Hadrian

6 minutes ago, Zaknafein said:

Two questions:

Will using this test branch affect feat progression, just like time capsules reset them?

For those of us who stream TLD, can test branches be streamed or would you prefer not to?

I'd assume yes to the first, to be safe.

And historically, unless they specifically say otherwise (and I believe they have, once or twice), they're fine with streaming as long as you make it abundantly clear you're streaming test branch.

As a fellow content creator, I appreciate your asking about it.

Thanks, @Sherri! That really means a lot.

At this juncture I'd suggest we all adjourn our back-and-forth, as it's not contributing meaningfully to the thread on which we're having it.

This will be my last reply, and I encourage those connected to this little tangent to follow suit.

Cheers.

-H

Brother, listen... let me be real with you.

You just wrote ... 1,000 words.

Predicated on a misreading of my point.

A misrepresentation/misunderstanding of me as a player, and my content as a YouTuber.

And even a complete ignorance of the difficulty at which I play.

I'm not sure what combination of personal circumstances and stressors could possess a person to write so much about something so trivial, let alone factually incorrect, but I sincerely hope it gets better for you. I've had a rough go of it these past 6-9 months, partly due to to what the world is going through, but what I'm reading smacks of someone boiling over with frustration and anger and I just want you to know that I feel you.

And I hope you feel better.

-H

LOL

This just made my night. @Azdrawee and @Sherri, thanks for sticking up for the spirit of my content.

@Killerboom204, I'm sorry you didn't find what you were looking for in it. None of my series, in any game, are ever intended to be expert-level. What I teach people in, say, Survival School is expressly intended to help beginners learn to find their way, period. If I offer advice as an expert in an area of the game, I will qualify it as such beforehand, and frankly, I rarely do.

What I'll say in my defense is that if you think I survive purely on luck and more skilled players don't, you aren't being very honest with yourself or with me.

-H

10/10 would fully support.

-H

Yes. It's awful.

Just a toggle in the sound settings, please. I don't remember the last time I disliked a change to the game this much. I'm sure I'm not alone.

In its current form, after spending some hours with the new version and watching streamers play for similar amounts of time, it feels repetitive (as there is only one iteration) and thus immersion-breaking.

I preferred the atmosphere created simply by the subtle, tell-tale sounds of a nearby wolf and then the sounds of the growling and barking as it aggro'd.

Thanks for considering, guys! Hope you are all happy, healthy, and safe.

-H

9 hours ago, Thefriendlysithlord said:

I really like all of these ideas, but I would rather see them implemented as a sandbox level between Stalker and Interloper 

Have the weather at or near Interloper settings, with craftable clothing being the best available. Allow all weapons and tools to be found in the world, albeit at low spawn amounts. Lastly have animals and plants somewhere between Stalker and Interloper settings 

This way, people that feel Stalker is too easy, but don't like the "on rails" feel of Interloper, can have something that is fun, and challenging that also allows them to earn badges 

That would be great, but to go that far without giving the Custom Players the changes mentioned would be not unlike robbing Peter to pay Paul. 🙂

13 hours ago, stratvox said:

Try setting baseline to high or very high, empty container chance to the max, and container item density to the lowest setting, and loose item availability to high. You can get top tier stuff but with container density to low and empty container to high you end up really not finding a lot of stuff. In my experiments with custom games setting the container stuff up like that ends up with ~>90% of containers having nothing in them whatsoever... and with baseline set to very high there are a lot of containers that you can use for storage in the buildings etc but they're almost all empty.

I play on settings that mirror Interloper, and I definitively do not want the best items to spawn. To each their own, of course. I'm responding because I just want to be as clear as possible that this isn't something that can be resolved simply by tweaking the existing settings. It's the need for more degrees of freedom in the custom setting, with the clear justification that the Baseline setting currently controls two or three separate mechanics. I'd like to see those mechanics each have their own tweakable settings

16 hours ago, harshstorm said:

Imagine a mode(or a challenge) where top tier manufactured clothing and weapons exist in the sandbox but just one and exactly one of each.

It would be a good incentive to explore the whole world to get all the rare item.

Each of these item will be precious and players would be inclined to always take care of them. imagine a wolf attacked you and you survived but it tore your only expedition parka. Not as intense as death but that would be an intense experience of loss as one would have in a apocalyptic situation. material and tools which are required to fix and repair these precious items would still be there.

