stratvox

Only thing I'd say is go for the gold mine and then the summit; the crampons make those rope climbs WAAAAYYYYYY easier.

On 3/15/2021 at 4:00 PM, darkscaryforest said:

and even consider going for the technical backpack / crampons via a route involving something like signal hill and farmstead -> plane crash in PV -> timberwolf summit -> ash canyon gold mine.

16 hours ago, TropicalSurvivor said:

On 3/13/2021 at 7:38 PM, Gun Tech. said:

Expand  

How did you manage to access this area?

He did it by what's colloquially known as "goating" or "mountain goating". You would be amazed at the places you can get to if you're not afraid of spraining ALL OF THE LIMBS.

I have given some thought to this.

I've spent a lot of time in the deep game; hundreds of days in where survival is not really a problem any more, just figuring out what to do is. The general solution I've found works the best is to take up a nomadic life style and cycle through the regions so that you don't hammer any one region's wildlife too hard and kill spawn areas by overhunting. It's quite zen in my opinion; truly the objective is simply continuing to live and no more, and to do so in balance with the game so that one can continue to live. I think that keeping this as a feature is definitely a major plus; my personal progression was to start and then abandon games after they got comfortable, but the time came when I wanted to get one to that five hundred day achievement so I took it there, and discovered that the meditative aspects of the deep game are a real thing. I find myself sometimes having the dude sit next to a fire in the mouth of a cave and just watch the blizzard blow while I pick up the living room.

That said, I think creating certain kinds of world events that only trigger later in the game could make for an interesting addition. For example, we have the Whiteout challenge. I think it would be pretty interesting to have something like that happen a few hundred days in, and then have it happen every hundred or so days afterwards. Set it up so there's a progression in the weather that can be remembered and recognized over a day or two that culminates in a week-long blizzard, one that causes the temperatures inside houses and caves to drop by ten or fifteen degrees, say, with an outdoor temperature at 5am of -50C. This could trigger adventures pretty easily; the need to move from where the blizzard caught you because you don't have enough food, for example. Have the harbinger a day or so ahead of time to give the aware players a chance to move to a well-supplied location to ride out the coming storm.

There is even already code that does some of this, from the 4DON challenge a year and a half back, IIRC. I think it would be cool to be able to add events like this (I'm sure other ones can be conceived of to throw wrenches into a player's comfortable life in the deep game) as an option one can select at the start; sort of "I'll play Stalker with Events, Interloper without them" kind of an idea.

The introduction of mountain lions into the game could be done like this, too... have them appear at least as rarely if not more rarely than the moose, and make them REALLY DANGEROUS while they're spawned in. All of us long gamers know that wolves and moose and bears (oh my!) aren't really that dangerous once the player knows how to manage around them... but the stalking/ambush nature of how mountain lions hunt can perhaps be exploited by the devs to make them a much bigger challenge.

Anyway. The point is to have something happen that makes the game become significantly more difficult for a limited period of time before going back to the regular deep game "wake up-gather wood-hunt-harvest-repair clothes-eat-sleep" cycle that makes up the days of the typical denizen of the quiet apocalypse.

Whew. That is messed up.

If there was survival DLC made, I'd certainly consider paying for it (ah, who'm I shitting, I'd buy it). I think that there's not really a lot of controversy here; Raph has said the remaining two episodes will be coming out under the original purchase price, which is the remaining obligation to their customers for this game, and I believe him... I just think it'll be a while  but that's all right. Certainly from my point of view this game owes me nothing; I've got a ridiculous amount of time in this game and I've enjoyed it all (well, almost all... some of those bear maulings were not very enjoyable; we're definitely not talking Marian Engel style maulings here).

As for them asking me for ten or twenty bucks for a collection of regions... I have something of an appreciation for how much work must be going into those maps; they are incredibly well made and Ash Canyon shows what that can mean; at this point they are creating really great video game art (or, just art, really) when they make these maps, so I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that. One of the things that I think would be very cool would be a bunch of regions based on the Killarney area in northern Ontario just north of the Georgian Bay and Manitoulan; it's beautiful country and I think it would be a great place to be TLDed, and if Hinterland were to release a set of five maps or so based on that I'd almost certainly buy it.

