Dan_

Members
  • Posts

    545
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Dan_

  1. That's exactly the way to do it. You go down to the ravine basin and then transition into the top part of Bleak Inlet. You'll need to deploy a rope to get down from the top level and make sure to go the the Echo One radio tower and collect the note with the access code for the cannery workshop door. More often than not, you'll find a rope hanging outside the lookout tower in BI. As a side note, I gotta say I've grown to like Bleak Inlet and honestly I love it right now. The Timberwolves are not bad and having the ability to fully heal your tools using only a single piece of scrap metal is a game changer. I don't need to save up my knife and hatchet anymore, it's very liberating.
  2. Got a couple simple ones: Weight is mostly irrelevant, if you're not climbing any ropes anytime soon use it as a resource, load up on sticks as you travel and just drop them at a convenient location ( a cave, fire barrel, safe house, anywhere! ) , allow the amazing re-spawn mechanics to work, pick up the sticks and new ones will show in place of those in due time! Carry a buffer of sticks for emergency firewood and as some wise LongDarkians before me said: ABS -> Always be stickpicking! If you have to climb some ropes, drop enough sticks to make it and just carry on, you'll eventually have to travel through that spot again in the future, plus the stick pile at the bottom of the rope serves as an emergency cache, in a scenario where you have to get a few z's before climbing. Stickpicking it's TLD's dividend investing, it just keeps on giving. Your condition is also a resource, so you use it accordingly. You're settled in a nice safe house away from predators? You can stay outside longer to fend off cabin fever and collect resources ( or even gawk at the amazing art this game has, this isn't about minmaxing, it's about enjoying the game while you freeze you nuts off), draining your condition below 50% is not a big deal then. Are you about to enter a wolf infested chokepoint with no means of self-defence? Top up that condition bar and prepare for a possible struggle, you shouldn't really need to struggle if your aim is even moderately decent, but it's good to have 90%+ condition should you need to. Explore! I've seen countless threads ( mostly on reddit ) of people questioning if they should take their survivor to Bleak Inlet, Ash Canyon or Hushed River Valley. Losing a survivor is a also an extremely cool rite of passage, I remember a couple losses that taught me lessons I still carry to this day ( one was a 430+ loper, before I had the 500 day achievement ) but that never precluded me from checking the new regions. I've explored BI with Tom McKenzie, Will's roughneck and frostbitten cousin, and he beat the ass of the Timberwolves with a bow in his hand. For Ash Canyon I took Will himself there, if he dies he dies. Historytelling and roleplaying are key to enjoy survival, but don't let the attachment from that dull out your willingness and resolve to go further and farther! Last one: The best difficulty is the one you get most enjoyment out of. Simple as that, experiment with the difficulty levels and find your groove. No shame in playing any of the difficulty levels, because let's be honest, they all become easy with enough practice, but no less enjoyable. If you want even more suffering and freezing, the custom toolbox is always available and many forum members put together some codes for very interesting challenges. Replayability, that's the crown jewel in the treasure room of features this amazing game has. EDIT: I suddenly realized the thread is about things NOT to do, and I just postulated the opposite here. Sorry OP! Just apply a negative to the wall of text above and the semantics should work with the thread. Sorry!
  3. That's absolutely your best bet. As long as you have your bow and bedroll, there's not much that can pose a threat in loper, firewood is plenty almost everywhere and wildlife is sparse compared to stalker, but still plenty of game to be had even disregarding wolf meat. Plus, the climate is really mild on the early days, so much so that finding a decent coat will make the afternoons really warm. You gotta take advantage of that, minimizing condition loss is key to maintaining mobility. One thing I'd echo is that you absolutely need you tools and bow to have a sucessful run when you are inexperienced. So you need a central location to consolidate your guts/pelts curing while you forge, walking around with full scent is not a good idea when you're unarmed. If I'm going for a FM forge run, I'll station my guts/pelts/saplings in the Hydro Dam. It's super central and not too far away from the forge, plus between the Dam, Winding River and the Ravine you have pelts to make full deer and rabbit clothing, and you get the flare gun for the occasional accidental bear or moose scare ( even an emergency deer kill ). Just prepare everything there, go forge and then you'll have stuff cured on the way back to work on, works a treat when you just want to speedrun a new character to be the guinea pig explorer in a new upcoming region or something like that. Good luck!
  4. What a pleasant surprise, this thread takes me back in time. How does the game feel after such a long hiatus? I returned to Great Bear this week after a three month hiatus myself, and I've been enjoying this great game once again.
