ajb1978

Meat preservation has been a wish list item for the life of the game as I've known it. And I've been playing since before Timberwolf Mountain was a thing. With things as they are now, meat preservation isn't necessary. However, I would be in favor of some sweeping changes, which would make meat preservation valuable. To clarify: Current state, we can shoot a couple bears and a moose, then either leave the meat in the snow to cook long past its ruination, or cook it all up right away and eat it over the course of the next few weeks. Neither scenario is realistic, nor even plausible. Nobody is gonna pick up a chunk of frozen meat, eat it, and call it dinner. So if firestarting were made more readily renewable, i.e. bow drill or some other sort of craftable on-demand firestarter, we could then reasonably be expected to cook our food immediately prior to eating it. Or within a day or two of eating it, at most. At that point, when we're limited to eating cooked meat within 48 hours of actually cooking it, preserving meat becomes valuable. So my in-a-nutshell take is this. Raw meat decays as it currently does. Cooked meat is edible and resists food poisoning/parasites depending on cooking skill...however it decays at a rate of 50% per calendar day. Meaning you need to cook your food at most a day prior to eating it. However, raw meat that is instead preserved, either through smoking, curing, or whatever can be eaten at any time. It doesn't gain the calorie benefit of your cooking skill, but it halts decay and eliminates food poisoning or parasite risk.

I've said it before and what the heck, I'll say it again: Introduce that Bear Spear into survival mode. Give it two functions. RMB to brace against a charge, or LMB to thrust it as a stabbing weapon. Brace vs. charge would be useful against moose and bear, LMB to thrust would be a defensive move that if timed right would kill a wolf mid-charge. Utterly useless against deer. Edit: OK maybe not utterly useless against deer. If by some fluke you're able to actually overtake a deer and stab it with the spear, you deserve that meat.

Tagging off that, in addition to restoring 10% of your fatigue subcondition, it halves fatigue drain due to walking or sprinting for 1 hour. (Fatigue lost from climbing ropes is unaffected.) Energy drinks recover 60% of your fatigue, but once the Fatigue Reduced buff wears off, you instantly lose 50% condition. So take care that you don't lose that buff at a critical time, because it can quite easily tank your Fatigue straight to zero. If your fatigue is currently topped off prior to a climb (like if you grabbed a power nap at the base of the rope), the best time to drink the coffee is after the climb, to recover what you just lost. If you are NOT topped off, then drink the coffee before. That extra 10% of recovered fatigue makes you slightly faster on the rope than otherwise, which means less fatigue lost during the climb.

It used to be, years ago. I don't remember exactly when it changed to its current UI but it used to look like an actual book. I had a screenshot at one point but can't seem to find it right now. Edit: Looking at the change log I think it may have been added in the Timberwolf Mountain update, version 0.298, back in December 2015. Edit 2: Found it! (I blurred out my crappy writing. I was in a hurry since the game was passing in real-time as I wrote it so it was packed full of spelling errors.)

I had to 😆

You need to have a fire burning and either a recycled can or a cooking pot to brew it with. Start a campfire, or light a fire in a stove. Place the can or pot on a cook surface, then click on it to bring up the menu, and hit Cook.

Save slots are shared across all game modes, so you have 25 total save slots available to spread among Story, Survival, and Challenge saves. Story mode also gives you 3 additional free auto-save slots, and a "last checkpoint" slot, which aren't counted as part of that 25. So if some of these other games you were playing were Challenge modes for instance, they wouldn't show up when you go to load a Survival game. And vice versa.

My take on it is save scumming might seem to benefit the player, but really it only deprives you. I'll give you an example: You know when a new map is released and you explore it for the first time? That sense of "I don't know where I am or where anything is," is something you only get once. You will learn that map in time, and then that feeling is gone forever. People who just download maps online may think it's helping them, but all it does is deprive them of that sense of mystery. By using maps to make the game easier to play, they are missing out on a central component of the TLD experience. It's the same general thing with save scumming to undo the fact that you got lost in the fog, or quitting the game when a bear manages to surprise-maul you thanks to the waterfall drowning out the bear crows. It might seem like it helps you, but really depriving yourself of that mauling only deprives you of the satisfaction of successfully getting away, recovering, grabbing your rifle and getting some payback. Once you get settled, the game can get tedious. Hunt, eat, gather wood, hunt, eat, gather wood. A bear mauling or moose tap dance mixes things up and breaks the monotony. Ultimately it's your game, play it how you want. If you don't want the full experience, that's not for me to judge. Personally I only justify save scumming if I get irrationally stuck on some terrain, like that time I got stuck in the bowl on the 2nd floor of the camp office. I'll scum out of that one sooner rather than later, because at that point I'm one sprain away from a pointlessly ruined run.

There's two schools of thought, and they both have weight. 1: Start with Story mode, as it serves as a sort of tutorial that introduces gameplay elements slowly, and so far only uses 5 maps. That way you can master one thing before trying something new, so you're never truly overwhelmed. Also it has save and load functionality so you can feel more free to take risks. 2: Start with Survivor mode, as it has all crafting templates unlocked from the start, all maps available, and availability of all weapons (sans firearms on Interloper). This, coupled with Pilgrim, can allow you to figure things out for yourself without being in serious danger. That said, it does have permadeath, so you can't get complacent.

Least favorite, I'd have to say Spence. It does have some advantages, like being able to shoot wolves from safety and being at zero risk for cabin fever, but I think that little outdoor office at the BR maintenance shed beats it out. Better storage, wolf meat delivery right to your doorstep, easy access to a warm interior location if a blizzard pops up in the middle of the night.

No problemo! But what do you mean by "World Decay"? There's no such variable in Custom mode.

