UpUpAway95

You're posting to a thread started before the Steadfast Ranger update (v. 1.48) that saw substantial improvements to the game's performance. That update has also undergone 2 hotfixes since its release. It's up to you, but you may want to pick the game up again just to see if the performance on your system has improved. It probably has.

I hope it doesn't lessen the frequency of rifle rounds by that much. An accurate shot had ample to get to skill level 5, but a person who misses, say, even 20% of the time might have difficulty and it would be heartbreaking for a beginner going for that achievement to reach the end of a long long run only to fall short of a rifle/revolver achievement by running out of ammo. If your theory is correct and ammo spawns are all shared, then rifle rounds are going to get reduced by more than 50% to accommodate revolver ammo spawns. We also don't yet know what sort of kill rate/accuracy with the revolver it will take to get that skill to level 5, but we can expect that there will be a higher percentage of missed shots with that firearm given its intended use. I'm glad I've already gotten the Skilled Survivor achievement, since it could be a lot tougher to get it now. I'm somewhat disappointed that they chose to up the number of revolver spawns by decreasing the number of rifle spawns. It means I'm going to have to start ot carry a rifle when I move into a new zone and forfeit bringing along other gear to keep the weight down.

There are several settings in custom that you can use to length blizzard activity. Select your starting weather to "blizzard" and any weather variability settings to "low." Set blizzard frequency as high as it will go. Set the world to get colder over time. Voila - persistent worsening blizzard.

I know people want a shelter they can put their fire in, but I'm OK with having it outside the door of the snow shelter. I can usually place the shelter such that the fire is quite well protected from virtually all sides anyways and I don't want to haul around any more weight in wood and hides to build a more substantial structure when I can just move into a house or cave. It would be nice if we could clean up some places better and move furniture around rather than having to destroy it.

Possibly... my biggest challenge is getting many, many days into a stalker run. I tend to die quickly so hopefully having a revolver will help... although my biggest problem is still not being "alert" enough... they tend to sneak up on me and jump me.

Pilgrim Run - Started inside Trapper's Cabin in Mystery Lake with a 23% rifle on the rack and 3 rounds of ammo and a hunting knife. Collected wood, set rabbit snare, made water and slept. I walked outside to head to Camp Office only to find a moose standing in the clearing below the cabin. Killed moose with a single shot and the rifle did not break.. luckiest start I've had.

All I can say is my CH start has now survived 10 days without a single sprain. In that time, he has almost completely looted CH, trekking up and down numerous hills and often overencumbered (having looted 391 items according to the journal and having transported virtually all of it back to the quonset gararge). I think it's really just a matter of adapting a playstyle that heeds the cautions you're given. I don't think they've changed the actual risk rates at all. However, I'll up my difficulty to stalker on a new start and see if my sprain rate increases (but I do tend to die very quickly on the higher difficulties - I'm not very good yet at fighting off predators). ETA: On stalker, your character fatigues much quicker and fatigue is also a risk factor for sprains and does make you overencumbered when you wouldn't normally be if rested. As predicted, I died quickly, but I didn't get any sprains running up and down some hills before I met my demise to a wolf.

I did keep checking my journal for the kill for quite a few in game hours after I made this thread... no kill ever showed up. As I said, I would have considered it a miss if there had not be such a clear blood trail for the significant disntance I was able to follow it before getting the sprain and the blizzard starting. I'm convinced the bear reset when I went indoors and was the same healthy brear I saw wandering around the Unnamed Pond when I went there right after sleeping off the sprain. The only other possibility I can think of is that they've changed things and the existence of a blood trail is no longer an assurance that the animal will eventually bleed out and die.

Unfortunately, the journal doesn't differentiate between sprains that occur while walking and those that occur during attacks... a sprain is a sprain is a sprain. At the lower difficulty (voyager), I have averaged about 1 sprain somewhere per wolf attack, along with assorted bleeding wounds and clothing damage; but I haven't played anything but pilgrim since the 1.48 update since I've been trying to clear areas completely to get a handle on revolver spawn rates and I didn't want to be dealing with attacks at the same time. I generally don't last too many days on the higher difficulties yet (still need to git gud at this game 🙂)

You're contradiciting yourself there... Is it more from walking around (which would be somewhere between 50% and 99%) or all (100%) from walking around?

