So... that "Tea Situation"

[Guest jeffpeng]

  Hello fellow Survivors,

it has been a while since I last complained about my favorite thing to complain about: my favorite game, The Long Dark. You know someone loves you if they can't stop nagging you. (This is actually more likely true than not. Humans are strange.)

Whatever! Where wa... Ah right: Tea!

Now with 1.94 the wonderful people (really, they are) at Hinterland introduced a new "feature", or, if you want to believe the patchlog, a bugfix:

Quote

Fixed an issue where liquids would not become “Burnt Dry”, when being cooked for too long.

This means that tea of all sorts, including coffee (which technically isn't tea but better) and canned food that can be cooked now burns dry after 30 minutes after being heated up standing next to a fire or stove or so. Since Vigilant Flame, which introduced the amazing "new" cooking system (it's technically not new anymore - but it's still good!) heating up liquid things next to the fire was possible at (I believe) half the speed you could cook them on an appropriate cooking spot, and they then stayed warm as long as the fire persisted.

Now, when I read that I thought "Well, there must have been some issue with tea on cooking spots so good they fixed it". When I then saw my tea burning next to the fire I thought "well shoot they overfixed that problem." and I was kinda mad since I thought they put a new bug into the game - which is something I really don't like. But then, after actually thinking about it some more, I wondered if that wasn't actually intended. And after digging through some code I am now certain: It indeed IS intended.

The only thing I don't understand now that all other questions have been answered... is:

Why?

I know this is a question that has been asked many times since the inception of a lot of things (although, mostly pentalobe screws) but in this particular case what I mean by that is:

What is the utility of this? What is the rationale that makes the game designers deem it useful from a game play perspective? All it effectively does is make my day a little bit more complicated and it forces me to waste 8 minutes after waking up next to a fire. It doesn't make the game harder. It doesn't make the game more realistic. It doesn't apply a meaningful balancing aspect.

The only thing it succeeds at is to annoy me. If this is the reason - I can respect that. If this is not the reason ... please, you beautiful people at Hinterland (seriously, they are): kindly consider reverting this to its previous state. The world is cruel enough as it is.

Thank you for your consideration, and, as always: Thank you for reading.

[Karl Grylls]

I like that they fixed it. I never played Interloper, but saw some gameplay recently and it felt like it was to powerful, bit like cheating. On the other hand: in order to logic, every time you heat up water and drink it it should warm you like any other beverage you cook. But that would be even more op

[Guest jeffpeng]

7 hours ago, Karl Grylls said:

On the other hand: in order to logic, every time you heat up water and drink it it should warm you like any other beverage you cook. But that would be even more op

Well ... that would be op indeed. Also: I read some rationalization of this. The actual energy contained in a cup (let's say 250 ml) is surprisingly little when calculated against the mass of a body (let's say 80kg). Even if we assume that a person drinks this beverage at 80 °C (which is VERY hot), the actual heat dispersed into the body calculates something like (80 - 36) / (80000/250) = 0.1375 °C. So from a physics point of view this doesn't make sense to begin with. Although the argument has been made that the warming effect is much more psychological and/or due to carbohydrates contained in the beverage.

[Karl Grylls]

That's true. After a heavy meal (warm), i could see this effect happen. At least for a short time. When they nerf the heat bonus from beverages, then they could add a warmth bonus for moving (for a minimum amount of time) instead. But well, there is the other hand too: Moving will heat you up, but not when it's -20°C outside Maybe we can get this heat bonus when we have enough layers of quality clothing.

Edited June 13, 2021 by Karl Grylls

[Guest jeffpeng]

Well you can make all sorts of arguments about what "technically" is wrong with the warmth system. But I guess the important thing is that it works generally very well and delivers a workable, good-enough abstraction that is intuitive and rather easy to understand.

[Karl Grylls]

I think so too. I also think that this game is way to far in development to make changes about that. But for TLD 2 i can see the mechanics getting deeper, more specific, more synergistic and more complicated.

[DPHG]

Actually I think the change is more subtle than that. Depending on how far you place the tea, it will either heat up then burn dry (takes 5-8 mins), or will heat up and remain warm (takes about 15 mins). Try placing it further out, and be careful of the "warming" time.

[stratvox]

Pentalobes are the freakin' worst.