stratvox

....as for the bigger picture I don't know. If the timberwolves really do work together as an effective hunting pack it may be that you'll want its fast firing. The ideal behaviour for a pack of wolves would be something like this: The entire pack is pretty evenly spread over the region that are accessible to it (i.e two packs in TWM one south one north). When a timberwolf identifies quarry, they bark to alert the other wolves. The other wolves start moving towards the bark. The alerter starts following the player at a distance. Periodically they bark to alert the pack to the new location. When enough of them arrive they attack. Say, minimum four? Other wolves will join in as they arrive. They attack in a coordinated manner to bring you down. If you get to this stage you are in big big trouble. How to avoid the pack attack? If you're armed, kill the alerter wolf immediately and make tracks so you're not there when the rest of the pack starts showing up... or if you've got a good position to rain death from wait for them to kill as many of them as possible. If you're cornered by a pack, the revolver starts looking really really good... and I can see how those scenarios could result in eating a LOT of bullets... esp. if they've considered how much has to happen to deter the pack, as well as any individual timberwolf. If you're talking stalker (aka "wolf city") it makes it more stalkerish... way more stalkerish. I mean, stalker is all about the wolves (which is why I don't really play it) and something like what I've outlined above will significantly add to the challenge of the maps that get timberwolves. Also, think about it... you're cruising through somewhere in the early evening out in the fields and you pick up a timberwolf alert (you hear the alert barks from nearby). It's keeping its distance, and you need to shut it up and get away from it. If you're weaponless, you need to get away and hopefully indoors post haste. Imagine, you're run-walking to get away and you keep hearing the patter of their paws and the yips they're using to tell their buddies where you are. That'll be an amazing tension builder. You have a revolver. You finally spot the alerting wolf and turn the hunter into the hunted. If you get in there and hit them they run away whimpering. It's time to get a move on and hope you can avoid the wolves coming to look for their friend. Still lots of tension. I'm intrigued because I really want to see better behaviour from the wildlife... and because one thing that would really help the late game be more interesting is to have the player as an apex predator in an (undoubtedly vastly oversimplified) ecosystem. Another question I have is... will the wolves we've come to know and ... well, love o.O... still be there? How will they interact with the timberwolves? How about the timberwolves with the deer? If the pack goes after herds of deer using the technique I've outlined above, it won't be long before they hunt them to extinction... or that the deer will have to have an insanely high respawn rate to keep up. Testing the interaction of all the animal mechanics must be insane. Overall, I'll end this by saying that we've seen major overhauls and interesting buffs already (birch bark, well fed, etc) and they've handled them incredibly well from a gameplay perspective, so I've got a lot of patience to see what happens when Ep. 3 comes out and timberwolves (hopefully! oplease oplease) get introduced into sandbox. They've (i.e. Hinterland and Raph) have earned a lot of trust from me when it comes to not fscking up the game.

Revolver/Bow looks like a great road combo. Total mass of weapons is half that of the rifle.

He's pining for the fjords.

Some Winding River randos: This was good mapping weather. Looking up the river towards the dam. This was later when I was ferrying stuff from ML to PV. The weather adds just a touch of melancholy. I was in WR for three days. One of them started with a pea soup fog; a little later on it burned off so I went up to the dam to pick stuff up. As I moved my stuff through the cave to PV, I had occasion to hunker down in the cave and make some water and cook up some venison. It was my last trip through the cave. I stopped to look back at the cooking fire, which would burn down soon:

I did discover something interesting. If you then wake up, and exit the game, and then resume it later, the fire in the inside will not have the burning animation, but it will have the logs in the "set up" configuration and will give off light and heat.

So, now that I'm done mapping FM, I'm in WR. There's really only one place to live in the map; the cave where the river is about to turn. Interesting thing about that cave; it's got a campfire in it, and that campfire is in the "indoors" part of the cave; if you drop a curable item right next to it it will start curing. This would seem to indicate that the fire will not benefit from the cold bonus. However, if you place your sleeping roll right at the edge of the rock before it turns to snow, you will be sleeping in the "outdoor" portion of the cave... and the fire in the indoor portion will benefit from the cold bonus.

