Pillock

+1 for this idea. I recently started up TLD again after a long break, and found myself in Mystery Lake. One evening I was harvesting a deer carcass near Clearcut and I got into a wolf struggle, so I tried to limp to the hut by the pond at the bottom of the frozen creek to shelter the night and recover a bit. However, darkness set in with heavy snow, and I could barely see 15 yards in any direction. All the hills and trees started to look the same. I wandered around for half the night in unrecognisable blackness and then found myself... back at Clearcut - but this time with a bear grunting in my ear. Areas like this - hills with fairly dense tree cover - are great for making you feel lost, however well you think you know a place. When I first played this game, there were only 3 maps and you had to start in Mystery Lake each time until you had "unlocked" Coastal Highway and Pleasant Valley by visiting them - so I know Mystery Lake pretty well. But I still found myself getting hopelessly lost and disoriented. I'd love to see this done over an entire map.

You wouldn't be planning on sharing your save where you've harvested every resource in the entire Gameworld for some poor unsuspecting person to try, would you? Because they would be quite mean!

Well, it's been a viable strategy forever. And it's been a well known one for nearly as long. The fact that the Hinterland haven't chosen to change it suggests to me that it's perfectly within the scope of how the game's "meant" to be played. (I don't like it either though!)

Aberystwyth is far more desolate and than anything depicted in the The Long Dark

More or less, yeah. My brain tends to get a bit scrambled when I try to do much mental arithmetic, but it strikes me that the game would have to start tracking your intake/expenditure as a ratio only when you first reached 0 calories, otherwise it wouldn't work. If it started tracking the ratio when you were full (at the start of the game, say), you would always be in the negative from then on because the game doesn't allow you to ever exceed your original "full" status. I think it would also have to kick in more quickly than cabin fever does, otherwise it might not even occur. That is, I've never contracted cabin fever ever, yet I nearly always have a negative indoors/outdoors ratio. I don't really get how that works! But yeah, something along those lines.

You're never going to suffer this debuff if you're using the technique of starving while awake and then eating and sleeping to regain condition each day when your fatigue runs out. The debuff doesn't kick in in time because you're mostly eating every day before you sleep. And even if it does kick in, it is cured the moment you do eat something before you sleep, so it never affects you very much. It doesn't deter starvation/sleep-regain as a daily routine at all, unfortunately. I like the idea of a 'cabin fever'-type mechanic, that would track your calorie intake/expenditure over several days, and if you're consistently in the red you'd get landed with a big debuff - one that's damaging enough to really force you into changing your behaviour over time in order to get rid of it.

I've suggested something very similar to this in the past, so you get my vote!

I agree with the rest of your post, but I wanted to reply directly to this last bit. I play with zero condition recovery and "Low" (minimum) at rest recovery. I combine this with maximum thirst rate, which means I can't sleep more than 7 hours safely without losing condition to dehydration. A full night's sleep from 'exhausted' (in two stints with a water top-up in between) is about 12 hours, and gives about 12% recovery (though its difficult to tell exactly now that the % reading is gone). More if I have herbal tea, but that's fairly limited in supply. Getting attacked by a wolf or a bear does take a week or so to recover from, but you aren't restricted to staying indoors doing nothing during that time. You have to be super careful about going out, but the character doesn't behave any differently when s/he's on low condition, so you can still get the same stuff done if you avoid further mishaps. Being on low condition doesn't make you weaker (perhaps it should?). Deliberately starving is fairly pointless with this set up, but on the other hand it isn't particularly damaging either. I feel like the Well Fed buff does do its job, which is to reward you for keeping your calorie level up. But it doesn't act as a real deterrence to starvation - short or long term - if the player wants to min/max in the most efficient way possible. The only way to do that is to introduce penalties, you said. And I'd be quite happy if that happened.

As far as Interloper goes, I don't think you can argue that the Well Fed buff is more advantageous than using the starvation mechanic, if you're going for absolute min-max longevity. It's worth having if you can afford it, but it is still a luxury bonus for when you're doing well, rather than a deterrence to starving. To me, it seems like Interloper is balanced deliberately to encourage starvation. (I don't find that fun, so I don't play it!) The only way that I've found to make staying fed more of an advantage than starving is by playing custom games with the condition regain set to the lowest possible values, so that if you spend the whole day losing condition from starvation, you don't get all of it back at night. But that was the case before the buff was introduced.

Something I've always thought would be a nice idea would be drawing. It would require attaching a basic programme to the game that could convert screenshots into charcoal-sketch images. Then, instead of passing time, we could make little bits of art (while also using up some of that excess charcoal we collect from fires and never get around to using for maps!).

So you think these larger Timberwolves are the Alpha of the 'normal' wolf pack? I'd assumed they were a separate breed of wolf that has its own pack of Timberwolves. That'd possibly even bring it into confrontation with the smaller wolf type.

It would also perhaps revive the need for torch brandishing as a way of scaring off aggressive birds? Especially if they're actually attacking you.

That sounds like a good interpretation to me. So, it could be a kind of 'phasing-in' of the new, more dangerous wolves so as not to unreasonably disrupt people's existing games? But once people have got used to them in time, the question still stands as to what value the current 'lone-wolf' type actually has in the game in the longer term.

