Pillock

I sometimes like to write in the journal if I haven't got any pressing survival tasks to do.

I always have the intention to  record my thoughts and plans at different points in the game - I find it quite theraputic, and it seems to help organise my thoughts and keep me focused on what I should be doing next - but somehow, especially early on when I'm rushing about like a madman trying not to starve and freeze to death, I don't often feel I have enough time. The clock is still running when you're in the Journal screen! But I do sometimes dip into it instead of using the 'pass time' button (and then inevitably spend too long there and start losing thirst-condition by not paying attention).

I dunno. You can adjust loot amounts in the Custom Settings, and on the lower levels I haven't found there to be too many. I've even been running out sometimes.

1 hour ago, UpUpAway95 said:

Why can't it just slowly deplete the health bar like other afflictions, rather than adding yet another circle cluttering up the bottom of the screen?

Then there would be no point in adding it at all. 

Part of the idea is that the pain/comfort meter would be completely invisible, as long as you were completely healthy. And if you did start to suffer from afflitions or condition loss, it'd utilise the audio/visual effects over the whole screen (like it currently does for spains, headaches or very low condition) to give an indication that you are feeling discomfort or pain related to that affliction or condition loss. The 'circle' or 'bar' part of the indicator wouldn't really need to appear at all, except on the Status Screen, maybe.

The idea is not to add a new affliction, but rather to give a better and more immediate indication when you are suffering from one of the existing afflictions.

@UpUpAway95 & @ThePancakeLady

I wasn't intending to argue that the lantern isn't useful or doesn't have its place in the game. I do think, though, that the over-abundance easily available torches diminishes its value significantly - not to zero, but a lot lower than they were when burning brands were a part of the game.

I think that's my point, really - burning brands (or significantly nerfed pulled torches) would bring the other survival tools, like crafted torches and lanterns, much more into the mix and give the game a better balance between them.

I've had stones that I've thrown clearly miss visually, but still stun the rabbit.

Maybe they're sent into shock from the fright?

10 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

With a higher "fire time" penalty for drawing torches and a more limited burn time on the torch itself, I think it would not be as convenient to draw torches and would make it more tempting to craft torches. 

That would go some way towards it, yeah. But they'd also have to cap the maximum condition of torches pulled from fires (right now it's pretty easy to get them at 40-50%, which is way too high, I think). And they should also not be able to be relit once they fall below a certain condition level. That might sort it out. Even then, I'd still miss the old graphic representation of brands!

10 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

there is already an additional draw on the amount of cloth needed in the game due to the new sprain mechanic, so I'm not sure I'd be any more inclined to craft a torch anyways

Really? I honestly don't think that factors into it at all. There are over 200 pieces of cloth in the Coastal Townsite alone, in the form of curtains and towels. That's 400 bandages. (From one small area of only one map!) How many sprains are you getting?

I never bother with lanterns except for inside my main base. They're heavy to carry and they don't have any other uses beyond light. Torches can be used to save matches when lighting fires, for transporting a flame from place to place without spending more matches, and for scaring off wolves as well. They're an incredibly useful survival tool in TLD's world and when we had to craft them out of materials (rare-ish, in the case of lamp oil), they were also incredibly valuable. Now that we can pull infinite reuseable torches from campfires at the tiny cost of a few extra bits of wood, their value is totally trivial.

I think that's a shame. And it was a backward step for the game overall.

11 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

Ehhhhh I for one will not miss the pile of burnt out brands in the corner that I could never get rid of.

Well. They should fix that bit, yeah.

While we're at it, I've never understood what is actually happening when we 'Harvest' a burnt out torch into a stick. A torch is just a burning stick that we pulled out of a fire. So when it isn't burning any more, it is... a stick! What is this 2 minute harvesting process?

10 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

What I would suggest is perhaps that they add a mechanic that enables the collection of branches and that making a brand requires using a campfire to light a branch rather than a mere stick.  Alternatively, they could balance the "take torch" mechanic better by requiring at least an equivalent amount of time on the fire to the length of time the torch will burn (up to a maximum of 30 minutes).  That is, to get a 30-minute torch out of a fire, you would need to have a fire that would burn longer than 30 minutes.

Sounds reasonable. Although I do miss the aesthetic of the brand compared with the torch. I'd still like to see a distinction between the two. The main thing about brands was that you couldn't relight them, which meant you couldn't harvest loads of them at once to save up and use for mine/cave transitions (or for one-match fire lighting) - you had to craft torches for that, which felt much more satisfying and made lamp oil really valuable.

