Cap on 'Over Time' Environment Changes?

[Sherri]

If the world gets colder & animal respawns are reduced "over time" .... is there a cap to this?

Ie at a certain # of days can I assume I'm at the worst it will get?

Is there a estimate like "At 100 days you are at 50% colder" or something like that?

[Abby]

TLDR: There should be a cap on weather getting colder but I haven't tested it myself and animal respawns can never be fully eliminated.

 

I haven't tested any temperature decay's myself (and probably won't this week with the special event happening), but I did find some old posts talking about it. @Drifter Man said that on Interloper difficulty the temperature drops 20C over the first 50 days but then stays constant (1). Interloper has the highest weather decay at "high" so this is probably the worst case. 

In terms of game design, there should be a cap to the decay, or at worst it should be logarithmic growth. If there were no cap then the game would eventually reach a state where it becomes unplayable. That said, there is an achievement for surviving 500 days, so I would expect that the weather decay would be coded so that surviving 500 days is actually possible. If you run past 500 days then its possible that anything could happen. 

 

Respawn reduction is extremely difficult to test as it is affected by other variables such as hunting and trapping. I can say that while respawn times may become longer, you can never permanently eliminate a spawn. I had a 200+ day game in which I tried to purge mystery lake of all wolves and didn't succeed. I also recently spent 80+ days snaring rabbits on timber wolf mountain. After about 12 days away from the mountain they all came back from the brink of extinction. @Scyzara gave a great run down of animal respawns in an older thread (2).

 

I hope that helps. 

 

1. 

 

2. 

 

 

[Sherri]

Thank you @Abby!

[Funguy]

50 days to the bottom in Interloper.  I think 100 days for Stalker...