Additional Sandbox Toggles and Mass-Harvest Ammunition

[Veskaida]

A few ideas for quality-of-life features:

• Option to eat multiple Cattails at once
• harvest multiple Rifle/Revolver Ammunition at once. It's very tedious needing to individually press "Harvest" when e.g. trying to convert my revolver ammo into gunpower/bullets to turn into Rifle ammo
• An option to "harvest all Ruined Torches" would be really nice, I enjoy picking up all my torches when they're ruined, but similarly tedious harvesting them one at a time; a "harvest all ruined torches" button when selecting a Ruined Torch would be a nice quality of life feature

I'd love to see these as optional toggles for the Custom Sandbox for:

• 5 stages of Misery as a toggle-able option
• Permanent Affliction toggle: enabling a specific affliction from gamestart (e.g. "Haunted Mind", "Broken Ribs"). Seems like it could allow a lot of freedom customizing unusual characters, like one with perma-broken ribs, or perma-scurvy.
• Permanent Weather toggles: e.g. Endless Blizzard, Endless Aurora.
• Darkwalker: I'd love for the option to have the Darkwalker chase you in a sandbox world that isn't so finite (because of Toxic Fog). See how long you could survive with it constantly chasing!

Edited June 28, 2024 by Veskaida

[Mroz4k]

Might be an unpopular opinion - but I think that some things are meant to be laboureous, as it immitates actual effort. Eating cattails one by one should be annoying, it is very weak food, only filling in huge quantities, so it would probably take a while to eat enough to be full. But, as far as bullets go, since that is how crafting works, i would agree that dismantling them en masse would work, as long as you could specify how many (kinda like crafting prepared birch bark and specifying how many you want to craft, with longer circle that crafts one every 5 mins).

Love the idea with toggleable afflictions, to be honest - would make for interesting custom games.

Edited June 30, 2024 by Mroz4k

[oplli]

18 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

Might be an unpopular opinion - but I think that some things are meant to be laboureous, as it immitates actual effort. Eating cattails one by one should be annoying, it is very weak food, only filling in huge quantities, so it would probably take a while to eat enough to be full. But, as far as bullets go, since that is how crafting works, i would agree that dismantling them en masse would work, as long as you could specify how many (kinda like crafting prepared birch bark and specifying how many you want to craft, with longer circle that crafts one every 5 mins).

Love the idea with toggleable afflictions, to be honest - would make for interesting custom games.

Totally Agree

[Veskaida]

@Mroz4k @oplli I'm wondering 'why' you think this about Rifle/Revolver Ammunition Harvesting not having an accessibility feature?

This "Select how many" system is already in place (even for Rifle/Revolver Ammunition) when moving containers, just not for Harvesting; do you think The Long Dark would have better gameplay if the player was required to place items inside a Container one unit at a time, (e.g. 500 Rose Hips) instead of:

1. LMB on container to open it
2. Double-Click LMB on Rose Hips in inventory
3. "Select how many Rose Hips to transfer"
4. Transfer (with Toggle), Transfer All, Cancel

TLD simulates time with it's "Time Acceleration" mechanic, so e.g. if harvesting 500 Revolver Rounds takes 2 in-game minutes per round to disassemble, it still could take 1,000 minutes to disassemble manually or with a UI element. The only difference is ~499 less button presses and wasted real-world time, with no difference from the gamestate or resources spent.

What about Time Acceleration? The Long Dark runs at an accelerated timescale (about 15:1, so 1 TLD minute is about 4 real-world seconds). Do you think The Long Dark would have better gameplay if it's timescale ran 1:1? Currently Time Acceleration is a mandatory TLD mechanic (no option to disable), would you enjoy The Long Dark more if when crafting a Wolfskin Coat, that you had to wait 25 in-game hours (~100 real-world minutes) before you could resume gameplay?

Edited July 1, 2024 by Veskaida

[Mroz4k]

No problem, I am happy to clarify! I will be quoting your post in splits, so since it would be quite long, I will put it under a spoiler.

Spoiler

28 minutes ago, Veskaida said:

I'm wondering 'why' you think this about Rifle/Revolver Ammunition Harvesting not having an accessibility feature?

In my opinion, some things should not have quality of life on purpose to demonstrate effort, not all of them. I agree that for ammo manipulation, this accessibility makes sense. But, for example, for eating cattails, it does not. 

