Doc Feral

Hungry

Your carrying capacity decreases as you get more and more tired. "Sleeping it off" means that you raised your carrying capacity back to 30, 35 or 40 kgs (moosehide satchel and/or well fed buff may or may not apply), and that canceled the penalty which was causing sprain risk.

This is plain wrong. Sprain risk is a temporary situation. It comes and goes in a matter of seconds, sometimes you pick up a steak and you're at risk, then you eat it and the risk is gone. And it doesn't need drugs or sleep to heal, it depends on your weight carrying limit and carried weight. If you're dragging on tired and burdened, you're at risk, meaning you're more likely to suffer a sprain if the surface you're on is dangerous. No matter how tired and heavy you are, you'll not get sprains walking on a flat surface, but if you're at risk you'll be more susceptible to sprains once you move to a rocky slope. Sleeping decreases tiredness thus increasing carrying capacity, it doesn't "heal" the risk, it changes the parameters which are causing it.

As you probably have already figured out, it won't bleed out. No blood trail on the snow, no bleeding. If you're out of arrows that's really bad news, since either you kill it or it will eventually despawn and disintegrate your arrows in the process. If you still have arrows do yourself a favour and shoot at the thing from a safe place. Consider that animals can't climb, they can't drop from ledges and cliffs, and they can't reach you in places where you enter by crouching.

It makes me think. Since bears don't flee from fire, would a tightly packed minefield of campfires hurt a bear and actually stop its charge? Who wants to try?

Frozen solid food would be a nice addition. As for making jerky or smoking meat, the benefits of it are questionable for the sake of storage, but if it made meat less smelly the advantage would become significant. At the moment meat and fish are a really bad choice as travel food. Smelly and HEAVY. The best meat (moose) at level 5 cooking gives 1200-something calories for 1kg. That's lower than cat tails, and slightly better than canned food. Smoked or salted it may become easily half as heavy and without smell, but with a heavy dehidration effect. But as the Quonset commercial says, "water is free". And by the way, salt is free as well, with two oceanside regions.

I'm doing that because I'm at cooking level 5. I've already told the sad story, but in a previous game, also at cooking level 5, I gobbled up a RAW piece of wolf flesh by mistake getting poisoning and 75% risk of parasites, which of course caused the affliction. What makes the story sad is that it happened a few hours before the update which introduced the "are you sure you want to eat raw meat?" message. So no, I'm not lucky at all... We all agree sardines are evil, probably canned in Innsmouth.

"Just wait bro, I'll light a fire. Got cardboard matches, newsprints and reclaimed wood." The vegan's cabin. Seriously, no kitchen and a huge outhouse...

@kristaok Level 5 cooking negates all ill effects of "industrial" food or cooked meat, even if it's 0%. Raw meat and fish will still cause food poisoning, and parasites if it's wolf or bear. Not sure about unsafe water, and I don't care to try. Of course there's a bit of randomness, but more often than not you'll have trouble. And concerning settings, on Stalker, Interloper and the hardest difficulty of Wintermute you can get parasites, on lower difficulty settings they're not an issue. And @Mroz4k I've been eating total rubbish in my long stalker run, and never got food poisoning. I think I even have eaten a 0% can of sardines, which should have sickened Hedorah.

Started a relaxing voyageur game, trying to get the pacifist badge. This doesn't help, but it's an unusual place, at least for me. It's a rifle near a Stacy's, the picture is worse than I thought.

I noticed them too walking while crippled. My theory is that you're rolling dice for sprains even if no more are possible, and they simply show you're suffering. If they become longer it's interesting (hadn't time to get so many), it's true "blinding pain". Weirdly enough, they don't seem to reset the "pain" timer.

Side note: when I have to deal with a wolf in the dark I drop a bait and place a lit lantern near it.

How about crafting? Have you got a full barbarian outfit? Have at least one fur clothing item of each (maybe two deerskin pants), moose satchel and bearskin bedroll. That will keep you busy for a while.

There's a dead deer under a wooden shed in PV, between the farm and the Draft Dodger's Cabin. I've seen and ignored it when I went to explore the area near Three Strikes and Skeeter's Ridge. Then I found the entrance to TWM. So I carefully explored TWM, leisurely taking my time, and now I'm carrying stuff back to the PV farm. The carcass is still there, after at least a month.

@Mroz4k Looks like I should do some more testing. From what I remember, a randomly spawned ravaged carcass stays there as an unchanging part of the environment until you click it, then it becomes "activated" and starts decaying. It's like opening a container. I don't know if it was always like that.

The italian screenshots are mine.

Ravaged carcasses take more time and calories, maybe due to discarding the chewed and drooled on parts. When I checked times I did it for the hacksaw too, but I admit I only took a screenshot of the option, I didn't actually do it and I stopped testing before the update. Anyway quartering times don't change. I didn't test rabbits because you can always carry them to safety and time is less important (and there's no quartering). Maybe I'll do some more testing.

Maybe not, but if random map generation isn't worth an expansion or paid dlc I don't know what is.

Jeremiah's knife looked great! The bear spear is a weird thing. It's useless on wolves (tried it, they just stop and keep their distance growling while you have it braced, which is not for long anyway) and heavy. But IF bears were badassified a little more it would be great. As of now, one good hit with an arrow or bullet and the bear is a goner. If they were a little tougher against ranged weapons (bleedout only caused by critical hits, maybe) the spear could instead be the true anti-bear weapon with heavy damage and guaranteed bleeding. But it would need a better system.

During 4DON I found a flare gun. When I resumed my normal game I checked my inventory and current base and couldn't find it. Convinced of having forgotten it somewhere, I went on a rampage running around to all buildings where I had stayed, and after some days I remembered that my sandbox character DIDN'T even have a flare gun in the first place.

It makes perfect sense, in theory. Randomized maps are an utopic dream of many players, including me. As for myself, I once suggested the idea of a hex-based map (Battletech style) with each tile having "stats" for possible loot, hostile or harmless animals, shelter and so on, including "landmarks" such as iconic buildings, so the whole map would end up being "balanced" by an overall value. You wouldn't find a map covered by an endless flat orchard nor a metropolis. Wonderful, right? The only problem is that, unlike what happens in tabletop games, hex sides are not flat cardboard and need to be properly connected, which would probably be quite demanding for the devs.

Only that it wouldn't be just a wolf, and the few bullets would be made of silver.

Been there, done that, I only play stalker. If they keep fighting as low-level movie henchmen it's ok. My record (surviving) is five.

If wolves started fighting together against big animals they should rightfully do the same against players, and that would be murderous.

That's not fully correct. While a dying wolf (slowly walking with lowered head) will not go after you, it will fight with its dying breath to preserve its honour. So DON'T try to pluck an arrow off a wolf if it's not dead.