1000 Days in the Dam: An exercise in inventory control

[Jolan]

1 hour ago, Drifter Man said:

I will put some of the fast-degrading items into an outdoor container to see the difference. There could also be differences Voyageur vs Stalker.

This happened to me, too: I found a 100% condition piece of cooked rabbit meat in an indoor container.

I'll be happy to do it, just please tell me what those "colemans" are. The dictionary didn't help  My pelts don't degrade at all, though, not after they become cured.

 

1 hour ago, hauteecolerider said:

@Drifter Man Those "colemans" @Jolan referred to are also known as coolers; i.e. insulated containers.

In some parts of the US they are the be all and end all of all coolers. It's one of the best known brands of coolers around. 

Whoops, sorry.  I started calling the frozen corpses coleman's because as Hauteecoleride said, they're one of the best brands of coolers around.  A little bit of ice and you're good to go.  My pelts have been degrading slowly over time its very distressing.  That being said, a rough tracking of the decay on food in a container indoors and outside in a frozen corpse shows a bit of varience.  Deer meat in a coleman was still at 90% while meat from the same deer inside in a container was at 88% when I looked at it.  Um, I ate all that meat so I would have to start again to get real numbers

[Jolan]

16 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

Day 627 (578th day in the Dam), second entry

Rabbits of the Ravine have turned their backs on me. Over the last 10 days the number of rabbits caught per day dropped from 8-9 to 6-7 and I wasn't even able to catch those 53 rabbits I need in 10 days - only 52. I assume I've depleted some "excess rabbits" the rabbit zones had in storage and now I'm only getting those rabbits that probably respawn at a fixed rate. I can manage for now, but the consequence is that I cannot survive without deer, i.e. without arrows, again.

I've also noticed some inconsistencies in cooking times. Rabbit meat sometimes takes slightly less than 20 minutes to cook, and 1 l of snow takes slightly less than 30 minutes to melt and boil into potable water. I say sometimes - I don't know what the cause is.

I have caught very few rabbits since the last hot fix.  And having said that - all of a sudden rabbits galore.  Perhaps they really were on a strike.

 

 

[Jolan]

2 hours ago, Tbone555 said:

all of these graphs and charts are like a foreign language to me, however i will put my two scents in on climbing and meat decay. thanks to a very helpful tip from cekivi, meat left indoors have a very rapid decay rate. 20 percent per day, i believe he said. however, meat left outside (dropped on the ground or inside of an outdoors container) decays at only 1 percent per day. and i can confirm this as true from experience.

and as for the rope climbing. i just dont get it. i really dont. i try to reduce my inventory as much as possible to avoid tiring, though my inventory weight is still usually at 17 or 18 kilos just to carry my immediate survival supplies. i'm not going up timberwolf unprepared, thats for sure. i find about 2 tins of coffee are perfect to carry up timberwolf with you, at least the path i take. i dont know if my path by itself is a shortcut, or if theres a shorter path somewhere or what, but i can usually get up timberwolf after a full day's climbing with the right amount of coffee and 2-hour naps. i find that climbing half way up the rope, resting for a few minutes, then continuing your climb will reduce your stamina faster, but wont be quite as hard on your sleep meter. this could be my imagination though, as im usually laced on coffee when i make these climbs. i havent done professional testing.

is it just me, or is our character way out of shape? maybe he just skipped high-school gym class, who knows? i think even i could get up a couple of those ropes without being near dead of exhaustion.

maybe its to simulate altitude?  I know from experience that things I can do easily at sealevel are much more exhausting at altitude.  

[Tbone555]

1 hour ago, Jolan said:

maybe its to simulate altitude?  I know from experience that things I can do easily at sealevel are much more exhausting at altitude.  

didnt think of the altitude difference. that could very well be it. i have no experience there, myself.

i'm just gonna keep on hoping that im never put in the situation to have to climb a mountain to get to a crashed plane in the middle of a world-wide geomagnetic disaster in real life... but, knowing my luck.. xD

[Ruruwawa]

11 hours ago, Scyzara said:

That's not the solution either. @Drifter Man's condensed milk e.g. deteriorated 31%/40 days = 0,78% per day in an indoor container. My condensed milk deteriorated 0,25% per day in an outdoor container. So for condensed milk, outdoor storage seems to be beneficial as well. The same is true for tomato soup (0,15% per day indoor vs. 0,06% per day outdoor) and MREs (0,05% indoor vs. 0,03% outdoor). If this is following a system, I fail to understand it.

