Serenity

4 hours ago, Glflegolas said:

but I did see one bear around Drift Island. No idea where his cave is however.

I think on the eastern side of the island down on the ice.

There is another bear around Mindful Cabin

1 hour ago, Morrick said:

I know that it's just a smallish airfield and not a big city airport, but I expected to find a few more houses in the white expanse surrounding it, places where the airfield's workers live (something like the Cannery Worker Residences in Bleak Inlet). 

That is a good point. There are some rooms in the hangar and a kitchen, but that doesn't seem great for permanent living.

I got two bedrolls in Mystery Lake. They were in the usual locations (the hunting blind at Alan's Cave, and the Camp Office), but on Interloper you used to get only one.

A heavy hammer was even more sneaky than usual though. The devs like to hide stuff in corners and under furniture, but this one tucked way behind one of those lose locker doors so you could barely see the handle. Almost missed it.

Way too much effort to implement. And I think such a mini-game is out of place with the rest of the mechanics.

But I would like a more involved process than making a fireplace almost instantly. Be required to build the campfire out of wood and some stones first. And then have the lighting as the next step. That requires a bit more thought and preparation when you're walking somewhere away from your main bases.

The improvised hats and gloves exist because you don't start with head and foot coverings. Which can cause frostbite in the very early game. You start with shoes though. So this is would be more flavor than having a gameplay purpose.

I haven't noticed much. It's weird. I've heard people say they are waking up during sleep, which would disrupt condition recovery. But I haven't experienced that myself. Even if it happens, it's not a huge deal on most settings. Unless you play with decreased condition recovery - and thus really need the long sleep - it usually doesn't matter.

I think I didn't get insomnia in caves, but I can't say for sure and haven't really tested it.

The dam has some toilet water that allows you to survive for a day or so. And maybe a flare at least. Also possibilities for matches and a firestriker.

I can see this being useful to produce maps to put online. But that's it. It's not a proper mod.

I got a box of crackers 😀

In Timberwolf Mountain you no longer get the guaranteed matches in the three-way cave near Echo Ravine (Interloper). In the hut I got a magnifying lens, but no longer the guaranteed tool (was a hacksaw, hammer or storm lantern). Still good with all the cat tails. And I got a ski jacket, a hat and crappy gloves. But it nerfs this excellent starting location a bit, which is probably a good decision balance wise.

In PV Farmstead I don't have matches in the basement. And no tool either. Only a whetstone.

There are still shooting research books in Interloper. While it's fun to get your skills up that way maybe it's also a bit taunting and overall useless. Those could be removed.

Sapling spawns don't seem to have been updated. That would be a nice change too.

That bug where when you enter a cave or a location like the Mountaineer's Hut and all the wood around it disappears (and reappears if you go away some distance) is still there. Why hasn't this been fixed yet? 🙁 It was reported months ago.

I'm fine with the initial release not containing that much. There is a lot to look forward to. All the bugs they introduced in the first version however make me worried about the rather aggressive release schedule.

1 hour ago, Leeanda said:

 Even the Devs said it was harsher than pv.

Only temperature wise maybe. But PV seems a lot more volatile. FA has very long blizzards and fogs, but then you get whole clear days.

Also a general question: are these item spawns determined when you first enter a region or when you start the whole run? Seems to be the latter

The fire opportunities at the airfield are really bad. There is a forge in the basement and that's it. I don't think a fire barrel in the hangar and/or one in the repair shed would be out of place. Not safe when the airport was in operation, but after the disaster hit one of the many barrels could have been converted.

Great post

Regarding lighting, something I noticed with the the new update is how incredibly dark interiors are. You constantly need a lantern. Maybe the update to the Unity engine has changed things, but I probably also got used a bit to the Ambient Light mod. That mod largely fixes this, but it's honestly been a while since I played.

It's very noticeable in the new cabins that aren't separated maps. You can see outside the windows and open the doors. But it's still very dark. The hangar has this too, although it has these huge windows. There should be more light coming in at dawn and dusk. At least when the weather is clear outside. It would be a great bit of interactivity if the lighting changed with the weather. Even separate maps can do this since the sound already changes and you can hear blizzards for example. This could also be adjusted per location depending on the number, size and even the location of the windows.

