UTC-10

I need more potatoes. I have one and recipes typically call for two. No carrots either. Grrrrr. As unlikely as it may be because it is winter and that won't bode well for finding intact stuff, maybe there could be a capacity to forage and collect potatoes and carrots in some gardens near houses on Great Bear and Far Territories? Can't be too much worse than all those Oak trees dropping acorns that suddenly popped into existence. Root cellars might have potatoes, carrots, and maybe even burdock. I wouldn't complain if there were onions and garlic to be found perhaps as an optional addition to some recipes. More immersion I think. I hope the next update adds Frontier Cooking ingredients, some of them, to beachcombing.

I got all the fish back to the Camp Office, now they have been piled on the porch to await a decision to actually do a recipe. We can process fish into bait (3 baits per kg, wasting the rest of the kg of fish) so extending that to making only one or more 0.5 kg portions and wasting the rest might be a feasible idea to start from and extend. I will also mention that making a 0.5 kg portion of trout, salmon, whitefish, etc. would possibly slot into (my often suggested ☺️) generic fish (or meat portioning were applied to meat) soup recipe that a character could make (gloss over things like onions, green onions, veggies, etc.) a hot meal from. Other than brewed/reheated teas, coffees, and tomato soup or the output of Frontier Cooking recipes which require more time and ingredients to carry out, this would be a probably simpler way for a character to make a hot meal. But that's for the devs to decide. They have to do the backroom work after all. Just so you know, in case you didn't or wondered about it, I could take the travois from Forlorn Muskeg along the tracks into the tunnel to Mystery Lake and, when I appeared in the Mystery Lake end, I could move the travois (to my surprise) to the left of the railcar that would be largely blocking the tunnel entrance and exit the tunnel. I didn't have to do the equivalent of the portage thing.

Given that Frontier Cooking recipes that involve fish typically uses 0.50 kg of the fish taking what is needed and leaving the rest, I would like to see the ability of the character to process a fish into one kg or 0.5 kg portions so that the fish component can be more readily transported. Currently in Bleak Inlet and have a Rockfish 2.52 kg and a Coho Salmon 3.88 kg and the ingredients I need to make use of these two fish is at the Camp Office. Aside from the trout that amount to about 6 kg (4 or 5 trout), the Rockfish and Salmon add up by themselves to 5.3 kg. Right now having to carry both (well all) the fish out of Bleak Inlet and back to the Camp Office if I wanted to do those recipes. If I had to take just 1 kg or two 0.5 kg portions of each fish and waste the rest, that would be workable as far as Frontier Cooking goes. The cost of being able to take some of the fish off to cook up in a recipe if the recipe output was desired. I suppose if I could only take 0.5 kg of each fish and waste the rest at least I would have a decision to make one way or the other. In this latter case, it would allow one to reduce the amount of fish being carried to the minimum amount needed for Frontier Cooking recipes which would be convenient, depending on the circumstances.

I can foresee that this could be rather over-powered given it can add seriously to a character's capacity to conserve matches and fire starters. If the devs decide to expand the concept to other than stoves, i.e. one can bank a fire to try to keep embers going for a prolonged period, that would be up to them to work out the details of the implementation. Basic idea: Air damper on the inflow of air into the firebox of the stove. Normal/default/fail-safe is for the damper to be OPEN which allows normal operation of the stove as per how the game currently works. If the damper is CLOSED what happens is the fire in the stove is immediately turned into embers whose duration, as opposed to embers when the damper is open, will be a multiple of the remaining fire duration up to a hard limit based on the particular save game difficulty. For example (subject to dev decision on implementation): Ember duration = fire duration times nine (9) minimum of one hour. Difficulty Hard Limit (plus 15 minutes) Interloper 3 hours Stalker 6 hours Voyager 9 hours Pilgrim 9 hours When a fire is desired, the damper is set to OPEN and the fire starting process is started with the embers serving as the fire starting ignition source. The Hard Limit can be "reset" by starting another fire with damper OPEN with a duration of at least one hour then set the damper to CLOSE. Dev decision - these embers do/do not have a duration shown in the game to the character. The reason for an additional duration before the embers go cold was because sleeping occurs in one hour increments. If the character wanted to maybe light a torch, he would set the damper to OPEN, then try to light the torch (almost certainly successful), then must quickly set the damper to CLOSED or the embers would die out per the normal short duration of embers in regular game play. The intent would be to preserve the embers not to expect, for instance, that food or drink could be kept hot for extended durations while the character sleeps or is away from the stove unless the devs decide otherwise. Nor will embers keep up the radiant heat output once that mode is enabled other than at some nominal level. 🚧 🚧 I figure that the devs have their hands full as is. Just a thought.

