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Thank you for reaching out. We're sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue. For further assistance, please reach out to us via the Support Portal: hinterlandgames.com/support We appreciate the opportunity to investigate.

Thanks for reaching out. The reason saves were not compatible following the Update is that "we’ve made many changes to the Save system, and the underlying architecture of the game itself, to improve, future-proof, and optimize it, and these changes mean that all “old” saves (meaning from a version of THE LONG DARK from before the Expansion Pass launch) will be incompatible with the new Save format." (This is taken from the most recent Dev Diary.) We won't be making these changes every time we release a new Part, and we will always try to keep saves intact whenever possible. Additionally, if this does ever need to happen in the future, we will be sure to give you ample warning. So enjoy your current run, and good luck Surviving in the Far Territory!

Hello Survivors, Last week, we launched Part One of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, the first paid expansion for THE LONG DARK’s Survival Mode. TALES will be released as an Expansion Pass in 6 parts over the next 12 months. The full Expansion Pass Roadmap is available here. We also created a Video that outlines everything that has been added in Part One. Each Part of the Expansion will include content that is exclusive to the Paid stream, and to get that content you need to buy TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORIES. The launch of each Part will also include Free updates to Survival Mode. Please note that TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY is currently available on Steam and Epic Games Store, but it will be coming to consoles in the new year. More information is available in the Expansion Pass FAQ. PART ONE “FORSAKEN AIRFIELD” The following paid features and content were included in PART ONE of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY: Far Range Branch Line. This transition region connects from Broken Railroad, linking Broken Railroad to Transfer Pass. Transfer Pass. This hub region provides access to Forsaken Airfield, and the two additional new Regions arriving later in the Expansion Pass campaign. Forsaken Airfield Region. An abandoned airfield on a vast snowy plain. It includes the Hangar, Control Tower, Ranger’s Cabin, and other points of interest. Watch for the Aurora. Tool Variants. Vaughan’s Rifle, Barb’s Rifle, Curator’s Rifle, Woodwright’s Bow, Spelunker’s Lantern. Modifications of the base Tools, with custom stats and cosmetics. Glimmer Fog. Beware this phenomenon. It comes during the day, and getting stuck in it for too long will trigger the new Insomnia Affliction. Insomnia Affliction. Too much time in the Glimmer Fog can affect your sleep patterns. Please note that when you first start your adventures in the Far Territory, you cannot access the new regions or transitions from the World Map until you have first found them in the world. No shortcuts! They will become visible after they have been initially discovered. For more details of each of these included features, please refer to the Roadmap page. FREE DECEMBER UPDATE Along with the contents of Part One for the paid Expansion Pass, the following free updates were applied to the base Survival game. Complete Loot & Resource refresh. All loot tables have been updated, and the location of in-world spawned objects has been refreshed. The locations and amounts of all high-value Tools and Items have also been modified. Do not expect things to appear in the same place, or quantity, as you may have experienced them before, and also know that an element of randomness to loot spawns is present in any game. Interloper balance has been preserved in the loot refresh. (Additional details below.) Starting Spawn Points refresh. When you start a new Survival game, the locations you can potentially spawn in each region have been changed. Feel lost again. Visor Notes (Mementos). Notes will occasionally spawn under car visors (and other places). Finding these will unlock the location of supply caches or other items in the world. Improvised Crampons. You can now craft your own. Be cautious, Survivors – these Crampons are not quite as effective as the ones you find. Doe. Female deer have been added to the game, replacing the majority of the Stag population. FUTURE PARTS & UPDATES Each new Part will add more items from the paid Roadmap to the game, and each Part’s free components will be added to the existing Survival Mode game. Each Part will be accompanied by a video and notes that explain what has been added. Before you purchase, please read the FAQ for more information about how the Expansion Pass will work. SPLIT & CORE GAME OVERHAUL With this release, we also rolled out a major change: splitting Story and Survival mode into separate games. This was a massive undertaking, done to ensure we can continue to update and maintain THE LONG DARK into the future. This split also involved rebuilding many core game systems. In combination with other changes like the Resource refresh, you may find the game feels a bit different than it did. If you encounter behaviour that you feel seems very much out of character as compared to your previous experience, feel free to submit a ticket to our Support Portal. There will be bugs, and game balance/tuning will be an ongoing effort. We appreciate your patience. LOOT REFRESH Normally we would not get so granular in our notes, but to help understand the new “baseline”, here are some more precise details about the Loot refresh: The majority of container loot tables in the game have had tweaks and updates, so you will find there are new items spawning that didn't used to spawn, and some rare items are slightly rarer. Positions of placed gear items have been refreshed, so expect to find things in different