You're right.   Now that I see the details I failed to understand it too! 

11 hours ago, Scyzara said:

Plus, I wonder how it's possible that I'm finding 99% and 100% condition food items (1 soda and 1 can of peaches so far) on day 150 while looting Coastal Highway if everything should have started to deteriorate on day 1. 

I've see this too but I don't remember if it was in a game I started before v321.  Definitely something amiss here.

[Drifter Man]

13 hours ago, Jolan said:

 I started calling the frozen corpses coleman's because as Hauteecoleride said, they're one of the best brands of coolers around.

Thanks - I'll remember from now on that coleman is an expression commonly used in the US for a frozen corpse you can use for storage  Anyway, I put three pieces of raw meat at 90% condition next to each other at the fallen tree over the Ravine: one on the ground, another in a backpack, and the third one in a "coleman".

[Drifter Man]

Day 632

I assume this is my last looting trip to Coastal Highway. I want to take all the remaining resources from here. In particular I want to find some decent clothes to replace my coat, pants and boots in the more distant future.

Things didn’t go very smoothly at the start. Two days before I set out, I was headed to the Ravine to get one more deer in order to have enough meat for the trip. At the railway embankment I was attacked by a wolf without warning. The fight – my first since v.321 – was short and I instinctively ran to the Dam afterwards until I checked my status and realized that my adversary was probably much worse off than me. At 94% condition, with a sprained wrist and all crafted clothes damaged by 11% (I repaired them all just the day before!) I pursued and found the wolf dead on the river near the train bridge. I took its meat and pelt; now we are even. I put three pieces of raw wolf meat in to two outdoor containers (a backpack and a corpse) and in the open for testing.

On Day 630 I finally left the Dam. I was greeted by a crisp and chilly morning. By the time I reached the cabin between the Bear Creek Campground and the Fishing Camp, I was losing condition despite my 20-degree clothing bonus: I’m not used to this anymore. I slept for one hour to get warm and recover.

A bear was at the Fishing Camp, so I gave it a wide berth and headed straight towards the Jackrabbit Island, accidentally spooking an unseen wolf on the way. I like the icy plains at the Highway – I can’t help posting another picture of them. I arrived at the Townsite and took a careful look: wolves were nowhere to be seen. I was lucky.

I searched a number of cars I had to leave out the first time around because of all those wolves. I found some valuable items, including an energy bar at 35% condition - maybe the cold environment of the car trunk really reduces decay rate? Then I began looting the houses. This time I strip the houses clean – this includes breaking benches and chairs apart to get cloth, and toasters and metal pans to get scrap metal. My luck did not extend to clothes, though. Jeans and leather boots are the best I’ve found so far.

As for the condition of items found in the houses:

• Generally any food lying in the open was at 0%
•  Items found in containers had a wide range of condition, including some items at nearly 100%, although it has been almost 100 days since v.321 and over 600 days since the start of the sandbox. Decay was certainly not applied retroactively (i.e. not from the start of the sandbox 632 days ago) and in some cases, not at all.
•  Durable items found in the open have suffered almost complete condition loss, showing that decay was applied retroactively to them. Exception: some clothing was found in decent condition.
•  Raw and cooked meat could be found in ovens and freezers, excluding the possibility that it was affected by the rates of decay common after v.332

 All this chaos can be the result of applying the update to an originally v.302 sandbox game.

 

[ElvisHunter]

On 5/15/2016 at 1:58 AM, Drifter Man said:

Thanks - it looks that fatigue is the main variable that determines how fast stamina (if that's how the bar in the top right corner is called) decreases while climbing, with time and with the distance climbed.

Initial fatigue can be bumped up with coffee, allowing to succeed in climbs that would otherwise be impossible at a lower starting fatigue bar level. As for the fatigue bonus itself, based on the comparison of the two attempts - including the observation of stamina, which I didn't record fully - I don't think that it plays an important role, if any.

