ajb1978

Snowshoes! Oh man at any cost, figure out some sort of way to make snowshoes! Even if it's just strapping some plywood scraps to your shoes. If you've ever spent an hour trudging through deep snow, especially if you're not used to it, your thighs will be absolutely KILLING you the next day. Snowshoes take the edge off of that, by preventing you from sinking so deeply into the snow, you do less of the high-legged marching motion, and more of a natural gait. A sledge of some kind, but something that breaks down easily and can be carried. The idea isn't to haul more stuff, it's to make hauling what you already have easier when the circumstances allow. Why carry when you can drag? But you still need to travel light enough to be able to pick it up and carry it when you run out of even terrain. If I knew I was going to be attacked by so many wolves, I'd try to craft a bite sleeve (like what they use for K9 training) out of whatever I could. Multiple players of cloth, soles of old shoes, sticks for rigidity to protect against bone damage, etc. Then when a wolf charges, block with my armored left forearm and counter with whatever I have available in my right. Knife, hatchet, prybar, a rock from the ground, sharp stick. A tarp + paracord could have soooooooo many uses, from rigging up a simple lean-to, securing gear to a pack frame, throw it over yourself like a poncho while you walk under one of those waterfalls, etc. Also, a bow drill. Both cedar and fir are suitable for bow drills, and for the string itself you could either harvest some sort of cordage in the bush, use your shoelace, fashion one out of some braided scrap cloth, etc. Those giant hay bales in Pleasant Valley, man all you'd have to do is kick one of those apart and burrow your way in. You'd be blizzard proof, unless you were horribly underdressed to begin with. In fact, the snow would make the shelter even warmer, by providing a layer of natural insulation on the outside. And for that matter, being able to harvest more than just firewood from trees. I mean get some fatwood out of some pine trees, that's good stuff for firestarting. Or even if you find one that's got some sap oozing out of it, save up some chunks. Besides being very flammable in its own right, you can melt it near a fire then mix in ground up charcoal for a very strong natural adhesive, which would aid in the construction of a more rugged wilderness shelter. Meh I'm gonna stop here, I could probably go on like this for an hour. I keep getting hit by "Oh and another thing!" and there's always gonna be "another thing" when comparing a video game to real life!

Play both Story and Survivor modes, and be very thorough. Read every bit of lore, complete every quest, capture every buffer memory, read every tombstone... There's a lot of backstory present, to those willing to invest the time to find it. For the buffer memories, I recommend a Custom mode game tuned to be as easy as you can make it, with auroras at maximum frequency. Otherwise...yeah...you're gonna be at it for a very very long time.

Well this thread never really took off so I guess I'll just post the answers!

It's a mistake on the map most likely, although behind the blue trailer there's a sort of divot in the ground by the dark rocks, which seems to be low enough that it counts as protected from wind from every angle, so that makes for a good makeshift firepit. I've never had a fire blow out in there.

Yeah I remember it being stuck to the actual visor. It seems more likely that it was something in a dream that I'm misremembering as reality.

I could swear I found a candy bar up in a visor back in an early version, like before Timberwolf Mountain existed. But nothing in years since.

There's two sizes of cedar and fir limb. The normal size respawns, the large size does not. The normal size cedar limb gives 3 firewood and 1 tinder, and a normal fir limb gives 3 firewood. A large cedar gives 5 cedar and I believe 2 tinder plug, and a large fir gives 4 fir and 1 tinder plug. Honestly though I almost never chop up limbs for firewood. I'm a stick and coal guy.

That is a very good point, and one I honestly had not considered as I play 99% of the time with KB/M. (I switch to controller for fine tuning item placement if I simply MUST get item placement 100% perfect.) I guess my take on things is this: I would rather have overlapping hitboxes that make it vague which specific item I'm picking up, in exchange for being able to crowd them closer together. I typically have two methods of storing: The Hoard, and Easy Access. The Hoard is well organized with everything packed together as closely as possible, and Easy Access is like one of everything set aside in a separate area, that I can quickly nab up as I need it. One knife, one hatchet, one prybar, one hacksaw, one lantern, etc.

They covered this in the release notes, but they are basically storage containers that you can take items out of, but not place back in. They will disappear after you have removed the last item, but they won't just up and vanish while they still have stuff in them.

Yeah I have also noticed it with matches in particular. I used to be able to line up my boxes of matches right next to each other, but now I need to leave like a full matchbox worth of space between them.

