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!

Lumber mills are more likely in most places on GBI, I agree. However, Pleasant Valley is clearly a farm with several bales of straw lying out in the field, as is Spence's Homestead and Paradise Meadows Farm. Surely, they sold their crops somewhere for processing (most likely into flour) since there is little evidence of a significant livestock operation (i.e. feedlot with lots of corrals, cattle squeezes, and such) at any of them (although PV does have a barn and probably did have some livestock, but likely not enough to consume the crops from all of the fields evident in that zone). Yes, the old-fashioned flour mills used water wheels, but there are more modern ones that don't; hence my suggestion for an aurora powered one instead (just to keep up with a prevalent theme in the game).

There you go - you'll probably have the opportunity to use a mod to add it to your save - just like numerous players currently back up their saves.

I would say it's not a general issue with Custom since all my wolves make noise and I've not noticed any other sounds missing. I'm on an Xbox Series X (just in case it's a sound issue related to a specific platform).

It's really nothing new - The emergency stim (the quintessential "magic health pack") was been in the game long before Birch Bark Tea (15% instant condition restoration and unlimited stamina for 1 minute). They were/are in a very limited supply. Birch bark was renewable, so they made it act over time. Now, years later, they decided to add something faster acting but still not really unlimited - yet at least. Not sure what your point is here. I'm sure that devs, like everyone, can change their thinking over time.

OK then. They may have added some. I haven't noticed any difference overall in the individual zones I've examined since the update.

Yes. I think this is something that a few people have a misconception about. This is one setting where the standard Interloper is as forgiving as standard Pilgrim.

I still don't find the look of them great, but I'm sure they'll work on it some more when/if they have the time, and they, like all animatons of repetitive actions, will get repetitive after awhile, I'm sure. I'm learning to live with harvesting without being able to do it by hand. It still doesn't make logical sense to me to have to use a tool to skin a rabbit or break into a ptarmigan, but it is what it is. I also still feel that quartered bags should be able to be harvested by hand when thawed since the player has already needed and used a tool to quarter the animal in the first place (and taken an associated condition hit on the tool). Making them take a condition hit on the tool for every bag (regardless of whether they just use the tool for the first cut from the bag or use it to harvest the entire bag) seems a bit excessive to me. I hope they will consider changing it in the future. Also, I don't think the change will have any real effect on deterring micro-harvesting since people seem to have already found a workaround (but I also don't really feel that was HL's primary goal in making the change).

Well, head canon is a lot like soap - cleaning up innumerable things in the gaming world. 😀I seldom get to Level 5 cooking in my runs since I limit most of them to 50-days, so it's not a head canon I really need any mileage from. Wouldn't mind some soap in the game to wash these stinking clothes though.

... and do you realistically think that the old meat juices from before you got Cooking 5 aren't still on the cooking surface after you attain that level of expertise or that your hands and gloves are not just that much dirtier later on in the game than they are days after starting out? Actually, I'm surprised we don't just get arbitrarily "smelly" over the course of a run such that it doesn't matter whether or not we're packing around raw meat in that moment for a wolf to smell us. It's a game (lol) - Level 5 cooking is just a thing people want to attain because they like the perk - not having to worry about being poisoned by 100-day old cooked meat that has, perhaps, stayed frozen, but likely has sat out on the ground exposed to the sun and maybe been even pissed on by wolves, etc. Enjoy. Personally, I don't kill so much in advance that I can't get it eaten before it goes bad.

There's also another "player group" involved here. This is meant to be a permadeath game, which means that any save can and should end at any time and learning to lose them is "part of the game." - BUT some have gotten around that and found a way to backup their saves and, hence, have become, as a result, perhaps more "dedicated" to one save than they should be. That said, I probably would have made the opposite choice - let scurvy loose on long-running saves and let the attrition happen as it may. I doubt there would have been less gnashing of teeth here from it though. HL was truly in a no win situation; and for what it is worth, I support their choice and I've come to agree with it. Here's why: Way back when, I put an option into the wish list for players to be able to change things mid-save (mostly because I wanted a way to increase the difficulty on the file as the player felt more competent at the game. That suggestion was voted down by the players as being unfair because the player had already survived X days at the lower difficulty and surviving X+ days at a higher difficulty was not comparable to surviving from day one at the higher difficulty. This is much the same - those long-term saves have survived those days without scurvy (in effect, at a lower difficulty than having to consider getting scurvy from day one). Players with older saves can still play them at the same difficulty in which they started them (that is, without scurvy in the game).