stratvox

Very nice. Thanks

Okay, favourite spots.

ML: Trapper's.

CH: Fishing village

DP: Stone Church

PV: Forest Cave

FM: That cave just east of Ol' Spence's

BR: That cave up on the hunting lodge's plateau, where you can go take that path via the rickety footbridge to the rope climb down to the shed

BI: Hmmm. Guess I'm going to say the Pensive Lookout. Close between that and Cannery Workers.

MT: Definitely the trailer up near the cave to HRV.

HRV: The cave in the northwest of the map, between the entrance to the ice cave and the bear's cave. 

TWM: Mountaineers'. Deer Clearing cave's a close second.

Ravine: The cave between the bridge and the rope climb down to where you transition to BI.

OIC: The cave out on the water. So much coal. OIC is really a temporary stop though... it's very difficult to survive there long term, even if you have cooking five and can eat the wolves without fear.

I have noticed this too, and I'm pretty sure that this is something that has changed.

I've taken to playing customs with blood scent set to max, animal detection to max, wolf fear set to max, and wolf population to its lowest setting, as well as cranking up the damage from wildlife encounters. This is to cut down on the wolf encounters, to make them unpredictable (the wolf comes looking for scent but when it sees you its fear may cause it to run), and makes wolf struggles very dangerous... but rare. So far it's been all right as a way of balancing it all out... and given the animal populations in game realistically there are way too many wolves to be real.

@JensWhat software are you using to stitch the screenshots into the panorama?

I'm pretty sure that this is a bug, and that liquids left next to a fire are not supposed to get burnt dry, but that liquids left on a fire are.

2 hours ago, peteloud said:

Yeah,  I think that is overdone. I can understand cans of beans burning to cinders, but surely not tea and coffee.

I'm pretty sure that this is a bug, actually. It's like how drinks can switch from hot, to cold, to hot again when picked up, when placed near the cook fire, that happened when Hesitant Prospect first came out. Sounds like the intended fix is borken.

No, after that I found myself on that greyish-purple rock outcrop looking down at the stone shelf cave. I went down around the right to get down from there, ended up just in the mouth of the canyon that goes to the ropes up to the back of the mine.

The original topic springs from this map:

I've pulled out a bit so you can get a bit more idea of the exact location. You basically cling to the cliff across until you get above the light purple rock outcrop, then you can scramble down to it via a steep snow slope. I didn't find a deer up there, though; just a whole lotta sprain opportunities. I'm sure if I were to do it again I'd improve on that; I think that finding a good path down is totally doable with a minimum of real damage.

That part between the first and second drop... there are some serious drops there. You're really clinging to steep walls, but you can get right across there to that outcropping.

I found it necessary to go straight across that cliff quite a ways before going down. However, if you pick the right spot to do it, it'll turn into a very steep snow-covered slope pretty quick.

I tried it out. Not too bad; I've certainly done worse, that said I don't think you're very likely to traverse it without sprains... though to be fair I didn't go for getting the crampons before doing that particular run; maybe with the crampons it could be done.

Don't think it was really designed as a path, but yep... it's doable. If you do a lot of goating, you come around to the idea that sprains are a fact of life. This is not particularly bad, even if some of those sheer drops make certain passages seem pretty fraught.

On 4/30/2021 at 3:46 PM, Stinky socks said:

On the other-OTHER hand, if you take red dead redemption2, it's got a lot more detail in the world AND inside houses, which don't have loading screens.

In the game dev world, I believe that's referred to as full streaming resources that load and unload them as needed from RAM into the video card so they can do this. This is the real thing about the adjustable BAR/Smart Access Memory features on nvidia and amd; to make the moving of data from RAM to video RAM faster and more efficient... especially more efficient.