Nightclub needs a population able to make use of it. Seems likely that if there was one it would be in Perseverance Mills which I take to be about the only urbanized area on the island. There should be a port or ferry or barge terminal there as well to support the big trucks and tankers that presumably transport goods and fuel around the island. Of course this is a game world so not everything that might be expected would be present.

I recently had a glitch with the travois condition. I carry it around then had deployed it at the Thomson Crossing Community Hall, loaded it up, then dragged it all the way to the Farmstead. It had been about 99% when deployed and was about 82% when I got to the Farmstead. Unloaded it then put it into inventory. Next time I looked at it, a while later, its the condition was 2% ! No problem repairing it so I got it back to 72% but that was close. I did report this. It might have been the condition loss bug that seems to crop up, unexpectedly, every now and then.

The number of hand-operated portable devices that can be used because of the presence of the aurora is very limited (flashlight and short wave receiver). These suggested devices would be obviously very limited for general use and like the flashlight may not be worth it for the character to be carrying around. During an aurora or in glimmer fog I have often thought "I wish I had an electric lantern", "an electric arc fire starter" or "a darn chemical and toxic gas detector". Certainly wandering around Zone of Contamination or more particularly Forsaken Airfield a direction finding device might be useful in the glimmer fog to keep oriented. Being able to know (yes I know I can don the respirator) what the canister capacity was at a glance or just change the canister for a fresh one and discard the removed one all for convenience would seem somewhat useful. AURORA-Powered devices (formerly battery powered) whether during AURORA or Glimmer fog events. 1. LED Lantern (new) NORMAL lantern use - area illumination - powered during the aurora. It can be left always on. I thought that if the power source was the aurora then for ordinary use the device should be able to remain ON for as long as the aurora is in effect which should be the same for the flashlight. No such thing as a "capacity" since the batteries would be nominally non-functional. Lantern has no turbo mode (anti-aurora wolf mode). 2. Arc-type Fire Starter (semi-new) NORMAL use - Device has capacity (heat limit) that should amount to five repeated uses (i.e. five fire starting attempts) in quick succession at which point the "capacity" bar is emptied and capacity would be regained as the device is allowed to cool off. Once capacity is exhausted, the device cannot be used for until it has regained some capacity. The device could be used for illumination though the light provided would be no better than that of a match and each use counts as a fire starting attempt. IRL such a device would be able to do hundreds of fire starting attempts on a single charge but for game purposes the aurora is a much less reliable power source so the mechanism is not quite so capable. 3. Chemical and gas detector (new) Device that can detect toxic gases and chemical contamination at least a short distance before the user reaches hazardous levels of the gas or contamination that may affect him. Device has to be equipped. 4. Modification of Signal Void short-wave receiver to have option to home in on a region's transmitter. (kind of new) The Signal Void receiver can be tuned (mode 3) to direction find a transmitter if the transmitter is within the region. It provides direction information (signal strength and proximity) similar to the bunker and supply cache modes. This can be problematic since the short-wave receiver has 0.0 kg weight as part of the Signal Void Tales and this modification would or should make it weigh something. Perhaps an optional reward (so the player can choose to modify e.g. add components or not modify the device) for completing Signal Void Tales Part 2 unless there would be a Signal Void Tales Part 3 where it would be needed? Without knowing anything about where TLD is going - I remember the ship in the December Devs diary - the modified receiver might be useful in signally the arrival of the ship which I am making the huge assumption would be the Trader's ship. QoL Respirator improvement The respirator should show the condition of the canister. While it could be checked by donning the respirator it might help if the respirator in inventory or when selected displayed respirator condition (canister condition) so a respirator with a nearly "new" canister might be displayed as 100% (95%). The respirator's canister should be replaceable at will by the character. Whether the removed canister remains working would be up to the devs' decision. This could be a feature to ensure that the character's can have a full canister in the respirator and not have to carry a separate canister though the speed that a canister would be used up might make this moot.

