Griffen

Thanks for the replies and insights. I think what is driving this idea for me is the fact that I love the atmosphere of the game, but sometimes the mechanics of it can break the spell, if you will. I prefer a custom mode where the weather difficulty is high and condition restoration is very low, so getting caught in a blizzard or mauled by a bear takes almost a week to recover from, rather than a day or two. This leans towards a strategy of stockpiling not just resources but also tasks that allow me to stay indoors during blizzards or when recovering (needless to say, I also disable cabin fever). Crafting clothing is a great example of tasks that fit this bill, but that requires a workbench. This ultimately restricts my play style to locations that have workbenches or very easy access to workbenches. However, considering the breadth and variety of the TLD world, that means a good number of otherwise amazing safe house locations are out. Isolated prepper caches, while otherwise amazing base locations, are out since workbenches are often too far away. Most of Bleak Inlet is out, as the only workbench is in the cannery. For that matter, all of HRV is out, since there is not a single workbench in the map. Same argument can be made for indoor heating & light sources, although it can be mitigated somewhat by outdoor campfires. The part that bothers me is that this is ultimately a game design mechanic, not a survival mechanic (at least I'm assuming the workbench was put in to establish tiers in crafting accessibility). What is it about a workbench that makes it intrinsically necessary for the sewing of a rabbit skin hat? Why is our survivor unable to do anything to turn this perfectly fine wooden table into a workbench, or build a makeshift workbench for his cave shelter? Wilderness survival, at least to me, seems to have the essence of not only adapting to your surroundings, but also adapting your surroundings to your needs. You craft a shelter out of the materials at hand, you create tools with what you can find. As it stands now, there seems to be an arbitrary limit on how much we can adapt our surroundings. If this is a case of something on the developer's list already, fair enough, I will wait patiently. However, if this is a case of game vision where survivors cannot adapt their surroundings, only adapt to the surroundings, then that is something I'd be interested in knowing, just so I can stop hoping for it.

I'm a long-time lurker, but registered so I could make this suggestion. A lot of people have made mention of the end-game of TLD, and how at a certain point people start to lose focus. I wonder if part of that is that the game as it stands doesn't fully make the transition from survival to living. The game excels in the first few weeks as the player is forced to make difficult choices in order to secure needed resources: where to go, what to prioritize, what is work risking. However, once the tools are acquired and the clothes fabricated, the player starts to run out of decisions to make and it comes down essentially to a game of caloric budgeting. How many calories can I get from each type of food generating activities, what resources does it consume, and how much effort does it take to replace them? I know for myself that the reduction in permutations of the decision-making does take some of the thrill out, as I don't really need to prove to myself that I can fish X times at one location and hunt Y deer to last Z days. I say this as someone who loves this game and has spent 100s of hours on it, but it is beginning to feel slightly stifling. Part of that is due to how the game doesn't really simulate survival options beyond the essence of surviving the next few days. I think safe houses are the perfect example of this, as much of your survival strategy focuses on where you can store your supplies, and how you make use of that location. However, the safe house of someone who has survived 5 days looks and behaves pretty much the same as someone who has survived 100 days, simply because there is next to nothing you can do about your safe house. You can organize your supplies, you can make use of available amenities (beds, stoves, workbenches) and you can harvest resources (wood, water, etc.), but there is no capability for development. If a potential safe house location has no stove/fireplace, you'll never get one; same for a workbench. You can put down a bedroll, so that is the one element you can add to a safe house. However, it would be nice if there was more we can do with a potential safe house location. Going back to the question of reduction of survival choice permutations, one thing I do at the moment is consider the idea of permutations on where you can make these decisions, i.e. different safe house locations. Different locations would force different play styles and enable different atmospheres, which would be nice. However, due to the inability to develop a safe house, some are clearly less suitable than others with no way to change it. While I'm always up for a challenge, the fact that you can never change the capabilities of a safe house makes it seem somewhat arbitrary. Why couldn't a survivor build a hobo-stove out of scrap metal? Why couldn't a survivor turn that table into a workbench, given sufficient tools? Now, I think part of the reasoning for that is that TLD seems to have a theme of entropy, or decay. Everything we see is abandoned, technology only works in limited capacity for limited times, resources gained are often non-replenishing. Even the notes speak of people facing loss, isolation, and regression. However, I like to remember that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that a process creates a net gain in entropy. Some creation can exist at the cost of greater destruction. So keeping with the theme of entropy, what if a survivor could fashion a crude stove (1-2 cooking slots only), but it required breaking down one or two stoves elsewhere in the map and hauling heavy scrap to the new location. Similarly a workbench could be created at the cost of other resources. Thus a survivor could build up a small circle of order in an otherwise increasingly decaying world. There are other ways that one could develop a safe house, some larger and some smaller. Cleaning up garbage, scraps, and bodies is a common suggestion. Perhaps allow survivors to reinforce the insulation of a safe house to improve the indoor temperature. Granted, that might require making houses less insulating to begin with for balance. By allowing these kinds of activities, you increase the number of options available to a player, which makes for more interesting play. Does a player prioritize establishing themselves at a more complete safe house that might not be in an advantageous position, or does the player decide to develop a conveniently located, but otherwise unsuitable safe house? I would love the idea of doing a play through where you could develop one of the survivor caches where it becomes more than just a place to loot and leave. While there are many ways one could take this idea, the two most pressing concepts to me are the ability to move or build stoves and workbenches, as these are what define the utility of a building. The fact that a survivor could sew himself a bear skin coat, but not figure out how to convert a table into a useful workbench to do so, strikes me as an odd and arbitrary construct. If you've made it all the way down here, thank you for reading my wall of text.