1314 cattails

[manolitode]

I’ve always been curious – how many cattails are out there in The Long Dark?

So I decided to pick them up and count them. And while I was at it, why not count some other items as well. I figured the results might be interesting to share so here’s an extensive list below. It contains quite a few but not all non-respawning items. I attemped to be extremely thorough and explore every corner of Great Bear. But still, you'll miss a few items along the way. I usually find an undiscovered sapling or random green backpack in every new playthrough. An estimate would be that the compilation below contains around 95% of non-renewables for this particular playthrough. Anyway, hopefully you get some idea of the amount of items to expect in interloper, meaning resources are set to low. Spoilers below.

 

Cattails

Cattails: 1314 (equalling 197 100 calories)

When I asked Hinterland how many cattails I had missed, this is what they replied: Cat tails have a random spawn which changes with each new game. Because of these factors, we’re unable to give you an accurate count of how many cat tails spawn in any given session.

In other words, take this and other numbers with a grain of salt. 

 

Saplings

Birch saplings: 123 (equalling 369 arrows, I'm curious whether the total number can always be evenly divided by 3)

Maple saplings: 60

 

Tools

Can openers: 6

Cooking pots: 17

Flare shells: 12 (fixed number in interloper)

Hacksaws: 8

Hammers: 4

Marine flares: 11

Prybars: 11

Recyclable cans: 46

Simple tools: 8

Skillbooks: 46 (Gunsmithing seem to be in high demand among great bear inhabitans)

Spray cans: 30 (almost ended up spraying something once...)

Storm lanterns: 5

Whetstones: 9

 

Stuff that lights up the long dark

Firelogs: 3

Firestrikers: 3

Magnifying glasses: 3

Matchboxes: 27

 

Food and drinks (of which most were already spoiled)

Beef jerky: 17

Chocolate bar: 22

Coffee: 38

Dog food: 10

Granola bar: 19

Herbal tea: 32

Ketchup chips: 6 (but no syrup in this playthrough, started the playthrough before that update but still found chips)

Peaches: 12

Pork & Beans: 13

Tin of sardines: 47 (all but a few from the Cannery crates)

Tomato soup: 12

Salty crackers: 13

Summit soda: 13

 

Medicaments

Antibiotics: 24

Emergency Stims: 8

Old man’s beard lichen: 725 (equalling 241 bandages)

Reishi mushrooms: 751 (375 prepared mushrooms)

Rosehips: 3475 (144 batches of rose hip tea)

Water purification tablets: 8

 

Miscellanous

Cloth: 968

The cloth number is an exception since it is intentionally incomplete. It includes all broken down curtains, towels, clothing (including the cloth-worth on Will's body) and finding random single pieces of cloth. It doesn’t include most furniture.

Leather: 61

Includes single pieces of leather and breakables like shoes and driving/work gloves.

Perfect revolver ammo: 3 (although they wouldn’t stick to the bowstring)

 

Other

While I decided to chop up every crate on the island, as noted I spared some furniture with cloth. Some might call that laziness, I call it sanity 😄 It means of course that possible unlooted items remain, eg behind our much beloved turquoise armchairs. Some items were excluded from the list, like sewing kits (27), painkillers (32) and quality tools (3). For some reason I started to count them late. As for the red flares, I prefer blue.

There were no beachcombing.

Hope you enjoyed!

Edited November 25, 2020 by manolitode

[peteloud]

Surely this depends upon the level at which you are playing, i.e. there are fewer in a Stalker game than a Voyager game.

[manolitode]

15 hours ago, peteloud said:

Surely this depends upon the level at which you are playing, i.e. there are fewer in a Stalker game than a Voyager game.

It seems like a reasonable assumption. At the top of the custom menu you'll see how resource availability changes with difficulty. I'm not sure wheter there's a fixed ratio and whether there is a difference for all items. If you compare interloper and stalker for instance, in the latter there is an extra flare shell loot location and plenty more clothing, which means your access to cloth is greatly enhanced. I'm less convinced that there is a huge difference in maple sapling access between the two difficulties.

[gotmilkanot]

The number of matches seems alittle bit off for me, though. I've discovered 99% of the world in my current Interloper run, and only found about 100+ matches - including the 9 matches I've used so far.

I know these numbers can vary across different saves but I don't think there are ~300 matches on Interloper. Could be that I've missed out some boxes but I highly doubt it can even exceed 200.

Edited November 26, 2020 by gotmilkanot

[manolitode]

2 hours ago, gotmilkanot said:

The number of matches seems alittle bit off for me, though. I've discovered 99% of the world in my current Interloper run, and only found about 100+ matches - including the 9 matches I've used so far.

I know these numbers can vary across different saves but I don't think there are ~300 matches on Interloper. Could be that I've missed out some boxes but I highly doubt it can even exceed 200.

I'd agree that 300 seems like a lot relative to 100. If you usually end up around 100 matches I'm curious whether you break stuff down and scan indoor locations with a light source? Let's zoom out for a moment and get statistical, I promise I won't overdo it but I seem to be in the mood for data compilation 😉 27 matchboxes over 10 main regions equals 2.7 matchboxes per main region for this particular playthrough. The guaranteed matchbox spawns in PV farmstead basement, TWM hut, summit (2) and open cave, HRV cave, spence's and Hibernia alone gives us 8 matchboxes. 8 is of course nowhere near 27. But we have yet to explore 94% of indoor locations, all transition regions, most outdoor locations including all outdoor caves but one, all drawers, closets and all boxes but the one in the open TWM cave. Just to paint a broader picture. Still, as you suggest I might have been lucky and ended up on the high end of a match availability scale on this particular playthrough. If such a scale exists. 