However, you can get sprains during animal attacks, so how many of those sprains you're counter occurred during the numerous attacks you have survived and are not due to the sprain mechanic. My current character has survived 71 days in pilgrim mode and has 9 wrist sprains and 10 ankle sprains in total. The majority of those were incurred before the hotfix. My other current character (CH start) has only survived 3 days, but has no sprains so far.

The overencumbered line is arbitrary. I think the sprain risk is the same whether you're 1 kg over your weight carry capacity or 10 kg over. You can lower the number of sprains you incur by slowing down and crouching when you see the slope indicator come up on the screen. That is, respect the risk warning and slow down. I haven't yet gotten a sprain while crouching since the hotfix. Before the hotfix I was getting sprains on level ground - even indoors. I was overencumbered at the time, but I think the key trigger in those two cases was turning around quickly or suddenly... perhaps the game was interpreting the turning input as a slope. That has not happened though since the hotfix. The mechanic for sprains is not based on time, so the frequency of them is not controlled by the game, but by you and your behavior. They may have increased the game's sensitivity to slopes, but I actually don't think they did. They appear to have made a change to encumbrance that allows the player to walk faster while encumbered. That is, the PC's walk does not slow to crawl just because he/she is carry too much. This, I'm sure, is what is causing some players to incur more sprains than they did before. It is the player now who has to heed the slope warnings and slow down.

The water in toilets is potable in the game so that at least there is a source of drinking water if the player has not yet found matches or a tin can in which to melt snow or boil water (since the player starts with neither convenience in Interloper mode). I'd hate to see them change it.

Really not worth complaining about since you don't have to light a match or lantern to see where you're walking if you have a fire going in either a stove or a fireplace... just grab a torch out of the fire itself and carry it with you as you walk around. It will shorten the duration of your fire that's in the stove or fireplace, so just quickly check after you grab the torch to make sure there is still enough of a fire to finish whatever you're cooking and add fuel as needed.

Getting a "sprain risk" caution is really not a problem. The ones you got while picking up stuff probably meant that you became overencumbered by adding the weight of that item to your inventory. Carry less and leave yourself some room to pick up additional items and you'll see fewer cautions about sprain risk. Since the hotfix, I've been only getting actual sprains on sloped terrain. I can still get a sprain on sloped terrain when not overencumbered, but those seem to happen less frequently than before the hot fix. I will get regularly get sprains if I am overencumbered and walking on a slope unless I slow down and crouch... then I often will be able to successful navigate the slope without a sprain. I don't think that they are actually any more frequent, though, than before the update. What I have noticed as a "benefit" of this new sprain system is that being overencumbered doesn't seem to slow my character's walk down as much as it used to. So, even if the risk of getting sprains while overencumbered has been increased (and I don't think it actually has), I"m no longer slowed as much by merely being overencumbered... and I'm fine with that trade off. Without any treatment at all, the pain will last 4 hours. Sprained wrists will heal with 2 hours of sleep and sprained ankles will heal with 4 hours of sleep. So, if you go to bed and sleep for 4 hours, everything will heal without any use of other resources. I do think that perhaps they should make it such that pain from a sprained wrist will last only 2 hours since the sprain will heal with 2 hours of sleep.

I'm very happy with it as well. Great job Hinterland.

Finding notes is always nice and I would like to find more of them throughout the world. The various computer entries that come up during auroras are also one of my favorite parts to this game. I wish it was possible to read more than one entry per aurora. The little hidden cache stories are also great, and I wish more of the kickstarters would respond and write them so we'd find a lot less of them where the story has not yet been written. I'm not sure if placing notes on the corpses though would interfere with the random loot that can be found on them. I suspect it might since none of the current notes are found in loot containers (which is what a corpse is in this game). As for animals, it is possible current to quarter the deer, moose, and bear in a fraction of the time it takes to harvest the carcass. You do require a hatchet or hacksaw in your inventory. The idea is to take the resulting bags of meat to a more sheltered location to finish harvesting them. I think having that in the game is sufficient and see no need to allow players to even attempt to just pick up an entire deer to move it indoors... and one would certainly not be inclined to just pick up an entire moose or bear anyways. In this game, allowing yourself to become so overencumbered will likely result in your spraining every limb and perhaps even result in your death (and that's how it should be). I'd rather they simply slow the decay rate of quartered animals a bit more to allow more time to collect and harvest the bags of meat.

