Raphael van Lierop

Here's a pretty good wiki that is (mostly) accurate to what's in the game to date; I would consider this background to be canonical: https://thelongdark.fandom.com/wiki/Will_Mackenzie

Me: What's your favourite thing we've added in TALES? You: [writes several paragraphs outlining pros/cons, design suggestions, etc. etc. Also ensures to get at least one comment in about things being slow/delayed.] Ah this community. I wouldn't have it any other way. 😅

Curious to hear from you all. What is your favourite addition to the game brought through TALES so far? Could be one of the things added for free to the base game, or one of the TALES-only features or bits of content. I'll go first: First-Person Hand Coverings Took so bloody long to get this working and we needed Unity to progress to a certain point that we could use some of the tech there to handle this properly given how our game data is handled, but when I first saw this working as a prototype I almost cried. No judgement for people's choices, and don't attack other people for their choices, please. And no complaining, ok? This is meant to be a fun share.

Yeah, and I really regret not being on there anymore because it was a very easy "low impact" way for me to update folks, and the news would eventually find its way in here and everywhere else. But that's not a good replacement for nurturing our own Official community better. My assumption is people come here vs. posting in Steam or Reddit or wherever (or maybe you post in all those places too) to get that special insider feeling, and if we don't provide that here there's not much point in spending your time here vs. those other platforms, especially when they are quite active. We get it.

We don't take anything for granted, and the industry is in shambles, but we're fine, and we're still on track to deliver on our long-term strategy for Hinterland and our projects. But of course we are impacted by the losses at other companies, as it creates a lot of angst in the general atmosphere, and it's also hard to see our colleagues at other studios suffering.

It never works out well if I promise "next week" because if something comes up that means I have to delay it for some reason, folks just get disappointed and throw it back at us "but you said...", so just keep your eyes open for it and know that news is coming. Re: Technical Lead -- nothing to worry about. If anything you should take this as a sign of continued commitment to the game.

We're still here. Working away on various things, as always. (I try not to say (anymore) "dev diary in X weeks" or whatever because if something comes up internally that delays it, folks just get salty about that.) One cool thing is that you don't have to be snide or a downer about stuff to show how much you love TLD!

Hey all, Thanks for bringing this thread back to life. Re: my posting on Twitter -- no, I don't use it anymore. I've not been too quiet on my reasons why. And "losing" a community there that I spent years building has made it hard to feel much like investing time in other replacement options like BlueSky, etc. I don't think I'm the only one who feels a bit burned out by social media. Honestly it's just been easier to bury myself in work. I've been trying to find a good way to be more active in the forums and be more available again. I hate to sound trite but we are just so *busy* right now, it's been hard to stick our heads up for air. So much going on here and we are slowly working our way towards being able to share more of it, but it's just taking time. Those of you who have been with us for a while know we can be slow about stuff. Yeah, I know. Understatement. 😅 I've not been super happy with our community engagement for a while now, and that's something else we've been strategizing around and have plans for. But, as much as you may feel forgotten at the moment, you really aren't. I do have a dev diary coming which will outline TALES Part Five and give you some other updates (ex. TALES on Switch status), and as I hinted we're working towards some other stuff we're pretty excited to share with you. Apart from that, things are just brutal in our industry right now so a lot of our thoughts are with our friends from fellow studios who are going through hard times with project cancellations, layoffs, closures, etc. Hinterland is fine!! But it's tough to see many of our close colleagues at other studios affected by these mass layoffs and all the industry turmoil. It gets really easy to just hunker down and focus on things you can control, like your work and the stuff that's right in front of you, but I appreciate you gently reminding us that we need to pop our heads up once in a while. Sorry that I've been quiet and that you felt we had forgotten about you. - Raph

I suggest you do some research into how Insulated Flasks work in real life, and what happens when the vacuum seal is damaged, or in the older models, when the glass vacuum flask is broken.

Confirmed that this is how it works.

re: Insulated Flask Condition loss -- will double/triple-check the implementation, but the design was for the Flask to only lose Condition from Falls and potentially Struggles. It should not decay naturally, or at least not noticeably.

This is very important. I can't really say how important this is, because it 100% informs our design decisions and also seems to be the source of a lot of confusion/upset in the player community, because the Survival side of the game is Permadeath. The premise is that you *will die*, often and frequently. The premise isn't that you will routinely survive 1000s of days or keep the same save going for years. In order to design for the "one save" players, we would have to remove Permadeath from the game, which would fundamentally change the game we have made. Death is part of the cycle of learning and experiencing the world anew. Embrace it!

It's simply that I sometimes need to step in and remind this community of some facts. I feel no personal offense as most of the comments are subjective and everyone is entitled to them. I merely wish to point out that the community is vast with varied tastes, so some amount of personal awareness of this fact by each player is useful in order to have a thoughtful and welcoming community. Beyond that, of course I feel protective of the team's hard work and will speak out in their support, which is part of my role and my remit. If you think this is unprofessional, I encourage you to spend your time playing many other games produced by faceless corporations who will happily spoon-feed you some kind of sanctioned PR messaging, as that might be your preference.

Lot's of interesting comments and theorycrafting here. I don't want to spend too much time on it, because a lot of it is subjective feedback and opinions and everyone can believe what they believe, but just a couple of quick notes (for what it's worth): * This comes up a lot, with every update really, and it's kinda frustrating to always see it. It's just not possible to make everything in the game an option for you, just because you might not like it. Also, we are crafting a specific experience with intention behind it, and (apart from bugs which obviously do happen), limitations are purposeful. Even when we do make something optional, it doesn't happen without a bunch of work. So please stop saying "it'd be so easy to make this an option, they've done it before" etc. etc. It's just not the case. Every variation creates, at the very least, the need for significant additional testing, as well as dev work and often more UI, tuning, etc. Nothing comes for free. We make these choices and trade-offs all the time. The only easy thing here is posting in forums. * The world of GBI and the Far Territory is huge now. We try to give every region a theme. Some regions will be more interesting to certain types of players. We have 10M players and some of you have been playing the game for coming up to 10 years. We also get around an additional ~500k-1M players per year who are new to the game. And everyone in between. We're making a game for everyone, not just for one group or sub-group of players. The only way to do that is to add variety and to continue pushing ourselves to try new things. And, if you find you don't like a thing, that's ok because there are probably lots of other things for you to like, and I promise you some other player really loves the thing you dislike. It's 100% ok if not every region is to your specific tastes. I have favourites too and some I rarely go to. Pretty sure my list is probably different from yours. Re: Scurvy -- I mean this is our problem and not yours, but this is a damned if you do and damned if you don't sort of scenario, and, as per my first bullet above, making something optional isn't always that easy or the best solution for implementation. So it's fine -- if you want to play with Scurvy, start a new game. Easy. If you want to continue your long-standing save and not worry about ending up in a situation where you annoyingly have to do a bunch of stuff you didn't ask for because of a mechanic that was freshly introduced, or maybe it's super hard for you to continue surviving because you've already used up a ton of the existing resources that have Vit-C, great, you can do that. Nobody is forcing you to do one or the other, you can make that choice for yourself. So, like, stop complaining. 🤣

This is exactly what is meant. If the Carcass is already ravaged (i.e. partially eaten by something), you can Harvest it by hand as it's already been cut open essentially. If the Carcass has been partly harvested using a Tool, it's then "cut open" as well and can be harvested by hand afterwards. You just can't tear animals apart by hand anymore. Any cutting tool will do the trick -- Knife, Hatchet, Hacksaw, and the improvised versions of Knives and Hatchets. After cutting a bit, feel free to tear away if you like. Hope that helps clarify.