ajb1978

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Posts posted by ajb1978

  1. 7 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

    I have seen some competition archers use a release system on a long bow similar to what we use in game, but the 
    device was more for accuracy rather than to minimize the effort required to keep the bow drawn.   

    Indeed. And crampons would increase your traction on ice, not increase the amount of time you can spend there. Gameplay balance!

  2. There's clearly some sort of military significance to Great Bear, so I'm kind of hoping we find some sort of secret Canadian Area 51 bunker sort of thing. I definitely get the sense that there's some sort of extraterrestrial influence going on here. Some take on the classic "gods were actually advanced aliens watching and sometimes guiding us throughout history" trope. I always get a kick out of that kind of thing. Like the aliens decided to hit Great Bear with this calamity as a way to see if humanity had evolved beyond being mindless apes, and your decisions playing as Will (since he's the only one that really has had any choices, even if they were minor) influence the ending. Either they are convinced that humanity will never evolve beyond being simple savages and decide to unleash the aurora on the rest of the world, or they see a glimmer of hope and allow things to return to normal.

    • Upvote 1
  3. 3 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

    Interesting idea,
    it got me to thinking that it should trigger a Darkwalker event.  This thing is coming after you to eat your soul before you can find your journal which reincarnates you back into the game.  If you do, your magically transport back to the last savepoint where your condition was at least 90% or better...

    That's actually pretty cool, although I would make the suggestion that winning instead acts as a natural e-stim. You are on the verge of death and lose consciousness, and you experience this sort of nightmare scenario where you're running from death as your brain struggles to keep living. Successfully banishing the Darkwalker, you experience a surge of adrenaline that wakes you up from your nightmare at 15% condition wherever it was you went down. Enough to give you one more chance, even though your situation is still dire since whatever just almost killed you is likely still going to be an immediate threat. Wildlife, cold, hunger, whatever it was will still be affecting you. If you fell, you now have multiple broken ribs, everything is sprained. So you might just be screwed anyway, but at least you have a chance.

    • Upvote 2
  4. 1 hour ago, piddy3825 said:

    yeah, the fumes of that can put a damper on the day for sure.  I was pan frying some steaks once for some dinner guests and decided to season them with a little Tabasco sauce.  I'd been drinking a little and my aim was a bit off and a huge amount splashed  on the hot pan instead of the meat.  The resulting vaporized hotsauce was like being maced!  yeah, I thought I was gonna need to be hospitalized that night...

    A mistake you only make once is dehydrating a crop of carolina reapers in your oven on a baking sheet. I bought a food dehydrator specifically so I can run an extension cord and dehydrate them outside the following season.

    • Upvote 1
  5. 8 minutes ago, Glflegolas said:

    If I had to guess the guards would have used .50cal sniper rifles in the towers. For CQB, the guards would have used pump-action shotguns.

    My friend is a corrections officer at a medium security state pen, and when he has tower duty they have AR-15s with .223 ammunition. The standing order if something breaks out is "Shoot to stop the activity." Whether or not you opt to fire a warning shot is up to the officer. They're authorized to do whatever you have to, as long as it stops the activity.

    They also have pepper ball guns for use in de-escalating incidents. Basically airsoft guns that fire big balls of oleoresin capsicum that will absolutely ruin your day if you're caught in the cloud they produce on impact, but you'll live.

  6. 2 minutes ago, ilenisaatio said:

    Damn! That older journal looks nice.

    On the topic of the journal: I'd really love if it'd be easier to get to "today" instead of having to scroll through every single day. Gets a bit old after a while. Also, being able to export the entries into just a plain text file would be awesome. Such an option would ofc also have to be once you die.

    I just throw all my quick notes in my "General Notes" now, and don't bother with writing day-specific notes. And for that matter I alt-tab out of the game, type it up in Notepad so I'm not burning up in-game time, then alt-tab back and paste it into the notes all at once.

    • Upvote 1
  7. 1 minute ago, thekillergreece said:

    Question. Say you bring minor mods (ie. ambient lights, placing anywhere, time accelerator) that affect pretty much nothing but visually and such in an on-going run. You play that run. Then you decide to remove those mods for various reasons.

