Joelle Emmily

Articles regarding wood shavings as cattle feed: https://www.thegazette.com/2013/02/25/northeast-iowa-cattle-herd-thriving-on-sawdust-based-feed https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/oct/28/food.foodanddrink2 EDIT: Article outlining a moose's dietary requirements, which is approximately 10,000 calories or about 70 pounds of feed a day. https://forum.americanexpedition.us/bull-moose-information-facts-photos-and-artwork EDIT2: The Massai drink cows's blood and milk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aslbbvX5YvQ

I'd dispute that. Cows... ones not on a feed lot, don't eat much more than dear, and certainly less than a herd of them. They can just as easily route under snow to find grass and old dandelion and so forth as a dear, and they can also eat the chuck from kills, such as bone, connective tissue, brain, and so forth. For the vast majority of human agriculture, we fed cows bits or other animals... and bits of themselves... which didn't turn out so great... but it is feasible. They can also eat wood, if you shred it up and soften it for them. Personally, I think that'd be a great time waster in game, whittling sticks or branches, soaking them in warm water for several days, then feeding Mooington the resulting mush. Her droppings might be good for something as well! Not to mention the milk! There's an African tribe that makes a paste out of a certain rock to feed to their cows(not the same species as here), which enriches its milk with minerals. Then they make a kind of slurry using the milk and a little bit of the animals blood. They can also very easily tolerate fish, shockingly well in fact! There's a youtube video with a rather beautiful Indian cow feeding rather happily, just search "cow eat fish". Just as a pack animal, I think it'd be well worth the extra work feeding and caring for it... in real life anyhow... it's such a shame the world doesn't end...

Well, a dog going feral during aurora could be a plot point... maybe you have to tie your dog up securely during them and just let the insanity pass... or, if you leave him outside, maybe you lose him for a few in-game days until the two of your stumble upon each other again. Or my favorite, TINFOIL DOGGY HAT! Or maybe it only affects him when he's outside, but when he's inside he gets all nervous and whiny and you have to calm him down. There are literally endless story possibilities! Also, at the risk of being pedantic, polar bears are the only predatory bears, all other bears are scavengers, and most are omnivorous, not carnivorous, and brown bears mostly only eat fish just before hibernation. Almost the only time a bear will attack, is when they're defending young, or if your overly disturb them. 9 out of 10 encounters at a campsite will result in a bear running away whining like a big dog. Moose on the other hand, are massive jerks... EDIT: Grizzlies can also be jerks, but mostly won't attack if your keep your distance. EDIT2: Personally, I'd want a cow companion/sled puller. I love cows, and since this is a farming community, they should be around. They're docile and loyal and when you look into their eyes, you know they love you... Of course, they really don't know you're going to put a pin in their head in a few years...

Alrighty then. The topic of animal companionship, or even expended transportation, seems like a valid one, and was promised by hinterland in an old roadmap. In it, they suggested horses as a means of fast travel, and I'd assume having one would entail some interactivity... they might even follow you around when not in use... Dogs seem like a good idea, it would definitely make the game seem more comfortable, less lonely... and there's no real reason they should be specifically excluded, unless the devs see a reason too... But I think features and expansions on game play, such as pets or beasts of burden, are best solved with mods. If a mod existed where an individual could import a dog or whatever, it wouldn't interfere with the greater community's enjoyment of the base game, they could easily ignore it if they wished, or, participate after playing the baseline features. The power of mods.

It "could" exist... Google is your friend dude.

@ManicManiac I have no conclusion, nor am I saying you are correct or incorrect, what I've said is, that this is a game, and if the devs, or a modder wanted to add a feature such as this in, they would... and that your reasoning is simplistic and faulty. You assume an intention which has not been stated by the devs, and you draw parallels with the real world, only to dismiss other real world explanations which do not fit your conclusion. You began with the answer you wish to be true, then drew your line out of the proverbial maze of wisdom and knowledge, utterly ignoring its boundaries. I truly pity you buddy, trapped in a 2 denominational would world of easy answers, devoid of depth and rich meaning... like an endless field of corn, homogeneous, unchanging, variationless... or like the man, hammering a screw into a board, because he can't find a screwdriver...

