ajb1978

Members
  • Posts

    2,373
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by ajb1978

  1. I hear ya, but raw meat is in a class of its own. Falling asleep and freezing to death...that happens. Stumbling into a campfire, that happens too. Falling, twisting your ankle, yup. Bumping the trigger and shooting a gun by accident, yeah, that happens. Same with releasing an arrow by mistake. Eating a candy bar of questionable quality and getting sick, sure. Even accidentally drinking unboiled water--it's not like it would look any different. All of these things have an element of "Yeah, I can see how that would happen if you're careless..." But raw meat vs cooked, there is absolutely no way you can make that mistake, even if you're a total klutz. Maaaaybe you make the mistake of biting raw meat in the dark if you're careless, but you would immediately know from the texture and taste, and wouldn't continue to eat.
  2. I'm 80% in favor of it. Context is key--the game's interface was getting in the way after the Vigilant Flame update. When cooking, you open radial, left-click the food, right-click raw meat, left-click to place. When placing a pot or can, it's left-click to open the menu, left-click to select the item, left-click to place. The left/right/left vs left/left/left was causing people to accidentally eat raw meat, and that is just absurd. No one is going to accidentally eat raw meat. The thought of someone getting ready to cook a steak, then accidentally shoving the whole raw hunk into their mouth, chewing, and swallowing is laughably absurd. Which why in this specific case, the hand-holding is warranted. The 20% that's not in favor of it, is that I don't like this specific implementation. It gets the job done sure, but the dialogue box kind of destroys the immersion. I personally would have preferred raw meat to not show up in the radial at all. If you want to eat raw meat, you do it deliberately, from the inventory. I've never accidentally eaten something out of my inventory.
  3. ?? There is a message. If you try to eat raw meat, it says "Eating this raw item could make you sick. Continue?" and then you have two buttons, Confirm, and Back.
  4. Clipping through the ground is rare, but does happen. I've never known it to be repeatable on demand though. If you can use F8 to grab a screenshot, so your coordinates are displayed on the screen (preferably AS you are falling), that can help when filing a bug report. The game has a built-in failsafe to where if you freefall for like 5-10 seconds or somewhere in there (a thing that can't happen unless you clip through the ground and fall into oblivion) you are automatically teleported to a specific location in that area. That second one doesn't sound like anything I've seen before. Although in that same cave one time, randomly the cave simply didn't render graphically. I turned a corner, and this whole section of cave was just a featureless void, and I could see on the other end of the void where the cave continued. I turned around, turned back, and everything was normal. Really wish I'd grabbed a screenshot but it all happened so fast.
  5. I usually find rifle ammo in there. And I think maybe a flare, if memory serves, but I'm not 100% on that. Rifle ammo for sure though.
  6. Wear a leather belt, even if you don't need it to hold your pants up. A leather belt has numerous uses. It can be used to bind firewood together for easy carrying, an emergency tourniquet, as a strop to keep a knife edge keen, a lifeline, wrap it around your hand if you need to handle hot/burning objects, a makeshift sling for an injured arm, etc. In an active shooter situation, if you're behind a door with one of those hydraulics door closers, you can wrap your belt around the arm joint, effectively locking the door by preventing that arm from actuating.
  7. Rather than a nudge button (people would absolutely abuse it to try and get into "off limits" areas), a key that triggers the "Fell through the ground" failsafe teleport. Hold this key down for 20 seconds, it teleports you to a predefined spot on the map. That could also hypothetically be abused, but the potential for abuse is far less if you have to hold the button for 20 seconds, and it always whisks you to the same spot.
  8. ajb1978

    Any tips ?

    Four things will trigger a survivor mode save. Sleeping, passing time and not Esc-canceling early, suffering an affliction (blood loss, sprain, etc), and entering an interior location. So if you get stuck on terrain and suffer a sprain while trying to get free...you're stuck. It sucks when it happens, no doubt about it. But every surivivor game ends sometime, from something. You had a good run. Your next will be even more successful. And you can fire the revolver in melee, you just have to struggle to build up the bar first, then you are presented the option to click RMB to take a shot, or you can continue to mash LMB to go for a blunt force scare. Personally I prefer to use the hatchet for wolf struggles. It ends the struggle pretty quickly, and inflicts a bleeding wound that will eventually fatal to the wolf. The key to being successful early on is knowing what constitutes a problem, and what constitutes an annoyance. Freezing for an hour is an annoyance. (20% condition loss, hypthermia risk.) Freezing for 4 hours is a serious problem. (80% condition loss, full blown hypothermia). Starving only hurts you 1% condition per hour, so you can go a couple days without food provided nothing else is in the red. Thirst hurts worse at 2% per hour, but survivable short term. Exhaustion also damages you at 1% per hour. So you can power through a few red sub-conditions if you know what you're doing. Yes, keeping everything topped off is preferred, but if all you have is a couple candy bars, starve all day and save them for right before bed.
  9. ajb1978

    Any tips ?

