GarlicPops

You can say that again! In regular modes, (Pilgrim, Voyager and Stalker) the total amount of cloth is roughly 800+ if you go around breaking every single curtain, towel and pillow you can find in every single region. On interloper this would be around 500+ (probably more after the new regions got added). So getting mending all the way up to level 5 literally consumes up to 45% or even 65% of ALL the cloth you can get in the whole map IF you succeed in every single repair attempt, and for what? To be more efficient with the remaining cloth after you've already used most of it? If you are a conservation freak like myself then, as someone already said, it's much more cost efficient to grind your way through mending by using your left over rabbit pelts and guts you get from trapping and hunting (but still, we are talking about 300+ rabbits). I personally don't really bother with mending since I always save scum my way through repair fails (the only thing I still use save scumming for) simply because I don't really like how it currently works.

I agree with you, however stuff like critical hits on animals and weather changes is something you can prepare to. Things like stripping naked to preserve your clothes while hunting for bears, always carrying materials for a snow shelter, always staying above 80% condition while walking around wolf areas and stockpiling supplies while waiting for an aurora in BI are things that the player can do to minimize RNG. Even fires aren't that big of a deal since the lens exist, however cloth is 100% non renewable if you don't consider beachcombing and there is nothing the player can do to "prepare" for a repair fail aside from just crossing your fingers or accepting the wasted materials and durability, so for this reason I'd rather scum that away.

A while back I posted a topic (here) regarding the fact that I abused save scumming and I asked the community's opinions about it. While most of you were very respectful and recognized that this is a valid way to play the game, most of you claimed that it takes away the fun and would rather not do it. After careful consideration I decided to abolish save scumming and started a new sandbox were I would base at the clothing bunker in Pleasant Valley. Right now I'm at day 41 in my new stalker survival sandbox and I can say I'm having a lot of fun playing without the safety of save scumming, it's being a nice learning experience for me and I'll see how far I can get. The only situation where I decided to allow myself to save scum is to avoid clothing repair fails. I personally hate the fact that you lose both the materials and sewing kit/tackle durability in a repair fail and that it is completely dependent on RNG, I really dislike the idea of losing 5 precious cloth in a row purely because of bad luck, in my opinion this is beyond the players control and skill and I don't feel like scumming this away is all that impactful for the immersion and challenge. Me and my new base at PV above.

I rarely come out during the night and I rarely confront wolves when I do come out, I've read somewhere on the wiki that wolves become more aggressive during the night, with increased detection range and they might charge stealthily without barking or stalking. Is this actually a thing or is this information outdated? Do wolves behave any differently at all during the night?

I have pretty much avoided all blizzards in my previous runs by save scumming. Recently I started a new sandbox where I decided to abolish save scumming and play the game like a man for once. I'm living in the clothing bunker in Pleasant Valley and I constantly get terrified by the idea of getting lost in a blizzard, do you guys have any tips on how to deal with blizzards without having to resort to a snow shelter?

As both a Stalker player and a bunker enthusiast, I'd say my favorite long term base is Pleasant Valley's clothing bunker. It's near a rabbit, deer and moose spawn, it's just a short stroll away from a bear and wolf spawn and there is a fishing spot at pensive pond. It connects to CH whenever I need to beachcomb and It's very close to ML whenever I want to visit the ravine or the dam. I personally do not like CH as a long term base because I can't stand the amount of wolves there in Stalker (I made a full post about it if you want to check) In general I'd say different people have different tastes and their long term base can vary widely since each one fills different criteria that might appeal to a player.

Yes, you can put itens in the accessory slot. There are currently 3 itens that can be put in the accessory slot, the wool ear wraps, the moose hide satchel and the recently added crampons. The wool ear wraps are a clothing item that grants +1ºC of warmth and + 0.5ºC of windchill The moose hide satchel is an item that can be crafted that increases your maximum carrying capacity by 5 kg. And the crampons are a new item that can be found in the Ash Canyon region that allows you to get less tired while climbing, reduce the chance of getting sprains and allows you to walk over weak ice for longer. Hope I helped you

I've been save scumming since I started playing this game and I do know this is frowned upon by many people. I do believe it does take away a lot of the danger and the adrenaline from the game since you can pretty much play without consequences as long as you don't get a sprain. I also do recognize that this isn't a good way to learn how to play the game and allows you to always get away with risky plays, with the only cost being your own time, but at the same time it allows me to explore more daringly and try many things out to see what works and what doesn't. For this reason I just don't seem able to stop doing it, or at least I don't have the motivation to. What are your thoughts about it? Am I a bad player for abusing save scumming? Should I stop doing it? What are the reasons why do you do/not save scum? Can it be considered a "learning playstyle" and therefore be considered a valid gameplay mechanic? Should it be removed from the game? Let me know your thoughts about it.

