Tactical Ex

I am seeing the same problem and have submitted a ticket.

I tried

• verifying game cache
• restarting
• disabling DLC
• reinstalling

all to no avail

1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

Pros:

- Who ever does the sound design at Hinterland is a true master of they craft. The sound of the game is already amazing (buggy sound scenes notwithstanding), but this might be one of the most memorable "entities" when it comes to pure audio horror in all of gaming. Big hand.

I agree. I happened to be doing laundry last night and ran the washer before going to sleep. The sound of an unbalanced, heavy. load made the same "thump-thump" that the approaching darkwalker did and it's a good thing I was not too far asleep to make the connection because I would have probably needed new pants. Horror usually isn't my cup of tea but I enjoyed this experience. For a seasoned player that took about a 6-9 month break, coming back to this challenge was great but a bit on the easy side ... understandably. 

I usually have a fairly robust backup strategy. In this case that saved my games and it was really luck that my inquisitiveness lead to me make a copy of the game directory to mess with later but I am currently stuck to one of the two scenarios...

1. Get latest game files and lose badges
2. Keep Winters Embrace version of game files and keep badges

Very curious what the next update brings, it should shed light on the update process. I know from experience that it is atypical to test version upgrades from 2-plus versions back, especially on platforms where the game updates are delivered as service.

This may be one of the few games where I choose to backup not just the game saves but the game directory itself moving forward.

Interestingly enough, I have the same issue. I keep a backup of my saves and in this case I backed up the game directory during Winters Embrace as well so I could tinker around later. Since then I rebuilt my computer but I still had the game saves and the Winter's embrace directory. After installing through steam I started the game which built the save directory and I populated my last state of play ... then realized the badges I earned were gone still. As a test, I copied the winters embrace directory into the live steam game directory and the badges came back. I then verified the game cache in steam and that wiped them out. I then tried only copying the additional files from the winters embrace directory into the live directory and that did not make my badge progress return so there is no special file it seems that handles ONLY badges, its tied into the rest of the game assets somehow. I can only hope that the next update in 2 days prompts an update which does not wipe my progress.

Sleeping ... in the dam ... on top of a wire ... then an aurora occurs. 

I have about 7 kgs of cans .... won't I eventually run out of cans considering decay?

On 3/6/2020 at 7:41 PM, ajb1978 said:

If anyone can find a storm lantern matching the one in the game, let me know.  I can find kerosene lanterns that use a mantle, and can have an optional flint/steel mechanical striker attached to them.  But lanterns with a mantle have the mantles hanging from above--the storm lanterns in the game clearly have an open flame burning from below, as you would see with a conventional wick-based lantern.  I've never seen a wick-based lantern that feature a mechanical striker.

Much like what @jeffpeng said, I think its a bit of a hybrid and a true analogue doesn't quite exist but ... this one looks really similar. If I was to pick one for cosplay, it'd be this https://www.petromax.de/en/px-produkte/petromax-hk500-electro-hanging-lamp/

My current custom game is at about 270 days. The weather gets worse as time progresses so for longevity sake I don't want to be in a position where I need to trek out very far to get resources in late game. I've looted all of the locations and stuffed the dam full and operate out of the dam like its an HQ, making small stocks of resources for excursions out of ML. This also means I can travel lightly in close proximity to ML stations like the Mountaineer Hut. 

I have a custom game where I have systematically checked every ... single ....location.... I recently brought all of the ammo crafting supplies to the cannery and found that I have 4 more Dusting Sulfur bags  than I do cans of Stump Remover. Unless there are 4 cans of stump remover in the CH mine only accessible during the aurora (The only exception to my looting conquest) and the fact that your mix match is the inverse of mine (more stump remover than Sulfur) I think it is safe to say that this is random. 

There is of course the chance I missed some hidden items. Hinterland devs are particularly devious in placing items but I have also been very thorough (Like, I break down all the crates and boxes in every location and tear up furniture for cloth and wood, some houses are vary bare). If I do find that these are equal as my games progress I'll update here. 

9 hours ago, Oywin said:

Here's what I mean: once a wolf gets close enough to enter chase (or probably more correctly: attack) mode, smell is no longer a factor. Nor is sight or anything else. It will forever loop this behaviour until it actually gets close enough to attack [...]

Once they are engaged, and especially in attack mode, they have no way of backing down except win or die. Which gets problematic when they can't reach you, because they look and sound ridiculous, and they'll keep doing it literally forever.

Are you talking about timber-wolves exclusively? It is totally possible to get a regular wolf to back down. I have engaged regular wolves (pursuing after sighting but not attacking) and lost them in the woods through a combination of tactics including breaking line of sight and broadening the distance between me and the wolf. They have given up when not reaching me in attack mode as well. When timber-wolves are alone they behave similarly too but this is harder to make work. I have been a bit annoyed with timber-wolves not dis-engaging without transitioning "scenes" as you mentioned. 16 hours of barking at the bottom of a lookout tower was a bit annoying but I'm conflicted on if it is immersion breaking or not.   

