UpUpAway95

Thank you. Love that we'll be able to harvest rabbits and ptarmigan with our hands again. Losing a little meat in the process seems like a very reasonable compromise. (Still waiting for the update to download so I can try it out as I've been away for a bit).

Thanks for the update and have a great Christmas break.

Yes, it could be done (not really saying it couldn't) and I do see where you're coming from. Still, I think they would have gone with weight a long time ago if that's the direction they were wanting to head with it all... and I still think "forced quartering" just now "fits" better since we've always needed a tool to quarter and we now need tools to straight up harvest anyways. I have noticed that they've also added a maximum time you can spend harvesting a carcass in one go if you're not actively keeping it thawed by a fire and the carcass shows that it's freezing as you go. No more harvesting a freshly killed bear with one's hand for 12 hours straight (which was possible if one wanted to take that sort of extreme chance on the weather). Now, the harvesting will turn red when you exceed the 'freezing time." Quartering now just makes more sense.

OK, I'm 22 days into this "challenge" and ready to do some extrapolations rather than continue the run: I began cutting fish holes when my prybar condition was 94% (due to opening lockers and the car trunk in Broken Railroad with it). It loses 2% condition for each hole and is now at 80%; meaning I've cut 7 holes in 22 days. With the weather settings (pilgrim level) in this file; and can usually fish for a full day when I fish (say, 8 hours). I started out averaging about 4 fish in that time but now, with leveling up a big, I catch around 6 per go. This is ample to keep up with calories and, since, most of the fish I can are whitefish (with a moderate vita-C content when cooked), the diet should also keep scurvy at bay. By the way, I have been, for the most part, maintaining the well fed bonus as well). I've not been using lures or tip-ups. I did use cut up some small Goldeye I caught into bait instead of cooking them. I've also used 8 matches (out of my total of 48 found in the zone - I found a couple of boxes after I had missed on my first clearing of the zone). So, in conclusion, I could certainly keep this file going well beyond the 50-day mark without ever leaving Broken Railroad. Of course, the demands on resources with interloper weather and the lower fish spawn chance would probably make this run a real struggle to maintain for 50-days in that small zone; but it should be easily doable in larger zones where larger fish can be caught (like Coastal Highway). It's probably not practical at all in Ash Canyon, where there is simply insufficient scrap metal to keep up with the loss of hooks due to line breakage (although breakage gets less common as one levels up fishing). With wolves turned right off (to avoid the temptation to use "wolf kills") and the bear not spawning, predators were a total non-issue in this run. No bunnies or ptarmigan were harmed in the making of this test.😀

Leveling up by weight is simpler than time, since times shorten as you level up. Basing it on weight has been proposed many times though and it still hasn't happened.

The Airfield is also a new zone and they were "breaking" into those two anyway to create the entrances to the ZoC, right? Again, scurvy has bugs in it (acknowledge by Raph) - would you really risk cratering someone's 600-day save with a "known issue" or leave it out of those saves to ensure you don't? They can always add it in or mods can do that, but if they added it and the bugs did their damage, it wouldn't be a simple thing to undo.

The more I think about it, the more I favour "forced quartering" of larger game (including deer) with a shorter time to quarter a deer being implemented (with the appropriate animations). Then, allowing unfrozen/thawed quarter bags to be harvested by hand as before. The travois makes hauling the quartered bags to a safe location much easier than before and we can no longer harvest them directly into steaks by hand when fresh killed anyways (except if killed by a wolf), so there really is no reason to attempt to carve even a deer into steaks in the field as long as the time it takes to do it is adjusted/shortened a bit. Since the amount of meat of the ravaged prop deer is minimal, harvesting for a couple of steaks makes sense there. This just leaves the deer killed by wolves in a bit of a limbo. I think the amount of meat left on the deer could be the deciding factor whether the player will be allowed to harvest steaks or be forced to quarter (say, under 3 kg = allowed to harvest steaks directly and, if still unfrozen, by hand). People have found a way to micro-harvest already, so there's apparently no stopping the determined (other than removing the OP benefit of reaching cooking Level 5) - and then some would probably still do it. I don't and I may not "like" that others can - but what they do to "cheese" their own runs is totally up to them.