    I encourage you to find your own play style, but since you asked... Voyageur, you can afford to be patient and play a long term strategy. Don't hunt, fish, or even bother harvesting edible plants unless you are desperate. And by desperate I mean, you've already been starving for a full day. You can soak up a bit of condition loss due to thirst and hunger if you just keep moving. Remember that with a 12 hour rest plus a cup of herbal tea before bed, you will recover up to 102% condition. So don't be afraid to do a little strategic starvation now and then. Pick a spot to call "home" on each map, and make a point to wander around the map, gathering supplies from the various interior locations, and cutting down saplings, then hauling them back to your home base. Don't spend time crafting or repairing your clothing just yet, just trade up as you find better stuff, leaving your old stuff at home to deal with later. You may need to boil some water on some maps, but you will find plenty of food just laying around to get you by. Once you're confident you've got one map cleared, move on to a new location wearing your best clothes but otherwise traveling light, then repeat the process. Find a place to call home, investigate each location on the map, haul the stuff back to your new home, trade up clothing. Just keep moving on...and on..and on...and eventually you will have a fortified safehouse in each location. Once you've gotten the whole world sorted out, such that each region has one well-stocked safehouse, go back to the region you started in. Now your saplings will be cured, and you will have at least one rifle and revolver, and several rounds for each. As for wolf management, if they aren't in a full on attack charge, you can simply walk away. Break line of sight, and you can sprint out of their detection range, and you're free. Otherwise, you can do something else to break pathing, such as walk off the edge of a cliff. Or enter a vehicle or building if the option presents itself, then wait for the wolf to wander way. Lit flares thrown into the path of a wolf can scare them off, as can a thrown stone that strikes them (whether a direct it or if it ricochets into them). Just remember that if you use RMB to aim, the wolf immediately goes into an attack charge, so try to hip-fire those stones. The revolver is a great wolf management tool, and the flare pistol is an instant scare for anything, even a charging bear. Stones are particularly handy if you see the wolf before it sees you. Toss the stone, it will create a noise where it lands, and the wolf will go to investigate. This can be used to get a wolf out of your way before you sneak past.
  10. If you're going to be there a while, maybe try using the cure-in-place method to hang some hides on the walls. Makes for good decoration.
  11. I'm 82.71% sure that only pertains to wildlife detecting/smelling the player. I have noticed wolves seem to detect rabbits, deer, and bears normally even if you tweak these detection ranges in a custom game.
  12. Long range direct hit with the flare gun..and I think it's specifically a long range critical hit, since I've had direct hits that inflict a bleeding injury, but the flare drops to the ground instead of getting stuck in the animal. The flare gun is a guaranteed scare even if you miss. On a normal direct hit, it inflicts a bleeding injury that--moose notwithstanding--is eventually fatal. A point blank critical hit on a wolf is an instant kill. (I've never insta-killed anything other than a wolf with the flare gun so I don't know if it can't be done, or if I'm just not lucky.) A long range critical hit the flare gets stuck in the animal and allows you to kind of easily keep tabs on it as it runs around. It's actually pretty difficult to accomplish with a wolf, since they present such a small target at range, and the flare gun fires at an arc necessitating that you aim the flare gun in a way that it blocks your view of the very thing you're trying to hit.
  13. Thanks for posting your results! Hopefully this will spare someone a headache in the future.
  14. Actually the bed of pine needles was added with the launch of Wintermute, so depending on when you first started playing the bed may not have existed yet.
  15. I believe items in your pack only take damage if you lose the struggle but survive anyway. The revolver does degrade if you use it as a bludgeoning weapon, and while I don't have a whole lot of data to back this up, I think it degrades at about 1/2 the rate it would if you fired it normally. I'm not 100% certain of any of this, but it's my best guess based on what I've seen.
  16. It appears when you get the struggle meter nearly maxed out, like maybe 3/4 of the way full.
  17. Inspired by the TLD Riddles, I did a deep dive into the game and came up with some trivia questions. These are all sourced from the game's material. I'll check back on this in...I dunno. A while. And we'll see who gets the most right In what decade was the railway line blasted through the Mystery Lake region? What is Mr. Barker's first name? Great Bear Highway is officially known by which highway number? Who tossed an apple core over the edge of the cliff, in Milton Park? After the collapse of the North American banking system, besides cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, what other major currency became the standard medium for trade? What model of solar panel did Mr. Barker use? Where did Sarah Easton work? What was the name of the pastor assigned to St. Christopher's Church? What is the average altitude of the Mystery Lake region, in meters above sea level? Who wrote the book "Medicinal Plants"? Who made the decision to officially close down Carter Dam? What day of the week was the prison bus scheduled to arrive at the prison? How old is Steph Longmire? In what year was Carter Dam first built? Who is Dan Presnell's supplier? What month and year did Milton Credit Union cease operations? In what year was Milton's dirt road replaced with a paved highway? May the odds be ever in your favor.