Oh, hell yeah. If the Devs were able to go as far (which I'm not asking them to do, mind you) as to implement scalable rarity for the clothing / tool spawns, the lowest settings could make it to where only one of each item spawns. That would address your suggestion and mine in one change / set of changes. It would mean a "High Quality Gear" setting with High to Low options, most likely. Then, of course, you'd have an "off" for folks like me who mostly want to avoid it, especially when playing for YouTube.

-H

8 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

Also, I thought the "Loose Item Availability" setting already controls the amount of loose loot one finds in the world separate from the Baseline Resources setting.  Am I mistaken?

You're right; I'd forgotten that setting existed because I've had it glued to "Low" for literally ever. Ha.

That said, what I would say based on experience playing with that setting on "Low" and Baseline Resource Availabillity on "Medium" (to keep Tools spawning) is that Baseline Resource Availability does still seem to control the lion's share of the variance in non-container world loot, despite the Loose Item setting.

You have to think of the Baseline as the literal "start point" and the subsequent Loose Item Availability as a modifier. Lots of the Custom Settings work as modifiers. So, I think the original point still stands, although I think your caveat adds some clarity. Maybe the best solution is to put more weight in the Loose Item modifier than presently exists.

Edit: And just to defer to a potential correction from Raphael, I might be wrong about the modifier function. All I know is that I have "Loose Item" on Low and changing Baseline to "Medium" sure seems to make lots more clothes spawn than spawn on Interloper.

-H

So I've been dragging my feet on posting about this after talking about it endlessly elsewhere... oops. The following suggested change to the Custom Settings framework would increase my enjoyment of the already excellent Custom Mode by an order of magnitude. Here's the long and short of it:

The very first Custom Setting, "Baseline Resource Availability," currently controls two to three settings in one. I, and I have it on good authority that many others feel similarly, would love to see those settings demarcated so we could manipulate them independently of one another.

Why? Because I love the scarcity and challenge of Interloper, not only of items in general, but the absence of the best items ... but I do not at all care, and I never have, for the complete absence of the tools and feeling forced to go in specific directions (read: Forges) rather than exploring openly in any direction in the spirit of traditional, non-Interloper gameplay.

Here are my thoughts. Baseline currently controls ...

- The prevalence of non-container, in-world (indoor and outdoor) loot spawns
- The availability of top-tier manufactured clothing (Expedition Parka, Mukluks, Gauntlets, etc.)
- At its lowest setting, the availability of manufactured (non-improvised) tools such as the knife, hatchet, firestriker, etc.

Here's why this is a major opportunity for the next sandbox update, in terms of a practical implementation that would address the core issue and an ideal implementation that asks far more, but fully realizes the potential of the change to the current mechanics.

Primary / Most Practical Implementation: Create a separate setting, like the ones that already exist for Rifles & Revolvers, that allow Custom Players to play with manufactured tools enabled while playing with otherwise "Low" Interloper-level clothing and world loot spawns via the Baseline setting.

Ideal / Most Ambitious Implementation: Split Baseline into three separate settings, one for baseline world / non-container loot, one for whether the top-of-the-line clothing items spawn, and then multiple toggles to control the availability (and perhaps rarity) of each tool so that the knife, hatchet, firestriker, etc could all be turned on/off just like the Rifle and Revolver. As an added thought, it would be great to see these individual settings have degrees of rarity (Rifle and Revolver, too), so we could set all these spawn frequencies to low, medium, high, etc.

So as the primary implementation text implies, this is about allowing Custom Settings to recreate an authentic, traditional Long Dark survival experience at the highest level of difficulty and resource scarcity without the current contrivances, unique to Interloper and the lowest Baseline custom settings, that force players to play the game differently than they'd like to.

Please.

Please, Hinterland.

Cherry on top.

-H

I mean ... I'll still be playing. ;-)

Sounds great, Raphael. Thank you and thanks to the team for all your hard work. Good luck with the fine-tuning and QA phase!

-H

Not to hop on this bandwagon too hastily, because I like most of the new system ... but as for chance to hit / HOW to hit ... my shooting is the worst it's ever been in TLD.

The front sight seems uncharacteristically wide. I know I'm used to that fine point, but to have it replaced by something so broad and flat-topped is confusing.

I've hit one target that I've intentionally shot at... of about 20 shots I've attempted. And that includes one of my classic "shoot at a wolf's face while it's charging" sure-shots.

I missed.

