The "Did you know?" thread

[TIMBERBEAR810]

Today I realized that stack of papers exist and I don't know how I didn't know before

 

[UTC-10]

With the 1.94 update, putting things, like a drink - coffee, teas - next to a fire can now result in the drink being ruined if left too long.  Canned food probably also can be ruined that way now.  This does not apply to raw meat and fish - no cooking except on a cooking surface. 

I hope the following is an artifact of my games:

Might also be aware that while cooked fish (at Level 5 cooking) gets the 25% more calories, I have found instances, sometimes consistent, sometimes inconsistent, where those 25% bonus calories seems to disappear when the cooked fish was consumed.  Like you have a fish of 1,250 calories, eat it when you need 1,000 calories, and end up with nothing left instead of a piece of fish with 250 calories.  Alternately, you have a 2,000 calories fish and end up with 600 instead of the 1,000 calories. 

Not so much of a problem with whitefish or trout since they tend to have under 1,000 calories but with small-mouth bass and Coho salmon that tend to have over 1,000 calories, sometimes well over, it might be more of a problem if you were counting on those extra calories. 

I suppose that, at base, one could "nibble" on the cooked fish(es) to make it lose the calories now, if it was going to happen, before one ventures out into the trackless wilderness with lots of weighty calories that might evaporate unexpectedly. 

[Dr. S.]

One thing I learned recently was that passing time counts as rest time for the purpose of healing broken ribs (and I would guess sprains). I had always thought you had to sleep for a cumulative 120 hours to heal broken ribs.

[Stinky socks]

Interesting, well I guess playing cards is sort of resting...

[Jimmy]

Did you know: The maximum condition possible of a torch pulled from a fire is 50%?

Did you know: the condition of a torch equals the minutes it will burn?

When you're doing a cooking marathon, using the above knowledge can assist you in maximizing your efficiency. Assuming you're cooking 1kg chunks of rabbit meat for 38 minutes, light up a torch after you've started cooking. Spend 38% of the torch's burn time collecting sticks, arriving back exactly when your food is cooked. Never waste a minute!

This is also a great method of avoiding your torch going out on Interloper, when you're carrying fire to avoid spending another match. Want to know if you can safely harvest that rabbit without losing your torch? Just check the time for the action, and check your torch condition.

I usually give myself a safety margin of 4% extra torch condition to allow time to drop and chain a torch. This has saved me dozens of matches. Hope it helps!

[wilsonaka]

You can open the door to Hibernia(upstairs) from below the stairwell, near the lockers outside. I don't see it as very useful.

[Muestereate]

Did you know that the smoke from stoves changes according to how much burn time is left? Nice for working outside and avoiding cabin fever. I believe I was on level 4 fire skill at Trappers lodge and was observing the white zig zag smoke rising from the chimney. I had thrown in a Fir log to boil a couple pots of water while I did some chores outside. After an hour the smoke turned to black, and then it turned into gray smoke  rings at just under 15 minutes. 

I still need to test for repeatability with cedar and reclaimed wood and coal to see if it is fuel specific but the smoke rings are close when a full pot is done and still time to add fuel and put on some more water.

[piddy3825]

12 hours ago, Muestereate said:

Did you know that the smoke from stoves changes according to how much burn time is left? Nice for working outside and avoiding cabin fever. I believe I was on level 4 fire skill at Trappers lodge and was observing the white zig zag smoke rising from the chimney. I had thrown in a Fir log to boil a couple pots of water while I did some chores outside. After an hour the smoke turned to black, and then it turned into gray smoke  rings at just under 15 minutes. 

I still need to test for repeatability with cedar and reclaimed wood and coal to see if it is fuel specific but the smoke rings are close when a full pot is done and still time to add fuel and put on some more water.