  5. Just my uneducated two cents here, but I'll never understand why other players would want the modding to be limited in order to vet out silly or out of the element mods, like huge full-autos or my little pony skins. The skyrim example is perfect, there are all sorts of terrible and silly mods alongside the ones that add to the ambiance, gameplay, etc. Why not just use the mods you deem worthy of your attention and let everybody else enjoy their own stuff? To each it's own. If mods were ever officially supported I'd really like to try changes in some of the core mechanics, like crafting, forging, firemaking and hunting. Plus, I'd love to see more primitive skill elements added, the craftable clothing and tools are a good start, but I'd love to see those expanded a bit more.
  6. Just stopping by to say I truly appreciate the diary, I know it's not easy to find time within a busy work schedule ( + keeping the little people at home studying and behaved ) to make these. I also appreciate immensely the survey, it shows HL has a commitment to always making the best possible product. I truly believe that Survival mode DLCs would be hugely successful. I own 20 or so games I purchased personally and still play on my Steam library, I've purchased DLC at some point for every single one of them that have it available. It is a valid way for the established player base to curate titles they enjoy and at the same time gives the developer even more time and resources to expand and experiment with new mechanics/experiences. The way the survey pictured the scope of the DLC packs also pleases me. It's better to have a more comprehensive content pack at a fair rate for the developer than purchase multiple small tidbits, the proposed prices also seemed really fair for the content as it was broadly described.
  7. Yeah, that's pretty much standard procedure when you're unarmed. Just gotta make sure the wolves do not close the distance and you can even walk close to trees and natural obstacles to make their pathing more difficult. As long as you're not super fatigued or massively overencumbered you can easily outwalk them. What I usually do is throw rocks to draw the wolves away from my path and put myself into favorable angles so if they detect me I can just keep going on my merry way. I also need to do some test runs to see how well can I throw rocks at charging wolves and hit 'em, that would be very useful in single region challenges where you have no weapons to defend yourself, I'm pretty sure there are players who can do that pretty easily.
  8. That's amazing, thanks for sharing! I've been hanging to the crampons but only wearing them when climbing ropes to avoid struggle damage, this removes the need for micromanaging gear and gives a buff to the protection bonus. I'm 100% happy to trade the earmuffs for more defense. Great job HL!
  9. I guess this is a reference to Mr. Alan Lawrance, one of the former Hinterland Studios 4 knights of TLDpocalypse, alongside Raphael, David and Marianne. Maybe Alan liked camping at the place, it is a pretty cool spot after all. I'd love to know the history of the names for the locations and also how the team at HL evolved through the years. Hopefully we get a Hinterland backstage deep dive, like The Simpsons Behind the Laughter or something of the sort in the future.
  10. I'll chime in with my 0.02, which is the snow shelter has limited utility and that's a fact, it's an accessory game mechanic that can be useful at times, but most often than not will always live in obscurity. I use it for two things: Challenges ( one region and outerloper ) and camping for fun in late loper games. Allowing it to be placed in more spots would be a welcome mechanic, I suspect it hasn't been done because it caused issues with the player exiting and getting stuck in the snow shelter in the past, I'd wager that is one of the reasons you need a perfect spot to place them, which is annoying but ok. The cloth cost is not a factor if you can move around and repair it at will. It probably would be bad in a 10-year run like some folks have but in reality, for most of the games it isn't really an issue. For challenge runs and single-region gauntlets then yes it becomes a huge factor, but then again only a few nutsies like us do stuff like this. I'm all in for going full native skills in the game, so I suppose you could include pelts as a substitute for cloth (make it expensive) and I'd love if the decay rates were tweaked a bit, because in loper anything over a day and you need cloth to repair the shelter, so you kinda limit your working radius when using the shelter as a base camp. Other than that, I'd like to say ( and please note this is not a dig at anyone here or in other threads whatsoever) is that sometimes we get too hung up on the concept of not making the game "too easy" and thus kinda limit our imaginations and restrict the possibilities a bit. Well, the game has been getting progressively easy since early alpha and it also got substantially better at the same rate. So that's not really good argument because there's custom modes, and varied regions with different difficulty levels so you make the game as easy or hard as you want it to be. Plus Hinterland has been masterful at introducing new elements that sometimes reduce the overall difficulty but improve the experience, but at the same time being respectful of the average challenge each difficulty mode presents. Offering more possibilities is always great in my books, it gives more people into their personal goldilocks zone when playing and enable more and more folks to experience the amazing artwork and sound design of this game. Apologies for the rambling, stay warm out there!
  11. You absolute legends! This makes me so happy! Ty!
  12. Dan_