  18. If they eventually go with the full 4 seasons, this would make for a decent summer/autumn activity, but just can't happen in Winter sorry.
  19. Yup! It was years ago, well before the area was overhauled into "Quincey's Quonset", and occasionally when exiting the garage you would fall through the ground. After several seconds of freefall with no impact, the game's failsafe kicked in and teleported me to the transition zone. Every region and interior location has a spot where if you do bug out and fall through the ground, after however many seconds of freefalling, it just teleports you to that spot. A little inconvenient having to walk alllllll the way back home, but meh. Beats losing the save.
  20. Not my turn either, but here's a good one. I exited the Quonset garage, and five seconds later, I was by the Ravine transition. I did not load from a save, I did not quit and start a new game, and the game did not crash. How did this happen?
  21. The aiming may not be what you're used to in a shooter, but it is self-consistent within this game. The rifle and revolver are hitscan weapons that strike whatever the weapon is pointed at. So making sure your target is lined up with the sights is critical, but once you get that down it's just point and click. The bow and flare pistol shoot on an arc, so a bit more skill is required for distance shots. The flare pistol itself is a nightmare to snipe with since you have to aim above your target, causing the pistol itself to obstruct your view of what you're aiming at. Also a flare shell is the slowest projectile in the game (second slowest, if you include thrown objects), meaning that for long distance shots, the target is likely to get spooked by the noise and run before the projectile reaches them, effectively dodging the shot.
  22. Dang, necroed after 2 years. And yet, here I am, replying anyway lol This reminds me of something I thought of a while back. Take away the ability to choose exactly how long you want to sleep. If you go to sleep, instead you have two options, "Short Rest" and "Long Rest". So you do have a measure of control, but you don't know exactly when you'll wake up as it's partially randomized. Like 1-6 hours for a short rest, and 7-12 hours for a long rest. Then, introduce a wind-up alarm clock to the game. When carried in inventory, this clock allows you to tell time down to the minute, as well as allow you to select exactly how many hours you want to sleep.
  23. Holy Snot Rocket how did I miss this survey? I picked Survivor mode, because at its core that's what this game is all about. I'm a pretty early supporter...not as early as some, but early enough to remember when the game was just Mystery Lake, Pleasant Valley, and Coastal Highway (and the respective transition zones). I've logged well over 2000 hours of my life playing Survivor mode, and maybe a couple dozen playing Wintermute. That said, I absolutely enjoy Story mode, in the same sense that I enjoy each of the Challenge modes...even though I haven't touched them in over a year. I still like them...I still want more...I just don't touch them that often.
  24. TLD inspired me to try canned sardines (not bad if you completely mask the flavor with mustard...but plain out of the can "Last Resort" indeed), as well as reishi, rose hip, and birch bark tea. Birch bark and rose hip tea I actually rather enjoy, but the reishi...meh I still haven't used up the bag. When it's gone, I don't feel the need to repeat the experience. Reishi isn't bad, it just...isn't good either. Edit: I've heard people recommend mixing reishi with coffee as a dietary supplement. I've done that, and it does indeed mask the flavor, but I never noticed any effect on my overall well being. Then again, I never get sick as it is, so maybe someone who is immuno-compromised might have better feedback than I. The trunk of my car is my emergency kit for the most part. In it I have an MRE (Menu 5 "Chicken Chunks, White, Cooked" to be specific), claw hatchet, folding saw, tinder box, some waterproof matches, firestriker, charcoal filter, water purification tablets, hexamine fuel tablets, collapsible campfire grill, six 30-minute pyro flares, a basic 8x8 blue tarp, 50' of paracord, a 50' roll of aluminum foil, and a gallon of distilled water. Also a vacuum-sealed waterproof bag containing a change of clothes, spare shoes, and $500 in cash. Inside the car, velcroed to the back dash I have a bag containing 6 additional 30-minute flares, and I have a knife, flashlight, and seatbelt cutter in the glove box. Shoved under the passenger seat I have a fire extinguisher. Also, a folding camp rocking chair, because if I'm ever stranded at the side of the road, dammit I'm gonna at least be comfortable.
  25. Actually I just thought of something else that's a little inconsistent. if you line up the regional maps with the world map, using rivers and lakes as guidelines for how to rotate them, we see that there is a big space east of Mountain Town, north of Mystery Lake, and west of Pleasant Valley. Since Astrid would have exited Milton via that tunnel, she would arrive in this hitherto unrevealed region, which is heavily implied to be Perseverance Mills. (Based on Jeremiah saying it's a "shit nothing town a few hours north" in predux, and this hypothetical region is indeed due north of Mystery Lake.) And also in predux he gave Will explicit instructions that once in Pleasant Valley to stop at Signal Hill, and if the radio doesn't work, follow the road north to Perseverance Mills. However...the road does not run north/south, but east/west.... The road itself is north of Signal Hill though, so perhaps that's what he meant. Anyway this all strongly suggests that Perseverance Mills is the missing region. So here's the rub: If Astrid was going to so much trouble to get TO Perseverance Mills, why did she instead blow right through it and end up in Pleasant Valley? The only explanation I can think of is that while Will was grocery shopping for Grey Mother and getting his stab on with the Old Bear, Astrid already had her adventure in Perseverance Mills, and had to proceed to Pleasant Valley for some reason.