UTC-10

One possibility is that the save game function failed several saves ago (I assume survival mode). You still see the hatchet indicating saving game but that does not happen. Why? I don't know. I have had several instances where game progress was not saved and in one case it was an hour, two hours, I forget, but I lost several game days of progress. Now I have the folder where the save game files are and check them when I am about to log off. The user001 file, so far, has always saved but if the save game day/time stamp is more than one minute different than that of user001, I am pretty sure I am about to lose some game progress and the game is about to crash if I try to force a save. I have been sending the crash files and the unity crash files to Support but I don't expect them to fix the problem anytime soon. This propensity to crash can be rather frustrating.

Yes it happens momentarily.

Cleaning firearms (rifle or pistol) do not result in skill points. Initially, when the skill was introduced (rifle), it did but since it was not uncommon to find several rifles, all in need of some degree of cleaning, often a lot of cleaning, it was felt that the skill advanced too fast for too little effort so that got changed.

I play Pilgrim. I tend to wear the best clothing I can find. I do tend to craft the boots, pants, hat, and mittens when materials become available (or too much on hand). The heaviest of the animal hide clothing that I would craft would be the wolfskin jacket. I don't consider the bear skin coat (though I did craft one before the save game apocalypse) or the moose hide coat to be worthwhile (but Pilgrim lets me make that choice easily). I do tend to make, and my sandboxes have gone long enough, the boots, pants, hat, and mittens at my various bases since, if nothing else, they can be mended using materials I can collect indefinitely. They also provide a back-up in case of need, say I need to swap soaked/frozen gear (after trying to join the polar bear club on Coastal Highway, for instance) for dry stuff. It is part of my thing to leave crafted clothing in my bases on the "just in case" idea.

I think the problem facing implementation is going to be how it could be used without blowing up the game and what consequences for use and misuse there should be. I would expect that its use would turn out to be much less advantageous than one who has used one in real-life would expect and perhaps much more troublesome. A lot of thought, a lot of programming, and the end result may be a toss up whether it would be an effective device for the purpose it was created for or better to just shoulder the pack and walk.

I suspect that the idea being requested is to be able to change game settings (environment, health, etc.) while in the sandbox. I don't think most anyone considers the settings that you can change either while in a save game or when at the beginning menu to be that critical to playability, but I could be wrong.

A single cleaning of the revolver at base skill results in a 5% improvement in condition with each improvement given skill increase being on top of that. Excepting level 1, each additional level boosts the improvement by the amount indicated for that level, so level 4 giving a +4 to condition improvement should then be a total of up to +9% to firearm condition. So cleaning the revolver which was at 91% results in it being 100%. As for the degrading of the cleaning kit, it might be worth remembering that the game is displaying integrers (whole numbers) and not decimal fractions, so it rounds the number displayed. I have found that things like the condition loss in items can be not truly consistent, for whatever reason, and the 16% kit might have been at 15.5% (rounded to 16%) and after losing 5% (or possibly because of the sometimes inconsistent way these things seem to go) maybe a tiny bit more than 5% resulting in a kit condition of 10.4 or 10.49% which gets rounded to 10%. It might be a function of how hard it is for computers to deal with fractional numbers, but for practical purposes, it just happens.

With a new menace, there might be the need for a new remedy/defense. It would seem to be burdensome to have two different versions of otherwise the same item - a road flare - except one is used against wolves and the other against Timberwolves. It might be that there will be a discrete item that converts a road flare from the red flame to having a blue flame and that item has to be applied before use or it might be a powder you can sprinkle on a burning flare or torch to make its flame blue for a little while. The number of those items you have determines how many time it can be used.

If I have nothing else to do, I collect sticks. Lots of sticks. I had so many sticks in a neat pile that it would take me about a minute of delay between clicking on the front door of the Camp Office (any exiting door really) before I would actually appear outside. It appears I was stressing out the game engine because of so many sticks in one compact pile that it had to account for when I left the building. Fixed that by splitting the stack into eight stacks of 100 sticks. I think I try to treat the sandbox like something that I have to manage. Check on outlying outposts, shelters, and bases. Every two or three hundred game-days, I set out on an inspection tour of the regions and the installations ... I mean outposts and bases. I may detour to places like Desolation Point to check out what I left there and to see if anything interesting washed up on the icy shores. I also have three Pilgrim sandboxes that I can rotate through. If it got really bad, I still have Mountain Town/Milton and Hushed River Valley to visit. I have stayed out of those regions specifically to think that "there be dragons". I look forward to new regions as additional places "there be dragons" and am interested in what changes Episode 3 will make to the landscape in Pleasant Valley. The survival mode update adding the revolver and birch bark tea was a godsend in giving me something to boot the sandboxes and check for stuff.

