Suggestions on how developers could make Interloper more fun

[fewerlaws]

So I'm on Day 220 or so on Interloper.  I've had a lot of fun so far, but I'm really starting to get bored.  I've played this game over 1000 hours according to Steam's metrics.  I think making Interloper not boring and even more fun should be one of the primary objectives of Hinterland developers.  A fun Interloper experience benefits the hardcore players, who are probably the most likely to introduce new people to the game.  Therefore,focusing on improving Interloper would probably translate to higher revenues for Hinterland.

My Interloper strategy has been to minimize my consumption of hard to find resources, and then to rely primarily on beach combing to obtain them.  The beach combing resources that I most value are listed below in order of preference:

1. Birch saplings
2. Maple saplings
3. Scrap Metal
4. Cloth, or any clothing items that can be harvested

I harvest almost always harvest carcasses by hand in order to minimize any wear and tear on my tools.  I position the fire far enough from the carcass so as to not degrade it, but close enough to me so I can warm up easily while harvesting.  I use the Heavy Hammer whenever possible instead of the Hatchet, Knife, Crowbar.  This is because the Heavy Hammer can be repaired with easily found Douglas fir logs, plus only a tiny amount fraction of scrap metal (via the toolbox which degrades and can only be repaired with scrap metal).  I only use the Improvised Knife for crafting arrow shafts, the Survival Bow, or any new articles of leather clothing.  I never use the hatchet except for chopping down saplings.  The only logs I have are ones I've found via beach coming.  Coal is vitally important for staying warm and for cooking.  I use coal and sticks exclusively for almost all my fire and heat needs.  I usually pickup all sticks, only occasionally break down larger ones, and I only break them down by hand and not with a tool.  Any logs I find on the beach I will burn too, except for some Douglas Fir logs which I save for repairing the Heavy Hammer, which I use for smashing ice fishing holes, or breaking down crates and pallets in order to obtain Reclaimed Wood, which I use for snares and sometimes burning.

Also, for some reason, in my game not a single bear spawned at either of the 3 spawn locations in CH between day 160 and day 220.  As soon as I left CH and spent 3 days in Mystery Lake, then returned to CH, the wildlife respawned there in CH including a bear at the northwestern cave by the stream.  Not sure if that was a bug or by design.  I've never had a problem with deer or rabbits respawning in CH, but I've noticed that as the game progresses, there are fewer wolves, deer, and bear in CH.  CH is definitely my favorite area in the game, mainly due to the abundance of coal, fun hunting on the ice, ice fishing, and the 2 other nearby beachcombing locations; CrH and DP.  I also like the Mountaineer Hut at the base of TWM.  Mystery Lake is another good place to have a base but there is no beach combing there, which I love.  BTW, why are there no Timberwolf packs at TWM?  Maybe add a small pack of Timberwolves down in Echo Ravine and have them guard a few airplane cargo boxes.

I have some suggestions on how to improve the game.

