Baalhug

Resuming, there are 2 main ideas in this thread: those you think it would be better if the game could be played indefinitely and those you think it's good as it is. I agree both. The greatness of this game, in my opinion, is the way it forces you to be busy all the time. Well, you can do what you want, you're free to choose what to do next, but if you choose lightly the system will remind you how close you are from end game everytime. Let's talk about interloper, other game difficulties can be long enough (thousands of days). I'm in my 10th run. It's my 5th interloper run (the first 4 were really short, less than a week). I'n past day 300 now. I spent last 100 days in manteinance yard. I think I can get to day 1000 with no problems just staying here. Rabbits alone are not enough to feed you unless you go the starving route. Starving route means you will be at 60% health average all the time and my wolf encounters (full health) often end below 40% health. That means you are letting your chances in the hands of luck. I only went the starvation route first month, after that I had the "well fed" perk all the time. The second problem is weather. After day 50 (I've read) temperatures stop dropping, but there is a huge difference between weather regions. 5 degrees may not seem huge but it's the difference of being able to gather wood from trunks or surviving out of sticks. The difference between being able to gather meat from a wolf corpse with or without a campfire. And more important, the difference between 1 blizzard every 2 days or 2 blizzards every single day. Also weather is the key factor for the third problem: cabin fever. I had a very hard time in Pleasant Valley. I got my first moose there or should I say he got me. I had to build a snow shelter in front of the barn door and I learned the bad way broken ribs have to be healed from the medical menu. They were my hardest 40 days but yet the most interesting and intense. So yeah, surviving is easy. You get your clothes ragged, you repair them, you build your snow shelters, you repair them. And you get out of cloth. You move somewhere else. You're out of water and no sunshine, you use a match. Your improvised knife is about to break, you gather corpses with your hands and move to a forge. You run out of arrows and you go find more sapplings. So in the end it all reduces on how do you manage your resources: looking for the long term or just using what you need in every moment because you didn't plan it enough or you were in a rush because you were freezing and went straight to the wolves between you and your shelter and you lost some arrows. So yes, I think the game is nice as it is. You can survive for years in interloper if you plan carefully and you go live in places where you have good access to food (easy means good meat/expended resources ratio, wolves are not a good food source), where weather does not force you to lock up more than 3/4 of the day and/or you can fight cabin fever, and you got access to a forge (so you can use your hatchet and knife freely). That place is manteinance yard. It has not the best food sources in the game, too many wolves, a single bear and that moose will take long hollidays. It has a poor access to coal too, you will have to warm up the forge with wood everytime you use it, and when you run out of it you will have to travel relatively far to get more. But the weather is quite warm, in the best hours of day without too much wind and the right pelt clothes you can gather wood and corpses without a campfire (yes, in interloper day 200-300). You can live in the front office, no cabin fever there, it's like a cave with a nice temp bonus and a warm bed. The door is always open but wolves will never pass it. You have the hunting lodge nearby with a 6-stove if you really want to save timber and time. It's starting to get boring but soon I'll be forced to go for a coal expedition and maybe I change my wolf coats for bear ones so this is not interloper anymore. Nevertheless I think it would be nice if cloth, firestarters and ultimately iron would be infinite and therefore you could survive indefinitely. First of all because some people likes it, and for those of us who feel it's easy enough the way it is now (well, I have read a lot and tried the other difficulties before playing interloper), the company can release a harder difficulty mode where, for instance, meat on the ground or even corpses attract predators (this is an unrealistic behaviour right now), predators can target you from further distance, they don't run away when you get cover, blizzards can run for days, parasites are not removed entirely with cooking 5, etc... Also I would love skill tree was improved as well.