useless Items made usefull

[Observedfuture3]

I find that newspapers, books and, recycled cans have zero use my thought is to be able to make paper logs out of the paper (3 pr log) or books (1 per log) and line (2 per log that also uses up excess gut) and as for the cans make them into scrap metal at the worktable 

Edited September 20, 2019 by Observedfuture3

[Serenity]

Books are pretty useful early game as they greatly increase the fire starting chance. It's only with leveling up the fire skill that they become useless

Edited September 20, 2019 by Serenity

[Observedfuture3]

once you reach a certain point they are completely useless and I find myself needing something to kill some time while warming up between hunts gathering and blizzards I hate to just kill time sitting on the bed I like having something constructive to do

[ManicManiac]

12 hours ago, Observedfuture3 said:

I find that newspapers, books and, recycled cans have zero use

Steady on there, I see what you are getting at but lets not be to hasty to make declarative statements like this.  News papers, books, and recycled cans all do have their uses.  Granted those uses get overshadowed once we get a cooking pot and when we get to fire starting level 3... at that point yeah they can arguably become "less" useful, but lets acknowledge that those things do have use.  Maybe not so much in the late game... but the usefulness of those resources is there.

I've always been in support of the idea that tinder should continue to be useful beyond level 3.  I've argued that tinder should always contribute to the percentage changes of starting a fire (albeit a very small one, I think it should still be have one).  This way while it's optional after level 3 there would still be at least a small benefit to it.

I've also been in favor of the idea of being able to "read" non-skill books as a way to help mitigate cabin fever risk (maybe even if only a little).

 

12 hours ago, Observedfuture3 said:

as for the cans make them into scrap metal at the worktable

I feel like scraped aluminum cans wouldn't reasonably be useful for crafting the kinds of things we see in the game.  That's kind of like saying we want to use soda cans to make arrow heads...  To me that would seem a little lame.  Besides, considering a player managed to survive more than 10 in-games years on interloper suggests that there is more than enough scrap metal in the game for the players.   

 

[Addendum]
I'm assuming most here know that news papers are good for making tinder, that books are both good for boosting fire starting percentage chance as well as boosting skills (referring specifically to skill books), and that recycled cans are good for boiling water...  I just don't think it's fair to say these things have no use. 

Edited September 20, 2019 by ManicManiac
Edited for clarity

[Serenity]

I don't carry around two pots. Or even one. Too heavy. They mostly stay at bases and I only take them with me when I make a fire for hunting for example. Otherwise it's always two cans.

Yeah, you eventually end up with a surplus of cans, but so what? I once played with a mod that allows you to recycle them. It makes some sense, but it also made getting scrap a bit too trivial. There is plenty of stuff to saw up, but you need quite a lot of time for some items. So it's an investment.

Edited September 20, 2019 by Serenity

[ManicManiac]

3 minutes ago, Serenity said:

I don't carry around two pots. Or even one. Too heavy. They mostly stay at bases and I only take them with me when I make a fire for hunting for example. Otherwise it's always two cans.

Yeah, of course.  I also tend to leave two cans in every place that I might likely hole up.

[Observedfuture3]

I agree they have some very small use but if I left 2 cans everywhere I went I would still have an abundace of them I am a bit of a horder of items

3 hours ago, ManicManiac said:

3 hours ago, ManicManiac said:

I feel like scraped aluminum cans wouldn't reasonably be useful for crafting the kinds of things we see in the game.  That's kind of like saying we want to use soda cans to make arrow heads...  To me that would seem a little lame.  Besides, considering a player managed to survive more than 10 in-games years on interloper suggests that there is more than enough scrap metal in the game for the players. 

 

 one thing about the cans is they are not aluminum most if not all cans used for food are tin because aluminum tends to leach into the food and can cause aluminum poisoning and as for the abundance of scrap metal this is for something to do while there is a blizzard ouside or you need to warm up between trips outside so you don't alwasys have to pass time sitting on your butt in the bed

Edited September 21, 2019 by Observedfuture3

[Observedfuture3]

5 hours ago, Serenity said:

Books are pretty useful early game as they greatly increase the fire starting chance. It's only with leveling up the fire skill that they become useless

I agree with that but I always end up with many many books after the early stage of the game and just thought that something useful should come of them and I personaly have made paper logs out of old news paper and books it is something to pass time and be constructive

[ManicManiac]

22 minutes ago, Observedfuture3 said:

 one thing about the cans is they are not aluminum

Fair enough... tin-coated steel then (I happily stand corrected)... still it would reasonably take quite a few "tin cans" to craft anything meaningful considering how thin and flimsy the metal is... I suppose they could reasonably used to make fish hooks - so I'd grant you that.  My main point here is there is plenty of metal in the world to conceivably survive more than a decade (that much has been demonstrated).  I just don't really see a need to be able to re-recycle a can this way when we objectively have more than enough metal laying around to keep us going (even in interloper) for a very very long time.

