Ruruwawa

@Spakerman @fauxjargon Thanks for the extra detail -- the fatigue debuff is a very interesting wrinkle.   I also didn't realize that you could put the condition cap loss on pause day-to-day with a treatment.  Is there an "easy meat" debuff too?  (Other afflictions increase predator awareness, also exhaustion and being overburdened.  I call that the "easy meat" penalty.)

@Timber Wolf Hello old friend, great to see you around!    This might be a good challenge for you... I'm not doing it because I lose patience with micromanaging so quickly.  But I think Hushed River Valley is a better Interloper loot start than TWM in the first days of the game.  No flare pistol, but hacksaw + bedroll + good clothes on day 1 is hard to beat... if you know where to look and how to avoid getting wolfed.

1 hour ago, fauxjargon said:

Parasites cap condition, they don't reduce it.  The cap goes away once the parasites are cured, too.

1 hour ago, Spakerman said:

yes, the cap goes away but the condition does not fill itself back in.  If you started the parasites at 100% and had no other source of condition loss then after 10 days your condition will be 80% of max 80%... when the parasites affliction then clears you will be at 80% of max 100%.   So the affliction doesn't tick away at your condition, and if you were already below 80% condition then there will potentially be no lasting impact of the condition.

Interesting.  Is the course of the affliction different if you don't use tea/antibiotics?  Does the cap keep dropping as the days stretch past 10, 20, etc?  Or does it just stay at 80% if you don't cure it?

16 minutes ago, Drifter Man said:

At least I want to do something useful, so I go to the other bank to check the other carcass location. It's there, and I harvest it for 1.3 kg.

To pass the wolves I usually just jump down from this corpse and scoot up the path to the dam.  But maybe they were too close for that too?

47 minutes ago, JAFO said:

Deadpool progress update.. Deadpool #9 spawned on the BR/FM border, and by the time he reached ML had found 2 (!) Mackinaw jackets and a plaid shirt, among other sundries. Thanks to paying religious attention to not taking damage, after 3 days he was still at 100% condition. He has so far made his way to DP, and, at Day 13 is at 93% condition, has not yet used a stim, and has 2 stims on hand if needed. He collected the flare gun along the way, and has stashed some canned food along with enough coal, deer hides, rabbit skins, cured guts and saplings, to craft boots, mittens and a bow and arrows when he returns from his forging run.

He's done a full rethink of his tactics and strategies, which I'll cover in another post soon.

Whoa, sounds like a great start.   In reading about how folks are approaching this challenge, I've been surprised that more folks don't go for the bow.  Beyond the basics of managing food, water and condition, a lot of the rest sounds like luck, so why not go for it?  Once you have a bow, you'll be King of the Wolves.  That's the express path to cooking 5 and easier survival.

5 minutes ago, Drifter Man said:

Outside of the cave, I notice crows circling in an unusual place, high above some inaccessible point.

Probably for the deadman inside the cave you just left.  You'll see the same thing for the dead cave wolf at Monolith lake.

The really unusual thing is that the weather was good enough for crows!

At the end of the Retail Launch Trailer, there's a roadway (or bridge?) with lots of vehicles lighting up in the Aurora.  Will we ever get to see that in-game?  (I hope so, I get all kinds of feels from it!)

1 hour ago, Looper said:

I'm very happy for this post since i'm very much in disagreement with it . An exploit to me is simply a misuse of a game mechanic to get an unfair or unpredicted advantage that breaks immersion or difficulty.

Advantage over whom?  Yourself?

So you don't like 900 kcal/day, mountain-goating down from TWM, or stoning bunnies, etc?   You could just not do it.  I never skip ropes to cheat the carry weight mechanic, my Interloper games average about 1700 calories per day, and I shoot bunnies with bow and arrow.  I'm not saying my way is better, because there is no right or wrong here.  It's just a game, and that's the way I prefer to play.  I absolutely do not care if other people do these things -- seriously, let folks do whatever they enjoy. 

