UTC-10

The explanation by Sito would account for the discrepancy between journal days and days survived. Elapsed time starts from when one first appears in the sandbox so the first day by elapsed time would be 24 hours after appearing, while for the journal it is already day 1 and it increments at midnight. You've brought up something that I never considered. In my current run I have survived 305 full days (I make the assumption that is 305 twenty-four hour periods rather than days), the journal says it is day 307 (morning) which is not unreasonable, and my combined awake/rested time is 7,471 hours or 311.29 days. By journal count of days noted as being spent in a given region (Mystery Lake, Forlorn Muskeg, Broken Railroad, and Bleak Inlet) they total out at 292 which has me scratching my head. It just occurred to me that the journal has no entry for Ravine. I had gone into the Ravine Basin (then to upper Bleak Inlet) so those days were "lost" not that I spent all that long there. That probably also is true for Winding River though the time spent awake and resting would be counted. I don't think that accounts for much of the difference. So there is a discrepancy. I can only account for part of the time. I have been making entries, every day in the journal, and each day says something about locations visited, but I am not going to go over 307 entries to figure out what happened. That would be too much work. 😁

How about this? 😄 Instead of the Hunting skill, we get Witcher skill😲. Follow a dying animal across clean blank snow now that the wind and snowfall covered the tracks and drops of blood by using our "Witcher" skill to see the marks. Will or Astrid can even make comments like, "a good hit, the deer wont last long"😁.

Don't ask so many questions or the devs or their minions will come to see you one day soon to talk about it with you. 😁

Carter Dam comes from the devs designing a structure that looks nice for game purposes but would be functionally useless (in real life consideration). Of course realism only goes so far. Those generators in the upper dam and the turbines in the lower dam are huge and that little stream/river coming to the upstream/intake side of the dam would be obviously too small to supply that much water. There would also not be any need for such a massive structure that tall. Making Carter Hydro look the part of a real dam would have moved Mystery Lake right up against the dam itself and the size of the needed impoundment area would have radically changed the region's layout. This does not take into account the staff to operate and maintain the dam and its systems would have been sizeable too. Accessibility would be a problem since, at the present, the railroad was the only way to move people and equipment to, through, and from the region. I would also mention that there was a definite lack of other structures, such as a sundry store even if closed at the time, for Mystery Lake as it was placed. The camp office, the lookouts, the logging operation, even trappers's cabin were seriously lacking in what I would have thought were a minimum amount of vehicles and equipment (even if we couldn't use them) to support operations in the region. But it is a nice place.

Deerskin pants, boots, and rabbitskin hat and mittens would be the usual thing I would always do and if I get into the mood then the wolfskin jacket. I don't really need or want the bearskin stuff or the moose hide stuff except for the moose hide satchel, of course. I do not really need the warmth or protection as I play Pilgrim. So the wolfskin jacket among the choices would be the best tradeoff of warmth and repairability for me. If I do make a bearskin coat or moose hide cloak, it usually would be for the novelty of it or if I found a repairable example somewhere, like the bearhide coat I found in Ash Canyon. I am not sure I would ever wear that coat if I got it fully mended.

If it was near Pensive Pond then it was the clothing cache. I would think of it as a good find. If one fishes at Pensive, shelter would be nearby.

My whiteberry map of about 2016 shows 9 caches in Pleasant Valley. Three in between The Long Curve and Three Strikes Farmstead. Three in between Three Strikes Farmstead and Skeeters Ridge (two on the lower level and one on the upper level) Three in between Signal Hill and Thomson's Crossing (formerly Crossroads). Good luck on finding the Pleasant Valley prepper cache.

As far as I know, there were always nine possible prepper caches. Just like in Mystery Lake. In the games I have played I have only found a few - medical, tools, and one or two food.

I don't think so as that might be the devs getting way down into the weeds when it was not necessary. The game does have a problem displaying, in many cases, decimal places. Although the quartering bags in my test went down by about 2% a day, without a clock (or decimal places) I could not tell if that was 2% on the dot or 1.6 to 2.4% and the decimals can add up. % get rounded up (maybe even rounded down) and there was no way to be sure. The game remembers about decimal places but does not tell the player about them. Sneaky game. 😁

No reason I can see for quartering bags to disappear in 3 days. I can imagine the decay rate for Voyager, Stalker or Interloper being multiples of what I saw but I find it hard to imagine the multiple getting to 10x what I saw. I would concede that if it did then 3 days would be "reasonable". I did click on the quartering bags about every day to check their condition. The condition of the meat would be what the quartering bag's condition was. I did find that between checking in the "morning" (about dawn) and "evening" (about dusk) the condition of the bags would go down by 1% fairly consistently. If you quarter an animal again, you might check the condition of the quartering bags regularly rather than leaving them alone until they go *poof*. 😅 I would be interested in how fast they decay in your game.