Blah blah spoilers y'all know what you're getting into with this thread by now. Not gonna bother with the tags. In Hardcore Survivor difficulty, the Joplin Bunker Raid quest does not start in the Rural Store. That corpse, and the backpack that goes along with it, instead spawns at the Derelict Cabins. Which of course is patrolled by a pack of wolves, so choose your path carefully. Once the quest starts, it seems to play out same as the other two difficulties.

I wish there was a series of comic books or graphic novels that we could buy, illustrated in the watercolor style of the game, that tells some of the background stories in a little more detail. Like what exactly happened between the time of the plane crash, and the time Molly finds Astrid. Or the story of the prison bus crash. Or going all the way back to 1986, and telling the story of Lily's failed climb. What exactly happened at the Point of Disagreement. The wolf encounter where Molly left her husband to die. So many stories....

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If the Climber's Journal in the TWM hut is any indication, the game takes place early September. The journal entry describes the crash of the cargo plane at the summit, and is dated September 5. And I mean yeah, if I needed to bust out my parka on September 5, I'd find that unusually early too!

Hmmm fair. Default to off, allow it to be activated in a Custom game.

I would agree with all of these except "show map location". Story mode gets a pass because it's a different experience entirely, but in Survival mode we shouldn't have access to a GPS. If you get turned around in a blizzard, that could very well be your ass right there. That's really the only time I'm ever at risk in Survival mode anymore. Just last month I nearly lost a 400+ day run (Edit: Nope, I remember now, it was day 4 of 4DON during the perma-blizzard.) after getting lost in a blizzard, then falling through the ice on CH. I stumbled onto the logging camp which blew my mind because I thought I was way over by Misanthrope's. In Story mode I could have just reloaded an old save if I'd died anyway, so at that point you may as well give the player a GPS as well. In Survivor mode, not having that GPS provided an experience Story mode can never offer. So for this...I say no GPS. But everything else, spot on. Maybe require a hacksaw in your inventory to harvest scrap cans, so it's not so OP. Edit 2: And I've posted this elsewhere but it fits the conversation. A feature I would really like to see added is crafting stick bundles, to serve as a single firewood item worth however many sticks are in that bundle. A 40-stick bundle is worth adding 40 sticks to a fire in terms of both heat and duration, and weighs as much as that many sticks would. But it's a single item, so you don't have to murder your mouse just to build a fire.

I seem to recall something about how Great Bear was inspired by some real locations on Vancouver Island, but is intended to be its own separate entity. So like in the game universe there's Vancouver Island, and somewhere nearby is Great Bear Island. I'd get a kick out of it if they did a little self-referential gag in Ep 4 or 5...like you find a video game by Winterland Studio, called "The Extended Night".

I for one would be very interested to play a non-winter version of TLD, or a sequel. So many things we take for granted in the current game would no longer apply. For example summer nights would be very dark. In the winter, snow reflects star and moonlight very well, so you can find your way around just with that. But in the summer, when all the foliage has sprung to life, the ground is no longer reflective, and the treetops occlude the moon...forests would be very dark indeed. Something a simple as walking on a flat surface without a light at night would be a "sprain risk" so to speak. Or in the springtime maybe you get some freezing rain that takes your clothes from dry directly to frozen with no middle ground, and puts out your campfire just to add insult to injury. So many possibilities!

I see where you're coming from on the whole "It's fiction, deal with it" and I do agree, but I feel I have to make a point here since you invoked Star Wars Star Wars is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It takes place in space, but it's got more in common with Lord of the Rings than anything else. Laser swords, space wizard, the light and the dark...that's not science. It's fiction yes...but not the scientific kind. Now compare that to something like Star Trek where they at least make an effort to explain how things work. Sure Trek glosses over some of the details, but at least they bothered to list a "Heisenberg Compensator" as a transporter component, acknowledging the very obvious problem of being unable to simultaneously identify a particle's vector and position in classical physics. And even Star Trek pales in comparison to some of the other stuff out there. The Martian, sure there are some glaring inaccuracies in there (the wind on Mars is not powerful enough to drive a stake through someone's skin, let alone a suit) but they got so much right. And Interstellar...well besides what happens beyond the event horizon of the black hole (which we don't know jack about anyway) it pretty much gets a perfect score. So yeah. TLD might qualify as science fiction, and it can have a pass on scientific inaccuracy for the sake of telling a compelling story. I just wish it those inaccuracies were consistent! Personal gripe.