1 hour ago, Skelegutplays said:

The brand shall return!!

So the ”take torch” campfire option should be replaced with a ”make brand” option. To make a brand you would need a stick and a campfire to light it on. It would burn for about 30 ingame minutes and when its burnt it should be replaced by a burnt brand, which could be burnt in a fire for 3 minutes of burn time.

#ReturnOfTheBrand

This will always get my support whenever it reemerges as a suggestion.

Brands were just better, in terms of game balance. The "take torch" mechanic is way overpowered, and totally obviates any need to craft torches from cloth and lamp oil.

The (fairly brief) period when brands were in the game was a Golden Era!

I think mine is starving.

If I'm on low or zero calories and I find food... I eat it. I know I should wait until bed time to be efficient, but... I can't.

1 hour ago, FrozenCorpse said:

Cuz HH is one of the fastest ways to get a critter off you with minimal clothing damage...?  Least it was, at one time .. I think.. (heck, idk...).

Yeah, it still is, I think. It's just it weighs a heck of a lot and isn't useful for much else (if you've got a hatchet).

Now we've got the revolver, it's become a lot less attractive as an anti-wolf weapon.

The prisoners who made it through to Mystery Lake didn't go through the bus and the tunnel, I don't think - because the road doesn't go to Mystery Lake.

I think they must have climbed over the rocks to reach the transition area below Milton Park, and we just have to accept that NPCs are able to do such things while we are not.

1 hour ago, TheEldritchGod said:

Just a thought, make a microwave able to cook, but only during the aurora. Just make it a one "cooking surface" fire that only turns on during the aurora.

Would they blow up if you put cooking pots in them?

37 minutes ago, Revenant said:

A simple wish. Cooking pots are sometimes hard to come by in this game ...

Are they? I've usually got more than I can possibly use at once within a few days of starting.

38 minutes ago, Revenant said:

...essential for making large quantities of water and cook things faster

Using cooking pots is better than not, but I wouldn't in any way describe them as "essential". Not in a life-or-death survival sense, anyway.

I do generally support the idea of having more forging options, though (bearspearbearspearbearspear)

10 hours ago, ThePancakeLady said:

Interesting to hear that meat and fish left outside is subject to predation. I, and I think many others, have been under the impression that as long as we dropped the meat and fish where a predator did not see us do so, meant that it was safe from being detected by them, may not be as true as we believed. A bit eye opening, and it makes me a bit more glad I do not kill everything that moves, and leave huge piles of flesh all over the place.

I think it's just unharvested meatbags (from quartering) and unharvested carcasses that you have previously interacted with that are subject to "predation" (gradual loss of meat content).

In previous versions, there was a part of the bear behaviour that had them walk up to unharvested carcasses and appear to "eat" from them. But it didn't seem to directly affect the state of the carcass when I checked. I haven't seen this for ages, so I don't know if it's still a thing they do.

Ah, thanks. I did wonder as much after I posted that, actually. But not knowing anything about Mass Effect, it looked like a typing error when I first read it!

I've also since figured out what the second quote meant! I'm guessing it was a word-for-word translation from Spanish or something.

55 minutes ago, ThePancakeLady said:

My bad. I overlooked the fact that you had a blizzard going on. Aurorae are supposed to only happen during clear weather. With the blizzard, it sounds like you had a fairly significant bug occurring.

There's no reason that a blizzard should prevent the electrical impact of an aurora, is there? I mean, it'd stop you seeing the lights in the sky, but they'd still be there in the upper atmosphere, unaffected by the weather below, I'd have thought.

If it is a bug, it doesn't seem to me to be one that necessarily needs fixing!

13 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

Mackenzie is voiced by Mark Meer (most renowned for voicing Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series). We also have Jennifer Hale (who also voiced, amongst many other roles, Commander Shepard in Mass Effect)

Erm...?

14 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

why, if done, that visor in machine can be open, then there never nothing there is no?

Double-erm...?

Looking forward to the Devblog! And interesting to know that sprinting gives a small warmth bonus.
Thanks, as ever, for keeping up with these Mailbags. Always a pleasure to read.

1 hour ago, Lurve said:

Close.  The greatest feeling is doing it outside where you can watch the snow.  Stone Church in DP is my preference.

I'd go for one of the two lookout towers myself. The Mystery Lake one is more homely than the Coastal Highway one, so maybe that one wins.

