Rowboat

[Pyroxene]

I don't know what Raph has in mind for expanding the game world.. but I think rowing to other places using a boat would be fun.

[Pyroxene]

What's your opinion, @Raphael van Lierop?

[Mroz4k]

Hello! 
I think it is a bit hard to suggest an opinion on a rowboat/rowing without a bit more concrete concept in mind. 
What would be its place within the game? To get to different places - do you suggest something like "row to a different island" for like an expansion? 

Im an amateur to rowing, done it maybe three or four times in my life, on a lake and on a river. Given the extreme weather in TLD, rowing a boat onto the sea seems like a very risky thing to me. Would one not get swept onto an open sea by wind of strong water currents? Any still waters on the island, such as lakes, would be frozen over to begin with so I cant see the rowboat being very useful there.

What could work is if it was a boat, meant for crossing a running water such as river, and it was fitted to a strong rope that connected the two opposite sides of the running river. If it was a boat, fixed to a wire, that could work, I think. Seems a bit excessive for TLD in my opinion though. A bridge, or even a fallen log over the river, would work just as well without a need to program something new. Just a couple of my opinions.  

[UTC-10]

The mechanism to get the character to another place to adventure would likely be using say a beached (ice-bound) boat as the transition point to the other place and a similar ice-bound boat for the return transition.  Not much reason to provide the visuals and such for a character rowing the boat. 

The destinations (away from GBI) could include:

1) A small island with not much more than a small isolated cabin, possible fishing around the island, and not much else.  Intended for a getaway spot for fishing in happier and warmer times.  Beachcombing would supply wood, coal, and other items.  Bad weather would or could be harsher out on the island and more frequent.   Alternately, it might have even less shelter (ersatz) lean-to or remnants of a cabin (like Forester's Hermitage).   Definitely a rim grill for a picnic/barbeque area (like outside the PV farmstead or at Thomson's Crossing).  

2) A small island with an anchorage that can be where the Trader has his camp/boat.  A small cabin. A small storage area.  His boat would allow for extension to yet another place - small or large island or even the mainland - but that would be a future DLC.  Steal anything from the Trader Joe's Place and you get barred "for life" from going to the "trading post" which would provide possibilities (quests) for getting back in Joe's good graces though he has a Three Strikes Rule.  

3) A barren island.  A lonely rocky spur with nothing much going for it except bad weather, no water, no food, and only what beachcombing turns up. 

A similar mechanism might have been done for mountainous locales like Ash Canyon, Blackrock Mountain, and Hushed River Valley.  Some options could be presented to expand, slightly, those areas.  

[K3V038]

Getting lost at sea and then a blizzard starts... I see a boat having a great use in fishing coatal areas, more fish in the deeper waters, but with risk of no shelter, and travel to distant small islands could be possible, we have seen this in wintermute

[UTC-10]

On 8/18/2024 at 9:03 AM, UTC-10 said:

The destinations (away from GBI) could include:

1) A small island with not much more than a small isolated cabin, possible fishing around the island, and not much else.  Intended for a getaway spot for fishing in happier and warmer times.  Beachcombing would supply wood, coal, and other items.  Bad weather would or could be harsher out on the island and more frequent.   Alternately, it might have even less shelter (ersatz) lean-to or remnants of a cabin (like Forester's Hermitage).   Definitely a rim grill for a picnic/barbeque area (like outside the PV farmstead or at Thomson's Crossing).  

...

3) A barren island.  A lonely rocky spur with nothing much going for it except bad weather, no water, no food, and only what beachcombing turns up. 

Either would do but maybe more applicable to #3.

Solidly aground on or more likely near the island, is a cabin cruiser with a hole in its side (ala Gilligan's Island) that has a cabin area (no transition) that provides wind protection, maybe has a small stove (yeah, a wood fire on a boat, no chance of mishap, right?) and maybe even a (+2 C) bed and maybe a few cabinets or maybe not. 

