ajb1978

5 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

where does free passionate modding and paid DLC begin to crossover? 

Now we're talkin'. Maybe some kind of hybrid approach. I accept that modders do it out of love and not for pay, that makes total sense once I put myself in those shoes. They already have a day job, they don't need another set of commitments. But...there are also people for whom "modding" this game IS their day job. i.e. the fine folk at Hinterland, and the "mods" are not mods, but formal releases.

So...yeah. Maybe some kind of poll where people can vote on new content, which is then officially developed and implemented as paid DLC.

I'd get on board with that.

On 5/27/2022 at 3:49 PM, APixelatedLemon said:

Like yes William, the can of peaches is indeed food. What else would it be?

Reminds me of this old grocery store in Chicago back in the 80's that had a mystery rack where they'd sell all their canned goods that had lost their labels. I don't think you can get away with that today of course, but back then since we were already broke as a joke and living on food stamps, that mystery rack was our go-to for food. I mean to be fair you KNOW it's food of some variety, you just don't know what it is exactly.

I am pretty sure I have in fact eaten dog food at some point in my life. The only times I've seen meat chunks and gravy in 4oz cans that looked quite like that, was like Purina or something. But I ate it, over plain white toast, with a handful of mixed veggies thrown in.

A battery powered drone. Can be used to fly around and see what all is out there, without leaving the safety and comfort of your cave. Comes complete with a convenient auto-return feature if the battery reaches critical. (Drone unequips and returns to your inventory if the battery dies.)

6 hours ago, Digitalzombie said:

Very few of us want another job. And taking money would make it a job with obligations.

Excellent points, thank you for your feedback. I see why a bounty system won't really work, because relegating it to a commission-based or bounty-based model would steal the soul right out from it.

Meh. I just feel like there has to be some middle ground. Where random buffoons like me can be like "Hey, I'd love to see X Y and Z" and have a way to push that forward, without having to actually go full commitment and learn how to program stuff.

I had a thought; would it be possible to post bounties for mod requests? Whether it's officially managed by Hinterland, or even if we used GoFundMe or something, where players could pledge money towards mod creation, and whoever completes the requested mod claims the pot. 

I'm well aware that the nature of something like this could become a legal snafu, especially where taxes are concerned. But maybe @Admin can weigh in on the feasibility of this. I'm an idiot when it comes to business admin stuff, because I just punch a clock at my day job.

I'm just saying, there's a few things I'd love to see done with survival mode that I would be more than happy to throw money at....but I'm also well aware that the amount I'm willing to spend won't buy more than a sneeze's worth of time from an experienced programmer. But if a bunch of like-minded folks all chipped in some cash,  the collective bounty could become worth the effort.

On 5/10/2022 at 5:48 PM, Strelok said:

TLD cigarettes mod.

Love it. Its like Coffee for the fatigue part. No hydration and only 1 kcal. Good stuff.

Find a pack of cigarettes, harvest it to get 3 cigarettes.

Not familar with it myself but I would appreciate if they'd include the negatives, like a subtle but cumulative debuff on your stamina. Every cigarette decreases your stamina regeneration by 1% for 14 days, capping out at 50% reduction. Every time you smoke a cigarette the 14 day timer resets, and the stamina regeneration debuff increases by another 1%.

Edit: Ooh more thoughts. If you smoke 3 cigarettes in a row without letting the debuff expire, you're addicted. Once addicted, if you go more than 12 hours without smoking, you suffer 50% decreased condition recovery until the debuff expires (14 days without a cigarette).

The Bear Spear has the best potential for this. The spear has been called "The King of Weapons" for its sheer versatility, and difficulty to defend against. You can brace it against a charge to allow an enemy to impale themselves (this is how it's used in Episode 2). You can thrust to stab or swing to slash. You can invert it and strike with the butt for less lethal attacks. You can throw it like a javelin.

It would stand to reason that adding an alt-fire mode to perform a melee strike with the spear would be the way to go. Vs. Bears or Moose, you set the spear for impalement. Win three struggles, the bear/moose dies. Against wolves or deer, you instead perform a thrust or at just the right time. It only works in a very short range, like within 1m. A thrust that hits is an instant kill.

4 hours ago, Strelok said:

Even though i did my loot hauling again via the short route through the down then up rope and the transition cave directly to ML Trapper Cabin, i would argue in your scenario that it would be better to move one package in one go through FM to ML and then going back through the cave, so you only have 1 rope up and the much shorter way. What do you say about this? Because you have alot more rope up climbs in your scenario.

Yep there's more rope climbs. And in return, you don't need a light source, and you can quickly get the supplies into a manageable location. I'm talking quick as in real time, not quick as in "what's the absolute most efficient in-game use of calories". The only time I'm in this situation anyway is after I'm very well established and have weeks of food and water in reserve. So there's really no harm in extra climbs, if it makes it easier on me as a player.

