stratvox

I'm a hundred and seventy days in on a custom, cold and blizzards set to max, voyageur resource base, all afflictions (so predator meat in early game is a gamble), fire doesn't overcome ambient, struggle damage cranked, and animal awareness and scent increase set to max. I just came into Pleasant Valley. Between maximum cold settings and maximum blizzards it's a hell. So much blizzard it makes getting around the region very difficult... PV is big and that allows the blizz setting max opportunity to mess with your life. You get like halfway across the field and all of a sudden all the faraway stuff disappears and thirty seconds later the wind's cranked, you've got all the down arrows on your temp meter, and you can't see sfa. My POV on lower difficulties is that I (when I had No Idea What I Was Doing Back In The Day) successfully passed a night on the ledge up to the summit on TWM, and that was only because I had the bearskin bedroll. I'd ... messed up and got exhausted on the ledge. So, I slept. All night, in one hour shots. If I'd had the bedroll I would've been in trouble, but the bearskin kept me in positive territory all night. When I woke up shortly before dawn my FL was -10, or +2 in the bag. That'd've been -5 with a normal bedroll. The bearskin's ability to open up a far greater number of places one can sleep in relative safety makes it not exactly necessary but really useful.

My personal head-canon on all this is that we're dead and in purgatory. TLD is a very Canadian purgatory.

I take it. It's +12 takes many marginal situations and makes them easily survivable. I don't find its decay rate to be that bad; it's well over a month before you want to even think about repairing, and given the bear population on Great Bear supplying that is not really difficult. I tend to end up having the bear skins pile up anyway. If you have moose on outside (armour, waterproof) and bear on inside for coats, you'll only need a bear skin once every six months or so for the coat. It's relatively high decay rate's not really a big deal. There are a surprisingly large number of nooks and crannies in many of the regions that don't qualify as caves but will offer protection from a blizzard. When you're looking at bunking out in one of those, the bear skin bedroll can make the difference between living and dying. I usually play custom now with blizzards and coldness set to max and yeah... it matters.

I'm still on my first playthrough, and playing very deliberately. I'm definitely going for completely going over the map on this playthrough. Working the region over, you might say. There are a lot of cool little spots that I've found. Liking this one quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to checking it out in survival as well.

The stone work in the new region is on point. I never thought I'd see flowing water like this in the game. This opens up a bunch of new possibilities, imho. -------- The face of this region is cut by many river gorges. -------- Looking back while leaving a quick warm stop: -------- I had a feeling about that mine, and I got away with tons of loot. Getting it out, however, shows one of the best overall areas I've ever seen in this game. Look out for that first step... it's a lu-lu. It is hard to explain how happy the look of the snow in these two pictures makes me feel. The weather is so good in this game. Also a pretty nice shot showing off some of the landforms. The spectacular spectacular land forms. -------- I was exhausted after the two trips up and down (and many go drinks hammered in) so I passed out in a conveniently located cave. Next morning started out foggy and I continued downstream. -------- The floor of the gorge is sinking and narrowing. Turns out there are a lot of little hidden corners in this gorge. Looking up at the sky. -------- Getting a little tight: -------- That bottom down there is a LONG way down from here. This little trick area is just the capper of the whole trek down the river. -------- Out of the gorges. I'm near Cook's Farm. The end of it is amazing; there are serious options about where you can end up when you come out. I decided to put off going back to the prison; I'm thinking I still need to go hit the aggressive wolf and last convict cache up on this side of the map before I go back in to see Mathis. -------- Gathering wood near Bricklayers where I'm going to pass the night before rolling up to look at those other side quests before going back in to the prison. At some point Mackenzie's going to go in there for the last time and if side quests are unfinished when that happens, then they're unfinished. Got a nice view and really whacked sunset sky colours, thought I'd share.

Just as an aside, I far preferred the old crow sounds. They were good enough that they would fool the crows that live around my house; I'd hear them replying to crows in the game when I played in the summertime with the windows open even.

This is a bug. I reported it some time back, but I guess it hasn't been fixed yet. Go hit the support portal and report it; the more reports they get the higher up the priority list it goes.

Not a fun way to go.

Or he was coming from an as-yet unreachable region and got stopped by the gate and starved to death.

My guess is that they are there to potentially permit creating new cave systems that lead to other regions. If you look around you can find many locations like this all over the place, where a few minor touches can be used to create a transition point.

Showing once again that the real key to long term survival in the game is map knowledge. With map knowledge it's very hard to kill the player, without it it's as easy as pie.

Oh aye, one does what one must to survive. I actually use the moose cloak over the bear coat when I get into the end game; I have cold set to max in the special settings and the two of them work well together, not least because the rate of decay of the bear coat on the inner slot is INCREDIBLY LOW (0.033%/day) and the moose cloak takes it much better than the bear coat when wolf/bear/moose struggles happen. Also, the ability to harvest and remake the cloak to 100% condition with four gut and "sixteen point six six six ... repeating of course" hours is ... pretty darn sweet. I've noticed that too, and not just there. It's kind of a bug, no doubt about it; I think I understand why it happens but I'm sure it's not an intentional effect. You can see the effect in normal caves too. However, not game breaking, just immersion breaking. I submitted a bug about it a long time ago; I'll be looking to see if it gets fixed when the new update drops on Wednesday. I have a couple other long-standing ones in that I'm going to be checking out when the new version lands on my machine.