If you're looking for more challenge, tweaking the custom options can really help -- for example, try disabling healing from sleep.  That negates the eat-before-bed tactic completely.

1 hour ago, Looper said:

The real agenda of your post seem (maybe) to be that it is dangerous to discuss these issues and that we should just live with it. I strongly disagree for several reasons. First this is the wish list forum. Surely it can also contain other things than "I want [insert random canadian wildlife/gnomes/items/food]" .

The "agenda" for my post was to say I don't agree with your definition of 'exploit'.   (And I still don't.)  But by all means, discuss away!

2 hours ago, Looper said:

Surely the purpose of a forum is to discuss these issues among the players of the game - and not just say "it pointless, lets wait for the next game". 

It is, and I'm sure Hinterland read these forums.  We've seen a few suggestions implemented, and quite a few that weren't.  I make suggestions from time to time myself, but my expectations of direct action are very low.  Makes sense too, since I haven't given Hinterland any money since I bought the game for myself and a few friends.  I'll cheerfully throw money at a DLC or new game, however.

This premise of this thread seems a little off to me.   Isn't an exploit some some bug or emergent gameplay used to gain unfair advantage over a competitor?  For example, duping is a very common exploit in multiplayer games because it provides a huge advantage over other players.  TLD did have an arrow duping bug, and for all I know it still does.  But TLD is a single player game, so I never worry about it.  Easy to just ignore the extra items, because no competitors.

I think by "exploit" you might mean "a design I disagree with." 

Apropos to the topic:

Quote

Perfect is the enemy of good.  --Voltaire

This is especially true in entertainment.  In finance or banking every detail needs to be precise.  But entertainment, including computer games, has a limited shelf life.  Continually reworking old content is a dead end for a studio -- movies, tv, music or computer games.

I look forward to a nicely polished Wintermute, and eventually to a brand new game from Hinterland.  Fresh stuff.

I guess I'm the newest member of the "I love Lake Cave" club.   I came here to get my moose, and now I can't bring myself to leave. 

The entry passage into the cave has been windproof for me so far, even in some strong winds that seemed to be pointed toward the cave.  It's a lovely spot to hang out while cooking and a reliable spot for a moose hunting fire.

Nice views from here too...

Moose steaks and "hushed margaritas" (2 parts herbal tea, 1 part rose hip tea - freeze partially then shake well).  Add a snow shelter with a view and loper life doesn't get any better!

1 hour ago, Khan_Drichthyes said:

That would be Devil's Tower, in Wyoming.

I noticed the same formation that @dead frozen dude did, and this was my first thought.  Nice touch with the aurora.

Watching the aurora, and watching out for aurora wolves.

Traffic!

Dinner time at the Riken.

And for breakfast: coffee, bear steak and a blizzard.

23 minutes ago, Riotintheair said:

I've made the TWM assent once without a bedroll, but that was powered by 15 cups of coffee which your outerloper will never get - there's probably only 5 cups of coffee in the world available to him, maybe 10 if he gets exceptionally lucky at the coffee/tea crate on the TWM map (fortunately you don't need to climb for that one).

I think someone has detailed a day one TWM summit climb using snowshelters and ripping apart clothes, but I've never made it work for me. I think it was @Hotzn, and if not it was probably @Ruruwawa or @Drifter Man

I've done the day-1, no-coffee, tear-your-clothes-up rush to the summit several times, because I like getting out of TWM and to a forge asap.  Doubt I'll do it again though, since the HRV start is easier and so much closer to a forge.  I documented one run here:

I think Drifter Man tried this strat with a few of his TWM snowballs too.

Regarding coffee and tea, there are two such cargo crates in Interloper. 

  I had good luck in my current game and got 10 tea and 15 coffee for my troubles.

I love bright interiors.

2 minutes ago, Drifter Man said:

Thanks @Ruruwawa for your valuable combat experience... I need to add this method to my skill set, along with driving wolves out of the way using stones. Striking a match to make fire every time is too expensive.

Making a fire to chase wolves away is very reliable, but I agree -- it feels too expensive on Interloper.   I want to conserve my matches to combat freezing.

