My DeadLoper run

[xanna]

I started a new run the other day, as I mentioned I might. I like to sometimes play on settings that are way too hard for me, to have a short break from my long runs, just an evening's worth of play. I call them 'Short Dark'. This is my latest run, DeadLoper, with settings as follows:

• Interloper base
• Turn off condition recovery (Dead Man)
• Turn off all animal spawns (Dead World)

I meant to turn of birch bark crafting for tea, too, but I forgot.
Challenge: see how long I survive!

I thought it would be really difficult, like I'd die in a few days, but it was not so hard, despite some poor RNG. I thought a Dead World run would be a good excuse to try the new beachcombing settings. I started in Coastal Highway - great start for beachcombing! I am now at about 9 days and at the Pleasant Valley crash site. Observations so far:

• Acorns are great to have when food is your biggest worry. They saved me a few times. Eventually I found a heavy hammer and have been making acorn coffee, as it has a 25% calorie bonus over whole acorns, and I need every calorie I can get. It's the first time I've made it and it was good to have a specific reason to do so.
• I was expecting more deer carcasses, as there's no reason from my Custom code that there would be fewer than a normal Interloper run, but in all of Coastal I only found ONE. Several spots where I always expect to see one were empty, eg near Waterfront Cottages, by the road junction near Log Sort, Bear Creek Campground, and also behind the foreclosed houses over the river from Thomson's Crossing in PV. This made everything much harder!
• I am a packrat/loot goblin so have a constant struggle with inventory management on my usual runs, so I really quite enjoyed not having to worry about carrying any weapons (not even stones!) as it really kept my weight down. Plus I guess I won't be getting any heavy clothing like a bear or wolf coat.
• I can carry all the raw meat I can find and there's noone to smell me!
• Walking around not worrying about predators gives a different feel to the game. It felt more like 'my' world, and it helped me to explore a bit better too. I did keep expecting to hear wolf howls, they're so ingrained. I thought it might feel sad or lonely, but I didn't feel that too often. I missed the rabbits.
• I am not used to minding my condition! I am far too blasé about my temperature getting low because I'm used to a few minutes of hypothermia risk not being a big deal. Most of my condition loss is down to being too late to light a fire or get indoors because I'm not used to it being important.
• All the bear dens are there with bones in them, even though the bears don't spawn. That was interesting. I say all of them, I haven't counted, so maybe not all of them.
• I've never done beachcombing before, and it was pretty helpful in this run. I got a couple of deer carcasses (very low meat ~0.5k) and a couple of cattails. For some reason I wasn't expecting human corpses to wash up, and that gave me a chill.
• Interloper weather SUCKS 🥶

Edited April 23, 2023 by xanna

[xanna]

Breakfast, lunch and dinner

[JMK]

6 hours ago, xanna said:

I can carry all the raw meat I can find and there's noone to smell me!

😁

[Nalliah]

It is just a trick of the eye with the imagery, but when I look at this the flames and the logs form a human shape, greedily reaching towards the fire.

[xanna]

11 hours ago, Nalliah said:

It is just a trick of the eye with the imagery, but when I look at this the flames and the logs form a human shape, greedily reaching towards the fire.

Yeah, I see that

[xanna]

There are so many harvestable items on Interloper!
Looking at the settings, the amount of foraged stuff is the same across all the standard modes, ie High, which I didn't really realise. My usual custom run has a lot less.
Mushroom party! 🍄🍄🍄

[ManicManiac]

23 hours ago, xanna said:

Breakfast, lunch and dinner

Every hour is Tea time somewhere...

[conanjaguar]

I foresee that this run can go on for a while yet . There is plenty of food out there, and with the new improvements to beachcombing, the only enemy is the cold, and even that can be conquered eventually.

I’m also curious, did the deer carcasses that washed up have hides? It seems like they should, but probably very low condition.

[xanna]

1 hour ago, conanjaguar said:

did the deer carcasses that washed up have hides? It seems like they should, but probably very low condition.

Yes, but I didn't harvest them so I don't know about condition. I've limited myself to old world clothing only (apart from the rabbit hat I found in PV!)

[xanna]

4 hours ago, conanjaguar said:

I foresee that this run can go on for a while yet . There is plenty of food out there, and with the new improvements to beachcombing, the only enemy is the cold, and even that can be conquered eventually.

Yup, it feels as though I can survive at least until I've been to every region. I'm on my fourth region now and have an excess of food - not much of an excess, but an excess. Need to change something to make it tricker for the next time, maybe turn down harvestables, or go for harvestables-only or something

[Glacia]

Deadworld has becomed possible thanks to the new beachcombing. Before it was only a challenge of how far someone can go, but now it's possible to survive with BC fish, carcasses and BBT washing on the coast.

It's indeed fun to try 😁

[xanna]

OK, this is a silly amount of cat tails.

Not quite the experience I was after, so I used the same code but remembered to turn off birch bark tea, and reduced the forageables spawn rate to low. We go again!

3 in-game days later, I'm very dead in Bleak Inlet. That's more like it!

