ajb1978

It would make more sense to implement the Bear Spear into the game. The spear has been called the king of weapons, and with good reason--it has offensive and defensive capabilities both up close and at range. You can slash with the tip, or strike with the butt. You can set it vs. charge (how it works in Story mode) or thrust it like a knife. You can block and deflect, and in a pinch throw it as a ranged weapon. The spear is king.

Sort of. It's based on your ambient temperature, wherever you are. While this is most noticeable inside a house vs. outside a house, it also applies to places like the Mountaineer Hut or Forestry Lookouts, where you can have an indoor heat vs. outdoor heat without changing environments. For instance, if you dump 11 hours and 59 minutes worth of fuel into the fireplace at the Mountaineer Hut, that exact same fire will last longer if you're outside the hut than inside. Because your personal temperature is lower outside the hut, the fire lasts longer.

I gotta say those enamel mugs are handy because you can apply heat directly to them. On cool summer evenings I like to sit out on my deck with a Dietz lantern that has a cook surface on the top, read by lamplight, and keep my drink hot by setting it on the lantern. (It does a great job at keeping hot things hot but I wouldn't suggest trying to cook with it unless you have a couple hours to kill.) The downside though is the mug handle gets as hot as the drink does. So if it's hot enough that you have to sip at it carefully, it's also too hot to hold by the handle. Kind of a catch-22 there. When the coffee is the right temperature, you can't drink it unless you have a folded up napkin or something to pick it up with.

Back in Milton Mailbag 31, Raph was asked if he were to produce paid DLC, what would he produce. And one of the ideas he mentioned was a partially procedurally generated journey down a highway, traveling hundreds of kms to get to your destination. Now I know this was in no way a promise and was just brainstorming, but I really liked that idea. Because how do we currently play? We establish well-fortified bases, and then travel between them as we get bored with one region. But that means we become super stingy with our resources, doing things that if you think about it in real life, are really goofy. Like cooking up a month's worth of food in advance and throwing it outside in the snow. Or boiling up hundreds of liters of water in plastic bottles that appear out of nowhere. In Story Mode, you hardly have to do any of that because you know you're not coming back. At the end of Episode 1, you just make sure you have all your best gear equipped and some provisions for the road before heading on to Mystery Lake, so you leave behind all the heavy stuff you can't be bothered to carry, hoping you'll find replacements later. A procedurally generated game, even if it used all the same core TLD mechanics, would be a totally different experience from both Survival and Story mode, carrying elements of both. You'd have to live off the land more, especially if you're 50 miles from the next destination on foot and just ate your last granola bar. And when you do find some abandoned house you can search for supplies, you'd use it as a temporary place to rest and repair your gear with whatever resources you find on site, and leave behind anything you don't have a specific use for. You're never coming back, and you have no base to fortify. So yeah, I would LOVE to see this implemented as DLC, or more likely as a standalone game with its own story.

I seem to recall this coming up on the Steam forums years ago. There was a joke about using the emote to poke a bear and see what happens. (Probably nothing good.)

Commercial passenger jets don't have them. Parachuting requires a boatload of training, and realistically, there's no way to ensure that passengers on a jetliner have that training. So, the general rule is...don't crash lol

Or siphon off the leftover aviation fuel!

Oh! Nope, unfortunately Will's first love is dead and in a million pieces. No going back.

Do you mean can you still choose a starting buff? If so, yes, you must grab Astrid's Pack and Hardcase (10kg combined), and you can choose one of the three 5kg starting buffs. Distress Pistol, Rations, or Medical. Or nothing at all... I personally think Hardened Survivor and a no-buff start is the way to go for a new Story Mode game. You get that "am I gonna make it" tension early on, but towards the end of Episode 1 assuming you complete all the side missions, you end up just as well off as you otherwise would have regardless of which buff you chose.

Well to be perfectly fair that Atari Portfolio was pretty portable! It only took 3 AAA batteries to run that thing. As far as hacking scenes go, well yeah it's easy to shoot it full of holes, but it looked good. Way better than anything we saw in the movie literally named Hackers. Or the Unix system in Jurassic Park, I think that was the first time I cussed at a movie in front of my mom.

