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Co-op gameplay isn't always easy to crowbar into a game mid-development, but it's much, much harder in TLD because timeskipping mechanics are an important part of the game's mechanics. How is a multiplayer server going to handle timeskips for breaking down crates and etc?

I actually really like the idea of compasses being aurora indicators and think it'd give them a decent place in the game. Would be a perfect accompaniment for an update that made aurora effects more important. (IMO a simple change would be allowing flashlight strong charges to stun rabbits, and causing rabbits to come out in greater numbers during the aurora)

I think it'd be a much, much better idea if Tinder was actually worth something after Firestarting lvl3, something everyone and their grandma has been demanding for years. (most likely as an extra fuel source) IMO, it would be preferable to ensure we don't have any items that we genuinely want to delete than just bandaid the problem with the ability to delete them. Having a "Delete Item" function wouldn't be reasonable, though, and I don't see a reason why not. Just have a basic safety measure like making it a click and hold function to ensure people don't delete stuff on accident.

"Signposting" is a general game design term for making sure a player knows what's up in an environment. Ideal signposting is usually seen in Naughty Dog games or Half Life 2, where their level designers pull all these fancy lighting tricks and architectural techniques to get people to behave in specific ways, then go to GDC and flex about it for several hours. (there's the classic example of bars. When you enter a bar, you ideally want the bar to begin vertically adjacent to the door entrance, because that lowers the distance, literally and mentally, between the bartender and the potential customer. If you place the bar at the end of the room far from the door, it's a less effective marketing strategy) I'm not suggesting Hinterland need to run these kind of 400 IQ analyses on every single interior they've made, though. My issue is more that if a player begins completely blind, and doesn't look at community map sources... Do we REALLY expect them to find every Region on their own? An example of good signposting in an environment in TLD is probably Mystery Lake. It has 4 regional transitions, two of which are on both sides of a railway which is an intuitive thing to follow, and one of which is through Carter Hydro Dam which is one of the most unique and obvious buildings in the game. It has one cave transition to Mountain Town, which is reasonably close to the notable Trapper's Cabin and is also introduced to players early on in WINTERMUTE. Pretty good! But, Hinterland also have an unfortunate "just put a cave somewhere" syndrome when it comes to them needing an environmental transition, such as Forlorn Muskeg to Bleak Inlet. Mystery Lake has "follow the railroad" and Coastal Highway has "follow the highway" which are more interesting ways to encourage players to find the regional transitions than just dumping a cave somewhere. A couple of potential ideas to solve this: Having lines on the World Map that indicate which zones transition to what. This wouldn't fully solve the problem on its own, but would help mitigate it, as players would at least know that there's a transition to another area and vaguely where to look. The game does already have the intuitive system of simply having transitions between zones that are adjacent to each other, but would you really guess by looking at the World Map that, for example, Bleak Inlet connects to Forlorn Muskeg, but not Coastal Highway? Would you really be able to figure out that Pleasant Valley connects to Coastal Highway? (Note: One might complain about being "spoiled", but which zones transition to where is already listed in the game's region spawn options) Add some kind of new asset to distinguish region transition caves. (and perhaps other region transitions) Maybe something as simple as red cloth flapping in the wind, maybe just something more subtle like literal signs. Add notes in the environment that talk about regional transitions and where they are. For example, Hushed River Valley's cave is pretty out of the way and it's supposed to be part of the completely untouched wilderness, but you could easily have a Note in Mountain Town talking about this well-hidden hiking trail. This can even hint towards features new players might not know about, such as a survivor corpse in a common zone like Pleasant Valley or Mystery Lake that notes they used to work at the Bleak Inlet cannery and know there's machinery there that could be used for manufacturing ammunition. A body in Pleasant Valley might note that they saw a plane crash on Timberwolf Mountain and it looked sizeable enough to be carrying cargo, but that they know Timberwolf Mountain is dangerous. Every Region should have at least one of these hooks IMO, ideally 2-3, to encourage them to visit other Regions. Any more concepts/ideas, or feedback on these ones, would be appreciated!