1. Make Firelogs craftable using10 Tinder or 10 Cat Tail Heads plus 250ml of lantern oil.  After you get Fire Starting level 3, all the tinder just tends to accumulate and clutter up the game.  Please provide a mechanism whereby we can burn this stuff up in some useful fashion.  If we could add tinder it to an existing fire in order to extend its burn duration by just 2 minutes, that would be an improvement.
2. Allow players with Level 5 Fire Starting to start fires with a bow drill, which could be a new craftable item at a workbench, and could be created using 1 reclaimed wood, 1 gut, and a 1 maple sapling.  Fires started with a bow drill take 4x longer to start and have a lower probability of success, say only 50 percent.  The bow drill I think is needed because relying on clear daytime weather for the magnifying glass to work makes it impossible to reliably schedule a trip through a dark cave when you must rely on torches for light.  The bow drill could be used up to 50 times before wearing out, so 2% reduction in durability per use.
3. Allow the Crampons to be repaired either with a toolbox or with the milling machine or hacksaw.  I rarely use the Crampons because I know once their durability reaches 0%, they're gone forever.  Required 1 scrap metal for each 20% repair to durability.
4. Allow flare shells to be found on Interloper on the beach, but make the probability of finding them exceedingly rare, such as 1 in 400 or something.  I never use the flare gun in interloper because I know there are limited number of unrenewable shots.
5. Allow bottles of Antibiotics to be found on the beach with about 1/3 the probability as painkillers.
6. Allow gear to be raised and lowered from any rappelling location using a 2nd rope in the players inventory.  The game mechanic could work by having the player place say 30kG of items in a container at the base of the rope, then once you're at the top, you can raise or lower those items at the cost of some energy (exhaustion).  That way you could move items more efficiently up and down at climbing spots, without having to carry your entire body weight each time you bring items up/down a rope.  Typically, people haul their gear up a rope separate from their bodies.  It is what I do when I go hunting to haul gear (my gun and backpack) up and down from the tree stand or elevated blind.
7. Add a new penalty for Interloper players who have maintained a pure carnivorous diet for more than 2 weeks.  Make it function similar to Cabin Fever, but call it something like Scurvy.  Require that the player get some nutrients from edible plants, which could be made more renewable , especially the Rose Hips and Reishi Mushrooms.  Right now the only only renewable edible plants are Cat Tails (from beachcombing) and Birch Bark tea.
8. Add seaweed or kelp to the game as a renewable edible plant.  Sometimes obtained via fishing with 5 to 10 percent probability, sometimes found via beach combing.
9. Add Instant Oatmeal to the game.  Oatmeal would grant the "warming up" bonus, would quench 250ml of thirst, and provide 200 calories per pouch.  Every box/carton of instant oatmeal would contain 10 pouches.  Very lightweight, just 0.05kg per pouch, or 0.5kg per carton.  Degrades very slowly if at all. Mix 1 pouch in a recycled can or pot with just 250ml of water.  Quenches 250ml of thirst in addition to the 200 calories.  Ready in 6 minutes over a fire just like Tea/Coffee.
10. Allow the creation of a Firepit using 30 stones.  Firepits would allow you to build a fire that couldn't be blown out completely by a blizzard.  Firepits wouldn't be as nice as the fire barrel, but you could maintain a small 10 minute fire by adding sticks to it every 10 minutes and even during a blizzard.  Firepits would take 30 minutes to build, and have either 1 or 2 cooking slots, depending on developer preference.  Firepits could only be built by players with level 4 or higher skill in Fire Starting.
11. Allow the crafting of red flares using gunpowder, paper, and red rose hips.
12. Add a new craftable throwing weapon to the game -- the javelin (or Improvised Spear).  Make it very inaccurate with highly random/variable effectiveness.  To craft it you would need to use the forge to make the spear head -- (4 scrap metal).  For the shaft you would need a Fir log or reclaimed wood.  Make the spear heavy -- 2kg each.  This could be used for hunting whenever no Maple or Birch Saplings can be found to make a bow or arrows.  Another drawback to using a spear to make a kill would be that the spear damage reduce by 20 percent the amount of harvest-able meat from the carcass.
13. Allow the creation of Wood Matches using gunpowder, water, reclaimed wood.  Matches would need to cure (dry out) for 48 hours after you mix up the paste and apply it to the end of the match sticks.  Only players with level 5 fire starting could craft matches.
14. Allow degraded (but not always ruined!) T-shirt and Dress Shirt to be found via Beachcombing on Interloper, but with low probability.
15. Add seasons.  Everything would still appear graphically the same with snow everywhere, but just make the outside temperatures fluctuate with the time of year and seasons.  Also, make the available resources a function of the time of year.  So in "winter", temperatures would be extremely cold with blizzards that can last 1 to 3 weeks and summers could be warmer with more abundant wild game and renewable edible plants.  With each passing year, average annual temperatures would drop by 1 degree C up to a maximum of 10 degrees C after 10 years.  Interloper players could start in the late Fall, and Pilgrim survival players could start in the early Summer.
16. Add seals in coastal areas?  You can hit them with an arrow or spear, but risk losing your arrow/spear head if the seal survives the 1st hit and they jump back into the ocean.  If you kill them, you have to risk falling through the ice when you go out to retrieve their carcass.