It's a relatively new game tech, and TLD predates it. I'm hoping that once the last two episodes are done, that Hinterland will start developing TLD II, where basically they don't really change how the place looks and feels but redoes the underlying base so that we can benefit from having houses fully integrated into the world in the way you're talking about here. There are probably a few other things that could be done that would be all right too, for example modelling the effect of wind on arrows, or gravity and wind on bullet trajectories; right now the guns are like the rail guns in Quake II; just a straight line from the barrel and the arrows are only affected by gravity. Another cool idea for the game would be modelling how the ecosystem functions in the game between say rabbits, deer, moose, wolves, bears, and mountain lions, along with better animations for how they interact with each other and move around the world. I mean, think about stumbling on a pack of wolves harassing a mountain lion. It'd be so cool... and sooo dangerous. It would also serve to make the wildlife much less predictable to the player if they were autonomous agents traversing the terrain and reacting to their environment seeking food whilst avoiding becoming food.

8 hours ago, Dancewithknives said:

 If the sapling are an issue, then I don’t see a reason why they can’t reduce the spawn rate if it needs balancing. 

Saplings do not respawn. Once you've used up all of the saplings in the world, the only way to get more is when they wash up on shore in Desolation Point, Crumbling Highway, Coastal Highway, or Bleak Inlet: by beachcombing.

This is not a particularly common occurrence, having saplings wash up on shore.

Right on. Thanks folks!

Hm, I wonder whether the flashlight high beam deters a charging aurora bear. If it worked, that'd be ... interesting.

2 hours ago, Stinky socks said:

@stratvox, you don't like to waste a lot of time. Fast traveler!

I'm sort of viewing it as a sort of challenge. I'm sort of making a custom difficulty that's like a cross between interloper and voyageur. In my head, I'm calling it "hunter" mode. I like having access to things like rifles and Cowichan sweaters and hatchets, but I also want intestinal parasites and interloper weather. I've also set animal detection of the player to maximum to make it harder to hunt. I've upped the animal's power to hurt me during melees, set wolf fear to max, and set both recovery settings to low. With these settings, it's taking four days to get back to max condition after a bear mauling, assuming nothing else goes wrong. Next time I iterate I'm going to start turning down the loot and maybe turning up the natural resources... but I'm going to get this guy pretty far in first because I want to see how the changes I've made affect the medium and late game; I'm just getting into the medium game now (I'm at a month in, he's wearing the bear coat from AC, waiting for a bear hide to cure at mountaineer's. I've got top notch clothing... I'm well set up. Now it's time to get the hunting relevant skills up. Deer are challenging when you're bow hunting and animal detection is set to max; you're a long way away from them when they start running.

I've got a moose hide curing, so the question is... do I wait? Do I make a bag and say to heck with HRV, or do I continue my run of grabbing the unique stuff right off the top? Do I make a moose cloak, and then head to HRV to grab the bag? Or should I go to HRV now and then come back to make the cloak? With the animal damage cranked, the moose cloak starts to look pretty good for its 25% armour value, and could be very handy to have in HRV. It's also day 35; with the cold settings that means I've got about another two weeks before it gets to the final temperature setting this guy's going to be living with for the long term; the cold is already cutting into the travel time of the day, so it's an open question as to which is better; get the moose cloak (its wind protection is also Top Shelf) then go to HRV or get that bag and come back before it gets harsher?

One of the things about this run is that there's voyageur levels of loot, i.e. a metric buttload. I've been almost entirely living on found food up to now, and I've no doubt that I can hammer my way through to HRV on the same basis (living on food found along the way). I came up ch -> cinder hills -> pv -> twm and would be going pv -> carter cave system -> wr -> ml -> mt -> hrv so the path is unlooted and I should have no problem finding food. Then again, that's just as true two weeks from now when I've got the cloak made and the coat I picked up in ac (yes, my outer coat is the bear coat; helps make the wolves less of a nuisance) repaired up to a decent level of condition.

Yeah, thinking on this, I've got lots of food here (a bear and a moose to cut up and transport to mountaineer's), and I'll be able to add a lot of insulation and armour value when this is all done. It makes sense to suit up before heading to HRV I think. I'll also be in a position to assess what it's like to travel in interloper cold in the best circumstances (which will be a first for me; the other times I've done it I was playing, you know, interloper, and stuff like cowichan sweaters and woollen long johns were just not available).

