Scyzara

Thanks for sharing these informations and your thoughts about the launch with us, Raphael. As a great Sandbox fan I'm especially happy to hear Survivor mode is going to get more attention again in the future.

And I for one think the team did a great job with Wintermute. The launch may not have been perfect, but it went pretty well overall in my opinion. The first steps are always the most difficult ones - and you guys really did an amazing job releasing the game on that many platforms at once.

Enjoy your well-deserved holidays and recharge your batteries!

On 11.8.2017 at 4:43 PM, Rayir said:

1. Are the specific spawn rates for each animal; rabbits, deer, wolfs and bears after they are killed and fully harvested?

2. Does the rate change in different difficulties?

Yes, there are specific respawn rates for all animals, but they depend on various factors. Most importantly the duration of your game (e.g. on day 100 Interloper, deer will have a longer respawn timer than on day 10), but also the experience mode and presumably even how often you've killed animals in this region before. (The latter may just be my personal impression, though - it's hard to say because as you kill an animal in a spawn location over and over again, your game time also progresses as well of course.) It's hard to name some specific numbers because they're not static, but typically bears have the longest respawn timers while wolves, rabbits & deer respawn rather fast.

On 11.8.2017 at 4:43 PM, Rayir said:

3. Can you wipeout the animals so they don't respawn? Example if I come across a group of rabbits (3-4) and I kill and harvest them all would that have an effect on a possible spawn rate? 

It does, but you can't exterminate animal populations forever. If you exhaust e.g. a rabbit population, their respawn timer just becomes way longer than usually - but at some point the rabbits will still respawn, albeit probably in lower numbers at first.

On 11.8.2017 at 4:43 PM, Rayir said:

4. Can respawn location change or is set?

They can (and do) change, but it's not totally random. There are multiple potential spawn locations for each animal species and not all of them are inhabited at once. So if you kill a wolf in let's say region A, it's well possible the wolf won't respawn in A again, but rather in B, C or D. The same is true for deer, rabbits and bears. 

Just as a sidenote: You can easily check if a bear location is inhabited by checking if there are bones in front of the potential bear cave. If bones are lying around, the cave is inhabited - if not, you know the bear has spawned elsewhere.

I'm totally in love with the aurora. ^-^

Thanks  for explaining the different certification requirements and processes, Raphael.  I bet most people haven't been aware of these things, especially not about how long it takes you to have a new patch certificated on consoles.

That being said I'd like to say my personal experience (Steam/Win8.1) with Wintermute wasn't bug-loaded or in any other way negative at all. I've hardly ever noticed a bug and none of those few I encountered was even remotely game-breaking. 

So please don't be too harsh on yourself - there are presumably also a lot of people out there like me which had a very smooth and enjoyable launch. When you'll release the next episodes you'll have more experience with all those different platforms and their required processes. And I for one am certain you'll then be able to provide a very enjoyable experience for everyone right from the start. 

Just analyze what can be improved and keep up the good work! 

Launch at exactly 17h CEST for me! 

Yay, made it! 15 Minutes left! 

I'll do my best to be home from work at 17h CEST then. 

During the last months the Devs have been extremely busy to prepare the Wintermute Release. And as Story mode was their absolute main focus, the vast majority of the team has been completely removed from Sandbox development.

 I think HL will certainly reallocate a fair share of the team back to Sandbox/Survivor mode development and gameplay improvements once Wintermute has been released.

So we should really try to be patient, as hard as this may be sometimes.  

@Timber Wolf: Very interesting data again, thanks a lot for sharing!

The hammer and improvised hatchet's numbers somehow look much more similar on Interloper than on Stalker. Given that a hatchet-struggle kills the wolf eventually (while a hammer-struggle doesn't), the improvised hatchet is probably the better choice on Interloper in most situations.  

I assume your characters died during those struggles where they suffered 100% condition loss, correct? In this regard the hatchet also seems to be superior to the hammer, although this might just be a coincidence, of course.

Anyway, the improvised knife is definitely off the table for me. 6 out of 50 lethal struggles is really a poor outcome, seems I was pretty lucky so far. I've only been killed by Interloper wolves a few times so far, but I certainly DO remember that those lethal struggles felt disproportionally more difficult than "average" struggles. At least I had that impression.

Just as a sidenote: I personally find it rather questionable if the current huge variety in struggle outcomes (between <10% to >90% damage taken are possible under equal conditions with a pretty fast clicking speed) benefits the fun while playing, but I've been saying that since two years or so now.

I remember the times when your clicking speed actually had a much higher impact on the damage you would take (and pure randomness had a smaller effect), but that system wasn't perfect either, as it put slow-clicking players at a huge disadvantage. Guess it's very hard to find a perfect balance between both aspects, and currently the emphasis is more on the side of randomness.