Now that I have bases in Milton and HRV I would be less reluctant to making the trip there but I always see a long rope climb as a reason not to go somewhere unless there was something of value to me that overcomes that reluctance. The opening of the road to Perseverance Mills that requires passage through Milton would be plenty of reason depending on what Perseverance Mills region actually contained. I dislike deadend regions such as Desolation Point, Ash Canyon, Blackrock, etc. so if not for my habit of a Tour of the regions every few hundred days if there was nothing else to be found or useful in a given region, such as the ammunition work bench and milling machine in Blackrock, I probably would tend to not go there.

I had not visited (in any of my pre-DLC Pilgrim games) Mountain Town/Milton or Hushed River Valley and would not have in my post-DLC Pilgrim game until Signal Void Tales Part 1 forced me to do so. The decision to not go there was specifically because I always wanted a "there be dragons" kind of place that I could go to eventually once Wintermute (aka Story Mode) had concluded. In fact my intention was to take all four of my Pilgrim games to Perseverance Mills (probable region for Episode 5) but the Great Legacy Save Game Massacre II put an end to that. I started a new Pilgrim game December 2022 and it took almost a year to build all my bases back to where I wanted them. Then I started Signal Void Tales Part 1. I think that Mountain Town and Hushed River Valley will still be the least visited of all the regions simply because of the rope climb to get to Mountain Town. About the only place not visited at all would be the Milton Basin between Milton town and Forlorn Muskeg. Just haven't gotten around to it.

If you're used to seeing the [running/climbing] stamina meter go down without crampons then it might certainly seem like you're going faster when using crampons possibly because you see yourself getting further for the same amount of stamina expended e.g. you didn't have to stop on a ledge to regain stamina to complete the climb.

I don't use mods though I can see how they would be useful and add functionality to the game. Maybe at some point I'll try them.

The glass-fronted refrigerators that often contain a few sodas or water bottles have doors with very limited swing so that the shelving inside is of limited and inconvenient use if one wanted to stock it with cans of soda, cups of tea or coffee or even bottles of water or any other useful item that could fit. Maintenance needs to work on them so the doors can swing fully open and allow access to the entire shelf. 😉 Since the fridge is not a container, it could then serve as a place to store, in somewhat orderly manner, if one was so inclined, meat and fish (raw or cooked), sodas, canned goods that even if in ruined condition (as matters stand nowadays) won't be at risk for being lost due to the usual rule. 😁

I would assume an oversight on the devs' part. One that they should have caught in QA but didn't. I would expect something in the DLC part 5 update whenever that is or if they had to do some hotfix for some other serious game problem.

One place where they should show up should be as items from beachcombing. Maybe inside containers, suitcases, trunks, or whatever. Just add them to the items that can be inside containers and washed up. And my constant suggestion that Frontier Cooking should have a generic recipe of meat/fish in a pot/skillet with water for a hot meal. Calories, hydration, and warmth bonus (if applicable). Two servings in a pot recipe and one in a skillet recipe. Maybe a half serving for a recycled can. I am kind of put off by the recipes having the same positive and negative effects. Hard to implement but more variety might help in choice of what to cook AFTER they generic meat/fish recipe is implemented.

Good to know. I'll still be careful. You cannot run with a travois nor turn sharply however you could back up (if you're fast but maybe not fast enough) so not being able to walk onto weak ice would be helpful. I can imagine how much it would hurt to have a fully laden travois just disappear into the ocean or lake even if you survived the swim.