 

 

Now that is indeed a very useful observation.  looking forward to reading about your results regarding fuel specific fires.  I usually just use the time of day as a reference to time lapsed considering that indoor fires burn very consistently over time, but this would allow for leaving the cabin for wood gathering and such while making water and still getting back in time to avoid boil off.  

[Tommo]

You can sleep inside any car without a bedroll - Dunno if someone has already said it, but I found it very useful for completing As The Dead Sleep.

[peteloud]

37 minutes ago, Tommo said:

You can sleep inside any car without a bedroll -

I played TLD for several weeks before I found that I could sleep in a car without a bedroll.  Knowing that made a considerable difference to those early games.

[mfuegemann]

If You are walking in fog, Your vision is more clear at the edges of Your sight than in the center. This peripheral vision is sometimes quite useful. 

[Leeanda]

It could be me but I find walking sideways in bad wind you move slightly faster! Admittedly not ideal for keeping an eye out for predators!

[Jynxer]

Might have already been mentioned in this thread, but, I just learned that you can look in overhead compartments at the plane in PV. So obvious,  but I never thought to check in those! 

[Sir Major M.oos.E Sr.]

Quonset Front door, behind the gas pumps, is safe from predators and the moose. you can lure them to you with a fresh gut or something and shoot them comfortably right in front of you. If you move back and forth they run off ☠️

[alone sniper]

Did You know that during labour the pain is so great that a woman can almost imagine what a man feels like when he is waiting for episode 4 ? 

[Leeanda]

I got lucky then I was numb from the waist down😄 

The only thing I know is painful for a man except patience is a kick in the groin!

Want to compare the two?😃

[Jynxer]

For switch players...  (Btw I’m not a gamer or tech savvy so I didn’t know this) 

I have had a hard time hunting with my joycons because of it swaying while aiming, despite trying to keep still with my lil joystick.  Even though I was on level 5 for archery and rifle. 
 

I just now figured out that you can disable the motion aiming in the options/controls. So you can just aim by toggling the joystick and not worry about moving the joycon. 
 

It is much easier for me now, I just stoned my first rabbit ( couldn’t before because of the motion aiming). Can’t wait to try my bow. 
 

I just wish that it hadn’t taken me this long, I’ve been playing for almost a year now lol. But, like I said, I’m not familiar with this stuff lol. But I’ve still hunted more than my fair share of the animals on great bear lol. 
 

so, this is for anyone who didn’t know this already, I hope it helps 😀

[Manifold2]

This is pretty dumb:

I just learned that you can break torches down into a stick.

I've been throwing ruined torches onto fires just to lighten my load, never realizing they had actual value as fuel if you break them down.

The Long Dark: the gift that keeps on giving.

[Shi-an]

Here are a few tips I learned from doing some runs to practice speed and efficiency:

 

• In terms of fuel-to-weight ratios, sticks are the worst, followed by Fir, then Cedar/Reclaimed Wood, and finally Coal. So burn them in that order for the best weight efficiency.
• Prepared Rose Hips are only 0.5kg while 24 rose hips are 0.24kg. Prepared Reishi/Birch Bark are 0.05kg while the raw materials are 0.10kg. Birch Saplings are 0.20kg but if you carve them into arrow shafts they go down to 0.15kg.
• When harvesting Scrap Metal, the most efficient ratio is 15 min/1 scrap. Pails, Toasters, Broken-down lights, Can Openers and Prybars all provide this ratio, whilst shelves/benches tend to have a worse ratio. So look to harvest these smaller items first.
• I see people using the Starvation Tactic all the time, but not so much the Sleep Deprivation tactic. Sleeping at night is time wasted if you don't need to be that awake for what you're planning on doing the next day. E.g., I'm at the PV Farmstead, tomorrow's plan is to go to Thomson's Crossing and loot, harvest some metal/cloth/rabbits and then come back to the Farmstead the next day. If I spend until past midnight at the Farmstead doing things in the dark like preparing teas and harvesting rabbits, I can sleep for 4 hours and get to Thomson's during the day without been overburdened with weight. I again loot, harvest, and prepare well into the night (even if I'm fatigued I can do these things), sleep for 7 hours and head back to the farmstead. I've only slept 11 hours over 2 days (as opposed to 20+ if I tried to sleep through the night) and have had so much extra time to harvest/prepare because of it.

