ajb1978

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.

I don't know about turning this into a horror game or anything, but there is definitely a middle ground. Especially if you're exhausted for too long, start to introduce hallucinations like shadow figures that appear very briefly at the edges of the screen but disappear when you look directly at them. Or you start hearing growls from nonexistent wildlife, mysterious whispers, etc. You as the player know it's not ghosts or anything, but it's still unsettling, and might provide you with some incentive to not exploit exhaustion. I just hacked up the entirety of Hibernia pretty much without sleep, and just exhausting myself down to nearly the red zone for condition before I finally rested. The only consequences of performing like day after day of heavy labor without rest was huffing and puffing when I walked around. Or heck even "If I don't rest soon I'm gonna faint," make that actually happen. Fainting risk that goes up the longer you stay exhausted, and at some point sooner or later you're going to collapse on the spot and sleep 1 hour. (That could be a way to take the edge off Cabin Fever too.)

Never underestimate the raw versatility of a tarp and a spool of paracord. You can use it as a groundsheet to prevent water from seeping in from below. You can cover your tent directly to help add additional rain protection. Or tie it over the top of your tent like a canopy to serve as a detached rain fly, to improve airflow in the tent while still staying dry. You can angle it a bit to direct the runoff, then leave a bin on the ground to collect water. So if it does rain, boom you've got your water right there to wash up in the morning and don't have to go lugging jugs around. If you tie it high enough you can use it to protect your campfire from rain, and to provide a dry spot to sit outdoors so you're not stuck huddled in your tent waiting out the storm. Oh and always store your food inside a locked vehicle. If that's not an option, suspend it high off the ground to protect it from opportunistic wildlife. And I'm not even talking like bear country or anything, common campground raccoons desensitized to humans are friggen relentless, and will absolutely figure out how to open your cooler if you leave it unattended. Unless it has a latch or something.

Snowshoes definitely because the core elements are already present in the game. We already know the player can travel different speeds on different surfaces (you move 10% faster on pavement). And we know equipped accessories can lower your risk of sprain. So...combine the two. Both Crampons and Snowshoes would reduce sprain risk and grant more time on weak ice. But Snowshoes would buff your movement speed on land, while Crampons functionally buff your movement speed while climbing. (They do so indirectly by slowing your stamina drain, and since your climbing speed is based in part on how full your stamina wheel is, the result is a faster climb overall.) Skis I can understand why they don't make an appearance though. That's a HUGE change to how movement would be handled, especially on hills. Building momentum, having to slow down, equipping/unequipping climbing skins to travel uphill, etc.

Actually I've made rose hip & birch bark tea before. The rose hip flavor completely overpowers the birch bark. Birch bark tea by itself is actually very subtle, and tastes kind of like really, really, really watered down maple syrup.

Serving only the finest organic toilet water.

heeeeeee of course I was joking, flinging crap would be a terrible addition to any game that doesn't involve Duke Nukem. "What am I, a chimpanzee?!"

Cattail pollen. You can substitute it 1:1 for actual flour. You can literally bake bread, make crackers, etc. with it.

Probably an unpopular opinion but I'd back this only if we can throw it as a weapon. "How far are you willing to go to survive?"

It does hinder the game IMO. I understand why it was included from a narrative/storytelling perspective, but from a gameplay perspective it's about on par with requiring that the player find a place to poop. Because what actually happens is players unexpectedly get their stuff taken away. Weapons, sure I get that. Bring a knife to prison, that's getting taken away. I'm on board with that decision. But your HAT? Come on man. So OK fine, I notice my hat is missing, I reload a previous save, make a point to drop all my gear in that prison office and advance the story while technically naked. Thereby avoiding the consequences. This entire process does not contribute to the gameplay experience, it directly detracts from it. It's a problem I can easily deal with yes, but why do I have to deal with it?

Radioluminescent minerals. Affliction Risk: Cancer.

Any of the above actually. The Cinder Hills Coal Mine contains the upper portion of the mine leading from PV to CH, the lower mine leading to the elevator, as well as the area between the two that you can get stuck in if the aurora ends after riding the elevator up. If you were able to clip through walls and fly around you could see all three sections of the mine floating in the void. They aren't even directly connected, when you use the elevator controls the game displays a loading screen and teleports you to the other end. That's why items dropped in the elevator don't come with you--the elevator isn't actually moving.