Why does this stand to reason? What evidence do you have to support your conclusion? Or is it just supposition... which it is. You're assuming whatever mechanism causes one species to be effected, would automatically affect another. They are lots of diseases and aliments which effect wolves which do not affect dogs, and vis versa... What do you base this analysis on, besides your guess. Did the devs say it would affect dogs? Would it affect a cat? What region of the brain is it supposed to be affecting? Or is it more of a hormonal imbalance? What artifact about the in-game aurora are you privy to, that the rest of us are not?

And you may have missed my point, or ignored it entirely, there is nothing saying anywhere that a dog could not be your companion... and not attack you when the zombie aurora from space drive the other mammals nuts. Humans don't seem effect, nor are the dears or rabbits or moose... in the real world, moose are totally more dangerous than bear, they're just giant pricks... Maybe it's because we as humans, and rabbits as rabbits, are out of direct radioactive contact with the aurora, and so, don't go crazy... but that doesn't work because bear and wolves both den in caves and burrows... Maybe it's the stereoscopic nature or the predator's eyes... no, then it would also include us... Maybe it's the increased amount of white matter... Nope, still includes us.... Amygdala? No, we all have about the same size proportioned to our body... I go it! Maybe it's magic and they can make anything be anything. GREAT GIDDY GOD! It means we can have doggy companions if the studio so choose. Or if a modder does... I wonder if a modder has...

Guess this also didn't make sense to the devs... Although I think at this time, you also couldn't sleep in cars, but now I'm pretty sure you can... swings and round abouts, swings and dabedabodudu.

Guess 4000 years of Inuit tradition didn't make it on the list...

Why would you wish to believe something untrue? Why not just be hopeful instead? Does it really require a cognitive dissidence and blind faith to believe they'll deliver on their promise? If so... I don't know what to say... If I didn't think I might be kick banned again, I'd show you how easy it is to mod... anything.

Black bears typically do not attack humans, rabbits are more apt to bite you than wolves... blah... blah... The Long Dark takes massive liberties with what's believable... an aurora strong enough to produce sustained voltage in a transformer, would also be strong enough to bath a person in enough x-rays and other high energy particles to kill them instantly, and computers would just melt... if the game's magic wand isn't powerful enough to make loyal dogs believable, then it's just not believable... And didn't you and I have this exact same argument 3 years ago? EDIT: You'd also fry to a crisp due to exponential increases in UV and other lower energy particles reaching ground level. Edit2: You'd also be blinded by white flashes going off in your retina from increased x-ray and gamma radiation... EDIT3: Oh yeah, the atmosphere would be stripped away by stellar winds rather quickly! EDIT4: Also, there seems to be a massive misunderstand of the science behind auroras, they are not caused by the earth magnetosphere, they're caused by highly charged particles falling into the earth's atmosphere around its magnetic force lines. Those charged particles then excite any atoms it comes in contact with, turning the planet's atmospheric gas into a plasma... kinda like how those novelty globes work. The only real electrical potential which an aurora could generate, is static electricity, or beta particle radiation, ie, free unbound electrons.

