Martin Prchal

The lack of medical teas will not kill you first. Reishis you never have to use once you get cooking 5. Rose Hips are a luxury for sprains and broken ribs are avoidable. Birch Bark respawns. Old Man Beard could probably run out if you wolves attack you daily but that is also avoidable. Trust me, there are a LOT of these medical things on the map.

Ok thanks, that's not area I find myself in very often, but I'll keep an eye out for it. Maybe I'll send a Pilgrim survivor over there. It's weird to me that there are places on the map where you can get stuck like this, it seems to me that the map is usually pretty well made.

Can you tell me the exact location of this so I don't go wandering over there like an idiot.

I've found that if I stay in a zone for too long blizzards start appearing almost daily. That usually tells me to get out of that zone quick.

17 hours ago, ThePancakeLady said:

But we have this debuff, to a degree. If you starve for multiple days, your fatigue recovery is capped at below full. You cannot become fully rested, you lose your max fatigue refill. And the longer you starve, the more you lose. Meaning your max carry weight goes down, and you become tired, faster. The eye icon gets a red line, and fills with red from the top (where full would be). At least, it used to. Haven't starved my characters in ages, so I haven't seen the debuff in ages. Could have been removed in an update, but... I am too tired to go look at all of the changelogs right now. 

Really? I guess I've never starved enough to see this happen. That's pretty cool. 

25 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Which is kinda my point here, thank you. Since Interloper has to account for that weird kind of gameplay, you kinda "have to" do it to play the game as good as you can, and Interloper is harder than it should be (on the calorie side) if you do not. I think Interloper would be much better served and feel more intuitive if you would raise the starvation  damage to, let's say, 3% per hour (up from 1%), adjust thirst damage to the same for realism sake, and in turn reduce the calorie intake to Stalker levels - or something like that. If you start playing harder difficulties you just try to keep your meters topped off. You don't even consider going without food, let alone all day. Until at some point you discover, for whatever reason, that not eating is okay (or you stumble upon it in this forum or the wiki). This, by definition, is unintuitive, as the outcome is the exact opposite of what a player without detailled knowledge would expect.

Of course I would really love to see finer-grained mechanics. There have been many good examples over the years, some of them actually quite creative and well tought-out, but I sorta get that the dev don't wanna overload the game with more mechanics to learn and understand. So maybe just flipping some numbers here and there will do the trick. My main concern which I want to voice with this thread is that, while well received, Well Fed does not, in my opinion, properly address one of the two main issues it was introduced to resolve, hence Interloper balancing is still broken. In many ways, now that I think about it, Well Fed feels like the rewarding half of a mechanic to adress starvation exploitation, but the punitive half never got implemented. 

If anyone asked my opinion on how to address this I would personally favour an effect that would gradually increase over a couple of days of not meeting your calorie requirements. This could manifest as increasing fatigue that would start to weigh on you like parasites do, combined with a mild reduction in carry weight as being tired does, just not as severe. As this effect isn't binary but gradually increases over time it would still allow short periods of starvation in real food shortage scenarios, but you'd kinda have to pay back that credit with a longer period of staying well nourished to get rid of the debuff - and only time after that would count towards well fed again. If you completely ignore this past day 4 or 5 or so you'd lose sleep recovery, which would ultimately force you to eventually eat - or die.

This would actually also be a bit more what one would expect from common sense. You don't immediately die from starvation. In fact you can get by for very long time depending on your reserves. But what the body indeed does rather quickly is ration your calories, meaning your metabolic rate slows, you feel tired all the time, your muscles don't regain strength as fast, you tire much faster from endurace activities such as walking, etc, etc. This is grade school knowledge - and as such I think it would be intuitive enough to implement.

I, on the other hand, understand why the devs don't want to adjust sleep recovery as it is. I've played games with no sleep recovery, and while challenging, it might be frustrating for many people that after a mishap like running into a wolf, even well clothed, you are essentially grounded for a week or two, which then in turn usually is amplified by other problems, such as shortages in firewood and/or food or cabin feaver. Plus the fun factor of staying put for two weeks really is quite low.
 