When I go for my "break down everything" personal objective after I've looted the world, I gather up all the coffee, birch bark tea, energy drinks, and stims I've managed to scrape together. If CF kicks in and I can no longer rest to recover condition, once exhaustion knocks my condition down to around 50% I will start using coffee (halt the exhaustion damage) and drink birch tea to recover. Energy drinks if I run out of coffee, then those stims would be my last resort to recover condition. Coming prepared like that, I've never died down there! Oh and if you want to pass time while afflicted with CF, just harvest your boots and cancel before it's complete. You'll pass about an hour.

Unfortunately wild boars are not indigenous to Canada. There are small populations of wild boar that have been introduced, but not statistically significant enough for it to make a sensible addition.

Hate to disappoint you but check out the ingredients on a can of pork & beans sometime.

I'd bet dollars to donuts the new item is gonna be the long-awaited bear spear.

Global time acceleration would probably be the best way to implement fast travel while preserving game balance. Hold down a key and the entire game speeds up by 3x or whatever. If you're not paying attention and blunder into a wolf while in accelerated time, that's on you. But it would turn that endless slog across the muskeg from an exercise in holding W for 5 minutes, into something less tedious.

I just carried them all the way to the power plant end of the steam tunnels and dumped them in a heap on the ground. In retrospect I probably could've just used the lockers but meh.

Gunpowder is also EXTREMELY common in episode 4. One can of gunpowder = 50 bullets, but only 5 noisemakers. With the amount of gunpowder you'd find on Interloper, you wouldn't exactly be able to spam these things out willy nilly. Maybe craft up 5 to use in case of emergency, then that's all you have until you find or craft more gunpowder, assuming you're even willing to risk Bleak Inlet in order to do so. I think it would be good to include on Interloper, because it provides an actual use for gunpowder besides just accelerant, and you certainly don't HAVE to craft noisemakers.

I'm invoking a loophole here by listing two wishes, each of which I would be happy to see included, at the exclusion of the other. 1: Decouple materials from garment type. Select the hide you wish to use, select the clothing item you wish to create. Each material used contributes its own drawbacks and benefits. Rabbitskin clothing would be the warmest and lightest, but it also wouldn't be terribly durable. A coat stitched together from 20 rabbits is going to have a lot of seams...that's translates to a lot of points of failure. But it would be light and fluffy, and make for a nice undercoat. Conversely moosehide may not be the warmest, but if you're wearing all moose, you can pass under waterfalls and not be completely drenched (maybe 20% wet per full second you make contact), and not drop straight to freezing. 2: Endgame scenarios for survival mode that you can work towards. Crafting projects of epic scale and scope, like hauling an old outboard motor from Coastal Highway all the way to Broken Railroad. Use the same carry mechanics from Episode 3 where you're sort of half carrying, half dragging someone, but have to put it down if you want to interact with the world. Once there, you spend 100 hours and 100 scrap metal to repair it. Then haul it all the way back and install it on a little boat. You pull the ripcord a few times, the engine turns over, and the game fades to black. (I figure if they can give old school party line phones a pass, the rudimentary electronics in a simple outboard motor could get one too.) Or another scenario, you find a bridge to the mainland but it's blocked by rubble. So you need to use an old hand drill to bore holes, craft explosives like in Ep 4, then blast away a layer. But it's not completely clear....so you drill more holes, craft more explosives, blast another layer away. STILL not clear...drill more holes, blast more debris...eventually after tremendous effort you've blown enough debris clear that you can crawl through, stand up and see this long bridge, and the mainland in the distance. And the game fades to black. Either case it says "You've escaped back to the mainland, and are rescued by the RCMP," or something, your save is deleted as if you'd died, but you get the satisfaction of knowing you made it.

A few years ago I was crossing the log bridge in the Raven Falls Ravine. My cat jumped up into my lap and jostled my hand. I looked down briefly, then looked back up and was a bit confused by what I was seeing. By the time I realized what I was seeing was me falling to my death, I didn't have the reaction time left to quickly hit Esc and quit the game.

I've worked tech support--NEVER hesitate to submit a bug report. If one person reports a problem, one person has a problem. Low priority. If a hundred people report the same problem, it needs to be escalated.

In technical terms though it's not the trees that produce the limbs, it's a defined area on the ground. They've simply placed trees in these regions--if you deleted the tree objects from the map the fuel would still spawn in those regions. So it would be necessary to further define a mechanic that tunes the respawn rate for that region based on how many trees remain, and that can get dicey. Plus seeing as how most of the trees aren't dead standing, they're alive and dormant so they wouldn't produce very good firewood anyway. Live dormant trees still have a lot of moisture in them.