Addendum: The reason I'm not considering it immersion breaking is because I have 2 dogs who hunt in my backyard all the time. If they chase a lizard into the banana tree they will circle and bark at it for hours if I leave them there ... they won't stop ... at all ... and it annoys me to no end because I MUST go get them for the sake of my sanity. 

I finally got to test this out. 2 observations which are of note ...

1. Entering Forlorn Muskeg from the cave leading to Bleak Inlet does not place the lost and found box at the entrance to the cave. It appears that this box will always appear at the FM/ML connector. 

2. Even though I had a boat load of supplies strewn about in the BI/FM cave, no lost and found box was triggered and everything was where I left it.

My issue dealt mostly with the cave so nothing negative occurred for me in that regard but having to drag 33k of coal and meat back to the forge in FM is always going to be a walk from the tunnel exit across the muskeg 😕

3 minutes ago, Makex said:

There isn't anything to eat for wolves. So wolves might briefly visit indoors to look what is going on but return outside as soon as they realise: "no food here" "Must go back".

True, but, food isn't the only motivation. Weather and other needs like sleep are also factors for entering and finding refuge in an indoor location. I had a raccoon in my attic once and he didn't go there to eat (though he did chew some wires....). You do bring up a bit of a twist that might be employed in this scenario, though ... maybe chances to encounter a wolf indoors increases at certain time of the day?

This is what I assume is only there for immersion (other reasons when aiming a weapon). If that sway you mention did not exist then TLD might feel much more like a FPS with tight-locked controls. The Long Dark is meant to be more atmospheric and immersive. You could try changing the FOV and some other tweaks that @MarrowStone mentioned to reduce it but I would try to "deal with it" for a while longer and see if you just adapt to it. 

38 minutes ago, manolitode said:

While I'm in favor of adding a couple more fluffies across the world's caves I see very few means of defending oneself in an indoor location where you can't make a campfire 

I think the fact that you cannot defend yourself is the risk aspect of the risk/reward system that would be introduced here. In the early game, we have no way of defending against a wolf but we're OK with that in that moment. Part of the way I envision this allows the player to mitigate the risk by not just NOT entering a dwelling with external damage (broken window, missing wall or door section) without, say, ... a revolver, which would be suitable for close quarters. I don't think I'd keep wolf behavior the same indoors either; I think you'd probably expect some audible queues which I would expect quell any fears of being "unexpected" jumped by a wolf hiding around the corner. 

42 minutes ago, manolitode said:

Applying the same logic to caves, are you suggesting that regular wolves occasionally inhabit random caves with loading screens? 

Yes, but maybe not "regular wolves" since I expect indoor behavior to me modified a bit if this were to be implemented. A perfect example which helped spawn this idea in my head is the broken door at the Cinder Hills mine entrance in PV. There is a huge hole in the door and my first thought was "Looks like something pushed it's way in before me."

There are already several instances of wolves spawning indoors so let us ignore what we currently know for the moment.

I have traversed nearly every location in my current game and have run across several places with partially broken exteriors. When initially playing I recon-ed  the entire outside to see if i could find alternative entrances but I know there is little need for that behavior anymore BUT I thought it might be interesting if, just as we have some locations where dwellings can spawn intact or broken down, ... why not also have random wolf spawn for indoor locations as well? One caveat I would like to state for this feature would be that the chance this would happen is 0% if there is no external damage to the dwelling. By doing this the player would have to examine the dwelling before entering or run a risk of a fluffy-esc encounter. 

I've been working my way towards what I consider an optimal custom survival experience, learning from the custom game I created to get the last 2 achievements. I think there is an "end-game" but it is hard to get to.

I would describe the end-game I want to experience as a set of conditions that lead to the supplies getting rarer and rarer, the weather more harsh and tools and clothing are degrading without hopes of repair. There are all custom settings for these things and finding the balance for them is the key. 

On all of the default options (pilgrim, Voyager, Stalker, etc) I usually plateau into an easy repetitive cycle where I have so many resources that things can get a bit mundane. This is OK, I'm sure many of the players like the first 20-100 day struggle and there is nothing wrong with that but I'm trying to find the right settings for a particular experience that I can only really show with a chart. So please, offer your thoughts on how to set up a custom game to possibly have a similar difficulty curve to the one shown in blue. 

Please keep in mind, I have very little experience on interloper and these are all estimations from my perspective and skill level. 

