Love how this game can surprise you

[stratvox]

I've got well over a thousand hours into this game (which is just nuts, but anyway...) and I just found the cave on Crumbling Highway under the Arch that I never knew existed.

As an aside, the amount of coal in it is off the hook.

I'm experimenting with various custom settings to try and set up a different kind of experience and then to stream a game with them, the idea being wildlife detection is set to far, meat and blood make you smell a lot, the weather freakin' blows, and while resources are set to medium all the other gear type settings are set to minimize loot... so yeah, there are hatchets, knives, and rifles, but overall there's not a lot of stuff and decay is set to high. Oh, I am planning on having loose item availability set to high, though, because that means you have to keep your eye peeled to make sure you don't miss stuff when you're tossing someone's house.

The question I'm wrestling with is hostile wildlife. If I go with hostile, my plan is to set wolves to the lowest setting and their fear reaction to highest, and if not hostile still low but fear reaction to low as well. Attack damage will be set to highest level. The idea I'm hoping will bear fruit is that raw meat will be a wolf magnet, and every once in a while I'll end up stumbling across one within the "attack anyway" range, or to make them very rare... but incredibly dangerous when they do occur. This is because otherwise once one gets set up with decent weapons the fact that wolves completely home in on you mean it's hard to starve because they keep bringing you snacks. This is to give reasonable loot in the very early game to help get one kitted up, but then to make hunting very very difficult over the long term... so far more on the exploration hunter/gatherer side of experience rather than stealth the zombie wolves experience of Stalker, say. I can tell you that with wildlife detection set to far that hunting deer is going to be a serious challenge at low skill levels. I also plan on having aurora set to high, because reasons. Actually, one thing that would be awesome would be an option to have passive predators, except that they turn hostile when the aurora is on. My research indicates that this is not a possible scenario right now, which is kind of a shame.

Anyway... just love that after going through this game this much that I can still find things that I didn't know existed before. It's great!

[Cr41g]

when you get it all sorted....drop us the code....sounds like it would make for a good run

[stratvox]

Currently I'm doing a run of the passive wildlife version until I meet a moose so I can check out the behaviour; wolves and bears flee, but I've yet to encounter a moose so I'm not sure what'll happen. If the moose flees too, then I'm probably going to go hostile wildlife with wolves set to low and all the other animals set to high... to be frank having all the wildlife run away makes the game a little boring. Also want to try a few tweaks to the loot settings first... I'm still finding more stuff that I really want to find, though I'll allow that may well be because I know where all the good stuff is and just immediately run there when I enter a region.

[s7mar7in]

On ‎9‎/‎22‎/‎2018 at 8:18 PM, stratvox said:

the cave on Crumbling Highway under the Arch

Very nice, I tend to do a left-hand search to avoid the wolf that is patrolling the road. This allows moving quickly through the region, while looting the basement and the cave at the North...thanks for sharing!

9 hours ago, stratvox said:

Currently I'm doing a run of the passive wildlife version

This could be interesting as it seems to me that the HDT is slowly tweaking towards wildlife being "cautiously aggressive", (which feels more like wildlife behavior). So great minds do tend to think alike. Good luck my friend!  

[stratvox]

Thanks! What I'm hoping to come up with is one that's really rough in the first 48 hours, okay for a week or three after that, and then starts to get harder and harder as the survivor has to rely more and more on hunting with the hunting made very difficult. Sort of a long reflective exploratory approach with a need to level up the bow and rifle skill ASAP to avoid a medium/long term starvation issue... and then streaming it. I'm thinking I won't go with a webcam, just audio of my voice with it being off most of the time. Keep it really pure, as it were.

[Spakerman]

I would watch some of that stream but people get bored with a stream without the commentary.  If I'm not hearing your thought process or learning something from your commentary then I likely turn off the stream to focus on my own game.

Your idea for the game design does sound fun though.