6 hours ago, Timber Wolf said:

That does appear to be the case.  More tests might show the improvised hatchet and hammer leveling off.  But one thing seems clear, the improvised knife is not good.  When I was testing with it, the struggles "felt" a lot like struggles with bare hands. 

Behold Astrid Odinson and her faithful warhammer Fluffnir! 

Thanks a lot for your data once again. I would probably never have tried to use the hammer on Interloper - always used the improvised knife, which appears to be a really poor choice in retrospect.

Something should definitely be done about the ingame weapon descriptions, they're seriously misleading (or at least lacking relevant information). Pretty sure most people are far more interested in damage minimization than in bleed-out times... or one could simply offer both informations at once.

Knife: "Stabbing weapon which may inflict deep wounds, causing wildlife to bleed out faster. Doesn't do a good job protectiong yourself in the struggle, though."

Hammer: "A blunt, heavy weapon. May fend off wildlife quickly, but does not cause any bleeding damage."

Hatchet: "Being both sharp and heavy, the hatchet is the best weapon to end wildlife struggles quickly. Also causes minor bleeding damage."

Something along these lines...

Carefully monitor the outdoor temperatures and perform time-consuling outdoor tasks like exploration trips, cross-map journeys or chopping wood during the warmest hours of the day (typically late afternoon/early evening) if possible.

If you need to be outside for extended periods of time at low temperatures, don't hesitate to use fires (best placed inside caves so they need less fuel to get you above a felt +12°C) to warm up again. If there are no caves to be found nearby, at least try to light your fire in the most wind-protected place you can find (hollow tree/rocks formations usually work very well) and keep in mind that wind directions can change very fast.

Don't stop adding fuel once the fire temperature reaches a felt +1°C. While this is enough to stop further freezing damage, it'll take ages to fully regenerate your character's warmth bar this way. +10/15°C is a more reasonable value to aim for. (The hotter your fire, the faster your warmth bar fills up again.)

Hot beverages can also be very helpful to deal with the cold. They offer both an immediate warmth bonus (maybe 10% of the warmth bar or so) and give you a positive affliction that decreases the speed your character loses warmth for the next 2 hours. Unless you're planning to go for a 500day+ run, don't be afraid to "waste" reishi tea or rosehip tea for non-medical purposes just to stay warm. It can make your life a whole lot easier sometimes by preventing freezing damage before it happens.

(Sidenote: Cans of food like e.g. canned peaches or pork&beans can also be heated and have the same effect. Don't eat them without a second thought if the cold troubles you.)

As for tea & coffee:

Herbal tea increases your condition regeneration during the first six hours of sleep which is a pretty precious benefit. It should thus rather not be wasted "only to warm up", but rather if your character is at low condition and can benefit from the health regeneration gain.

Coffee decreases your fatigue (both immediate bonus and long-term positive affliction) which can be extremely useful for long journeys or trips that include rope-climbing. You should, however, be aware that drinking too much coffee can prevent your character from sleeping. So be careful not to consume coffee if your character is at very low condition. (Herbal tea is your friend here).

15 hours ago, BIGwooly said:

I think two primary adjustments should be made to CF at a minimum.

First, the 'time indoors' to reach CF should be tied to a particular location.  So if you sit inside the same house for 3 days straight, etc.  But if you're in coastal home one day, and the garage the next, and one of the fishing shacks the next ... it doesn't make sense to me that being in these different indoor locations is all contributing to me going crazy from being indoors.

Second, time spent being productive indoors shouldn't count against you.  If you're repairing clothing, cooking food, breaking down furniture, crafting clothing, making torches, reading books ... it makes no sense to me that the character is going to go crazy.  He/she is actively engaging their mind.  He/she has a purpose and a mission.

I think CF should be tied to doing absolutely nothing in a single location.  I wouldn't even mind if the time to catch it was shorter if these revisions were made, although I don't think it needs to be.

A big +1 for these two suggestions.

The second aspect has been suggested numerous times in the past and I still support it wholeheartedly because it would imo counteract a lot of the current arbitrary gameplay choices one needs to make to avoid cabin fever. (It's e.g. not very intuitive to craft your fur clothes or melt water outside on purpose at temperatures around -35°C like I usually do on Interloper).

I also like the first idea a lot. Might encourage players to keep a bit on the move in a way that feels rather natural. At least more natural than spending your nights inside caves to compensate indoor clothing crafting times.

@Patrick Carlson : I think this poll shows quite impressively that the majority of players isn't really happy with the implementation of cabin fever in its current state. Could you please forward the suggestions mentioned above (or other ideas from cabin fever-related threads made in the past) to the Dev team? Even if it's already to late to ask for big changes regarding current mechanics before the release of Wintermute, it's definitely something the team might want to focus on in the long run.