That's a very nice thread. I'm actualy an organization freak myself too. However I've noticed you are storing all your food indoors, even the ones that decay faster while indoors (Beef Jerky, Candy/Granola/Energy Bars, Peanut Butter etc). I personally store all my indoor food (Salty Crackers, Pork n Beans, Pinnacle Peaches, sodas etc) in storage spaces and keep my outdoor food in a rock cache just outside my base, and I leave the meat on the ground as well. Here you can see all food that decay slower while indoors neatly organized in the shelves, in decay order (Yeah...). Here I store all my meat also well organized by decay order (Old meat on the bottom left <<<) And finally I store all processed foods that decay slower outdoors inside this rock cache I built.

The way prepper caches work in both Mistery Lake and Pleasant Valley is that only 1 will spawn in each of those regions in a location picked at random from the 9 possible spawn locations. So if in one playthrough the clothing bunker spawns, it doesn't mean it will appear again in the next one, another one might spawn instead (Firewood, Medical, Tools or Food). I personally haven't noticed any inconsistencies in bunker spawn locations in Mistery Lake. They're challenging to find, so just check the region map and watch YouTube videos and keep checking every possible spawn location in your playthrougs until you find one. If even after doing this you can't find any you should report that to us so we can see what's wrong. For Pleasant Valley on the other hand I've noticed that in previous versions prepper caches weren't spawning correctly in the region, in my current playthrough I've checked every single spawn location in the region and couldn't find any bunkers. It seems that this has been fixed now, but I'm not sure if missing bunkers will reappear in playthroughs were they were previously not present, does anyone know if that is the case?

Birch Bark indeed does recover a little bit of condition, but it is a very small amount. Also all your stats must be on the white, so you can't be freezing, exhausted, dehydrated or starving in order to gain the tea's passive benefit. This is a sweet bonus in my opinion specially considering it's a renewable food source and grants you hydration and calories on top of the condition recovery. If you are living near the ravine or the birch forest in Pleasant Valley you can get around 2 days worth of calories from birch bark every 5-6 days assuming you have cooking 5 and efficient machine, so it's a neat resource to be collected.

If my profile picture doesn't already make it obvious enough, my favorite long term spots are bunkers The best one in my opinion is the Clothing Bunker in Pleasant Valley. It's close to a Fishing Hut, a Deer, Rabbit and Bear spawn, safely distant from wolves, close to the Winding River cave, a short stroll from the Farmstead for a workbench, plenty of storage and super cozy. I admit that bunkers aren't necessarily the best spots for long term survival, I just love to live in them for the challenge and the "apocalypse" feeling I get from them. I'm currently living in the Clothing bunker in Mistery Lake and I'd say it is the second best one, but the best is the one in Pleasant Valley hands down.

They do still exist. Mukluks are likely the rarest item in the entire game, you might be able to find one in the Old Spencer Family Homestead, The Safe in the Trapper's Homestead and in Broken Railroad.

In my current 150 day stalker run I have the habit of going to the ravine every 4-5 days to collect sticks and specially birch bark. It turns out that the Ravine is the second best place to collect Birch Bark according to a post by TheEldritchGod, only behind the birch forest in PV, to the point that I'm able to collect an average of 20 birch barks every 4-5 days in it. However after the newest update I've noticed a SEVERE decay of birch bark in the ravine, the last time I went there after 4 days I only managed to get 6 of them instead of the regular 20. Is anyone experiencing something similar? I couldn't find anything in the patch notes that referred to reduced birch bark spawn rates.

I actually have two memorable losses that can also be counted as "stupid deaths". If my profile picture doesn't make it obvious enough, I absolutely love living in Bunkers. There were two instances where I had an excellent early game living in the clothing bunker in ML but died in ridiculous ways, the first one was when I was exploring the dam during an aurora and got electrocuted because I didn't know wires could insta kill you, the second one was when I was exploring a cave and decided to strip naked and sleep for 12 hours straight, which caused me to freeze to death on a promising save. Even though these deaths were stupid they helped me learn more about the game and prepare in advance, such as always wearing clothes while sleeping in caves and sleeping in shorter intervals to make sure I won't end up freezing to death, as well as staying away from exposed wires

Thanks for the insight. I'm glad you like my avatar

To be completely honest with you, I think snow shelters should only be used in ABSOLUTE emergencies, since, as other people already mentioned, you are going to end up spending at least 3 cloth to make one. It doesn't seem like much but cloth is one of the limiting factors for long term survival and every piece of cloth you waste on snow shelters is less cloth to repair your top tier clothing in the far future. I personally only bring materials for a snow shelter in dangerous regions like TM, PV, HRV or FM where getting caught in a blizzard can mean death. When it comes to Cabin Fever I don't believe using snow shelters is a good option to deal with it, most regions have cars and caves you can sleep in and spending a day or two cooking food or boiling water outdoors is normally enough to fend it off. In a nutshell, snow shelters should only be used in absolute emergencies, while it is better to lose 3 cloth than dying they are way too expensive for my tastes and shouldn't be used in any other situation, specially on Loper.

