ajb1978

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Posts posted by ajb1978

  1. I always carry a simple knife with me any time I'm out of the house, so as long as I have my pants still, I'll have my knife. Just a basic 3" blade, full tang. The knife plus sheath fits comfortably in my front jeans pocket. So if I were able to find flint out in the wild, boom. I've got flint and steel right there. But assuming I already had some form of ignition, I'd use the knife to feather off small shavings of wood from a larger piece to make tinder and kindling.

    Of course if I had my way I'd just shove a few handfuls of wadded up newsprint under my tent of sticks, hose it down with naphtha, and chuck a match at it. Fwoosh, instant campfire.

  2. I prefer things as-is. Animals typically do stick within certain territories anyway, particularly when they already have an established herd or pack. An animal that's been rejected from its herd or pack though might travel great distances, seeking a new place to call "home" that's far enough away that they won't be harassed by their former group.

    Solitary creatures like bear or moose also have a place that they call "home" that they typically don't stray too far from.

    • Like 3
  3. When Father Thomas tries to mansplain to Astrid "No no, you crashed yesterday, in the hills!"

    Look Padre, I just spent the last week straight grinding out all the side quests and pre-stocking the community center for that little grocery run you're gonna send me on in a bit. I know where I was yesterday, and it wasn't on a plane.

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  4. 1 hour ago, angelfolks said:

     But the phone doesn't go "dead,", it just stops ringing because someone else picked it up. Astrid could have been quick about it. Surely the phones don't keep ringing even when someone picks up? 

    That's precisely my point--with party lines, the line stays active. If I'm calling my friend Dan, and your phone rings, you pick up and answer, I'm like "Hey angelfolks, I'm trying to reach Dan," you go "Oh ok sorry," and hang up, then I keep ringing. Then eventually Dan picks up and I have my conversation. If you wanted to be a jerk though you could just quietly pick up and say nothing. I would have no idea you're there, I would keep ringing, until eventually Dan picks up, then you could just eavesdrop while we were none the wiser. (Back then you wouldn't pick up and say "Hello", you'd pick up and say "Churchill residence, Winston speaking," or something to that effect.)

    So with a party line if Molly were ringing Astrid and Will approaches the phone, the fact that it just spontaneously went dead would simply mean that Molly stopped ringing the phone. Had will picked up, he could've heard Astrid/Molly talking (or whomever else was on the line).

    It's also worth mentioning that despite the plot device of party lines being used, none of the phones we see in the game are actually party line phones. Those are the old school ones where you pick up the earpiece, put it to your head, turn the crank (which powers a dynamo that triggers the chime on all phones on the circuit) and then you speak directly into the mouthpiece which was mounted to the wall.

    Edit: #3 on this list does a fair job of explaining party lines: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62876/10-aspects-old-telephones-might-confuse-younger-readers

    Another common misconception I've seen is the use of the word "party" in this context. It's not party as in "whose turn is it to bring the keg", it's party as in "party of 5, your table is ready." Party as in a group of people.

    • Upvote 2
  5. 38 minutes ago, conanjaguar said:

    I think we can expect a skin and some guts, but not much meat. Perhaps half that of a bear? When you compare the two creatures in the wild, bears are usually a lot bulkier.

    Remember we harvest only a fraction of meat that we would in real life. You can reasonably expect to get around 4kg of meat off a wolf. 4!! Off an animal that weighs on average around 50! By the same token black bears are around 100kg, and you only get maybe 30 of meat in-game. And the ratio gets even worse with moose, which weigh around 500kg, and in the game yield around 40kg of meat.

    So it doesn't make sense for a new animal that weighs about as much as a wolf, to be worth 4x as much meat. It might not necessarily break the balance of the game if cougars are particularly rare, but it would make very little sense in light of how the other animals stack up by weight vs. meat.

    • Upvote 1
  6. 1 hour ago, Wonderland Wanderer 3 said:

    Alice hopes, a coguar corpre have a much more loot than a bear. A skin, guts, and alot of edible meat, which don't brings a parasites inside your guts)))

    Most likely on par with wolves as they're pretty close in size. Not like comparing deer with moose or anything. And as cougars are predators, it would make sense that intestinal parasites (which are probably trichinella) are a risk too, as cougars can become infested same as any other predator.

    The pelt would probably have a unique purpose though. The low-hanging fruit would be to have the pelt used as a crafting material for the travois, although I REALLY hope they eventually decouple material with article when it comes to clothing crafting. Rabbitskin coat, wolfskin gloves, bearskin pants, etc. each with its own unique properties depending on the material it was constructed with.

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  7. 18 hours ago, Glflegolas said:

    The one disadvantage of kerosene heaters is that they can result in a lot of condensation, as burning any fuel releases water. If your house is very dry, however, that might mean you don't have to run a humidifier.

    Oh totally, in the winter that's actually an advantage of kerosene heat. You do have to make sure that your kerosene source is reliable and K1 grade. Underground pumps if they're not well maintained can introduce moisture seepage from the ground, which dilutes and compromises the fuel. The official stance is to buy prepackaged kerosene for heaters, unless you really trust your source. I'm fortunate enough to have a reliable distributor so I have the advantages of low-cost fuel pump, and high purity. Cleanest kerosene you can get from a pump. It's actually cheaper to heat my place with kerosene than the electric baseboards, but I don't like the smell lol.

