stratvox

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.

1 hour ago, hozz1235 said:

If you peer into some of them, you can't see an end.  Doesn't mean they don't end just around the corner where we can't see.  But, from my personal exploration of mines, they don't put serious bars like that unless there is something to hide - why bar a shaft that only goes in 10 feet?

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.

On 10/2/2021 at 10:25 PM, Lord of the Long Dark said:

I just immediately head to the central river cave to get matches and then to the ice caves to get the combat pants, bedroll, hacksaw, earwrap, and of course take cattails on the way. Then to the signal fire for the jacket and hammer. Then I leave the zone takin maples and birch with the hacksaw. By time I leave the zone I am ready for a forge run while curing the bow and arrow shafts .

  easiest possible interloper start in the whole game. 

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.

On 10/3/2021 at 3:39 AM, Drifter Man said:

I agree that 6 (in my case only 5) arrows are not enough... I was out of options, so I had to kill it with whatever I had. I like the bag, but I got mine from the Signal Fire and it only asks for a piece of leather once in a year or so. And I prefer the Bear Coat to the cloak. For meat, I'd rather hunt 4 deer than 1 moose - for the same usage of arrows and the same amount of meat, but with much less risk. But in BI I may need to change some habits.

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.

On 10/3/2021 at 3:52 AM, Drifter Man said:

I notice an interesting phenomenon: blizzard without snow. Then I realize that it only happens when I am at the cave exit (which is a transition to another region). When I leave the exit zone, the snow reappears.

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.

14 hours ago, Jrod7405 said:

with episode 4 we are probably getting some sort of explosive device

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.

16 hours ago, Leeanda said:

It is very odd, I would technically cast it as a cave so they  should be the same!? 

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. 

43 minutes ago, Stinky socks said:

I thought broken railroad is sort of end of the line map? It's on the edge of the map.

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.

My thinking is that the dam was abandoned and decommissioned many years before the first flare, and that the pipes have been open and letting water through so there's no reservoir on the upper side.

7 hours ago, Valuable Hunting Knife said:

Did not expect Blackrock in survival mode any time soon, so that is a big bonus. Also intrigued by the 'few other additions' mentioned.

The artwork gives more clues as to the size of the region (and the prison within it), my guess now would be similar to bleak inlet/the cannery, although visually the new region looks most like ash canyon in this image.  

Also, I don't want to draw too many conclusions from artwork rather than screenshots, but that does appear to be a gun on McKenzie's back and it may be a little shorter than the current rifle?

Could be a shotgun. That would be a logical addition to the game; short range deadly, not so great at long range.

Question is... can it deter a charging bear?

ETA: also, a shotgun would be a logical firearm to find inside a prison, so having Will find and use one would make narrative sense. I could see that being reason enough to add it to the game.

Oooh oo-oo-ooooh

Saturday! Saturday! Saturday! 

Saturday! Saturday! Saturday! 

Saturday! Saturday night's all right!

Are you sure about that? All of my fire sites have been immortal, and only recently have they been able to be removed with the "break down campfire" option, they certainly have never disappeared of their own volition whenever I've played...

Right on. It's good to see that progress is being made. I very much look forward to what's coming down the pike. The art looks beautiful; given the high quality of the work you folks have been putting out (AC, like seriously) I have high hopes and expectations for the new region and for the story. It looks fantastic.