SteveP

If you wanted firewood, in real life, you would be cutting down dead trees and you would be expending about 90% of your calories gathering, transporting, splitting and stacking fire wood. The economics changes if you have draft animals. To cut down a large tree takes only about 15 minutes with a good axe or a saw. Even less with a chainsaw which is what people use nowadays. In a wood stove, that amount of wood will last for a day or two. People can cut & split a cord of wood in a day, using a chainsaw. If using a camp fire for heating and cooking, you use a LOT more wood. For outdoor cooking, its very advisable to build a primitive stove to contain the heat. Old growth trees are massive things, much valued for lumber. You would not use them for firewood both for ethical and practical reasons. An old growth forest has more than old growth trees in it. The area around Mystery Lake has been extensively logged so would never be considered old growth. There isn't much virgin forest left anywhere in the world. The stumps would actually be much larger than in the game, 5 to 15 foot in diameter with some Douglas Firs reaching 20 feet in diameter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_fir#Description Standing dead trees are dry unlike anything found on the ground in BC. A solitary individual would in fact be very hard-pressed to survive without a chain saw and means of transportation for harvesting wild game. Fishing would be one's best hope for calories although one would be very flexible about gathering whatever was available and desperately trying to hunt large game. Often the best chance for a substantial meal is a porcupine or a beaver. All of this is moot in a game has significant restrictions on simulation complexity and yet must cater to a diverse audience. Rather depressing. (about the forest, not the game)

Well there are several piles of logs on Mystery Lake near the Clear Cut that are seasoned or dried, that would make an indefinite supply of fuel however transporting that wood is impractical; it's much more important to utilize fuel sources close to where it is needed. Another interesting possibility would be to make it necessary to split larger wood in order to stack and cure it. Limbs could be bucked or sawn to length and cured for a few days or weeks however it's more typical to actually season wood for several months. If there were stacks of fire wood, I suppose those could be used and the player could anticipate needing seasoned fire-wood in a few months. If I were to be stuck in an isolated location and thought I would be there for a long time, fuel would be top of the list followed closely by a source of good water and food resources. Conservation of ammunition and development of alternative food sources would be of primary interest as well as a method to smoke and preserve valuable meat. Meat in game lasts for months with only cooking but presumably this could be changed I suppose. Hides would be an important resource, primarily for shelters and blankets but at some point, one might need warmer clothing than was available to be found so fur clothing could become a priority too. In practice, green wood can be used in fires although it produces a lot more creosote with attendant risk of chimney fires if done in wood stoves or fire places. Interesting that we suffer no ill effects by having fires inside closed or semi-closed structures such as the barn on PV, the Quonset building on CH and the inside of the Carter Hydroelectric Dam. In terms of market appeal, there is perhaps a small percentage who would consider wood to be important in a survival game. It is a central theme in this game but perhaps that is satisfied by a simplified procedure for harvesting firewood. The rapid degradation of the hatchet is a concern however it is mitigated by the possibility of making new hatchets. As a useful tool, I think in real life, I would go with a bow saw since in a calorie game, it's the most efficient method. Also it's easier to chop or saw green wood and it cures much faster after being split. If you split it small enough, it would cure fairly rapidly especially considering that there is plenty of wind to help do the job. If the notion of curing green wood were added, I think a delay of a week or two is a reasonable compromise. In terms of player appeal, I do think other wild life has more potential followed closely by hunting and fishing and gathering and primitive technologies (forging, crafting, tools, weapons and clothing items) I've been mulling how to address a poll or to gather end-user feedback. The unfortunate thing is that we only have a few people active on the forum so I wonder if we are representative enough. Possibly. Another challenge is to identify all of the features that have already been suggested so I almost need a discussion just to ensure the list is more or less complete prior to turning on a poll. I suspect that adding two or three wood fuel harvesting options is the simplest new feature with wild life being the most costly in terms of development effort followed closely by an extensive crafting tree and new tools for same. It might be a good strategy to break down the polls into three or four categories. I do think having a separate forum under Wishlist just for polls might be a good plan. That way, the (more important?) polls could be more easily found by forum users. "Perfection is the enemy of good enough"- Voltaire. My time today is limited so one more post along this theme I think.