The game has three switches that may be relevant. They are accessible when starting a custom game. 1. Environmental: Fire (automatically) overcomes ambient air temp. Any fire (within a certain range of effect) will raise air temperature to above freezing (i.e. +1 C). The description also says that will happen regardless of the amount of fuel put on the fire (basically true) and regardless of how cold it is (true). Windchill is not affected. 2. Health: Fire prevents freezing. Player can become colder while sitting next to an active fire, but will never begin to freeze. 3. Health: Wake player, when freezing, near a fire. If you start to freeze when resting (i.e. sleeping) near a fire you will wake up. Only applies to resting near a fire. (I would assume an active fire). All three are ON for vanilla Pilgrim and Voyager. Off for vanilla Stalker and Interloper. The only discrepancy I know of is that for #1 it is possible to make the fire hot enough, by adding enough fuel, to get air temperature higher than just above freezing. Note that #2 and #3 both require there be a fire present to get the benefit.

The Coleman Elite Propane Lantern says matchless starting (push button Instastart). I had to look specifically at the description because many have a dial but that is for gas flow and needed a match to start. There are a few more Coleman lanterns that include "instastart" in the product name. What seems to make the TLD storm lantern different from most lanterns is that it looks roughly like a Coleman lantern, but has a flame not a mantle as well as mechanical ignition. It is probably a secret developmental lantern that Carter Hydro or Breyerhauser developed and were testing on Great Bear before things went to heck.

I get apprehensive about boiling a pot dry. Normally it takes me 84 minutes to make two liters of water. I have tried making pots of water in succession while sleeping one hour at a time, but I could see the benefit from that short sleeps was rather limited. I have also been surprised (I don't know why) when a blizzard rolls in and the rate of cooking food/making water can increase up to double normal (42 minutes to make two liters of water). I have left a pot on a stove with enough burn time to make boiled water and, since it was inside, not worried about it boiling away.

Having the capacity become depleted when used on high (to scare off wolves) was one way. Another way would be the use of high beam would cause damage, perhaps a relatively large amount of damage, to the flashlight and necessitate repairs using metal scrap and a tool kit. Any kind of intermediate condition, especially with a dimming flashlight, would probably be a fair amount of trouble for the devs to implement, so I am not too hopeful.

The smaller distress pistol has been that way for quite a while. I don't know if anyone else is bothered by it. It does look amusing to have several comparatively large shells for it neatly arrayed on a table next to it.

Don't know about guaranteed revolver spawns but it seems likely that you would find at least one in any major region. I typically seem to find two or three in a major region. At least, you should check caves where a corpse has spawned. All the cars and the man-made structures seem "likely" places to find one. My first revolver was in a flower pot in the maintenance yard front office (in another sandbox there was none). Not all caches will have a revolver and/or ammunition spawn but in other caches than the hunter/weapon cache, I have found a revolver and, usually, a box or two of ammunition. But no guarantee.

I would agree that the flashlight's function ends abruptly when the aurora ends. There is no depletion phase, such as the capacity bar emptying quickly, to serve as a warning that the light is about to go out. Perhaps Raphael is thinking about the depletion of the flashlight capacity while it is in use and the aurora is active. Then there is a period where it can recharge back up to full as long as the aurora is still active. I have been exploring a building to suddenly find my light is gone. Others have been using the flashlight light to fend off a wolf or wolves when suddenly their defense is gone. I would not mind having a flashlight that dies pretty quickly when the aurora ends even if that takes a few of game minutes, say no more than five game minutes then its dead again. No sticking a "full capacity" flashlight in your pocket for use later on. Otherwise there should be no time limit to ordinary flashlight use as long as the aurora is active - no capacity depletion as currently exists.