Thoughts?  What do other players do to make Interloper less boring?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

[I_eat_only_wolf_meat]

I think the ultimate answer to survival mode boredom, of any difficulty level, is multiplayer.  What would you do to another survivor to get his bearskins?  Or his 30kg of  meat?  To preserve the flavor of the game, you could really only have one or two other players on an entire map (all regions)

[Dr. S.]

I do what I would probably do if stuck in such a situation: adopt activities  to hone my skills, understand my environment, and challenge myself. So, for example,

Complete the “Faithful Cartographer” achievement. 

Locate all the cairns (the game should definitely be more helpful here). 

Spend 30 (or 50, or whatever) consecutive days in each region, while maintaining the well-fed bonus. 

Hunt aurora bears. 

Make sure each entry in the journal is nonzero, including “bad” things like parasites and moose stompings. 
 

BTW, if I may say so, you seem a bit obsessed with nonrenewable items. I’ve survived 500+ days on interloper without doing any of the things you describe to conserve items, and without coming close to running out of anything. (Including no beachcombing—too boring.) So if you lighten up on that, you might have more fun. Plus, running out of stuff can lead to new challenges and make things interesting. 
 

Also, I don’t understand your comment about the mag lens and caves. The lantern provides infinite reliable lighting for caves. Even in interloper the are enough lying around so that you can leave them at cave entrances. 

[Serenity]

Removing resource scarcity wouldn't create any less boredom. It just would let you extend it even further. There is this strange idea some people have that resources are almost non-existent and that you should almost never expend anything. But it's just not true. Even Interloper has plenty of matches. You can be somewhat wasteful with them and still make it to 500 days with plenty of them left.

It's even more true for other stuff. There is absolutely no reason to make medicine renewable from beachcoming when so many plants exist. Flare shells can actually be found. But they are very rare and hard to see

I'll never understand this obsession with bow drills

I agree that the late game is pretty boring, but this isn't a solution to that. It just makes it even less of a challenge than it already is

Edited November 17, 2021 by Serenity

[fewerlaws]

5 hours ago, I_eat_only_wolf_meat said:

I think the ultimate answer to survival mode boredom, of any difficulty level, is multiplayer.  What would you do to another survivor to get his bearskins?  Or his 30kg of  meat?  To preserve the flavor of the game, you could really only have one or two other players on an entire map (all regions)

Yes, good suggestion, however from a developer standpoint, adding multiplayer would be a massive investment of development time and open a lot of possibility for bugs.  I'm was trying to think of features that would be relatively easy to implement.

[fewerlaws]

4 hours ago, Serenity said:

Removing resource scarcity wouldn't create any less boredom. It just would let you extend it even further. There is this strange idea some people have that resources are almost non-existent and that you should almost never expend anything. But it's just not true. Even Interloper has plenty of matches. You can be somewhat wasteful with them and still make it to 500 days with plenty of them left.

It's even more true for other stuff. There is absolutely no reason to make medicine renewable from beachcoming when so many plants exist. Flare shells can actually be found. But they are very rare and hard to see

I'll never understand this obsession with bow drills

I agree that the late game is pretty boring, but this isn't a solution to that. It just makes it even less of a challenge than it already is

Thanks for your feedback Serenity.  I'm not necessarily saying make resources more common, I'm just saying make some of them renewable but also make them more rare in terms of the fixed number that you would normally find throughout the game.  Yes, I have a big reluctance to ever use any non-renewable resource.

