Reporting "Non-Bug" Bugs?

[Ansible]

I love this game, LOVE it. It's frankly the greatest video game I've ever played, and I'm at about 2100 hours into it. I commend this team for their masterful vision and work on it for the past decade. But, nothing is perfect, of course.

So, this is a weird question, but... as I've reported in the past, I've come across things in the game world that are kind of a in a state of "is this a bug? or is it not?"

Stuff that doesn't technically BREAK the game or makes it stop working, but takes someone out of the "game world" by seeing something that doesn't quite seem like it was intended.

And I'm trying to figure out if I should report these things to the HelpDesk, as if they are a bug, or collect them all and make one giant ongoing thread where I show the current "problems" in the game and post it here.

What I'm talking about are things like:

• Items not falling down when the object they are sitting on disappears/is harvested
• Items disappearing entirely when the object they are sitting on disappears/is harvested
• "Invisible walls" (I **HATE** invisible walls, if some point/area is not meant to be passed, then stick a real rock wall there or something!!!)
• Items that can't be harvested that can be in other locations (such as shelves, buckets, etc.)
• ...and other miscellaneous things that we're not sure whether or not they are "bugs"

I say that I'm not sure whether or not these are "bugs", because I'm not sure whether or not they are actually errors in the code, or design flaws by the designers not thinking about this situation or that they hadn't considered. I, as a programmer myself, realize that we are all human and we ALL make mistakes from time to time, and we can't always think of every possible situation.

But I guess what I'm asking is, what's the correct and proper approach to take with these things that seem troublesome? HelpDesk, or a single collective thread on these forums where I report all of these oddities? If I'm not sure whether it's an actual bug, or an oversight, or just wasn't "fixed" because of too little staff/resources to handle all of it... what do I do with it??

Full disclosure: I am a high functioning autistic, so I have a tendency to notice things that others don't, or that others just let slide by, because they mess with my sense of what's "right in the world". One example is when you're "mountain goating" on a cliff edge close to the ground, and you're walking around on the cliff edge, but you can see your invisible footprints in the snow 20 feet BELOW where you're standing at! Bugs the HECK out of me!

[Leeanda]

Well the first two I believe are bugs,and others have reported the same thing..

Invisiwalls have always been present though. And there are more now than there used to be.

 

Maybe continuing this thread for queries is the best way to find out what is intended or not..  I would rather have feedback fromm other players before submitting bug reports..  

[twyn1]

I also like to check before reporting minor bugs. I have seen floating objects (noted a bottle floating above the shelf in the railroad depot behind the ZoC outbuildings).

Also, most all of my arrows have been floating above the carcasses of the larger animals I've killed (deer, wolves) -- rabbits and ptarmigans are not showing that glitch.

I've also had a still-growling wolf carcass that was un-harvestable (in BRR). Stopped growling when I shot another arrow into it, but still could not harvest, no hit box.

[Leeanda]

I've had the growling zombie wolf in zoc... Lasted over a day.. 

The hitbox is rather off trying to harvest some wolves and deer too.

[dahemac]

I find the invisible walls sometimes weird. There are, on some maps like Mountain Town or Mystery Lake, large areas that you can mountain goat to, or in one case, just walk a zig zag up a slope, and this opens up large areas of the map that are somewhat unaccountably unused. I walked onto a large hillside area on the right (unaccountably south or north?) side of the map on the way to the dam in ML. Then I turned around to look back at untextured polys and realized I had walked outside the map. In that case the solution is not an invisible wall, but just to finish that part of the map. And there is a high meadow in Mountain town that is “out of bounds” although you can mountain goat to there. Again, why not just finish it? Some of the “You can’t go here” design decisions, seem somewhat arbitrary.

There used to be a puzzle game called MYST that was very beautiful. But sometimes the most obvious solution to a puzzle was, “well, I would just step over this string.” These are the weak points in game design.

[Ansible]

Okay, since it's been over a week and there's been no official reply, I'm just going to go ahead and start posting debug screenshots of what I'm going to now call "oddities" that may or may not be bugs, but certainly don't appear to be an intentional design choice.

Here's one:

1) That cloth should not be floating in the air, and 2) that wooden hut should should be on FIRE right now (kidding on the second one!)

Floating flare gun case

This ladder in Milton should be harvestable, as wooden ladders are elsewhere. In fact, there's a LOT of things in Milton that should be harvestable that are elsewhere. I just started an Archivist run, so I'll probably have a bunch of screenshots from there next.

[Ansible]

Huh, a tree growing directly out of a rock face... I mean, I think I've seen something like that before, but usually there's some dirt or something around where the tree cracked the rock... another "oddity".

[Ansible]

Non-Harvestable Cabinet Doors that can be harvested elsewhere. I should think of a nickname for these types of objects... oh, I know.... "challenging". 😁

[Ansible]

Here's something that I think must be a bug, because I don't recall the devs ever stating that they had changed this behavior. In the past, when you were trying to transfer stuff from your inventory into a container, you could start the transfer process with any stack of stuff, even if the whole stack would be too much weight for that container to hold. The game would just tell you that you can't transfer that much.

Instead, now, once you try to start to transfer a stack that's too big to all go into a container, where before you'd get the interface pop up that would ask how much you want to transfer, instead the interface no longer pops up, and you just get the "ert!" noise that plays whenever you try to do something that you can't do.