Something more in line with a woven lattice of sticks (since branches cannot be picked up) might be workable as a temporary, field expedient wind shield. It still has to be properly placed for a given situation and may even be moveable around the fire site. It stops being moveable once its condition drops to less than 50% (too fragile, it might break into pieces if tried) and moving it costs 25% of condition so it can be moved just not repeatedly. Its condition deteriorates at 5% an hour in calm and light wind conditions, 25% an hour in stronger winds, and breaks in blizzard winds. This is not a long-lasting wind barrier. Of course predators will go right through it like it didn't exist and it blocks the character's line of sight so limits, to a degree, the ability to use ranged weapons especially when crouching. The "shield" needs to have a cost to gain the wind break effect. Weaving the lattice might take a game hour to do and take 30 sticks. It cannot be crafted away (how far away is depends on the devs) from where the fire is to be lit. It is very bulky (cannot equip a weapon, torch, or lantern while carrying one). And it won't block a blizzard - breaking almost immediately. Of course this then steps into the realm of player-crafted items that can be placed largely at will - something that has been repeatedly suggested in the past. Certainly a potentially useful item but with a real trade-off (given how I described it) in terms of time expended, materials expended, and general utility, which makes it highly unlikely to be implemented anytime soon unless something like this fits seriously into some quest in episode 4 or 5. I lose fires frequently to irritating wind direction changes. Just have to live with that and choose as wisely as one can about where to place a campfire. At least a magnifying lens fire, because it won't cost me a match, mitigates some of the irritation. Free fire is free fire and losing one does not hurt quite so much.

The raw fish was inside the Camp Office. Anything raw inside a dwelling decays several times faster than if it was outside. The 8% decay rate for the white fish was a bit higher than expected - I expected it to be about 6% a day. The raw venison was on the porch of the Camp Office so was outside. I was also running a check on food decay in a stone cache. Part-way through that test I left raw white fish in the snow next to the stone cache and the decay rate was about 1% a day (25 days, 21%). I was getting some screwy (as in unexpected) decay data from the stone cache contents. Seems that cooked fish and meat in the stone cache decayed at slower (i.e. 2x or 3x) than expected rate. Raw fish and meat decay rates in the stone cache seem to be somewhat consistent with that of being left in the snow.

I ran a test using a quartered deer, leaving two of the bags outside on the porch of the Camp Office and two inside the Camp Office. This was in Pilgrim mode. To my surprise the bags inside and the bags outside decayed at functionally the same rate which was about 2-3% per day. Starting at 87% on day 173 they had decayed to 29% by the end of day 196. Part way through the test, I put a piece of raw venison on the porch outside and it decayed about 0.5% a day. A raw white fish I put inside decayed about 8% a day. When the bags hit about 20%, I harvested the bulk of the meat. I left one last fractional piece in one outside and one inside bag to see the final result. The bags eventually got to 2%, the last time I looked at them, and then disappeared when presumably they hit 0% sometime around day 205. As noted this was run at Pilgrim level. YMMV with Voyager, Stalker, or Interloper mode. The results seem to indicate that (for my game) there was no real advantage to keeping the quartering bags unharvested as a means of storage other than temporary convenience. Raw venison on the snow decayed several times slower (0.5%) than the quartering bags (2.0%).

Nothing wrong or unreasonable with the idea but it does point to an aspect of the game, survival mode, which remains frozen in time because of the needs of story mode, Wintermute. As long as Wintermute is the objective of The Long Dark with survival mode as a foundation, a lot of reasonable ideas just cannot get to the point where they see they light of day. Once Wintermute is concluded or perhaps better to say episode 5, whenever that does come out or is in the can, then that constraint will fade away. Keep in mind all the implications of a green house if it is to be useful. It is not just how to find materials and construct one, nor about finding the seeds and materials to grow stuff, or how it should be operated and affected by the environment, then there is what is the character to do with all that stuff? One thing leads to other things and so it is not just "craft a greenhouse and grow something". Lot of back-room work needed. One day it may become a reality.

That can be quite infuriating especially since to advance the skill one has to do a lot of fishing (or find a ton of Frozen Angler books). (Level 1) 8% means a probability of one line lost every 12-13 uses. I am closing in on Level 5, so I can breath easier and can look at the carpet of cooked fish (can't forget the lamp oil) in front of the Camp Office. 🙂

Fishing tackle breakage while fishing is separate from the condition of the fishing tackle. At level 1 ice fishing, the breakage chance is 8% and goes down with each level gained. When low level have a bunch of fishing tackle because you will tend to lose them somewhat regularly as you gain levels in ice fishing. Although it is possible to fish with fishing tackle condition as low as 1%, it would be better to not get it that low. I have found some ice fishing holes that do not recognize having one fishing tackle at 1%, in inventory, as having fishing tackle (pick up a couple more 1% tackle and magically you now have fishing tackle) so stopping at 3+% and higher would be a bit less frustrating (I try to go no lower than 10%).