[Addendum]
Looking into it further it sees we were both correct... "Of course, tin is only the traditional way to make cans. Many cans today are made of aluminum or different types of treated metal, as long as that metal can be formed into the can shape and is resistant to corrosion and rust."

Edited September 21, 2019 by ManicManiac

[Observedfuture3]

3 hours ago, ManicManiac said:

I'm assuming most here know that news papers are good for making tinder, that books are both good for boosting fire starting percentage chance as well as boosting skills (referring specifically to skill books)

I end up with an excess of tinder like hundreds of them I have never had to resort to breaking down the news paper for tinder.  I have no use for skill books anymore and normal books just pile up in a corner of my base since I have lots of both types of wood 

[ManicManiac]

@Observedfuture3

And I agreed with you that tinder should continue to be useful, and gave you my thoughts as to how I feel it could best be done.   

As for the rest... my point remains.  Just because items are not useful to you in the late game does not make it correct to say that the items have no use at all.  They do have use and I'd wager they were even useful to you early on, just perhaps not so useful in the late game... 

 

Edited September 21, 2019 by ManicManiac

[Observedfuture3]

@ManicManiac

I will agree that they have use to some players I have played this game since it was still in preveiw and have never really used any of these things I am not trying to upset any one with my blanket statement that they have zero use I should not have said that I should have said they haven't really ever had a use to me and I think they would make a good palete to make new way to kill time while warming up or avoiding a blizzard oh and I also wish to correct myself about the material cans are made of most food cans are made of steel or tin free steel (dependind on what country you are from some are aluminum) and most beverage cans are made with aluminum so as you said both of us were correct

Edited September 21, 2019 by Observedfuture3

[UTC-10]

I have the fire master badge so I start at Level 3 fire starting so I don't need to but have gotten into the habit of carrying and using tinder plugs just about every time I start a fire.  I now feel a bit funny not using tinder plugs when I start a fire.  Before I used tinder plugs to mark paths and just left them in the trash cans, but lately I have been picking them up and replacing them with cattail heads or something else. Sure I can use cattails for tinder, but I am not going to be a purist about it.  As long as the paper lasts, I'll use tinder plugs. After that, well... I'll see.

 

 

[ajb1978]

The one thing I DO want to see is the ability to bundle sticks together as a singular firewood item.  Small, medium, and large bundles let's say.  20 sticks for a small bundle, 40 sticks for a medium, 80 sticks for a large.  The weight is the same as that many sticks, and it is worth that many sticks worth of heat and burn time (Edit: 80 sticks would just instantly be worth a 12 hour fire, since that's actually more sticks than any one fire can hold), but it registers as a single item.  Highly useful for when you want to drop your firewood in a pile.  I've written a function in AutoHotKey that maps E to "rapid click" which makes it easier when I want to pick up a mountain of sticks for the fire, but still...having hundreds of sticks indoors increases the chance that the game will crash on area transition.

Everything else, like making paper logs, harvesting scrap metal from steel soup cans, etc. would be nice, but I'm honestly fine without it.  Being able to craft stick-bundle firewood items is something I'm actively in favor of.

Edited September 21, 2019 by ajb1978

[Guest jeffpeng]

There's a bit to unpack here.

Let's start with the easier issue, the cans. Making scrap metal out of them seems intuitive, but it upsets the balance as it consistently removes the already low incentive to hacksaw metal furniture. Hacksawing scrap metal is time consuming, costs quite a bit of calories, and you find so much scrap metal in the world (conveniently placed around forges) that you will only have to break down furniture for scrap metal relatively late in the game. Now think of how you could turn every salvaged can - of which you will accumulate 50+ in a long game with moderately thorough scavenging - into scrap metal .... why would you even bother with breaking down metal furniture then unless you want to pride yourself of owning 500 pieces of scrap metal you'll never need.

Aside from that I do as many others do: I leave them with fireplaces at that make a good waypoint. I go so far that I even often leave enough time on the fire to boil the water before moving on - so when I come back I have a "fresh" litre of water waiting for me. Plus carrying around two pots really is too much hassle for me. Two cans is all you need to keep yourself afloat. To me pots are something stationary that I place strategically where I will need them: at my home base(s) and in fishing huts.

