ajb1978

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Everything posted by ajb1978

  1. It's also worth pointing out that the DLC content isn't all restricted to the Far Territory, and a lot of it is randomized. The Hunter's Revolver for example appears in one of the 9 randomized prepper caches, all of which are in Lower Great Bear. What if that bunker happens to spawn in Bleak Inlet? Boom, now we've got to add Bleak Inlet back to Story Mode, modify Episode 2 to allow the player to leave Mystery Lake and enter the Ravine, and at that point you've just broken Story mode. It also means Astrid has no hope of ever acquiring it. And if it spawns in Ash Canyon, they're both out of luck. This is why you can't just add the DLC into Story mode despite the fact that the game is still visually similar. There's a LOT of stuff behind the scenes that needs to be considered besides just the maps themselves Using that randomly spawning Hunter's Revolver as an example again, can you imagine the game balance impact it could have if it spawned right away for Will in that little bunker near Milton? A hypothetical solution to hard-code them takes us into very dangerous territory because that requires opening all 4 of the existing episodes back up to modify them, in addition to balancing Episode 5...which only has a couple months left in development anyway.
  2. I just realized today that apart from controlled experiments where I'm testing mechanics, I have NEVER used a decoy to distract a wolf in this game. Not once. I always either evade them or kill them (and sometimes the other way around) but never once dropped a decoy. I just checked my stats for my current long run... Anyone else got anything like that? Some simple, easy, basic thing that's been part of the game since "forage for firewood" was a menu option, that you just never use.
  3. Yup that's partially why I'm just not even worrying about mod issues right now. Like some DIY items (but not all) disappearing on scene reload, that's a problem for later. I'm gonna end up tabling that run until the mods are fixed and starting a throwaway game to just experience the new stuff before I do it "for real" with my long game.
  4. I think it's safe to assume every Story map will be added in some fashion to Survival, because why not? If Blackrock is any indication, they build the map for Story mode (which is going to be 90% of the work), then modify the map slightly to add a way into or out of in Survival. It's all open ended so there's no need to worry about restricting the player from going someplace that might get them out of bounds/away from the story. Heck of a lot more feasible than trying to take a Survival map and add it to Story mode.
  5. The only one I've noticed that significantly impacts performance is the Better Bases mod. Entering someplace like carter unmodded takes 1 second to load the scene, but with the mod installed it's closer to 15. All those extra interactive items contribute to the scene's loading time, and it will be like that as long as the mod is installed even if you don't make any actual changes inside. What the game is doing, near as I can tell, is it loads all objects, then "remember" which ones you've broken down and despawns them. By making every object interactive, instead of only having to worry about say crates and chairs, now desks, wall decorations, lockers, doors, fences, miscellaneous equipment, drawers on the floor, wall hangings, etc. are ALL interactive. And the game now has to remember THEIR state, in addition to the objects from the base game. It's easily the "best worst" mod out there, IMO. It's great because of what it offers cleaning up the junk, moving furniture around, etc. Especially combined with DIY since you can really make a place yours. But it's going to permanently slow down your entire game.
  6. The DLC stacks on top of Survival mode. Assets from Survival mode are missing. Therefore the DLC cannot be applied no matter how much anyone wants to. You'd have the same luck applying the DLC to Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Appling the Survival mode assets back into story mode would be direclty going against the whole purpose behind which they split them into two branches to begin with. There's no point adding Survival mode content back into Story mode since again, unless you glitch your way out of bounds, you can't get there.
  7. Most likely because it was designed with the PS4 in mind, which is not a PS5. Most features probably would still work, but even though Sony does a fairly good job at backwards-compatibility, at the end of the day it IS a different console than the one it was built for. That's one of the biggest downsides to consoles, the goal posts keep getting moved the moment you get close. So developers have to keep releasing new versions of the same game, either to address backwards incompatibility, or to take advantage of new hardware features.