Keep in mind that in game development the devs probably considered how long tools and such would last. With the intent of a story-driven game, it would not be too hard to imagine them thinking that relatively fragile (quickly used up) tools would push a player to move forward through the story. Survival mode was an unexpected outcome to the game and I suppose one could say that story mode and survival mode have some issues with how something would or could work in one environment and how it would or could work in a different environment. I would not mind improvements to the performance of whet stones (i.e. last longer as is or do more within the parameters of current use) or mitigation of the condition loss for some tool usages (i.e. hatchets and knives have a range of condition loss depending on how they were being used). Something can be improved given environments it would be used in but the devs likely think "it is not broke so do not try to fix it and maybe cause it to break".

The exception being referred to would be that ruined food and ruined food ingredients (and these particular categories of items that go to ruined in the travois) placed into the travois would not disappear per the general "ruined item disappears when put into a container". This might be helpful with use of Frontier Cooking given that so many ingredients have tended to get to ruined condition. The decay rate for meat and fish, cooked or raw, is a very short period (about 100 days for each state) compared to the normal 1,000 day decay line for most everything else (instituted when survival sandbox proved to be very popular). So many people may have large amounts of ruined food (meat, fish, canned goods, etc.) that they dare not put into a travois to move them because they would disappear immediately. Now if the devs implemented some food preservation mechanic that would lengthen the decay time line for preserved food to the normal 1,000 day line that would help. This exception, for this topic, would only apply to the travois storage and not any other general container... except for the Lost and Found containers if Lost and Found were ever to be executed again. In this latter case, the player has no option as the Lost and Found program will gather up EVERYTHING and put them into a Lost and Found container which then destroys all ruined food items.

How about Recipe Packs containing all the ingredients for a given recipe, except for water or broth, for which all prep work has already been done? You get the fire going, put the pot or skillet on the cooking surface, then then the cooking menu shows what you can cook and you select the appropriate Recipe Pack for what you want to cook. All prep work has already been accomplished off-stage/at another time and you only need things like water or broth in inventory then *voila* you have a stew or pie cooking. The Pack might be kind of weighty depending on the included ingredients, and would be subject to normal or maybe extended decay time, but it might enhance a player's willingness to go through the actions to utilize it for Frontier Cooking. A variant of this would be to have the other ingredients in the pack but not the meat or fish but that can, especially for fish, partially defeat the utility of the Recipe Pack unless a very sizeable fish could be cut into smaller pieces no more weighty than a kilo of meat. For instance. There could be Venison Stew Recipe Pack that just needs broth added or there can be a generic Stew Recipe Pack that requires broth and where the choice of meat can depend on what's available.

I see it only as an enhancement to recipe-based Frontier Cooking. Hence something that the devs can implement if they decide they have the time to do so or adds enough to the FC mechanic. Maybe as part of DLC II, if TLD survives DLC I. It is certainly not critically or significantly important improvement because Frontier Cooking is entirely optional on the player's part. As matters stand, I look at the recipes and think not worth the effort except in particular circumstances. I just realized that cutting a fish into smaller chunks would solve a different issue that most probably don't realize can happen - the game can forget the 25% calorie enhancement from Level 5 cooking and revert back to "normal" calories in a way that might puzzle a player (by hunger and the calories of that piece of cooked fish I should have had something left). This is getting too long so I"ll stop here but I have verified, to my satisfaction, that the effect does happen and so having a 2,000 calorie cooked multi-kilo fish is not so much of an advantage in my eyes. Of course cutting a fish into 0.5 kg chunks would be kind of silly if cooking and consuming them directly but as a work-around for losing calories it would mitigate it.

