Dr. S.

Interloper + endless night would be very, very, very hard. I doubt it’s survivable for more than a few days, and even then only with the best of spawns (say, FM + clear skies).

There’s not much need for crafting on Voyager. But there are multiple outside work benches (including at least one inside) where you can craft under most weather conditions. Lantern fuel is not much of a problem because fishing.

You mean surviving on "Endless Night"? Sure. My current run is Voyager + Endless Night. I'm on day 20 now, planning on doing at least 100 days. Although I did almost die in my last session when I stupidly tried to walk from the fishing hut to the Mountaineer's Hut when it was snowing pretty hard and I ran into the bear, got mauled, and then got lost in a blizzard. BTW, this combination of settings is pretty interesting; I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a challenge or a change of pace. It really turns some things on their heads.

I'm guessing that this is working as designed (or maybe more accurately, as programed), and that sleeping is one of the things that triggers animals to spawn or despawn. So I think your thinking is right and that you just got unlucky and the animals despawned while you slept, and the game engine doesn't bother to resolve that particular edge case. I haven't noticed this with deer and wolves, but I had exactly the same thing happen with a moose in DP when I put a couple of arrows into around dusk, and then had to leave and come back the next morning because night fell. Of course moose don't bleed out, so I was disappointed but not too surprised when I found it had disappeared along with my arrows overnight. But it seems like the same situation: a wounded animal that despawns and takes any arrows with it.

Sadly, it's not a bug. The list is alphabetical. Only wooden matches come after the torches. If you're playing on settings that allow cardboard matches, they always come first. And if you're carrying multiple packs, enjoy hitting the arrow a few times ... It would be much better if a lit torch always came first, of course.

So I've been paying more attention to this ... Here's a picture I just took. These are two wolves I shot the previous day and came back to harvest. Only one carcass had crows. The interesting thing is, I harvested 2 kg of meat from the carcass on the right. When I finished, I noticed that the crow sound was louder, and when I looked up there were two groups of crows, one over each carcass. I backed up to take another picture, and while I was framing it, the crows over the carcass on the right disappeared, leaving only one group of crows, over the carcass on the left.

I was talking about how I thought TLD worked, not what would be realistic in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic world. Sorry if I was unclear. Maybe I'm not observant enough, but I always thought that if the crows were out then every outdoor corpse/carcass had crows. Apparently that's not true? If so, that makes me wonder which corpses or carcasses might not have crows, and under what conditions. In particular, is it possible for the carcass of an animal that I've hunted to not have crows, even if the crows are out around other carcasses? That would affect the way that I search for them.

Has anyone else noticed an issue where not all carcasses/corpses spawn crows? I'm on mystery lake, near two corpses, one by a fishing hut and another nearby (at the little island). Crows are only circling over the corpse by the fishing hut. I'm not aware of anything that should cause this. Weather's fine; that's not the issue. In any case, either both should have crows or neither, no?

Eh? At harvesting 5 it's 6 min/kg with the improvised knife, so you can harvest the meat from a 40 kg bear in 4 hours. 28 more minutes for the hide (and more for the guts, of course, if you need them). Hardly impossible. For me, quartering is situational. I'm more likely to do it early in the game or when the carcass is near a cave or other location where I can take advantage of the indoor temps while harvesting the sacks you get from quartering.

He's a tad obsessed with the idea that people who discuss long interloper runs here are actually manipulating the game behind the scenes by modding it or editing save files, or whatever. (See, for example, this thread.) It doesn't read as sarcasm to me, but YMMV.

In my experience, once you have a clothing bonus of +22ºC or so, a regular bedroll is sufficient to sleep through the night in the back of any cave under any conditions in interloper.

The bearskin coat is much more useful than the bedroll, in my opinion, so I would craft that. My suggestion would be to go to Milton and spend 30 days there. I like to use the Paradise Meadows farmhouse as a base. The nice thing about Milton is that it has a good mix of terrain, with the park/gas station being different than the town which is totally different than the basin. From the basin you can venture down to Marsh Ridge and from there to the rest of FM, which is nice as well. After Milton, head on over to HRV and spend another 30 days there. Just leave some crafting supplies in the trailer in Milton by the entrance to HRV for things that you might need to replenish that require a bench, like arrows.

Not on Marsh Ridge! 😉

I think it depends a lot on the settings. In my current interloper run, I'm actually ahead in mending compared to fishing, and it's not because I've neglected fishing. Even at level 4 fishing, the catch rate is well under one fish per hour.

Like @Serenity I find the arrows to be useful in fog/bad weather. I like to use them at fishing huts to point the way straight to my destination, so I always start in the right direction when the weather is bad. I also use them to mark places that I need to make a turn, like the turn toward draft dodger's cabin on the route down from burned ridge cave. Not needed in good weather, but can be life-saving in a blizzard. I also use the 'X' to mark dead ends that I've already searched in caves/mines. Sometimes I'll mark a large cache of meat from a bear or a moose if it's off the beaten track and I think I'll forget about it.

If your condition is good pre-stomp, you won't die. I had an interloper run with an evening start in TWM where I got lost trying to evade wolves and find the climber's hut and ended up getting stomped by the moose that spawns near there. It didn't kill me, so I decided to see how many stomping I could take. Died on the fourth stomping.

I like the regions that have sub-regions that seem to feel distinct to me and give me a sense that I can get different experiences by moving around the region. So my least favorite regions are probably Desolation Point and Coastal Highway. Both of these regions seem pretty monochromatic to me; I never have the feeling that I'm going anywhere. Of course, DP is small, and what little area there is is dominated by the ice (unless you like walking along the road 😂). Coastal Highway has the same problem from my point of view, even though it's considerably larger. Too much ice, and if you head up into the hills, there's not much there there. OTOH hand, my favorite regions, PV, TWM, FM, and MT are all pretty large and have distinct sub-regions for exploring/hunting/camping, etc.

This is exactly why I've never attempted to do this. With regards to the original suggestion, I think that having some indication that we've visited a cairn would be nice too. What I would like to see is the ability to add a stone to the top of the cairn. Alternatively, being able to use a piece of charcoal to mark the cairn would work. But I like the idea of having our survivor be able to interact with the cairn in some way to create the marking/indicator.

I wish the list of cairns were sorted by region in the journal, so I would know when I’ve found all the cairns in a given region.

Maybe it's setting dependent. I see that message a lot when trying to keep a fire going in the wind.

It's 9 minutes. But I wonder if you've done this recently? If the wind is strong enough, you can't add fuel, you get the message "It's too windy to maintain a fire" instead.