Endless game or certain death?

[Hotzn]

It seems there are a number of people (at least on the steam forums) who want to be able to craft a lot of things - especially bows and arrows, but also vegetables and so on - and "live off the land". This raises the question whether or not the game should "allow" a player to survive for an endless amount of time, relying on renewable (in other words: respawning) resources. This is of course debatable, as some people might derive pleasure from "beating the game" or just having a cozy feeling of being safe in the long term. However - and this is my personal liking only - I prefer that feeling of pending doom, of urgency and running out of everything eventually. What makes this game attractive to me is this dark atmosphere (despite all the white snow). This feeling that I will not make it alone, that I need to move on, optimise my resources and find other survivors to team up with.

I don't know if there are many people around who played and still remember the game "Unreal". It came out around 1998 or 1999 and was a revelation graphics-wise. But what I liked best was that desperate atmosphere of loneliness, that constant hope of finding other human survivors. You would always find dead bodies and logs hinting at other survivors who were trying to reach destination x or y for some reason. But travelling the same route, you would eventually only find their bodies and some other log explaining why they didn't make it. It was depressing in a way, but also fascinating.

[Orwell 1984]

Quite good question, however the game is in alpha, you can gather more information about it if you read the latest AMA here:

viewtopic.php?f=3&p=23994#p23994

I am sure this game have much more in it, aka hidden and unexpected potential, and surviving for an endless amount of time without proper content or online gameplay is a bit useless at this point, but later on? Who knows:D

Please consider you are playing a game created by game industry veterans, they have more tricks than you can ever imagine:D That is exciting isnt it?

[FoneBoneJay]

I favor adding more content and things that need to be done just like real survival and making it a test of how many things can you continue to keep yourself able to do. With the light slowly closing your windows of opportunities. Example maybe a permanent bum leg later on, or permanent broken arm. Injuries that after being sustained will keep the player permanent crippled. Also maybe some conditions like acid reflux which prevent you from eating just before sleeping, which is a real world concern for millions of folks and it is nasty. That would take care of the lets eat right before bed without eating all day exploit.

I favor all sorts of additions and things to add depth and keep the game a constant survival experience. It should be possible to survive almost indefinitely and then your biggest risks will be the wildlife and the crushing risks of all the debilitation from past injuries and conditions. Maybe losing some teeth means you eat slower.

[harobed1156]

The top numbers on the leader boards are unrealistic right now, so I pay no attention to them in my games. However, if the developers let us make an awl from antler or bone, to craft buckskin clothing with rawhide thread, and provided a whetstone for sharpening, then conceivably you might become self-sufficient. This would be awesome once seasonal scenarios are released.

[coryduran]

I disagree about sewing kits being vital and I only say that because I don't think you really need to keep any of your cloth clothing together to stay warm enough (the bonuses from the craftable clothing are so high they're kind of all you need most of the time).

Scrap metal is the only thing that kind of ends games for you because eventually you're not going to have tools to harvest meat anymore, thus no way to get any food, but even that I think is really something far down the road (I've made it to 130 before and still wasn't close to running out of scrap metal).

I'd prefer it if the game became something more where you could become self sufficient through things like bow drills and stuff for fire starting, a way to sharpen and keep your knife going, but the game became more likely to kill you in certain ways as far as weather and the like are concerned.

I certainly think the plants we can harvest should be renewable after some time, that alone would make long term survivability much more feasible since as it stands you have the plants available in game to remedy all illness (other than bleeding out) and some nutritional value in cat tails.

[Cosmoline]

I think TLD sandbox runs end up as a sequence of at least three game stages. The stage of the game you're talking about is the final part of the game, when you've set up one or more home bases and can just keep going and going. There's a lot that could be done to make this more interesting, but statistically very, very few players ever make it past the mid game either because they get killed or lose interest in it. Making it more minecraft-like in the later stages would help hold interest. The alternate and probably more realistic approach is to make it more and more difficult through game scarcity. But I don't get the sense that the devs are putting much focus on the late game at this point. It may simply evaporate once the final product is finished.

[jonnywalker]

Surviving forever is possible (v.200)! I just crossed day 365 and have no end in site.

1. Forage around until you find a magnifying glass - this is the only man-made item you need. You can get clothes, sewing kits, medicine, tools, and the rifle to make startup easier, but they are all unnecessary and will wither to dust eventually.

2. Set up shop in one of the places that has a bed and craft table. I prefer the Trapper's Homestead (unoriginal, but easiest).

3. There is only one source of recurring food that doesn't require you to use any non-renewable resources - abandoned deer kill. There is a trick (bug?) to get the wolf to leave the carcass before it has eaten all the sweet, sweet flesh. Track the wolf until it kills a deer, or flush a deer to it. Do not engage the wolf! A nasty gash will require peroxide, old-man beard, mushrooms, or antibiotics - all non-renewable resources. Instead, run back to you home and sleep for 1 hour. Run back outside and the carcass will be there, sans wolfie with about 3kg of unfrozen flesh. If you have sun, make a fire with your magnifying glass and wood that you foraged with bare hands. This allows you to harvest the meat, leather, and gut without you or the deer freezing.

4. Use the gut to make rabbit snares to supplement diet and make mitts.

5. ABS - Always Be Starvin. Sleep a lot (lowest calorie use) and and eat as little as possible. Let your condition fall to ~50% from starvation before eating a unit of meat. You can survive 2 days per kg of venison, 1 day per kg of rabbit.

6. Forage fir wood by hand as often as you can (tedious, but necessary).

7. Make a big bonfire for water every so often.

8. Make deerskin boots and rabbitskin mitts by hand as often as you have the materials. These keep you warm enough for most outdoor missions.

9. Survive a lonely, cold, starving, monotonous, back-breaking existence ad infinitum.

I love this game.

[FoneBoneJay]

Magnifying glass is not a forever item. It wears out.

[The_Hawk35]

Yeah no matter what you do you'll die. Firemaking will always be the ultimate limiting factor as it's the only way to get water.

[Orwell 1984]

You light a fire, and keep it alive.

How limiting is that?

[The_Hawk35]

Really you can't keep the fire going forever, get stuck for a week inside because of a blizzard?

[Orwell 1984]

I usually collect wood while others "hibernating", so before you run out of matched you have hundreds of woods stockpiled up, regarding the fact the dry wood needs 2 years between dry conditions to burn perfectly, so longer it is resting in a dry environment the better it is.

[ChillPlayer]

Really you can't keep the fire going forever, get stuck for a week inside because of a blizzard?

You can inside a fishing hut, I've spent about 40 days inside two different huts this way. In the first hut I've eaten through almost 30KG of bear meat, in the second I lived off fish and the occasional deer/wolf pair. Forage 10-15 pieces, get the fire going, sleep 10 hours, add wood, forage 10 pieces, rinse & repeat. If you're skilled enough in wolf fighting you can live forever like that, you only need to kill a wolf/deer per week, you don't even need to hybernate (which I never do ). If you have a lot of scrap metal even better, 4 hours of fishing shoud provide you with enough cals for a day.