I don't use snow shelters, but as far as using hides go, perhaps instead of a fixed number of hides in lieu of cloth, the alternate animal hide form of a snow shelter might require a certain weight of hides in lieu of cloth. For the sake of discussion, the weight of hides required to substitute has to be twice that of cloth required. So say one kilo of hides so that would equate to two deer hides or two wolf hides or one bear hide or one moose hide. As far as rabbit pelts go, perhaps twice that for rabbit pelts (e.g. twenty) since those are "small" and maybe add a few pieces of line (used only for fishing tackle) to tie the pelts together. How much is recovered depends on whether the hides are cured (50% chance) or uncured (0%). This would provide some cost to using animal hides for a snow shelter. Of course this would be a lot of work for Hinterland, but if they ever have "free" time , they might look at it.

It used to be for cedar and fir pieces after chopping a limb that they would be scattered on the ground, along with any tinder plugs that may have resulted, and have to be picked up piece by piece. That was way back in early access and was changed to automatically go into inventory because it was a real bother. I think people were chopping up limbs then walking away and forgetting the pieces of wood were still on the ground. Most suggestions tend to involve Hinterland having to come up with new graphics, new processes and a lot of thought to implement. In this case, having all the charcoal go into inventory might be, dare I say, "easy to implement".

When I harvest charcoal from a campfire or stove, I really would like to not end up holding a piece in my hand. Sure it is easy to hit "H" to put it away, but we don't end up with a stick in our hand when a branch is broken down or a chunk of cedar or fir wood in hand when chopping up a limb. All the charcoal pieces should go into inventory leaving the hand free. Okay I had sworn to myself I would post something. Thanks for reading.

I would like to have a crafted (work bench or forge) improvised pot since in my older sandboxes I tend to find most regions have none. So, obviously, I would rather have the option to not have to carry them around in order to have a "pot" to cook meat faster, make more water at one go or have more "pots" in a given location. I would not mind if they were somewhat heavier, had the same capacity (as the current pot), and were susceptible to damage from ordinary use (it would be nice if they were then repairable, but okay if they were not). An improvised pot that had the same basic characteristics as the current pot (i.e. weight, capacity, etc) would probably be okay and the "improvised" nature of the pot could be that it degrades with normal use (and even more substantial degradation if water is boiled away or food burned in it). If one wanted to differentiate between a "forged" versus a "crafted" improvised pot, could be defined in how much degradation each type suffers and how they may be repaired and the material cost (to make and repair). But this is all wishes and while I only have two (at last count) pots in my oldest sandbox, I can get along anyway. But it would be nice.

Birch bark tea: As opposed to Reishi mushroom or Rose hip teas (antibiotic or pain killer), the new birch bark tea is primarily a condition restorative on a more limited basis than herbal tea. Shouldn't it them be listed in the consumable list just like herbal tea and coffee instead of the medical list? Soup: I find myself reluctant to use the brewed birch bark tea solely as a drink or hot drink because of the condition restorative factor, but that's just me. It would be nice to be able to convert a kilo of any meat and a liter of potable water into two to four cups of a soup that could be heated (or drunk cold) which supplies only calories and warmth bonus (if heated). Or maybe one or two large mugs (bowl) of soup that give a bit more calories and a somewhat longer warmth bonus (when heated). But thanks for the birch bark tea, I was even more reluctant to use herbal tea or coffee since those were not reproducible like birch bark.

For whatever the reason, things laid on snow can still eventually find themselves deeper in the snow. Not quickly but it happens. This has happened to meat and campfires. That may have been a previous bug, but I still feel it is happening still. My understanding about wet/frozen clothing was that frozen clothes was like not having anything on (i.e. no protection) while wet clothes still was some protection. Once clothing gets 100% wet it starts to freeze. I don't leave meat bags around or carcasses unharvested so finding out (or confirmation) that wolves (and bears?) can come across and eat them is somewhat new to me. I won't say totally new because I thought I ran into an instance of that a long time ago on Mystery Lake and but never since.

If you consider the possibility of accidental discharge when cleaning a firearm where generally the muzzle would tend to be pointed away from you, try placing a firearm from the radial menu and watch as you handle the firearm by the muzzle so the revolver and rifle is pointed right at you. At least up to now.

There are a number of things that can be crafted in the dark (they don't need a work bench) but whether you would want to do that depends on circumstances. You can mend stuff if the moon is up and you're outside. But you will likely find yourself often with nothing to do during the night. Do the best you can.

I think the real problem will be the trade-offs Hinterland would make to balance the value versus the costs of any animal companion and this does not take into account the animal AI that would be needed. This would be akin to introducing a NPC that would work with the player. The cost to Hinterland would be great while the benefit with respect to the survival game (and it would have to be only survival mode, at least so far) would be minimal.