Salty Crackers

I'm currently working onsite in Alaska and won't be able to play the update for a couple months, but I've been looking over the forum and the wiki and have noticed a few food items I feel could use a bit of tweaking. Keep in mind I'm going entirely off the wiki. -At cooking 1, 4 acorns are worth 320 calories. Ground up and cooked in oil for acorn bannock, the acorns are now worth 250 calories and dehydrate you, with no advantage in cal/kg or beneficial afflictions. I see no reason to ever cook it. -Porridge should be able to be cooked in recycled cans. It would make sense to be able to make gruel with flour and water too. -As mentioned above, carrots should be worth less calories. -Skillets should be able to boil at least 0.5L of water. I didn't see anywhere whether they could or couldn't, but I'm not able to test for myself currently. -Salt should be able to be rendered from seawater in a cooking pot. With salt being renewable, broth will also become renewable, giving late-game survivors another option food wise rather than just meat and fish. -Why can't we cook anything with tomato soup? Canned corn and ham would also make good ingredients, especially as corn is such a bad food by itself. Looking over the changelog, this looks like a really cool update! I'm a little concerned about the balance on being able to place ice fishing holes anywhere, as I feel the ability would boost DP (and the Riken in particular) to being objectively the best place to stay long-term. I'll wait until I try the system for myself before I make any judgements. It certainly makes some spots a lot more viable for long-term stays, like the Milton Basin and the Bleak Inlet prepper cache (if we can fish by Summit at Ravine's End)

I play with healing during sleep disabled, so I never noticed. Still a viable strategy, but if you really need the condition back, just wait until you're healthier.

Before Cooking V I eat as much food below 20% as possible immediately before bed, as long as I have antibiotics. No matter how many instances of food poisoning you get, you only need 2 antibiotics and 10 hours of sleep to cure it, and you lose no condition while sleeping. There isn't much of a point in conserving antibiotics as the only use after Cooking V is treating Infection, which is very easy to prevent that late in the game. If really desperate, this also works on raw meat and fish, which can cause food poisoning even after Cooking V (but raw predator meat will give you a TON of parasites risk, so don't eat it under any circumstance!)

That's great to hear! I've been following your posts since the early days of the Man in the Dam and was really sad to hear that you were quitting TLD for good. Your posts are some of the most entertaining and well-written stories on the forums, and have been for over 5 years.

You said that you had several runs before your 103 day run that were really short. If you were sprinting around and died in less than a day, it would inflate the average calories per day. I believe the statistics choose the largest number over all runs and not just the statistics from the longest run.

This brings me back. I started playing around the Timberwolf Mountain update, and remember complaining on the forums every time something changed about the game. Looking back, it's pretty clear that change was for the better. I still miss a few small things about the old TLD, like the time being displayed as 'about X hours of daylight left' and being unknown during blizzards, and loot when searching appearing at any time on the search bar, rather than always at the end. I believe around this time you still need a hatchet to harvest saplings, so you should probably make for DP ASAP (as FM doesn't exist until the next update). I didn't play much Interloper around this time, so your best bet for advice would probably be reading some of the old Survival Stories from 2016.

The weather is truly awful. While there is plenty of wood to stay warm while fishing, the walk back to the trailer is long and you have to get around two wolves on the river. I see the region as a good place to get lamp oil while living in Blackrock.

To be fair, it might not be the best idea to idolize Mallory. His Everest expedition didn't go too well for him. I've found Blackrock to be an excellent region to survive in long term, with the Penitentiary as the main base. You have wolves and bears inside the prison yard, deer outside the entrance, and a pack of timberwolves outside the Power Plant easily hunted from behind the closed door. The workshop has an ammunition workbench and a milling machine (without the obstacle course!). You could live in the Staff Quarters without a bedroll, but I find it easier to live in the gate house or workshop.

Enjoy waiting 30 minutes to add coal and needing a hatchet to harvest saplings. Do a write up, if you can! And say hi to Fluffy for me!

The game was a lot harder back in early access, when the sandbox was mainly for testing mechanics rather than a game in its own right. I'd like to challenge all the hardcore Interlopers to boot up Vigilant Trespass through the Time Capsule and give Interloper a shot there.

It still takes over a week to recover from a bear mauling. Even if I enabled cabin fever, I could just wait a week in a cave with top-tier clothing without cabin fever risk at all. My thinking is that of your character is willingly living in a cave out of fear of going crazy indoors, they're probably already crazy. I just wanted to get rid of the single most annoying thing to micromanage in the game. Hibernation as a strategy was big back when I first started playing, when there were still public leaderboards for days survived. My goal isn't to get to an arbitrary number of days survived, but to explore the world and actually enjoy my time surviving.

No, it's not easier than Stalker. Most settings are at Interloper level, while some are at Stalker level. By definition, the difficulty lies somewhere between the two modes. I explicitly said the difficulty is probably less than Interloper, depending on how you factor in the very slow condition recovery versus the fast recovery of Interloper. The reason I use medium base loot availability is that I want to be able to find knives and hatchets, but there is no individual setting for that. Otherwise, I would be on low base loot availability. With Interloper settings for loose items and empty container chance, I get a lot less loot than in Stalker (while still more than Interloper) with the exception of the cargo containers, which is why I have the house rule of leaving behind half the loot in the cargo containers.

