Kean Valk

Your position in the world. To elaborate; The Long dark does what most survival games fail to fully achieve for me. Slamming you, a human, back into the food chain. It's mother nature putting you in your place. I've played many survival games over the years, (hell I've always said that Open-world survival games were my 'bread and butter') and most of them were very well made or at least fun. But none, none I say! Are as good as The Long Dark, in reminding you how frail humans can be. In ARK if you level enough, nothing can even hold a candle to you. In 7 Days to Die if you build enough, you don't even have to leave the base for the rest of the game. But in The Long Dark? You are never the 'top of the food chain' out there, and I like that. Nowadays we have plenty of open world survival games, but most, at least for me, run into the problem of being tedious when played past a certain point. ARK lets you get an army to do everything for you, hell in 7 Days you can get so well set up that dying starts to be a challenge even when you are trying. But in The Long Dark, it doesn't matter how well set up you are, every day could be your last.

I had said everything I could think of on the topic, but I've seen enough discussions between my friends to know where this is going. So think I'll step back in. I'd like to start off by saying that the thread was made because Kaisentlaia brought up that, although candles have been long since wanted by several members of the community, it seems like all of the necessary game design and mechanics have already been added. The model has been added, There is a lightning effect made, and the crafting system to make it all happen. Therefore by that logic, it wouldn't be too hard to give us a crafting recipe and just reuse what's here already. To correct part of what has been going back and forth for a bit (that I admit to have been a part of) ManicManiac, the candle is the only thing that needs to be added. A can to hold it, the fuel in the form of our beloved lantern oil, and a cloth for a wick. Note that we are not saying to make wicks with cloth, but just to use the cloth. Theoretically, nothing else needs to be made besides the crafting recipe itself. Personally I love the idea of having candles, my main reason for liking the idea is, however, more for what it could do to change the atmosphere. I see where Moll, Kaisentlaia, and deathbydanish are coming from with there ideas. They all shared wonderful ideas that, while maybe needing some balancing here and there, would be great additions to the candle idea itself. (and a nice touch to the game world) I do however, also see where you are coming from. It's not like you are in any way trying to put the ideas down, with over 1,000 posts I have no doubt that you are a kind member of the community. With the three posts you have written here you brought up valid points, it is all down to player choice.(for the most part) You were just worried about us giving the devs a task that, while not meaningless, is a bit unnecessary. The only thing I have left to bring up is: You are right, it would take something already lit to light the candles. But I had a thought about that, let's say that a candle lasts 24 hours and there is no way to lengthen that. If you lit a fire in a stove, did whatever you needed that fire for in 4 hours and went to sleep. But before you went to sleep you took a lit torch out of the fire and lit the candle. Then, you sleep for 8 hours. You get up and head out, let's say you are gone either hunting, fishing or coming and going stockpiling firewood for 12 hours before you are getting too tired and need to head back. So you get home, let's say an hour later. (maybe you had to avoid a wolf) It's time to light your nightly fire to cook some food and make some water.(or tea if you need it.) You pull out a torch and light it with the candle that's still burning for 3 more hours, get your fire going in a try or 2 with the torch and boom! 1 match for 2 days without burning firewood on keeping the fire going that whole time. Repeatable for however many candles you have.

That's why i was thinking of giving it another use, like warming drinks for example. That way it could be a utility item as well, balanced by the cost of making it and it's limited use time. The warming up buff is really handy but not worth lighting a normal fire for, unless you were freezing. So every time you went to make it, you'd have to ask the 'famous' long dark question "Is this the best use of my resources?" Maybe not to difficult, but definitely not cheap either. I was thinking as a bridge between early game and mid game or calling it a mid game craft-able. It could be set up to need fire starting level 2 or 3 as a condition that needed to be met first, as a way to make the cost itself a bit lower. I would say that making the cans unusable for anything else would make some balancing sense (at least to me) and while it's a nice thought, for balance you probably shouldn't be able to re-collect the wax. At least not all of it, if you could then later down the line you could have a lot of candles Metal channels heat well so that would help the oil candle in making some heat too. I like that idea! Getting it off of cooking meat would make a bit more sense, maybe you would need a pot to collect it too. While that could work (and I get where you are coming from) I don't think it's the best way to go about it. Now I'm by no means a game dev, so I really don't have much ground to stand on here. But adding it like that I feel would effect spawns negatively. If it spawned kinda like cans did (so just where you'd expect them to be) then there would just be to many and the importance of having found one would go down. But if it spawned like matches, (I find most people keep the candles near matches if they use the candle, although that could just be me) then it could sometimes replace a match that you really need. Again I'm not a game dev nor a programmer, but it's what I am worrying about as a player.

That comes down to how long a candle would last then, if it is gonna burn for a few hours then go out or if it would last longer. Candles don't burn forever, and if you're gonna light a full fire then you don't need it. So that would only save a match if you had a candle lit already. I just thought of another use too, you could use it to have light in places without stoves like the cabins in ML. But what if you could use it for heating up drinks? Not cooking food of course, but just holding a cup of over the candle till it's warm?

You can scrap fishing hooks, I'm calling out cans because you can't even scrap them. Other than cooking, cans have no uses at all. While they DO degrade it's only by 10% if its contents are burned or boiled dry. So as long as you are careful to will end up with a pile of cans and no use for them all. (looking at the 20 I had in a corner of my stalker run before I noticed that they couldn't be scraped)

Well you can already kinda do that, lighting a torch with a match can't fail and you can keep trying to light fires with the same lit torch

I think a way to add the sled idea that would at least be possible balancing wise, would be to make something that could be pushed along the railroad track. That way it had a set path, lots of in-game limitations, (such as the derailment in ML getting fully in the way) but would allow for much larger loads then what you can normally be carried. The problem is that even that isn't balanced and you can already see some glaring issues, like "How is it gonna move from region to region?" or "how much would something like that cost??" As for the idea of snow shoes and changing levels of snow, personally I really like the concept of this idea. But just adding show shoes would call a lot of things into question. For instance, why does the level of snow never change? Even after 3 blizzards in the same week and below freezing weather 24/7, not an extra inch of snow.

This would be amazing! There are so many times when I'm just stuck inside with nothing to do if I don't wanna waste fire starting supplies. I think it makes a lot of sense and it would give cans another use too.

The thing that gets me the most is that it's impossible to survive forever. At some point you will run out of ways to start a fire, and while you theoretically could find a system to keep a fire going for a long time (see deep forest achievement) once it goes out you have no way to get water. That might not kill you faster than the wildlife will given half a chance, but it definitely will in time. Another thing is that some items are fully useless once at 0% quality. While this does make sense for any food items, what about the survival bow and sewing kits? I feel like it would make sense if they were burnable, the sewing kit is a cardboard container and the bow is flat out made of wood. at least let me scrap recycled cans.