I agree; another cost factor to consider would be the trade off between weight and fatigue. A hatchet takes a lot of effort to produce X firewood. We could think about increasing the fatigue cost of harvesting wood in this way. If you use an 8 pound cross cut saw, you have the weight cost of the saw as well as the fatigue cost. Cutting wood is a lot of work. If we had the buck saw with a weight of 4 pounds, it takes longer to cut X wood but the fatigue cost is lower. The fatigue cost per kg of wood should be lowest with the most efficient wood harvesting tool which would hypothetically be a cross cut saw. Cross cut saws are usually managed by two people however it's possible to use it alone. I misspoke earlier about the rifle weight. In game it is 4 kg or 8.8 lb. (The British Enfield 303 actually weights closer to 7 pounds). If you spend X hours harvesting wood using a hatchet, the fatigue cost should be high because this tool is inefficient and takes a lot of chopping effort. This tends to be reflected in the length of time to cut X amount of wood. The buck-saw has perhaps a similar cost per hour of harvesting, perhaps a little bit less but the cost per kg of wood should be much lower. The cost per hour could be less than the hatchet and certainly less than the cross-cut saw. Effort per hour: bucksaw << axe << hatchet << cross-cut saw & maul Effort per kg wood: cross-cut << bucksaw << axe << hatchet Weight to carry: hatchet << bucksaw << axe << cross-cut + maul I can't speak to development costs. We have a limit on development effort so perhaps there might be some other features that will add more "sex-appeal", allure or glamour. Product vision is important here. Is this to be a pure "exploration" game or include real-trade offs for survival or include interesting learning experiences? I lobby for the latter but again, defer to product management.

Please don't reduce this to a difference of opinions. As I have been explaining, this is a question of balance and system analysis not about opinions. Your question begs the assumption that additions to the game to cure jarringly unrealistic situations will have no value for game play. That is known as the strawman argument or a false dichotomy. I suspect your position is emotional rather than logical. Your statement that you don't wish to learn stuff is not representative of what other people may want. We need to confine ourselves to cogent arguments and not reduce issues to personal differences. That is known as sand bagging.

If you want to add diversity and interest to the game, this is a simple way to facilitate it. Wood and fire are of paramount importance in survival. It strains our incredulity that we have only a foolish tool like a tiny hatchet to take care of this need. By reducing the time necessary to stock pile wood, you can free up time for other activities. After a certain progression of the game, it becomes rote and less interesting; that's why the interest in crafting decorative items. On TWM until such time as you have crafted fur clothing, you need a fire at night to sleep in the Alpine Hut. That requires a lot of firewood, enough that after a few days, you have used up the hatchet and eventually used up the whetstone. The Alpine Hut unlike other structures, is linked to the outdoor temperature. I think it would be reasonable to make more structures like that and the only habitable structures are those with stoves. I think you are also forgetting that the cross cut saw would weigh about 8 pounds. That's more than the rifle or any other tool in the inventory. You're not going to drag that around with you everywhere unless it is extremely rare and then you might have to make two trips to ferry all the supplies. An ideal place for the cross cut saw would be near the clear cut on Mystery Lake. You could cut up those massive logs there and then split them with a maul. Transporting them would be an arduous task but it could be done with a sledge or toboggan. For traveling, I would prefer a nice buck saw or collapsible bow saw over a hatchet any day. I think if you say you don't need it, you mean that you are happy with the way the game is, a simplistic almost philosophical approach to survival. We have a thing for fire, a thing for water and a thing for food and a thing for shelter. The point is it has to be representative of realism not simply a maze exploration treasure hunt where you magically convert a few items to other items. Well for one thing, I'd like to see animations for processes like cooking, chopping wood and fishing. Cooking especially has a rich set of rewarding sounds, smells and visuals that reward the brain. Forging is also an intensely visual activity with a rich repertoire of lovely clanging sounds! The very sound of clanging a heavy hammer on an anvil sings a song to soul of the black smith. The trend away from photo-realism also points up a trend in certain other "survival" games like FarCry Primal which contain realistic portrayals of female anatomy and attractive faces. I also like the de-emphasis on combat in TLD. I dislike that it is more of a map exploration than improvisation. Improvisation is an important quality for a game and not easy to master in a way that doesn't give away too much to the player via menu systems. You should have to puzzle your way how to make things with maybe many alternative ways to achieve similar results. -sigh- wishful thinking huh? Well if the game infrastructure is well built and designed using inheritance to leverage capabilities, then I don't see why games can't evolve more in that direction. Remember, we are only constrained by our imaginations when it comes to software games. As for picking up sticks off the ground, those are all wet and won't realistically ignite as kindling. You need to find dead wood that's not on the ground or you have to fell, buck and split dead standing wood. For the sake of ease, picking up sticks from the ground doesn't strain the "reasonable suspension of disbelief" simply because so few people actually spend time in the woods where its either wet or cold. I like that TLD is an education on Canadian winters and wilderness. Our Northern European friends will get this but perhaps not so much in the lower 48. As Les Stroud says, gather a huge pile of wood that you think will last the night and then go and gather four times that much. Fire is more important than any other survival tool in the North. Without fire, you die.