This is the current version of the code: 8sHM-bi8P-KzuT-AXJe-NwIA

Edited May 2, 2023 by xanna

[gotmilkanot]

For acorns, it's more efficient to craft the large portion due to the following reasons:

• It uses less water to cook than 4 small portions.
• Both unconsumed and partially consumed cooked acorn (large portion) gives you the same type of ground acorn, which is then used to make the acorn coffee. So you can eat like 90% of the large portion and grind the remaining 10% to get the coffee, which will still be at full calories (100 at Cooking 1). This means you can get ~300 "free" calories AND the coffee from every large portion of cooked acorn.

Edited May 3, 2023 by gotmilkanot

[xanna]

5 hours ago, gotmilkanot said:

For acorns, it's more efficient to craft the large portion due to the following reasons:

• It uses less water to cook than 4 small portions.
• Both unconsumed and partially consumed cooked acorn (large portion) gives you the same type of ground acorn, which is then used to make the acorn coffee. So you can eat like 90% of the large portion and grind the remaining 10% to get the coffee, which will still be at full calories (100 at Cooking 1). This means you can get ~300 "free" calories AND the coffee from every large portion of cooked acorn.

No, really?? Sounds like an exploit, surely not intended...

The only downside to the 'large portions' is that it is heavier when uncooked:



1 small portion = 0.05kg
4 small portions = 0.2kg
1 large portion, made from 4 small = 0.25kg

Not a big increase, but sometimes that 50g can make all the difference! @Admin do you think this is intended?

It's only true for uncooked acorns, though. Cooked acorns don't add any weight for the bigger portion. It makes most sense to make the large portion (1 min) just before you cook them

[gotmilkanot]

2 hours ago, xanna said:

No, really?? Sounds like an exploit, surely not intended...

The only downside to the 'large portions' is that it is heavier when uncooked:



1 small portion = 0.05kg
4 small portions = 0.2kg
1 large portion, made from 4 small = 0.25kg

Not a big increase, but sometimes that 50g can make all the difference! @Admin do you think this is intended?

It's only true for uncooked acorns, though. Cooked acorns don't add any weight for the bigger portion. It makes most sense to make the large portion (1 min) just before you cook them

The game currently has no way to differentiate the ground acorn made from unconsumed or partially consumed cook acorn, so I would call that a loophole. It's similar to how the last 10% of reishi/rosehip tea provides the medicinal value or another full hour of warmth buff.

BTW, 4 prepared acorns -> 1 prepared large portion actually takes about 10 mins in-game time. The 1 min seems to be a typo.

[xanna]

9 minutes ago, gotmilkanot said:

The game currently has no way to differentiate the ground acorn made from unconsumed or partially consumed cook acorn, so I would call that a loophole. It's similar to how the last 10% of reishi/rosehip tea provides the medicinal value or another full hour of warmth buff.

BTW, 4 prepared acorns -> 1 prepared large portion actually takes about 10 mins in-game time. The 1 min seems to be a typo.

Yeah, it reminded me of the bottomless cattails exploit, too.

Thanks for pointing out the timing error - that's good to know!

[AdamvR]

On 4/23/2023 at 6:14 PM, xanna said:

acorn coffee, as it has a 25% calorie bonus over whole acorns

I'm not sure if that is correct: you need 4 acorns for 1 coffee, thus you actually lose a lot of calories (125 in coffee instead of 400 in 4 acorns - or 100 vs 320 if cooking level 1)
Not that you are in need of calories, I just thought of sharing my disappointment, when finding this...
cooking them one by one (instead of in large portions) might save water and time, but is actually a good way of levelling up the cooking skill - probably interesting in longer runs only.

Edited May 3, 2023 by AdamvR

[gotmilkanot]

3 hours ago, xanna said:

Yeah, it reminded me of the bottomless cattails exploit, too.

Thanks for pointing out the timing error - that's good to know!

The cattail exploit was just too OP and needed to be fixed.

The acorn exploit, on the other hand, doesn't feel too broken IMO. It doesn't provide unlimited calories and finding/prepping acorns actually takes a decent amount of resources. I would say the ~300 free calories is fair game in this case.

Edited May 3, 2023 by gotmilkanot

[xanna]

1 hour ago, AdamvR said:

I'm not sure if that is correct: you need 4 acorns for 1 coffee, thus you actually lose a lot of calories (125 in coffee instead of 400 in 4 acorns - or 100 vs 320 if cooking level 1)

Doy! You're right, I forgot to multiply by four! ☹️ What an error. My apologies.

Well, that makes more sense... maybe?

[xanna]

I'm still having fun with this. It was way too easy so I reduced the amount of harvestable plants, then it was still too easy, so I thought, hey! you know what would be really fun? Doing this in Forsaken Airfield!

I didn't last long, that place is nasty! Not abundant with food so I put the harvestable plants back up, but the main problem is that the spawn is so far from anywhere, so I lose just so much condition trying to get started. It's real tough, and IFAIK there's no stim out there (if I'm wrong please tell me!).

For balance, I might put birch bark tea back on, and make the weather a bit less homocidal.

[conanjaguar]

6 hours ago, xanna said:

Doing this in Forsaken Airfield!

If you can pull of THAT particular bit of wizardry, then your name is sure to be whispered around campfires along with those of great survivors like @Drifter Man and @Hotzn…

[xanna]

Not if I just adjust my settings till I can do it!

[conanjaguar]

@xanna

You might want to look at “Sleepwalker” mode for an idea. Essentially, you can recover 1% condition per hour while awake, and non while asleep, as long as you stay well fed.