Jimmy

God I'm tired... It just doesn't end. Here in Queensland, Australia, the local community has now woken up to the fact that the virus is a real threat since the news was released that one of the locals is known to have died from COVID-19. Prior to this, most folks were happy believing it was a 'not us' problem. No days off for yours truly for the last eight days, but hopefully I can get time off during the Easter holidays. Working in healthcare right now is scary, heartbreaking and honestly a little bit surreal. Went for 36 hours yesterday without a chance to eat. Too busy, too risky, too tired. Traded calories for rest instead. It seems to be working. New cases are falling. Please let it be working.

Thank you. As a devout skeptic in the non-existence of the flying spaghetti monster, I praise my Schrödinger's deity's social distancing technique. R'amen. Here's a good layman's explanation of the reason COVID-19 is so dangerous. Still pretty slow over here in kangaroo land. It's a bad time to be asthmatic, since most relievers are gone. Forget about finding face masks, hand sanitizer or gloves too. I'm not holding out too much hope for the salbutamol to return to supply. Last time I toured the facility that manufactures the local brand, their machines broke down three times in the five hours I was there, and that was just a normal workload. Since then, I know they've actually had several batches of medications from that place recalled because they found 'contaminants' in their product. It was parts of their aging machines that had snapped off and been ground into their drug products. Their equipment is old, worn out and only just able to meet normal demand. Forget about trying to ramp up supply. When you have a government that's been aggressively seeking lower drug costs by cutting supplier margins for decades, you get what you pay for.

Looks like the virus has finally reached my town. I have a friend who's in the morgue at the local hospital. We're seeing our first deaths now. They should be announcing it officially in a few days to prevent panic and give us time to prepare. I'm doing what I can to protect my team. It's hard when access to basic medical supplies are so low now. Been trying to take the riskiest jobs personally where I can. No sense spreading risk across the other staff if I can help it. I hope my wife and kids will be okay.

I'm from kangaroo land, specifically banana bender country. I grew up in bogan central within cooee of crazy Steve's croc farm, playing wheel of goon on my hills hoist each arvo with my mates.

My survival tips: 1. Loot and scoot. 2. Burn resources to increase speed. 3. Dump it if you can't use it right now. 4. Plan your journey, anticipate your needs. 5. Passing time is a mortal sin. 6. Don't be afraid to fail and try again.

Not exactly, since beachcombing allows renewal of every single resource except antibiotics. There's no theoretical limit to survival time in a single game, provided you don't get an infection (which could only happen if you're exceptionally careless). Honestly, once the first ten days are over, you can pretty much survive wherever and however you want. You should have the critical tools by this stage, namely matches, a hacksaw, a hammer, and sufficient clothing to survive the cold. On Inteloper, if I've reached Day 10, I know I'm set for the remainder of the run. Since @Robbiieeee asked for long term survival strategies, my typical Interloper plans run as follows: At spawn, head for the closest source of matches on my current map. Fire is life, cold is death. Once I have matches, I'll make for Pleasant Valley to find a hacksaw. I usually check the farmhouse if I don't find one on the way, since it's a 50% chance of spawning here. From the Farmhouse or Barn, I run to Draft Dodger's Cabin, then up to the crash site for some good clothing loot. I keep going on up to Timberwolf Mountain, resting at Prepper's before climbing and bringing ten cloth for a pair of snow shelters to get to the summit. After going to the Summit of Timberwolf Mountain, I'll usually have one or two ski jackets, a wool ear wraps, two pairs of wool socks, one or two thin wool sweaters, and enough food and loot to last for days. With careful planning, the rabbits and deer carcasses you find along the way should be enough to avoid needing any of the food you loot too. From here, it's back to Pleasant Valley and on to Carter Hydro Dam, grabbing enough gut, deer and rabbit hides to make boots, mittens and pants, plus a few saplings for a bow. Letting those cure while I forge, I haul a hammer out to Spence's, forging a knife, hatchet and arrow heads, then go back to Carter Hydro Dam and make one set of deerskin pants, mittens, gloves, a bow and a half dozen arrows. Then I'll usually run out to loot Milton before grabbing the mackinaw jacket, second wool ear wraps and combat pants from Hushed River Valley. After that it's a loop to loot Coastal Highway and Thomson's Crossing for any missing clothing items like a second pair of thermal underwear. Then I've pretty much got everything I need for the future, and start hunting bear, moose and working on my skill ranks. I might hit Broken Railroad for an extra firestriker, or Desolation Point for a heap of coal. By this stage, it's all pretty much the same when it comes to survival. Just move steadily across the map, hunting calories and leaving caches of food and firewood wherever you stop. The best strategy for long term survival is to ensure you're constantly moving, not settling in one spot, and leaving enough resources for future you should you ever return.

