stratvox

The main reason for the long walks is to weed out the players who don't plan adequately basically. Sub par clothing or leaving on those walks with an empty stomach will come at a cost.

Looking off the deck at sunrise from the Mindful Cabin. What a spectacular view.

I am 💀 🤣 Yeah, running it on linux here, Because Reasons.

I was not mad in any way; in general, I experienced very few problems. There are some bugs I've discovered (and submitted to the zendesk page; I'm sure I will find more) but by and large this has gone as I'd expect. I have an advantage, though; I work in software and have an idea of what kinds of things can go wrong on release day, and the various ways little things can add up to big problems (ask me about how to better manage node's heap sometime... actually, don't) and let's just say that I lost the delusion that things ever launch perfectly; sorta like when playing music nobody ever plays a clean show. A big part of the reason I like this place so much is because there's no mealy-mouthed bull from you folks. As for the folks who are losing it over the fact that it wasn't perfect, well, I feel bad for ya son I got ninety-nine problems but bs ain't one. Shit happens, and it esp happens when you're working in a small dev team; it's not like these guys have the thousands of devs on staff of a bungie or a ubisoft. It might be a good idea for folks to go to https://notalwaysright.com/ and reflect. Personally I've seen enough bad behaviour both online an irl where someone buying something thinks that the twenty bucks they're laying out means that they have the dispensation to be shitty to people. Hell with that.

I had exactly that at exactly the same location. Took me a sec to figure out what it was; it was a challenge to figure out what I was looking at! I don't think it's really floating, I think it's sleeping on top of that rock but it's not exactly aligned properly.

So, fired up a new one, decided to do Voyageur to begin with because I probably want to start trying to get the blizzard and coffee buffs, and because I like rifles and expedition parkas and stalker just has Too Many Wolves. Started out in a random location and got MT. Now been there and HRV for a total of nine days getting my stuff together for the trip; I'm very close to being ready to roll down to FM to make arrowheads with a dozen or so arrow shafts and a bow. Was coming back in the evening from the plane crash site where Will and Astrid first came into this place and got a nice shot of Milton. Would like to be further along but I needed to do some urgent urgent stuff on the company firewall for the core and web dev teams at work, and that took me down the iptables and tc rabbit hole. At any rate, I got one nice shot, sort of like... A Great Bear Ghost Town

Likewise here; you have to enable in under Accessibility as well as assign a key in Options -> Key bindings.

When they released this update all the save files for survival mode were invalidated. We're all starting brand new games; I always pick random and I ended up starting out in Mountain Town. Nearly done looting the village, then it's going to be down the ropes into Forlorn, hope that there's a hammer somewhere, and get some arrowheads going on, then it's on to BR to look for the new exit to the transition region. Kind of sad saying bye to the ~1200 day and ~900 day games I had going on, but ... sometimes those are the breaks. Haven't had much chance to see what I'm getting, but the loading screens are super super fast now... which forebodes well for the future.

A last photo dump before the morrow. A night on the lash in HRV: Started down in the valley below, and as I made my way across and up I passed by Stairsteps as the sun set. I made my way across the map under the auroral light and made my way back to my usual stomping ground. I also went to Pleasant Valley and spent some time in the Forest Cave. Early morning; cold, and the light has that ethereal quality. Now I'm up in Blackrock at Bricklayers. Still no bears in TWM, and the bear that used to live near Bricklayers over near where you can jump across the river to get right next to the Pen seems to be gone as well. I'm almost thinking I should run him back to HRV because the living is definitely a lot easier there so that he ends up in the happiest of hunting grounds once his universe passes into obsolescence, stasis, and silence. I read in the interview that the new Airfield level is going to be comparable in size to PV, which is definitely cool. Pleasant Valley can be a very good place to live with plenty of food and lots and lots of places to live that are absolutely long term viable. It'll be cool to have another level that is comparable, and hopefully also with unique features all their own. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow; it'll be cool to get tossed into the deep end once again, see what I find myself with.

It is, even though I'm personally not a mac user. Do appreciate the heads up, though.

That's definitely not true. I've deterred a charging bear with a revolver, outright killed a charging moose with both a revolver and a bow, and also killed a charging bear on several occasions with a bow. The time I killed the moose with the revolver was super special; I was on the bridge in DP when it charged me. Dropped it like ten feet away from me. Deterring the bear took me hip-shotting with the revolver until it was empty, but ... it worked, which was good because my back was against the cliff at Foreman's and I didn't have anyplace to run that was going to work.

In all seriousness, Mountaineer's in TWM's one of my strong faves, along with Bricklayer's (such great hunting there!), Foreman's Retreat, and the cave just across from the ice cave and the rope down to the Hushed River near the NW corner of the map in HRV.