So i started at the bottom of the ravine with my stam and rest bar 100% full about 27kg of gear. Then i climb until i fall, or reach the top, no mid rope stops. 0 cups of coffee resulted in a fall about 5 feet past the ledge. 1 and 2 cups of coffee got me within 5 feet of the top before falling off the rope. 4 cups of coffee allowed me to climb all the way to the top without stopping or falling. I tried each run a couple times. I think coffee stacks and the resulting lower stamina drain while climbing allowed me to make it to the top. The coffee was the only variable and as such must be assisting in climbs. I believe the fatigue reduction aspect of the coffee is stacking. 

[Ruruwawa]

3 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

 Durable items found in the open have suffered almost complete condition loss, showing that decay was applied retroactively to them. Exception: some clothing was found in decent condition.

Which durable items?  just clothes, or tools and weapons also?

[Jolan]

4 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

Thanks - I'll remember from now on that coleman is an expression commonly used in the US for a frozen corpse you can use for storage  Anyway, I put three pieces of raw meat at 90% condition next to each other at the fallen tree over the Ravine: one on the ground, another in a backpack, and the third one in a "coleman".

I might not be entirely representative of the population - but cool!

[Jolan]

Hey Drifter Man, just wanted to let you know that not only is this all very interesting, I recently said to a friend who plays "I don't know if that's the case, lets see if Drifter Man 

corroborates your finding." And we both fired up the forum.  Of course that caused the other person in the room to look at us like we'd lost our minds... but hey a small price to pay for SCIENCE!

[Drifter Man]

2 hours ago, ElvisHunter said:

So i started at the bottom of the ravine with my stam and rest bar 100% full about 27kg of gear. Then i climb until i fall, or reach the top, no mid rope stops. 0 cups of coffee resulted in a fall about 5 feet past the ledge. 1 and 2 cups of coffee got me within 5 feet of the top before falling off the rope. 4 cups of coffee allowed me to climb all the way to the top without stopping or falling. I tried each run a couple times. I think coffee stacks and the resulting lower stamina drain while climbing allowed me to make it to the top. The coffee was the only variable and as such must be assisting in climbs. I believe the fatigue reduction aspect of the coffee is stacking. 

Thanks - that's the ultimate way to test it, but I didn't want to fall and die  How did you do it without starting several characters - can you quit and reload while falling? I think that the one coffee I had just wasn't enough to make a visible difference.

[Drifter Man]

2 hours ago, Ruruwawa said:

Which durable items?  just clothes, or tools and weapons also?

Sorry - by durable I meant "they last for long, but not forever" items. Examples: I found bedroll at 0%, antibiotics at 30+%, painkillers at 0%, wool socks at 7%, jeans at 70+ %, wool sweater at 40+ %.

[Drifter Man]

2 hours ago, Jolan said:

Hey Drifter Man, just wanted to let you know that not only is this all very interesting, I recently said to a friend who plays "I don't know if that's the case, lets see if Drifter Man 

corroborates your finding." And we both fired up the forum.  Of course that caused the other person in the room to look at us like we'd lost our minds... but hey a small price to pay for SCIENCE!

 

Hopefully we won't all end up in a mental facility to discuss the degradation rate of painkillers for the rest of our lives  That would be a big price to pay for science

It is fun to speculate about how the game is designed and intended to work, and then adjust the play accordingly. Know the rules first. It's probably not what Hinterland had in mind, though. I guess they want the game to be played intuitively. They could add some noise and additional probabilistic variables to make it opaque and impervious to efforts of this kind. But then survival would depend on chance rather than on foresight and strategy, which wouldn't be good, either.

[ElvisHunter]

1 hour ago, Drifter Man said:

Thanks - that's the ultimate way to test it, but I didn't want to fall and die  How did you do it without starting several characters - can you quit and reload while falling? I think that the one coffee I had just wasn't enough to make a visible difference.

Yeah pressing escape while in freefall allowed me to quit and retry with different amounts of coffee about 6 or 7 times before I finally failed to press it quickly enough. RIP for science!  

[hauteecolerider]

1 hour ago, Drifter Man said:

But then survival would depend on chance rather than on foresight and strategy, which wouldn't be good, either.

