Vigilant Trespass Interloper

[Guest jeffpeng]

Hello fellow survivors,

as @Salty Crackerssuggested I want to revisit "Vigilant Trespass", an update made to The Long Dark in 2016. Mostly to see if the game really got that much easier over time, but also to delve into a bit of nostalgia of simpler times. It is also an iteration of TLD before my time, since I joined a bit later, before Faithful Cartographer, but after the paper doll was introduced.

The basic premise is, well, as always: standard Interloper, no feats, no maps (eh eh eh). Our survivor is Marty. Marty failed to apply the correct 1.21 gigawatts (not jigawatts, mind you) and crash landed with his Delorean on Great Bear Island..... in the year 2016. There are no hoverboards, but even worse there are also no rifles and hatchets and in general not a whole lot. Will he survive? Well, enough nonsense, let's do this.

Marty 1 / Day 1 - So that's still the same

It's daytime. And it's also Timberwolf Mountain - between halfway and three way cave. Not the worst start I could have imagined. Now what do we do with it?

I bolt to the halfway cave. I'm not particularly sure I want to attempt a day 1 Summit run basically not knowing half the game. I guess the sensible thing is to get to the hut, and then see what we can do. At the cave I find the matches, pork and beans, the torch and some firewood. Not losing any time I run towards the cave connecting the two engines. Inside I realize that this still had brandishing. Also means no chaining of torches. Looking at the corpse inside I really notice how far TLD has come since then.

A dead blow up doll!

I find another torch, some crackers, and a book about fire starting. Helpful - I think. Getting through the cave I also realize how freaking dark the old torches are. Outside I decide I've got better chances climbing down the rope, but maybe I have misread the tea leaves here. The bear is patrolling below. I climb down, sneak past him, and holding right I take the long way to the landing gear. I make it to the rabbit grove, and then realize that stones aren't even a thing yet. Jesus. So how again am I supposed to make a bow again? I didn't start playing Interloper after .... Rugged Sentinel, I think.

Home!

At least the hut is warm enough. I find a down vest, a granola, the matches, the firewood, a very colorful sewing kit, a thin wool sweater, which I can only assume is the kind of premium loot it is today (so hooray?), some lamp fuel and a soda. No lens, no hacksaw. I sleep an hour to warm up, then want to check the hut - but just showing my face a wolf comes storming at me - and I get back in. What the hell? I sleep another hour and let the wolf leave. That aggro range, tho. Having learned my lesson I sneak out this time. I find a pair of gloves and a heavy hammer. If the loot tables are anything like what they are today that invalidates a Summit run. I sprint back inside and almost run into the wolf. Holy hell.

Inside I look through the old crafting menu, under S as in Survival Bow .... ah, here it is:

So that's still the same.

I guess I am then supposed to harvest guts from carcasses? Alrighty then. I put on my newly found clothes. +2°C, so I guess I can sleep 7 hours? But I have nothing to drink, and don't want to make a fire yet, so 5 hours is all I get.

I wake up completely parched. Something is tripping around the hut. Well, let's make some water. Ah right - no can's. Just .... click the fire. Okay! That I can still remember. I get some water done, then sleep two more hours by the fire. In thick fog I set out, trusting that the geometry of the world is mostly the same. ... It is, and pretty damn frozen I find the rope down to the abandoned bunker. I find the place at blistering -5°C. Just to stop freezing I sleep an hour. Then I look around. Beef jerky, a can of soda, that's it. I break a crate, since I will at some point need torches, and apparently they are made of reclaimed wood in this timeline (when did this change?). Then it's 6 hours of sleep - since I am really tired.

Where do I even go from here? The topology at burned ridge has significantly changed with Episode 3, that I know. But I guess Draft Dodgers should be there, and one way or another I'll get down there. If I can escape the wolves - that's a different matter. I still have a torch, I have matches. So maybe.

10 days, eh? I don't see that yet.

[ChillPlayer]

Oh man this brings out memories of the good old times. I remember how tough that was when Interloper came out, on my best run (after many failed) I got to 103 days but this was really stretching it out. First running around all PV to find deer carcasses, then I learned how to kill a deer without any weapon near farmstead with the help of a wolf, made it to the forge in DP and then I could relax, but just a bit.