I think it has to be looked at in the larger context; does it open up more opportunities for interesting situations and introducing new risks and excitement. Longer storms, trade offs in weight. A cross cut saw can weigh around 10 pounds so there is a trade off and since trade offs are a big part of the game, I think it would make the game better. It could open up territory for example. You could make it so that certain game strategies open up such as extended fishing in the fishing huts on Coastal Highway. It takes a massive amount of wood to weather some of the storms on that lake depending upon how long they last. I can see reasons for the compromises to realism with meat for example. They built it so that it was necessary to hunt frequently which means more encounters with wild life which are the primary threats in the game. We have a limited number of bad actors in the game: predators, cold, injuries (which are minimal) and illness (limited) Predators and dangerous game add excitement so there is a big benefit for going in that direction. How much development cost is there to this? There is art work. There are sounds that need recording. There is a modest amount of coding and integration since the object frame work and mechanics have already been done for the hatchet. Compare this for example to adding new wild life.

What are you trying to say here exactly? Are you suggesting that all pretense of realism is to be given up? That this is a game of limited realism and deserves nothing more? That sounds a lot like sand bagging so I'm going to get back to appeals to realism in a second. The point about realism is that the game does not strive for photo-realism. The art work is impressionistic or surrealistic, not sure what the right description for it is. That's fine. I love the artwork. If you change any part of the art work you would ruin the visual cohesiveness of the environment. The second point about realism is the development cost of simulating everything in the available world. We need to strive for representative assortments of things. Concerning axes of various kinds here is the best resource I could find after about 20 minutes of research: http://www.orionn49.com/choosing_an_axe.htm Hatchet: - 18" 1.5 lb Limbing - 24" 2 lb Felling - 36" 3-4 lb Splinting maul - 48" 8 lb or more I think the game is realistic in its intention to simulate certain aspects of survival such as trade offs. This wishlist is about input into ideas for how the game can evolve. So a common complaint is that after a certain point in the game, it becomes rote. I agree. Here's what I think is going to happen: They are going to introduce some new stuff in several categories: wild life, tools, weapons, medicine, food and resources. It's going to evolve along the general theme as has already been established, moving away from reliance upon products and returning to more primitive technologies such as forging and flint knapping. It should also evolve new risks and a few of those have been proposed including illness (3 IIRC) and injuries (avalanche) as well as a suggestion that the weather could get much worse later in the game (around day 50 to 75) provided we have the ability to get prepared. So why are you leery of realism? or appeals to realism? Is the game is not supernatural enough for your taste? just kidding. I'm perfectly willing to entertain appeals to realism if it does not make the early game too difficult. The wear rate of tools is something that might get addressed I suppose. I don't think we should close the door to that idea in order to improve the reasonable suspension of disbelief. I think we do need to trust the developers as well as our abilities as alpha-testers to be able to find & fix anything that's not balanced. I think it's reasonable to assume that there are methods for gathering feedback that perhaps we don't know about and are considered to be competitive advantage and as a developer, I might not want to expose. Heuristics and adaptive tuning are another, perhaps secret advantage. At this point in the game evolution, considerable effort has been extended to document the condition decline rates and the calorie values and nearly all of the objects within the game. It would be preferable to use the spawn frequency as a tuning variable as well as the weather. Therefore, perhaps to address the limits of the hatchet, rather than changing the hatchet's attributes, it would be more expedient to add a new tool or tools. I really really like the idea of new wild life, both game and predators. Elk and moose are appealing since they also have the capability to be threats. They might only frequent certain maps. The gathering of parts for some tools might span several areas. If we have flint as a resource, then perhaps it should only be available on one of the maps such as the mountains where volcanic obsidian could be present. Canada is not a region of chert although that's something that bears researching. Lastly, please remove the white space at the end of your postings folks. Thanks.

