ajb1978

1 hour ago, Lord of the Long Dark said:

At the very best there should simply not be an option for character to pass.

As much as I dislike invisible force fields in open exploration games, they are vastly preferable to instant permadeath out of nowhere. Or at least a flashing skull and crossbones in the center of the screen similar to the weak ice indicator, indicating you're near a killwall. Although that sounds to me like more effort than simply removing the killwalls, or turning them into force fields.

Actually now that modding is on the table, there's a million dollar idea. A "No Killwalls" mod.

Haha well I'm not a mod author, I don't have the patience for that kind of thing anymore! I did write a batch file though (below in the code block) that allows me to quickly mod/unmod the game. If it detects anything in the Mods folder, it unmods the game by moving all the files out to a Disabled folder. If it detects the Mods folder is empty, it moves those Disabled files back. Useful if you want to switch the game back to vanilla to test a bug/exploit prior to reporting, or just to play the game "by the rules". 

As far as obtaining mods, this is my go-to source. And here's hoping this doesn't become my first ever deleted post lol!  https://xpazeman.com/tld-mod-list/

My personal mod list is (Edit: List does not include required upstream dependencies like ModSettings, ModComponent, etc.):

• Better Fuel Management - Allows you to transfer fuel from one container to another, or drain fuel from lanterns. It also prevents empty fuel containers from disappearing.
• Better Water Management - Eliminates magic water bottles. Water bottles remain when empty, and you can fill existing water bottles or transfer contents from one bottle to another. Also adds a craftable waterskin. If you don't have a means to store water, you can move the pot/can off the fire and it will retain the water until you either finish drinking it, or decide to dump it and pick the pot up. Also adds an option to melt/boil snow while brewing tea, vs. having to boil the water first and then brew tea with it.
• Developer Console - Exactly what it sounds like. And I mean who wouldn't want that?
• Fire Pack - Adds a craftable bow drill and ember box.
• Fire Addons - I use this so that I can use tinder as fuel. It has other functions as well like an option to use a lantern as a firestarter and some other stuff I don't recall offhand, but I have everything disabled besides the tinder.
• Free Look In Cars - Lets you turn completely to look out the back.
• Gear Decay Modifiers - Lets you customize the rate at which things decay. I use this to double the rate cooked meat decays, and halve the rate raw meat decays. It further encourages me to cook realistically, while still allowing me the option of preparing a week's worth of food in advance if I plan to break down all of Hibernia in one go.
• Pastime Reading - This one is super meta. It adds an actual readable in-game book bound to the 5 key, complete with animations and sound effects. You can customize the title, author, and contents of the book by updating the text file in the mod folder. It is kind of gimmicky and probably not for everyone, but I find it fun and immersive to read an actual book in-game while a blizzard roars outside. And I can always pass time normally if I just want to get on with it.
• Placing Anywhere - You can RMB an item into any location, and it has keys to rotate objects in 3 dimensions. Besides allowing you to immersively stack items it gives you the option to decorate by "hanging" climbing ropes on hooks, stick a knife in the wall and "hang" a hacksaw from it, stand flashlights up on end, etc. I personally like to collect books and fill bookshelves, or make it look like my survivor is busy doing research by having a stack of books on a desk next to a cup of coffee and a mag lens.
• Warm Food - Freshly cooked meat gives Warming Up, as do MRE's the first time you open them. Synergizes nicely with Better Water Management and Fire Pack, by offering a very intuitive and realistic cooking experience where you cook what you need when you need it.
• Time Accelerator - Lets you bind a key to adjust the game's time scale from 0.0x (time stands still) up to 10x. Auto-walk is nice and all but walking 5 minutes in a straight line is kinda boring! Being able to accelerate the game simply by holding a key is vastly preferable. And everything accelerates--the time of day, the rate at which you get hungry, the speed animals move. So it balances itself.