I don't remember what I did the following days but after around - the then dreaded - day 50 I eventually camped it out in and near Jackrabbits CH. What ended my run in the end is lack of firewood, I relied primarely on reclaimed wood because I stood no chance harvesting limbs due to extrem cold weather and constant winds/blizzards. Also back then it wasn't too clear to me how Cabin Fever works and I was constantly afraid of it. Instead of spending 5 out of 6 days inside, as seems to be the norm these days - though I'm not even sure this'd have even worked back then - I tried to spend half a day in fishing huts and thus burned through all the wood in the vicinity pretty quickly.

Yes no stones, no torch chaining, no birch tea, no moose items, I don't think you could use fishing tackles for repairing/crafting, and you couldn't repell wolves by just standing there with a torch in hand.

This was my last attempt on interloper for more than 5 years, I found it just too stressfull to be enjoyable. Funny enough, I have started a new run 5 days ago and I am already at day 63 with one set of deer pants and both rabbits cloths, rest rubbish or naked but it feels way easier then I remember. I can't put my finger on what exactly makes it easier,  wolves are certainly less scary and 5 years ago I also haven't discovered yet how useful the cave in the Ravine is, if it even existed back then. On my current run this cave helped me a lot once I've forged some arrows.

But I'm beginning to get how people can now reach over 1000 days in interloper, I don't think that'd have been possible in VT, I certainly couldn't. Please keep us updated about how you're doing and what else you notice that makes interloper easier these days.

[Guest jeffpeng]

3 hours ago, ChillPlayer said:

then I learned how to kill a deer without any weapon near farmstead with the help of a wolf

Theorycrafting in my head I also remembered that this, of course, should still work pretty reliably.

3 hours ago, ChillPlayer said:

But I'm beginning to get how people can now reach over 1000 days in interloper

I wouldn't say it is easy now. But it is more a war of attrition than actually "hard". @Lord of the Long Darkpretty rightfully said that the first 100 days of interloper are 10 times harder than the following 1000, and frankly I would even propose that the same is true for the first 10 days compared to the next hundred, and day 1 compared to the next 10, basically meaning difficulty is calculated 1/d, where d is number of days played. Sure, chances of dying stack up over time, but generally if you live your first 10 you will live your first 100, and from there on out the things that kill you are negligence and boredom.

Don't get me wrong: I very much prefer the game how it is now. It is very much more enjoyable in its current state. If difficulty would equal enjoyability I would strife to end world hunger, solve the energy crisis or finally rectify USB naming conventions, so I am fine with that. But after just taking a short dip I'm pretty damn sure TLD Interloper is nowhere as hard as it used to be, so only more credit to those that pioneered it back in the day.

Edited December 19, 2021 by jeffpeng

[ChillPlayer]

1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

I wouldn't say it is easy now. But it is more a war of attrition than actually "hard". @Lord of the Long Darkpretty rightfully said that the first 100 days of interloper are 10 times harder than the following 1000

I completely agree and by no means did I ment to say interloper today is easy, it's just much more doable than it used to be when VT came out. Getting to day 100 did not mean that you are out of the woods, it pretty much marked the end of your journey. I think the most someone managed to survive back then was around 150 days or so.

But then updates followed rather quickly, changing interloper for good. Otherwise, who's to say that people wouldn't have figured out how to live in VT interloper for 1000 days if they had a few years of practice. People are solving rubik cubes blindfolded so I guess everything is possible

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by ChillPlayer

[Guest jeffpeng]

5 minutes ago, ChillPlayer said:

People are solving rubik cubes blindfolded so I guess everything is possible

There is possibility and there is "possibility". Technically it's possible a random quantum fluctuation occurs tomorrow and we wake up in a universe where unicorns are the norm rather than the exception. Is it probable tho.... ? 😄 Anyways, I'll give it an earnest shot.

[ChillPlayer]

56 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

There is possibility and there is "possibility". Technically it's possible a random quantum fluctuation occurs tomorrow and we wake up in a universe where unicorns are the norm rather than the exception.

lol I spilled my rosehip tea when I've read that

[Salty Crackers]

This brings me back. I started playing around the Timberwolf Mountain update, and remember complaining on the forums every time something changed about the game. Looking back, it's pretty clear that change was for the better. I still miss a few small things about the old TLD, like the time being displayed as 'about X hours of daylight left' and being unknown during blizzards, and loot when searching appearing at any time on the search bar, rather than always at the end.