Since the Vigilant Trespass update the game features a wildlife depletion rate where animals will become more scarce the longer you survive on any given sandbox game. However I remember reading somewhere on the wiki a long time ago that a similar depletion rate also applies to fish. According to what I've read the more you fish on a given region the less fish will start to come by per fishing session over time. However I tend to be super conservative with food and don't normally fish very often, so I haven't played long enough on any given world to actually feel a significant change on fish population. Does anyone have played long enough on a world and managed to fish enough times on a region to feel any difference? Or did the fish population not decay at all? If anyone can answer that I'd be glad.

I'm currently living in the clothing bunker in Mistery Lake and I'm storing all my food that decay slower outdoors, well, outdoors. With the recent addition of Rock Caches I imagined they would be a nice place to store my outdoor food rather than keeping them on the ground, however I'm pretty sure that different containers have different decay rates even when outdoors. For example, Frozen Corpses seem to be the best containers to preserve food. So I'd like to know if anyone have ran the numbers regarding decay rates for itens in Rock Caches. Hopefully they will be as good as itens stored outdoors.

I'm pretty sure the region is much better in Voyager and Loper due to the lower wolf count. I'd say that, if hostile wildlife is not taken into consideration, Coastal Highway is by far the best region in the game. Forgiving weather, easy to explore, beachcombing, loads of useful loot and plentiful hunting grounds. I'm just not a big fan of the region since all I play is Stalker.

I'm currently in a 120 day Stalker game and I went to Coastal Highway twice to loot resources and bring them back to my base in Mistery Lake. But while CH has a very high resource density, I have come to the conclusion that the amount of wolves present in the region in Stalker mode is SO high that it makes it nearly impossible to live in with relative safety. This turned out to be a big surprise to me, since I believed Jackrabbit Island was one of the best places to live in during the end game due to the abundance of wildlife and easy access to fishing and beachcombing, however after spending a few days in the region during my looting expedition I found numerous disavantages that makes it really unattractive to live in it. First off, there are very few key locations to live in, cabins and trailers have no fires or workbenchs and are either too isolated from hunting areas or are close to wolf spawns, the lookout is far from key locations and might require rope climbing and the misanthrope's homestead might spawn a wolf INSIDE the island, making it hard to even walk 3 steps from the house without getting ambushed by a wolf. In theory, the only two good locations to live in are Jackrabbit Island and the Gas Station, but the amount of wolves around the Gas Station is so high that the danger does not compensate the presence of a workbench and a fire barrel, so essentially there is only ONE viable safe location to live in in the entire region and that is Jackrabbit Island. Jackrabbit Island provides easy access to beachcombing, rabbit hunting, fishing, deer + wolf hunting, and a safe porch to store food outdoors. This might sound like an useful place to live, but I strongly believe it's not the case. The reason for that is the absurdly high amount of wolves in the region in general, most of the hunting areas are full off 4-5 wolf packs, so even if you manage to hunt larger animals such as deers and bears, or catch large quantities of fish chances are you are still going to get smelled by wolves before you can get pretty much anywhere in the region unless you cook everything before transporting, which is not always possible. Not only that, but eventually you are going to need to use a workbench, and 2 of the 3 workbenches available in the region are in areas patrolled by large wolf packs, and the safest one in the cave system to pleasent valley is too far away to even consider using. And even considering the fact that Jackrabbit Island is one of the safest places in the region to live in, in Stalker mode there are at least 2 wolves that might spawn in the tip of the island and patrol the area, so even rabbit hunting inside the island can potentially attract those wolves if one is not careful enough. Don't get me wrong, I love Coastal Highway and I love what the place has to offer, but I just lost track of the ammount of times I got jumpscared by wolves in the region, in my opinion the region is way too dangerous to live in Stalker mode due to the amount of wolves, this might not be the case for other experience modes, but it is in Stalker imo. I guess I'll just shift to the strategy of going to the region and staying there for 3-4 days only when I need resources from beachcombing and then coming back to Mistery Lake. If there is any Coastal Highway enthusiast who disagrees with me and/or wants to give their opinion I'll be more then glad to listen to it.