As you may guess by looking at the chart, I kind of want to force the difficulty back up from the plateau I've been encountering. I'm sure hundreds or thousands of days in on the presets supplies would start to dwindle but I don't want to spend more than about 25-50 days in the easier sweet spot AND I want the difficulty to climb above its entry level on day 1.

Any thoughts on how you might set a custom game up like this?

Bottom line question: If a lost and found box appears in the cave, which end of the cave should I expect it to appear?

Can anyone cast some light on how this feature is expected to work with transition caves? I have not been able to find solid information on how this is expected to behave on the forums so far. I'll test it out if need be but would rather not dump the time into it if the answer exists already. 

Scenario prompting the question: I have loads of resources dropped (some food, some firewood, mostly ammo crafting goodies) inside the transition cave between FM and BI (items are on the BI side). The expectation is that I will be able to move all the goods to the cannery in a few trips after culling the local timber-wolf population with the limited protection supplies I've stockpiled. 

My current assumption floating around in my grey matter is that the boxes appear at the entrance you first encounter. I've seen Lost and Found boxes in indoor areas (Logging house in CH) and they spawn by the door (but there was only one door) so maybe the boxes spawn at the first entrance which the player encounters? If that is true then it would be beneficial for me to enter BI through the ravine and go to the transition between FM and BI from the BI side so that my loosely strewn resources spawn in a box close to where I originally dropped them. Then again, I don't know if they will even spawn inside caves so mostly assumptions are being made.

I'm currently playing a custom game (stalker-lite would be an appropriate name for it) in order to get the last 2 achievements which have been alluding me. One of them being 500 days surviving. To do this I've planned out my long term survival journey all over the map. In a nut shell, ML Dam is home base because of it's central location and I am slowly moving ALL of the resources in the game towards the Dam. I'll leave furniture mostly in place but boxes, curtains, ... everything gets broken down and hauled to home. From there I'll build up a huge stock of food and water and basically run the clock so that I can move on to a more difficult custom game.

I have already cleared out Broken Railroad, Forlorn Muskeg, Timberwolf mountain. Mountain Town, *most* of Pleasant Valley, and now I'm working towards Desolation point via Coastal Highway. 

At some point I will have opened every container and searched every dark corner and have all the loot in the Dam (Some of it is sitting at the entrance to Bleak Inlet). It is at this point that I will go craft all the ammo possible (since I will have all of the supplies which spawn to do so) and use it to do some major hunting. After that I'll be able to run the clock in bursts before another hunting session and so on...

Doing this has caused me to develop a strategy to efficiently and safely move all the goods so I figured I'd share my strategy with CH since its a nice visual to work with. 

Step one - decide on a path with outposts.

As you can see in the above image, the outposts I have selected are the hut in the rabbit grove, a house in the fishing village, the house at jack rabbit island and Misanthrope's Homestead. 

Step Two - consolidate all the map's loot onto checkpoints along the path

In this image the green represents how the loot is distributed before the player interacts with the map.

... and this image represents how the loot distribution looks like in the map once everything is consolidated

Step Three - Move loot along the path, stopping to grab things along the way from outposts. 

This takes many trips of course but this survivor has time to kill/be productive so why not? Note that in this game type there seems to be enough packaged food in the map to make it to step 3 without hunting but once the line is set I'll go get a bear and distribute a bunch of food and water along the path. In this case, once the loot has reached 30% of what it was I'll set up the same type of thing in Desolation Point.

On 6/5/2019 at 3:33 PM, UpUpAway95 said:

I would prefer they disable the cleaning option unless the gun is unloaded, so that the game is a reminder to everyone that unloading before cleaning is just the right thing to do.  I'm sure a number of people will forget from time to time to reload the gun and wind up getting mauled when the gun they've leveled at an onrushing bear is unloaded (click).

I agree this is probably an easier option to implement. I do like the OP because I would like to promote gun safety wherever possible. I'd be happy in either scenario (accidental discharge when cleaning a loaded gun or the inability to clean the gun if it is loaded). 

53 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Well basebuilding is precisely what the devs do not want - Raphael van Lierop mentioned that more than once.

Ah, I have been playing the game for well over a year in a bit of a silo and only within the last few months had an interest in engaging with the community so I have much to catch up on with things like that. Had I read what you referenced then I may not have even proposed the idea. 

53 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

But even that, the more you think about it, creates more problems than it solves.

53 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Now errecting structures in the world - no matter how expensive - is an exploitation bugfestival not just waiting to happen, but with set date, tickets and Iron Maiden on the center stage. If you could errect those structures anywhere players would start walling in spawn points of wolves and bear, for example, or maybe "just" wall off bears from half the map entirely. Not even mentioning the already quite complex and challenged pathfinding algorithm would have a field day with this. The only way to prevent this kind of tomfoolery would be to limit the places where you could erect such structures to predefined locations thorughout the world. That could - in fact - be a somewhat interesting gameplay mechanic (having to make a designated base useable first), but it would not satisfy what you are trying to achieve with this proposal.