Dang, crazy that an almost 7 year old thread is still getting replies! Assuming I don't have anything better to do, I start decorating. Ever since the Placing Anywhere mod became a thing I like to save up all the books, newsprint, and paper I find and arrange them so that it looks like I'm doing serious research. Bookshelves just rammed to bursting with all the books I find, stacks of paper on the desk, maybe a spare mag lens sitting on top of one such stack, a cup of coffee off to the side. Also with the recent release of the Item Piles mod that lets you bind firewood together into single items (which is something I'd been wishlisting for YEARS) I am doing that now. It's practical too, since instead of having say 500 sticks in a pile on the ground, I'll have 10 bundles of 50 sticks each, which are neatly stacked on top of each other in the corner thanks again to the Placing Anywhere mod. This drastically cuts down on load times since there are way fewer objects to render, not to mention reducing the amount of mouse clicks required to pick them all back up and add them to a fire.

But why? You can't use arrows until you get a bow, and maple saplings take two days longer to cure than birch, on top of the 5 hour crafting time to make the bow. So as an absolute bare minimum if you don't waste a single second, you're looking at 6 days 5 hours before you can be shooting arrows of any sort. On the other hand starting from day 0, hour 0, you can be chucking stones at bunnies and getting food/hide/gut without having to wait or craft anything. Heck by chucking stones at bunnies you can literally already have crafted a rabbitskin hat and mittens at least 15.5 hours before any maple saplings even are done curing. 3 days for the pelts but that's superseded by 5 days for the gut, add on 3.5 hours to craft the hat, 5 hours for the mittens. If you're efficient, you can have the hat/mittens 5 days 8.5 hours in, which is 15.5 hours before the earliest possible maple saplings can be done curing. Or 6.4 hours if you're using fishing tackle. (Edit: These are not truly feasible numbers because it requires time to actually kill the rabbits, harvest them, etc. But given that the alternative of harvesting maple saplings is dependent on finding a tool in order to harvest said saplings, it kind of evens out.) Either way, you have your mittens and hat before you can even think about bow-hunting, putting you nearly a week ahead of the curve. And early game, a week is everything! Upgraded arrows I think provide more interesting gameplay than downgraded arrows I don't think anyone would ever use, given that there's an abundant and free alternative available with zero wait time. Plus if you miss with a bow/arrow, you've degraded your bow/arrow. If you miss with a stone...you just pick the stone back up and try again. Although upgraded bows would be a nice touch too though. A compound bow that allows you to draw and hold it for a lot longer (hold weight vs. draw weight). Combine broadhead arrows with a compound bow and you've got a supremely deadly weapon that can compete with a rifle any day. (Albeit one that requires a bit of effort and travelling to some dangerous regions to reach its full potential.) Heck, in real life a good bow and arrow won't just stick into an animal, it'll punch a hole clean through it. So even if by some chance your shot doesn't drop the beast immediately, you can at least retrieve your arrow right away, before setting out to track it. Not that it'd get very far anyway. Broadhead arrows are devastating.

I'd go the opposite direction on arrows. We already have Simple Arrows. So let's go with Broadhead Arrows as an upgrade. (I've posted this before elsewhere, so if this sounds familiar...yes this is a repeat.) Basically you craft a Simple Arrowhead, then carry those to a region with a Milling Machine. You use the Milling Machine to upgrade the Simple Arrowheads into Broadhead Tips. Crafting arrows with Broadhead Tips results in Broadhead Arrows, which always kill wolves or deer instantly, regardless of where you hit them. Moose and bears would have a much increased chance of instant kill, but not guaranteed. Also, Flaming Arrows. 1 Simple Arrow, 1 cloth, 0.1L lamp oil = Flaming Arrow. You must light it first (so -1 match. Edit: Or perhaps allow lighting from a campfire, and of course firestriker. Maybe even allow direct lighting via mag lens on sunny days? I dunno. I haven't thought this one through much.), and once lit it will slowly degrade over time (like a torch), and massively degrade after a shot depending on what you hit. These would basically be craftable Flare Shells, and would have the same effect. i.e. scaring off charging bears.