    "Realism"

    Hinterland, please hire this man as a consultant or a psychic, 'cause he's either got great ideas that the passionate players share or he has tapped into my mind palace and is posting my thoughts.
  13. That's a dead on accurate video by RB, thanks for sharing. Personally I'm not affected by motion sickness when using the bow with the new effect, but I empathize with those who do. There absolutely should be an option to disable it, no feature is justified when it affects the health of a previously established audience, period. Gameplay-wise, it makes pretty difficult to land long range snipes but it's doable if you just draw and release right away. It kinda caps the player skill curve and makes the bow less interesting as a gameplay skill to master, so I'm not a huge fan but I can live with it.
  14. I love Miner's folly as a setup, mostly because of the bear and warm outside workbench. I took him out with the bow from distance, I feel like this is honestly the best way to hunt the bear, you just need to make sure you're out of it's detection zone and crucially that it didn't detect you, it should flee immediately as it is hit. If it charges just run back to the cabin and wait 15 minutes. If you have archery level 5 then it's a breeze. I'd recommend you use the bow over the rifle given the bleedout timer is smaller with bow hits, and I'd recommend against going inside to wait for it to bleed, just confirm the blood trail and it should be dead in no time. Go under the hayloft on the destroyed barn, it's like a warm cave under there and wait for the 2 hours so it bleeds. Also, if you want to rambo him and go full mano-a-mano, I'd recommend having the flare pistol on the ready so you can quick switch and blast the bear to avoid mauling, perhaps even get a lucky shot and drop him dead there. Good luck!
  15. I agree with the idea but I don't think this is technically feasible without a lot of work, specifically the random wolf spawning spots everywere, if that's what the OP means. Remember in older updates when new zones or objects and props within a "scene" were introduced and caused lots of issues with wolves attacking through fences, ectoplasming their way through walls and sometimes not being able to find a path to the player and engaging in all sorts of weird behaviours? I'm pretty sure they changed and improved the pathing algorithm a lot of that effort went into scene design to simplify pathfinding, rather than make an even more complex algorithm I'd assume, given the game expanded to consoles ( even the switch now ) and these are not the most powerful machines on earth so the pathing must be simple for the game to run well ( CPU wise ). That was an issue before, though HL have been improving the game substantially and good and fast animal AI was something the game lacked before, they might have improved that a lot and my concerns might be irrelevant. I'm just throwing this out there as a consideration. I love the idea, but as a programmer I'd wager the amount of work involved would immediately put HL devs off the idea. As a player, I'd love to have random wolf spawns, hell yeah. In regards to the loot tables, they were introduced to guarantee tool spawns given loper random spawns are few and far between for high value items. I recall a playthrough before HRV was introduced were I looted the entire map and only found two wool toques through bad RNG. Imagine having only one hammer through the dozen or so regions we have now? To me it would be awesome, to a Loper newcomer it would elicit complaints, I'm sure. Having more loot tables would be a good addition IMO, and it shouldn't be way too difficult to adjust. ( I assume they're simple scene configs, I might be wrong ). To me they do not spoil the experience because through looting the maps and hitting all major buildings and looting spots you'll eventually have more tools and good-level items than you realistically need in a game. Plus the only essential is a hammer, you can find enough scrap laying around everywere and the other tools and clothing you'll have to craft anyway. The loot tables also enable the Loper newbies to get a footing into forging and using the bow, so they serve a purpose. To end this huge and juicy steak of text, remember than last than 2% ( I think ) of the player base plays Interloper on a regular basis. The fact that this difficulty even exists with all of it's unique quirks is more than I could ever ask from HL, honestly. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. TLDR: Agree with the ideas, don't think both of them will come to fruition, for reasons outlined. Stay safe and warm out there ( Inside IRL, please ).