Obviously the Sleep Deprivation tactic does have its risks and requires a fair bit of game experience and planning to use effectively. However, if you have Birch/Herbal teas to cover the condition loss, or even going for well-fed so you're passively gaining condition, it saves you a lot of time. Furthermore on Interloper where the day gets 0.5 degrees colder every day, being able to squash 3 days worth of activity into 2 is a huge plus.

[TFA303]

On 2/20/2021 at 10:25 PM, straffin said:

I think they must have changed the pathing AI in a recent update because I just had a wolf walk right into the Carter Dam yard through the gate I'd left open (since I'd read here that you could do that and nothing would come through). He fled once he reached the steps, even though he was agro'ed by my aiming my bow at him, so can't-climb-steps is apparently still a thing...

A bear can and will run up the back steps at Hibernia Processing in DP and maul you before you can open the door. 

As you may suspect, I have learned this the hard way. 

[Glacia]

Coal can respawn in a few outdoors spots, even if it doesn't seem possible.

There is a burned house at the Cannery Worker Residences with 5-6 respawning coal pieces every 10-15 days. Likely there are more spots around the world with 'Outdoor coal' respawning, and sometimes it's very usefull.

 

[Pencil]

The healing buff from a cup of Birch Bark Tea overcomes the condition loss from exhaustion. Your condition will rise during those two hours.

Just found that out and it really surprised me

Edited February 26, 2023 by Pencil

[PaddyM]

You can grab your arrows from still-living animals as they run past you. Not particularly useful to know, but pretty funny.

If you collect tin cans for making noisemakers or something like that, you can carry way more at once if you game the weight system. If you eat from a can of dogfood, for example, but stop eating at the last second, you will end up with a can that weighs ~0.01kg. Once you finish that final morsel of food, the empty can you harvest weighs 0.15kg, which is significantly heavier. Don't finish eating until you're at a location where you can dump the empty cans.

On Stalker or lower difficulties, you will never have to forge a single item if you set up base somewhere with a beach front. For example, in Coastal Highway, Desolation Point (even the Crumbling Highway in between) and Bleak Inlet. Frequent beachcombing will give you more hatchets, knives and arrowheads than you can use in a lifetime.

You can get your gunsmithing skill to level 5 fairly quickly just by making bullets from lead. There's no quality difference between a bullet made at level 1 versus level 5, unlike the final revolver rounds or rifle cartridges which do come out at differing qualities depending on your level. So just make your bullets first. I believe making gunpowder also increases your gunsmithing level, so do that first, too.

If a wolf begins to stalk you, you can just keep walking at a steady pace away from it and it will never pounce (assuming you're not walking at the slowest possible speed because you're overencumbered). You can literally walk a wolf from one end of the map to the other. This is good to know if you're short on ammo, arrows, flares, if it's too windy for fire, etc. Just walk. However, if you sprint away from it, it will go into attack mode as soon as you stop. I'm not sure if the walking away thing is possible during an aurora, during which animals are way more aggressive.

The distress pistol is extremely useful against bears and moose. If you shoot them on the head, you'll more often than not score an instakill. I highly recommend not using your flare shells for anything else if you can help it. Hunting bears and moose is both easier and safer when using the distress pistol (even if you miss, the animal will be scared off by the flare, so you can easily reload for another try). Both the pistol and the flare shells are renewable resources (on Stalker or lower difficulties) by beachcombing. You will often find both on the large boats that wash ashore.

