fewerlaws

So to make things more challenging on Interloper, I've restarted and am playing with these self imposed restrictions: Cannot ever consume any food that you didn't hunt. Cannot ever harvest any cloth from, curtains, upholstery, towels, etc. All cloth must be harvested from clothing you find or via beach combing. Cannot ever harvest any plants, including firewood logs, both maple and birch saplings, cat tails, rose hips, old mans beard, mushrooms, etc Cannot ever use the hacksaw or hatchet. This means that any scrap metal you get you must have obtained without breaking down or cutting up any metal furniture. I scrapped 2 crowbars to get enough to pieces of metal to forge a knife. I'm still debating whether or not to allow the hacksaw to be used for opening the airplane cargo containers at the TWM summit. Can only use the heavy hammer once, and only to forge a single improvised knife, and 4 arrowheads. Any additional arrowheads must be found within the world. Often 2 more can be found in a toolbox in Ash Canyon, and sometimes you can find a single arrowhead in a few other toolboxes. Cannot hunt deer. To kill them you must have them killed by a wolf. I.E. lure wolves into a flock of deer, then do a quick wide U-turn sprint around the deer, then spook the deer towards the wolves then watch the carnage. No game except the moose can be hunted with more than 1 arrow. This is because the moose is the only animal that won't bleed out. Thus if you want to hit a non-moose animal more than once with an arrow, then you have to pull the arrow out of the animal while it is still alive, then shoot it again. I'm on day 45 and doing just fine playing under the constraints listed above. I now have 2 pairs of wool socks, 2 pairs of long johns, rabbit skin hat, rabbit skin mittens, 2 pairs of deer skin leggins, 1 bear coat, 1 ski jacket, 1 moose satchel, deer skin boots. Also I have the magnifying glass, a normal bedroll, 7 toolboxes, and 14 pieces of spare scrap metal, 25 pieces of cloth, 1 survival bow, 5 arrows, 7 cured birch saplings and 3 maple saplings (from diligent beach coming sessions in CH, DP, and CrH). Almost done crafting my 2nd bear coat. I have about 250kg of meat harvested and cooked. Anyone else tried playing this way?

Also, adding snowshoes to the game would prevent falling through the ice better than Crampons. And a compass would still work even while earth was getting hit by a corona mass ejection. The fact that you can see aurora borealis is evidence that the earth's magnetic field is still active and doing its job. Crafting a compass isn't hard. Just need a needle, a flame, some fluid that wouldn't freeze (water with antifreeze from a car radiator), and something to float the needle on like a cork.

I agree with the principle of making the game more challenging and therefore more enjoyable. My current challenge is to survive using only resources found on beaches or that I craft from materials gathered from hunting. A cool challenge is to play without ever using the hacksaw or the hatchet. I'm considering trying to play on interloper without ever crafting any tools including the knife, which would mean no bow or arrows. I would need to rely solely on fish found on the beach, rocks/snares to kill rabbits, and wolves to kill dear and rabbits. I would stay warm using coal and cloth coats rather than crafted leather ones. Has anyone played this way? The problem with the lanterns is that they consume lantern oil, which long term you can only get from Fishing, and fishing consumes valuable scrap metal either in the form of hooks, or wear and tear on the Heavy Hammer (for smashing the ice open), and the Heavy Hammer requires the toolbox to repair, and the toolbox requires metal to repair. Torches require no metal in order to produce them. If you haven't noticed, I prefer to only use scrap metal to repair the Improvised Knife using the Milling Machine.

Thanks for your feedback Serenity. I'm not necessarily saying make resources more common, I'm just saying make some of them renewable but also make them more rare in terms of the fixed number that you would normally find throughout the game. Yes, I have a big reluctance to ever use any non-renewable resource. I think perhaps if you ever had to make a bow drill and start a fire with one, you would appreciate it in the game more. I don't particularly enjoy ice fishing for lantern fuel on Interloper. I end up just making tons of water while keeping warm by the pot belly stove in the fish hut. I like torchlight more than the lantern light because torches keep you warmer and you can thrown them at wolves to scare them off. Perhaps if there were a chance to get a massive fish or pull up an interesting item like a pair of boots, then fishing would be more fun. I also think it is funny that you always find shoes in pairs while beachcombing when in real life you only ever find one shoe and never a matched pair of shoes. I'm on day 240 now and I have something like 1300 kilograms of meat piled up outside the CH garage back door by the pickup truck. I could survive for more than a year without getting any more food. I think having really severe winters in all areas and mild summers would be a neat feature for people who play for the long haul. Having to store up food for the winter would be fun especially if wild game were made exceedingly scarce in the winter. Another idea for interloper would be to add an Improvised Flashlight, that could be crafted from a bathroom pipe, wire and battery cells from some electronic devices like laptops or radios, and light bulbs salvaged from cars. I do think the spear idea could be fun especially if saplings were made even more scarce.