Yes and I've touched on this point elsewhere....sometime... Don't remember where or when but I remember talking about it! And Ep 3 has addressed some of my concerns. To recap, an EMP capable of frying sensitive electronics: Easy. An EMP capable of frying analog devices like generators and old-school diesel engines: Would also kill biological life due to the sheer magnitude of broad-spectrum radiation required. This seemed to be a major problem until the party lines in Ep 3...which are an old-school analog device that are still quite functional. Soooo if we assume that there are simply no old-school diesel engines on Great Bear, and all the generators people have contain some sort of microprocessor (maybe for smart power management..it's plausible!) that have been overloaded, then suddenly this becomes quite feasible. Everything is over-computerized, and all those microchips have been fried. But all tech prior to say 1920 still works. Although this still doesn't explain why a party line telephone would work mid-day, but a freakin' battery powered flashlight does not.

I guess I didn't read quite so far into Thomas's behavior, regarding his supposed inaction. I never really consciously considered it, but now that I am my thoughts are that it's a combination of him being simply overwhelmed, not having the knowledge of how to diagnose/treat patients, and so that the player has something to do. As opposed to a statement about the ineffective nature of "thoughts & prayers". I mean he's a small-town priest whose idea of medical care probably stops at neosporin and a band-aid. He may not have even thought that a diabetes bracelet was a thing. (I know I probably wouldn't have thought to check.) My take on the narrative is he's been trying to get these people comfortable and warm, and provide them with food and counseling for their grief. Also we don't know what would have happened had Astrid not shown up--he may very well have been considering venturing out into the town himself to look for more food (to his ultimate doom no doubt, seeing as how he's not in the best of shape, and isn't packing heat) when Astrid showed up. The fact that we only ever see him standing around staring at the floor seems to me like a development decision, since while that level of polish on the mo-cap would certainly help the aesthetics, it would also not really contribute much to the story compared to how much extra effort goes into it. Not to mention working out his pathing, getting him to move from person to person, how to handle collision with the player, etc. Easier to mo-cap the dialogue then just have him go idle. (I personally get a chuckle out of the very last time you talk to him, where he's just faces away from everyone and stares at the floor forever, like he just gives up on life.) Interesting hypothesis about the geomagnetic storm only affecting Great Bear though.... A solar flare capable of shorting out electronics would also absolutely cause an aurora as those charged particles slam into the magnetosphere. So I suppose it is entirely possible that for whatever reason, Great Bear is being impacted more seriously than elsewhere. Or like the quakes are causing particular disruptions in the magnetosphere which channel more charged particles than elsewhere. For that matter, maybe Will's hangar is totally okay, having suffered some flickering lights but no actual damage. (It's also canon that the power grid on Great Bear is ass to begin with, so that certainly doesn't help.) That would certainly explain how two aircraft came crashing down several days apart. If the full details aren't revealed in the game, I sure hope Hinterland releases some "behind the scenes" stuff after Episode 5, to paint a more thorough picture of things!

Something just occurred to me on my third play-through of Episode 3. So when you first encounter Fr. Thomas, he asks if you came from the crash site. Astrid says she crashed several days ago, but Fr. Thomas says something like "No, you just crashed yesterday" as he mistakenly believes she was on the airliner. That's a gap of several days. Mackenzie's plane was hit by the aurora and went down several days BEFORE the airliner did. The event that brought down Mackenzie's plane apparently didn't affect everything, and a second hit took down the airliner several days after Will and Astrid crash-landed. Did anyone else notice that discrepancy? What do you think it means? It appears that the first aurora did not in fact cripple the world, and that several repeated hits have been happening that each systematically cripple more and more of the infrastructure. Edit: Fr. Thomas later states that the diabetic came in from the plane crash a day or "maybe two days ago" so I suppose it's possible he's simply confused....

This isn't quite the same but if you start up a Custom game and set it for 4x time dilation, your fires will last a VERY long time. At 4x, time passes at the rate of 3:1 compared to real time, so a 12-hour fire in-game will last for 4 real-life hours.

Magic deer hide used to craft the BFG, or Buck Firing Gun. It's a portable trebuchet that launches live bucks as ammunition. It's very useful at accomplishing absolutely nothing. The French used to have a version used to launch cows at stuffy English Knnnnnnigts.

You can't shoot him actually. You can try, but you won't hit anything.