I would go via Milton Basin personally. I would first make a point to just move supplies to the bottom of the two rope climbs, then immediately head back up and rest. Then move more stuff down, climb back up and rest. Once all the stuff I intend to move is at the bottom of the rope climbs, then I can afford to be encumbered since the rest of the trip to ML would be entirely on foot. Plus the entire trip is over land, so you don't need to worry about navigating dark caves. (There's a way to walk directly to/from the Marsh Overlook without traversing the cave by the Hat Creek Waterfall or using the rope.)

Game design decision basically. Everyone in the community center is a crash survivor, there are zero townsfolk. That doesn't seem like an oversight to me, it sounds more like the logistics of creating an interior location large enough to house plane crash survivors AND unrelated townsfolk, vs. what's necessary to tell the story, the decision was to keep it simple. Say there's 10 people in Thompson's Crossing, plus the 16 total plane crash survivors, you'd need a MUCH bigger community center. That's extra design work for both the interior space as well as the outdoor area for the town. It's just sort of implied that they're there "off camera".

Same reason why our survivors can last for months and we never once see them go poop.

The Underdark. A labyrinthine network of caves linking multiple regions of Great Bear to a single massive subterranean central chamber the size of the Astrodome. This enormous cavern counts as outdoors, and is perpetually dimly lit from above with phosphorescent moss on the cavern ceiling high overhead. A kind of eerie, mottled faintly glowing "sky". Traces of modern technology are scattered here and there. A mysterious trailer with a research station. A workbench next to a random port-a-potty. An old laptop on a crate with some snacks nearby. What's it all for? Who knows...  While in the main central chamber, you can see well enough to navigate day or night without a light source. But in order to get into or out of the region, you're going to need to navigate the cave network, and that will require light.

To provide incentive for searching the darkened areas, there's a randomly spawning deserted campsite. This campsite offers a Pup Tent as a unique campcraft item. The Pup Tent functions as a reusable shelter placeable on any even terrain via the campcraft menu. Sleeping in a Pup Tent wouldn't be quite as warm as a snow shelter, but it would prevent wet/clothing damage from weather as well as be repairable with just cloth and a sewing kit.

Besides the Pup Tent, The Underdark can serve as a "warp zone" of sorts, providing a one-region shortcut to any other region on the map, although it requires a light source to navigate. The region would be devoid of wildlife of any sort, so while it's safe in that regard, food is going to be a problem. Especially if you run out of light sources. But if you want to warp from Broken Railroad directly to Ash Canyon, well it might cost you a tank of lamp oil but you can do it.

We're gonna need to change the name of the game to "The Long Well Lit With Custom Accent Lighting" at this rate.

I don't drink unless I'm completely parched. My go-to strategy is to wait until I'm fully parched, then eat all my thirsty food first. Then eat any hydrating food second, and lastly drink water to top myself off.

3 hours ago, twyn1 said:

Yes, does BR mean the hut in Keeper's Pass South (transition zone)?

It would have to be, given that there's no fishing hut in Blackrock or Broken Railroad. The closest match would be Keeper's Pass South.

If you can't find it PM me, I'll give you an email address you can send your save file to. I'll take a look myself and see what's going on.

Edit: Assuming you're on PC. If not, well...bleh. Nevermind.

The only problem I've had is missing the hatch the first 3 times I went looking, only to stumble on it a hundred days later when tracking a wounded animal or something.

All the playthroughs blend together. I've gotten in the habit of using spraypaint to mark places I've searched, with an X. Just paint a marker on the ground at your feet when you check a location, that way you know simply by glancing at your map that yes in this particular run you did in fact check that one spot, and you're not mixing the memories up with one of the other dozens of runs you've played over the years.

The radios in cars don't play the same background track as the ones indoors, and it takes a few seconds for the audio clip to start playing. It plays one of the Survival mode tracks by Sascha Dikiciyan.

Regular wolves are by far the most annoying. I hear that warning bark, and just about every time I say aloud "God f&cking damn it!" because now my plans to do whatever I had planned to do have taken a dump, and I have to go out of my way to shake the wolf.

On 2/27/2022 at 1:09 PM, Catlover said:

Is that guy outside of the lower dam, with all those bandages, one of her victims perhaps? I've always found the dam creepy though I'm glad I didn't play when she was there, I bet Fluffy gave inexperienced players a heart attack! 

Seems like that was a prelude to Molly, on account of the broken arrows lodged into the hatch as if someone had missed.

