Serenity

6 hours ago, RegentRelic said:

Did you notice the new tree texture?

Yeah, I thought they did something there. Wood like sticks and branches also has a better texture now

Check your side quests. The game tells you what to do

I've been fine with 2-5 pistol or rifle rounds per encounter. Usually 3 or 4. Which is easily sustainable with what's available

How it works out varied a lot for me. The timberwolf behavior seems a bit wonky. Sometimes they go for straight attacks which makes them easy to shoot. Sometimes they run around in circles right past me without attacking, but aren't scared off by shots either

Oh, the plane is there in survival too. Interesting. I thought they may only add that in story mode. Not surprising that a plane went down there though. I always thought the area a bit ahead looked like something had cut through it

Other new things:

1.) A new small barn at the farmstead. And you can access the basement from the inside now. The farmstead also has a nice new roof inside that wasn't there before I think (look up when you're upstairs)

2.) A new small cabin near Point of Disagreement

3.) Some fences and road signs leading to Cinder Hills Coal Mine. Not so easy to miss now

4.) The cave at Misty Falls may have a small surprise if they kept the addition from story mode

Even going to the big barn, it's a ridiculously long way. Much faster to just go into the direction of the silo and straight ahead. But they added a new small barn at the road to the house.

That has been there for a long time

24 minutes ago, Skelegutplays said:

Will episode 3 absolutely only take place in pleasant valley? 

Yes

Does this mean that the PV changes will come to survival mode right away? Otherwise the "loot box" thing wouldn't be necessary yet

On 10/15/2019 at 7:22 PM, jhickie said:

That bear usually comes to the lake but I don't think I've ever seen him that close to the Hut!

Yeah, usually his limit is between the fishing hut and the fallen tree maybe

There are two such caves in the game. The one you visited can have a bedroll, which can be a nice reward for people brave enough

I only ever fire up Pilgrim to test some route to a certain location or check out some geography. I played a bit of Voyageur to start with and then went right to Interloper. I learned TWM on Voyageur by starting and staying there. I did Faithful Cartographer on Stalker, and that was my only longer Stalker game.

There is still a ridiculous amount of loot on Stalker. More tools than you ever need. Just loot normally and you will have everything you need. Things aren't exactly hidden. Maybe a few important things are in somewhat remote locations, but nothing obscure.

More hidden locations and weird corners usually only contain food. Like a candy bar tucked in a corner you need to crouch to see. Nothing essential.

Interloper too still has quite a lot of stuff if you search all regions. There are several hammers, crowbars hacksaw and lanterns. But only 0-1 per region. Tool boxes are random though and can be a bit scarce if you're unlucky. The tricky thing is that you don't have firearms, knives or hatchets. You need to craft your tools. And the high level clothing doesn't spawn, so you need to craft animal clothing, which is optional on lower difficulties.

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One example I can think of off-hand is Old Spence, crate upstairs next to the bed.

The downstairs crate has dog food

I can confirm the box at the crashed plane. Even on Interloper you can find combat pants there. A very, very rare item. You can sometimes find at Signal Hill, but this one was the only pair in my game.

There is quite some stuff there. Not that you really need another heavy hammer or hacksaw at that point. I also found a whetstone. If you need to stock up on plants it has everything. Saplings, reshis and lots of rose hips (which aren't that useful these days though).

Food wise it's really easy to survive. So many cat tails.

Otherwise it's like with mountains. You go there because it's there

Milton is very wolf invested. Especially the house in the town. It varies by region too, depending on how spawning regions there are defined.

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Once you have rid yourself of them, if you have set "Time to wildlife re-spawn" as high, there ought to be a noticeable delay before wolves return to the area?

I don't think it affects the exact time between spawn events. But that it rolls a dice after a fixed amount of time and if your respawn chance is higher you're more like to get a new wolf at that point.

I only really play Interloper, but it seems to take about a week for a wolf to respawn after you kill it. As you said it also helps if you don't harvest all of them as the corpse needs to decay first and only after that the respawn timer kicks in. You can take some things. Just leave a bit of meat on them so they aren't completed ravaged.

Sometimes they're back quickly. Sometimes you get lucky and they stay away for a while (and then you just wait to get jumped).

Basically everyone thought that the setting referred to the frequency. So low frequency = more time between events = less spawns

I think that was the intent, but somehow they mixed up the internal settings. So instead of messing around with that and maybe introduce new bugs, they just changed the description so that now: low = less time between events = more spawns 

Crusader Kings 2 handles this much better. You can change all kinds of game rules and adjust some things to taste or make them more difficult. But if you make it too easy achievements are turned off. So it's not about making changes, but the kind of changes you make.

Literal campfire only. Just go into a cave to be save from the wind

I don't carry around two pots. Or even one. Too heavy. They mostly stay at bases and I only take them with me when I make a fire for hunting for example. Otherwise it's always two cans.

Yeah, you eventually end up with a surplus of cans, but so what? I once played with a mod that allows you to recycle them. It makes some sense, but it also made getting scrap a bit too trivial. There is plenty of stuff to saw up, but you need quite a lot of time for some items. So it's an investment.

Books are pretty useful early game as they greatly increase the fire starting chance. It's only with leveling up the fire skill that they become useless

Hopefully it will be better than last year. Not that that would be difficult. Something to force you to be outside. And not just sit around inside and pass time. No wild life on Day 1 was also bad.

Maybe have optional special objective for people who want to push themselves more. Like climbing Timberwolf Mountain. Or reaching the mysterious signal fire.

Happened in my current game when I beat a wolf to death with a prybar. Hit it with an arrow but it didn't die and still charged. Then killed it in the struggle. All other wolves died properly.

Only cave coal respawns. The pieces just lying around like the train cars in FM or the river in CH don't.

Seems to be time based. And modified by the length of the game and difficulty settings. As in resources becomes rarer as time goes on.

You can see how bad it is when playing Wintermute. There you basically have a GPS on your map which allows you to move around blind. It doesn't improve the gameplay at all.

There are certainly areas where you can get lost, but they've also added a lot of landmarks to help you navigate.

One game I used a mod that allows you to break down cans into scrap. It wasn't bad, but a bit OP. Scrap metal isn't hard to come by, but sawing large amounts takes a lot of time. I'd like a distinction between aluminum and iron/steel though. Like needing harder iron for arrows, but soft metal from cans being good enough for hooks.

Proper fuel management has been asked for a lot and something that really needs too happen. As it is jerry cans despawn when they're empty, which is silly.