-- 

Heh, looking at this massive block of text... I guess the year of pandemic isolation's got me feeling voluble.

ETA: Oh yeah, that's right, I got stomped by a moose. This guy's definitely waiting before going to HRV for the satchel.

I'm up in Timberwolf. I started in DP, made arrows quick, booked out to CH, have hit a fair number of houses and gotten myself top tier clothing going on, then left there via cinder hills to PV and a straight shot up to the abandoned cache and the climb into TWM. Spent a night at mountaineer's, and crawled through echo ravine into ash canyon. Made angler's the first night by taking the finger canyon up, went up to the gold mine the next night, miner's folly the next after that, then down the front hill side to angler's and then up and around down to pillar's footrest and into the cave system down there, and came out at the Deer Clearing, where I spent a night:

Then I pushed on around and climbed the peak the next day. Spent an extra day up there because a blizzard blew up and it was too dangerous to travel.

So now I'm back at mountaineer's, have just killed a moose and a bear on the same day by the wing: 

If I hadn't dropped him at the last second that would've been my second broken rib that day. Happily I dodged that bullet and now I'm set for a while. I've got well fed, technical backpack, crampons, and in a couple of weeks I'm going to have the satchel. Though I've got to admit part of me feels like I should go hammer my way over to HRV to get the moose satchel there, just because.

I think that part of what you're seeing with Crumbling Highway and DP is that they're old and were built with a much older version of the both game engine and the internal tools Hinterland developed for making regions than they're using for later regions like HRV and AC. I remember a few years back they spent some time talking about putting together a new pipeline for creating regions, citing the bad complexity involved in creating large regions (regions doubles in size, complexity goes up four times, that kind of bad).

They're small because they wanted them out the door and by being small they could get them that way.

I step in and make my way forward. Up ahead I can see a pool of water, but before that I find a fire barrel and some packaged food. I am exhausted by this point, but need to boil up some water, so I set a fire and ... realise I've forgotten my cans back at the mine when I climbed the rope. Fortunately, there's a can of beans here, so I eat that and use the can to boil up some water. After that I lay out my bedroll and go to sleep.

The next morning I get up and, lighting up my trusty storm lantern, continue further into the cave. The pool of water bars my path, so I take off my socks and boots to wade in the water; coming out the other side I see that further ahead more water awaits so I just continue on. Eventually I reach the end of the shallow water and come into the main part of the mine. Up ahead I can see some trolleys and crane equipment; I continue past those and find a little camp set up and ... another body. I find a note that I'm guessing was written by the guy lying on the floor... it looks like he may have died of a heart attack. He's got some nice camping and climbing gear; I'm sure he won't mind if I use them; his note has the feel of a decent person's expression.

I find a partly collapsed tunnel and continue on to see what else I can find; further along I find a rifle but I find that it slows me down too much; I think I'll stick with my slowly improving archery skills... for the time being, at least. Maybe a little later on I can come back here and retrieve the rifle, but for now I feel it's too important to be fast on my feet. Pressing on I eventually find out why there's so much fresh air in this mine; there's an exit to literally a hole in a wall! I can see that there are steep scrambles down plus rope climbs; eventually I figure that I'm about a hundred meters up from the valley floor or so. Looking around I decide not to risk climbing out; I can tell that if I hop down from here I will not be coming back the same way, and I still have things I want to collect in the mine. I head back.

