"Sleep under the stars" surviving

[Mistral]

So, let's inagine one was actually surviving in the wintery wilderness of Canada or other nothern region. The most likely scenario of course would be that you'd be forced to stay in the woods or otherwise barren landscape with no access to indoor, or even outdoor walled shelters. Not even caves. So you would have to sleep under the stars and sun, if you could. You'd probably have a fire in the snow, and you'd sleep next to a tree or perhaps a big rock or something. Maybe at most have a terrible temporary shelter you built from sticks.

With that in mind, have you ever attempted surviving in TLD without sleeping in man-made or natural shelters for long, extended periods of time? And when I say without sleeping, I also mean avoiding such places altogether for as much as you can. So preferably not going to houses or caves to even get warmed up or to escape blizzard etc

These man-made or natural shelters include

- Buildings, intact or destroyed

- Vehicles, intact and broken + train carts

- All caves, indoor AND outdoor

Snow shelter is alright if you yourself built it, because that is up to you and actually realistic. As are those hollow trees of which you can find on some maps, and also canyon walls bordering you as long as there is no extensive roof overhead. But everything else is excluded.

One-region survival is probably one of the last great final frontiers of this game, particularly if one has experienxed Deadman / Deadworld challenges, but I think this aspect too is interesting, trying to avoid all the luxury the game is trying to give us by refusing to use the plentiful shelters.

In the end, the key to everything is having warmer-than-ambient-temperature fire, and somehow protecting it from the wind. With that achieved, one should be able to survive in the "woods" too...

Edited September 28, 2020 by Mistral

[odium]

in real life you could build a very nice shelter with access to all the tools we have in TLD, and with some knowledge of wilderness survival, you could survive a very long time i would guess.  

 

In the game however, the snow shelter provides the bare minimum warmth and degrades very quickly.  long term outdoor survival would require essentially a perma-fire, which would consume huge amounts of time and resources to maintain, prohibitively so, i imagine.  

[TiffTastic]

I’ve done the hollow tree thing for two weeks before...that was in muskeg too on that bluff with the view. You do need essentially a permafire, at least the ability to have it going half a day, every day at the minimum, and it does degenerate into a wood chopping fest. Now I really like to do outdoor shelters in general, and have spent entire sandboxes without staying indoors...but I’ll admit I don’t do the interloper thing. I use a custom game generally equivalent to stalker, with decay tweaked down, weather tweaked to worse,  and Long animal respawn times. I’ve kept a fire going for 22 days before on desolation point (I usually base out of the church there).

Tiff🦋

[stratvox]

This is why caves exist. Caves exist to protect fires from the wind. They are pretty close to the only places where fires are guaranteed to be out of the wind no matter what, with only a very few places where you can build a fire and never have it blow out that aren't in caves.

Build in the outer part of the cave and sleep next to the fire, so you get the most out of the cold duration bonus. I've often slept for twelve hours to wake up to five hours of fire remaining because it got very cold overnight. Proper exploitation of the cold bonus will really cut back on the amount of wood you need to keep a fire going all the time, esp. when you get up to higher fire skill levels.

[stratvox]

I'd like to add that having tried the hollow tree thing a few times... they are dangerous because if the wind comes from the right direction your fire will blow out and you will freeze to death.

Don't ask me how I know this.

[ManicManiac]

With the hollowed out tree, true it's only "mostly" protected.  However, if we sleep for short periods of time, we can drastically decrease the risk of the fire going out.  A wind blown fire will never just extinguish... it just caps the burning time to about 9 minutes (or 45 seconds real-time).  If we catch it in time, we can keep that fire going (we'd just need to add 1 stick every 45 seconds or so).  Once the wind dies down (or changes direction) we can build up the fire again if we want to. 

When I'm in a situation where I need to use a hollowed out tree, I just make sure to use a minimal amount of wood (that way if the wind blows at just the right angle to affect the fire, I can limit the loss).  So when I'm going to sleep, I tend to make sure the fire has just a little over hour of burn time, sleep for one hour, check on the fire, and then repeat throughout the night.

[TiffTastic]

14 hours ago, ManicManiac said:

With the hollowed out tree, true it's only "mostly" protected.  However, if we sleep for short periods of time, we can drastically decrease the risk of the fire going out.  A wind blown fire will never just extinguish... it just caps the burning time to about 9 minutes (or 45 seconds real-time).  If we catch it in time, we can keep that fire going (we'd just need to add 1 stick every 45 seconds or so).  Once the wind dies down (or changes direction) we can build up the fire again if we want to. 

When I'm in a situation where I need to use a hollowed out tree, I just make sure to use a minimal amount of wood (that way if the wind blows at just the right angle to affect the fire, I can limit the loss).  So when I'm going to sleep, I tend to make sure the fire has just a little over hour of burn time, sleep for one hour, check on the fire, and then repeat throughout the night.

Pretty much exactly what I do, to a T.  It’s a bad idea to pile a ton of wood on an outdoor fire that’s not in a barrel or something in all cases, even if the wind stays your friend, then you’re left with like 6 hours of extra fire that’s wasted too, especially if it was really cold and it burned for longer...as I play only custom games I turn off the “can freeze despite fire”, if wind can magically extinguish a huge fire in ten minutes I figure I’d get a break in not freezing while at a fire, but yeah, 60-90 min of fire and sleep an hour at a time....

[hozz1235]

On 9/28/2020 at 2:08 PM, Mistral said:

- All caves, indoor AND outdoor

A cave is natural just as is a hollowed out tree, as are many other types of "shelter" in the woods.  As far as gameplay, caves are a pretty convenient place but, also, have you ever froze to death in a snow shelter?