I think perhaps if you ever had to make a bow drill and start a fire with one, you would appreciate it in the game more.  I don't particularly enjoy ice fishing for lantern fuel on Interloper.  I end up just making tons of water while keeping warm by the pot belly stove in the fish hut.  I like torchlight more than the lantern light because torches keep you warmer and you can thrown them at wolves to scare them off.  Perhaps if there were a chance to get a massive fish or pull up an interesting item like a pair of boots, then fishing would be more fun.  I also think it is funny that you always find shoes in pairs while beachcombing when in real life you only ever find one shoe and never a matched pair of shoes.

I'm on day 240 now and I have something like 1300 kilograms of meat piled up outside the CH garage back door by the pickup truck.  I could survive for more than a  year without getting any more food.

I think having really severe winters in all areas and mild summers would be a neat feature for people who play for the long haul.  Having to store up food for the winter would be fun especially if wild game were made exceedingly scarce in the winter.

Another idea for interloper would be to add an Improvised Flashlight, that could be crafted from a bathroom pipe, wire and battery cells from some electronic devices like laptops or radios, and light bulbs salvaged from cars.

I do think the spear idea could be fun especially if saplings were made even more scarce.

[fewerlaws]

5 hours ago, Dr. S. said:

BTW, if I may say so, you seem a bit obsessed with nonrenewable items. I’ve survived 500+ days on interloper without doing any of the things you describe to conserve items, and without coming close to running out of anything. (Including no beachcombing—too boring.) So if you lighten up on that, you might have more fun. Plus, running out of stuff can lead to new challenges and make things interesting. 

I agree with the principle of making the game more challenging and therefore more enjoyable.  My current challenge is to survive using only resources found on beaches or that I craft from materials gathered from hunting.  A cool challenge is to play without ever using the hacksaw or the hatchet.  I'm considering trying to play on interloper without ever crafting any tools including the knife, which would mean no bow or arrows.  I would need to rely solely on fish found on the beach, rocks/snares to kill rabbits, and wolves to kill dear and rabbits.  I would stay warm using coal and cloth coats rather than crafted leather ones.  Has anyone played this way?

5 hours ago, Dr. S. said:

Also, I don’t understand your comment about the mag lens and caves. The lantern provides infinite reliable lighting for caves. Even in interloper the are enough lying around so that you can leave them at cave entrances. 

The problem with the lanterns is that they consume lantern oil, which long term you can only get from Fishing, and fishing consumes valuable scrap metal either in the form of hooks, or wear and tear on the Heavy Hammer (for smashing the ice open), and the Heavy Hammer requires the toolbox to repair, and the toolbox requires metal to repair.  Torches require no metal in order to produce them.  If you haven't noticed, I prefer to only use scrap metal to repair the Improvised Knife using the Milling Machine.

[fewerlaws]

Also, adding snowshoes to the game would prevent falling through the ice better than Crampons.
And a compass would still work even while earth was getting hit by a corona mass ejection.  The fact that you can see aurora borealis is evidence that the earth's magnetic field is still active and doing its job.  Crafting a compass isn't hard.  Just need a needle, a flame, some fluid that wouldn't freeze (water with antifreeze from a car radiator), and something to float the needle on like a cork.

[Serenity]

Why are you so worried about scrap metal? It's hardly valuable. You'll die of old age before you run out. Some people really underestimate the amount of resources on all maps and how far you can get with them. And they just keep adding more maps.

If you set yourself weird limitations like not using a hacksaw that's on you. The game can't be balanced around that

Edited November 18, 2021 by Serenity

[Dr. S.]

2 hours ago, fewerlaws said:

 I'm considering trying to play on interloper without ever crafting any tools including the knife, which would mean no bow or arrows.  I would need to rely solely on fish found on the beach, rocks/snares to kill rabbits, and wolves to kill dear and rabbits.  I would stay warm using coal and cloth coats rather than crafted leather ones.  Has anyone played this way?