Collecting all of the stuff (and especially that sweet sweet backpack) I head back out the front door. I know that there are some birch saplings in the valley, and I collect them and climb back up the rope I layed out the evening before. After the climb, I'm not going to have a lot of oomph, but I figure on making it to the buildings I saw in the opposite direction of the wooden bridge that brought me to this place. I retrace my steps along the crags and peaks, and eventually find my way to the bridge. Crossing it, I look to the right and yes, I can see a house up on a hillside there. I continue forward, noting some bear sign; clearly I'm going to have to step carefully here. Still and all, I manage to dance around and avoid the bear and make my way up to the house I saw. I haven't really covered all that much ground today but it's still getting on towards evening and the long climb out of the valley with the mine means that I'm quite tired. I start a fire and find a cooking pot, and use that to melt some snow and boil up the water. My food supply is beginning to dwindle somewhat from what I brought up from CH, but I've still got a fair amount of good road food. The next day's plan is to make for the cave near Pillar's Footrest that leads to the Deer Clearing on TWM.

The next morning is cold with light snow. I faff about for a bit to get my carry weight down; I'm going to take the cave up to the highlands and I'll need to be under weight to do its rope climb. One of the under-appreciated features of the game is that this faffing is accompanied by in-game time passing, at six seconds a minute; you have to actually be in the moment while your guy dithers trying to figure out what to do.

Anyway. I get myself up and at it. I don't waste too much time; I'm hoping to spend the night in the gold mine and that means that I've got some walking and climbing to do tomorrow; it'll be really easy to run out of fatigue and get stuck on the wrong side of a rope climb if I'm not careful. I walk off across the little lake and make my way up the right side of Broad Falls, and take the path that cuts under the waterfall. There are a few little scrambles up the other side of the falls, and I'm up into the next area. The trees here are not burnt at all. I walk along the riverside and climb up next to a cataract... when I get jumped. Wolf struggle. However, unlike the first time, this time I have a hatchet, and my clothing is much much better, so I come out happily surprised at my condition. My first wolf struggle, it took me four days to recover.

The wolf runs of whimpering to bleed to death in a corner; I continue on to the cave that will lead me up to the highlands. A quick walk past the falls, and down a little scramble, and there it is. I walk into its echoing entrance until it's dark enough to make me light my lantern. The cave itself has some good stuff in it, but is far from a treasure house; that said it's also a warm safe place to sleep if necessary and that alone is a good thing. I wind my way up until I get to the cavern with the rope climb; I drop some water, mount the rope, and a moment later I'm up. I make my way forward until I finally come out, perched on the side of a crag. A path leads off to the left; I follow it and quickly come to the bridge that leads towards the gold mine. So now, do I go to Miner's Folly, or do I push ahead to the gold mine? I look across the dilapidated wooden bridge and see a climbing rope; I take that as a sign and go pick it up and start my way around towards the gold mine. I cross a series of rope bridges, and am properly wowed by the vistas on offer. Finally, I make my way around through the little ravine to the mountain vale that holds the gold mine. I deploy the rope, and climb down, just in time to see the sprain risk affliction to come up while on my way down the rope... just made it. I spy a body near where the waterfall I was at the bottom of several hours ago; I go check it out. He's holding a revolver... it must've gotten very desperate here in this place at the end.

My revolver is perfectly adequate; I'll leave his suicide weapon undisturbed to be reclaimed by mother nature.

I'm beginning to get tired; it's been a lot of climbing, hiking, and spelunking to get here. I cross over to the entrance of the gold mine, pull a loose board off the entrance, and climb in. I fire up my lantern and make my way in.

I clamber my way through the finger ravine, and note that the rock has changed from Timberwolf's dark blue schist to a rusty looking granite. Occasional snow sifts down into the canyon on drifts of air. It's quiet. I continue forward until the ravine opens out and I can see a shallow valley in front of me, filled with the burned out husks of trees. There's a path that winds down to the right, but I want to go left and find the long finger canyon that winds along the southern side of the central plateau; it will shelter me from the wind as well as hopefully allowing me to sneak past wolves undetected. I find a spot where it looks like I can slide down a snow-covered hill and do exactly that, without banging myself up too badly in the process. I set out; I can smell the acrid smell of the old charred wood; marks of the fire are seen all over the land here. I stick to the southern edge of the river valley; I can look up a meandering river to the north and hear wolves howling in the distance.