Firstly, I don't know anything about Lupine variations so I may get some things wrong here. I'm also going to make a couple of assumptions about the future of the game which I fully accept may also be wrong. The first assumption is that the new larger, tougher, smarter Timberwolves that are going to make their TLD debut in Wintermute Ep 3 are going to be in addition to the other wolves that are already in The Long Dark, not a replacement for them; the second assumption is that they will at some point make their way into the Survival Mode. So this got me wondering: what is the reasoning behind having two different varieties of wolf in Survivor Mode, if that is indeed to be the case? If the Timberwolf is going to be "smarter", and potentially is going to have some form of pack/group behaviour AI, then do they not simply supersede the 'normal' wolves as a gameplay element? Is there really a good reason for continuing to have the 'normal' wolves in the game at all, if there's going to be an all-new-and-improved version of them? Improved AI and pack behaviour for wolves has been a long-time request from the playerbase, and something that Raph has consistently talked about as a development goal for Hinterland - and it's fantastic that it does appear to be coming to the game soon. But what of the old wolves, in that case? Do they serve a purpose any more? Purely from the perspective of Survivor Mode, would it not be better if Timberwolves, with their improved behaviour, just replaced the old ones as a gameplay threat to the player, rather than having 'good wolves' and 'crap wolves' in the game simultaneously? I don't know, maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick with this.

This has been the official position for a while, and I think most people accept it as is. However, I can't say I agree with it when it comes to Story Mode. It's a simple matter of player engagement with the narrative. Wintermute is one story, split into five episodes, not five different stories. It's going to have been eight months at least between the release of the Episodes 1 & 2 Redux and the release of Episode 3. In that eight months, I have simply forgotten what was going on, and I think I'm going to have to replay Episodes 1 & 2 in order to refresh my memory before I set out on Episode 3. This is really not ideal, because part of the experience is the player's own connection with the narrative. It's not just a passive experience like watching a series on Netflix or Amazon, where the story remains identical no matter how many times you watch it: we're actually involved in the story of Wintermute, the way we pace ourselves through the different stages, the order we choose to do things in and the decisions we make. If we have to replay the story a second time, or more times, then that connection is unavoidably altered - we know what's coming next and we might do things differently. That breaks the original sense of anticipation and tension that we got the first time, and I feel like it weakens the overall experience. If I'm going to have to wait another 8 months between Episodes 3 and 4, and another 8 months again between Episodes 4 and 5, replaying the whole thing from the beginning each time, I have to ask myself whether I really want to play them at all when they first come out, or whether I'm better off waiting until the full set is available. And that seems to me to run completely counter to the purpose of an Episodic release in the first place. That is, I can understand the advantages (I think) from a development perspective, but I don't think it makes for a good experience from the players' perspective. I appreciate that you want to deliver polished, high-quality episodes as opposed to ones that are rushed to a deadline - not many people are going to argue with that, least of all me. However, if eight months (or more) is going to be the standard for development time between Episodes, then personally I'd say that needs a re-think. It's too long. I would rather play 2-4 hours of high-quality, polished Story Mode every 4 months than 7-8 hours of polished, high-quality Story Mode every 8 months - purely, as I said, for reasons of maintaining that connection with the narrative. I appreciate that the standard has now been set in terms of episode play-time length for "The Long Dark Season One: Wintermute", and you may well not want to change it mid-season, but if Hinterland is planning to do an episodic release of a linear narrative-based game in future, then perhaps it's something to bear in mind. Sorry if I've put this post into an inappropriate part of the forum, but since the issue was raised by @Admin, I felt the urge to respond to it here! I hope it's taken as honest (helpful?) feedback from a dedicated player, rather than as unfair criticism or complaining (as might have been the case with a previous poster).

Don't know how commonly known it is, bit there are a couple of places outside the Carter Dam (Winding River side) where containers or backpacks can spawn inside those pipes. Access is blocked by piles of pallets which must be broken down before you can get to them.

Milton Basin's got to be up there? For rabbits, I've recently discovered that the little pond just over the hill from Mackenzie's plane crash is absolutely teeming with them. I play with all animal spawns on "Low", so normally there's not more than 2 or 3 in any one place, but that little pond has a good 7 or 8 all together! (Until you start killing them, natch.)

Not a crate, but in the upstairs storeroom of Grey Mother's house there's a lighter fluid can hidden behind some cloth that's hanging off one of the shelves. And underneath the overturned sofa in the Coastal Highway lookout tower there are sometimes some rifle rounds hidden. (obviously not on Interloper) I have a vague memory of breaking down cardboard boxes (in Quonset?) to find flares. (I always play on Custom settings these days, so I'm afraid I can't tell which ones might be equivalent to the preset Experience modes.)

Yep. That happens with campfires as well.

I'd say you made the right choice with "The Long Dark". Cheers as always for the Mailbags! Looking forward to Ep3.

Actually, I was joking. But I have been told by someone was told by someone who knows about dogs that dogs do distinguish the colour blue more clearly than reds and yellows and greens, which all look alike to them. So, if you throw a tennis ball into some long grass, your dog will find it harder to locate than it would a blue coloured ball. So maybe there is something in this: a blue flare might appear brighter and more off-putting to a wolf than a red flare?

I prefer the house down the hill (if it's not burned out!) on the edge of the townsite - the one with the little veranda on the front. It has a fireplace, more storage, and generally feels more homely to me than the one up the hill. Plus it has a good view of the townsite itself from the front door, where you are safe from wolves and bears on immediate exit.

It is a well known fact that timberwolves are scared of blue

I like to get bouts of food poisoning and intestinal parasites in the early part of my games (or rather, I'm careless at avoiding it), so I often go there to forage for mushrooms. I like the ambience of the place, when the weather's good. But I'm not sure I'd choose to live there...

No. I've never been that lucky.