I very rarely have an issue with reduced mobility on gear. The poor weight-warmth ratio is a more significant downside, however it's what better-balances these equipment items. Their upsides are that they are repairable with easily renewable materials, and very durable. Getting carry weight upgrades like the Tactical Backpack and Moose Hide Satchel will also assist greatly in dealing with the extra weight of hide clothing.

You actually don't even need to do that- You could probably just make the calculations as to what the interior temperature should be when the player loads into an individual interior. It also does indeed open up possibilities regarding some base improvement systems. Something that could organically fit with the game's systems would be applying a small negative insulation modifier for every window an interior has, but code all windows to give the player the open to drape materials over it, with Cloth being something like 50% effective, Deer skin being 75%, Bear skin negating 90% of that penalty and if you're insane enough to invest Moose hide, the window's insulation penalty is totally negated.

This is definitely true. Game design wise it wouldn't change that much as Water's quite plentiful. I'm not sure about outright tiredness debuffs as the OP describes, but I do think giving Hunger and Thirst more cascading negative effects for the player if they ignore them has legitimate merit. The other Needs already do this: Temperature comes with Hypothermia risks, Fatigue lowers your carryweight, and Hunger rewards you instead with the Well Fed buff if you can keep up with it. I would probably suggest becoming Dehydrated causes something like your Fatigue to lower much faster instead. You don't just deal with slow and steady Condition loss, but you also risk another Need starting to run dry.

-200C is definitely absurd (though that poster doesn't specify if they're using celsius or farenheit. -200F is somewhat more reasonable, but still a crazily low temperature), but Custom already has other vastly unrealistic settings like Endless Night.

I was kinda worried that higher difficulty levels would feature a discrepancy here as I personally play Voyageur for the most part. The "it's normal difficulty, so that means I should play it" bias is pretty hard for me to break for a lot of games. I imagine on Interloper lategame you'd probably need to rely on fires and bed warmth more. Regardless, I do think there's some value in making a more complex insulation/interior heat management simulation for the game like this one that might extend vaguely similar effects to more difficulties, create special downsides for certain basing locations, etc. And maybe allowing badges to be earned on custom so people don't feel punished for using the feature, but that's a different discussion.

Re. Spears, I am personally against the Bear Spear specifically getting added to Survival. I know Hinterland have been considering it, I just frankly consider making defense against Bears (and potentially, dealing damage to them and hunting them!) so trivially easy a great disservice to the mechanical purpose Bears currently serve. Regular Spears... Meeeh? One would have to question precisely what materials would be needed to craft it. Bow in particular is bottlenecked by requiring a hatchet (a big problem on Interloper), cutting both kinds of Sapling and letting them dry, hunting an animal by other means and letting their guts dry out, and getting an Arrowhead via either forging or looting. Spear would most likely be Bow's direct competition, so one would need to think of good mechanical distinctions for it. I've brought up a thing about the shotgun on a different thread so I won't repeat myself here. Loads of people have brought up a sled. It fits well conceptually into the game but balance wise is an extremely high concern as carry weight is a really, really big limiting factor in this game for how much players can get done at once. There MIGHT be a way to make sleds work out. However, my main concerns are: Currently, the outdoors isn't really hazardous enough for "you can't defend yourself at a moment's notice" to really be that much of a downside Cooking Level 5 combined with Sleds would allow players to quickly produce their absurd stockpiles of Bear Meat, and do it with gross efficiency

Hinterland already have official maps in the form of the charcoal ones. I don't think they should display uberdetailed information like what's avaliable on the wiki as IMO it's perfectly reasonable for factoids like "here's every possible prepper cache spawn" to have no official source and instead be community-compiled information. With that said, the charcoal rubbing maps are genuinely bad and IMO need a full replacement/heavy editing. Obviously they should not have the appearance of a professional cartographer's map, but there are identical "hill" icons for both impassable hills and mild slopes or they're just badly placed, no distinction is made between regular terrain and impassable terrain, the markers on the map are pretty badly thought out (marking carcasses is borderline useless even before they despawn and just act as clutter on the map once they have, as are the dozens of cat tail plants I harvested five months ago) and there's no indicator for things like height- With charcoal, Will/Astrid could easily do something like slightly shading in parts of terrain that are higher than others for example.