 

For this example below, I have a stack of tinder. The container has 0.49kg of space left in it where I should be able to put stuff, which means I SHOULD be able to put 9 of those 12 tinder into that container because they each only take up 0.05kg of space. However, I can't. The game just says "ert!" and doesn't let me even try. Has this changed as a formal change somewhere listed in the change log and I just missed it? Or is it a bug? I don't know!

[nautofon]

That last one is a confirmed bug, listed in the 2.26 release notes:

https://hinterlandforums.com/forums/topic/44488-the-long-dark-updated-to-v-226/

[Ansible]

1 minute ago, nautofon said:

That last one is a confirmed bug, listed in the 2.26 release notes:

https://hinterlandforums.com/forums/topic/44488-the-long-dark-updated-to-v-226/

Thanks!

[Ansible]

Replacement fuse - found floating in mid-air. I didn't even harvest anything this time!

[Ansible]

I'm gonna say that these are an oddity too.... challenging grates. If they can't be opened, I think they should have a slightly different look or some kind of other indicator that they are different than the ones that you can open:

[dahemac]

3 hours ago, Ansible said:

Replacement fuse - found floating in mid-air. I didn't even harvest anything this time!

I am sure I have seen that fuse in that spot and reported it long long ago.

Edited January 20 by dahemac
found the screen shot and wanted to include it

[dahemac]

An oldie but a goodie.

I am in the maintenance shed on the pier at Bleak Inlet. I am looking up at the big skylights. It is broad daylight on the other side of the glass. I really wish they would spend a bit of time making the interior lighting make sense.

[Ansible]

Another oddity. I've noticed that some of the new foods implemented with the new cooking system allow you to "overeat". This includes potatoes and carrots.

Other foods in the past, your character would munch away, until the hunger bar got full, and then would stop. It was a great way to conserve food and not waste it. Now, with these new foods, you have to pay attention the bar and Esc/Cancel out of the eating the moment you see it just about to be full, to prevent wasted calories.

Not sure if that's intentional or not, but the old foods still use the old "auto-stop" behavior, so I'm not thinking that it is.

[Ansible]

Floating radio:

[Ansible]

Okay, this one MUST be a bug... right? I'm doing the Archivist challenge, and I'm almost near the end of it... I go to the Desolation Point lighthouse to get that one, and since it isn't an auroroa, I proceed to harvest everything inside the lighthouse, since I've got time to kill. So, I chop down the desk that the laptop is sitting on, and the laptop surprisingly falls on the floor properly this time instead of floating.

HOWEVER, next aurora comes around, and the laptop is lit up, but I CANNOT interact with it in any way... no prompt comes up, no matter how close I get to it, or what angle I approach it from. Is this run doomed because I went all Jack Nicholson on the desk???

 

[Ansible]

Another one... "challenging" pillows:

[dahemac]

22 hours ago, Ansible said:

Okay, this one MUST be a bug... right? I'm doing the Archivist challenge, and I'm almost near the end of it... I go to the Desolation Point lighthouse to get that one, and since it isn't an auroroa, I proceed to harvest everything inside the lighthouse, since I've got time to kill. So, I chop down the desk that the laptop is sitting on, and the laptop surprisingly falls on the floor properly this time instead of floating.

HOWEVER, next aurora comes around, and the laptop is lit up, but I CANNOT interact with it in any way... no prompt comes up, no matter how close I get to it, or what angle I approach it from. Is this run doomed because I went all Jack Nicholson on the desk???

Sometimes, the interact hitbox (?) for things is off. Like when you have to click on the ground near a wolf’s foot to interact with it. Maybe try clicking up where the computer was. It may have fallen without taking its interactive element with it.

[Yimnam]

I've met issues like this very often in other games when my laptop didn't meet requirements for game but I played it anyway. Floating objects trees in weird places and stuff. Like it just doesn't render properly.
Weird because I'd bet that it doesn't meet this game requirements too xD but usually I don't have issues like this. Actually it's one of best working games on my potato.
But maybe it might be the problem?

[Ansible]

A challenging shelf:

 

Also... I can't make this bannock because I only have 0.05L of the required 0.05L of cooking oil? BWUH????

[Ansible]

This one's fun, and MUST be a bug... right? Well I'll consider it a feature then... I found this while trying to complete As The Dead Sleep. There's a spot in Mountain Town where if you start climbing up the side of the mountain, you can keep on climbing... even when the mountain stops. That's right, climb right up into the air and keep on climbing... you can literally walk on air! It's probably more impressive with a video, which I didn't take yet, but here's some screenshots which also show the location.

And yes, the second image **IS** me looking straight DOWN:

Edited February 13 by Ansible

[palbi]

On 2/2/2024 at 8:45 PM, Ansible said:

A challenging shelf:

 

Also... I can't make this bannock because I only have 0.05L of the required 0.05L of cooking oil? BWUH????

The bannock-story: this is a problem of a weird rounding process used, from the very beginning of the game (I mean back the Early Access). You're gonna see the same with oats, lamp fuel, etc. Really should be changed.

[Ansible]

5 minutes ago, palbi said:

The bannock-story: this is a problem of a weird rounding process used, from the very beginning of the game (I mean back the Early Access). You're gonna see the same with oats, lamp fuel, etc. Really should be changed.

I kind of expect that it's the display that's doing the rounding not the game engine, and I actually had, say, .0499 of that item, but the display rounded it up. I don't think it would hurt to just expose the actual amount, instead of showing an incorrect rounded value. Let's say... show up to 4 decimal places rather than 2 like I just did, and it'd make a huge world of difference!

Edited February 13 by Ansible