Some honorable mentions that are nifty but I don't personally use anymore:

• Binoculars - Adds binoculars to the game that do exactly what you would expect. Cool idea, but in practice I didn't use them. Maybe if they were bound to a hotkey, but instead you have to equip them from your inventory, and meh. That was just inconvenient enough that I never used them.
• Blanket Mod - Allows you to craft a blanket which, when kept in your inventory, adds warmth while sleeping or passing time. Again neat idea, but in practice not terribly useful for the weight. It would only really be useful on Interloper, but Interloper players aren't the sort to want to make life easier!
• Food Pack - Adds new food items to the game. Fun idea, but didn't really do it for me.
• Fox Companion - This one is just super impressive from a technical perspective. Unfortunately, it just didn't do it for me.
• Hunger Revamped - Completely overhauls the way hunger works, and frankly it is pretty cool. But ultimately I just prefer the simpler vanilla hunger system.
• Movable Containers - Great idea in theory, it allows you to move storage containers around, or even pick one up and carry it with you to a whole new location. The problem is, it was kind of buggy. Sometimes containers would duplicate, and other times disappear...along with their contents. Maybe it's better now I don't know, but I don't want to risk it on a 400+ day run! Might give it another go when I start a new guy.
• Remove Clutter - Allows you to break down nearly any interior object or decoration. But it caused some weird obstruction issues with certain environment objects. For example the calendar on the wall in the Orca station, for some reason I couldn't walk past it, I'd have to crouch and crawl under it. Ultimately I decided I was more bothered by the side effects than I was the random clutter. And again this one might be better now too, it's been a year since I tried it.
• Wooden Statuettes - Adds crafting recipes to carve little decorative animals out of fir.  Neat idea...but they take up space, wear down your tools, and I found myself never crafting them after the novelty wore off.

And lastly here's that batch file. Copy the contents into a file, call it "TLD Mod Toggle.bat" or something like that. Maybe change the paths if your default install location is different.

If not exist "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\Disabled\" mkdir "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\Disabled\"

call :DirCheck "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods" 
@exit /b  
 
:DirCheck
@call :Status "%~f1" 
@set RESULT=%ERRORLEVEL% 

@if %RESULT% equ 1  move "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\*.*" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\Disabled\"

@if %RESULT% equ 1 move "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\version.dll" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\Disabled\"

@if %RESULT% equ 0   move "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\Disabled\version.dll" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\"

@if %RESULT% equ 0   move "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\Disabled\*.*" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\Mods\"
@exit /b  
 
:Status
@for %%I in ("%~f1\*.*") do @exit /b 1 
@exit /b 0 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Killwalls have no business being in Survival mode! 

Story mode sure, keep the player in bounds and they have autosaves they can roll back to so you're never going to be set back more than 10 minutes of play. But survivor mode? NO. Just no.

I mean the places where you can safely goat around and places that will just straight up murder you are so inconsistent. It directly punishes a player for exploring every nook and cranny. Maybe that steep hill is one of those shortcuts you can butt-slide your way down. Or maybe it'll just kill you instantly. Everything else you have a fighting chance against. Wolves, bears, blizzards, weak ice, starvation, thirst, broken ribs, dysentery, cabin fever, hypothermia, and even the friggen Darkwalker. But not those invisible walls of death.

OK rant over.

Does this mean we are now free to link to mods, explain how to download/install them, etc?

8 hours ago, Fuarian said:

My biggest gripe is the whole tinder situation. 

At level 3 you don't need it. AT ALL. 

My take on that is it's like learning how to feather your firewood to essentially create your own tinder on the fly. You don't need separate tinder, you've learned to shave off fine slivers just before starting a fire. I've done this myself with softwood (specifically spruce) and it works quite well. You don't need separate tinder or kindling if you have a good sharp knife and some softwood.

I wouldn't want to try that with hardwood or "reclaimed wood" like chunks of busted up couch however. That...yeah. Recipe for disaster. But softwood, especially if you have access to fatwood, totally doable.

18 minutes ago, Ghurcb said:

Personally, I don't see how a bow drill would fit into the game. It's either OP or useless. 

Ideally it would allow players with high firestarting skill to have a renewable means of starting fires. I mean currently we just min-max the game by waiting for sunny days then going on a cooking/boiling marathon. This is just so horribly unrealistic it's laughable. By introducing a renewable craftable firestarter, the game could be played more realistically, by cooking and boiling as you need it. And not just cooking up 2 bears and leaving them in the snow for a month.