28 minutes ago, Kranium said:

the lighting mod

Ambient Lights. Interiors are really uncomfortably dark now unless it's noon. I wish they'd change that in vanilla 

Yeah, not a fan of this. Figuring out where you are was a nice part of the starting experience. Usually not difficult with the very limited amount of spawn points, but with potentially more starting locations now it seems like a strange choice to negate that immediately.

I've seen some issues with interactions not triggering properly. Not just with old man's beard, but also pots on stoves

I sometimes have some strange texture pop in on large rocks.

39 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

Hey Admin, just curious but the new region seems completely empty of wildlife except for rabbits. 

The transition regions are very barren. That's probably intentional though there would be room. The airfield is overall very empty, but it's an astronomically large map. There are rabbits, wolves, deer and I've also seen a bear.

I haven't see many saplings. Three birch. Three maple. Very different from Ash Canyon where every possible sapling spawn location has one (rather than being semi-randomized like on other maps)

There is no consideration for PC players given all the console exclusives. So, no.

The teasing and announcing a roadmap is fine. If you want people to give you money up front you should tell people what they can expect the future. It's also completely fine that the exact content and the time table isn't known. I've experienced instances where features were in development for some time and a lot people hoped for it, and then it was cancelled because it didn't work out for technical reasons. So devs can't make promises.

There just should have been better communication of what's available at release. Could be just a list and some checkboxes.

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and chain torches/fires from one place to another.

People keep mentioning that all the time, but it's really not necessary. Sure, it helps and it conserves some matches here and there. But it's not something you absolutely must do to survive. Interloper isn't that hard and allows for multiple approaches.

What regions you visit on what order, or if you are stationary or more nomad-like also comes down to personal preference. Plenty of options.

2 minutes ago, Leeanda said:

Moose burgers with much needed ketchup.

Just use the ketchup chips

Really looking forward to this. I love the game's graphical style. The water color style is unique and the lighting is some of the most beautiful in any survival game. At least as far as the sky, sun and fog are concerned. The cold really feels cold just with the why the colors are shifted. But the game is showing its age and the limitations of the Unity engine. I don't even think this is a "high end PC" thing. My machine is old and it runs newer, more demanding games fine.

For technical issues something that needs to be fixed is draw distance. This has actually gotten worse over time. At extreme distances there will always be some object pop-in (very flat maps like CH always had it). But right now you have camp fires, meat and carcasses popping into existence at very short ranges. This doesn't just look bad - it's really bad for gameplay when you're searching for things. It wasn't always like this.

Also despite loving the overall  great lighting some things could be improved. On the technical side I think there is a bit of an issue with open air caves where it's bright outside, but the cave is pitch black. Except for the items on the ground which have maximum brightness. Just looks bad and again I don't think this was always the case.

For general improvement with lighting I'd like an implementation of the Ambient Lights mod. This generally makes interiors brighter so it's no longer very dark at dawn. But it also does it depending on the time of day and sun position. And it changes the color slightly with the weather. This is also a nice way to connect the insides more out what happens outside despite usually being different maps.

It would also be nice to go over old maps and backport some of the later improvements. Ash Canyon for example has some gorgeous lighting in those narrow gorges.

The other thing I'd like to see updated a bit is objects and textures. Increase the vertices of round objects like pots or car tires for example. They are very polygonal. It doesn't have to be perfectly round, but just doubling the vertices would be an improvement without sacricifing the stylized art direction. It'll never be - and shouldn't be - realistic, but it could be a bit better.

The other issue here is textures. Most of the time it's fine, but when standing up close to walls it's really noticeable how low res some of them are. Improvements could be made here without going overboard with super high res textures, which might impact performance and could change the look of the game too much.

There are some mods that already allow this, so it's not a huge deal to implement:

• removing clutter and trash to make the place nicer. Needs some logic though to decide what can be removed
• moving around furniture and small containers

What I'd like for building options is building small storage containers. Something similar to those green metal boxes for 10-20 kg. Make it cost 4-6 pieces of cedar or fir wood maybe. Also repairing those broken cupboards. So bad when 2 out of 6 drawers are broken for no reason.

I definitely don't want eleborate base building like walls and floors like in more generic survival games.