No worries. It's been an interesting morning. I agree totally about having tons and tons of skills and tools that just magically let you navigate through the achievement list is not what I think the vision of TLD and it's not what I want. I like to have it make sense in a realistic fashion. Look at all the magic you can do in FarCry Primal; that's not realistic. To me this game is really about the survival aspect, the trade offs and the risks. I'd like it to have some legs, some more interesting and challenging bits. At the moment there only three or four risks. Wolves & bears, weather, food poisoning and injuries.

Play Timberwolf for a while and see how many days you can harvest wood with one hatchet before it is used up. See if you can last a week holed up in the alpine hut riding out a fierce storm. As I have already stated, creating a LARGE cache of firewood is a good thing and does not make the game magically too easy. Remember, for each threat there must be an appropriate response; for each bonus there is a corresponding new threat or risk. This is referred to as balance. This is a picture of a heavy splitting maul! There is no way that a hatchet is appropriate for splitting wood, especially wood cut with an axe. You can only split wood that has been cut with a saw. And if you spend any amount of time making firewood, you will know to use the proper tool for the job. The buck saw and a splitting maul or double bit lumber jack's axe are what is needed to lay in an adequate supply of firewood to last through an indefinite amount of storm.

The advantage of a sharp buck saw is that it can cut a 6' limb in about 2-5 minutes where a hatchet takes about an hour for each cut.. Haven't you noticed how long it takes to harvest wood from limbs? You could easily build up a cache of firewood to last out a week or more of storm with a buck saw and it gets you way ahead of the curve for the coming bad weather. If you had preserved meat, also no problem. At about day 60 to 75 maybe a monster storm blows in. Why think small? Think about adding several items to the tools and a dozen craftable structures and useful items. How about a big cauldron you hang over a a fire on a tripod? TLD already has the software infrastructure to create a lot of things and with the simple mechanics, development is fast. The art work is the big work. Art work can be done in parallel. Foleys or sound recordings are also relatively easily made!