I've been giving it a try the past week. My take: Food is quite plentiful. I'm commonly having food in my inventory rot. The macronutrients system is a nice spin on the normally basic concept of nutrition in survival games, where hunger is normally just a status bar which can be filled by any easily sourced calories without penalty. Water is the more limiting factor to survival when located in a map area with no large water sources, especially during the game's dry season. Static maps and loot spawns reward multiple playthroughs by having reliable locations to find key survival items. Hostile mobs such as natives and big cats are fairly rare, so long as you don't go looking for trouble. It's a rather peaceful survival experience. Cats tend to stalk in a straight line for an easy spear throw to the head, and natives move quickly but attack slowly, meaning it's quite simple to get a head-shot off with the bow once they're close. I still need to try the harder difficulties, since I've mostly spent my time learning the maps and completing story mode. Once I move up from Welcome to the Jungle mode to King of the Jungle or Green Hell difficulty, I'm hoping for a more challenging experience.

I work in healthcare, so I'm on the front line of the pandemic. I'll be pretty much guaranteed to be exposed to the virus if I haven't been already, and self isolation or working from home aren't really an option, since if I do, the most vulnerable of our population receive no care. Frankly, I'm not worried. I have a fridge and cupboard full of food just like any normal week. If I run out of toilet paper, there's always the shower. It'll be painful to have the kids home from school, but either myself or my wife can be at home with them, so we'll make it work.

None. Hushed River Valley has a guaranteed bedroll spawn in one of the ice cave systems, so you don't need to make snow shelters if you can reliably navigate them.

There's been a bunch of locations, mainly the updated Pleasant Valley region and the new Bleak Inlet region, which now have natural beds added to caves. These appear as piles of branches, and function to allow you to rest and recover fatigue in these locations without a bedroll. These include the Hilltop Cave near Signal Point and the Burned Ridge Cave near the Crash Site, with Bleak Inlet having these types of beds located at the Fallen Lighthouse, two caves in the Frozen Delta, and a cave near the Ravine exit.

The limitations of the game regarding simulation of reality mean some things that would be logical don't translate well into gameplay. Who's to say descending down a steep slope is unrealistic, if you could lie down on your back and slide across the powdery top layer, cushioning your landing in a snowdrift below? Perhaps you might risk spraining an ankle with your landing, but that's the risk you take for using a shortcut.

You end up losing your worry about cluttering the map with campfires pretty quickly on Interloper. When -10°C means you go from fully warm to hypothermia risk in a single hour, you drop a campfire wherever you need it. Personally, I think the new feats are a great addition, but I certainly wouldn't bother using any of them in place of Cold Fusion and Efficient Machine for Interloper. Compared to these two feats that are 'always on,' the others are simply too situational to worry about. Cold Fusion is essentially a free wool toque that never loses condition. Efficient Machine translates to 10% more calories per food item. Neither is worth trading, though whenever I'm slowly pushing into the teeth of a biting cold wind I wish I had Blizzard Walker as well.

Great list @jeffpeng! I have a modest addition to your list of requested features. Add tinder to fuel fires When Fire Starting 3 is achieved, or with the Fire Master feat, tinder items currently serve no purpose. Instead, allow these items to be added to a fire to give +0.5°C and 2 minutes duration to a fire. This is both realistic and does not unduly serve to unbalance the game. With these values, 0.10kg of tinder plugs gives the same heat boost but half the duration boost of a 0.15kg stick, offering an interesting choice between shorter, hotter fires or longer, cooler fires.

My general rule of thumb is to quarter bear and moose, but not wolves and deer. The big benefit for quartering (besides moving your meat somewhere more convenient) is gaining the gut and hide in one go. Given the time cost of harvesting big game gut and hide, quartering can be faster at lower Carcass Harvesting skill levels if you're gathering these resources. It takes two hours when quartering a moose to gain twelve gut and a hide with a knife at Carcass Harvesting level 2, against two and a half hours by harvesting the regular way. Oddly enough, both the improvised knife and improvised hatchet carry the same two hour time cost for quartering big game. Since these tools are even slower than a hunting knife, quartering with them is even more efficient to gain hide and guts from bear and moose carcasses. Especially in Interloper when minutes matter most, quartering these carcasses is the best option if you are planning to take everything.

The good part about the feat system is that it tracks over all your games. So long as you complete the task in any of your Survival or Challenge games, you'll progress towards unlocking the feat. No need to grind, just play normally and they'll eventually unlock! For me, I plan to work on my Expert Trapper feat in my Interloper game when I retire to the Ravine. A snare line of thirty traps or so should unlock this pretty fast.

You might be interested in reading the Wikipedia article about Professor Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his studies regarding the native diets of the Inuit people. His studies of their diet, which was comprised of nothing but meat and fish for 6 to 9 months per year, showed it is quite possible to enjoy good health and remain scurvy free eating nothing but animal products.

Perseverance Mills is most likely candidate for new location to be added to the game come Episode 5, and given the name, it's likely to be a lumber mill.