I'm still not convinced your new saplings are all that new. As I said, players have been noting additional cat tails spawning into areas they've previously cleared for ages, and doing updates has often tended to reset areas a bit. The maple counts overall, so far, in the areas I've cleared have been about the same as previously to the update and a couple of maple in an area where you didn't notice them before is not conclusive evidence of them intentionally increasing the numbers of maple in the game in order to incorporate the travois. Granted, I haven't been doing loot tests in Transfer Pass since I'm not that familiar with that zone; but one should also cosnider that it is a newer zone and they may have just decided it needed some tweaking overall. It's NOT a save wipe. Your save is still playable without using the time capsule. In addition, there's a bug with scurvy right now that causes it to not activate in some new saves (i.e. Raph mentions that if you set your starting load out to "very high" in custom, it won't kick in). Clearly they are still working on it, but wanted a release before their Christmas break, so they were cautious - not wanting to crater long-term save files with a still "buggy" affliction. I agree with their decision. Also, I don't think it will be very hard for the modders to figure out a way to add it into old saves - easier, I think, than it would be to figure out how to eliminate it if HL had arbitrarily added to all saves (bugs and all).

In my saves, I'm finding the variants, but not the regular Hunting Rifle. The only place I've found one of those so far is, very occasionally, in my Broken Railroad starts. Despite multiple quick runs checking loot spawns in Ash Canyon, Mystery Lake, Forlorn Muskeg, and Mountain Town, I've yet to find one in any of those zones and the spawns in BRR seem much rarer than before the Frontier Comforts update. In BRR, on runs with Baseline Resources higher than "Low" (i.e. not interloper settings), there has been in the past a guaranteed spawn of a hatchet and a knife. Lately, though, I've had several starts where the hatchet (and the campfire it used to spawn beside) is missing altogether. I've also had a couple of spawns now where the knife is missing (although the sitting corpse it spawned beside has been there). That corpse for ages has always spawned in 1 of 3 possible locations, which it is still doing; but when the corpse spawns in the cave near the hunter's blind, the knife has been missing every time. Whether it's spawning underground there, I don't know. There is definitely some sort of spawning bug occurring - maybe several different bugs - maybe related to each other and maybe not. HL has some testing and debugging work to do. I hope they can sort this all out.

As @Leeanda said, scurvy will not kick in on old save files. There is also a bug where if won't kick in, even on a new save file, if your Starting Gear Allocation is set to "Very High." This is noted in the announcement under known issues (which you may want to read through regardless, since there are various bugs happening right now that HL was aware of before release and noted in that announcement).

or some items are spawning under the terrain or the bug varies on different platforms. Who knows? HL will just have to keep testing it to figure out what's wrong. I have noticed some Cat tails spawning in after I've cleared the area previous (i.e. spawning in late). I've seen this occur in Fallout 4, where looting and emptying drawers seems to unburdened an area such that if you go back immediately, drawers that were not emptied, but previously empty will suddenly contain loot. This is before a total respawn in that area occurs.

I started two different custom runs in Ash Canyon after the update and after reading the post about the Curator's Rifle being missing. In my runs, it was there both times (on the ledge near Wolf's Jaw Overlook).

More information on scurvy and the vita-C amounts in fish: It appears that my first observations may have been a little in error (not sure yet). However, I have definitely confirmed that Fresh Lake Whitefish are listed as a "Major" source of vitamin-C when raw and drop to a "Moderate" source after being cooked. The Smallmouth Bass, however, is a "Major" source when raw and stays a "Major" source after being cooked. The Goldeye and Burdot are not sources of Vita-C. As I recall in my previous post, I noted that one o the fish I found in a fridge in Milton (on an earlier run) was a "Minor" source when I found it raw. It was in very poor condition. I thought it was a Lake Whitefish, which would mean that the Vita-C content diminishes as the fish decays (at least while raw). I can't confirm this yet since I'm struggling in this "hands only" run (in Broken Railroad) to acquire enough fish to allow some of them to decay. (I am holding my own on calories, but just barely so far). If I get more fish, I'll allow a Lake Whitefish to rot when raw and check the Vita-C content. Meanwhile, one should not assume that all fish are major Vita-C sources.

Wouldn't it be cool if the poisoned animals had "glowing" hides that we could make stuff out of that would glow in the dark? A glowing moosehide coat should scare away everything else on the island. 😀

Imagine if it is a poisoned moose with no meat on it. 😀Enjoy your holiday in the ZoC!