places to before. Note that we do still have approximately the same amount of basic tools as before (hatchets, knives, prybars, etc), but their locations are updated. The quantities of plants is also unchanged (saplings, rosehips, reishi, etc). Weapons have had a significant rebalance – rifles are much rarer so they are no longer guaranteed in every region. Revolvers are now more common, and Distress Pistols are also found in a few more places than before. As has always been the case, it is important to note that most loot placements and containers have a large degree of randomness, and this does result in a significant variance of what is a “normal” amount of loot and what type of loot you get. So you can just have very lucky or very unlucky runs in the game. Interloper has had its loot positions refreshed and more position randomness added to its important items (like hammers) to add less predictability. Overall, Interloper’s difficulty should remain the same as before (if anything, it will be slightly harder given the increased randomness from the important item placements). On Interloper, guaranteed item spawns for items like matches have not been increased (or decreased), however, please be aware that there are random match spawns that can come from containers that might result in “lucky rolls” where you find more. This is not some thing that was changed for this update. If you find items that did not used to spawn an interloper in an interloper run, it is most likely a bug – we especially did not intend for weapons to spawn into interloper games (a bug we addressed in one of our earlier hotfixes). We have not adjusted the weather tunings for any of the Experience modes, so temperature range (which is quite broad) and temperature drop over time remain as they were before this update. We have intentionally removed prepper hatches for now, but they will return soon. SAVE GAMES The split and core game overhaul means that old Survival saves are no longer compatible with the game. They can be continued (on Steam only) using the Time Capsule. If you would like to benefit from the new and future free enhancements and content added to THE LONG DARK’s Survival Mode, you will need to start a new game. If you would like to play TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, you will need to start a new game. Pre-split WINTERMUTE games should still work with the revised game. NEW “THE LONG DARK” PRODUCT FAMILY The split between Survival and Story has allowed us to create a new SURVIVAL EDITION product, which is a lower-cost, entry-level version of THE LONG DARK that only contains only Survival Mode. From SURVIVAL EDITION, players can optionally upgrade to the paid Expansion Pass, TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, and/or can optionally upgrade to add the WINTERMUTE Episodes to their base game. Each of the following games has its own in-game Home page with access to the revised in-game News system: THE LONG DARK, TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, WINTERMUTE, and SURVIVAL EDITION. How to know which version you own: If you see a revised menu in-game when you start, and it says “TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY”, you have added the Expansion Pass to your game. If you see the Mystery Lake Trapper’s Cabin menu, and it says “DECEMBER UPDATE”, you have the base THE LONG DARK or SURVIVAL EDITION products, and you do not have the Expansion Pass. If you owned THE LONG DARK prior to the December 5th split, you still own both Survival and WINTERMUTE, and do not need to repurchase them. You do not have to spend any more money, you still own all the things you owned before, and you will still receive future updates to WINTERMUTE Story Mode. The free updates that are part of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY will automatically be applied to our base THE LONG DARK or SURVIVAL EDITION games, for free. The paid updates that are part of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY require you to buy the Expansion Pass. DETAILED CHANGELISTS Due to the massive overhaul to the game, it is impossible to share every individual update or change that has been made to the game over the past year of work. In addition to all the aforementioned changes, we are also calling out these general areas of fixes and changes that we would like you to be aware of (each bullet point encompasses many individual fixes): Upgraded to Unity 2021.3.6f1, fixing numerous engine-side issues. General - Updated the game to use more asset bundles, improving load times and future update size. Audio - Cleaned up various audio to improve quality and consistency. Environment - Corrected multiple locations where the player could become stuck. Environment - Fixed multiple locations where items or projectiles could fall below the ground when dropped or shot. Environment - Fixed numerous clipping or missing texture issues. Environment - Fixed multiple unreachable item placements. UI - Ensured stats tracked the correct game values on Journal and Status screens. Save File - Updated the save system to better manage the size of saves, avoiding issues where saves could grow too large for safe cloud storage or become corrupted. Custom Game Mode - Fixed an issue where players were unable to reduce Cabin Fever Risk while Endless Night was enabled. Custom Game Mode - Reviewed all Custom Game Mode tuning values to ensure they are working as designed. WINTERMUTE - Fixed sev eral issues in Wintermute missions that could cause a Player’s mission progress to become stuck. WINTERMUTE - Fixed an issue that would cause the Episode Progression stat for a save to display incorrectly when viewing a Load Menu. Steam Deck - Optimized general performance for Steam Deck. FURTHER INFORMATION For a list of Known Issues were are currently tracking, please go here. For all bug reports and requests for help, please use our Support Portal. Join our mailing list. Follow us on Twitter.