My settings are based on Interloper, with base resources set to medium, no at-rest condition recovery, no cabin fever, no birch bark tea, decay rate set to high and rifle spawns enabled. Is it easier than Interloper? Probably. But with no at-rest condition recovery or tea, I have to carefully manage my condition, only gaining around 10-12% a day when all needs are positive. It makes the game more enjoyable for me than being able to gain half my condition back every night.

The point of putting it in a prepper cache would be to force you to look in multiple areas around the map rather than beelining towards the guaranteed spawn and immediately leaving the region.

I was thinking the prepper cache would have some unobtainable items, like either a hatchet or knife (not both!), or clothing like a thick wool sweater or climbing socks, along with some food. With a regular hatchet or knife, there is an incentive to use the Milling Machine once you run out of whetstones.

What 'house rules' do you follow in-game? I personally use quite a few. Clothing- You are not allowed to wear two hats or scarves. The innermost torso slot must be a shirt, rather than a sweater. This makes the Long Wool Scarf and Wool Shirt actually valuable relative to their rarity. Food- You may not eat ruined food. Raw meat can be left uncooked until it is ruined. This makes Level 5 cooking somewhat less overpowered and makes me more realistically cook food when I need it, rather than cook everything at once. Gameplay- You may not use the 'torch trick' to save matches. You can't chop up carcasses into tiny bits to grind Cooking. You cannot scare wolves away from carcasses by aiming weapons at them. This is mostly personal preference, as I view these tactics as bordering on exploits. Loot- You must leave behind half of the loot in Cargo Containers and Airline Food at the Crash Site, decided randomly. I play on a modified Interloper with base resource availability set to Medium. This means that the cargo containers are absolutely packed full of loot, while the rest of the world is comparatively empty. The Crash Site will easily have 7-8 Airline Food. Using a random number generator to get rid of some of the loot means some crates will be nearly empty while others will be mostly full. It also makes it possible the Summit won't have some of the high-tier clothing, if you're unlucky. Other- The only items you can harvest for cloth are clothing, pillows, bedrolls, and pieces of cloth (like in the Camp Office). This is to make cloth a more critical resource in the long term.

What would be a viable reward for dealing with the timberwolves? The Milling Machine would be useful to repair crampons, but they are repairable with a toolbox and scrap metal. I've already mentioned Noisemakers. Would you want something like the prepper cache spawning in Interloper?

While the text is almost certainly a bug, heated seats and lights would be awesome. I hope this is something you're actively working on, rather than something you scrapped and accidentally left a bit of code for in the game.

The game isn't balanced around Interloper. The majority of players are a lot more casual, sticking with Pilgrim or Voyageur and focusing more on the pensive exploration rather than hardcore survival. Hardcore Interloper players are overrepresented on the forums as they are a lot more invested in the game. This doesn't mean that Interloper is not a valid way to play the game- it can be one of the most rewarding survival experiences out there. It just means that the devs don't have to justify adding in regions by making them viable for the least popular experience mode.

The only use I see for the Ballistic Vest is if you want to knife fight some wolves for the meat. Still probably not worth it, especially on Interloper, where you would be forced to use the improvised hatchet at best. It would be fun to try and knife fight a timberwolf pack with it on, mainly to see if it could be done. Even on Interloper, you still need to visit Blackrock to unlock the Noisemaker blueprint, so there is at least some reason to go even if you don't want the Ballistic Vest.

Blackrock works by itself, like the Ravine. If you really want to shorten it, I would go with BP for Blackrock Prison or BM for Blackrock Mountain.

A couple suggestions for QoL mods: A can opening tool selection screen, like when you break open ice fishing holes. Default to the can opener when it is in your inventory, and default to smashing if you have no tools. Otherwise, show a selection screen with the available tools, as well as the option to smash open the can. Moving lit torches and flares to the start of the firestarting menu, and moving mag lenses to the front on clear days (while still behind torches)

The torch doesn't keep wolves at bay as far as a lit flare, so it may have something to do with that. With a flare, you don't have to face them. My favorite way of dealing with packs of timberwolves is with a bow and a lit flare. When the pack first spots you, light the flare and drop it at your feet. The timberwolves will never attack as long as you are standing on the lit flare, so you can shoot them with the bow at your leisure. If you run out of arrows, simply pick up the flare, walk over to your arrows, and drop the flare once you get the arrows back. This also works with campfires, but you can't retrieve your arrows and you are vulnerable if the wind shifts and blows it out. Once a timberwolf is injured, it will no longer attack you, so if you injure all of the timberwolves in a pack, you are safe, although the morale meter will remain until enough of them bleed out. If only one timberwolf survives, it will always flee when you approach after you initially break the pack morale. This can be useful, as timberwolves still hunt rabbits and deer like wolves, and can be driven off the carcass by simply walking up to them.

My biggest request would have to be the return of Fluffy. The Dam just isn't the same without the sense of terror when you first enter. To my knowledge, Fluffy was originally removed as the new interior of the Dam was too hard for the wolf AI to navigate. If someone were to make this mod, they would probably have to declutter the turbine room where Fluffy used to spawn, and possibly remove some of the electrified wires if they damage animals as well.

I think the fact that the character shivers when they are freezing makes a lot of sense, and forces the player to be in better condition when hunting. Having said that, the animations seem jerkier than they used to be, and should definitely be smoothed out a bit.