That is a time honored tradition. I remember back when the game was just three regions, one of my early go-to tactics was to chase a deer into a wolf, then charge the wolf and take it out the hard way. Bandage my wounds, and boom. One deer hide, one wolf hide, four gut, plus enough food to last several days. Of course this is suicide on Interloper, but Interloper didn't exist then

My educational background is in information security with a focus on white-hat hacking. Basically, I find ways to break your shit, so you can fix your shit in a way I can't break. So yeah, Jace's position is a very, very liberal interpretation of hacking, with the intent of moving the story forward at the understandable expense of accuracy. If we were interpreting this with strict realism, there's just no way Jace could be hacking anything. The fact that the electronics only work when the aurora is in the sky is a huge detriment. And I don't care how skilled you are as a person, if you're encountering a network for the first time, you just suck. You just can't possibly know all the weaknesses. That takes weeks, months, possibly years to fully ascertain. So right off the bat, it's just not happening at all. And add into that the fact that Blackrock is a self-admitted amalgam of different eras of technology. Steam tech physical access, analog electrical telecom, digital electrical PC networking. You're just not going to find that in the real world. At all. But I can suspend disbelief for the sake of the game, same as I can suspend disbelief when someone in a movie "Hacks the mainframe to disable power and open the locks." If you dig into it, there's probably a hundred reasons why it can't happen. But it's a work of fiction. You suspend disbelief in order to enjoy the story.

Telephones always used electricity as their basis. The phone line Molly uses is an old party line. (Even though the phones we see in the game are not party line phones.) The way they worked was you would pick up, put the earpiece to your ear, and turn the crank. This powered a dynamo that would cause all phones connected to that same circuit to ring. Everyone would pick up, you would listen in to see if the call was for you. If not, you would politely hang up. Or maybe you impolitely eavesdropped on someone else's conversation. Either way, it was an analog system that used hand-powered dynamos to generate the ring, and your voice itself provided the power to operate the phone. It was a sound-powered phone, where your voice vibrates the speaker, which interacts with magnets and wires to generate a slight current, that vibrates the speaker on all other connected phones. Even to this day the US Navy still uses sound-powered phones for shipboard communication. If your ship takes a hit and the power goes out, you can still shout into a voice-powered phone and get your message through to the bridge, engine room, or wherever. The circuit between Pleasant Valley and Mystery Lake might have been connected, but that doesn't mean the Blackrock region was part of the same circuit. It could very easily have been on its own separate circuit, allowing Will and Jace to communicate in a way that Molly/Astrid had no access to.

I miss brands because it was just more realistic. (Although I DON'T miss having a pile of burnt out brands in the corner.) I would personally like brands to make a comeback, but behave more like the torches we currently have. Burn for a few minutes, throw them to scare off wolves, light a fire with one. But once it's burnt out, it's burnt out. You can't just put it out and relight it later. I'm as guilty of exploiting this as anyone, but lighting a fire and pulling out a half dozen actual torches is just silly!

Easily rectified by having them disappear when placed into a container, same as burnt out flares. Edit: Ooh, or save up a few burnt out brands and craft them into 1 charcoal, just to give them some utility. And because players like me HATE wasting anything. I save my empty spraypaint cans in the hopes that at some point in the future, they will have a purpose...

There's definitely technical solutions that could be implemented, such as automatically aborting the action if an animal gets too close, or putting up an invisible barrier around the player that prevents animals from approaching unless they were already aware of the player's presence. Current state though, there are steps you can take to mitigate the risk. Crouching before you perform any time-accelerating activity is a great habit to get into. When time returns to normal, you're crouched, and much harder to detect. If time returns to normal and a bear is right on top of you, well...yeah you came up snake eyes, tough luck. But the odds of a bear being RIGHT on top of you when time returns to normal, well that you can plan around. Bears have predictable paths, so if your quarry drops on one such path you know you have to play it careful. Light a fire if you can, and start harvesting in small increments, and keep your head on a swivel. If you see a bear keep harvesting in little tiny increments and keep an eye on it. If it starts getting too close for comfort, pack up shop and come back for the rest later.