Take a look at this thread. 

 

[piddy3825]

Boredom

@fewerlaws, I think boredom with the game is experienced by most all of the players regardless of difficulty level.  Once you've gotten to the point of your characters development where all of your daily needs have been met, then just playing in the sandbox on survival mode becomes more of a challenge in staying interested in playing the game.  The sheer daily repetition of just existing without some interesting diversion can make playing the game feel more like work and a lot less like gaming.

That being said, just a gentle reminder that the game has been out since 2014 and you are certainly not the first, nor will you be the last to ask for and/or suggest ways in which gameplay could be improved.   I think making your time in the sandbox entertaining is more a player's responsibility and not the developer's.  With custom game settings you can fine tune many of the features to your personal tastes and if your willing to seek out and use unsanctioned mods, items like a bow drill and ember box are now available as well as some multiplayer platforms as suggested by @I_eat_only_wolf_meat.    I believe what you need to do is to set some goals for yourself.  Try to get complete all the achievements and earn all the badges.  Have you made 1000 fires yet?  Let me tell you, that is not an easy feat.  Literally took me years of game play and probably more than 2000 hours of gameplay before I got that Firestarter Achievement.    

As to resources in the game, even on Interloper there is such an abundance of material in the game it's silly.  I once harvested every bit of scrap metal, crate and pallet that I could at Carter Hydro and ended up with something like 700 pieces of scrap metal and hundreds of kilos of reclaimed wood.  Did the same at the fish processing plant in DP.  Literally hacksawed every bit of scrap metal available in the region, chopped every crate and busted up every pallet.  I ended up forging hundreds of arrowheads, dozens and dozens of improvised axes and knives.  I stayed in DP for almost 284 days before I had finally run out of scrap metal.  

I hope you try some of the suggestions @Dr. S. posted, those are certainly obtainable goals but do require a fair amount of effort.  Life in the sandbox is only as boring as you allow it to be.  Now get out there and snare 100 rabbits, drink 200 cups of coffee, count all the cairns, stone a bunny from 50 meters!  
You won't be bored long

[WillemD]

17 hours ago, fewerlaws said:

15. Add seasons.  Everything would still appear graphically the same with snow everywhere, but just make the outside temperatures fluctuate with the time of year and seasons.  Also, make the available resources a function of the time of year.  So in "winter", temperatures would be extremely cold with blizzards that can last 1 to 3 weeks and summers could be warmer with more abundant wild game and renewable edible plants.  With each passing year, average annual temperatures would drop by 1 degree C up to a maximum of 10 degrees C after 10 years.  Interloper players could start in the late Fall, and Pilgrim survival players could start in the early Summer.

I've though about this before. In addition to lower temperatures in winter, the length of days/nights could also vary. Like in summer, you get 18 hours of daylight, and 6 hours of darkness. While in winter, you get 18 hours of darkness and just 6 hours of daylight.

It would give the game a sense that time is passing, breaking some of the monotony.

Edited November 18, 2021 by WillemD

[Mistral]

8 hours ago, WillemD said:

I've though about this before. In addition to lower temperatures in winter, the length of days/nights could also vary. Like in summer, you get 18 hours of daylight, and 6 hours of darkness. While in winter, you get 18 hours of darkness and just 6 hours of daylight.

It would give the game a sense that time is passing, breaking some of the monotony.

Yeeeeeeees this is something I've wanted for a long time.

In fact I'd say zero hours of daylight, the polar night, in the middle of winter in December and January would be the most effective and realistic way... I mean you could still have 2-3 hours of non-darkness, you know murky overcast or clear skies at noon, but no actual sun. That's basically my Christmas time world.

However if you went to that extreme, you'd also have to make summer months with sun that never sets for few months.

At the very least I wish there was a custom option to determine static time of the day for sunrise and sunset. Right now the only options are Default and Endless Night but you could have so much more quite easily...