On the topic of distress pistols: When you fire a round, there's an animation where the player's hands open the pistol and dump out the shell, then close the pistol again. This can easily be mistaken by new players as the character reloading the pistol, ready to be fired again. But in order to reload it, you need to manually tap the reload button. Otherwise, you'll find yourself fruitlessly pulling the trigger repeatedly before you realise the gun is empty, and the bear is now eating your face. You can actually tap reload during the "emptying the spent shell casing" animation, and the reloading animation will seamlessly follow it.

The travois can often be used on prohibitively-steep hills if you go up or down them diagonally. You just need the hill to have enough breadth to give you the space needed to go from 'bottom-left' to 'top-right' of the hill, for example.

You walk faster on solid ground than on snow or ice. The roads in Pleasant Valley and Coastal Highway, for example. If you're on the bare asphalt, you'll walk noticeably faster. You'll even slow down a little again as you walk over patches of road that are snow-covered.

The condition of crafting materials doesn't matter to the condition of the final product. So making a rabbit skin hat from rabbit pelts that are at 30% condition will still yield a hat that is at 100% condition. You should therefore use up the lowest condition materials first to ensure you don't end up with lots of ruined ingredients. I'm not sure if there's a lower limit on how close to ruined an item can be but still be usable in crafting.

Although the magnifying lenses you can find throughout the game are of varying conditions, they never lose condition through use (I think it's possible for them to lose condition in bear attacks, but I'm not sure). So don't disregard a lens just because it's at 23% condition when you find it!

At cooking level 5, you can eat ruined food without getting food poisoning, which is enormously helpful. To speed up the process of getting to level 5, you can cook any canned foods you find, make teas from reishi mushrooms, rose hips and birchbark, make coffee and herbal tea from boxes/tubs, cook prepared acorns (and eventually make coffee from them to get even more levelling out of them), and of course you can cook harvested meat. If you find lots of coffee and herbal tea at the summit of Timberwolf Mountain, take it with you to cook it all even if you don't think you 'need' it.

If you're mountain-goating down steep hills or cliff faces, staying crouched, or toggling quickly between crouching and standing, will help you to move much more slowly and will help you avoid accidentally walking off a sheer drop to your death.

[MrWolf]

12 hours ago, PaddyM said:

If a wolf begins to stalk you, you can just keep walking at a steady pace away from it and it will never pounce (assuming you're not walking at the slowest possible speed because you're overencumbered). You can literally walk a wolf from one end of the map to the other. This is good to know if you're short on ammo, arrows, flares, if it's too windy for fire, etc. Just walk. However, if you sprint away from it, it will go into attack mode as soon as you stop.

Good post, but I have a couple clarifications:

"It will never pounce if you keep walking" is usually true, but not always.  In some cases, a wolf will charge after following for some time.  It might be related to the region or certain parts of a region but I've had it happen several times in Ash Canyon (on flat terrain, not encumbered), and some other regions as well.  Don't always assume you're safe if you keep walking, always have a plan ready if the wolf decides to attack.

Are you on console?  I've heard of wolves attacking if you sprint on console, but that hasn't been a thing on PC for a long time.  I routinely sprint while a wolf is following (on PC).  The wolf will run to catch up then resume walking and growling.

[Sebastian1992]

1 hour ago, MrWolf said:

Good post, but I have a couple clarifications:

"It will never pounce if you keep walking" is usually true, but not always.  In some cases, a wolf will charge after following for some time.  It might be related to the region or certain parts of a region but I've had it happen several times in Ash Canyon (on flat terrain, not encumbered), and some other regions as well.  Don't always assume you're safe if you keep walking, always have a plan ready if the wolf decides to attack.

Are you on console?  I've heard of wolves attacking if you sprint on console, but that hasn't been a thing on PC for a long time.  I routinely sprint while a wolf is following (on PC).  The wolf will run to catch up then resume walking and growling.

Interesting! The wolf can you very long stalking, but after 15 minutes he has enough and he come very close, finally he attack you, similar like old bear, but much faster as the wolf....