I agree with what @ManicManiac said. It's a piece of video game logic that wind can reduce a 12 hour fire to 9 minutes without returning resources, and part of the core strategy of fire maintenance in the game. However, note that you're not losing all the resources you've spent when this happens. The fire, despite having a lower duration, still gives the same warmth bonus to the surrounding area based on what you've added. Wind reducing fire duration is needed. This prevents the player simply dropping a big fire wherever they want without consequence. You're given the choice of balancing the warmth or duration of the fire you desire against the possibility of losing the resources you've spent in creating it. To give an example, in my recent Interloper game I shot a bear as I was travelling along Bear Creek in Coastal Highway. Suddenly I have nearly 40kg of meat that will be wasted in five days if I don't harvest it quickly. The weather was still, but I was on an exposed piece of open ground. To save matches, I used my torch and almost all of my gathered fuel to start a 2 hour fire and quartered the bear. This was a tactical choice based on my expectation that the weather wouldn't change for at least an hour or two. Typically weather patterns change at most every hour, usually every 2 or 3 hours. This was a success, giving me a pelt and gut, plus bags of meat. The weather remained calm, so I harvested a pair of 1kg bear steaks and set them to cook for an hour. During this hour, I prepared two more steaks, then went and gathered sticks, dropping my temperature to zero and risking hypothermia. I did this because I knew I'd want more firewood to keep the campfire lit, and instead of adding the sticks when I got back, I simply dropped them next to the fire. I continued to alternate between adding new steaks to the fire, warming up as I harvested the meat, and gathering sticks when my temperature was full again. Each time I finished cooking the meat, I'd only add enough fuel to the fire to complete the next set of steaks. About halfway through the cooking process, a blizzard lands. However, I now have a massive stockpile of sticks, and the fire is providing more than enough heat to keep me toasty warm, even though I'm completely exposed in the open. I simply continue cooking through the blizzard, adding one stick at a time whenever the duration of my fire goes down to one minute. I used a dropped cup of cold tea next to the fire as a method of speeding time between each stick so I didn't have to watch the duration slowly tick down. Because of my tactical choices and preparing myself beforehand while still seizing an opportunity, I was able to complete cooking the bear I'd shot despite spending half the time in a blizzard. My actions were rewarded by the game, and it became a memorable experience and a highlight of the current run. The Long Dark is about having interesting choices during play. In order to be a choice, there has to be pros and cons of each option. For camp fires, the way you prepare for wind and approach the problem of fire duration dictates the reward you earn from your choice.

Correct! Let's keep the ball rolling: There's game aplenty in this hidden glade, overlooking a broken road.

Mountain Town, the cave between the two rope climbs below the Picnic area. My entry: Bitter cold hides a secret in this place of silent waters.

Credits roll, with soundtrack provided by Commander Chris Hadfield, first Canadian to walk in space and all-round living legend.

The normal Canadian wildfire seasons are from April to September, which peaks from June onwards. You can even see the annual fire weather risk on a handy interactive map on the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. Note that even during the peak months, fire risk simply doesn't rise very high in the Vancouver region, which is our best approximation for Great Bear's fictional location. Mid-winter would be almost zero risk of wildfire.

I know there's been a few areas patched with instakill walls to prevent out of bounds exploration. Some old screenshots of areas that are a work in progress were discovered thanks to such tricks. Not linking to it since the admins have asked not to reveal unfinished regions, but you can still find these if you look. As for me, I'm always leery of trying new routes. I'm very guilty of sticking to my known paths whenever I play, taking the same route across the maps to reach the points of interest. I have respect for those like @ManicManiac who challenge the game's boundaries, trying to get just that one bit of map revealed. It takes guts to risk ending a run thanks to a bad fall into an unclimbable crevice or an invisible killzone.

My experience is that Interloper becomes decidedly simpler with a survival bow and Cooking 5. Soon you have caches of meat and water ready to see you across the maps. These caches quickly replace the initial non-renewable resources such as toilet water and cat tail stalks. In my current Interloper, I'm more than 30 days in, and haven't eaten a single food besides meat, tea and cat tails. The looted foods and canned goods are just decoration and clutter for my base. The moment you kill a bear, food becomes a non-issue for that region. Again, it all comes down to having the proper tools for the task. First is a box of matches. Then a hacksaw. Then saplings and improved clothing. Then forged tools. Finally crafted hide clothing and a bow. From that point, it's up to the player to decide their fate, since survival in any given scenario should be achievable with their available resources.

If you've not yet gained much experience with Interloper, I recommend giving it a try! The massive drop in both available equipment when looting, plus the unforgiving nature of the weather, makes Interloper a completely different game compared to the other modes. Gaining basic equipment such as matches, clothes, or tools requires specific strategies to accomplish before you're dead from exposure or starvation. It's a truly challenging game mode, designed to push your planning abilities and knowledge of the maps. Once you've mastered Interloper, the community-created 'Deadman' mode is a great option for the next 'hardest' mode. But even this can be mastered through creative and unorthodox means. However, it's the nature of the game that the difficulty curve declines as you gain the tools required to survive. Having a bow, or a knife, can make a huge long-term impact to your game. No matter what mode you play, if you've survived fifty days, you're likely able to survive five hundred. The first ten days of any game are the real challenge, when you're scrambling to gather the clothes, tools and other resources you'll need to make it to the next day. As most experienced Interlopers will tell you, the biggest cause of death for a Survivor past the first ten days is boredom. There's a rush that comes from the knife-edge of survival during the start of a game that simply isn't present later. If that's what you enjoy, then just go ahead and start a new game! The beauty of The Long Dark is that there's no wrong way to play.