I like the moose because I like the cloak and the bag, not to mention that it's a bear sized meal package without the parasites. However, six arrows are not enough; I'd much rather have at least a dozen, and twenty is better. I don't want to have to sneak around to pick up arrows I've missed with in the middle of the hunt because keeping your distance is important with the moose. Of course, you know that Nice account. There are two caves on the Delta that are decently positioned for living in, though one is pretty isolated and a bad choice if you're thinking of making an aurora run to the workshop. There is a house which is pretty much the right place to live if you're waiting for an aurora to get to the workshop; in that house you'll be living on bear rather than on moose. BI is all about the big game.

The trick to dealing with Timberwolves is using all the tricks. That cave you found in your latest post here is one of the good spots to live because of the wildlife around the edge of the Delta; as you've noticed there's a moose... it turns out there are a lot of moose there, compared to most other places on Great Bear. After you take one, you'll want to get a bunch of meat to the three blinds around the Delta. Use the meat to pull the timberwolves on the delta to you inside the blind. I found it worked best to crouch and face the "doorway" and fire arrows at them as they pass the opening while they circle the blind figuring out where the meat smell is coming from; if you're crouched they can't see you, can't tell you've pulled the bow and therefore will not attempt to dodge. Then take them out. Just shoot 'em once and let 'em bleed out and then recover any arrows you may use later. There are also other places where you can restrict access to you so that the wolves have to follow a path you can cover with your bow and/or rifle; up on the promontory the leaning tree is a good one; they will come up the tree but while they're on their way up to you you can just fire down the trunk and you WILL hit them. They're more like moose or bears that way; proper positioning when hunting those animals is key to avoid getting curb stomped. The locations that have timberwolf spawns all have places that are good positions for hunting them from. At the cannery, the trick is to RUN; once you get inside that fence you need to run to where the rope climb is that will get you up on the high path that will take you around so you can get into the workshop. Once you've broken the morale of a pack it will be a LONG time before the pack recovers enough for them to be willing to tangle with you again; once you've broken the will of all of the packs you will have a lot of time where you can walk around basically unmolested as the wolves will run away from you unless you get too close before they become aware of you. I've only really ever dealt with them using the bow rather than the rifle, but that's more a me thing than a game thing; both weapons (or the revolver for that matter) should be adequate for dealing with them.

Think that'll obviate the need to get your fishing skill up; just toss it in the icehole and wait for the fish to float up.

Look up the town of Centralia, PA.

BI is challenging. I have managed to live there for months, but it's not easy and where you are is extremely important... and as far as I can tell you haven't yet found some of the good spots. Are you interested in some suggestions about how to manage the timberwolves?

So happy to see you here chronicling again, @Drifter Man.

Just gotta say... I just don't understand why the game won't let you light fires in coal mines. It's a puzzler. /me g,d&rfc

From what I read in the September Dev Update, it's not going to be in survival until later this year; I imagine that right now they're completely concentrating on finishing the testing and bug fixes required to make the story episode as solid as possible on release and will then turn to making the required changes to the map to turn it into a good survival map after the initial bugfixes for the Ep 4 release get dealt with. We can expect there will be at least a couple three weeks of work dealing with issues revealed by giving the game to some tens of thousands of users rather than a few testers in the lab and then it'll be time to do the necessary changes to make it into a good survival mode map. My guess? December for that update... could be earlier if they don't do a Hallowe'en event this year, but I gotta admit I kind of hope they do... but I mean... can't be the Darkwalker that's just part of the game now, so... another 4DON? Time'll tell I guess. Given all that's going on and that Hallowe'en's only a month away it's possible there'll be no event this year. At any rate, the survival version of the map will follow on later, and my instincts say December for its release, but of course that's all up to Hinterland.

Yeah, winter sunrises are really something else once you get far enough north. Hinterland really gets the colours right.

Got a new old one for you folks. “Northern Lake”, 1914, Tom Thomson.

I'd think not, not without a transition region... though being able to say climb down into that river ravine on the western edge of BR and travelling north up that river through a transition region say around MT to HRV via its valley landslide at the very 'bottom' of its map would be super super cool.

Emily Carr, not Tom Thomson, but she is definitely a major influence on this game imho, so why not? Not to mention it's a nice painting. Sky, by Emily Carr, 1935 or 1936

I think it's pretty much a case of they replaced a waterfall with the dam, because the key items for hydro power are height and volume of water. The size of the reservoir on the other side doesn't matter nearly as much. Now Hoover Dam (for example) has a huge reservoir, because it's being used for water management AS WELL AS electrical generation, to help accumulate water to use in the SW desert, but that's clearly not an issue on Great Bear, which is (according to canon) somewhere in the temperate rainforest archipelago of the BC coast, so no need to have a reservoir; all they need is water dropping a lot of height in a short distance and period of time to generate the electricity. It's like the Churchill Falls dam in Labrador on Canada's east coast; it doesn't have a big reservoir but is quite capable of producing very large amounts of electricity thankyouverymuch.