I find some more birch, and after walking down into a frozen bog I find the finger canyon. I walk through it, finding birch saplings along the way, as well as a cave about two thirds of the way along; possibly a good place to spend a night if travelling, but long term living in that cave would be impossible. I come out the far end, find a rope climb up to the Pillar's plateau. I spy a wolf, and manage to sneak past it without it twigging to my presence, which is a first. It was behaving strangely, I wonder if maybe it had locked on to a deer on the plateau above. If so, a lucky break for me; I didn't have to kill it to get past it. I keep going, sticking to the right wall, and come out into the middle canyon valley, where the Angler's Retreat cottage stands upon an island, passing an unfortunate upon the way; from the looks of the body, they'd fallen from a bridge I can see way above.

I hope it was an accident.

I make my way to Angler's without any further incident, and gather some sticks; I'm going to need to make some water. I'm still driving hard, but at that point there's only a couple of hours of daylight left and I judge that this is the place for me to crash for the night. I tumble the place, but there's not much of immediate use to me; I hammer down a chocolate bar and a can of dog food, as well as some of the nicer stuff I brought along with me. There's a book about archery which looks interesting, but I have a rope climb to get to the high ground in this area so I need to lose stuff, not carry more. 

I drop all the saplings I've gathered since I left Mountaineer's that morning, and go to bed.

Okay so I made it to the gold mine and am crashed in Foreman's. So, on day 19 I set out. I faffed about a bit too long in the morning getting my clothing all up and ironing out my carry. I made it up to Cinder Hills without incident. Went through the mine... pretty typical. Lots of coal, more than usual. Came out and it had started snowing and blowing. I was coming in with ten arrows (nine of 'em were 100%) and the revolver with lots of bullets. I left the rifle bullets back in CH; it's just too heavy and at that point why carry bullets? Anyway, it was getting towards four pm (assuming sunset at six) and I thought about trying to make it up to Prepper's but decided that the weather was turning and it was getting dark, so I went for Thompson's. Crashed in the nice house after checking some of it out, but I wasn't there to loot Thomson's; the real cold weather in this custom run is coming and I want to get the good stuff up on Timberwolf, and I want the crampons and technical pack to ease the path there and lighten the load back.

I took the river along that side of the map for most of the distance; less wolves that way and I was already on it because I'd crashed at Thompson's for the night. I cut back up to the roadway once I was past where the derelict cabins are; if you cut up on the right spot you can get on the road and get up higher; when you get to the bridge that crosses the river coming from NE corner of the map at Misty Falls. Which is what I did; by doing this I can hit the cave which has some seriously good stuff, and avoid the wolves that are often hanging around the point of disagreement when I walk from the cave at the Misty Falls campground to the Prepper's Cache.

So, that's basically my next day, traipsing across Pleasant Valley; had one wolf struggle along the way, but I got a revolver round into him before he jumped me so I didn't take much of a beating. I made a bunch of water at the stove near the cache, and then crashed out fully exhausted. When I woke up, around noon the next day, it was to blizzard conditions. Fortunately I was dragging a ton of food around with me (as I find food caches I eat the canned stuff because it's heavy, and have accumulated lots of choco bars, bags of chips, cans of pop, and the like. My heart and liver are probably pissed at me, but I've got lots of fuel)... so I've got stuff to eat and can maintain well fed.

The blizzard clears right at sundown and I consider heading out to see if I can get to mountaineer's when I hear it... the jingle jangle of oncoming aurora. I really generally make a policy of staying in on aurora nights without a very good reason to go out because the animals can be super dangerous; exceptions obviously get made for things like hitting the mill in BI but by and large if I'm out during an aurora I'm on my front porch (as it were) watching the sky, not traipsing around pulling all the wolves and bears in so I can waltz with them; I have ended enough runs in aurora conditions to know that it's a big risk. I futz around a bit, and take a load up the rope, and come back down. This is good because it tires me out nicely so I can go to bed early that night. With all that sleep the damage I took from cold and the wolf struggle crossing PV get decently improved; the following morning as I get up to head in to TWM I'm back up to nearly full.

