Carrying animals around

[Cyclone35]

So after you kill a large animal, you can harvest them for meat and resources. The main issue present is that trying to harvest the animal out in the open can be quite dangerous. The big obstacles are bad weather and hungry predators jumping at you when you least expect it. Sure you could build a fire to keep warm and scare away wolves/bears. However, expert survivors usually find a safe place to harvest their catch. In Wintermute chapter 3, the player can carry a survivor on their back. What if the player can pick up the animal and carry it to a different location. That way the player can take their catch to a safer location to make the most out of their harvest. There will be some down sides to this.

1. Large animals like bears or moose will be too large to carry. Only deer and wolves (also cougar depending on its size in game) are small enough for a normal human to carry themselves.

2. Due to their weight, trying to carry an animal will prevent the player from using items in their inventory. They have to place the animal on the ground in order to interact with objects and pull out a weapon to defend themselves. In addition, carrying a heavy animal will reduce your base movement speed and prevent you from sprinting.

3. The scent of a large animal will attract predators. The scent bar will be at 3 notches, meaning you have to be careful if a wolf or bear are in the area.

4. You cannot carry the animal inside a manmade shelter. The only exceptions are cave shelters found throughout the map. Also to avoid complicating the system, lets just say you can't carry an animal to another region or a transition area.

5. Animal carcass that have been ravaged cannot be picked up.

Edited February 19, 2023 by Cyclone35

[Razum]

I would change it from carrying like in ep3, to instead dragging it behind you. You can pick up another human, but even a deer or a wolf would be pretty heavy. I like the rest very much.

[Lexilogo]

Hinterland adding Quartering was their direct response to people asking for this feature, and I don't really see the point in Quartering continuing to be a thing if carrying carcasses became possible.

I will definitely say in terms of FEEL, I vastly prefer the fantasy of throwing a wolf's body on my back, walking through the snowfields with it then tossing it onto my dining table to butcher, than spending an hour in the open to magic the wolf into a bunch of bags to pick up.

But in terms of gameplay, carrying bodies makes Quartering mostly redundant. I don't think it would be outrageous to suggest that carrying Deer/Wolf bodies could just replace Quartering for them entirely, and Quartering becomes a feature exclusive to moose, bears, and similarly heavy animals?

[Stuffed Plush Chainsaw]

I personally think this would make a rather good addition to the game if it came with the appropriate costs applied. In exchange, quartering would indeed to be removed for smaller animals like deer and wolves. I believe the reason quartering was "invented" was mostly a stopgap solution. Now that the software infrastructure exists to carry bodies around I believe it is time to change this.

  

7 hours ago, Razum said:

I would change it from carrying like in ep3, to instead dragging it behind you. You can pick up another human, but even a deer or a wolf would be pretty heavy. I like the rest very much.

A wolf wouldn't be heavier than the typical human. Same goes for the white-tailed deer as depicted in the game.

Edited February 19, 2023 by Stuffed Plush Chainsaw

[xanna]

Don't forget about the upcoming travois sled

[UTC-10]

I don't think Quartering is going to be exchanged for carrying a carcass.  It has been around too long.  It was the devs' response to being able to move a carcass other than a rabbit.  

The carrying of a survivor was a Wintermute work-around which relieved the quest devs (by fiat) from having to work out how to make it an actual general mechanic applicable to Survival mode (the two code bases were kind of joined at the hip at that time).  So carrying survivors would not be applicable to carrying a carcass.  

I would be interested in the capacity and manner of functional implementation of a travois.  Is it an addition to the character's weight capacity (at the cost of no running)  either in absolute (a given number of kilos like the Moose hide satchel or a percentage increase to capacity so the greater the character weight capacity the greater the additional weight subject to exhaustion) or will it be a separate device that has a fixed weight capacity separate from the character (I doubt it but it is possible)?  Wow what a long question.  🙂

[Stuffed Plush Chainsaw]

1 hour ago, UTC-10 said:

It has been around too long.

While that might be a reason I don't feel like this qualifies as an argument. 😉

1 hour ago, UTC-10 said:

I would be interested in the capacity and manner of functional implementation of a travois.  Is it an addition to the character's weight capacity (at the cost of no running)  either in absolute (a given number of kilos like the Moose hide satchel or a percentage increase to capacity so the greater the character weight capacity the greater the additional weight subject to exhaustion) or will it be a separate device that has a fixed weight capacity separate from the character (I doubt it but it is possible)?  Wow what a long question.  🙂

I guess the most straightforward way to implement this would be to have a container with x amount of kilograms of space which you could access by clicking the travois, much like any other container. Dragging the travois then would be mostly a problem of how to implement actually dragging an entity around behind you. I guess you could implement some logic that would even adapt the amount of slow down dragging a travois would inflict based on how much weight is loaded into it.

 

3 hours ago, xanna said:

Don't forget about the upcoming travois sled

I don't feel like the travois fixes the biggest problem with quartering: you have to spend an additional hour quartering an animal. Let's assume your deer has 10 kilograms of meat, you have carcass harvesting 5 and an improvised knife, then you could just take those in the same amount of time plus 40 + 2x10 minutes for hide and guts. If you quarter the animal you get hide and guts instantly, but then still have to carve up 10 kilograms of meat - only if you don't do it on the spot you have to carry twice the weight in meat.

So bottom line: quartering deer and wolves rarely proves advantageous, both in terms of time requirement and logistics, travois or not. The fact that there exists such a "break even point" for quartering, and that you usually do not reach it with smaller animals goes to show that the mechanic is badly designed and if not replacement could at least use some updating.

Although: if you could put a deer or a wolf on a travois as a whole .... maybe that would be something. (And if you meant just that I didn't say a thing 😄 )

Edited February 19, 2023 by Stuffed Plush Chainsaw

[xanna]

2 hours ago, Stuffed Plush Chainsaw said:

(And if you meant just that I didn't say a thing 😄 )

I did, but I won't tell a soul 🤐

[odizzido]

Bears in TLD only weigh about 40-80kg, so you could totally pick one up.

Anyways all of this will need to be done by modders so we will just need for hinterland to finish the game(and hopefully have good mod support) so some good mods can come out.