There are other tools that are easy to craft on a forge that could be used for processing logs to build a log shelter. A bark spud is one. A bill-hook is another. A bark draw-knife is another and log rollers are also handy for log construction. A bark spud let's you take big peelings from a log that can be flattened out into squares of roofing material or siding. Bark spud Draw knife. I'd like a meat hook for hoisting a fresh carcass up for skinning and butchering and a block and tackle would make that possible. Having a sled or toboggan to skid home your deer or bear harvest would be nice too. For milling planks, normally this is done with a large rotary saw powered by a gasoline or diesel engine. A band saw is the other method. This is probably beyond the capabilities of a single person. You would need a draft animal in order to skid out logs. I guess you could do it with a winch and cables or ropes. It's a lot of work but you could probably build a cabin in 150 days or so. How many logs would you need? You'd also need an axe to notch the ends of the logs and a spud or something to flatten the logs to make them fit tight. Here is a website with a lot of highly valuable tools for log cabin construction. http://www.loghelp.com/categories/log-tools.asp This would be a lot of mechanics to include all of the processes involved in log cabin construction. I was thinking more along the lines of a hut shelter with log poles for a stringer and shorter logs to make an A frame and covered with bark for wind protection and rain/snow protection. An improvised stove of bricks or a small metal barrel with a stove pipe could heat it. Build a reflector for your camp fire. Etc. Cordage is an essential for constructing all manner of ad-hoc shelters and caches and tree stands for bow hunting.

Well for one thing, the wood saw or a double-bit axe could reduce the time necessary to break down limbs and would greatly preserve the life of your hatchet; No wonder it takes so long to break down a single limb with a wimpy little hatchet. Sure it's light weight so the trade off would be weight. A big old buck saw is going to weigh 3-4 pounds or a couple of kilos.

Should we have some type of saw for harvesting wood from limbs. The hack saw won't cut it. [groan] Optionally it could be resharpened using a round file or a tool kit or requiring a work bench. (please discuss) Old saws tend to be rusty and dull quickly. Heating and quenching and tempering could be added at the forge to improve the ability to stay sharp. A rusty saw can loose it's temper if it is case hardened and become dull. Is there going to be an activity mechanic added to wood harvesting like the one for cooking? Harvesting wood is time consuming with the hatchet. Fire and wood are some of the most valuable assets we have so being able to create stores of firewood is a reasonable plan for survival especially if there is an extended storm or if we find other uses for wood. We wouldn't have to cut limbs or logs to firewood length; we could make poles for all sorts of nifty things such as a cooking tripod, a teepee shelter, a ladder, a sled. A draw knife would also make a great extension for shaping things such as a handle for the axe, if it breaks. Currently it costs 45 minutes to get three pieces of cedar or 50 minutes for five pieces using the hatchet. With a buck-saw you could cut a three inch limb in half in about two minutes and a 4 inch limb in 3.5 minutes. Maybe less because I haven't found anything online about wood cutting rates. So that would net you 30 to 40 pieces of wood in an hour. If you only cut half way through, often that is enough to snap the large branch with a stout kick or angled between two trees for leverage you could go even faster. The rate would be even higher if you took down trees and cut them with a cross-cut saw and split them with a maul. It would make it possible to have a fire going for extended periods of time and perhaps to damp down a fire or bank it in order to further preserve it at night. This would make the game more interesting so that we could weather out longer storms or use shelters that were more affected by the outdoor temperatures. I'm sure there are ways to balance out the advantages such as the additional weight of a 30" buck-saw at around 3-4 pounds or a bigger cross-cut saw at 8 1/2 lbs for a three foot single man cross cut saw. https://books.google.ca/books?id=_gdrCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=what+is+the+weight+of+a+cross-cut-saw&source=bl&ots=x3ZdvgA7tW&sig=nrtjpOsWlMbWTlj-FdXDPp0hA6Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJ_Ou_-bXLAhVB7WMKHbiNBqQQ6AEIMDAE#v=onepage&q=what%20is%20the%20weight%20of%20a%20cross-cut-saw&f=false Here is a useful website http://modernsurvivalblog.com/preps/preppers-might-freeze-to-death-without-a-crosscut-saw/ covering the importance of the cross-cut saw in the survival context where there is no fuel for a chainsaw. It only takes about an hour to cut and split a cord of wood with modern tools, even less with a power splitter.

