peteloud

Today has been an interesting day. I managed to get v.1.48 at around 3:30am, (BST, 7th, May), and have spent most of my day trying it out, looking for problems. I found a few things I liked and few on which I am undecided. I avoided a serious look at the sprains issue, but eventually I had to get back to my usual game. That is a 900+ day, Voyager game in which I am trying to map all of the black spaces on my charcoal maps. My current objective was to climb TWM, from the Mountainer's Hut and goat down from TWM on a new goat path, (or rock face). I felt that this was a task that would give me many sprain problems. A few days ago I did this and sprained every limb I have. This time I had very limited painkillers. I hesitated because this might easily end my life. The first surprise was that the game crashed while I was walking up a steep, but nothing special, snow slope. Before setting off I kept my load lower than my usual heavy load 40+kg. I was trying to keep below 35Kg just in case that was a trigger point. I can't be sure I was below 35Kg because I might have picked up a couple of sticks after a rope climb. One second I was plodding up the slope then the next second I had a sprain warning, the mountain screen was replaced with a small window on which there was progress bar. Then it was all over. It happened so quickly I could even see what the progress bar was about. Fortunately I was able to return to my last auto-save at the Mountaineer's Hut. A day or two later I continued my climb and got beyond the deer clearing and climbed a rope. Immediately after reaching the top the computer crashed. Fortunately I needed a sleep at the bottom of the rope so there was an auto save at that point, so It wasn't a big problem. After that I restarted and continued and reached the summit. I had a walk around picking up a few sticks and retired to the cave. The computer crashed again. I can't remember the exact point at, which it crashed. It was after cooking but whether it was before or after sleeping I can't remember. Ahhh, the perils of drinking cheap wine when you play TLD. It is not a big problem. I'll be able to recover the situation, but normally I have no crashes, then three crashes between Mountaineer's Hut and TWM summit means there is a problem. I don't feel bad about it. Over the years I have had many things go wrong with stuff I have been developing. I don't blame Hinterland for cutting corners and racing ahead, we players demand it. In fact, I have greatly enjoyed spending today looking for and finding problems.

I tested the bow with the new aiming arrangement. I fired one arrow and it got the deer in the head. A sample of one in very scientific, but I was not aware of any problem or difficulty.

Sprains need more fine-tuning. I have had a few warnings when I have been on safe flat territory, including inside a fishing hut. It seems that the warning is triggered by exceeding a load of 40Kg, rather than potential terrain difficulties. I have not suffered an actual spring in v1.48 so I don't know how it works out on rough terrain. . . . . . I have just returned to an old game. It opens with me getting out of bed in the PV farmhouse. I immediately had a sprain warning. My load was 40.7Kg. That problem has bugged me for ages. I have reported it a few times. Once upon a time the PV barn was darker in daytime than at night, but it was fixed. More recently the PV farmhouse was very dark and usually I could not see most of the resources that I had dropped. That has been fixed in v1.48. A couple of hours ago I checked Trapper's Cabin, it is still too dark in there, but not as bad as PV farmhouse was. Before v1.48 the Hunters Lodge in Broken Railroad could do with lightening, although it would be understandable if the basement was darkened. I don't know if it has been lightened, but my guess is that, as they didn't fix Trapper's Cabin, they have not systematically checked and fixed all building interiors. Another problem is that some places were/are too bright. The fire in the TWM Mountaineer's hut was too bright and the colours and details were burnt out. Many times I have been outdoors and the snow is too bright and burned out.

XaldinVii ". . . . the Brace mechanic with the Spear is tied to your stamina. " I was severely injured, (perhaps killed, I can't remember), a few times before I realised that. Once I knew that it was easy. The next time the bear attacked me I was able to kill him.

Failure, " That's what I expected, thank you. " There is a unnecessary touch of bitchiness in your comment. There are many games which do not suit me, so I don't play them. I think that Raphael's comment was sensible, and not in the least rude.