I'm not talking about the arrows, their behaviour with the bow equipped is completely reasonable. I'm talking about the fact that you always choose the highest condition bow when you activate it by pressing "2", the weapon hotkey. This leads to a situation where using the hotkey with multiple bows in your inventory will result in the longest possible time passing before one of them wears out and can be dropped... and the other one will wear out within a shot or two after that, rather than having a high condition bow and a lot of time to prep to make the next one.

It'd be really great if the player selected the bow with the least condition when the player has more than one bow. This would be consistent with the arrow behaviour and would is a better default wrt item weight management on the part of the player, as they'd be able to run a bow down until it broke and then discard it and switch to the other bow, as opposed to the current situation where the player is going between bows and therefore they are both wearing down together, meaning that they both end up breaking at the same time much later.

I'm going to agree with PeteLoud and say that I can't see it coming into the current game, but I've seen Raph muse about how rock climbing is a natural fit for the milieu and I would not be surprised if it showed up as a game mechanic in TLD 2: The TLDening.

One thing that would be cool would be if crampons allowed climbing much steeper terrain, so you could like put on crampons and skinny up a tree. However, I think that's a lot more likely to be a next gen feature of the game.

Aurora-ridding in Bleak Inlet.

It's pretty dangerous moving around under aurora skies there, avoiding the timberwolves is ... challenging.

Welcome!

On 2/1/2021 at 10:37 PM, Ahatch said:

Head's up... the pic's busted. 

Yeah, AC should be very long term survivable at Miner's Folly thanks to the bear. It also looks like the stone shelf cave has real potential, but the moose that spawns there has to be a lot less reliable than bears tend to be for showing up in time to keep you in food. I've found a complete paucity of wildlife on the plateau around the Climber's Cave which is a real shame; that place looks like it should be a fantastic place to plunk down but the complete lack of wildlife there makes it a total non-starter, more's the pity. 

The one mesa that you can reach over the runaway bridge and the fallen log bridge with the little tiny cave with the sheltered spot for a fire and a pine bough bed look really tempting but it's just too far away to find food for it to be viable... which is too bad because the view when you wake up in that little alcove is freakin' amazing.

On 1/29/2021 at 5:58 PM, ajb1978 said:

About the only place this would be a problem is along coastal regions while beachcombing. I don't know if you've ever fallen through ice in real life or not, but the biggest challenge in self-rescue is that you have practically zero traction on wet ice. You're kicking your feet up behind you in the water while trying to seal-crawl out of the hole on your forearms, and you're just slipping all over the place barely making any progress.

I've done that before, and more than once... because I'm dumb  Getting out of the water in that situation is not easy. That said... it's very hard to model that effectively. Heck, just think about how challenging it would be to actually attempt to model snowfall in a way that's computationally cheap enough for a video game.

On 1/13/2021 at 8:58 AM, Dr. S. said:

One thing I really noticed is that there are *way* more outdoor warm-up caves than I thought from touring the region on Voyageur. I've encountered five or six so far, and I haven't yet explored the entire region.

The caves were changed in the last patch: "[Enviro] Updated caves in Ash Canyon to count as interiors when curing items." It makes living there much much easier. When I first ran through the region, all those caves were exterior only. I was wondering if they intended to change that or not, turned out they did. I'd love to know the backstory on the change... was it an idea to make the caves in AC different and harder that got rolled back due to negative feedback, or... what?

On 1/26/2021 at 9:49 AM, Dr. S. said:

Now that the caves are warm, I like the Stone Shelf cave as a base of operations.

Haven't run that yet but I'm sure you're right.

55 minutes ago, Ahatch said:

Just hit 50 days on Ash Canyon plan is to get the moose hide satchel then make a bid for the Summit of Timberwolf Mountain .  

I'm doing that on my current run, but really taking my time. Getting up to the summit is a lot easier when you enter TWM from the deer clearing and have the crampons and technical backpack. I'm now hanging out at Mountaineers and waiting until I get enough together to get the bearskin bedroll, and then it's going to be time to move on. I'm thinking I might make a cloth run to CH and a forge run to either FM or DP, and then maybe go to HRV to camp there for a while away from the detritus of human civilisation, or come back to TWM and AC, which are an incredible one-two combo of regions. Starting in AC so you can hit the gold mine and get those two things to take with you up to the summit in twm to score fat lute is a really good way to get off the ground and into the middle game.

Managed to do some good goating around TWM: 

And of course the requisite sunset from the plane: 

I've also been spending a lot of time in AC and have a curiosity and some beauty shots. 