31 minutes ago, Veskaida said:

This "Select how many" system is already in place (even for Rifle/Revolver Ammunition) when moving containers, just not for Harvesting;

This kinda confused me. These are two different things. You used an example that works within Inventory management, which is completely different to crafting/harvesting management. In inventory, all items are separated by name (type) and its % condition. This is kinda where it would be a problem for "auto-salvaging all ammunition" if some of the ammunition had different condition. You would, at the very least, always have to specify which ammo should be harvested.

But there is already better example of this already in crafting section, too. When one choses to craft "prepared birch bark", you also select "how many" and then the time is accelerated with every 5 mins, a single item is added. This similar mechanic could be applied to ammo harvesting too, and it would, in my opinion, work perfectly.

37 minutes ago, Veskaida said:

TLD simulates time with it's "Time Acceleration" mechanic, so e.g. if harvesting 500 Revolver Rounds takes 2 in-game minutes per round to disassemble, it still could take 1,000 minutes to disassemble manually or with a UI element.

Which is what I proposed, exactly. We are both in complete agreement here.

40 minutes ago, Veskaida said:

What about Time Acceleration? The Long Dark also runs at an accelerated rate from the real-world (about 15:1, so 1 minute for The Long Dark is about 4 real-world seconds). Do you think The Long Dark would have better gameplay, if it's timescale ran 1:1?

Noone advocated for that. Time acceleration is integral, without it, between 40 to 70% (depending on individual playstyle) of the gameplay would be just "downtime". Though, if it did not exist, TLD would be co-op capable from gameplay sense. (though most likely not from game code sense, I know nothing about programming, but I guess TLD is purely single-player game to core). But I doubt anyone would enjoy TLD without the time acceleration mechanics.

To sum up what I said in first post:
I dont like the idea of being able to eat multiple cattails. It should be done individually. Its a truly weak foodsource, you would need to eat many to be fullfilled. If one could eat many at once, it would no longer be weak foodsource, but a superfood, instead. 
I agree that ammo should be harvestable using the "how many" method, for convinience.
 

 

[Veskaida]

1 hour ago, Mroz4k said:

In my opinion, some things should not have quality of life on purpose to demonstrate effort, not all of them. I agree that for ammo manipulation, this accessibility makes sense. But, for example, for eating cattails, it does not.

I think that's reasonable. IMO cattails are usable as-is even en-masse, but ammunition crafting is a chore (especially on lower difficulties). I was only including "eating multiple cattails" for completeness, since I thought it was a similar suggestion, and have heard similar sentiments from other players/streamers.

1 hour ago, Mroz4k said:

 In inventory, all items are separated by name (type) and its % condition. This is kinda where it would be a problem for "auto-salvaging all ammunition" if some of the ammunition had different condition. You would, at the very least, always have to specify which ammo should be harvested.

Yes, that's a good point: that ammunition crafted at differing Gunsmithing Skill levels has different Condition. Alough I don't think this is a problem: since like-items stack with those of the same %condition (if they can stack, like ammunition can), so this UI could simply be per-stack based. e.g. Harvest the Gunsmithing 3 - 60% Condition Revolver Ammo that's in the same stack in your inventory, but not the 100% Revolver Ammo that is a separate stack in the player's inventory.

1 hour ago, Mroz4k said:

But there is already better example of this already in crafting section, too. When one choses to craft "prepared birch bark", you also select "how many" and then the time is accelerated with every 5 mins, a single item is added. This similar mechanic could be applied to ammo harvesting too, and it would, in my opinion, work perfectly.

You're right, the Crafting/Forging UI is a closer example to what I was suggesting with Ammunition Harvesting, and that functionality would be would be an improvement over vanilla, which currently is manual: so it requires manual user input and waiting for the "Harvesting..." animation for every instance.

The reason I didn't reference 'that' UI is because that that implementation of a dial menu would still require the same number of key presses (e.g. 1 LMB to increment the dial left/right, e.g. crafting Simple Arrows), but other dial menus in-game (like Storage) have additional functionality like the Mouse Scrollwheel (or "Transfer All") which also saves keypresses but leaves gameplay identical.

Edited July 1, 2024 by Veskaida
Quoting Spoilers only resulted in "Spoilers", not quotes. Edited to include your quotes correctly, lol

[Mroz4k]

9 hours ago, Veskaida said:

that ammunition crafted at differing Gunsmithing Skill levels has different Condition.

Yep. Should not be too hard, as harvesting itself requires to select specific condition item to chose for salvaging, could easily chose which condition ammo to salvage.

9 hours ago, Veskaida said:

The reason I didn't reference 'that' UI is because that that implementation of a dial menu would still require the same number of key presses

I see. Never played with controller ao I didnt know that. Interesting. I can see how annoying that would be to do repeatedly.