upnorth

- Mommy, can I see Willy today? Emma asked as they started preparing breakfast. She had not realized this yet. The normal childhood for Emma might not be. Playing with friends. Pre-school. School. Getting excited for a career and exploring life in general. - I don't know Emma. I don't think they have a landline but we can try to find their number in the phone book. But finish your breakfast first, ok? Christine replied. - I'm sorry for Mocha biting Emma, she just gets nervous around strangers sometimes. Amy said trying to break the ice after way too much stress the past couple of days. - No worries, the wound seems to have healed. You tried to help her pet her in a safe way after all, Christine replied. - What happened to your house, if you don't mind me asking? Christine continued. - I don't know. The firemen just gave me what they had managed to save, it looked like some wire had fallen and ignited a fire somehow... Amy answered, still tired from yesterdays events. - Ok. Well, you are welcome to stay here. I think we have enough to keep warm, fed, and healthy for a while now. But we need a plan. Even if most of town have left we still have limited supplies in the store. Or any establishment for that matter. I have a gun and some ammunition but it won't last forever. We should probably try to check in with the authorities and see if we could get some news. About that, are you sure you don't have anyone you want to call Amy?

No worries, just wanted to check that everyone wasn't waiting for me or something. Also, I want to avoid discussing ideas openly too much, or it will risk becoming too "meta" and not very immersive to read the story.

@Catlover@Swippity_Swappityand others that might want to contribute. I have a couple of plots and some TLD lore I think would be interesting to explore, but I also try to limit how much and often I contribute to the story to make it easy for everyone else to jump in with your ideas as well. Don't want to control the story too much.

Probably the closes you get with similar "gameplay" and environment

Firefox 84.0.2 (64-bit) might be relevant

Just happened again trying to navigate into a sub-forum

Just refreshing the /forums route I ended up in the install script for the forum software. After going back and trying again, it refreshed normally. But you might want to check it out.

- Is that Amy? Christine asked aloud when they approached their home. - I think so! Hi Amy! Emma shouted. As they approached the slumped over women on their doorstep and her dog between her leg they got a sense that something was wrong. - How have you been, did you find out anything from that guy we met this morning? Christine asked. - I... I... Amy stammered. They waited for her to get her composure. Christine noticed she was clenching a dark cup between her hands. - He took me along to loot a store for supplies, then he drove back home and invited me in. But I felt bad about it and just wanted to get home... Amy quietly told them. She started sobbing. - It's burnt to the ground! My house is gone! I don't know what to do. First the power outage last night and now this, what is happening!? Amy finally told them, with her dog trying to console her. - I'm so sorry! Of course you are welcome with us, let's get inside! Christine helped her gather her things and opened their door. The last 24 hours had been odd to say the least, she couldn't imagine how Amy was feeling. The guy Amy had spent the day with apparently had a working car and hadn't used it to leave town yet, she wondered why. But enough for one day. For now they just needed to get warm, get feed and get rested. You don't survive well without a clear head after all, her father had warned her plenty of times.

I learned some basic AI/ML (selfdriving 2D car with various "sensors") a couple of years ago and was utterly disappointed with the lack of actual intelligence in an AI. Machine learning is almost cooler than AIs though, so I appreciate them using that in a realistic manner at least