I agree with your 4th paragraph. The effects of starvation need to get progressively worse the longer you starve. I think something similar should also be implemented with fatigue. You rarely end up with the fatigue bar in the red for extended periods of time, but it would be cool if the character's vision got blurred and it would be hard to perform even basic tasks after lets say, 48 consecutive hours of starving or being fully fatigued. Another idea I just got off the top of my head is to have an affliction that is essentially the opposite of well fed. The amount of starvation could be calculated like cabin fever and once the risk gets too high, you can get a "malnourished" effect. Something like, "you have been starving for 48 of the last 72 hours, you are finding it hard to do physical labor". Carrying capacity could be reduced even further, fatigue would drain very fast, and you would become very susceptible to the cold. I'm basically just spitballing, but I think this would make consistently starving yourself day after day very punishing.

I really try to keep my sleep schedule. I try to get indoors before dark and sleep/pass time until the sun is completely visible on the little clock to avoid the morning cold. This obviously leads to a lot of extra passing time. I like to think of days where I end up passing time more as "rest days", where the character gets to recover from pushing the last 3 or 4 days, even though my condition or fatigue does not need to be replenished. So my point is, the extra passing time does not really bother me most of the time.

The bear cave is shown to be somewhere in the Skeg if you go into the map while in the cave. Anyway, I would really like to see the bear cave in Survival. Not saying I would ever go in there, but it would be interesting to wander past it and listen to the bear shuffle about.

On Voyager it is surely worth it for me because it is really easy for me to keep it. I always carry 30 cattails in case I can't kill a deer in time, but I rarely have to cut into my supply. I haven't graduated to Loper yet, so I cannot put any thoughts into it from that perspective, but basically all streamers I watch keep the well fed buff, so it seems to me like it is worth it in most cases.

Ok thanks!

So you are saying they are acting like longitude and latitude?

Are the numbers on the Whiteberry and Straywolf maps distances in meters? Why do they go both positive and negative? 

Bears and moose cannot be killed in struggles. But yes, getting to a forge is rather essential in Loper

It would make sense for Perseverence Mills to connect to PV, given Episode 3 will be in PV

Thanks for getting in touch with the community every week like this. I really like seeing the game from your perspective, especially the challenges and decisions you face as a developer. I really look forward to these every week. 

Would be hard to implement, but a scene like this in the 'Skeg would be unforgettable. Maybe it would actually make me visit the place. 

"The Thin Ice" by Pink Floyd isn't bad either.  "Don't be surprised when a crack in the thin ice appears under your feet" always hits home when crossing the skeg. To be honest anything by Pink Floyd has the same relaxing atmosphere as the TLD soundtrack.

1 hour ago, Tbone555 said:

It was a dark, but much simpler time. I can't remember when they updated the dam - did you ever get to meet fluffy? I miss fluffy. She was my first death!

No, I never got to meet Fluffy. I have heard many stories about her for sure. However, I have met her cousin in HRV.

I happen to own one of those small camping stoves that runs on propane tanks. It has a mechanical striker that eliminates the need for another source of a spark. However, it broke fairly quickly and I generally have to use a lighter to get it going. I have never really used lanterns though, so I cannot speak for the presence of strikers there like in TLD.

Are you like me and playing on such a potato that the starting screen lags for you? I had like 10 fps (steam counter) in the start menu when I first started the game and the audio was also very laggy. I had no problem getting to the settings though.

I feel like they are rather against being able to make a shelter wherever because it makes the game significantly easier. However, it would be nice to make shelters with supplies in them in strategic locations and have places you know you can come back to. I would really appreciate being able to make a shelter around a campfire so you wouldn't have to worry about the wind while cooking up a bear.

I came after the cooking update and I have to say I don't know how you guys did it the old way 

Being on Voyager, I really like spending time in the wilderness regions. I spent like 10 days just in Milton Basin or in the Valley Cave in HRV. Really chill to just look at the beautiful landscape sometimes.

Wow, now I remember it from Story Mode, but I still cannot recall looking at it in Survival. I guess I was always sprinting over to Trappers too quick to appreciate this. So that is the area where the plane crashed?

Today I noticed something weird. I was going from Milton to Mystery Lake in the little canyon with the waterfalls. Really close to the cave to Mystery Lake, I noticed a pretty little view to the left side that I had never noticed before, even I have gone this route before. Was this always here?