Thank you for your feedback. And we look forward to seeing all your screenshots in the Far Territory!

Thank you for filing a bug report, we appreciate the opportunity to investigate.

Thank you for reaching out. When did you file your Support Ticket? Have you checked your spam folder for a response? We are experiencing a high volume of tickets following the launch, but if you send us a private message with your email, we would be happy to check on the status of your ticket. Thank you for your patience!

Thank you for the ongoing discussion. If we have missed any questions or comments, please do @Adminus just in case. We are experiencing a high volume of messages, but we will do our best to respond as quickly as possible.

The new Region will not show up on the map until you discover it, but the new content is there waiting to be explored. Good luck, Survivor!

This is a known issue we are working on, but we don't have an ETA on a fix at this time. Thank you for your patience!

These are absolutely stunning. Thank you for sharing!

Thank you for the continued feedback. As a reminder, if you encounter bugs, please report them via the Support Portal: hinterlandgames.com/support

We're sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue. This is a known bug we are working to address, and we will share an update as soon as one is available.

Thank you for the feedback! We will continue to monitor suggestions and responses on this topic.

We are working on something currently, and hope to provide an update today/tomorrow. Thank you for your patience.

Thank you again for your patience. We will provide an update as soon as it is available.

Very glad to hear it! Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need anything in the future.

Welcome!

We will be sharing more information soon. We genuinely appreciate your patience.

Thank you for the support. If you notice abusive language on the forums, please don't hesitate to report it. We try to catch instances as we see them, but we always appreciate reports. And yes, let's try to keep the Forums a positive, welcoming place for everyone. We really appreciate our community.

Thank you for reaching out! The current goal is to ensure you can continue on your current run when the bunkers return, but we will absolutely provide an update if that changes. We appreciate your patience.

We are hoping to address this ASAP. Thank you for your patience!