It was a recreational cabin cruiser and has a fishing pole still mounted on the stern and open water around the stern (a place to fish from without having to chop a hole?) but still need fishing tackle at a minimum. The fishing pole might be able to function like an infinite tipup (one fish at a time, of course). 

The open water, a new landscape feature, would mean the cabin cruiser is surrounded by a zone of weak ice but the boat itself is solid.  It is a permanent fixture after all.  The weak ice does prevent the travois from being used to draft supplies to the boat, but the distance from shore to the boat is not far so should be an inconvenience rather than a problem.  

The cabin has minimal warmth (+2 C) which makes it still "outside" so a place to shelter when combating cabin fever, if applicable.  Of course any kind of wood-burning stove appliance makes survival there easier in bad weather.  Whether the cabin has the capacity to cure things, thaw and dry clothing would be dependent on whether the devs deemed it desirable to have it have those properties.  

The island (i.e. #3) itself  had no particular resourcs other than what might turn up with beachcombing so traveling back to the GBI terminus regularly for wood and other things would likely be necessary.  

A new hazard might be storm waves sometimes accompanying a blizzard (this requires some thought).  The boat would survive but any contents not put into a container or cabinet  has a chance of being swept out of the boat and lost.  If the character weathered the storm waves on the boat, s/he would have a chance of getting soaked (to some extent) as if s/he broke through the ice into deep water but no automatic hypothermia.  Getting off the boat onto the desolate #3 island would prevent the character and any loose gear from getting wet or swept away.  Of course the high waves might be a part of blizzard conditions which might require more efforts to survive.  

[Lexilogo]

The issue I have with small island survival in TLD is that it seems like it'd just be boring? You're on an isolated tiny island with nothing to draw on the map, nothing to hunt or be hunted by, nothing to loot past the first five minutes, just nothing to do in general, except sleep, stargaze, and check the beach.

 

I could see a rowboat being used as a way to transition to a new area, Perseverance Mills is a clear candidate for that, but it'd have to be an area where fun survival gameplay can happen, like what goes on in the rest of Great Bear.

To try and resolve my problem, I can think of three ideas for how island gameplay could work:

 

First, an archipelago of different small islands connected by weak ice to make a full, somewhat conventional zone, a bit like Forlorn Muskeg. It might still be hard to justify animal life on this island, and without wildlife it'd still be a bit dull, but it could perhaps be balanced out by it being a great Beachcombing zone, but it's barren of resources to start with, you can't use the rowboat while encumbered or in the dark, and the rowboat consumes time + calories, so it's basically like a special Beachcomber's zone you will have to reinforce with supplies from other regions to last more than a couple of weeks there.

 

Second, taking the "special beachcomber's zone" idea to a heavy extreme, it's a single island with the same aforementioned gimmick. To amp up the tension as gameplay compensation for this not being a proper zone, you could have no interiors and the water could be made a threat, eg. during high tide if the wind has picked up, splashing water will start dousing your campfires and soaking you, but each high tide generates new beachcombing resources and washes the old ones away. If enough work was put into designing this it could become a kind of interesting minigame, the longer you can hold out against the cold, the more beachcombing stuff you can stockpile. Or, it could become a solved formula and just get boring for people.

 

Finally, maybe make it like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it allows you to dock on randomly generated islands, check around for resources, and once you leave you'll never be able to find it again, each trip is like paying resources for a random cache of loot, mostly stuff you could find via Beachcombing. Maybe in this scenario, the boat would be gas powered instead. I can envision this idea very clearly, but it doesn't fit with TLD's philosophy of truly infinite survival being out of reach, beachcombing is supposed to be an asterisk on unrenewable resources, not a serious way to make those resources renewable. It's also very videogamey as a feature, so wouldn't really fit into the game.

[dahemac]

I would have sworn that when I played Crossroads Elegy that there was a cut-scene at the end with a rowboat.