My apologies for going beyond the cloth hat and hand wraps topic, but having mentioned a couple of other issues I feel I should add to those loose ends. The discussion about the benefits of using cloth for a hat compared to wearing jeans is interesting, but such scenarios are only a very particular and very small part of the game. I went back to a pre-v1.48 backup of my 900+ day, tough TWM game and reinstalled that, to get my bits of cloth back. I'd rather go up TWM with my usual headgear and gloves and have the pieces of cloth for emergency repairs. The sounds definitely seem much more detailed, interesting too. I am looking forward to new sound experiences. Although I am delighted to be able to see inside the PV farmhouse, and that the fire in the TWM mountaineer's hut is now not over bright I found that the Trapper's Cabin is still very dark. I can see in there, but is unrealistically dark considering the number and position of the windows and compared with buildings like the ML Camp Office. I have still not found a revolver, but I tested the new sighting on the rifle and bow. I think it good. In a 400+ day Pilgrim game which I use for demonstrating the game to friends, my level 5 bow and arrow skills easily killed a deer. My level 4 rifle skill only hit the dear, but I couldn't get a head shot. I thought that about right. Personally I suspect that I will continue using the bow and arrow and leave rifles and revolvers at my base.

".... there is enough content for maybe 100-150 days. And the end of that is already repetitive. " After 500 game days the number of interesting challenges is reduced, but there are still many challenges out there. I have played well over 2,000 game days, at Voyager - Stalker level, and still find fresh challenges. At the moment I'm at day 913 on a Voyager game. At day 900 I decided to check that I had mapped the full area of each charcoal map and found that I had a few black patches on my TWM map. So there was a new challenge. It is proving quite tough. It might be tougher now with the new sprain mechanism. This morning I have a new challenge. My tld.exe file has disappeared, but that is more likely to be a Steam rather than Hinterland problem. It was there a few hours ago when I tested v1.48, now it has gone. . . . . . I have solved this problem of the lost tld.exe Fortunately I made a copy of the v1.39 files and was able to copy over the tld.exe from that. Just in case this happens to you I siggest that you make a copy of your tld.exe file, you'll find it under something like, "I:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\tld.exe" . I don't know why this problem arose. I was not doing anything out of the ordinary.

After 24 hours of impatient waiting I finally got ver. 1.48 . The first thing that struck me was the sound. The environmental sound seems to be much more detailed. I am not sure if that has been altered or could it be that my volume is just higher for some other reason. I immediately made a cloth cap and some hand wraps. My first reaction is that they are a waste of time. I am cursing that I used up 6 pieces of badly needed cloth in a tough game in TWM. They just offer another hat and pair of gloves when there are already sufficient hats and gloves. I am delighted to find that I can see my way around the PV farmhouse. That was my biggest bugbear. I even found some items I didn't know that I had dropped in the farmhouse. The instant I stepped out of the farmhouse I had a sprain warning. It appeared and disappeared so quickly couldn't work out the significance of it. I have no idea when the revolver will turn up. I am not bothered. I am not into gun games. It just seems like a complex variant of the flare pistol. Back to the game to see what else I can find.

The biggest problem with TLD is not the endless wolf attacks. No, it's not the surprise attack when you didn't hear the bear. It is not falling through the ice into freezing water. It is not even the inconsistent levels of illumination inside buildings, which is my bugbear. It is tedious drawn out actions when you just want to get over with some boring task. It might be a long walk into the wind, or overloaded, when you are cold and hungry and you just want to get into a shelter, warm up, eat and drink. Yes, that is a tedious action, when you wish you had a time machine. However that is not my complaint. I actually think that is a superb bit of game psychology. That is exactly what it is like when you have had a hard day in the hills. When you have the last three miles to walk, the excitement has gone, you are worn out, cold, wet and hungry. My problem is that in these tedious, drawn out moments I pick up my glass of cheap wine and grab a quick drink. The trouble is that there are a great many such moments. They are realistic and conjure up what it is like in real life. But they are turning me into an alcoholic!

Doc Feral, " Using a small piece (the 0.1 kgs or so harvesting leftover) of cooked meat is better. " Thanks for that info. I assumed that was the case but have never got around to checking it out.

I have encountered the issue outlined by Mroz4k. I assumed that the bear had recovered from its injury and just treated it as a new bear encounter. It would be interesting know whether the bear was bleeding out while acting normally and would soon die.

I became so irritated by how dark it was in the PV farmhouse and it being such a hassle to see things I gave up playing and am waiting for that problem to be fixed. I hope that the illumination levels are fixed in the next update.

I wish we could have bows and arrows in Wintermute. The rifle is very heavy. In Survival I try to get a bow & arrows as soon as possible, thereafter I would not dream of carrying around a rifle.