The curiosity is up behind Broad Falls: afaict this fire is completely protected from the wind, which makes this place a possible place to live, esp. if you've got fire 5:

The rest of the shots are from up by the Foreman's Retreat:

Hope you enjoyed

Animals defecate too.

I reported it and got an email back. The problem is not that they're wet; the state is what it's supposed to be according to the game "rules" all the time; the problem is that the UI is not updating properly until certain kinds of events happen, like equipping them. There's probably an event loop of some kind on the crampons that's not sending messages properly to update the UI for the player, but another routine forces the UI update to happen, and my guess is that's in the "equip" code somewhere... maybe it's updating because when you equip items it can affect the overall layout of the usual UI, so the "equip" routine queries the entire state of a piece of equipment and updates the UI, e.g. when you equip a bow queries have to happen to be able to put things up like the arrow capacity, rifles get graphics about how many bullets are loaded plus how many you have in your pack, and so on, so that ends up forcing the crampons to send a message detailing its current state, including its wetness and then the equip routine does the UI updating.

All that's speculation without being able to see the code, of course. I really don't have any particular insight into how the internal plumbing of TLD works... but this would make a lot of sense to me.

58 minutes ago, hozz1235 said:

I am hoping they will introduce a mechanic to repair them.  Until that time, I only put them on when I'm around ice (FM coming to mind).  I wish I could wear them all the time...

Rope climbs are the other place to use them... makes them way easier on the player.

I like the idea of repairing the crampons, and the repair being very challenging. I actually suggested making them repairable at the mill in BI quite a ways back because it made sense, both in terms of manufacturing (looks like stamped metal) and game balance (crampons are quite durable if one's restrained with them, and making it very challenging to repair them makes a lot of sense). It also pushes people into BI in the sandbox, which is a good thing imho... making the mill more valuable is a good idea I think because of the unique features of the region (i.e. timberwolves, which are a whole 'nother fun thing) which seems to intimidate a lot of people away from it. They are in fact quite manageable once you know how (use the hunting blinds and use raw meat to bring them to you and they become very easy to pick off). Anyway, I digress. 

I think the mill is the place to do it.

1 hour ago, Bean said:

I almost always start new survivors on the slopes of TWM these days.  Summitting is easy if you know where you’re going.  That last bit is key.  
once at the top, there’s always a hacksaw laying about to give you the keys to the kingdom of phat lewt!  
Then I’ve got a day old survivor with nearly full gear from the start. 

I'm pretty sure you're talking about the Fat Lute, aren't you? 

A similar problem exists in certain areas under the linux proton environment, and can lead to the game freezing. Very annoying. Yes, it started in linux with Hesitant Prospect as well. It appears differently than it does in Mac, but is similar enough that I suspect its a similar source. Unfortunately, a bug in TLD/Unity makes "-force-glcore" a non starter, as the landscape flickers to an insane extent when using the opengl backend under linux; it /appears/ that this is a known problem but I suspect it's been placed into "will not fix". Running the windows version under Proton and its ability to convert directx calls to vulkan calls make the flickering landscape into a non-issue, but now I see periodic instability. @Admin if you're interested it appears to be triggered extensively in Ash Canyon, and also in the Echo Ravine in TWM; in short where the deep shadows/misty areas are lead to the game going unstable and then punching out.

Oh, I'd say they could keep it going a lot longer than that. I'm heading into year three (🤔) playing this game, nearly 3k hours... If they were releasing new regions every six months I'd just keep playing.

I imagine at some point it'll switch to DLC for new regions that has to be paid for, but given that I'm significantly below a penny an hour on this game, I don't think I can really complain. Graphically, the only think I can think of that might make things better would be light extinction/rayleigh scattering a la the scatterer mod for Kerbal Space Program and ray tracing to really exploit shadows created by the surrounding terrain, as well as the ability to deal with snow reflections, snow blindness, sun dogs, and so on. I think the art style is very good (and I recognise its influences, people like Emily Carr and Lawren Harris and Tom Thompson) and doesn't need changing. I think the animal AI and animations could use work... but I think a lot of that would be more appropriate for TLD II, along with using streaming resources to dump most if not all of the loading screens. But even as it stands right now, it's an excellent game and if the regions keep coming it'll be good basically forever.

Stanima.

I have not yet figured out a way up there. Tried a whole bunch of times but there are... challenges.

How long was it unrolled for?