'Fully equipped' is a very relative term in TLD. In max. warmth Interloper gear (including 2 bear coats), the feels like temperature during the warmest hours of the day under late-game Interloper conditions is indeed sth between 0 and -15 ºC depending on the map. Which I personally find appropriate. It's the core feature of Interloper that your greatest enemy there is the cold and not wildlife.  

Wow, thanks a lot for your efforts @Timber Wolf!

That's really some awesome data - I personally always considered the knife to be superior to the hatchet, but your data definitely changed my opinion about that.

16 hours ago, Timber Wolf said:

It looks to me as though having protection doesn't make much difference, in terms of condition loss or injuries sustained.  What do you think?

Well, I think @Drifter Man is right. The Stds of all struggle-related data in TLD are always huge and this ultra-high variability of a struggle outcome (even if you use clicking macros and have perfectly equal starting conditions every try) makes it quite likely that "smaller" n numbers give you some kind of skewed results.  

It's already great that you chose n=20 (for data in real life, that's usually a very solid starting point, at least in my field of work), but due to TLD struggle data's huge variability, one would probably need n numbers in the range of n=100+ to really see a 26% decrease. But I'm optimistic it might exist.

But anyway, I personally never chose my clothes to maximise the protection value in the first place and I certainly see no reason to change that. I mean even if it meant an average condition benefit of 16% average condition loss versus 22% average condition loss, you would have so many weight and temperature disadvantages in your combat clothes that it would probably never be worth wearing them anyway.^^

So I just forced myself to finish this challenge (because I didn't want the half-finished savegame to be lost once the new testbranch hits). And it was seriously no fun, but only felt tedious.

I think this challenge would be ten times more engaging and fun if the 3 day-staying period in each location would be removed or at least decreased to only one day. Because what happened for me on every single location was that I reached it, looted it and afterwards spend three full days alternating between passing 15h of time and sleeping for 9 hours. At least 75% of my real life time while playing this challenge was filled with watching the "pass time" screen. And sorry, but that's as boring as it gets.

I think I melted some water about three times alltogether, but apart from that I found more food and drinks than necessary in each location.

To make things worse, only the time actually spend directly in the indoor location counts towards the achievement. So if you try to play in a somewhet "active" style, and go e.g. hunting or exploring you don't have to stay in each location for three days, but rather for a whole week in order to spend the 72h indoors. One may argue that I might possibly have tried that approach because it would suit my playstyle better and I can hardly deny that. (I decided against it because I seriously lack the time to play TLD for dozens of RL hours during the next few weeks.)

I do, however, not believe that a challenge called "nomad" should be about staying somewhere for extended periods of time anyway. It should be about the feeling of travelling and being on the move. And that's exactly the feeling this challenge does not convey to me at all in its current state. Simply because you currently spend 25% of your rl time actually travelling and 75% time looking at the pass time screen.

Sorry for this unprettified honesty, but the Nomad challenge is (in my opinion) not only the most boring of all challenges, but - and that's much worse - goes against its own spirit, at least for me.

10 hours ago, Deathdealers747 said:

Now, keep in mind, this level of difficulty is not due to the "challenge" presented, but rather the challenge within the challenge, which is: Boredom! Seriously, guys, I think you should reduce the time required to be inside of the specific building down from 3 Days to 1 Day (or less). It is soooooooooooo easy to do on Voyager difficulty that I'm getting very bored from it.

I've never completed the Nomad challenge for the same reason. It just feels incredibly pointless to stay in a location for three days in a row - it's too short to create a real main base (= going hunting for fur clothes, creating bigger stocks of meat or water), but on the other hand it's too long to just sit idle and pass time waiting.

I totally understand this challenge is not meant to be difficult, but I support the idea to decrease the time you have to stay in a location to only one day (or even less). Whoever needs to stay longer (to recover from wildlife attacks or whatever) might still do so without any disadvantage, but the rest of players wouldn't have to waste time waiting for some timer.

Green eyes in the woods
Brave embers fight for our lives
A breeze brings us peace

Some more muskeg impressions. I really love the diversity of all the light conditions and wonderful colors... 

Morning at the muskeg.

Behold ASTRID BEARSLAYER, the one and only Queen of the North!

PS: Sprinting is for cowards!  ;p

A beautiful place to die...

Houses are overrated... back to the roots!

8 hours ago, cekivi said:

Lucky. I have not found any jack-o-lanterns yet on my interloper run. I am really appreciating those candy bars though!

I think I found four in my game alltogether (one in DP, one in CH, two in PV),  but there were probably more. I basically only had time to play on Sunday and thus didn't manage to explore more than 50% of the world or so. Would have loved to discover especially TWM during the event... well, next year maybe.