Why? First, in a game that largely markets itself off trying to stay warm, it's a little silly that you can accomplish this task by being indoors and wearing a pair of particularly warm socks. Heat essentially acts more like an oxygen mask and oxygen system in this game. I'm NOT creating this with the intent of, for example, the Temperature gauge always decreasing. More like: When your run starts, buildings are about as warm as they currently are (perhaps warmer), to give players a few days to obtain decent clothing. In insulated regular housing, people wearing what they usually wear should easily result in positive temperatures. To heat up quickly, you'll probably need to start a fire. If you try to take off your clothes and strip down in a chilly house you haven't lit a fire inside in ages, you will freeze. In less insulated, opened structures, you will need to have solid insulation on your clothing to have a positive temperature rating, especially if the conditions outside are super cold such as during nighttime. Lighting a fire in the interior will offset these problems, but you won't get the longer-term temperature preservation you'd see in an insulated interior. How? I won't bore you with any kind of exact idea of how the math would work and it'd probably have to be altered anyway after playtesting if I came up with some, but here's some factors that I think could be taken into account to pretty easily produce a decent system for producing an interior temperature: Outdoor temperature (not counting windchill) Interior insulation (1-3 rating. 1 would be areas like Carter Hydro with loads of holes. 2 would be areas like mines that have some direct routes to the outside but long stretches without it. 3 would be most houses with full insulation) Interior fires (how long, how hot, etc. If you light an especially long, warm fire, you might create warmth for your base that potentially lasts weeks) For interiors with electronic heating, potentially auroras could quickly begin to increase their temperatures, as an extra little bonus they provide for the player This kind of system could easily create a little extra depth to the game, and even add potential for more difficulty, Challenge modes, etc. And now, when outside temperatures drop, you can't just escape their consequences entirely by going indoors. This isn't intended to change gameplay fundamentally, as typical clothing setups should still almost always result in positive temperatures under a system like this IMO. This is just intended to add an extra small issue to the background of the game that will help make the cold more of a consistent menace, even if it's far, far more serious while you're outdoors.

Yeah, I can get behind this. I would imagine this might require some changes to how meat kg is generated, but I wouldn't think such changes would be difficult at all. This shouldn't be extaggerated to cartoonish levels, though. Just a subtle little detail of sizes varying something like -20%/+20% size.

Being able to outright cut trees down wouldn't totally conflict with the purpose of the game, but I have yet to be convinced it really fits. (I certainly feel like different kinds of axes for splitting and chopping is total overkill. just a proper axe would be fine. and maybe a little long overdue) The main issue with the feature is just... Who needs THAT much firewood? I usually have an excess of Fuel in my bases at all times and Sticks being easily renewable just keeps adding to that. A single felled large tree would be worth at minimum 8 logs or so. I'm much more sure that I don't support the idea of trees growing back. TLD has enough nonrenewable (or effectively nonrenewable) resources, and there are SO MANY trees, I really don't see a reason why they should grow back. Is it an impossible feature? Definitely not. I think the easiest way to implement it would be as a Radial Menu function and essentially work like placing a structure- You stand next to the tree and a model indicator shows where the resulting toppled tree is going to land (with it being red if the slope is problematic or something along those lines). Then, it's just a matter of editing the tree assets the game has to have this functionality, and adding fallen tree assets for each of them. The question however remains as to why we should have this. It's not like the current system of gathering firewood is terrible. Sure, maybe a little too reliant on random drop spawns and not too conducive to player agency, but you can generally get what you need from it. If some major additions were made to Survival mode that in some way created a need for way more logs, I could see felling and chopping up trees being a decent mid/endgame goal, but right now that need doesn't exist.