So far, "Your misses will make more sense than they used to" and "You'll sprain less than you used to" are not working out for me at all. "But the mechanics are deeper" isn't doing it as a justification for either at this point. Maybe I'll adjust, but as of right now, I'm so annoyed that I'm posting about it here. Which isn't normal.

-H

*non-chalant post-2018 bump*

(Pretty pretty plz, @Raphael van Lierop... <3<3<3)

-H

*quietly looks up from tidying his shelter*

Huh.

Could have sworn I heard something just now.

...

*shrugs and goes back to arranging matches*

-H

PS. Awesome idea. Holler if you found one.

I'm aware it was touched on in their Reddit AMAs. I wanted to give them a chance to speak to it again here, free of a separate or social-media-specific context. I'm not much for the reddit wing of the TLD community. They espouse and protect toxicity way too much in there.

-H

One of the most compelling — and surely daunting — ambitions the team has ever disclosed to the community has been making The Long Dark's sandbox have all four seasons instead of just one.

Is this still on internal roadmaps, and can you talk about some of the challenges and opportunities it would present?

-H

*nonchalant post-update bump*

-H

@stratvox Adding a dreaming mechanic the way you described it would be incredible. One of the most fitting suggestions from an atmosphere standpoint that I've read in a long time. Can you imagine the increase in immersion, particularly once Cabin Fever was integrated with the dreaming mechanics and you started to see hints of psychological changes (maybe even other future psychological states like @Raphael van Lierop has teased in the past?) manifest in the dreams.

One thing that excites me about this is that nothing helps fix shallow mechanics such as CF like deepening the surrounding systems to create more robust options to address the problem. Another thing is that, art design aside, I can't imagine this would be terribly complicated to add to the game. Certainly more complicated suggestions have been made.

Plus, the idea of leveraging the community to help create some of the dreamscapes is nothing short of genius, @KinoUnko.

-H

Really appreciate the deep digging. I've just updated the list  with the latest ideas from the thread. Hope to see this thread continue until we've really mined as many different perspectives as we reasonably can.

-H

Jeez! In one page of replies, you lot have already taken what began as a discussion on bringing the mechanic up to snuff and piled on a bunch of things that can take it far beyond that. Call it "Cabin Fever 3.0." So, as I see it so far, we've got two sets of propositions. I want to keep the near-term set simple, based on the most straightforward fixes we've discussed; i.e., things that can be implemented swiftly and with moderate to minimal effort.

I will update this list as more replies come in. Thank you, everyone!

Original Post — 11/9 @ 9:55 am ET
Updated w/latest discussion points — 11/11 @ 1:04 pm ET

Cabin Fever 2.0 — Suggested Changes (Comprehensive; not all listed points would be implemented)

• Remove total indoor rest restriction in favor of assorted penalties to normal resting process, such as...
  • No recovery of condition (0-100%) during rest (but conditions such as sprains, food poisoning heal normally) — H
  • Or perhaps you can recover, but only up to a certain percentage? 50%? — H
    • This particular restriction is important for preserving the protection against the hibernation exploit that Cabin Fever was designed to provide.
  • Slower recovery from exhaustion during sleep — H
  • Faster degeneration of calorie store (due to anxiety) — H
  • Inability to pass time idly indoors — Fuarian
  • Reduce maximum amount of time one can sleep — KinoUnko

Cabin Fever 3.0 — Possibilities (Comprehensive; not all listed points would be implemented)

• Implement better UI-based indicators of Cabin Fever (CF), for both risky and beneficial activities — selfless
• Associate Cabin Fever Risk (CFR) with repetitive similar actions instead of with proportion of a given period spent indoors...
  • Passing time repeatedly (Using cards) — Fuarian
  • Sleeping repeatedly — Fuarian
  • Breaking down furniture repeatedly — Fuarian
  • Crafting — Fuarian
  • Repairing clothing, any other form of work / time passage, etc...  — Fuarian
• Tweak CF restrictions based on Game Difficulty (Perhaps ease them on Interloper, see Fu's post above) — Fuarian
• Chance of success while repairing/crafting/firebuilding/etc indoors penalized — JP
• Dangerous wildlife encounters (drawing aggro from a wolf, especially a bear) should reduce CFR substantially — JP
• Reading a skill book should reduce CFR — JP
• Add recreational reading books as a means of reducing CFR or eliminating full-blown CF. — JP
  • "Locket" or other sentimental items, as original Road Map doc described — Raphael, technically?
  • Musical instruments for same, ability to increase skill (reducing overall CFR over time!) — Prestermatt
  • Give us the chance to become the Bob Dylan of the apocalypse. — JP

-H

Hi all,

So I'm prefacing this topic pretty heavily up front for those that want some context / rationale for participating in what I hope will be a lively and important community discussion.