11 hours ago, Bearimpaler101 said:

Was there a wolf in Carter hydro dam and where

Prior to the initial release of episode 1 and 2, Carter Dam wasn't decorated with as many interior objects, and the whole upstairs floor with the office didn't even exist. There were crates and cardboard boxes in the room just past the lobby, but the turbine room (with the fire barrel) was mostly empty space. That turbine room is where Fluffy used to prowl.

Which if you see how much junk is scattered all over the place in today's version, makes complete sense why Fluffy was removed. The AI pathfinding doesn't handle tight constraints well.

2 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

really, open source?  that is a big wish. 

Not entirely unreasonable though. For instance iD software releases their engines to the world after a certain period of time. It's how we ended up with these god-tier source ports like GZDoom that keep the original game going strong nearly 30 years after its original release. Once Hinterland moves on to bigger things, if they were to just release the source of TLD into the world say 10 years from now, just imagine what the community at large would create.

13 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

ah yes, the inequities of the all or nothing approach does appear to put a little bit of a dampener on this potentially promising mod.  
I complelely agree with your suggestions regarding different decay rates of items left outside vs. being stored inside.  
I still got dress socks in my underwear draw that l got back in 1990 and they hardly look worn.  I even got a couple of pairs of brand new jeans in my closet with the price tags still on them that my wife bought for me just a few days before she passed away in 2005.  I still hang on to them, thinking that one day I'll drop a few pounds and maybe they will fit, lol.  And just in case you're interested, my whetstone is almost 60 years old and although the plastic case is brittle cracked and yellow with age, I still sharpen my fillet knife and camp axe to fine razor like edge when I use it.  

So I'm not sure if I'm blind, or if this was added after I last spent time really looking at the mod configuration menu, but there ARE now options to granularly control stuff. "Advanced Gear Decay Modifiers" opens up sliders to control clothing, quarter bags, bedrolls, and food. And Food has a sub-menu that further expands it to control decay rates of raw meat, cooked meat, packaged food, and packaged food that's been opened.

Soooo...I guess Christmas came early this year?  

On 2/3/2022 at 3:31 PM, piddy3825 said:

De-clutter has to be one of my most favorite new mods now.  I love the fact that I can finally pick up all that paper trash lying on the floor of my home base!

I haven't tried tinkering with the decay rate mod yet.  What's your take on that one?  

My personal take on it is it would be a LOT better if it were more granular. It applies blanket a modifier to all ambient decay rates, so if you set it to 0.1, everything decays 10x slower. You can use more advanced sliders to control the decay rates of specific tools when used, but everything else like food and clothing is all lumped together. And you can't apply different rates to indoors vs. outdoors. I'd like to be able to do things like set clothing to never decay when left indoors. But if worn, or just sitting there outside exposed to the elements, it should decay. But sadly no, it's all or nothing.

In its current state yeah, you can at least use it to make some decay a bit more sensible. Like a whetstone doesn't just crumble to dust after an hour and a half sharpening hatchets.

So I apparently am blind as a bat because there is an option to granularly control that stuff... I'm not sure if I somehow just completely missed it, or if the mod was updated to add that in.

I would like a migratory style of gameplay, where you are tasked with traveling south to avoid the encroaching winter. The temperature gets colder very fast, so you have to balance stopping to craft and repair, vs. forging ahead and trying to get out ahead of the cold. If you move quickly enough, you might not NEED heavy clothing. So there is incentive to keep moving, not loot everything, and no point behind establishing a safehouse because you're never coming back. You're free to USE your gear, because you know you can always find more later. You don't have to get stuck in the mindset of thinking "what am I gonna do for fire on day 1500" when your goal is to not still be here when that day arrives. On the other hand that sweet rifle you just found, well who knows when the next time you'll find a weapon is. If ever. There's no "stash it at the safehouse for when you need it", you either carry it or leave it behind.

And that would lend itself very nicely to a randomized game world, where your skills are what get you by, and not how much gear you've managed to hoard. Procedural generation would really shine here, although I don't think that's possible for this particular game.

I don't really have true nightmares anymore but the worst recurring dream I have is some variation of me endlessly performing some task that just never gets any closer to being done. Either new stuff is being added faster than I can handle it, or the things I'm doing are repeatedly failing no matter how close attention I pay to it. And lately that exact scenario has actually happened. I designed an e-learning module and sent it out for feedback, and got a list of changes. I made those changes, sent  it out for feedback, got another list of changes, some of which were to directly revert previous changes. Sent it back for feedback, another list of changes. This has gone back and forth 8 times now, it is 2 weeks past due, and when I logged out of work today the last thing I saw was an email coming in with another list of changes. Not even important changes either, just "oh I think this image should be a little farther to the left." We're two weeks overdue, nobody cares what you think about the image spacing. Just sign off already!! Ugh.

So it's kind feels like like I'm living a crappy dream.