  8. Even if somehow the DLC were added you wouldn't get to explore any of it. The version of Broken Railroad in story mode is unfinished on that side of the bridge. There's no rail tunnel, no truck, and of course the gap is impassable. Some regions were apparently flat out removed. Used to be if you glitched your way out of bounds you could explore the rest of the world. Now though, Bleak Inlet, Coastal Highway, Ash Canyon hard lock at the loading screen if you try to enter the region. Only way out is to Alt-F4 the game. And although Blackrock is in Story mode there's no way to glitch into or out of the region, as it's completely cut off from the world map. The two branches are going to continue diverge more and more, so yeah....not gonna happen!
  9. Actually cooking does attract more wildlife than raw meat, by virtue of the fact that the cooking process releases more compounds into the air, which generates a LOT more scent. Cooked or not, meat is meat, and carnivores know meat is food. (Edit: That's real life, not in-game.)
  10. I use mods to create controlled scenarios whenever possible. In this case I manually spawned a bear (they move slow, easier to keep tabs on) and observed its behavior as I picked up and dropped various bits of meat.
  11. Having a small detection radius is desirable because it means distant wolves remain unaware of your presence. The more meat you carry, the greater your detection radius, and raw meat increases that radius faster than cooked meat. Having a bleeding injury also contributes. Not as extensively but only because the results were quickly and readily apparent: condition doesn't affect scent at all, only cooked vs. raw.
  12. I've tested it pretty extensively and raw meat does indeed contribute less to your detection radius than cooked meat, but the effect is really only noticeable when carrying multiple pieces. A single piece of meat attracts attention equally, even if it's not showing a scent line on your screen. But it takes multiple pieces of cooked meat to reach two scent lines, so if you're going to carry any meat at all you may as well carry several pieces. Based on my tests, carrying 3 pieces of raw venison attracts predators from the same distance as 6 pieces of cooked venison. The weight of the pieces doesn't matter, it's quantity. So you're better off carrying full 1kg chunks than multiple tiny pieces. Same with fish, a single scrap of cooked trout smells as much as a full raw salmon, when carried by itself. I suspect the idea that raw meat contributes less scent may be more due to the fact that cooked meat is kind of deceptive with its scent. You're generally not gonna be lugging around 6kg of cooked meat with you, you're going to be carrying 1 or 2 cooked pieces that don't trigger a scent line. But they still attract predators same as a piece of raw meat, because 1 line is the minimum whether you see it or not.
  13. I suppose an abridged recipe could work. Charcoal + hammer = activated charcoal. I mean we can reload casings without primers, so why not.
  14. This is normal. One piece won't trigger the visible scent line on the UI, but it is enough to attract their attention from farther away. Go to Mystery Lake or CH, or anyplace with wide open swaths of ice where you can see wolves way before they can see you. Carry a piece of meat and start sneaking towards a wolf. Eventually you'll notice it start to head towards you, even though you don't have a stink line. If you immediately drop that piece of meat before the wolf actually SEES you, the wolf will resume its normal patrol. Pick the meat up off the ground again, it immediately locks back on to you.
  15. Poisoning typically happens either slowly, in which case debilitating effects build up over time and take a long time to recover. Or it can happen very acutely, in which case by the time you even notice you're poisoned it might be too late to do anything about it. I'm guessing it's gonna be more like the former, where poison gradually builds up in your system over time, imposing cumulative debuffs. For sake of argument, say all of your subconditions start getting redlined. So day 1 your cap is 99%. Day 2 your cap is 98%. Not bad, you can deal with it. But let it go a week, now your best is 93% and you're starting to feel it. After two weeks it's DEFINITELY noticeable in your day-to-day. Stick around for two months, and you're barely holding together capping out at about 1/3 of your normal strength clear across the board. Can't keep food and water down, can't sleep for more than a couple hours at all and then you're lying awake restless, etc.