Might keep the condition of the carcass - frozen or freezing, if so, how much freezing - in mind as that tells you when the animal died. Not super important but it will give you an idea of when it died. This applies to snared rabbits, bleeding out deer and wolves, as well. Anyway, the game is messing with your mind. Take care. 🙂

Your game has gone nuts 😁 I don't think that bleed-out, at its worst, would last longer than eight hours but that would be only a guess on my part. One observation that might help would be to note whether the bear carcass was frozen or still freezing. If the bear spawned and died after the second blizzard, for example, when you came out of shelter, if the carcass was found fairly soon thereafter, it would have been still in the process of freezing. If it died before you went into shelter, it would have been completely frozen by the time you came out.

I would not mind being able to do multiples of crafting fishing tackles. I suppose the fact that I do not craft bunches of fishing tackles "all the time", like I might do relatively with tinder plugs or reishi, rose hip, and birch bark tea preparations, accounts, in part, for that crafting activity not being reworked by the devs.

Nothing wrong with the idea but it seems unlikely until Wintermute is concluded (or some quest in episode 4 or 5 required it) that it would be implemented any time soon. Would be nice, but until it becomes something in the game, just have to take precautions and hope for the best.

Blood trail (and tracks) persistence has been a sore point about hunting. I (in Pilgrim) have shot deer and wolves in Broken Railroad then went determinedly on their trail. From an initial blood trail, I have seen it peter out unaccountably. Sometimes the tracks persist, sometimes the blood drops persist, and there were times when both didn't. The fact that they will just disappear (right in front of my eyes while I am tracking) especially once the animal dies did not help. If not for Broken Railroad being a rather limited area, around the lake, I might not have found the animal carcass. But I have not had a wounded animal from the git go not leave a blood spatter and blood trail. At least I don't remember that occurring in recent memory.

What does and does not get added to the game in story or survival mode is up to the discretion of the developers. So we have whetstones but cannot craft them. There would also be a question of just how realistic/unrealistic the developers wanted things to be. The devs also had to face facts. The change from a decay time line of 100 days to 1,000 days likely reflected the unexpected popularity of survival sandbox and so having a way to maintain tools such as knives and hatchets would be a reasonable decision (i.e. it would be unrealistic to not have something) and not being able to make more of the "way to maintain tools" would also be a reasonable decision (don't have too much of a good thing) too. One can also say maybe "a bit short-sighted" or "a momentary lack of imagination". Happens to everyone.

Food that reached ruined inside a container disappears. * Food that spawned in the container can remain there even if it goes to ruined. I just don't find that too often and if I was wrong I would only find an empty container anyway. The only things, so far as I have found, that can go to ruined inside (or be put as ruined into) a container is clothing. One can also put ruined torches into containers and they survive. I suspect that is a dispensation on the assumption that the ruined items can be harvested for materials (i.e. cloth or sticks). It would be convenient and helpful to be able to store food supplies (meat, canned goods, etc.) in a container rather than strewn all over the desk/table/floor, but the danger of losing it if one were to walk away to explore some other region seems too great. * Strange event. After Lost and Found, I came out of the Camp Office and looked into the Regional Lost and Found (RLF) box on the porch. I was astounded to see ruined meat in the box. What I should have done (in hindsight) was grab every piece and throw it on the snow but, instead, I was so surprised I ran inside to "save" the game and when I came out again the ruined meat had disappeared. Possibly the Lost and Found event had moved all that ruined meat strewn all over the region to the RLF box which 'saved' it but once I then "saved" the game the usual rule applied. 😓

The quartering bags are containers. When the meat condition inside the bags reaches 0% (ruined) the meat will disappear per the general ruined item in a container rule and since the bag's reason to exist was to hold the meat [and bones] from quartering, it disappears too. How fast quartering bags decay may depend on the difficulty mode for I play in Pilgrim and I remember that the meat in the bags decayed at what seemed to me to be near the ordinary rate, maybe marginally faster but not super fast. I know I quartered a wolf and kept a couple bags unharvested then took one bag inside the fisherman's cabin in Coastal Highway and it disappeared when the meat contents reached 0%. IIRC it certainly didn't decay like it was on the wolf carcass. I never depend on the quartering bags, on those occasions when I do quarter a large animal, to act as storage. I will harvest the meat from the bags at my earliest opportunity.

Keeping in mind that the actual intended duration for The Long Dark was a matter of a few weeks (Wintermute/Story mode) and not many years (Survival mode) the need to be able to create a whetstone from anything would not be a high priority. Certainly if the intent of The Long Dark was the other way around, tools would be way more durable and items like whetstones and cleaning kits would last a whole lot longer and maybe even something that could be crafted. We'll have to see if there will be DLC that adds such things once Wintermute is concluded. Funny that my (and probably others) long-ago idea of a big immobile grindstone to serve as a permanent whetstone that characters could use, albeit not so conveniently accessible, showed up as the aurora-powered drill press that uses scrap metal to fix knives and hatchets, etc..