The next day I am up about seven and heading to Mountaineer's. It's cold, really cold; I should've probably waited but I didn't want to repeat not hitting my target and costing a day in PV. Anyway, I head up the rope, pick up the stuff that I left at the top, and suitably loaded (I have brought a couple of hacksaws I found between DP and CH with me Because Reasons) and set out. By the time I get to the cabin the morning has eaten my "warm reserves" and I pick up sticks near the cabin and get a fire going to warm up a bit. One thing runs into another and I eventually decide that trying to make Angler's is a fool's errand given how much of the day is left. One of the keys to travelling in TLD is not rushing your trips; if conditions are good then push on, but if things start looking sketchy there's nothing wrong with delaying your voyages for a while. I run around picking up sticks so I can keep a fire going all night in the Hut, and pass the night there. The next morning I am once again up early and off. I have to do a little dancing around the bear that lives near the path down into Echo, but that's easily done and I continue on. I make my way to the end of the Ravine and climb through to the Ash Canyon region.

When I was a teenager I used to go on summer camp trips to Algonquin. This wasn't the typical "summer camp" style stay; instead we'd spend some time in a lake local to where I live while we got taught how to paddle, portage, build fires, set up tents, and all that good stuff, along with a decent smattering of local flora and fauna, and then we'd head north for the last week to ten days to go on a canoe trip where we'd typically cover about fifteen miles a day. Doing this I spent time in Algonquin, Killarney, and Temagami, all areas in Ontario where the canoeing is good. Anyways, we were in a small bog type lake somewhere in Algonquin's interior when we saw a moose eating in the shallows at one end of the lake. One of the counsellors had a camera and wanted to get up close to take some pics. I was paddling bow in his canoe, so we started making our way over to the moose.

Now, when I say "small bog lake" it was still a couple of kilometres across. So we're paddling over to where the moose is hitting those tender tasty aquatic plants and we don't really grok that the water got shallow a couple of hundred yards before we got to the marshy end of the lake. So we get over there and the guy's taking pics and the moose hears the camera, pulls its head up, and looks over at us, and decides we're annoying it and starts lumbering our way. 

This was definitely the pucker moment.

Anyway as the bowman I said "we're paddling in reverse" and started back-paddling. Happily I know how to get a canoe moving (short fast choppy strokes will get you moving quicker than long deep smooth ones) and we started moving away. It was at least as large as a station wagon I'd say, and for about a hundred yards the moose's head was basically 45 degrees up from mine and quite a few feet over head... looming you might say. We were back-paddling furiously and after a couple of hundred yards we hit the deep water and the moose had to stop trotting and start swimming so we could get away.

Like I said I don't think it really wanted to mess us up, but I got an extended look from less than ten feet away at its nose... and that's why I know that moose are Damned Big Animals. 

Well, dude's been busy; he made his way to CH, had some wolf tussles, done nearly no hunting, but has hit about half the structures in CH. His clothing situation is much better (they don't call it Clothing Heaven for nothing ya know!) and he's been waiting to get some arrows happening before setting out for the high country and the treasures that await therein. He's gone back to DP to pick up the saplings and bear skin and guts that I left there and brought them back to the fishing village, and I expect he'll be starting the trek to AC via PV and TWM within a day or two after I get enough arrows made. Going to be an epic journey, I'm sure. Basic loadout is going to be a bow, ten arrows, a revolver with thirty bullets, the clothing I'm wearing of course, hatchet, hacksaw (I'm pretty superstitious about taking a hacksaw with me to TWM because reasons), knife, prybar (everybody knows the good stuff's in the locked lockers), lantern, and of course a bunch of matches because Fire Is Your Friend in The Long Dark (not to mention at Outpost #31 ). 

