So, a serious bug with Cabin Fever


dahemac

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I am in the lower mine by the log sort in Coastal Highway, the one with the elevator. I am at the bottom of the elevator. It could be days before the next aurora. However I now have cabin fever, so I cannot pass time. I am not sure what you thought pass time was for, but game-mechanic wise, I think it is for skipping hours and hours of nothing to do in the game.

Now here I am potentially waiting, staring at a black screen for real-time hours(?) until the power comes on in game, or I die. And since there is no save in TLD I cannot even reasonably walk away in disgust to just try again later.

This is a pretty ridiculous oversight. For now I am just going to leave the game running with a black screen and go do something else, for, it would appear, a very very long time.

The number of hours I have played TLD tends to indicate that it is my favorite game ever. But this is easily the most ridiculous game mechanic situation I have ever seen in any game.

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On 5/27/2020 at 6:25 AM, dahemac said:

But this is easily the most ridiculous game mechanic situation I have ever seen in any game.

That's why I'm playing Custom mode without Cabin Fever. I love this game but Cabin fever seems like a joke to me and not a good one. Absolutely doesn't help me to feel more immersive in a game. 

I mean I can spend one month+ at home in a real life without any problems(especially during quarantine) but my guy Will Mackenzie spends a couple of days in a warm house and then decides that it's too easy for him and he need to spend the next 24 hours in a cold cave to recover. He can die any moment outside from a bear/wolf/moose attack or just cold and can't sleep in a house. Really?

Edited by Hestonworld
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I think it's relatively easy to just wait out cabin fever... I know a lot of folks have come to depend on "passing time," but I've learned to largely get by without it.

:coffee::fire:
To me, it's just not that big a deal to not be able to sleep or pass time for 24 hours.  :D
 

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I know that every post you make says there is nothing wrong with the game but I am surprised that even you don't see it as an issue that someone has to leave their game running for hours doing nothing because they're trapped and cannot pass time. If you actually don't see anything wrong with staring at a black screen for three hours doing nothing at all then you must be the only person who doesn't.

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I understand the origin of CF and I’m not particularly bothered by the “no sleeping indoors” part, but the “no passing time” part always seemed punitive to me. It’s not even clear what the developer is trying to accomplish by disallowing passing time while subject to CF. 

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I am not sure how long I left the game running, maybe only a couple of hours, with my guy sitting in complete darkness, doing nothing. I watched some videos. I did a bit of housework. Screen still black, nothing happening. Went and put the garbage out. Came back and there was the longed-for aurora. Boy did I get me and all my stuff out of there. 

But to be clear, I got lucky. I waited in-game four days to get down the mine. Without pass-time that is 8-hours of game play. It was just a fluke that there was an aurora  on a subsequent night so I could resume play. And fine, had I died in the mine because I could not escape, that would have made narrative sense. That stuff happens.  And I do not mind going and sitting in a car for a night to ward off mental illness. The character you are playing in TLD is under terrible emotional stress and that he might take off all his clothes and walk out onto the ice to die is a thing that really happens to people. But there is no way Cabin Fever should disable pass time "inside." That irl hours of blank screen is a game feature, the possibility that I could have had to leave the game running for several hours with nothing to do before I died of exhaustion… that is a mistake in game design.

There are several settings in my custom game I would like to change. And I know there is a game editor on PC (I am on a Mac). How about just adding a settings panel in the next update?

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14 hours ago, odizzido said:

If you actually don't see anything wrong with staring at a black screen for three hours doing nothing at all

:D I mean we never have to do that.  The time scale is 12:1 :D  (or 1:12, I forget which would be the proper way to express it)
Specifically in this case this means a full 24 hours of game-time is only 2 hours of real-time.  So generally speaking between when it gets dark enough to be a real problem... to the time it gets light enough again is maybe 45-50 minutes tops.  :)

...and even in the worst case scenario (heavy overcast/bad weather all through the evening and the night) you'd only be "sitting in the dark doing nothing" for at most 1 hour.