I thought that the mission might be region-limited so I tried to return to Milton to snare a rabbit, but the rope to climb back up was missing, so could not return. Although I didn't try returning from FM via the Milton Basin.

In Wintermute I felt certain that I had snared many rabbits, but when I looked at my Journal I saw the side mission "snare a rabbit" was still not ticked off. Just to be certain I went and snared another rabbit and checked again. It was still not ticked off. Can anyone explain this?

I play TLD a great deal, almost daily for over a year, and I have had no technical problems. My system is, Win 10, Dell, Xeon, CPU E3-1225 @ 3.2 GHz, 16GB, Radeon, R7 360.

I am surprised that some people like blizzards. In my early days of playing TLD, a little over a year ago, I was often caught out in bad weather. Surviving the cold was a greater problem than surviving the wolves. In those early days I didn't realise that I could build a snow-hole or sleep in cars. (I didn't realise that the radial menu offered activities not available from the inventory.) After several hundred games days I developed a different strategy in which I give a higher priority to the weather. I would avoid going out in very bad weather or even travelling when the wind was blowing from in front of me. Once I adopted that strategy life became easy and fairly safe, apart from the occasional wolf or bear attack. I guess that I have not needed to build a snow-hole for over 1,000 game days. (Of course this is helped by now knowing where there are safe places to shelter.) I find this interesting from the real life situation. Hinterland covers their ass by saying that this is a game and not a training simulation, but I feel that I have learned a lot about survival in harsh winter conditions from the game. Alas, my days on snowy hills were decades ago, tonight I gave up and brought my glass of wine indoors, from my garden, when I felt that I could do with a Cowichan sweater.

What I most want to see in the next update are corrections to the levels of illumination in houses. Some houses, especially the PV farmhouse, are so dark inside that I can't see objects even in the middle of the day unless I use a lantern.

I find Mr Jade's negative comments very, surprising and very, very unfair. I am an old IT guy and I have played a great many games over decades. I am retired so have lots of time to spend trying and playing games. I regard TLD as the best game I have encountered. It has many minor bugs and it doesn't have state-of-the-art graphics. Those issues are very small issues. The game-play psychology is the best I have come across. When I play this game, and I have played well over 2,000 game days at the Voyager - Stalker level, I am constantly amazed to find how carefully, and accurately, the game creates an illusion of reality. I could write a book on the seriously good aspects of the game, but I suspect that Mr Jade's expectations, enjoyment and challenges of a simulation of survival in a harsh environment are very different to mine, therefore my words would be wasted. I haven't had to survive in the severe wintry wastes of Canada, although I have read books about the hardships of the early explorers, but many times I have been out in hills in nasty conditions, and TLD re-creates the desperate need to find shelter when you are tired and cold and in the middle of nowhere. For me, TLD, for all its development problems, is the greatest game ever.

Hawk, "... You only research the books in Survival Mode. Not in Story Mode. " Yeah, that's what I thought. For a moment I wondered if I had missed something fundamental.

fezbling - I have had the same problem. Doc Feral - I don't understand your reply. When I go to the inventory the only place I see the books is in the journal, as fezbling describes. While I'm at it let me ask about a problem I have in the Wintermute journal. On the side mission Basics of Survival, the box for snaring a rabbit has not been ticked off in spite of my having snared many rabbits.

". . . next to the Hunting Lodge " I think "in the area of the Hunting Lodge", would be a better description.

I dashed over from ML Camp Office and sure enough the the Prepper's Bunker was there. It's very easy to see if anyone bothered to check behind the tree. I have stayed in the derelict house countless times without ever looking there. I didn't find much of use but it could be invaluable in some situations. The current game is at 547 days so clearly bunkers don't deteriorate and disappear. My journey from the camp office to the bunker was the easiest I can remember. I wasn't attacked by a wolf once. Although I was saved from one wolf by a rabbit being between the wolf and me. Normally I play at Voyager, Stalker or between the two, I wonder whether I was lucky or if this was a very early custom game which I made easy.

I always have that derelict house well stocked with food, water, fuel and everything else, so I don't have a reason to search around near to the house. I shall have to see if I have a game which is currently nearby so I can go and check. Does it deteriorate then disappear after a long time? Most of my games have been running for hundreds of days so if it deteriorates it might no longer be there. I shall explore.

Good heavens ! I have been in that area and climbed that rope many times and have never seen this cache.