It's not realistic for winter to never end. It's not realistic that bears can't climb trees. It's not realistic that predators glow green and become super dangerous when there's an aurora. It's not realistic that you can fix a sprain in moments with a bandage and some acetaminophen. It's not realistic that you only get ~10kg of meat from a deer, or only ~30kg from a bear or moose; those animals both weigh well over a quarter ton when fully grown. It's not realistic that there are only bucks, not does. If death is the only guarantee, why bother? I mean, it's not like real life has a hundred percent mortality rate, now does it?

Again, for me, the current system makes sense. As was said earlier... yes you can "waste" meds by screwing it up, but let's take a look at how humans operate under severe stress for a moment. So you've just had a wolf struggle, terminating when you jammed your hunting knife into its neck and it ran off whimpering. It's dark, the weather sucks, and you're a long way from home. It's entirely reasonable that the avatar could make mistakes while doing their first aid on themselves... but how to model that? Random occurrence of a mistake that wastes it, or put it on the player to follow the right procedures? Putting it on the player absolutely makes the most sense, and leaving room for the player to make a mistake and waste resources also makes the most sense because that can go down that way in real life. It's similar to the people that want to be able to walk up to a pile of sticks and pick them all up in one shot through some kind of automagic bundling facility. Part of the reason they don't have that is because one of the most precious resources in the game is time... and picking up a pile of forty sticks effectively should take time. The interface ensures that time gets taken by making you double click to get each stick in your inventory. Any other large pile of stuff should work the same way; you can't expect to be able to load up ten fir logs in under three seconds, it just doesn't really follow how reality works. A similar thing I've seen in the forums lately is people complaining about the revolver firing because they're picking up sticks and miss the stick and fire the revolve. Well, if you're gathering wood with a firearm in your hand I think it's reasonable to accept that accidental discharges are possible. Just be glad that they don't have the possibility that your accidental firearm discharge ends up in your leg or something. If you want to fix that? Put the revolver away before picking up that wood.

This is really the crux of the matter. This game punishes not paying attention to what you're doing when you're doing it. I personally like that aspect of it... that there's a real possibility that you can screw up applying first aid to yourself and waste resources, which is a real departure from how most video games handle picking up medkits, but it's probably not everybody's cup of herbal tea.

It's a finite play, but that finite number can be very long; there's a guy who's had a run that lasted over ten years in game.

You can either stream to twitch or youtube, record to hard drive, or do both. There's a learning curve, but I can say once you get over that curve it works very well.

Well, it matters, but not that much really. Daily usage of a bearskin bedroll gives you about six weeks of use before repairs really need to be done. By and large it should be totally possible once in the middle game to get that many bearskins coming in; often you can get a lot more than that many coming in. The thing that's really good is that it's easy to set yourself up with a permanent fire once you hit fire five; you only need about four or five fir logs to give you twelve hours of fire when you're burning outside. I think the longest running fire I had with my current guy was around 260 hours. This has several huge advantages, beginning with having long-running fires cuts down on the match consumption. Also, instant warmup; once you've got a fire going over the course of a full day or so it's at max temp and you're gonna get three bars warming up if you're within its range. I've generally found that at fire five you can keep a permafire going with an hour or three of wood gathering per day, depending on what you find and how far you have to carry it. Note that I'm not suggesting a newly dropped survivor should try to dive immediately into cave living, but after you get your good clothing going on it has a lot of advantages.

The cave down in Milton Basin is a good spot to camp out for a while. My long run guy has spent at least a couple of months living out of that cave. It's a bit of a hike down the watercourse to FM to get to the worktable and forge at Spence's, but it's far from impossible and generally is an overnighter which is far from onerous. Overall I find cave living to work a LOT better than living in buildings... the extra something something you get out of your wood when living and cooking outdoors is a huge advantage.

If you're interested in recording you playing, I'd suggest OBS and a multi-core CPU. You probably already have the multi-core CPU I figure, so... check out OBS: http://obsproject.com.

Aye, it's not ready for prime time yet. Interestingly, I just got a download for my two unity games from steam consisting of "pre-cached shaders: opengl vulkan" so I'm thinking things might be seeing rapid improvement....