    Would it corrupt your save file or?

    No, the saves are actually pretty resilient. If you use a mod that adds in new inventory items or objects, and you uninstall it, those things simply disappear from the game world. You can still load the save. If you were on a user-created map however, and uninstalled it, THAT would probably trash the save. I don't think there's a failsafe for "Oh this map doesn't exist anymore."

    Something like lighting tweaks, free look in cars, time accelerator, etc. can be added or removed mid-game with no repercussions.

  8. 10 hours ago, Catlover said:

    I second this idea. It doesn't make sense how you can slap on a bandage and sleep after a mauling, waking up at near full health, on stalker anyway. 

    Sleep off a bear mauling, then die of cabin fever in Cinder Hills while waiting for the elevator to work... Seems legit lol

    • Upvote 1
  9. 21 hours ago, ajb1978 said:

    And I understand where you're coming from about having the rapids be near-death but survivable, but that river canyon is pretty steep and there aren't many places you could really crawl out at. And what if you fall in at the Narrow Bridge? There's not really anything left downstream on the map, so that one would either have to be fatal, or end up launching you out of Eric's Falls on Timberwolf Mountain (which according to the world map is most likely where the rapids end up).

    So I just realized the river flows south to north! (Which is weird in and of itself.) So this changes things. This means that if you fell in the river at pretty much any point in Blackrock, you would end up going through the dam. If you're unfortunate enough to get pulled through the turbine, you'll probably get chewed to pulp. But even if you're "lucky" enough to go through the spillway, the intense current would pretty much guarantee you die. It would require a sheer stroke of luck for you to survive, and no amount of skill can save you in that situation. So.. Yeah. Makes sense!

    In Episode 4 as for why

    Will and Jace survive, that's because they fell into the water on the other side of the turbine. So the water had already been slowed down somewhat, and they would've been dumped out past the spillway.

    Still a stroke of luck for sure, but way more survivable than going over the dam.

  10. 29 minutes ago, A Lamp said:

    That never happened to me, and i've been using Movable containers since it was posted on the mod list.

    Speaking about mods, i miss Relentless Night...

    I took a plastic container from one of the trailers by the train unloading area in mystery lake and brought it to the camp office. I went back to grab another container, and the plastic container I had just grabbed was back again. Curious that I may have just been an idiot I put some object where the container was and took it again. After placing it in the camp office I went back to the trailer again, and the plastic container was back again, on top of the object I'd left behind, in an unsearched state. I later realized that at least one iteration of that moved plastic container had vanished from the Camp Office, along with everything inside. I'm not sure what triggered that though, I went to go on a mending marathon during a blizzard to grind the skill and realized all my cloth was gone.

  11. 1 hour ago, Waltz said:

    you can launch the game with --no-mods option, which will start the game clean without any mods and even melon console iirc

    I was not aware of that command line argument, good to know! Either way you'll end up having two shortcuts though I guess. Either you have the regular shortcut and the no-mod shortcut, or the regular shortcut and a  batch file to toggle the mod state.

  12. I'm neutral on the topic. If you don't want to pull torches from fires, don't pull torches from fires. That's a choice you as a player can make.

    On the other hand, I thought the decision to go back to "take torch" was a strange step backwards. In very early builds you could pull torches from fires. Then they changed it to "take brand", which was shown as you holding as burning stick. You could "brandish" which instead of throwing, you'd wave it around in front of you for a slight hit to your stamina, which would scare wolves if done at the right time. Once they burned out, that was it. You couldn't re-light them. The downside was they NEVER despawned, so eventually you'd have a pile of burnt out brands all over the place that you could never get rid of.

  13. Realistic Recovery Mod

    Have condition loss from physical damage (falling damage, wildlife attacks) turn a portion of your condition bar red (similar to burns). This physical damage would only heal by 2% per day by default, but that would be user-configurable. So if you get mauled by a bear and are down to 30% condition, your max condition is now 30%. Tomorrow it'll be 32%, the next day 34%, and so on until you are fully healed. In short, it now takes you a full month to recover from that mauling.