Hello guys, sorry for taking so long to reply, but I just wanted to come here and say that I've managed to bring most of the loot at the summit back to my bunker in Mistery Lake. After following the tips that you guys gave me and watching a couple of youtube videos, I followed the route down the summit that doesn't require any rope climbs and managed to bring down 61 kilograms of loot to the Mountainer's Hut. Then I took 3-4 days to transport it back to the Prepper's Abandoned Cache and finally I made 3 trips back and fort from the Preppe's Abandoned Cache to Winding River with all the loot I got from there, then I took 2 more back and fort trips to bring everything from Winding River to my Bunker. In general it was a pretty safe adventure, shot around 5-6 revolver bullets for self defense and didn't have to enter any wolf struggles. I left a few resources in the summit such as cloth, pelts a rifle and antiseptcs which are things I won't need that much for now and it works as a motivation for me to come back there once again to loot the rest of the region. Anyways, I'd just like to thank you guys for the help and attention.

Ok guys, so it turns out that I'm currently living in the clothing bunker in Mistery Lake. I've reached day 101 and I went on an expedition to loot Timberwolf Mountain's summit because I didn't want all the good stuff to decay completely. Well, turns out this was the first time I was visiting Timberwolf Mountain and after seeing all the fat loot in there I'm assuming this is supposed to be a place to spend the endgame or to use it's resources until they end. But it turns out I actually looted the place expecting to bring everything back to Mistery Lake, but it seems it will be pretty difficult and time consuming considering all the rope climbs I'll have to make and the distance between TM and ML. So the things I want to know through this post are: 1- Was it a mistake to loot Timberwolf Mountain's Summit so early on expecting to transport everything back to my base? 2- Since the "damage" is already done, which is the best route I can take to transport everything to the bottom of the mountain? 3- Does the loot in the summit actually decay overtime? The reason why I'm asking this is because I wanted to get all the good clothing and food in there before they got ruined, but it turns out many clothing and food in there had the exact same % of durability left, does that mean that they simply didn't decay or that they started all with the same durability? Sorry for the long post, but I'll be glad of someone can answer my questions and help me in this expedition.

Lol, the Darkest Dungeon reference xD

As we all know, The Long Dark’s goal is to be as realistic as possible when it comes to survival mechanics, the Vigilante Flame update introduced us to a more realistic cooking system, making the already challenging food mechanic more engaging to players. However, while the food mechanic in the game have a descent degree of complexity and challenge to it, the same can’t really be said about water. In it’s current state, the way the game handles water gathering and transportation is pretty unrealistic and easy to say the least. As long as we can keep a fire lit we have access to a nearly endless supply of water, that remains stored in our inventory inside a large water bottle with seemingly endless capacity, and whenever we want to drop water, a plastic water bottle will appear out of nowhere on the ground for each liter of water we dropped, seems pretty unrealistic right? It’s worth mentioning how the game handles food and hunting and how complex it actually is, we need to craft or find weapons and ammunition to hunt animals, we need to harvest the animal and transport it’s meat, hide and guts, which can be challenging depending on the weather and the amount of predators around, we need to cook the food we gathered and still deal with the risk of parasites in some situations. The whole process of gathering food involves at least 3 skills, weapons, carcass harvesting and cooking, it requires planning, timing and you get better at it as time goes by. The same can’t really be said about water, there are no skills or challenge involved and very little planning to it, normally being directly related to when and where to light a fire, not to mention the horrible unrealistic way we transport water in the game. So my intention with this post is to give suggestions on how we can make water a more realistic and challenging feature in The Long Dark. Mechanics and Features: - Plastic water bottles can be looted and reused as liquid containers. - Peanut Butter jars and GO! Energy Drink bottles can be reused as liquid containers after their contents are consumed. - Mugs must now be found and looted in order to use them for tea or coffee. - Tea and coffee can now be drank directly from a mug after being heated on a campfire or kept in a small protected container. - New selection menu where players can refill water from recycled cans and cooking pots into containers in the player’s inventory. - New selection menu where players can put water from one container to another. - Liquid containers now have their own weight value (Calculated: Regular weight + Water weight) - Water in the player’s inventory can now freeze if the players is not well protected against the cold, represented by a meter in the players inventory. - Water can be heated up to take more time to freeze. New Items: - Large water bottles, heavy containers with very high capacity for liquids, useful to keep them at base and use them to refill smaller containers, but bad for carrying around (can be found and looted) - Empty water bottles, compact containers with low insulation (can be found and looted) - Water flasks can now be crafted from Deer and Moose hide, can either prevent water from becoming frozen or delay the process depending on the devs preference. - Glass jars, useful for storing tea and coffee (can be found and looted) - Empty Peanut Butter jars and GO! Energy Drink bottles. This new mechanics and items will give a whole new depth, challenge and realism to water in The Long Dark, there will be planning involved, difficulty in the early game and more options in the late game as we find/craft more container, there will be decision making regarding what type of container to bring depending on our expeditions, we will have to keep and eye for extra weight as we carry more containers and we must be careful to not let our water freeze. In general I think this is a good approach to make water more realistic and engaging in The Long Dark, let me know what you guys think about it.