If you just want to get to the meat and potatoes of what we're talking about, skip down to the 3-point list at the bottom.

I did a quick search on Cabin Fever prior to this; I'm not sure if this idea has been raised before and doubt I'm the first to think of it. Seeing as the game's first substantive new patch since Wintermute has been announced, I thought it would be a good time to discuss what has been — for many of us — the game's most cumbersome and frustrating mechanic.

As a consequence of the frustration that it tends to cause, Cabin Fever has already been re-balanced once. Patrick said the following** of how it worked at that point (how it still works, I believe), a year and a half (!!) ago:
 

Quote

* To get Cabin Fever, you now have to spend the majority of 6 days indoors. 
* If you develop Cabin Fever, you will now be prevented from Resting *indoors* for 24 hours. 
* We've added a "grace period" of 50 Days in Voyageur (25 Days in Stalker), during which you will not develop Cabin Fever. This is to "simulate" the idea that Cabin Fever only becomes an issue if you have been isolated for a long time. 
* There is no risk of Cabin Fever in Pilgrim. 

** If any of this needs to be clarified (looking at you, Patrick/Hinterland, or anyone else who can speak with authority on whether additional changes have happened), let me know and I'll update the post.

I have a small set of suggestions that I believe will bring Cabin Fever into what I feel is a long-delayed state of harmony & alignment with the rest of the game's design. Just to set the tone, let me throw some important disclaimers down very quickly.

• I both expect and welcome disagreement on this issue, from the developers themselves and/or the community. My goal here is to start a helpful discussion on behalf of those who feel the mechanic needs adjustment, not to simply start a bandwagon. If you're happy with how Cabin Fever works, I want to hear from you. On that note...

• I am not interested in seeing any discussion on this topic or another topic related to TLD devolve into finger-pointing and flaming matches. This is, I believe, a contentious discussion point. So I'm asking folks, as I do on my channel, to be measured in their reactions so we can have a quality discussion & continue to raise that bar.

• I am not interested in doing away with Cabin Fever. Cabin Fever was added to prevent players from exploiting the game to rack up "days survived" when a state of survival equilibrium, so to speak, had been reached and a survivor could reasonably camp in one indoor location while hunting outside when necessary, rinse and repeat.

So, here's my idea. Let me know what you think, and I'll see you next t—oops. Habit.

- — -

1. Cabin Fever should no longer prevent players from resting indoors. This is the most immersion-breaking aspect of Cabin Fever for most of us, I think, and it's the component that should be completely removed. While some would argue that some unrealistic and  "gamey" mechanics are necessary to maintain the feeling of fun and even escapism in video games, the total inability to rest at all is too unrealistic. Nix this component completely — perhaps preserving the inability to pass time indoors, because at least that makes more sense than not being able to rest (discuss!) — in favor of the following...

2. Cabin Fever should, however, prevent players from recovering any condition (0-100%)  indoors. So, you can rest inside all you want. You can recover from exhaustion and afflictions such as sprains, food poisoning, etc., but if your actual condition is below 100, you won't be able to actually recover if you're resting inside, because you have those Cabin Fever jitters. While Cabin Fever should never have a persistent condition drop effect (it does not now; I'm just saying keep it that way), restricting condition gain while indoors would preserve the spirit of Cabin Fever and prevent players from exploiting the ability to perpetually rest indoors without a major restriction on gameplay mechanics (just not as major as not being allowed to close your eyes at all!)

3. Cabin Fever should likewise reduce the rate at which exhaustion recovers (among other suggested tweaks, per discussion on this thread). I think it also makes sense to replace the current full restrictions on rest and passing time with nuanced tweaks to the player character's normal state of being in addition to being prevented from recovering condition. Reducing the rate at which sleeping recovers is one obvious change — you have Cabin Fever, after all; you can sleep indoors, but you're not going to be sleeping well — but what else can be done? Should passive calorie degeneration increase due to anxiety / increased heart rate, requiring players to eat more?

- — -

Having laid all of that out, please share your candid thoughts and additional / alternative ideas for Cabin Fever. If anyone at Hinterland finds this idea — or even just pieces of it — resonating with them, especially Raphael & veteran team members, all of them (and the players in turn) will benefit from a lively, detailed, & respectful discussion.

Thoughts?

-H