Many requests already for sled, sledge, or toboggan! If we get cordage added, many more improvisations are possible. Hinterland is close to release time so it's hard to tell how many enhancements they would add at this time that would alter the game balance. With the addition of temporary shelters, we could endure more severe weather. Personally, I would not mind if they added more stuff and delayed the release another few months. I think the game as long term play potential but needs more things to do and the morale improvements could be very interesting!

In Canada you are not permitted to carry a handgun in the bush for bear defense unless perhaps you are a park ranger or you have an occupation that requires you to spend long periods in the bushand then you need a specific authorization to carry (ATC) which species exactly where and when you may transport or use the handgun. Just hunting, fishing or camping is not a good enough reason. A bush pilot could conceivably have a legitimate reason to carry a hand gun as kit in the airplane. Judging from the number of permits to carry side arms, it is not generally done. Applications to carry handguns in B.C. and Alberta

I don't think more weapons are essential for the game however in very long games, one eventually runs low of bullets, arrows and metal so I've suggested stone tools. I do agree that an atlatl would be a complex technique that would need much practice in game to master. Atlatl: how to throw If there are too many weapons, the game play would suffer and not be challenging enough for the majority of experienced players. We are nearing the release of Story Mode and the final release. Just coaching that don't hope too much for new features. I do think there is a lot of room for more features in the future so either Hinterland should do it or a competitor will.

In Canada unless it is overcast, in winter with snow, there is a kind of semi-darkness. If the moon has risen, it's plenty of light to see by although most things will be very indistinct. I think TLD should add moonshine on a 28 day cycle. Often extreme cold weather is clear at night so there is starshine. The wind can be minimal or it can be fierce. I don't know if you guys tune the weather to be quite realistic or not? Just like in real life, the weather is often what kills you. Starvation should take much longer to kill you. Dehydration should take about 5-6 days but modelling this level of fidelity would change the game.

These weren't amateur survivalists... http://www.history.ca/alone/bios/ The 4 who made it to last week have some experience or skills for Canada. The first bunch, most were naive. These guys weren't experienced survivalists at all. It was obvious. :-) In bear country you don't leave food in your tent. Even the rankest amateur camper around here should know this. I think these guys overestimated their skills. Crunch time now!

Not coaching on generalities but on the specifics of staying alive for safety regulations. Keeping food scraps out of your main camp is very important.

There's always an element of unknown risk dealing with predators in the outdoors. They could be injured and starving and the smell of food in camp just lures them in. That was their mistake. I'm surprised they weren't coached on the need to keep a clean camp separate from the cook camp.

I have a feeling that the guys who gave up after the close encounters in the dark had not encountered black bears or wolves in real life. If there had been fresh blood, the situation might have been very different; it was bad enough when the guy brought his food to his sleeping shelter. I guess he didn't know about how food acts as an attractant. The bear didn't want the dude, he wanted his fish. There's a reason when we wilderness camp, we put food in the tree or locked in a vehicle. We don't want unwelcome visitors. Habituated bears are much worse because they associate people and dumps with easy food. The thing to do is build up your fire, if you have one and make some noise such as banging a pot. I think the wolf behaviour in The Grey was somewhat realistic however poor the animatronics and CGI were. But compare The Grey with Never Cry Wolf. See Wikipedia wolf attacks on humans In the former case, the wolves were very hungry and territorial while not in the latter. It's perhaps fortunate that the show started during salmon spawning season so the predators were not hungry. Establishing a base camp with fire, smoke and human presence should be enough to deter the predators after the first few days. I don't think any of them had enough energy to build substantial shelters although one chap gave up after deciding his clay mud wasn't suitable for chinking (it was fine, mix with straw) The best started out fairly well, almost thriving but the weather got them down and they started just subsisting and laying around non-productively. The editing for the show determines what segments got put in; I think it just happens that when alone, these guys just focused in expressing their depressive thoughts rather than perhaps focusing on productive video subjects. Hard to do when stuck in a small shelter shivering and alone. Why do you think we want other activities for the game that are productive like crafting traps, baskets and so forth!?