Then about tinder and raw tinder materials... I agree with @ManicManiacin that they should retain usefulness throughout the game. My vision for that differs a bit, however. For once I would like to see them as a requirement even post Firestarting III when trying to make fire with the magnification lens. Then I think they could play a role in implementing firestarting with sticks. I voiced this idea before, and I think it fits here: to start a fire without light or matches you'd need a log of cedar or fir, a stick, and a few tinder, plus a bit of extra time (which is something you might not have) and a reasonable skill in firestarting (III or even IV) to begin with. This would offset matchless firestarting so far that it would be only an option if you had excess time and/or a crucial need to preserve matches.

About books .... in my opinion they are fine how they are. Early they help you start a fire, later they guarantee it. If you still have books around when you hit Firestarting V .... well, you should have used more books to save time and/or matches earlier. It would be relatively counterproductive from a game design perspective to first implement cabin fever to prevent time-skipping through life, and then offer mitigations for it to allow just that. One can debate if cabin fever is a healthy mechanic or not, and if it is even still required in the game, but if at all it should be either adjusted while still fulfilling its intend (to get people outside) or removed entirely.

@ajb1978Yes, please. Just bundles of 10 would already improve this situation by an order of magnitude.

 

[ManicManiac]

@Observedfuture3
I've been at it a while now too, playing since the later end of 2014 (right around the time it arrived on steam early access - sadly I missed the chance to be a backer...).  I know where you're coming from, I wasn't upset about it or anything... I just couldn't back your initial assertion.  I do agree though there are things that should reasonably continue to be a little more useful in the long game.  That part I can agree with you on.

 

36 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

The one thing I DO want to see is the ability to bundle sticks together as a singular firewood item

  I agree this would be a wonderful addition... while I don't mind doing it, it can be time consuming (and a bit tedious) to pick up 100 sticks from my wood stockpile one at a time.

 

40 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

Everything else... [text removed for brevity] ...I'm honestly fine without it.

I agree with this as well.  Some of those things could be a nice touch, but I also am fine with the mechanics as they are now.

 

13 hours ago, UTC-10 said:

I have the fire master badge so I start at Level 3 fire starting so I don't need to but have gotten into the habit of carrying and using tinder plugs just about every time I start a fire.  I now feel a bit funny not using tinder plugs when I start a fire.  Before I used tinder plugs to mark paths and just left them in the trash cans, but lately I have been picking them up and replacing them with cattail heads or something else. Sure I can use cattails for tinder, but I am not going to be a purist about it.  As long as the paper lasts, I'll use tinder plugs. After that, well... I'll see.

I think this is a good perspective.  I tend to always want to use tinder regardless of Fire Starting level as well.  I think it's good from an RP standpoint, and it makes sense.  That's why I kind of wish tinder would have some percentage boost (even if it's something small like 5%)...  or say something that you could put in a fire to keep it alive while the wind is blowing out your campfire (maybe 2 or 3 tinder would equal 1 minute of burn time or something like that... something small since you can't get your fire up past 9 minutes under those conditions anyways) 

 

[ManicManiac]

3 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Making scrap metal out of them seems intuitive, but it upsets the balance as it consistently removes the already low incentive to hacksaw metal furniture

Right on.  I was trying to convey something similar, but I didn't manage to do so as eloquently as you did here.

 

4 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

About books .... in my opinion they are fine how they are. Early they help you start a fire, later they guarantee it.

Also sport on, I agree with you 100%.

[Guest jeffpeng]

28 minutes ago, ManicManiac said:

I think this is a good perspective.  I tend to always want to use tinder regardless of Fire Starting level as well.  I think it's good from an RP standpoint, and it makes sense.  That's why I kind of wish tinder would have some percentage boost (even if it's something small like 5%)...  or say something that you could put in a fire to keep it alive while the wind is blowing out your campfire (maybe 2 or 3 tinder would equal 1 minute of burn time or something like that... something small since you can't get your fire up past 9 minutes under those conditions anyways) 

Actually there is a very elegant and relatively "easy" way to make this work: Give tinder a 20% chance to increase firestarting, and chop away 20% from the players base chance. This would effectively make tinder useful until the very end, and even then make it worthwhile to use it. So with firestarting III you technically could start a fire without tinder (45% base + 15% stick = 60%), but you would in most cases opt for using tinder anyways - while you still could do without if you really had to. With firestarting V you could reasonably go without it (70% base + 15% stick = 85%), but it would still be required to elevate you to a guaranteed fire without the use of some other modificator like a book or a firestriker.

The elegance in this is that it would not upset overall firestarting difficulty (which is fine in my opinion), it preserves the ability to start fire without tinder (at a mild penelty), all while making tinder something that has value even on late games.