That's been a problem for a while. Keep going in and out of the cave and eventually it will trigger the cutscene. Sometimes it happens your first trip, sometimes it happens your 10th. Kind of obnoxious but meh. It takes like a minute to force the cutscene to fire, out of what is otherwise hours of gameplay.

It does. This is best tested indoors to eliminate windchill, but check the temperature. Sprint to exhaustion, then check the temperature again.

Well it'd be simpler to select Interloper and then just dial Item Decay Rate back to Low, but yes that's the gist of things.

There is no setting in the game to where you can take like a 1000+ day character into a completely new, unexplored region, and not have the items affected by global decay. Items you haven't found yet are always going to be affected by whatever day you're on. (With the exception of items that do not decay at all of course, like crackers and cups of coffee.) Pilgrim has the slowest decay rates though, so using Pilgrim decay will give you the most time to find stuff.

I think the atmosphere on Great Bear is 87% sulfuric acid, because I have a t-shirt IRL that's old enough to vote and I've never once had to repair it with a sewing kit.

If you're canning low-acid foods, such as a tin of sardines or a simple mason jar of meat and water, it needs to be brought up to a temperature sufficient to kill clostridium botulinum. This requires a pressure canner, which is basically a very large pressure cooker, that you use to cook the jars at 240F/115C for 90 minutes. You can certainly do it over a fire, although you really need to watch it like a hawk since controlling the heat isn't as easy as with a gas or electric stove.

A friend of mine is a corrections officer in a medium-security state penitentiary. They have procedures for these scenarios, including one where the power goes out and the generators fail. Essentially everything goes into lockdown immediately--all inmates return to their cells. And the thing about prison is it's not like TV or movies--the inmates aren't itching for a chance to rebel, because the majority of them just want to do their time and go home. You will get a couple bad eggs, and when they go off the rails the prison staff throw them in segregation. The other inmates just back off, because again they just want to do their time and go home. Actual prison riots are extremely, stupidly rare. People literally win the powerball jackpot more frequently than a prison riot happens. So a more realistic scenario would be the power goes out, the guards put everyone on lockdown long before anyone realizes "this is permanent and the power isn't ever coming back". Then after a while food reserves start to run low, and most likely the actual battle would be infighting among the prison staff. A faction that argues "Screw those inmates, they had their chance, let's keep the rest of the food for ourselves" and the faction that argues "they're still human and we're not going to stoop to their level, keep them fed." While the prisoners are helpless in their cells.

Only indoor locations work. Curing isn't so much a function of heat as it is evaporation. Something can cure in a cold, arid environment faster than a warm, humid one for instance. So you need to bring them someplace more arid for them to cure. In game terms, that means the back of a cave, or any indoor location that involves an area transition. There are a couple exceptions to this--the Mountaineer's Hut and the enclosed back porch of the Pleasant Valley Farmstead both count as indoors and will cure gut/hide, despite lacking an area transition.

I would definitely play this mode. Especially because once that hypothetical earthquake hits, I wouldn't be compelled to search for this exit if I didn't want to. And I do sometimes use Nomad in lieu of Survivor so that I can voluntarily end the story on a high note by simply completing the objectives. But voyageur is a walk in the park to me at this point, and I can't set Nomad to anything else.

To be fair, the opposite would be true. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn doing anything. Even sitting still doing nothing, your base metabolic rate would be higher than a non-muscular person. That said, if you avoid starvation for 3 days you do get a +5kg bonus to your carry limit, and an additional +5 if you have a moosehide satchel. That's 40kg, or 88lbs you can carry without penalty. Even going straight up a climbing rope. How many people do you know of can climb a rope straight up while hauling 40kg on their back? And you can go up to 50-55kg (110-121lbs) and still be walking around at a reasonable pace. I'd say that's about all you could ever reasonably expect of anyone, regardless of physical conditioning. To put it in perspective, that's about on par what your average soldier carries around with all day them when in combat, when you take into account armor, weapons, ammo, water, batteries, other miscellaneous gear. So yeah...our survivors are basically already at military-levels of physical fitness. I think that's pretty good already.

Off topic, but funny thing is I prefer fishing tackle over sewing kits. The line is going to snap while fishing sooner or later. May as well get a few free repairs out of it before it does!

It's not really "broken" per se, it's just heavily out of balance with every other skill in the game. Cooking, carcass harvesting, rifle, revolver, bow, firestarting, ice fishing...you can get them all up to level 5 fairly quickly. Heck I have an on again off again Interloper game that's on day I think 70, and I've already got level 5 firestarting, carcass harvesting, archery, cooking, and level 3 fishing. Mending is still stuck at level 2, and the rate I'm going likely will still be at level 2 up until maybe day 300 or beyond. If I play that long.

Seems like it. They judged weapon effectiveness by how much condition you lost during the struggle, which seems pretty close to what I've observed. Although they went into a LOT more detail. I only did a few tests per weapon, and I went with struggle duration instead of condition loss. So their results are likely more accurate. But still it seems to corroborate that hatchet and hammer are both solid choices with the hatchet being slightly better, knife is okay, and the prybar sucks. The revolver is still the wild card though, and depends both on your level, and on whether you elect to fire a shot to end the struggle early.

I've tried them all, even deliberately running into a wolf just to test something. This is my analysis Hammer: Fastest end to the struggle, but no bleedout Hatchet: Fast end to the struggle, does moderate damage, bleeds out in time. Knife: Moderate end to the struggle, with the potential to do extreme damage and instantly kill. If not, bleeds out over time. Prybar: Moderate end to the struggle, but no bleedout. Fists: Good friggen luck. Revolver: The wildcard, as it depends on your skill. This can be anywhere from marginally more useful than fists at level 1, to a faster end than even the hammer at level 5 (edit: Assuming you button mash until the "take shot" pops up, and then take the shot).