  16. I disagree. Only the regions with coastlines are truly one zone "retirement" spots. You'll need cloth, metal and saplings to survive indefinetely. AC has none of these as a renewable resource. Good hunting opportunities exist in every region and I also consider the wolves to be a good source of food and pelts/guts and not really dangerous if you got adequate preparation. Being somewhere without their immediate presence is a disadvantage in my opinion. By that measure, only DP qualifies since it's got all of these and a forge. In another note, I'm always curious as to why so many people who post here usually create a main base and operate from there. I can't never play like that and always end up in a nomadic style, go to a region, spend 20 to 30 days there stocking up some spots and hunting a bit, then move on to another one. Staying in a single spot always ends up being boring to me.
  17. This year taught a lot of us many many valuable lessons and skills. From managing a completely different work setup to living with your relatives and children closer than we ever did before. I'm thankful for the health and well-being of the people around me and wish for all the good folks in this community to find themselves in the same situation. Merry Christmas everyone! 🎅
  18. I can confirm one of them, I forgot where the other one was:
  19. I couldn't have worded it better. AC is wonderfully intriguing, every single cranny and little slope might hide a footpath to amazing vistas or a transition to a new plateau or different section of forest. Honestly, I feel like this is what they wanted to do with HRV but with a more limited scope, with Ash Canyon they could let the creativity flow and still produce a great multi-level map. I particularly love the birch stands sprinkled in between the sheer rockfaces in the west side of the map. I still have stuff to find and couldn't figure how to get the mine still in my limited time, but with 80% or so of the map covered I can proclaim a verdict: Amazing map, well worth the wait once again the guys and gals at HL deliver.
  20. Sweet! Thanks once again for the amazing update, I love that you guys and gals keep updating and improving good ol' survival mode! Much appreciated! I'm assuming the backpack is available from Stalker downwards, right? I'm coming right in to check for Loper crampons, just need a long long trek to get there.
  21. Oh that's absolutely mega! I was supposed to stain some wooden windows and paint a small section of wall in the house after my work is done but I guess priorities have changed, haven't they? Super excited, now I just have to get my survivor out of Bleak Inlet in one piece. 😅
  22. Same, even though this was by far the best halloween event we ever had, the extra anxiety is not affordable for vitamin-D deprived me. Happy I got my badges this time around.
  23. Manged to get it past the splash screen via the fix provided through the technical section. Got six notes and both badges, my route went through DP-CH-PV-ML-MT-FM, I can still go through to BR but I won't. Got a close call in the Dam where the thing got within 35 meters of me and nibbled my bacon down to little condition, had an excruciating walk through ML with little condition and fatigued ( was my first and only try ), managed to pull ahead of it by the derailment and from there keep sleeping, never stopped running and got to the end without ever seeing it again. Honestly, this is anxiety simulator, superbly well-done and I once again tip my hat to the masterpiece that is the sound design of this game, because running around the dam yard with that thing breathing down my neck I shivered for real, never once in my life that damn gate took so long to open! Hahahahah I had my dose of anxiety for the day that's for sure. Once again, superbly well-done and I appreciate the thought process that led to such an awesome event! Thank you!
  24. Hmmm, I've looked through the forums and nobody seems to share my frustration. I can't open the game at all on steam since the DW update, it gets stuck on the splash screen that tells you to not use TLD as a survival guide. Is there anybody else with this issue? I don't want to put on a support ticket if I don't need to.
  25. Dan_

    Livestock

    I'm still waiting for that Farming Simulator 19, Pleasant Valley and Paradise Meadows farm map mods.