Hello players, TL;DR: I’m sorry about the issues around launch. If you owned THE LONG DARK before Monday, you still own it and also own WINTERMUTE. You do not have to repurchase it. THE LONG DARK includes both Survival and Story. SURVIVAL EDITION is only Survival, and you can upgrade this by buying the WINTERMUTE episodes as DLC if you like. TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY is completely optional. Both paid and free content is being released in multiple Parts over the next year. We’re still fixing some bugs. If you encounter any, please report to: hinterlandgames.com/support Long version: I want to apologize for the hiccups around last week’s launch of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. I know we didn’t hit the quality you expect from a paid product, and I want to try to explain a few things that happened to hopefully provide a bit more behind-the-scenes info on what was going on. Unfortunately it seems that between confusion around some aspects of the launch, and some deliberate misinformation, some of you have been given the wrong impression and I want to clear some things up. The inception of TALES was the community’s own desire for us to continue expanding Survival Mode, which we’ve done with free updates over the past 8+ years of development. Between Episode Five work and other new projects at the studio, there are many things our team can be working on, and it no longer made sense for us to continue putting out free updates to Survival. But we knew there was interest in us continuing to expand Survival, so we put together various potential plans, one of which was to launch a 12-month update campaign that would bring back some of the energy and “buzz” of our original Early Access. It’s an experiment, as we’ve often said. Since our players have received free updates for so long, it was important to us that we continued to provide some amount of free content alongside the new paid content, because we know not everyone is in the position to spend more money on the game. We also didn’t want the “base game” to start to feel too outdated compared to the paid stream in TALES. So we planned dual update streams -- one paid, one free -- that would launch simultaneously. The paid updates are entirely optional. We’ve never telegraphed too much about what would go into our free updates, and for TALES we wanted to maintain that same strategy because it’s allowed every update to feel like a big exciting moment that our players can celebrate together. But we knew that for TALES, as a paid product, we’d have to provide a bit more info so people would know what they’d eventually be getting, so we set out a Roadmap that outlines what will be included over the course of the entire 12-month campaign. All through our communications around the expansion, we’ve been clear that the full Roadmap would be released gradually over the 12 months, with new content dropping every 8-10 weeks. In order to be able to embark on this update campaign, we needed to split the Survival and Story parts of the game, because over the years the testing burden of having to review all the Story episodes, every part of Survival, all the Challenges, etc. has made it very difficult to update things frequently, or quickly. And since we had to split the game anyway, we thought this might also be a good opportunity to offer a stand-alone Survival Edition to new players, which could later on be updated with the WINTERMUTE episodes via DLC, for anyone who wanted both parts of the game. This way, you could get into THE LONG DARK’s Survival Mode for a lower price point, and not pay for Story if you didn’t want it. All through communicating this process, we’ve been super clear also that anyone who bought THE LONG DARK before Monday’s launch, would continue to have both Survival and Story, and would still get Episode Five (included in the price) at launch. Same for anyone who buys THE LONG DARK moving forward. You only pay for WINTERMUTE if you want to upgrade the SURVIVAL EDITION, and again, it’s entirely optional. On Monday, we made a mistake, and a few unexpected things also happened. The combination of those things meant that we confused a lot of people, and it seemed like we had gone back on promises I’d made. The mistake was releasing an incomplete game package to Steam when we launched at 10AM on Monday. This meant that as soon as players started updating the game, they got a failed package (it was missing some important files) and the game crashed. We realized the mistake immediately, worked to fix the package, and verified it internally, and then released the fixed package to Steam. So the crash issue existed for about an hour, between the initial launch and the moment where we were able to get the fixed package out. We also requested that people restart Steam, or restart their machines, because often this forces Steam to get the latest game update, and without that we couldn’t verify if people were struggling with the initial crash we’d caused, or some other issue in the game. Unfortunately, quite a bit of damage had already been done at that point, with thousands of the first players encountering the crash bug, and many of them going straight to Steam to write negative reviews. Most people, upon restarting Steam, were able to get the corrected update and the crash was resolved. Simultaneous with this crash, we discovered -- to our surprise -- that our Survival Edition SKU, which was meant to be a standalone $19.99 version of Survival Mode that could be updated via DLC to include WINTERMUTE, was instead set up as an “Edition” on the TLD Steam page. An Edition in this sense is a different version of the base app. It doesn’t get its own Steam page, and so all the material we’d prepared -- screenshots, copy, infrographics, etc. -- to help communicate how the SURVIVAL EDITION and WINTERMUTE DLC fit into the overall plan, and how it was different from THE LONG DARK (combined Survival + Story) was missing. And to anyone who came to the TLD page, it would look like they had the option to purchase WINTERMUTE DLC. Many people interpreted this to mean that we were asking them to re-purchase WINTERMUTE -- which we had said over and over would not be the case. It was a misunderstanding, caused by a mistake in how the SURVIVAL EDITION product was set up, but again, people were understandably confused, and some were angry and felt we had misled them. I apologize for this mix-up and take full responsibility for it. We spent a lot of time on Monday -- through our community team -- in Steam and the various forums and social channels, the support team, and on my own Twitter account, to try to clarify these things, to reach as many people as we could. We appreciate everyone who approached this moment with patience, and also regret that we inadvertently caused the initial crash. We’re still working with Valve to try to remedy the issues with the store page. Besides those two issues, and some other bugs we discovered over the first couple of days of launch -- ex. local settings being reset which put the game back to Low-quality settings, or reset of Autowalk, a change in the radial due to the addition of the new Tool Variants, etc. -- we also found that some very old Steam packages, going back to Kickstarter Backers, or the 2015 BAFTA Awards judge’s package, hadn’t been given the proper WINTERMUTE entitlements, and so for those players it appeared they no longer had access to WINTERMUTE. This reinforced the fear that we were asking people to repurchase the Episodes. This issue has since been fixed, but if you have bought WINTERMUTE a second time, please request a refund. Within the first 24 hours of launch, the team released 3 hotfixes, and we had the crash (fixed in the first hour) and most other game issues resolved within the first few days. There are also some other minor issues trickling in that the team is working to fix before the studio shuts down for the holidays. If you encounter issues, please consider reporting them to our Support Portal, so the team there can help you out. Again, I apologize for the launch issues. This isn’t the way we wanted things to go after preparing for more than a year, which included splitting the game into two and rebuilding the entire foundation from scratch, making other global changes to the base game (ex. loot respawn), adding the structure that will enable us to add paid content to the game, adding the additional SURVIVAL EDITION and WINTERMUTE products, as well as the huge new region plus transitions, the other new features and content we added in the Paid and Free streams of Part One of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY. We’ve learned a lot in this first week, and we’re confident that the release of PART TWO, as well as the console launches in the new year, will go more smoothly for all of you. I hope this information provides a bit of insight into what happened last week. Again, I’m sorry to anyone impacted by the launch issues, and we’ll work hard to earn back your trust. We hope those of you who chose to join us in the FAR TERRITORY are finding things they like in it so far, and we’re excited to roll out the subsequent Parts based on the Roadmap over 2023. - Raph

We apologize for the confusion. Sometimes, decisions are made to support overall development goals. At this point, we do plan to bring them back soon, but we don't have an exact date at this time.

As a reminder, if anyone thinks anything is really unusual or bugged, please don't hesitate to reach out via the Support Portal: hinterlandgames.com/support Otherwise, we appreciate the feedback!

We continue to investigate this issue, and we appreciate your patience as we work toward a resolution. Thanks!