  16. Salt has similar issues, I've got 0.01kg of salt that is apparently 0.0099 and rounded up or something, because it's completely unusable. Looks fine, looks like 0.01kg, but doesn't actually work! Simple solution would be a failsafe that tries to use the 0.01, but if there is less than 0.01 remaining but not a perfect 0.00 then it just uses up whatever's left and calls it good. Same with flour and oats. Yeah it's exploitable, but c'mon a free bowl of oatmeal isn't liable to make or break anyone's run.
  17. There's sort of an implied answer to this, although that answer could easily be invalidated by someone simply redrawing the world map. Pleasant Valley and Coastal Highway are separated by a ridge of mountains. If you arrange the regional maps according to how they're laid out on the world map (individual regions aren't necessarily oriented with North at the top, you gotta compare tracks/lakes/rivers on the world map as context clues for how to rotate them), you can see the railroad tracks would continue east basically threading the needle between PV and CH. Currently, those tracks lead nowhere, but the same is also true of "The End of the Road" in PV. According to the world map, that would also be on the eastern edge of the region. Stands to reason that Perseverence Mills will fill that role either by itself or in tandem with other new regions, on account of how they've kind of painted themselves into a corner in that part of the world. There's a nice big unused area south of Timberwolf Mountain/Ash Canyon, east of Pleasant Valley, northeast of Coastal Highway, and north of Desolation Point where you could fit a region or two. Link it to PV via a road, CH via railroad, and probably to DP either by adding a transition zone to the broken bridge, or to Scruffy's cave or something. There's really nowhere else to go unless you backtrack through an existing region, and I kind of get the impression that Astrid's adventure through CH is gonna be glossed over in the opening cinematic and we'll just jump right into the action in Episode 5 starting in a new never-before-seen region.
  18. Only time I ever use it is on speedruns, or in Story mode where I can drop a save at the top of the rope.
  19. (This idea was inspired by a glitched Snow Shelter in survival mode that respawns every time I re-enter that map.) We can't be the ONLY one out there. The island is huge. HUGE. Even if we made it a 2-player game, you and I could drop in at random spawn points and if we had no way of coordinating a meet-up we could very easily go months in-game without ever seeing each other. But we would probably see SIGNS of each other. Now of course, I'm not advocating having parts of the game spontaneously auto-loot and have everything neatly stack itself up in safehouses, that's insane. But things like the mysterious respawning snow shelter are quite in line with things like Beachcombing, that could be used to tell a little story. Maybe a snow shelter appears in a random spot. Searching the area, you find a Ravaged Deer Carcass, and an eagle-eyed player might notice a Frozen Corpse (the hunter) not far away, dead on the ground at the base of a tree after trying to retrieve an arrow lodged in the trunk. There's a blood trail leading to a fresh not-yet-frozen Wolf Carcass a dozen meters away, a low-quality Improvised Knife still protruding from its neck. Maybe if you'd gotten there five minutes sooner.... The whole scene lasts a few days and then despawns whether discovered or not.
  20. I mean ya can't tell me you don't see just a BIT of a similarity....
  21. ajb1978

    Jace

    The lights in the sky are a symptom. Like someone with whooping cough, someone might say "It's not more than just a cough. Yet, it is." It IS just a cough, in the sense that the Tsar Bomba was a just a bomb.
  22. Jeez louise that angle and the lighting makes it look like someone took that wolf out with a hi-ex round. It looks like a basketball-sized chunk of tissue is wholly absent from its lower abdomen.
  23. Take advantage of the rivers. Although wolves can occasionally patrol a confluence whrere multiple tributaries come together, for the most part the rivers are a wolf-free travel zone, and odds are you can get at least partial shelter from the wind too. Early on that's also a great source of cattails and tinder.
  24. This is the #1 reason I use the Fire Pack mod, personally. It breathes a ton of life into Tinder Plugs. It also adds renewable firestarters, but unless you go for role-play where you regularly start tiny fires to cook what you need when you eat it (thereby completely nerfing 6-burner stoves), it's not gonna affect your game all that much. "Cook literally everything you have when it's sunny" is a rock-solid, time honored strategy that is gonna be tough to dethrone as one of the cornerstones of survival mode.