Pay no attention to the hulking surly guy in the goalie mask carrying a machete; I'm sure if you ignore him he'll just go away.

Could go into Options -> Display and try the Noir setting, which makes the game black and white. It has far far more contrast then the polychromatic version.

I think this falls under the game dev version of Mark Twain's old dictum about writing: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good storygame".

Boars are simply not a thing in the region, neither on Vancouver Island, in the BC Interior, or on the Haida Gwaii. No boars! /EdnaMode

They would not. They are not a fauna of that part of the world. Mountain lions/cougar/puma? Absolutely. Kermode and Grizzly bears? Yup (and the grizzlies'll make you mark your shorts). Woodland Caribou? I'd love a version of the game that ditched the deer and replaced them with caribou, which are native to that area. Boars? Nope, no boars up there. Sorry.

Yeah, a drunken bear crab on a rock just a bit east of Vivec. I hear he pays top dollar for daedric armour and weapons.

Oh that's got the ring of truth. Sure is why I love the ol' video game shotgun. I could see this plus the bow being a very effective daily carry in the game. Maybe too effective. As was said above, maybe with the introduction of mountain lions...

Yeah, I think a way of modelling snowfall and the need to clear snow would be really cool, and could lend itself to some seriously interesting long term play effects... after all, if it never melts snow will only ever get deeper. I did some looking into this, and in particular about accurately modelling snow drifts. The math is very very hairy; most of the relevant work has been done in the pursuit of modelling sand dunes but the state of the art is not super stateful. The idea I had was to pick a basic number (say 1m) and use it to model the amount of snowfall and then use some of the dune math to figure out snowdrifts, but the thing is that terrain and wind speed and direction during snowfall are super relevant, and the complexity of the math goes up very very quickly... like exponentially quickly. I kind of suspect that Hinterland may have looked into this and realised that it's not really viable to try and model this; you could probably come up with something, but anyone who knows snow will immediately know that it's not even close to realistic. While there are many unrealistic aspects to the game (for example, bears are MUCH MUCH better at climbing trees than humans are; shooting a bear from a fallen tree is asking to get snacked upon), the weather effects are absolutely spot on, and I think they figured they couldn't do it without blowing the suspension of disbelief that is absolutely required for this game, which I view as being a piece of (Canadian!) art as much as a survival game.

Nice! In that first pic, did you build a campfire in the lighthouse to get that, or did you use a lantern? Colour says lantern, but I thought I'd ask... And welcome!

Well, all I can say is that the hunting in there is incredible. It takes time, but eventually you find the good paths around the region, and where the animals are, and then getting around is easy as pie and surprisingly quick. Really it's all about getting across the Hushed River. Anyway, I'd seriously encourage you to get a survivor up to good skill levels and equipment/clothing and then take them in there with a bow and twenty five or so arrows. Oh, and there are good caves and bad caves. The good caves have bad views, and the bad caves have good views... plus there's valley cave, which if you're passing time in the valley below is basically your only option, is decent, and also has good views. Seriously, HRV is awesome.

Once you get to know the place you'll find there are serious little corners of heaven in there.

It's a custom mode. From a Voyageur base, I turn on all afflictions (i.e. intestinal parasites are on), make blizzard frequency max, make cold max, make all the animals aware of you from very far away, max out how much scent you have when you're carrying things, turn bear, moose, deer, rabbits, and fish to max and wolves to min, turn wolf fear to max, make the wolf struggle really really bad for the player by turning it all the way up; basically, if you end up in a wolf struggle in the first few days you're in BIG BIG TROUBLE, and no matter when it happens in the game it's dangerous and really smokes out the clothing. Wolf fear is set to max so when the wolves become aware of you they have a much greater chance of fleeing, but won't always; basically, that's designed to make it as unpredictable as possible. Starting gear set to low, ummm.... I think that's about it? Oh, natural spawns (berries shrooms saplings etc) set to max. Idea is oriented towards long term survival, avoid wolves at almost all costs, bears and moose are harder to hunt and more dangerous, deer are harder because they scatter when you're quite a ways away from them. Sort of voyageurloper mode I guess. It's not hard to find the stuff you need, but it can be hard to acquire it when you're still at bow 1, so it's a race against time and the wolves to get ready for when the really cold weather comes in around day 50. Even with really nice clothing, it's rare that I can spend more than two or three hours outside on a nice sunny afternoon without needing to start a fire or find shelter to warm up... my current playthrough is about 800 days in.

So weird. I've got a guy in there, been there for about two months. He was in there for a few more months but had to come out about two months back (game time) because I was running low on arrows and needed the worktable at the trailer in MT to make more. He's in no imminent danger; the amount of meat, water, and firewood I have scattered at various caves around HRV is getting to the point of being epic. One of the best regions period for long term survival.