My current planned route is to make my way up to the Cinder Hills Coal Mine, to PV, and I'm probably going to largely skip PV for now and make my way along that eastern road past the End of the Highway and the Derelict Cabins along the towards the rope climb up to TWM. I'm hoping that if I can get my guy on the road early enough he'll be able to make it to the Abandoned Prepper's Cache for his first night. Then I'm going to get up to TWM and take the Echo Canyon exit to AC. From there I'll be taking the finger canyon up to Angler's where I hope to pass the second night, so I can start fresh the following morning to make my way up via the cave to the high ground and make my way to the Gold Mine. Hopefully I won't run into hostile wildlife along the way; maulings are what will throw my schedule off more than anything else... maulings and/or blizzards. Time will tell

Yeah, the idea is to try and create something that will have areas of challenge (since detection is set to very far, it's quite a bit harder to hunt esp at lower weapon skills) but still sort of retain that easy vibe, plus part of the idea is also that in the late game after the cold is there it's possible to have the wool long johns and the fisherman/cowichan sweaters so you can have access to more of the day in the late game, and more time before you take the hit... and that taking the condition hit means that you've got a couple of days where you're taking risks just going out before you build it back up again, and being hit by a wolf or a bear means that you're going to be wanting to be very careful for nearly a week before you're back on your feet.

I'm playing around with custom settings. This is not intended to make the game "harder" or "more realistic" so much as to make for some extra challenges at the skill level I most enjoy playing at: Voyageur. I like it because it's got All Of The Things, and it's not wolf crazy like Stalker. The short version is: low starting gear, parasites on, fire overcome ambient off, low condition recovery at rest and active, interloper level coldness, struggle damage pushed to high; wolf struggles should be rare but they are very dangerous, but without cranking up the clothing damage outside of the Voyageur norm.

Part of the goal is to start at a random location, and once one can, make my way to AC to get the crampons and backpack, and then to TWM to summit. First shot started at ML; after about ten days in there getting set up I set out; got to the gold mine, on my way to rest at Miner's Folly I got caught by the bear on the path next to the old wooden bridge, at which point I got bitten by a bug where the bear and mount and dismount vertical surfaces more or less instantly to take a second mauling; somehow I actually lived through that but staggering around on the path I fell off the edge to my death; while the bears might be the reincarnations of Tenzing Norgay I'm not.

So, new start. This time I pull DP, next to the mine entrance that leads to Crumbling Highway. I hop in there and grab some of the stuff near the entrance; no light so I'm not going deeper into the mine yet. I roll over to Katie's to get the bow and arrows etc; on the way there I hear a wolf bark very close but out of LoS, but then I hear it take down a rabbit so I keep going, get the goods off of Katie, then climb across the fallen tree from Katie's to the other side of the road and up over the high path to get to the Old Stone Church (bedroll needed), then having looted there I run straight across to the lighthouse. It's full on dark by the time I get there and I start a fire for long enough to get some water made and pass out for the night. The next morning I loot the lighthouse, then scramble down the cliff behind the lighthouse and set off to Little Island to grab some saplings plus whatever else I may find. Then I'm into the Riken. Loot there, cut up some metal, then pass out. I can't forge yet because I don't have a hammer; I'm going to try to make my way across to Hibernia the next day to see if I can find the one that's often in the basement there.

However, the next morning I go up on deck and see the bear. I crouch down in the lee of the superstructure and when it gets close enough stand up. The bear makes my position and starts coming for me. I have one arrow, so I'm hoping that I can get it into this guy so he'll bleed out and I can both travel in relative safety around Hibernia and get a boatload of worm-ridden food, guts-a-plenty, and start curing my first bear skin. He keeps coming and then really gets a load of me and rears up, as he's not yet figured out that he can't path to me. I fire the arrow into his belly and wonder of wonders I get the crit and kill him. He's like fifteen yards off the starboard side; I'm nearly freezing so I've got to go in and warm up, but it's going to be an easy quartering and easy transport of the goods back to the ship to start curing and prepping. Once I get the quartering done and the hides and guts curing, I'm going to make my way to Hibernia to see if I can't find that hammer... but first I'm going to go hang out in the crew bunk for an hour or so and warm up before I go quarter that bear.

An auspicious start to the run. We'll see what happens.