Sharpening with rocks

[Ignacio Ramirez]

It should be possible to sharpen your blades with rocks or against certain rocks, perhaps above certain skill. It really makes no sense to depend on wheatstones when it is quite easy to do in real life. Sure, it could be painfully inefficient.

[UTC-10]

A lot of things should be possible but implementing them is the bottleneck.  I expect that the devs have to pick and choose what they spend their time on. 

Long before Bleak Inlet, I had suggested that maybe there should be a large grind stone somewhere such that the player could take nearly ruined knives and hatchets to be "repaired" back to 100%.  The grind stone would not be movable (ala the forges), would be relatively isolated, and it would be an alternate way to keep tools up when/if whet stones were not available.  I guess the aurora-powered drill press fits the bill more expansively allowing a wider range of "repairs" than I had imagined. 

Once that was done, I would expect alternate ways to create whet stones went on very low priority since the issue was (to the devs pov) largely solved. 

[Baron Von Soule]

There is a note in the game that suggests using a flat river rock to sharpen your knife.  It seems like an easy addition.

[sonics01]

In reality, grinding edge on "any rock" will bring not-that-great result. But I was thinking, if there are ways to create something poor/coarse version of crafted whetstone, something crafted from crafting table with specific types of rocks harvested from cave. But now we have BI cannery so... devs will think that necessity of such options are low. I think better option and wider freedom of choice is always good, but I understand devs has their own priority and issues. So, if anything similar happens related with this idea, that should be modding. 

Edited August 24, 2020 by sonics01

[ManicManiac]

 
Sharpening with rocks?  No thank you.

It's been discussed quite a bit in the past.  I recommend the search function, because there has been a lot of really great discussion about this subject in previous threads:

On 7/9/2019 at 1:48 AM, ManicManiac said:

As to your whetstone question, it seems that the whetstones are plentiful enough that the majority of players will have died long before they would exhaust the world of whetstones.  For those who do live long enough, and are cavalier with their tools and wear them down quickly... once all whetstones are ruined, you still have access to the resources necessary to make improvised tools (which will extend your survival potential until  you exhaust all sources of metal - which I think general consensus is that would take a very long time).

 

Raph has discussed this before as well:

On 4/27/2019 at 1:52 AM, Raphael van Lierop said:

it's not really our goal to make The Long Dark endlessly survivable, so really the resource constraints of having to live with a limited number of Rifles, Cleaning Kits, Whetstones, etc. is kind of on purpose. You should cherish the "easy" tools while you have them, and work your way towards more self-sufficiency using tools that can be crafted. So, when the Rifles are gone, you'll have Survival Bows and Arrows (for example). This is how the game has always been

and a quote from Milton Mailbag Dispatch 18:

...The value of a whetstone is increased because it is limited. If you can craft a whetstone out of any old rock, and the whetstone helps keep cutting tools in great shape, then it has a negative impact on game balance and reduces the value of both things. In general the harder it is to maintain stuff the more valuable those things are, and the more valuable they are the more careful you are about using and preserving them. And scarcity creates the need for choice, which is what the whole game is about.

[ajb1978]

On 8/6/2020 at 2:23 PM, UTC-10 said:

A lot of things should be possible but implementing them is the bottleneck.

Yep I remember watching a YouTube video where a real-life survivalist played TLD, and he was coming up with a lot of great common-sense things that he would do in the real world, that weren't options in the game.  Such as crawling inside a hay bale to stay warm during a blizzard.  Makes perfect sense of course, but then again so does ripping out chunks of hay to use as tinder.  Or just dousing the bale with lamp oil and setting the whole thing on fire to really warm things up.  Or using a hatchet or prybar or something to chisel out a dakota fire hole.  It's just not possible to account for everything a person might do.

[oplli]

i like that idea maybe a rock that spawns sometimes can be broken with prybar or hammer and then looting heavy rock shards that can sharpen your tools and have a random durability when looted