4 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

Not that I carry bait around - I don't like the risk that it might attract more wolves than I have baits - but do they pause now to eat it? That could make them easy targets indeed...

I carry a cooked bait, a lightweight sliver weighing 0.1kg.  As far as I can tell, it's not enough to materially affect detection range.  Drop it after the wolf barks at you.

The wolf doesn't pause.  Instead it walks slowly to the bait, picks it up, turns 180 degrees and trots away.  If you don't want to shoot them just use this seconds-long animation to break contact with the wolf.  Just be sure not to get closer to the wolf than the bait.

If you want to shoot the wolf, take a few steps back from the bait before shooting.  (It's roughly as close as you can get to a deer before it flees.)  If the wolf charges, you were too close and the wolf's "weapon! must attack now!" AI kicked in.

As for multiple wolves, more than one can be attracted to a single dropped bait if they've barked before dropping the bait.  I prefer to engage "get away!" mode when this happens and let them fight over who gets it.

Keeping watch.

2 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

Sounds like interloper wolves aren't so scary after all, when you are armed... I still avoid them out of caution, because Timber Wolf's test showed massive loss of condition in all cases... Can't hurt not to get hurt.

Yep, massive damage to clothing too, as I learned in the struggle I barely survived earlier.   But using bait I can reliably get an arrow into the wolf so it's either dead or running away, not chewing on me.  The biggest challenge is getting the arrow back, so it's a tactic I save for when I have a warm place to rest while the wolf is dying. 

4 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

I prefer to rely on the hammer, based on @Timber Wolf's meticulous research. Or am I making a mistake?

Hammer is a good choice, wolves run away even faster.  I carry one before I get around to crafting a bow and arrows.

I'm on my way back from TWM now (good haul), leaving a trail of wolf pincushions in my wake. 

On 6/30/2018 at 5:21 PM, Drifter Man said:

Interesting choice of priorities. What do other interlopists use the improvised tools for? For me, knife is needed for crafting, but on Day 3 it is still at least a few days before you can think of making a bow, and you didn't mention making arrowheads. And again for me, hatchet is only good for clearing scrub brush obstacles in the Hushed River Valley. Otherwise it's better to go without it altogether, considering that:

• it's heavy
• carcasses can be processed with a hacksaw, which is lighter, more easily found and maintained
• chopping firewood outdoors doesn't seem like a practical proposition on Interloper

For me it's hacksaw > knife > arrowheads > hatchet.   I think the biggest factor in favor of a hatchet is it's effectiveness against wolves in a struggle.  I made one in my current game because of HRV and I don't regret it... I stumbled into a pair of wolves in the fog and lived to tell the tale!  Hatchet really does seem to get the wolf to break off the attack earlier than knife does.  And now I have a wolf coat. 

Very nice!  Back in college (on Wisconsin!) I traveled with the camping club on skis to remote campsite in winter.  Our tool: a machete.  We had deep snow so we trod down a big area to compress it and quarried our blocks from that.  Our shelters were quite comfortable, even with just backpacking stoves.

And no cloth or sticks used for us either, just snow. 

2 hours ago, 4djes said:

Thank you very much. Can i make more scripts easilly?

Sure.  The autohotkey site linked in that other post has full documentation.  And the script I linked is just a text file, easy to see how it's done.

17 hours ago, 4djes said:

Only game pad? No keyboard?

You can use AutoHotKey on PC with a keyboard.  I've described in this post, and there's a "left clicking" AutoHotKey script attached at the bottom of the post.  Basically, it left clicks continuously as long as you hold down the F2 button.

1 hour ago, Timber Wolf said:

Probably not, but I might run some more tests in a state of exhaustion.  I really thought that would make a difference.  And since the sprained ankle tests had a much lower standard deviation, I kind of want to see what happens if I have several injuries.  And now that makes me wonder what difference it might make if I am dealing with intestinal parasites.  Hmmmm.  I guess I have more tests to run.

Test assbite while you're at it?