You could even play around with this a bit. For instance you could do the +20%/-20% thing, but increase the bonus for firestarting IV and V by 5% and 15% respectively to better reflect your mastery, so that at Firestarting V you still get your guaranteed fire without tinder when using a stick (85% + 15%), but you could also get guaranteed fires with other wood like fir (85% + 0% + 20%) or reclaimed wood (85% + (-5%) + 20%) if you employ tinder - and by this introducing an active reward to it, also without upsetting the balance.

Edited September 21, 2019 by jeffpeng

[ManicManiac]

@jeffpeng
I really like this idea of yours.  I think it strikes a good balance between all the aspects at play.  I think it's really well conceived.

Edited September 21, 2019 by ManicManiac

[MrsHoneypot]

Just to throw in an alternate idea.

IRL you could tie some of the cans together and make a wolf alarm for your camp. In game that might mean sacrificing a couple of fishing lines or half a sewing kit.

[Observedfuture3]

I appreciate all the thoughts and ideas one main thing is the thoought that they should impliment more crafting to pass time during warm up and blizzards and as I said though I may find these things without a significant use others do and I respect that but after you craft your clothing and read all the skill books there really isn't anything to do when you are too cold to go out or there is a blizzard raging out side and I find myself just sitting on my bed twidling my thumbs for hours and hours or when you have a massive stockpile of food and wood and have searched everything you need something to pass time untill you start running low on things and I figured something usefull other than clothing would be a good adition to the crafting mecanic

 @ajb1978 your stick bundling idea is great this is the kind of useful crafting I fully support

Edited September 22, 2019 by Observedfuture3

[Guest jeffpeng]

1 hour ago, Observedfuture3 said:

I appreciate all the thoughts and ideas one main thing is the thoought that they should impliment more crafting to pass time during warm up and blizzards and as I said though I may find these things without a significant use others do and I respect that but after you craft your clothing and read all the skill books there really isn't anything to do when you are too cold to go out or there is a blizzard raging out side and I find myself just sitting on my bed twidling my thumbs for hours and hours or when you have a massive stockpile of food and wood and have searched everything you need something to pass time untill you start running low on things and I figured something usefull other than clothing would be a good adition to the crafting mecanic

 @ajb1978 your stick bundling idea is great this is the kind of useful crafting I fully support

Maybe when you find yourself idle during a blizzard try pressing the -> . <- key once in a while 😉

On a more serious note: when you are grounded by a blizzard the appropriate response is to feel grounded. When you got stuff to do - great! But you shouldn't think "Amazing! Finally a blizzard! I've still got all this stuff to do I don't get around to otherwise." Bascially: Imho having to wait out a storm with nothing to do but waiting out a storm is part of the experience out waiting out a storm. It sucks, and I have a feeling that was along the lines of what the devs had in mind. In fact I'm quite fond of those moments where there's nothing to do because nuclear winter has taken hold outside, but you are happily fortified in your cozy little cave, surrounded by your treasures.

8 hours ago, MrsHoneypot said:

Just to throw in an alternate idea.

IRL you could tie some of the cans together and make a wolf alarm for your camp. In game that might mean sacrificing a couple of fishing lines or half a sewing kit.

That's pretty creative, actually. However I don't see how this would have significant gameplay impact. On the other hand: if you ever happen to marry a moose or a bear .... 😉

[Rebeccap2012]

I think turning cans into scrap metal would be a good idea, but it would have to be about 5-10 cans per 1 scrap metal to make it seem balanced.

I also think that turning sticks into a firewood item would be good too, but I think the 80 sticks is far too extreme, when you consider the weight, 10-20 seems more reasonable  

[RegentRelic]

On 9/20/2019 at 4:05 PM, Serenity said:

I don't carry around two pots. Or even one. Too heavy. They mostly stay at bases and I only take them with me when I make a fire for hunting for example. Otherwise it's always two cans.

Yeah, you eventually end up with a surplus of cans, but so what? I once played with a mod that allows you to recycle them. It makes some sense, but it also made getting scrap a bit too trivial. There is plenty of stuff to saw up, but you need quite a lot of time for some items. So it's an investment.

I just carry them.

 

On 9/20/2019 at 4:43 AM, Observedfuture3 said:

I find that newspapers, books and, recycled cans have zero use my thought is to be able to make paper logs out of the paper (3 pr log) or books (1 per log) and line (2 per log that also uses up excess gut) and as for the cans make them into scrap metal at the worktable 

You can already write logs for free by going to the collectables and states screen and clicking on a day.

[Daymo]

How about making a lure for fishing from a can. 
The fishing mechanic seems like it could be expanded. A piece of meat as bait that needs to be replaced after each catch or a finitely reusable lure.