The best implementation would be to have the firestarting chance be penalized using a bow drill, such that even a level 5 firestarting might not succeed every time. TL;DR  by allowing a player to start a fire anytime, anywhere, it would disincentiveize the mag lens exploit of cooking everything all at once and then just gnawing on frozen cooked meat and bottles that magically appear out of nowhere and never freeze.

Well I stand corrected, it turns out it's body armor.

Ehhh it's a video game, I'm OK with little random inconsistencies here and there. I mean you can sleep off a bear mauling and be right as rain in the moring, for cryin out loud.

The one thing I would love to see added for firestarting is a renewable, craftable firestarter, like the oft-requested bow drill. Or a means of storing/transporting embers from last night's fire, so you can start a new one the next day.

See, starting fires isn't a problem. I've gone a thousand days without using up even a single box of matches. The problem is that it lends itself to this kind of min/max style of play where we use matches until we find a mag lens. Then wait for a sunny day, grill 10 bears and boil an Olympic swimming pool full of water, and then we're set for life. I'd much prefer a style of play where we cook and boil what we need, when we need it. And to balance the renewable firestarter, have food and water actually freeze.

Edit: I don't expect this to happen because besides being a massive shift in game balance, it would completely nerf the utility of a six-burner stove. Who needs six burners if you're only going to cook one piece of meat and boil the amount of water you can drink? A fireplace would be fine. Heck, the pot belly stoves wouldn't even be so bad.

8 hours ago, Ghurcb said:

If that IS going to be the bear spear, I hope it would take 20-30 hours to make it with using the instruments as a requirement. Such a strong weapon has to take a lot of effort to make, otherwise it would be too OP.

I always found it weird how in Wintermute Will fixes the broken spear in LITERALLY no time.

Well I'd imagine it would require multiple steps. Like traveling to a forge to craft the spear tip, then a workbench to craft the actual spear. Forging a spear tip should be most of the effort I'd think. It would be comparatively easy to lash it to a shaft of wood. Like crafting a giant arrow, basically. And it would really only be effective against charging bears that you know are coming in advance. Doesn't seem too OP to me really, considering you and your clothes take damage during bear struggles, whereas hunting them normally is relatively safe. Especially if you've got a tree or something you can force them into a circle-strafe dance and keep plugging away.

10 hours ago, PiterZ said:

Do not touch the deer carcass that you find if you do not intend to collect it - because then you start the timer for its degradation - and then nothing will be left of it.

To clarify this applies to the preplaced carcasses. If you shoot an animal and it dies, that timer starts immediately the moment it topples to the ground. In 96 hours the meat decays to 0% and the carcass despawns. A good rule of thumb is a carcass decays at 1% per hour until you either harvest everything, or completely miss out and it despawns.

Those preplace carcasses though, the timer only starts when you click on it to inspect it. Even if you don't take anything, simply examining how much meat/gut it has starts the timer. Leave the carcass alone, it'll be the same condition on day 1000 as it was on day 1.

5 hours ago, Valuable Hunting Knife said:

Interesting... I wonder if it will be available in 'Loper? and will it be able to be used on other wildlife? That'll show the bunnies who's boss...

According to what I saw on Reddit it's like partially implemented. It doesn't actually work on bears or anything really, but it does scare wolves away if you set the spear when they attack. Who knows what the final version will look like.

Bear spear in survivor mode. Some modders already picked apart the game files and found that there are now crafting recipes for the spear, as well as recovering a cured maple sapling by breaking down a broken spear.

3 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

yeah, aren't you supposed to avoid dented, bloated or rusty cans? 

That takes me back to my childhood... getting banged up cans from the discount rack at the supermarket and bringing them home. Submerge it in water and squeeze it as hard as you can. If nothing seeps out, it's probably fine. And better than going hungry.

If only food poisoning would allow you to bypass Cabin Fever....