    (Edit: Actually I do but only in small amounts. I run kerosene lanterns like some people burn candles. But the heater? Too much.)

  8. Kerosene heaters are totally fine for indoor use, it's what basically everyone in Japan uses during the winter. It does give off an odor, but I mean it's not like running a diesel engine indoors or anything. It's got safety features like instant shutoff if it tips and stuff, and I have a carbon monoxide detector just to be safe.

    I know a guy who doesn't even put the metal safety cage on his. He just has it permanently set up in his home office, and when it's running he leaves a kettle directly on it to add humidity to the room, and also so he has hot water for tea on demand.  But for me this is just a backup, so I attached the cage/handle assembly so I can store it away again when the power came back.

    Manuals always err on the side of caution and tell you not to do all sorts of things that are, really, 100% perfectly fine. But some guy somewhere did something stupid, and now they have to put in the manual "do not attempt to use this heater underwater" or something.

    • Upvote 1
  9. A couple years ago I started a new game and spawned in outside the Hunting Lodge. A Moose was right there. I went inside the Lodge and right there hanging on the wall was a rifle in pretty high condition, and enough rounds of ammo to give me a reasonable shot of taking the Moose down. I went outside, leaned against a car for a quick getaway, and put one downrange. Bullwinkle dropped in one! After scrounging around for some firestarting supplies I got a roaring fire going, and proceeded to harvest that Moose the hard way: by hand. But towards the end I got a little careless and overconfident, and went "Bah, heck with it, the fire's got enough fuel, let's just harvest the rest all in one go." Cue the God of Jerks blessing me with a blizzard and me dumping my tea in my lap as frantically I lurched forward to mash Esc. I canceled out of the state with like a severe frostbite risk, like 90% hypothermia risk and nearly dead from freezing. I hauled my popsicle ass and a handful of steaks back to the lodge. I was able to get another fire started and quickly get that steak and some water going, thaw myself out, and surprisingly make a full recovery. And on day 12 I had a satchel, and still tons of moose left. So yeah that first day was full of its highs and lows but overall that was a VERY lucky start.

    On a similar note, the last time I played Interloper I basically kept coming up jackpot after jackpot. Spawned in Pleasant Valley, got a ton of cattails on my way to the farmhouse. Found a mag lens and hammer in the basement, so I decided to take a gamble on the hacksaw in TWM and headed straight there. On reaching the summit the hacksaw was in near perfect, or maybe even perfect condition. I just know I didn't have to worry about it breaking on me and all the gear I found was also in near-perfect condition. Even the weather and wolf spawns were agreeable, like the whole time I was expecting the other shoe to drop and the game was like "Nope, this is Diet Interloper. All the cold, half the calories....and by that we mean half the wolves."

    • Upvote 1
  10. 2 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

    Following the logic here, they need to make an "Improvised Technical Backpack" too...

    I have a feeling that's the role the Travois is going to fill. Not as a permanent 5kg buff necessarily, but an improvised means of hauling more gear around.

  11. Found the Curator's Rifle on a dead guy by the gold mine in Ash Canyon, but it's in such terrible shape I haven't used it yet. Once I ransack the TWM Summit I'm gonna head to Blackrock to mill it back to health and see if it's any better than a regular rifle.

    Edit: Has anyone managed to hang one of the new rifle variants on a rifle rack yet? The Curator's Rifle wouldn't slot into the one at Angler's in Ash Canyon, but I didn't have another rifle to compare so I'm not sure if it's a bugged rack, or if it's the rifle. And I don't see myself being at another location with a rifle rack for a while.

  12. 43 minutes ago, Ghurcb said:

    Honestly, I don't see the point in there being an improvised version for crampons. I guess, it's so that you don't have to go to Ash Canyon to find them.

    And that's exactly it. What if you want to only live in the Far Territory? I mean right now it's just one zone and a couple transition regions so not much to see, but in another 11 months who knows what it'll look like.

    • Upvote 1
  13. Has anyone noticed that the Improvised Crampons decay MUCH slower than the regular Crampons? I crafted a pair on day one, and as of day 51 wearing them nearly non-stop they had only decayed to 98%. I just got the "real" Crampons from Ash Canyon, and in the 15 days I've had them, they're already down to 99%.

    Even though they weigh 0.25kg more, I'm inclined to think Improvised Crampons are actually superior due to the slower decay...

  14. Movie tickets.

    Bear with me, it'll make sense.

    What does it cost to go to the movies lately? 20 bucks sounds like a fair appraisal if you consider cost of admission, plus the amount the cinema charges for snacks and a drink, plus sales tax. What you have is basically $10/hour charge for entertainment. (A two hour movie, $20 for the whole experience, works out to $10/hour.)

    That's my benchmark for "is this worth paying money for."

    Did you get 2 hours' worth of entertainment out of the DLC so far? If the answer is yes, you already got your money's worth.

    • Upvote 9
  15. WeMod is basically a GUI front end for CheatEngine. (That's a gross simplification, but c'mon that's what it is.) So basically its focus is on altering or freezing memory addresses. Infinite this or that, zero reduction in this that or the other thing, enabling of specific dev functions like "fly mode".

    Like @Kranium said, and as its CheatEngine origins suggest, it is in fact primarily a bunch of cheats, although Fly Mode has legitimate uses for getting you unstuck due to terrain bugs.