Deep Forest Wood Gathering: Much Harder?

[SteveP]

The problem is that in early game, you only have a few choices for food. The found food soon runs out. Fishing or Snaring. Can't survive snaring 'cause not enough snares around (one per map?) and you need cured guts to do it and those can be hard to come by. CH has the advantage of a lot of houses with more found food but ML is tough but easier to find the rifle. Fishing would work to just get by with the old tuning. You could stay out for days and fish. Now, there is NO WAY. You cannot get enough wood out there. The imperative to get new food each day drives you out there in all weather eventually. I was taking huge amounts of reclaimed wood to the closest fishing hut by carrying only essentials and leaving the sleeping bag in the hut. It was very subsistence level, with never spare food and sometimes resorting to starving for hours at a time.

I don't know how they do the tuning; does it require a hot fix? I'm hoping there is one soon. GAH, getting frustrated.

[KD7BCH]

New forage system is great, however next level would be getting snow from outside, we really have a disconnect on snow, because if you go outside with the current do not freeze mechanic with hypothermia to get snow you restart the clock, except we don't go outside to get snow because it comes from heaven.

[LucidFugue]

I was taking huge amounts of reclaimed wood to the closest fishing hut by carrying only essentials and leaving the sleeping bag in the hut. It was very subsistence level, with never spare food and sometimes resorting to starving for hours at a time.

How long are you trying to keep a fire going?

My first stage of gameplay is to gather high grade clothing. To that end I tend to either clear out the houses around ML, go to the Coastal Village, or head for the PV Homestead. Any houses are fair game, and I'll stop at each one, raiding the bedroom drawers and cupboards. I stop raiding the kitchens regularly once I have about a day and a bit's worth of calories, and I grab sodas wherever I find them instead of stopping to boil water. That way I'm minimising the amount of food and items I'm causing to start spoiling, and grabbing stuff that doesn't degrade. Upgrade your clothes until you have peacoat or premium coat, wool socks/underwear, a toque, scarf, and mittens. Insulated boots are good too, but Work boots are fine.

Everything else becomes cloth/leather. Let's face it, you're not going to use them for anything else. And soda is much less useful once you can boil your own water easily. I restockpile houses with water later as it never degrades. Same with cloth.

That way, you can actually travel and sit around in a fishing hut without freezing. I'll prepare a hut by loading it with collected firewood before settling in, and I have loads of cloth to fix up my clothes if they start getting ruined.

I wouldn't recommend going straight to fishing without getting clothes to survive out there. I always found trying to keep a permafire was way too costly in calories even when you could collect the wood easily.

[SteveP]

How long are you trying to keep a fire going?

Nearly all the time with the weather I was getting. I didn't have insulated boots but I had premium winter coat so in total 12C degrees of clothing warmth. It's just not enough to get by without fire. I was getting -30 or colder consistently. Warm days often had fog.

My first stage of gameplay is to gather high grade clothing. ...

I wouldn't recommend going straight to fishing without getting clothes to survive out there. I always found trying to keep a permafire was way too costly in calories even when you could collect the wood easily.

Oh I have or had the clothing. The problem is the weather shreds everything and with such low supplies, I couldn't get by. I probably should have got lots of flairs and stuff and just bulled my way into the townsite. Locating a rifle seems hard and travel is more difficult now.

My priority was to get through enough days to cure the maple and birch saplings to craft a weapon. Finally got a bow and three arrows and was moving on the hunt when multiple wolf attacks finished me when I ran out of antiseptic. I should have been more aggressive with torches since there is now a nearly endless supply you can grab out of fires and extinguish for later use. Fire is a great weapon against wolves but not if its too windy to light a torch or a fire. Can't barely harvest carcasses due to wolves and if its too windy, no can safely harvest pelts or meat.

[DrMembrane]

A few things:

1. I'm very happy I managed to spark such a lively discussion!

2.The idea that it should take 30 second cause it would in real life doesn't make sense for game balance. However, the current model is not balanced game-economy wise. I very much agree with the people who say that branches should be tweaked I'd say raising the output to 4 or the time to 5 minutes would make it much more reasonably, I think the basic agreement seems to be the ratio of sticks to minutes should be 2.5:1 not 5:1, which I think is quite reasonable.

3.However I am vehemently against lowering the number of sticks lying on the ground because the current wood harvesting system is hard enough already, and secondly it makes the game feel like an actual forest, rather than an empty cartoon rendering of a forest to actually have sticks on the ground.

[madrepityu]

...secondly it makes the game feel like an actual forest, rather than an empty cartoon rendering of a forest to actually have sticks on the ground.

Totally agree!