All game developers are losing my respect, and... I don't really owe them anything to begin with, I paid for the product, furthermore, I paid for it when certain promises were made to the community via their roadmap. Personally, I think Canada and other countries should go the way of Australia, and start suing and otherwise legislating these companies into good practices. No Man's Sky is a huge example of bait and switch, Sean Murry sat there and promised the world; then Hello games turned around and sold an early access at full price. Only in the last few months has the game come into line with what Murry and co promised. Peter Molyneux over promised on every single game he was ever involved in...Anthem... Fallout 76... Andromeda... the list is literally endless. The gaming industry is an absolute mess, and no one seems to really care... Here is what Hinterland said they were going to add to the game, but haven't, when I bought it in 2016: MOD SUPPORT!, Cougars, Axes, wellbeing system(all we really got was cabin fever), primitive fire starting, more first-person presence, NPCs in Sandbox, parley system (all we have is a button masher), improved fire starting (IE blowing mechanics), snowshoes/skis, spring Sandbox, moving water, improved fishing mechanics, wolfpack behaviours (they stand around in groups, but the AI does not interact), wildlife interactions IE Wolves vs. Bears (if it's there, I've never seen it happen), Grizzly Bears, Sandbox survivor personas (I assume a character selection), VR, crafting for safehouse customization, crafting for clothing customization, full-seasons sandboxing, travel options (IE canoes and horses), long-distance travel, planting(crops I assume), and sandbox AI community social dynamics... That is a very long list of stuff, and even if it was a ""theoretical", would like to have list, it shouldn't have been posted to a roadmap with time frames and update names. They made it look like an expected feature set... And even if it wasn't intended to be a lie, it ended up being one. A very large part of me believe that they're pushing back mod support integration, because if they do allow mods, they would be instantaneously showed up by the community. Want such and such? FireStarter80 coded it and built new assets. You want so and so? DarkLongBoy built a backend addon that'll allow you to do that yourself... If you saw an advertisement for a colour television, and when you got their it was monochrome green(yes I'm dating myself), you'd be justifiably livid... Cellphone carriers are now forced, by law, to unlock your phone so you can switch carriers while retaining its use... a battle is continuing as we speak for the right to repair farming equipment... almost every jurisdiction has lemon laws pertaining to cars... Every industry has checks and balances... except software. Is Hinterland the worst? Not even close, there's much worse out there. Should we give them a break for not being complete con-men? No, absolutely not. In any other circumstance, they stole my money, and did it 30 times over because I kept buying copies and giving them away. The Long Dark is a very big reason I no longer gift keys or games... not the only reason, but a large one... it's one of the reasons I no longer get excited for new games... And you can say they have legitimate reasons for not expanding the game too far beyond what it currently is... having only 2000 concurrent players and only middle of the road sales would be a very big reason for that... but I really do not care. They've made a decision, it's alienated a portion of the community, and that, essentially, is life, it's the reality of software design and allowable false advertising. But why Hinterland and The Long Dark has hit so close to home? It's because it's always been uniquely Canadian. In winter, I can look out my window and see a scene very close to what's in the game. Or not see, because we frequently have whiteouts exactly like what's in the game. I walked around Pleasant Valley and Mystery Lake and am convinced they referenced photos from places I've been. And they received Canadian taxpayer's dollars through "the board's of Canada", which is the generic catch all term for the million and a half funds and foundations that give Canadian companies money to produce something. I expected my countrymen to be better than EA, and Bethesda, and Konami, and Hello Games... and every other shady publisher willing to lie just to push another few units out the door. In the gaming world, The Long Dark is as iconic as Canadian, as Mounties... but their business practices, wouldn't seem out of place if their headquarters were in silicon valley... That's my rant. As for the supposed technical issues, and comparing games, it's not apples and oranges, nor can there be something inherent in the coding to make modification excessively difficult, unless you're attempting to obfuscate something within the instruction set. Other games that have no inherent support for modding, but have robust communities, are Stardew Valley and Satisfactory. Nothing in their code is setup to load external libraries or assets, both are VASTLY different games and use radically different engines, but both accomplish modification in near identical fashions, and in which KSP ORIGINALLY did modding, before Squad inserted a preloading procedure to look for one specific file which then loads other mods. And I am very aware of the evolution of KSP, because I was involved with it's modding community. How modding is accomplished when it's not directly supported, is through code injection. or sometimes memory manipulation followed by injection. Some basic understanding of a program's defined calls are need to accomplish this correctly, but basically, a boot strapper inserts itself into the loading of a piece of software, and adds more executions between existing ones. If you'd like to visualize how this occurs using the language you already understand. Imagine you've written a function, then someone comes along, changes the name of your function, inserts a new one with the original name so the program automatically calls it, then re-appends your function to the bottom of their's... or vis versa, sometimes you want the original code to load first. That's basically it. That's modding in its most basic, and complex form. Every single piece of software does this to some extent as well, whether you're calling Microsoft's native APIs to do a thing, or you're fixing Unity's glitchy native physics with the extremely common patch, everything has some kind of modification to existing libraries to do something, adding to one that someone else has created for a game, is no harder or mysteriously difficult. Sometimes things don't work, sometimes they act in a manor that isn't expected... but the exact same thing happens during a regular development cycle, and you just have to work out the bugs. SAYING you won't allow mods, or talk about specific mods, is a jive, Hinterland has it's archived versions of the game, that they specifically say they will not give technical support for... mods would be no different, and would not generate very much additional requests for service than the legacy versions likely do, nor would they require a novel approach to deal with, in both cases, you simply reply, "I'm sorry, we do not offer support for [legacy/modded] games. The community helping one another on a game's public board without the company being involved or enforcing, literally happens everywhere all the time. I don't want to outright say that their official statements are a lie or outright obfuscation... but I can't really think of another plausible explanation. the only answer is, they wont absolute creative control over the customer experience... which is why they're ranked 200th... and losing to Raft...