IRL all too often survival does depend on chance. All foresight and strategy do is improve the odds in our favor, but they do not guarantee anything. But hey, this is a game, and it's fun the way it is!

[Drifter Man]

4 hours ago, ElvisHunter said:

Yeah pressing escape while in freefall allowed me to quit and retry with different amounts of coffee about 6 or 7 times before I finally failed to press it quickly enough. RIP for science!  

Wow... if my doubts about your statement regarding the caffeine bonus caused you to lose your game, then I don't feel too good about it. I too nearly died during the coffee test, barely made it to the ledge.

[Drifter Man]

4 hours ago, hauteecolerider said:

IRL all too often survival does depend on chance. All foresight and strategy do is improve the odds in our favor, but they do not guarantee anything. But hey, this is a game, and it's fun the way it is!

That's right - I think the game wouldn't be very popular if people survived more based on luck rather than skills.

[ElvisHunter]

9 minutes ago, Drifter Man said:

Wow... if my doubts about your statement regarding the caffeine bonus caused you to lose your game, then I don't feel too good about it. I too nearly died during the coffee test, barely made it to the ledge.

It's not about you or me man. I did it for the science Your doubts (and your most excellent thread) have driven me to produce some useful data so please don't have negative feelings. Logic dictates: The good of the many outweighs the good of the few. 

[Drifter Man]

21 hours ago, ElvisHunter said:

The good of the many outweighs the good of the few. 

At least I hope it didn't hurt much

[Drifter Man]

Day 638 (583rd day in the Dam)

Days full of trouble.

Having spent over two days indoors looting and breaking apart furniture, I became wary of the cabin fever threat and decided to devote one day to moving the loot closer to the Dam, to the cabin between Bear Creek and Fishing Camp. Unfortunately, a blizzard broke out as I neared the Fishing Camp, and the air temperature drop was very severe – about 13°C. I didn’t want to go indoors (cabin fever), so I stayed in a fishing hut for nearly two hours until my torch died. Then my temperature bar quickly dropped to freezing and I was running a risk of hypothermia – the last thing I needed. I had no choice to run to the fishing cabins and seek shelter there. I recovered in the warm bed but the blizzard lasted until the evening. Then I finally moved to the cabin above the Fishing Camp, dropped about 15 kg of cloth, scrap metal, clothing and tools on the ground, and spent the night there.

That morning (Day 633) the weather was bad again, another blizzard could start any moment, and over three mostly indoor days had passed. At this point I concurred with @Vhalkyrie that cabin fever forces decisions unto players that should not be normally affected by it. I waited for another hour, but when I tried to move on, the bear was blocking access to the Fishing Camp and I returned. Half desperate, I picked everything and braved the elements all the way to the Dam. By the evening I was back at the Fishing Camp again with four more venison steaks brought from the Dam, while a good part of the loot rested safely in the lockers and drawers at the homestead. Luckily the blizzard did not break out.

I spent the next day looting two houses at the Townsite. This time wolves were all around and weather precluded staying outdoors as well. I ran out of my remaining food and aborted before I was done. I will have to return to the Townsite again. All in all, the trip was a failure, because I didn’t find any of the clothing items I was looking for.

Weather wasn’t good on the return trip, which was especially troubling since I was getting low on food and wanted to save all those packs of the indestructible salty crackers for a real crisis. Thick fog hit me on the ice, which is always very dangerous, because you can’t see a thing and don’t know where you are going – not to mention that you can get surprised by a wolf pack. I used the sun (the brightest spot on the sky) to determine direction until I came upon the Log Sort. There I harvested meat from a ravaged carcass (39% - no decay, apparently) while the fog lifted. I reached the Fishing Camp by nightfall, cooked the venison in a fishing hut, ate it and fell asleep in one of the cabins.

I returned to the Dam on the next day. Weather continued to slow me down (it always feels like the Highway doesn’t want to let me go), but at least the wolves left me alone. I picked those test steaks of wolf meat (all at 69% - it does not matter if they are in a corpse, backpack or in the open), cooked everything and ate it, because there was little else to eat. I really underestimated the need to keep my base supplied for my return.

