New player feedback

[mazurek]

Hi,

I bought the game on steam sale, clocked about 30 hours and enjoyed my time.

I apologize if the ideas below were brought up before but I don't have the time to comb through the forums.

A few comments:

• After about 40 days in game and falling into a routine of checking snares, hunting and/or fixing equipment and boiling water I lost interest into going on. And I think for a sandbox that's fine, anyway. I certainly got my money's worth already, and the story mode is not even finished.
  
• Standing on the watch tower at Coastal Highway, the logs resting on the ice near logging camp flicker in and out of existence as you look around, which is breaking the immersion (ultra settings, Radeon 7850, latest drivers).
  
• The only thing I really missed was a way to have some source of light indoors. Sitting in pitch dark fixing my clothes with a sewing kit didn't seem very immersive. Being able to light a storm lantern and place it on the ground would go a long way to make those empty houses feel more habitable, even more so with a blizzard raging outside. The use of lantern oil could be reduced indoors. Alternatively, perhaps you could allow the players to make candles out of animal fat (bears, maybe a new animal like seals?). This would kind of fit thematically too, with the presence of the whale oil processing factory at Desolation Point.
  
• It would be nice to be able to make a man-pulled sledge for moving equipment between maps (it could considerably inhibit mobility or ability to escape but you could put a lot more stuff on it - spare tools etc)
  
• I'd love to see more traps, and perhaps trapping could be a skill so initially you'd only be limited to easy-to-make snares before succeeding at making more involved ones. A public domain US Survival Manual could provide some ideas https://archive.org/details/Fm21-76SurvivalManual Perhaps you could even find a book in-game to learn new traps!
  
• There are some streams of running water (notably at Desolation Point), seems like a missed opportunity to not have salmon in them, and some way to catch it (spear/net) instead of the relatively boring fishing. It could be also a way to draw the attention of bears as a risk/reward mechanism.
  
• Wolves don't really behave like wolves. It'd be reasonable to expect them to hunt in packs and not bark. I know that you acknowledge this in the opening screen, but since the complaints must have been common enough for you to put it there, perhaps some tweaks are still possible.

In the end, my only regret is that once the story mode is finished, I will have already known all the locations.