Edited November 26, 2020 by manolitode

[gotmilkanot]

35 minutes ago, manolitode said:

I'd agree that 300 seems like a lot relative to 100. If you usually end up around 100 matches I'm curious whether you break stuff down and scan indoor locations with a light source? Let's zoom out for a moment and get statistical, I promise I won't overdo it but I seem to be in the mood for data compilation 😉 27 matchboxes over 10 main regions equals 2.7 matchboxes per main region for this particular playthrough. The guaranteed matchbox spawns in PV farmstead basement, TWM hut, summit (2) and open cave, HRV cave, spence's and Hibernia alone gives us 8 matchboxes. 8 is of course nowhere near 27. But we have yet to explore 94% of indoor locations, all transition regions, most outdoor locations including all outdoor caves but one, all drawers, closets and all boxes but the one in the open TWM cave. Just to paint a broader picture. Still, as you suggest I might have been lucky and ended up on the high end of a match availability scale on this particular playthrough. If such a scale exists. 

My bad, I must've recalled the wrong number as I thought I've stored all my matches in the Dam.

Just went back to my save (which I haven't touched in months) to do a quick check since 2.7 boxes per region actually sounds reasonable, and clearly, I've only stored half of the matches I found in the Dam (168), and still have some in a few of my other bases.

It was a good thing that I typed down the exact numbers of my inventory in the journal when I was still playing. Added up the numbers and it was actually around 300 which seems to match with your stats.

Now that I actually went to look through my journal, my perception of "scarce" resources on Interloper has changed abit. I guess resources aren't that scarce even on Interloper if players actually make an effort to explore the Great Bear.

Edited November 26, 2020 by gotmilkanot

[TiffTastic]

300 matches would scale to pretty scarce in a 600 day play through....

 

That must have taken an amazing amount of time and dedication. Very impressive. If only I didn’t have ADD lol......

[manolitode]

@gotmilkanot Sure it's interesting to see what numbers excel from your expectations. I was a little surprised that in the end we get one prybar per fishing hut, while 9 whetstones, for instance, seems perfectly balanced. Curious if you can see the exact number of matchboxes on your old playthrough by the way? Just to compare them.

@TiffTastic I guess it depends on how early you pick up your first magnifying glass. And thanks, I appreciate it! But I probably won't count anything for a while 😉

Edited November 27, 2020 by manolitode

[gotmilkanot]

2 hours ago, manolitode said:

@gotmilkanot Sure it's interesting to see what numbers excel from your expectations. I was a little surprised that in the end we get one prybar per fishing hut, while 9 whetstones, for instance, seems perfectly balanced. Curious if you can see the exact number of matchboxes on your old playthrough by the way? Just to compare them.

I've counted a total of 288 matches so far so that's exactly 24 boxes. I'm pretty sure there are still some boxes which I haven't found yet but I'm not in a hurry either so I guess that day will eventually come.

[manolitode]

On 11/27/2020 at 7:48 AM, gotmilkanot said:

I've counted a total of 288 matches so far so that's exactly 24 boxes. I'm pretty sure there are still some boxes which I haven't found yet but I'm not in a hurry either so I guess that day will eventually come.

So you used 9 out of 288 matches after exploring most of the world, good on you! 👍 I like that we have one item that decay real slowly.

[gotmilkanot]

3 hours ago, manolitode said:

So you used 9 out of 288 matches after exploring most of the world, good on you! 👍 I like that we have one item that decay real slowly.

Actually, it's not that impressive considering I'm only 116 days into this run and I've already used my 10th match just the other day. So I'm using a match every 12 days and honestly, that's no where near impressive in terms of conserving matches on Interloper.

But then again, I realised there's not much of a point to be overly conservative on usage of matches, unless I'm aiming for thousands of days - which probably won't happen as I'm more likely to move on from this game by then.

Edit: I'm not too sure if matches ever decay. I've heard they used to long time ago, but I doubt they ever decay as of right now. Maybe they really do very slowly, but I haven't noticed any signs of decay for matches so far.

Edited November 29, 2020 by gotmilkanot

[manolitode]

I recently finished a playthrough with the same conditions as above but including Ash Canyon and thought it would be fun to compare some numbers between the playthroughs, though a little less thorough in this last one. Long story short, the numbers for hammers, hacksaws, firestrikers, recycled cans, cooking pots, flare shells and maple saplings were almost identical in spite of the addition of Ash Canyon. There were however 2 major differences. I found 52 skill books (as mentioned in another post) compared to 46 pre Ash Canyon. Gunsmithing was no longer the most common, instead that was Survive the Outdoors!. Also the number of spray cans had greatly increased from 30 to 37 (congrats spray can lovers!).  

 

Edited August 19, 2021 by manolitode

[Blizzard Walker]

On 11/27/2020 at 1:48 AM, gotmilkanot said:

I've counted a total of 288 matches so far so that's exactly 24 boxes. I'm pretty sure there are still some boxes which I haven't found yet but I'm not in a hurry either so I guess that day will eventually come.

Little did I realize the relative abundance of matches in Interloper versus Voyager. I am at day 998 in my Voyager run and maintain a spreadsheet of everything I have stashed in different locations.  Presently I have over 800 matches in various locations while carrying about 100 matches.  Some of that 100 will be distributed to various Mystery Lake locations I will be revisiting.  I am a slow methodical player and have not yet explored TWM, AC, BI or HRV.  Most likely I will end up with a stockpile in excess of 1000.