I was thinking that Frontier Cooking could make use of a mechanic that allows meat and fish to be cut into recipe-sized portions which would typically be 0.5 kg. Although Frontier Cooking takes from the whole thing what the recipe needs that can be a problem when you catch a Rockfish that weighs 6 kg at a spot far away from where the rest of your ingredients were located and you only need 0.5 kg for the recipe. You're options are lugging 6 kg to base or giving up on Frontier Cooking, or carrying around a bunch of ingredients like flour, cooking oil, salt, etc., or just cooking the fish to eat and get lamp oil. There never was a need to be able to cut up fish, in particular, into 0.5 kg pieces like you can do with meat when harvesting it from a carcass. This suggestion would apply to meats even though 1 kg chunks by themselves would not be as problematic. Pot-based recipes might have the option of using a skillet and produce half the product. Or maybe be able to use the skillet-sized recipe in a pot for a similar (half the product) result. More flexibility. And I still want a generic meat or fish into a pot or skillet with water and cooked to make a hot meal. 🍜 😉

I took a look at my collection of raw meat (mostly all ruined) and found that the titling of the forms follow two conventions. There is (for exampled) Ruined Venison Raw and there is Ruined Bear Meat (also raw but notice the difference in how the item is titled). When cooked, these become (note enough time has passed) Ruined Venison Cooked and Ruined Bear Meat Cooked. I believe moose meat follows the bear's titling convention. I didn't have wolf meat handy. The naming conventions should be consistent. Raw "Ruined Bear Meat" should be Ruined Bear Meat Raw or Ruined Bear Raw. It would be helpful to stick to one convention. Of course, there is no accounting for someone being unwary or careless but maybe the game could help in that tiny aspect.

The screenshots of (in this case) the broth recipe shows three different situations: 1. When lacking ingredients "Item requires ingredients you don't have". 2. When lacking the necessary cooking utensil "No cooking pot in inventory". 3. When all needed ingredients and the utensil (the cooking pot) are in inventory. As for the cooking pot, the recipe says "in inventory" to make the error message go away but the cooking pot cannot be used in inventory but has to be on a cooking surface with an active fire. Maybe as a reminder #2 could be revised as "Cooking pot on cooking surface and active fire needed for this recipe". (color change as well) Of course it would reference the skillet when applicable for a given recipe. While I got your attention, could the cooking time for the recipe be broken down into preparation time and (actual) cooking time? You still have to have an active fire but knowing the prep time might help one keep the fire going rather than forgetting to keep track of that. I was making three pies and then three stews only to have the fire which was about a 2 hour fire (or maybe shorter, I wasn't paying attention as I did the stews) go out while I was in prep for the third stew. My bad for not keeping track but I think I didn't realize the prep time involved. It would be information that would have been helpful. Haven't done this much Frontier Cooking in a long time so not aware of the nuances. Could also use a generic soup recipe - meat or fish and water in pot or skillet, boiled. Hot meal. It doesn't have to do anything more than calories, hydration, and warmth bonus (if consumed hot). 🍜

Fished at Monolith Lake. Based out of the Lake Cave. Suitable ice is pretty nearby to Lake Cave so even if a howling blizzard (that irritatingly usually last only an hour or two) catches you and you run for cover it is not far away. You can catch the usual assortment of small-mouth bass and whitefish plus the burdot, etc. I play Pilgrim so there is that but around Monolith Lake I have not seen predators (I found a couple of ravaged wolf carcasses). There are rabbits, ptarmigans, and deer. Coal spawns in most of the caves up there. I am so glad that the devs went back to % of weight depending on fish type for lamp oil instead of the fixed amount depending on fish type.

Typical butane lighter would have issues when temps dropped to freezing temps (actually at-2 C) and below. This is not to say that IRL some work around would work. Probably the devs decided that with matches, fire strikers, and magnifying lens, aside from road flares, there were more than enough fire starting devices for the game. I would think of lighters as being of the Zippo type using the "fire accelerant" as fuel for them or, with the introduction of the aurora, that a battery (aurora) powered arc type lighter of course usable like the flashlight only when the aurora was active could be a possibility. But it was not to be. 😞 [yet]

Hushed River does not seem to have any fishing spots along its length. From Offset falls to the Landslide. With all the falls feeding into Hushed River and the only apparent outlet being at the Landslide, there should have been at least one stretch of fishable river, shouldn't there? The Landslide must pass water like a sieve for it would be a natural location for a small lake to form or for the river to backup a distance. I plan to fish Monolith lake for a while. The only place to get lamp oil.