The grocery store was located near the town center, a few blocks away from Christine's house. They couldn't see anyone out and about on their way, just the sound of a couple of crows. No sight or sound of the wolves from last night either. - I'm cold! Emma complained. - Yes, me too, let's get inside quickly! Christine replied. No one was waiting at the store. But then again, they usually opened a bit later in the day and used the morning to re-stock shelves and prepare the cashier. No signs of a break-in either, although there were plenty of footprints at the locked main entrance, hard to tell from how long a go though. Christine pulled out her keys and opened the back door. Emma tried the light-switch as they got inside, it didn't work. - Yeah, we will have to do with daylight for a while I think. Christine commented. Slightly disappointed, Emma walked in to the office and jumped up on a chair to continue her drawings that she usually spent her time with while visiting the store. - I'll be in the store, just yell if you need anything, ok? Christine told Emma as she got ready to figure out the rest of their day and what they would do going forward... As she opened the store and spent a few hours checking her wares, nothing seemed to be missing. Although they were low on a few things. Remembering the warnings from the call earlier that day, she went behind the cashier and got her fathers rifle. There were also a couple of boxes of ammunition and a cleaning kit. - Ok. Do I just keep opening the store as usual or prepare for the worst and get as many supplies as I can back home? Christine said out loud to think more clearly. - We know that all electricity was somehow knocked out last night. Some vehicles apparently still work, but we have no idea which and until we find one we are stuck here. It would be suicide to try to leave town by foot. The landlines does still work, but not many people still have them. I guess my priority should be to secure supplies for our survival until we can figure out the more long term problems. No regular deliveries will probably arrive anyway, so we will have to make due either way. - Emma, do you want to make a sign that the store is closed until further notice? Christine thought a friendly sign could be a nice change of pace for anyone coming by. - I don't know how to spell that! Emma complained. - Oh, no worries. I'll help you! Christine walked into the office and aided Emma in making a nice sign. She grabbed a couple of plastic pockets and a staplers, just to make sure it wouldn't be ruined in a snow storm or fall off. They also added a note summarizing what she had been told by the 911 operator. No one was around as she went out to put up the sign. Perhaps people are just waiting at home for the electricity to be repaired, most people probably didn't think to call the emergency services. - Ok. We should take as much as we can carry of food and medical supplies and head back home, Christine noted to Emma. It doesn't look like anyone is coming to the store today. I think we will be safe at home for a while. Luckily we just got a shipment of MRE's, I know you don't like them much but they will keep us fed for a couple of weeks. But we should probably grab the medical supplies and some water purification tablets. We don't have everything we need in the store, but it's a start. They found a couple of old backpacks and filled them up with some essentials. It was only the day after a possible natural disaster, but for some reason it felt like they had just spent the first day in a completely different world. Everything was so quiet. They locked the back door as they left and started walking back home. It was cold, a fog had rolled into town and they couldn't see or hear much. Luckily they knew the way very well.

I noticed the AI structures as well, pretty nice and realistic touch to portray humanities near future. Or to be a little more correct (technical anti-hype rant coming), just structures optimized through machine learning rather than "human learning" by letting a program very quickly test thousands of variants much faster than a human could. AI is when you have a robot use those solutions, this is more of a static use

By the way. If anyone is interested in illustrating the story with art rather than joining in writing it, that would be pretty cool too

I'm getting better with stones against rabbits, even manage to run up fast enough to miss clicking on the rabbit once, but man do I go for realism with arrows and shoot over all the time. Lost 3 arrows in the snow hunting the same rabbit in the same place during a Wintermute mission. Also I need the wolves to start eating my face before I can hit them with either the rifle or gun. So annoying when you just scare them off and think (oh well, wasted another bullet). Managed to kill a few wolves in wintermute, but it seems they have tiny hitboxes in sandbox lol.

Yeah, people are acting like mama bear around suggestions that might severely alter the current experience. But the survivalist genre seems to be flourishing so you should be able to find something that interest you with better graphics

You know, it's only a suggestion. And you can't possibly know what effect it would have on gameplay before actually using it anyway. Not gonna argue the hypothetical more or less fun with you, as I'm sure we enjoy the game differently in many ways anyway. I've noticed that I would like that feature, so I made a suggestion. Feel free to disagree...

As @Avril suggested having 3 states of heat for food would represent survival much better than the existing two (warm and room? temperature). So in addition to the logical "buff" of eating hot food, this would be a "debuff" when eating cold food, forcing the player to think through what to eat and when. Which is what's fun about strategic survival. Both resource management and health management. Just pointing out things that I feel pulls me out of the immersion of the game. Wouldn't apply to all foods obviously. I eat cookies straight out of my freezer, so anything with low water content wouldn't be affected. But it's pretty ridiculous to open a can of soup that's been sitting in the snow for a week and be able to eat it no problem Also, I haven't talked about changing the warm-bonus at all, don't know where you got that from? And it might not be so "OP" if you regularly got both debuffs and buffs depending on if you have time to heat up what you find. Although the whole food mechanic seems pretty broken in general, pretty much only matters during rest?