I believe around this time you still need a hatchet to harvest saplings, so you should probably make for DP ASAP (as FM doesn't exist until the next update). I didn't play much Interloper around this time, so your best bet for advice would probably be reading some of the old Survival Stories from 2016.

[DsnowMan]

1 hour ago, Salty Crackers said:

 FM doesn't exist until the next update

Oh, shouldn't have told him that. Would have been fun to read about running into a rockslide at the end of the Mystery Lake railroad.

"But but.. how do i get to the forge?"

[Guest jeffpeng]

4 hours ago, DsnowMan said:

"But but.. how do i get to the forge?"

I checked that before hand. I knew FM was introduced later as the second forge (and arguably better, more accessible one, much like Blackrock now has the arguably better, more accessible armor-thingy), so I looked up what regions where accessible to start in. No FM. Yeah, bummer, ay? 😅

[ChillPlayer]

If someone has any doubt how much more difficult VT Interloper was, here's a comparison of the Average Calories per Day. Most of the All time stats have been updated by my current run but ACpD is from right after VT was released - I actually don't remember anymore why this was so high, or why Stalker is even higher. On my current run I stopped starving since day 105 and am constantly well fed:

[Guest jeffpeng]

That thing must somehow calculate this wrong, or it's like the maximum value you've ever had or something. Calories even with VT are pretty much the same as they are now.

And yeah, I need to continue this run ^^. But with everything going on right now I feel more like relaxing current day Interloper.

[ChillPlayer]

11 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

That thing must somehow calculate this wrong, or it's like the maximum value you've ever had or something. Calories even with VT are pretty much the same as they are now.

The value is calories expended/days survived. Which means on my VT run (103 days) I must've expended 615'940 cals in total. I think the calculation was always the same but I was much worse prepared for the freezing temperatures and as I wrote above, firewood was a huge issue. I ran outside, broke down palets, ran back inside to warm up, then ran to the next wood source, rinse & repeat. And I stayed 72 days out of the 103 in CH as I noticed in the logs, so I guess there was a lot of running across the frozen sea. Sadly there was no Ash Canyon back then, otherwise I would've chosen a better camping site

[EDIT]: btw, I forgot to ask: have there been any warm caves which counted as outdoors then? And was it still the old Ravine with just the bridge or was it already the new extended with cave and basin?

Edited December 24, 2021 by ChillPlayer

[Salty Crackers]

57 minutes ago, ChillPlayer said:

The value is calories expended/days survived. Which means on my VT run (103 days) I must've expended 615'940 cals in total. I think the calculation was always the same but I was much worse prepared for the freezing temperatures and as I wrote above, firewood was a huge issue. I ran outside, broke down palets, ran back inside to warm up, then ran to the next wood source, rinse & repeat. And I stayed 72 days out of the 103 in CH as I noticed in the logs, so I guess there was a lot of running across the frozen sea. Sadly there was no Ash Canyon back then, otherwise I would've chosen a better camping site

[EDIT]: btw, I forgot to ask: have there been any warm caves which counted as outdoors then? And was it still the old Ravine with just the bridge or was it already the new extended with cave and basin?

You said that you had several runs before your 103 day run that were really short. If you were sprinting around and died in less than a day, it would inflate the average calories per day. I believe the statistics choose the largest number over all runs and not just the statistics from the longest run.

[ChillPlayer]

58 minutes ago, Salty Crackers said:

You said that you had several runs before your 103 day run that were really short. If you were sprinting around and died in less than a day, it would inflate the average calories per day. I believe the statistics choose the largest number over all runs and not just the statistics from the longest run.

this... actually makes sense, haven't thought of that. It also explains why the Stalker value is so high, in that case sorry for the confusion.

[EDIT] guess my brain was frozen due to too long exposure in blizzards. All the journals from previous runs are available under "Extras" and this confirms @Salty Crackers assumption, I have expended even less calories then:

So again, sorry for the mess...

Edited December 24, 2021 by ChillPlayer