The way I'd solve the mittens issue is by attaching the mittens via tether around the player's FPP model wrists, implying they've briefly taken the mittens off to operate whatever they're using. I'm sure shooting a rifle while wearing mittens is possible but it'd require so much model distortion that it'd be unreasonable to animate. Even with AAA budgets and expertise, you want to keep those kinds of animations at a bare minimum. Anyway, this is very much an element of polish that Hinterland should finish before or when the game leaves Early Access. It's understandably a low priority issue, however, so don't expect it anytime soon.

Having your hunger system to account for different kinds of food isn't impossible to pull off in a survival game (Green Hell does it nicely) but it's not the kind of system I think can be crowbarred into a game at this point in development. I mean, food sources right now are purely balanced around simple factors like calorie count, and calorie-weight ratios. If you implemented a whole "Okay, you need to get this much fat in your diet" system into the game, how does that influence the game's overall design? Meat is VERY MUCH supposed to be the endgame, renewable source of calories, but will the game just force players to fish for a significant portion of their diets, too? How many basing locations would that end up locking out as options? In addition, I also just don't think this'd make TLD a better game. Sure, it's realistic and a neat reference, but is rabbit meat abuse really that much of an issue?

I like this idea more than others when it comes to mental health affliction ideas. Maybe it would be better served as a Cabin Fever styled affliction, where it keeps track of recent animal attacks, and if you've been in a REALLY large amount of fights, you get a nightmares debuff that helps put a damper on potentially abusing Condition regen from sleep to brawl with wolves all day. As for the aurora influencing sleep, I think it giving a caffeine-esque buff, so you recover Fatigue faster from sleeping and lose it slower from all sources, is extremely reasonable, and would effectively result in some "wake up, it's the aurora" scenarios. It'd make sense IMO that the aurora influences you too, and I prefer the idea of it being a genuinely exciting event than something I sleep through 90% of the time. This might screw with ingame sleep schedules, but IMO making Pass Time pause Fatigue consumption (we can say the player is napping or something) would be a reasonable way to patch this up if players just want to skip through nighttime.

Stuff needs a specific gameplay use, not just be placed in the world for its own sake. I don't put much stock in the blackpowder thing (I don't think anybody's going to complain that the ammunition chemistry is wrong. most players don't care if a caliber is off let alone the actual contents of the bullet) but you still can't just say "add more guns because I want them". A double barreled shotgun is the next natural suggestion for adding to the game, but offers questions as to its mechanics. We already have weapons fufilling a good few purposes: Bow: Economical, but difficult to use and not ideal against anything bigger than a wolf. Also has some more involved startup costs than simply finding it and shooting. Revolver: Great for killing wolves and self-defense, not ideal for hunting. Rifle: Capable of killing anything, but very heavy and with limited ammo. Distress Pistol: The ultimate get out of jail free card, but has limited ammo and avaliability. So, where does the shotgun fit in? IMO, the best place for it would be somewhere between the Revolver and Rifle, as creating something stronger than both the Rifle and Distress Pistol, or weaker than the Revolver/Bow seems unnecessary. I think giving it the distinguishing factor of different ammotypes would be a good way to grant a shotgun its own mechanical gimmick. I'd suggest just two: Birdshot: By far the most common ammotype. The ideal weapon for hunting birds or rabbits. (IMO, a shotgun update would need to come with the ability to kill and harvest birds) However, birdshot seriously struggles against wolves or anything larger, a single birdshot hit even to the head probably will probably cause a bleedout instead of an instant kill on a wolf. Buckshot: Can easily kill Wolves and stands up next to the Rifle in terms of damage output, even capable of putting down a Bear or Moose, but is slightly rarer than even Rifle ammo. Still overall worse than the Rifle however, with the issue being range. Bear hunting is a lot easier if you can hit the bear before it notices you, while a buckshot shotgun's unlikely to have that luxury. Will ruin rabbits and bird carcasses if used to kill them. With something like this, I think this ONE extra weapon could be squeezed out and have its own place in the game. Hard to see how you could fit in any more, though.