• Food decay           indoor    outdoor
• %/day                container container
• -------------------------------------------------------
• beef jerky           0.075
• candy bar            0.175
• cattail stalks       0.000
• condensed milk       0.775     0.222
• energy bar           0.675     0.333
• granola bar          0.250
• herbal tea           0.050
• military-grade MRE   0.050
• soda                 0.125     0.667
• pinnacle peaches     0.250
• pork & beans         0.075
• salty crackers       0.000
• tin of coffee        0.075
• tin of sardines      0.061
• tomato soup          0.150
• -------------------------------------------------------

 

• Meat decay (%/day)   outdoor, open   outdoor, container
• -------------------------------------------------------
• venison, cooked      0.8             0.8
• rabbit, cooked       1.0             1.0
• wolf, cooked         0.8
• wolf, raw            2.4             2.4
• venison, raw         1.6
• rabbit, raw          2.6             2.7
• -------------------------------------------------------

Note: the numbers are based on relatively short tests and not very accurate. @Scyzara, you should find an indoor container for your soda!

After a good night’s sleep I set out for the Ravine to get nine kilos of venison. Alas – no deer in the Ravine. I placed my snares and out of desperation I killed one rabbit with an arrow. 500 calories for a shot that could give me 7000.

With 6 hours of daylight left, but no meat, I took my rifle and decided to get a deer somewhere else. No deer at the Logging Camp. No deer at the hunting blind at the river. No nothing nowhere to eat. The fog fell. Hungry, I returned to the Dam and cooked my rabbit. Unusually, I ate it warm. There still are four kilos of cattail stalks so I’m not starving. And the food test locker, I’ll eat my experiment if need be.

As if it weren't enough, the wolf avenged it's death as it infected me with parasites. Great. I thought we were even when I got its pelt for my torn clothes...

[Scyzara]

2 minutes ago, Drifter Man said:

@Scyzara, you should find an indoor container for your soda!

Not necessary any more - I bet it has all rotten away inside the mountaineer's hut by now anyway. xD

Not sure if there even is an indoor container in TWM... well, probably one of the corpses inside the loading screen mines would work. 

Anway, thank you very much for your data. Good to see it's not only my soda that's going nuts.

[Ruruwawa]

16 hours ago, Scyzara said:

Not sure if there even is an indoor container in TWM.

My indoor container(s) for the mountaineering hut is the Abandoned Prepper Cache in PV.  No wolves en route (on Voyageur, at least) and I don't need to use a light source.

[Ruruwawa]

17 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

With 6 hours of daylight left, but no meat, I took my rifle and decided to get a deer somewhere else. No deer at the Logging Camp. No deer at the hunting blind at the river. No nothing nowhere to eat. The fog fell. Hungry, I returned to the Dam and cooked my rabbit. Unusually, I ate it warm. There still are four kilos of cattail stalks so I’m not starving. And the food test locker, I’ll eat my experiment if need be.

As if it weren't enough, the wolf avenged it's death as it infected me with parasites. Great. I thought we were even when I got its pelt for my torn clothes...

I don't rely on fishing much but this is the exact situation I save my tackle for.  It's a pretty reliable source of calories when weather is bad or game is MIA.  Not cost free (because a hook = 1/3 scrap metal) but I think it's a lot cheaper than shooting a rabbit (wear on the arrow shaft and knife/hacksaw).

[Drifter Man]

Day 642 (587th day in the Dam)

For a moment I considered moving to Mystery Lake for fishing, I even packed some fishing lines, but it wasn’t necessary. I implemented “emergency measures” – ate three packs of beef jerky to stop the complaints of my stomach, started taking all meat (not just the large 1kg pieces) from snared rabbits, and used knife instead of hacksaw to save time and some calories. By the end of the second day I was no longer hungry. On the third day I had a small amount of reserve calories. On the fourth day I was trapped in a cave by a blizzard but managed without cooking any food, and collected eleven snared rabbits in the evening. On the fifth day, when I finally got rid of the parasites, the deer reappeared.

But the fact that I have 500 liters of water and 700 sticks in storage, dozens of fishing lines and a fishing hut on the lake supplied with 200 hours worth of coal - this was all quite reassuring at all times.