game-play too much and is too punishing. However at the lowest settings for condition recovery I can heal up to 21%+ condition in a single day of healthy gauges and a lot of rest. That gap is HUGE! Ideally I'd like to be able to recover somewhere between 6-10% condition in a day, meaning that it would take a few weeks to recover from the most grievous of injury, not a month, but also not just a few days either.

[Pillock]

I have the the waking recovery rate set to 'none' and the 'at rest' recovery to 'low', and I get about 16 or 17% from a continuous 11 hour sleep. I could make it less by increasing the thirst rate, thereby making 11 hours impossible without suffering thirst damage, but I prefer not to.

For me, this works fine. I can't always manage an 11 hour sleep - I have to get myself totally exhausted first, so it's often only 10-15% recovery per night. And this means I can't afford to lose much freezing damage or hunger damage during the day, or I don't just get it back again. A bear attack takes about 6 days to fully recover from, and that's if I don't 'spend' any condition at all on the recovery days (recovering from wolf attacks obviously varies on their severity).

As I say, it works fine for me. I always try to keep my condition as high as possible, never willingly letting my health bars run out (sometimes it's unavoidable, though), because I also have the wildlife struggle damage as high as possible on all measures, so letting my condition drop on purpose could cost my life if I get jumped by a wolf unexpectedly (which it has, many times).

I agree with you that more granular adjustments in the Custom settings would be welcome -  but it's often the case that the other settings play into how each one individually will affect your game. That is, you can change other settings besides the actual recovery rates in order to make condition depletion more risky or costly, and to make maintaining as high a condition level as possible at all times more valuable.

[s7mar7in]

4 hours ago, Kayosiv said:

Right now you don't have a lot of options for condition recovery and I would like that to change.

The above discussion is well presented and to me very interesting.
As regards recovery options:

1. We have waking recovery rate while maintaining the (4) needs, (a welcome addition).
2. We have sleeping recovery rate while maintaining the (4) needs, (a topic of discussion).
3. We have herbal tea bonus, (currently, we are lacking a natural herbal tea bonus option).
4. ??? Is the Stimpack a net gain to condition ??? (seems yes if we can sleep to avoid exhaustion). 
5. We have timely first aid, (field medic supplies / readiness).

How nice would it be if recovery options and rates were tied to a new "First Aid Skill".

Good luck my friends!

[Hotzn]

The discrepancies found in the affliction 'system' is that there is only one single 'condition' bar which is supposed to reflect a variety of afflictions - hunger, fatigue, thirst, injuries, illness, cold and maybe others I am currently overlooking. In reality, some of these afflictions would be very temporary, while others would take time and effort to heal or wear off. Hypothermia could be 'healed' within hours by just staying warm. Injuries sustained in a fight with a bear, however, would take weeks or even months to heal. Hunger could be stilled within minutes if food is available, but going hungry over long periods of time would weaken the body, and regaining that bodily strength would require a long period of healthy eating. However, these distinctions cannot be made in the current system, because everything is counted against 'condition' which only has one universal speed of recovery (by universal I mean not distinguishing between the sources of condition loss). So basically the whole health/condition system would need an overhaul.

[Kayosiv]

9 hours ago, Pillock said:

I have the the waking recovery rate set to 'none' and the 'at rest' recovery to 'low', and I get about 16 or 17% from a continuous 11 hour sleep. I could make it less by increasing the thirst rate, thereby making 11 hours impossible without suffering thirst damage, but I prefer not to.

Interesting! When I initially did my testing and Condition recovery rate was set to 0, it caused condition to never increase during consciousness or sleep, or so I thought.

Just testing it now, with it Condition recovery rate was set to 0 and bonus with sleep set to low, 12 hours of rest gave me 17% condition back. When I slept 1 hour, it gave me 0%, or with my new understanding, likely less than 1% but still not nothing like I had originally thought. Sleeping for 3 more hours gave me 2%. 9 hours gave me 11%.