Edited November 18, 2021 by Mistral

[Stone]

@fewerlaws you've clearly some passion for the game and we most definitely can relate. Boredom wise though, as others have said, many of those suggestions just extend the game when there are resources to go thousands of days already, and is that making it less boring?

Personally I like things that add challenge so I like your seasons suggestion but it's still spread over a very long timeline.

I've made interloper more interesting by banning man made locations that involve a loading screen (call this outerloper) and then by aiming to spend 0 hours indoors which means even warmer bits of caves are off limits as they count as time indoors (weirdly). But that's almost boring because you have to works so hard at it.

Good luck on finding your fun!

[fewerlaws]

So to make things more challenging on Interloper, I've restarted and am playing with these self imposed restrictions:

1. Cannot ever consume any food that you didn't hunt.
2. Cannot ever harvest any cloth from, curtains, upholstery, towels, etc.  All cloth must be harvested from clothing you find or via beach combing.
3. Cannot ever harvest any plants, including firewood logs, both maple and birch saplings, cat tails, rose hips, old mans beard, mushrooms, etc
4. Cannot ever use the hacksaw or hatchet.  This means that any scrap metal you get you must have obtained without breaking down or cutting up any metal furniture.  I scrapped 2 crowbars to get enough to pieces of metal to forge a knife.  I'm still debating whether or not to allow the hacksaw to be used for opening the airplane cargo containers at the TWM summit.
5. Can only use the heavy hammer once, and only to forge a single improvised knife, and 4 arrowheads.  Any additional arrowheads must be found within the world.  Often 2 more can be found in a toolbox in Ash Canyon, and sometimes you can find a single arrowhead in a few other toolboxes.
6. Cannot hunt deer.  To kill them you must have them killed by a wolf.  I.E.  lure wolves into a flock of deer, then do a quick wide U-turn sprint around the deer, then spook the deer towards the wolves then watch the carnage.
7. No game except the moose can be hunted with more than 1 arrow.  This is because the moose is the only animal that won't bleed out.  Thus if you want to hit a non-moose animal more than once with an arrow, then you have to pull the arrow out of the animal while it is still alive, then shoot it again.

I'm on day 45 and doing just fine playing under the constraints listed above.  I now have 2 pairs of wool socks, 2 pairs of long johns, rabbit skin hat, rabbit skin mittens, 2 pairs of deer skin leggins, 1 bear coat, 1 ski jacket, 1 moose satchel, deer skin boots.  Also I have the magnifying glass, a normal bedroll, 7 toolboxes, and 14 pieces of spare scrap metal, 25 pieces of cloth, 1 survival bow, 5 arrows, 7 cured birch saplings and 3 maple saplings (from diligent beach coming sessions in CH, DP, and CrH). Almost done crafting my 2nd bear coat.  I have about 250kg of meat harvested and cooked.

Anyone else tried playing this way?

[piddy3825]

2 hours ago, fewerlaws said:

Anyone else tried playing this way?

keeping yourself amused in the sandbox is doing and playing however you feel like!  

Your game is draconian that you make Bear Grylls look like a milktoast!

Game on, Player!

[fauxjargon]

As many others have said, resources aren't really limited even in Interloper.  Eventually once you learn your way around the maps, learn how the mechanics of predator and prey animals work and understand your priorities as a new survivor, Interloper is pretty easy, and the main threat of death is carelessness due to boredom.  Needless to say once you have gotten to this point, you're likely to have hundreds of hours in  and have gotten your money's worth.

There are all kinds of ways you can challenge yourself, for instance both DP/CH and FM/BR, on Interloper, spawn a mostly complete set of tools - why not try limiting  yourself to those regions and see how long you last?  Or do the deadman challenge, or outerloper (no going inside man-made loading screen structures except mines).

[Long_Dark_Fan]

I’m really struggling on interloper lol I seem to die within the first 10 mins 😂🤣😂 how to survive a day  guide would be helpful lol 😂