I find statements like these to be... complicated... which is definitely not meant to be complementary. Whether or not The Long Dark is modded, is not Hinterland's decision, the fan base will modify the game if they choose. Highly modded games are usually indicative of highly popular ones, the more people play, the more likely someone who knows what they're doing will become annoyed at some aspect of the game, and attempt to "correct" it. At least in their eyes. Vampire the Masquerade received some heavy-duty mods, Nestor Gomez(KSP) at one time wasn't going to support them, now KSP lives on them, Stardew Valley uses code injection, Dangerous Waters, a very old and very discontinued game, has a loyal and strong mod community keeping it alive, GTA 5... I read somewhere, on some Hinterland thread, that the lead designer, I really can't be bothered to look up the thread or even his name, stated that Unity doesn't lend well to mod support... KSP is written in Unity, and they ported from version 3 to 4 to 5 during development, and kept mods alive during the process. Actually, KSP is a good example of one way to do mods. The game itself doesn't actually support mods directly, it instead loads an external library, separately maintain by the community, which then loads properly formatted plain text files and libraries. The Hinterland Dev also said they had to decide what mods they'd like to see in the game. Again, not really their choice, as soon as a way in is given, beyond code injection and manipulation, someone is going to bodge something together that is counter to Hinterland's "wishes". Also, no game, that I'm aware of, offers technical support for mods, every single studio states something along the lines of, "please uninstall all mods and attempt to reproduce the crash," or whatever. Even save files that have had mods applied in their histories are usually excluded from direct support. Again, KSP offers mod technical support through their community... direct technical also actually, we're basically computer and space nerds, and some on the forum expend herculean amounts of effort to help people get things to work. Satisfactory is another great example of a studio not taking an active role in mods, but encouraging their community to play. At first, it was a bodge using some kind of DirectX hack to get code into the game... now it's a loader or something. I'm not sure how the new version works actually. Update 3 broke everything, mod wise... Coffee Stain literally said, "sorry, but look, pipes!" Everyone had a right old laugh, then within a few weeks, the community got almost everything back up and running. My only interpretation of statements like these from Hinterland is, "this is our game, and you'll play it they way we want you to." Which is a huge sign reading "go away" to me. One of the reasons I got involved with The Long Dark way back when, was because of the promise of future mod support... I think to some extent, the ambiguous statements on modding, restricting discussion to the theoretical and the like, is an attempt to not avoid alienating part of the potential audience... but I interpret them as a passive aggressive rejection of the concept... Or maybe they're afraid a prospective modding community will show them up, insert something they wounder why they didn't think of first... or it's as basic as artistic control. Or it's authoritarian and this whole post gets censored, which at this point, I'm assuming, hostility to mods amd new mechanics was the reason I stopped playing a few years ago. Games live and die by their power users, people who have some kind of devotion to a game, who buy copies to give away(I checked, prior to 2017 I bought 30 copies), or write mods to add realism, or conversely, cartoonish antics, or make episodic stories to post on youtube... Winter's Embrace brought me back to the game for a little while... I got the badge, cleared out a few regions... now, I'm not sure what'll bring me back to the game tomorrow... or cause me to stream it again... I definitely can't say, "that's a cool mod, let see what a playthrough will be with that!" Which is somewhat heartbreaking, The Long Dark got me back into gaming, got me on Steam, made me care about the character... it WAS basically the only game of it's kind, and uniquely Canadian... Now it just feels like an old game whose time's past... Hinterland could change that over night... probably won't though... theoretically speaking... Which BTW, should actually read, hypothetically speaking.