I wouldn't be against adding Feats to the challenges like the one Darkwalker has. Would also be welcome to have more Feats with downsides, even if it might make the Darkwalker feat a little less "cool". Actually, you know what, I'll do it right now and suggest a feat for each challenge: Hopeless Rescue: Start the run with a loaded Distress Pistol. The Distress Pistol's weight is lowered by 75%. Flares and Marine Flares burn for twice as long. The Hunted (from pts 1, 2, and 3 if it ever happens): Bears' minimum meat weight is changed from 25kg to 30kg. Bears pick up your scent twice as easily, and will not be deterred by campfires or decoy meat while they are tracking you. Whiteout: Slightly increases your tolerance against Cabin Fever. (specifically, over 12 hours on average per day over the last 6 days being spent indoors as the threshold for contracting Cabin Fever risk is increased to 14 hours on average per day) Nomad: Gain +1% maximum Condition capacity whenever you discover a new Region. Archivist: Auroras happen with 25% increased frequency. Suffer from a +10% increased rate of Fatigue that will diminish with each Buffer Memory you collect until being removed entirely. As The Dead Sleep: Condition can no longer be replenished via sleeping or Birch Bark Tea. Emergency Stims are the only method of restoring Condition. As an optional feature, will dramatically increases loot quality from corpses. (to explain: this would replace the corpse loot tables with a much larger, unique loot table that can contain basically every major desirable item in the game, subject to usual difficulty restrictions like not being able to get a rifle on 'Loper. Pretty much every human corpse will contain something of significant value like an expedition parka for example)

I understand why someone would come up with this suggestion if they've been encumbered for a while, but it really doesn't make sense from a game design perspective. Rewarding players for being encumbered a lot just... Doesn't seem to follow for me, and the realism justification sounds more like an excuse. As a now-reformed packrat, I mean this in the best possible way: Just learn to manage your inventory properly and make regular trips to stash excess loot at places where it can be retrieved. You will still end up encumbered sometimes, but there is ALWAYS fat you can cut from your inventory. Don't bring lanterns unless you're going to be caving, only carry a single set of matches (or a single firestriker) around with you, don't bring a prybar unless you're exploring new areas that might have locks you haven't broken, those are just a few examples of how you can help With all that said, I'm not against exploring new possibilities for handling heavy loads, (the game doesn't really have a way to transport lots of resources between bases and there's probably a way to create one that doesn't involve something that'd make looting unbalanced) I just don't think getting faster at it the more you're encumbered is really that solution.

Don't really agree with this as it disencourages switching between different modes and overencourages Interloper play perhaps too much. A little animal symbol showing the highest difficulty you've completed the totality of a Feat on wouldn't be out of the question, though.

IMO the easiest implementation of a feature like this would be some kind of burial mound system. Keep it as a crow activity spot and have a storage element, but hide the body. It'd essentially be another world collectable, though this one would probably come with the catch of needing enough rocks, maybe some reclaimed wood for a marker, and calories/time investment.

New animals are hardly a bad thing, but I agree with the sentiment that adding animals for the sake of more animals isn't good game design. Animals should serve clear, new purposes, not just be present for variety's sake. The Moose is a good example, it isn't JUST there to be a moose, it has a clear role as being the rarest animal in the game with high rewards for hunting it. There are plenty of good ideas in this thread but I think the obvious nobody has mentioned so far- While this is technically not a "new animal", I would like to see Crows reworked so they're physically in the world and can be hunted. More universally present than other animals with no specific hunting grounds (though they'd obviously collect around corpses), has a bunch of feathers instead of hide, with the main catch being they're too fast to hit with rocks. (though, maybe their senses could dull during auroras?) You'll probably need to be willing to be inefficient with ammo/arrows to get meat from them making them a "last resort" hunting target, or should you need crow feathers.