But then again, they don't have open fires, and there's something to be said for staring into the flames to make you feel cosier during a storm.

Perhaps the Mountaineer's Hut with the door open, then? Problem with that for me is I've died in or near that blasted place so many times before that I can't ever really feel comfortable there. I can't relax and enjoy the fire because I'm always thinking, "Do I have enough fuel for tonight? Do I have enough fuel for tomorrow? How long is this blizzard going to last? Am I going to run out of food before I run out of fuel? Where do I get food from without freezing to death? Where can I find more matches? Why am I even staying here, when I could just run back to Pleasant Valley and live a nice comfortable Farmhouse?"

I for one am going to have to play the bloody thing again from the start before I try Episode 3, because I can't remember what happened. Unless they include some kind of story re-cap at the beginning of Ep3, I guess.

However, there is a point here, I think. We're all assuming that Astrid made it through the tunnel, aren't we? But the bus crashed into the landslide that blocked the tunnel, and Astrid was there after the bus crashed. So how would she have got through the tunnel? Or did she go over or around the blockage? And if she did, why couldn't Will go that way as well?

Jeremiah didn't seem to think that she came through Mystery Lake (or am I remembering that wrong?).

So how did she get out of Milton?

And how did the prisoners get to Mystery Lake without a rope to climb down the cliff from Milton Park?

(Methuselah got down there by materialisation, due to being, as he is, a supernatural entity!)

6 hours ago, ajb1978 said:

Ehh I don't know that it's OP, because it's not like you're getting free energy.  You're just getting a loan.  Once the effects wear off, your original fatigue level returns, minus whatever you had spent while under the effects.  Since I use it to squeeze in an extra rope climb or two, when it wears off, I typically drop directly to Exhausted.  IMO that's balanced.

I do wonder what they put in that drink. Imagine if you were dying of exhaustion, but drinking one can of Red Bull would make you able to Batman-walk up a hundred-foot cliff in 30 seconds, and the only side effect was a temporary mild headache!

The elevator manufacturing industry would go bankrupt overnight.

Antibiotics and mushrooms aren't strictly necessary for survival, as long as you never allow yourself to get food poisoning, and never allow your wounds to become infected. 

You can avoid food poisoning fairly easily; but you do need an infinite source of Old Man's Beard to make sure you can treat infection. Do they wash up on beaches?

The bit that I don't like about this system is that the burn time does not depend on how cold the location of the fire is: it depends on how cold the location of your character is. So, if you light an outdoor fire, and go indoors while your stuff cooks, the fire won't get any extra duration bonus; but if you stay outside, the fire will last longer.

To me this is utterly crazy.

You get more of a bonus to the duration of the fire the colder you are (or would be if you weren't next to the fire), so it's always more efficient to build a campfire in the coldest location you can find, as long as it's sheltered from the wind. It's supposed to be an incentive to building fire outside rather than inside, but it's just so counter intuitive to me that I can't really bring myself to engage with it for that purpose. I just put my fires wherever, and monitor them for burning time - if I overestimate how much fuel to add, I'll just harvest the remaining fuel into torches and then back into sticks. This is a bit of an unnecessary faff in my view, but it's a tolerable workaround for a very imperfect mechanic.

1 hour ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

If you want to play a board game based on The Long Dark IP, you might just want to wait a bit...  

Finally we might get multiplayer TLD!

14 hours ago, kristaok said:

This could work, I just hope no bar for sanity / insanity is added- EEK. 

Why, because it would break your immersion and sense of connection with the player character if s/he wasn't constantly as mad as you are?

Seriously though, given that pain a measure of how you're "feeling", it might make a happiness/well-being system a little unnecessary.

I have killed a bear in one shot with the revolver: standing on the deck of the Riken and firing into his rump as he walked past. He ran off towards the Lighthouse, and I found him lying dead on the road outside his cave the following day. I was rewarded with a lovely dose of parasites, which helped me regain my very low condition extra fast (because "rest as a resource" is disabled if you have parasites, so you can sleep-regain as much as you want).

If you don't aim the revolver (just fire from the hip), it seems to scare wolves every time, even if they're mid-charge. If you aim it at them, it not only causes an instant charge if they haven't already, but it doesn't scare them off either, even if you hit them - you have to actually bring them down there and then before they reach you. I'd say don't aim the thing at all unless they haven't seen you yet!

I think the effective range might be a lot less than the rifle's as well.