Getting ready to leave this place: I've been on FM for nearly two months, mapping out the region completely. Here is the result: The only two regions I have left that don't look like this are Winding River and Pleasant Valley. This particular guy has been wandering Great Bear now for ~690 days. My current plan (I'm now at the Camp Office) is to continue on up through the dam to Winding River and mapping that region, and then going to PV and mapping all of that region as well. I expect that by the time I'm done I'll have eaten another couple of months, and at that point I'm taking the rest of my saplings and heading up to TWM for a while.

I'm still seeing a lot of arrows suspended in mid-air: It very much looks like the arrow "froze" right at the moment of death of the wolf, instead of falling with it. See also: Also, the forge in Old Spence has smoke coming out the chimney even when the forge is not lit: It's hard to see, but it's there. On a positive note, I submitted a bug report some time back that pointed out that the z-order on the clothing paper doll for hats and ear wraps was wrong. Before you'd see the ear wrap on the outside of the rabbit hat and/or toque or what have you. Now: I can't believe you guys fixed it. Thanks! Yeah, that is some sweet sweet clothing that guy has. This is my long run guy, currently up to ~680 days. It doesn't really get any better than that. Sure the sprint is totally hosed, but if my clothing's at full and I get hacked by a bear I still have 55% condition after it's over.

Yeah, that flickering is exactly what we're talking about. On nVidia it's really blatant. If you want to use the command line option -force-vulkan (which may work much better on amd than nvidia; while the z-fighting goes away any shadows closer to you than maybe twenty metres or so will make you think Will/Astrid ate some mouldy rye bread) you'd edit the batch file to include it. Or, you can switch into whichever folder that the game got installed into in a terminal and try issuing "./TLD.x86_64 -force-vulkan"

As far as I know, there isn't. however, there are ways around most of them. However, the wires in the long corridor between the upper dam entrance and the turbine room are not possible to work around. If an aurora comes while you're in the dam, you're on one side of those wires or the other and that's where you will remain until it's over. Another set of wires that are impassable are in the Lower Dam at the bottom of the stairs that start take you upwards again to where you entrance to the dam from the Winding River side. You're on one side or the other of those wires when the aurora starts and you'll stay there or you'll be dead.

Yeah, it's dangerous in there. Heh, I remember when I first got the game I laid out my bedroll in the corridor of death in the dam, not realising that if an aurora came out there'd be electricity. I was just a-sleepin' away and then there's this "brrrzp" and I'd died of burns. I was like "what the hell...?"

Personal nukes or I bail.

If I have that kind of stuff and I'm going to do a time accelerated action (typically either carcass harvesting or chopping up a limb) I always drop. You don't need to drop it a distance away... as soon as it hits the ground no predator can pick it up.

Actually, what I think happened was this: when you kill a particular bear, some time later a new bear spawns into its cave. I think he happened to be there when it happened. I also think when a new bear spawns in it can be asleep if it's the time of day for it to be asleep; for example, when you step outside the door of your safe house, the entire region spawns in. If it's the middle of the night a bear will spawn into its cave and be asleep. Also, when the "respawn" timer hits zero the animal will spawn in, and I think it won't matter if it's a transition or not, it'll just do it... based on the fact that my long run guy's living in a cave in FM and the bear just appeared one day to replace the one I'd killed a couple of weeks before despite not doing any transitions from outdoors to indoors. So, new bear spawns in because its respawn timer his zero, and then he poked it and it woke up and that's the point that the faeces interacted with the rotating air impeller.

If you read the note in the lighthouse, you'll see that Sean didn't wake up one morning.

No, I'd disagree. I mean, if the tree is well sheltered by rocks or a copse of trees on its split side, it would make sense that it would be okay; the one up on the Muskeg Overlook faces directly off the cliff with nothing to stop wind blowing in that particular direction. It makes sense that some hollow trees could be safe and some not safe under those circumstances. Aye, but if it's windproof it doesn't really matter that much; if you can get up to a +40 fire going in there and you have decent clothes and roll, you're going to make the night if the fire is protected from getting blown out by the wind.