Besides that, what I'm talking about is...
A: it's not that hard to avoid cabin fever to begin with.
B: It's not that hard to spend a night without using the "pass time" feature... that's why if you plan well you can use that time for inventory management, breaking down items, or crafting/mending projects (I'm sure folks will say, "but how?  It's dark"... most indoor places have a firebox, and it only takes at most 80 sticks to keep a fire burning all night long).  There are several ways to mitigate the effects of cabin fever.

Instead of fussing about cabin fever... I found better ways to avoid it and found that even if I have to tough it out for a day; that cabin fever can be kind of trivial if you approach it/prepare a little differently.  :D


:coffee::fire:
I think part of the whole point of the game is to adapt to and overcome the situation your in... not about fussing to change the game for every to adapt to just an individual's personal preferences.

and for those who just can't adapt... they always have the custom options. :)

Edited by ManicManiac
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@odizzido

I didn't misread the other post... at the time I was just responding to yours.

Granted... I understand that in that specific circumstance a player choose to take a risk and got stuck waiting for another aurora as a result, but that's not the game's fault.  That was player choice.  I think this game is a great demonstration of , "choices have consequences."  Even in this specific example... the player would only be unable to "pass time" for 24 hours (game-time) which would still only equal 2 hours of real time... not the 3 hours that were mentioned. 

In this context, I think it's better for a player to face the consequences of their actions rather than wanting to change the game to protect players from their actions. 

So, if a player gets themselves stuck because of where they choose to go... and they choose to be inside for the majority of the previous 6 days... and they get cabin fever... I'd say that's fair.  :)

Sure perhaps it was frustrating to be suck with little to do for 2 hours, but honestly that was just a consequence of the choices that were made... again, that's not the game's fault.  I still think it would be better for the player to change rather than wanting to change the game for everyone.


:coffee::fire:

Edited by ManicManiac
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4 hours ago, DerpyLemon115 said:

I think cabin fever should be reworked overall as I think it was only sloppily added to curb people using the "hibernation exploit", as appose to crafting it as a decent affliction that adds to the game.

I don't have a problem with cabin fever but I do think it could be implemented better.  I've said this before, but the consequences of cabin fever are disproportionately harsh compared to the "crime".  It will kill you if you don't directly address it by spending time outdoors.  Even food poisoning isn't fatal by itself.  You can just power through and be fine. But cabin fever?  Nope!  It's right up there with dysentery and parasites in that it will kill you if you don't treat it.  Granted the treatment is easy, but still.  Nobody dies of cabin fever.  Maybe you have trouble sleeping sure, but exhaustion is exhaustion.  Maybe disallow sleeping indoors if your fatigue meter is more than half full, or wake the player up every 2 hours so the quality of sleep sucks or something.

Actually this makes me wonder...having an affliction like food poisoning allows you to sleep even if you're not tired, for the purposes of recovering.  If you have cabin fever and broken ribs, do the ribs override the cabin fever?  I've never had both at once.

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If you cannot pass time then you will always have some players getting stuck for hours of real life time staring at a black screen. Unless of course the level design changes. Simply taking the elevator up and being able to drop down could work.

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9 hours ago, DerpyLemon115 said:

Maybe have it so you can't pass time by playing solitaire over and over. Only way you could pass time would be to do something productive (Research books, repair things, etc)

That has been my opinion for a long time. Cabin fever makes some sense if you just bum around inside without really doing anything. But when you're focused on a task you shouldn't get cabin fever. It's also questionable if sleeping should matter since you aren't conscious after all. To compensate for that maybe you could get it sooner than now.

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 @dahemac Pardon the derail but I'm curious, what loot did you find in the mine? 

23 hours ago, dahemac said:

But to be clear, I got lucky. I waited in-game four days to get down the mine. Without pass-time that is 8-hours of game play. It was just a fluke that there was an aurora  on a subsequent night so I could resume play. 

 

 

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4 hours ago, manolitode said:

 @dahemac Pardon the derail but I'm curious, what loot did you find in the mine? 

 

 

I found ammunition for a pistol, a pistol, some miscellaneous clothing items, wood, coal, matches. Nothing awe inspiring. Some spoiled food. I think RNG was not doing me any favours. The gated room that would connect to the route from PV in Wintermute had no loot in it at all. Which I thought was odd. I had hoped for great loot. I sure prepped the heck out of going down there. But it was not any kind of windfall.