Unfortunately I'm at a stage where I can no longer definitively answer that question...I've long since raided HRV and any books I would have acquired are now squirreled away at the Paradise Meadows farmhouse. That's kind of my official home away from home while I work on mapping everything to completion. That said I think you're right, I have no specific memories of books spawning in HRV. Like, ever.

Possibly the jankiest setup ever... CPU: Intel i7 4790k Monitor: Some random Samsung 4K TV Secondary display: 1080P 21" HP monitor Tertiary display: Any of a billion virtual displays rendered in VR via the Index. 16GB System RAM GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti (and yes I'm aware of the bottleneck with pancake displays, I primarily use it for VR so the bottleneck is practically nullified.) Keyboard: Some red backlit Corsair deal. Got volume on a dial which is fun. Mouse: Amazon Basics Headset: That Valve Index again. Chair: Cat damage. Lots of cat damage. Those two laptops on my desk are for work. When I'm on the clock my primary and secondary displays are used with them. When I'm off the clock, it's game on.

Ooh, that's basically me! I'm currently doing a library run, where my primary goal is to abscond with every book in the game world, and line the shelves of the Pleasant Valley Farmhouse with them. In VR too, because that's how I roll. (Virtual 3D monitor rendered via VorpX, in case anyone is interested.)

I'd suggest just muting your speakers. Muting your ACTUAL hearing can endanger your personal well-being, as well as that of others. Odds are you'll be fine, but holy crap do you want to miss someone screaming for help, only to think 12 hours later "If only I hadn't put ear plugs in..."

I would be in favor of this as a mod or a Custom mode setting, and I know that the core functionality of varying interior temperatures already exists in the game. During the last Four Days of Night challenge, the final day featured a nonstop, never-ending blizzard and interior temps were like -30 or something. The idea being that you couldn't just wait out the last couple hours of the challenge by leaving your character standing idle indoors for two real-time hours. Another thing I noticed was the Lookout in CH, the interior temperature will sometimes go up by 2 degrees C if you enter and exit the upper Cinder Hills coal mine. I don't know what it is, but when it works, it works every time. -3C interior temperature, go to the mine and immediately return to the Lookout, -1C interior temperature. But then other times, it just won't work at all. Very weird little bug, and it might have something to do with the Cold Fusion feat since last time I tested it was on a throwaway Pilgrim run with that feat active. As for heating/cooling an interior location, different places could have different volumetric heat capacities to act as a kind of multiplier. The higher the value, the longer it takes to heat up, and the longer it holds heat. Someplace like the Pleasant Valley Farmhouse could take hours to completely heat up, but then it would hold that heat for a lot longer (possibly several days). Between being heavily insulated (it's a house in Canada, of course it's heavily insulated), all of the walls and furniture inside the house retaining heat, and because that basement provides a pocket of air between the warm house and cold ground. Someplace like the Mountaineer Hut would heat up very quickly but wouldn't get as warm, and once that fire is out it'll be stone cold in a matter of minutes. No insulation, no basement, not to mention the gaping hole in the roof. Forestry lookouts and the insides of cars would warm up on sunny days of their own accord, thanks to the greenhouse effect. As for base-building or improvements, I wouldn't mind a system like Skyrim Hearthfire, where you have a drafting table and can pick what you want to build for your home from a menu and any purchased upgrades appear in predefined locations. Using the Mountaineer Hut as an example, "Repair Roof" would absolutely be an option. And then some other things to make the place more homey, like a cabinet next to the front door, more shelves, a firewood bin outside, gun rack over the fireplace, outdoor windproof firepit, stack the two beds into one bunk bed to free up some floor space, etc. Maybe have a set of choices for different locations, like replacing the wood shelf with a dresser or something, but only one can exist at any given time.

Only reason I found out is I was going to toss an old torch in just to get rid of it, and poof. Lit the torch instead.