    Edit: And as another user-configurable option, the percentage of damage that shows up as red. For instance if this value is set to 50% amd you take 70 points of damage from a mauling, 35 are recorded in red, and 35 are regular "sleep it off" damage. To invoke White Wolf RPG rules, this would separate "bashing" from "lethal" damage. The Lethal (red) part would be the serious injury, cuts, internal bleeding, hairline fractures etc. that just don't go away overnight. The regular black damage is just where you were a little roughed up.

    Condition loss due to freezing, exhaustion, etc. would continue to operate as normal where after a good night's rest you feel better in the morning. Or at least, as well as your current injuries allow.

    • Upvote 6
  14. First of all this is critical: From the main menu go to Options > Privacy and disable telemetry and error reports. You don't want to inadvertently send HL bad data on bugs caused by mods, that wouldn't have happened in the base game!

    That link (here it is again: https://xpazeman.com/tld-mod-list/) actually has everything you need all in one place! It has a tutorial on how to install MelonLoader which is necessary to run mods, and then how to download/install mods themselves. Some mods have some extra steps, like configuring the book for Pastime Reading. But for most you just drop the DLL into the Mods folder. If a mod states that it has dependencies, like ModSettings or ModComponent, you MUST install those too. But again you can find all of that stuff on that one list.

    Unlike Skyrim/Fallout you don't have to worry about load order or anything. But don't start the game until you have everything you want. The first time you run a modded game it'll take some time to build the rest of the files it needs (mostly JSON config files to remember your preferences.) And I would highly recommend starting a brand new game, vs. continuing an ongoing run. Also if you add a new mod to an already modded game, sometimes (I think it might only be mods that add new items to the game) it just simply won't work. Like it doesn't even exist. (That's why I say don't start a game until you have all the mods installed you want, plus all the dependencies.) You can certainly try to add new mods on the fly--the worst that'll happen is it won't work. If that should happen, the only fix I know of is to completely uninstall all mods and MelonLoader, then reinstall everything plus the new mod, and then start the game again so it does that first-time mod setup.

    • Upvote 1
  15. 8 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

    I mean.... it's permadeath, and if you don't backup your saves (I don't) then you will eventually get screwed by such things.

    Aside from something like literally walking off a cliff, or the Trestle, or one of those rope bridges, or jumping into the rapids, I don't think anything should really insta-kill you. And I understand where you're coming from about having the rapids be near-death but survivable, but that river canyon is pretty steep and there aren't many places you could really crawl out at. And what if you fall in at the Narrow Bridge? There's not really anything left downstream on the map, so that one would either have to be fatal, or end up launching you out of Eric's Falls on Timberwolf Mountain (which according to the world map is most likely where the rapids end up).  So you'd survive the rapids only to die from that fall lol

    I mean if you get turned around in a blizzard, clothes are frozen, are exhausted, condition is down to 20% and things are looking grim, that's when the game is at its best. It's a real gamble, fighting to survive, you crest the next hill and wham a cabin! You might be saved. You stumble through the door, fumble around and find a single can of soda. It's enough to slake your thirst for a few hours. So you grab a few hours of shut-eye, recover a little bit of condition, but by the time you're dehydrated again the blizzard is still raging and your clothes aren't even close to dry. Do you risk going back out into the blizzard? Do you spend more time indoors knowing the dehydration might be the death of you? (Incidentally I'd gamble on waiting out the blizzard while dehydrated.) If you make a fatal decision, it is what it is. At least you tried your best. THOSE are the things that make for engaging gameplay. 

    Insta-death does not. At least that's my opinion on the matter. And like you said, you're getting screwed when it happens!

    • Upvote 1
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  16. 12 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

    I guess this isn't even a kill wall. I think they simply (gruesomely) misplaced the hitbox for drowning in the water.

    Oh, fair enough. Well, I still maintain my stance on killwalls even though that's not the case here lol!

    In this specific instance because they are rapids and you're carrying a pack full of gear and no floatation device, I can understand why it would be a death sentence. But only if you walk INTO the water!

    • Upvote 1