Just started watching, feels very The Long Dark albeit not totally the same concept. But I bet many of you would enjoy it.

Simply storing it shouldn't put it at room temperature immediately, but perhaps after 12 hours or so? Like how afflictions sometimes get a countdown.

If you find food in nature, it should reasonably be very cold or even frozen. Eating it without heating it first, should work, but should have some sort of penalty. Loss of warmth but perhaps also take longer or drain your energy faster?

- Lets see if we can reach 911 now, Christine said to Emma as they got back home and inside. - Are you going to call the ambulance for me? Emma wondered - Does it still hurt? Christine enquired - No, it just itches! Emma replied - Ok, that's good! That means your body is healing! Christine answered with relief. They needed to stock up on supplies... - 911, what's your emergency? The operator finally answered. - Hi! Not really any emergency yet, but in desperate need of news about what happened yesterday evening and what the state of things are. We haven't had any news about what happened and if there are plans in effect to deal with it, or information to the public in general... - Yes, I'll forgive you for calling in regard to that. We've been working all night on the few landlines we still have, a lot of people are worried and don't know where else to turn. We honestly don't know much, but the electrical blackout seems to be fairly wide spread, not just a local phenomena at least. Hard to tell the scope, but the emergency services have been scrounging to find vehicles that still work, a lot of the modern ones are too dependent on electronics it turned out. The police have had to deal with a lot of stealing by doomsday-preppers. You might have a hard time finding food and medicine if you aren't well stocked already unfortunately. There are of course some contingencies in the government for events like this, essentially stuff that most countries worried about during the Cold War era. I think you could expect some old school military "parades" eventually, not that we have martial law or anything, they just have some older transportation. I heard they even went to museums! From what we have heard from the military no foreign power has been suspected of any sort of attack, but with so much communication and transportation out of order it's hard even for us to get currrent information and supplies out. We haven't got many details yet, but with the few things still working they can't seem to identify a single active satellite, national or foreign. Whatever happened smells more natural disaster than military operation, but who knows, it would be a pretty good disguise. Please call and report any suspicious activity you notice, we could really use as much information as possible. Christine proceeds to sum up their experiences so far. - Thank you. I would urge you to check on your grocery store by the way, you live in a small and fairly remote place but I'm sure you have elements that are already thinking about looting and prepping right now. Otherwise you might want to spread word around to locate and help anyone old or sick in your area. Hopefully things will be back to normal fairly soon, but don't hold your breath. And also, we have reports of very aggressive wildlife during the aurora from more than a couple of surprised hunters, so don't take any chances. Good luck! Christine thanked the operator for the information and promised to call back with any news. - Ok. At least we aren't completely isolated, who knew it would be useful to keep this old thing. She mentioned with a smile to Emma who seemed a bit annoyed with her healing wound. - Right, we better head to the store. We need to secure some supplies and perhaps there are probably nice people in need of some warm clothes and blankets too. I don't think everyone was able to leave town actually, we did see a few people out and about with Amy earlier... I wonder if she heard anything interesting from that guy at the fire.

Someone provided us with a reaonable technical answer and then removed it, but I think we are covered Yeah, Merry Christmas, hope everyone is doing ok. Hell of a ride this year!

I assumed cars doesn't work any more as they need electronics. Did I miss something or is this an intentional exception/mystery?

@Catlover feel free to make it up if you have an idea, otherwise we could just leave it for now. Besides trying to be consistent with the details of the story, I don't think we need any rules. Just creative freedom and hopefully some interesting contributions

Hehe. Didn't have a specific place in mind, one of the unanswered questions, but initially I actually considered somewhere on the mainland just to explore that a bit considering how many knows the game map inside out already. So far we have a grocery store and that it's set in Great Bear. In my mind it's a small town, but bigger than Milton. Milton would have been abandoned before the events of the game too. Could be a small town on the way to the main land or even Perseverence Millls, not sure what kind of place that is?

We can call the mother Christine, seems to cause some confusion