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To be clear, I was never complaining about Cabin Fever. It was reasonable that I was having a mental health breakdown at the bottom of a black elevator shaft waiting for death or the aurora. My complaint is that a poorly-thought-out game mechanic caused a couple of hours of play to consist of leaving the game running while I did housework and watched videos on another computer.

And it was not poor planning. And no, it was not reasonable that I should start a fire and do a bunch of in-game busy work for up to 8 hours in real time. And fine. It would have made narrative sense to die, cold and alone in the bottom of a mine going crazy with fear and exhaustion. I would have accepted that. But to have to wait that out, at a stretch for 4 days at 2 hours of doing nothing per day, not actually playing TLD in any meaningful sense for all that time, that reflects a situation with a game mechanic the consequences of which were not well thought out.

TLD is a magnificent game. But like much human endeavour it could be improved, no matter how vociferously a serial contrarian insists that everything is fine and all problems are the player’s fault. And perhaps the reason why TLD is so good is that the developers don’t share a knee-jerk impulse to reject any and all player input.

 

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4 hours ago, Dum_Gen said:

I heard that people called TLD a "walking simulator".

Now it became "staring in the dark simulator". 8 hours, that's crazy.

I was very lucky. The aurora came after between like 12 and 24 in-game hours. So almost two hours of real time. Very lucky! As before I went down the mine there had not been an aurora in about a week. I just lucked out that there were two aurora nights in a row. In fact there was a third night with an aurora after that which I used to go in and retrieve all my carefully husbanded supplies.

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7 hours ago, dahemac said:

I found ammunition for a pistol, a pistol, some miscellaneous clothing items, wood, coal, matches. Nothing awe inspiring. Some spoiled food. I think RNG was not doing me any favours. The gated room that would connect to the route from PV in Wintermute had no loot in it at all. Which I thought was odd. I had hoped for great loot. I sure prepped the heck out of going down there. But it was not any kind of windfall.

Thanks, I haven't been down the mine in survival and considering your loot it seems like a huge risk for very little reward. Not to mention the cabin flu, which cons others already described thoroughly. 

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1 hour ago, odizzido said:

I didn't even know that the aurora opened new places to go in mines.

There is an elevator to the lower mines in the back of the mineshaft by the log-sort in Coastal Highway. There are lots of things that work during aurora. Turn on a radio next time and listen to the classical music.

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Guest jeffpeng

I must agree that the no-passing-time-thingy is ridonculous. Especially since you can bypass it as @ajb1978has pointed out.

I mean it's also no secret that I am not a big fan of Cabin Fever in general. It's an artifact from a time where the leaderboards were dominated by people that starve-pass-slept their way to high rankings while effectively not doing anything. The leaderboards are gone a long time, and nobody cares how you get to your 3652 days. Honestly ... if someone wants to spend their time this way in the game .... let them.

But not only does Cabin Fever serve no significant purpose anymore, it's also overly punishing while at the same time can be exploited around quite effectively when you just know how - but which is very unintuitive and, as with so many other things, makes players rely on Dr. Google more than common sense.

Please, just remove it. 

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this thread may be of interest, it partly covers the same topic: 

as I had the luxury of real time the day I got trapped in the mine (I started on a rainy weekend morning) I could just grab a book and go with it, so it ended up being a strangely memorable and intense scenario.  Had it been 10pm on a work night I may have felt differently!

 

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I still think the better solution is to be more careful and deliberate in our actions.
I don't see a need to change the game if we can just simply change the way we play it.
I think that the Cabin Fever affliction is easy to avoid and not at all hard to deal with, and because of that... I'd say there's nothing wrong with the mechanic.

I think it would be better for folks to try to adapt and overcome, and for those who just can't manage it... they already have the option to just trun off that feature.  Since folks have that option... I'm not sure why folks still seem to want to change something that they can simply opt out of. 


:coffee::fire:
I say leave Cabin Fever the way it is.  If it's working the way Hinterland intends for it to work... then I'd say it's not broken. :D

Edited by ManicManiac
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