If you get a blood trail, the animal should eventually bleed out and die... unless you go inside (triggering a load screen) before it dies, in which case there is a chance it will reset. I have only had a couple of occurrences where an animal leaving a blood trail did not get recorded as a kill in my journal. One of was bear just last week and, in that case, I did go inside to sleep and am quite certain that is when the animal reset (which is a bug in the game). The other was another bear last year when I did the same thing - went inside to sleep and the animal reset. I have failed to find several corpses of various animals, but the kill count in my journal has always recorded a kill whenever a blood trail was left (except for the two cases I mentioned above) The blood trail usually stops some time before the animal drops as it slows to a walk. It can continue to walk without bleeding in any direction and for quite some time (particularly with a bear).. I often find corpses where I did not really expect them to be. Listening for crows helps.

I have scored a crit hit on a wolf with the revolver. I have also scored a few hits that were sufficient to cause the wolf to eventually bleed out and die (denoted by the fact that the wolf leaves a blood trail in the snow rather than just seeing blood spatter when the wolf is first shot). The most common of course is there to be blood spatter when shot but no trail left in the snow, which indicates that the wolf was wounded but will recover from the injury or a total miss where the wolf will merely scare at the sound of the shot.

There is a custom setting to turn off sprains entirely, but it is only a yes or no option with no way to just lessen their frequency.

With the rifle, I'm sighting a little to the right and slightly high. The most important thing I noticed is to be sure to not take to long to aim. It seems to me that as the targeting stamina meter depletes, Will/Astrid is more likely to have started to lower the gun on their own. Previously, the gun would just start to sway, now they actually fully lower it and place it in the cradled position which brings the muzzle down and around to the left. If you are indeed hitting the animal, then it may be a loss of collision issue... that is, they are going right through the animal without harming it. This could also be why my arrows were completely disappearing (likely under the snow, although in my case they were killing the rabbits. I have noticed an inconsistency with the aiming of stones. On one run I started, I literally couldn't miss a rabbit even when I intentionally threw the stone so that it would be about a foot off the mark. On the next run I started, this effect wasn't there, but some of the stones would appear to go right through some of the rabbits without harming them at all. I think it's possible that rifle aiming is varying the same way from playtrhough to playthrough (or player to player).

I think it would be more disruptive than immersive. If you want to take extra time to eat, carve your meat pieces into really small bits and eat them one at a time with breaks in between.

I think classic interloper should stay as it is with the flare gun. I think they should instead add/change the custom settings to activate/deactivate the revolver, rifle, and flare gun each independently of one another. It would also be nice to be able to set the level of ammo spawns, including a setting for flares.

I agree. I'm doing a CH start right now; but it's not really practical for me to try to test all the regions or at higher difficulties (I'm simply not that good at surviving long enough to thoroughly search). I'm thinking though that you, as a dev, probably have a quicker way around this and whatever you ultimately find will be more accurate than anything I can do on this end. You also have the advantage on knowing how you might be intentionally manipulating spawns in certain zones to balance things rather than relying on straight RNG. Thank you though for noticing my post and responding. As I've said before... You're the best.

The cooking mechanic enables us to do other things while food is cooking, so its success is based on that. What you're suggesting would not allow us to do other things while eating, so there really is no in game benefit to making such a change. It would not even be more immersive since it would simply involve watching the timer dial wind down more slowly. It's bad enough watching the start fire timer, the hide harvesting timer, the sleep timer and the crafting timer. Adding even more "timer watching" would not be a good thing for this game, IMO.