I kind of agree. Currently, though, I'm more intrigued than averse to the idea knowing full well its a box of worms. All you have to do is look at the zombie pathing issues and exploits the devs of 7 Days to Die had to deal with just to get it in an "almost" stable state to know it's a big thing to tackle. Even still, the idea is tempting to ponder. 

53 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

I mean I'm a sucker for simple solutions - simple as in low complexity, not simple as in easy. Maybe that's an occupational hazard (I'm a software developer myself, even if in a totally different field), but it keeps the possible fallout of unpredictable side effects manageable.

Normally, I am with you. I'm a Sr SDET at an company that builds software tools to manipulate images, some of which goes into some mission critical devices (CT, MRI, X-ray, etc) so I am normally the one advocating to the dev team to test more and take less risks. Here, I get to let my creative side take over for a while. I'm trying not to let my SDET brain take over too much.😁

53 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

The Long Dark goes great lengths to present a limited and balanced sandbox experience with boundaries (mostly) cleverly disguised behind intuitive limitations. The moment you start placing structures in the world that do interact with anything but yourself this entire concept goes out of the window. The moment the player has control - albeit limited - over the game world the developer doesn't have it anymore.

Agreed, I trust Hinterland to make the right move and I'd rather not have them bend to whims of a player base (battle royale?). I would argue that snow shelters are structures so there is a little bit of wiggle room. That still begs the question of what I'll do with all these wooden planks...

53 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Well, as I am guilty (again) of throwing yet another Wall Of Text at the community ... I guess: Thanks for reading. 🤣

More is better, imo. It means real thought is going into it.

51 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

[...]your main goal is to combat cabin fever ..... why not remove cabin fever? What purpose does it really serve anymore, especially since it is rather easily circumvented?

45 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

I agree with Jeff... just turn off cabin feverr in the custom settings. 

I think my intentions might be misunderstood. I don't want to remove cabin fever, my idea was to have more interesting ways to interact with that feature. I do have some custom games which don't have cabin fever turned on but I do value that feature. I did stress in the OP that what I proposed would have to be balanced so we wouldn't want to make it too convenient or easy that circumventing cabin fever is trivial. Some methods to balance that were also mentioned. 

46 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

If anything, a campfire at the mouth of any cave should be sufficient to deter wildlife from entering (as long as it isn't allowed to go out) and closing the door should be sufficient protection whenever their is a door to be closed.  

I agree, none of that is untrue but there is a common theme with what you noted, it requires the player to go to a cave or existing structure. I've found some incredible alcoves and passages that I'd love to turn into a "base" but the danger is just too great imo because it is just too out in the open. An erect-able defense (wall, spikes, etc) would mitigate that danger and add a little bit more ownership to my experience. I mean, there is enough scrap wood lying around the Dam to build another Dam, I don't want my only options to be burn it or make a snare 😁

1 hour ago, UpUpAway95 said:

I really think I would not like turning the atmosphere of the Canadian North into a combat sim.  IRL, we're not "at war" with the wildlife up here.   

[...]

Somewhere in the settings regarding the animal's fear of fire should be a proper game balance.  Adjusting this would be my preference rather than allowing the player to erect an array of defenses.

This is a valuable thing to consider. There are all kinds of wild custom configurations player can make. Some people might like having incredibly hostile wildlife and have to battle it out. That is not my cup of tea but to each their own. I think if such a feature that I am proposing were introduced, I'd definitely want a custom setting where it could be tuned/turned off. 

1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

Since you already see the pitfalls [...]

Yeah, I don't want the idea to come off as too "pie-in-the-sky".  There are some challenges to overcome for sure (imo, mostly about exploiting pathing behavior) but it's not impossible. Some times the really fun stuff is hard to nail down 🙂

40 minutes ago, Admin said:

 

• [Gameplay] User can longer perform Fix or Repair actions when in the dark, as intended.

 

Is this intended to say "User can [no] longer perform Fix or Repair actions when in the dark, as intended."?

I'm not saying its aliens ... but its Aliens 😁

On 1/18/2020 at 11:31 PM, ajb1978 said:

I accept that it might not seem like that to you, given that you weren't in any way involved with the game's development.  However I submit that if it were a simple fix, given the level of support this game has received over the years, if this were a simple fix wouldn't you think this would have already been implemented?

Not at all, trivial software fixes get overlooked all the time based on scope/severity. In my profession I watch trivial issues go unfixed for years because the impact to the user just isn't severe enough to warrant the risk of change and the cost of testing. Adding a feature such as the one I suggested sits in the same feature domain including the sky animations so it would become more important to resolve if added to the game. 

I thought the moon was rather striking on this night time walk.