Oh this was back in 2015 I think and I rage quit pretty much. I was extremely frustrated by the total lack of documentation. I mean I get not having a tutorial, but the game didn't even explain the controls or how to get water. Like I had matches, I had tinder, I had fuel, and I'm like....pick up the snow. How do I get the snow? I spent so much time trying all kinds of options on the snow, freezing to death simply by trying to pick up the snow to boil water. Then I finally (incorrectly) concluded that somehow the devs made an egregious oversight, and there was no way to melt snow for water. At that point I was just done, because what kind of winter survival game doesn't allow you to melt snow for water? And that was that for like a month. Until I saw a YouTube video of someone playing and saw them starting a fire, and then realized the "melt snow" option was hidden behind an active fire. And now that I think about it, I kind of get it. Taking a pot and boiling up 2L of water from snow, that's a LOT of snow. If memory serves a mass of snow equals a mass of water like 15x the volume. So you'd be going back and forth adding a couple handfuls of snow to the pot over and over and over....and that would just not make for engaging game play. So I gave it a second shot, and being able to boil water was literally the key to unlocking the rest of the game's mechanics for me.

Of course now it's WAY different, these mechanics are well explained in Story mode, there's these forums, the Wiki, the Steam forums, a subreddit, etc. just rammed with tips and advice. But way back when this was a fledgling project? Not so much!

6 minutes ago, Lord of the Long Dark said:

Batteries are not affected by EMPs. Electronics are because the magnetic field produces a high voltage circuit.  So whatever the battery runs would be destroyed.   

The narrative is inconsistent here and we pretty much just have to suspend disbelief. Case in point, flashlights. There is no scenario in reality where it would not function during the day, but function at night during an aurora. Is the battery dead or isn't it? Are the wires fried or aren't they? If the aurora charges it, why does it spontaneously lose ALL charge the moment day breaks?

1 minute ago, Leeanda said:

I've got enough maple to supply robin hood and his merry men  for a lifetime!

Or to craft a Bear Spear. Word on the street is it'll be in the next Survival release, and will require scrap metal and a maple sapling to craft!

23 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

yeah, if you're gonna find a camera, it's bound to be a Polaroid!  Self developing film and all. 

The electrical part would be tricky though to keep with the "no electricity" narrative. Unless they only work during an Aurora. Or a picture taken during the day (manual shutter) that the camera won't actually eject that picture until the next Aurora. But during an Aurora you're free to use up the whole cartridge if you want.

Or as an extreme, have each cartridge be a single-use item. Take the picture, have to smash the cartridge to get it out thereby ruining the rest.

My current one started like that and then headed eastward to try beachcombing for some. And suddenly Coastal Highway and Desolation Point were just rammed with birch, and not one Maple to be found.

Oh yeah, quite a few. There's ammo inside a pipe outside Hibernia, and several crates have items inside if you smash them open. In reality the items are just placed on the ground in the game world, but the only way to get them is to destroy the crate they placed on top. Many crates in the Cannery are like this, plus a couple at the plane crash at the Summit, sometimes there's an MRE inside a crate in the Maintenance Shed.

They are fairly few and far between, but when you're sitting on three bears' worth of meat and nothing but time to kill, finding these little hidden goodies is a fun way to pass the time.

Keep an eye out for a bespectacled crowbar-wielding physicist in a HEV suit, because it looks like you've found your way to Xen.

16 hours ago, Cr41g said:

 The game has been done in an art style reminiscent of the Group of Seven painters...

From Milton Mailbag #31: "I wanted the world to feel like a moving watercolour painting, full of colour and beauty, and the art team has done a fantastic job of delivering on that."

Personally I would like to see a medieval setting. Or at least 1800s, where the modern conveniences simply don't exist. Or if they do, they're considered cutting-edge science. Using cooking techniques like jugging or preservation techniques like potting to address long-term nutritional concerns. And where a simple deep puncture could lead to death simply due to lack of proper understanding of medical procedures or sterilization. Think Dungeons & Dragons except there are no potions, and where your remaining HP is literally your chance of recovery. Got 9/10 HP? There's a 10% chance you die from complications!

I'd just directly move into Paradise Meadows. Straighten the furniture, pick up that overturned plant, sweep  and generally clean house. Maybe head into Milton and scavenge materials from other houses to fix the place up a bit, repair the kitchen cabinets, etc.