Yes, good suggestion, however from a developer standpoint, adding multiplayer would be a massive investment of development time and open a lot of possibility for bugs. I'm was trying to think of features that would be relatively easy to implement.

So I'm on Day 220 or so on Interloper. I've had a lot of fun so far, but I'm really starting to get bored. I've played this game over 1000 hours according to Steam's metrics. I think making Interloper not boring and even more fun should be one of the primary objectives of Hinterland developers. A fun Interloper experience benefits the hardcore players, who are probably the most likely to introduce new people to the game. Therefore,focusing on improving Interloper would probably translate to higher revenues for Hinterland. My Interloper strategy has been to minimize my consumption of hard to find resources, and then to rely primarily on beach combing to obtain them. The beach combing resources that I most value are listed below in order of preference: Birch saplings Maple saplings Scrap Metal Cloth, or any clothing items that can be harvested I harvest almost always harvest carcasses by hand in order to minimize any wear and tear on my tools. I position the fire far enough from the carcass so as to not degrade it, but close enough to me so I can warm up easily while harvesting. I use the Heavy Hammer whenever possible instead of the Hatchet, Knife, Crowbar. This is because the Heavy Hammer can be repaired with easily found Douglas fir logs, plus only a tiny amount fraction of scrap metal (via the toolbox which degrades and can only be repaired with scrap metal). I only use the Improvised Knife for crafting arrow shafts, the Survival Bow, or any new articles of leather clothing. I never use the hatchet except for chopping down saplings. The only logs I have are ones I've found via beach coming. Coal is vitally important for staying warm and for cooking. I use coal and sticks exclusively for almost all my fire and heat needs. I usually pickup all sticks, only occasionally break down larger ones, and I only break them down by hand and not with a tool. Any logs I find on the beach I will burn too, except for some Douglas Fir logs which I save for repairing the Heavy Hammer, which I use for smashing ice fishing holes, or breaking down crates and pallets in order to obtain Reclaimed Wood, which I use for snares and sometimes burning. Also, for some reason, in my game not a single bear spawned at either of the 3 spawn locations in CH between day 160 and day 220. As soon as I left CH and spent 3 days in Mystery Lake, then returned to CH, the wildlife respawned there in CH including a bear at the northwestern cave by the stream. Not sure if that was a bug or by design. I've never had a problem with deer or rabbits respawning in CH, but I've noticed that as the game progresses, there are fewer wolves, deer, and bear in CH. CH is definitely my favorite area in the game, mainly due to the abundance of coal, fun hunting on the ice, ice fishing, and the 2 other nearby beachcombing locations; CrH and DP. I also like the Mountaineer Hut at the base of TWM. Mystery Lake is another good place to have a base but there is no beach combing there, which I love. BTW, why are there no Timberwolf packs at TWM? Maybe add a small pack of Timberwolves down in Echo Ravine and have them guard a few airplane cargo boxes. I have some suggestions on how to improve the game. Make Firelogs craftable using10 Tinder or 10 Cat Tail Heads plus 250ml of lantern oil. After you get Fire Starting level 3, all the tinder just tends to accumulate and clutter up the game. Please provide a mechanism whereby we can burn this stuff up in some useful fashion. If we could add tinder it to an existing fire in order to extend its burn duration by just 2 minutes, that would be an improvement. Allow players with Level 5 Fire Starting to start fires with a bow drill, which could be a new craftable item at a workbench, and could be created using 1 reclaimed wood, 1 gut, and a 1 maple sapling. Fires started with a bow drill take 4x longer to start and have a lower probability of success, say only 50 percent. The bow drill I think is needed because relying on clear daytime weather for the magnifying glass to work makes it impossible to reliably schedule a trip through a dark cave when you must rely on torches for light. The bow drill could be used up to 50 times before wearing out, so 2% reduction in durability per use. Allow the Crampons to be repaired either with a toolbox or with the milling machine or hacksaw. I rarely use the Crampons because I know once their durability reaches 0%, they're gone forever. Required 1 scrap metal for each 20% repair to durability. Allow flare shells to be found on Interloper on the beach, but make the probability of finding them exceedingly rare, such as 1 in 400 or something. I never use the flare gun in interloper because I know there are limited number of unrenewable shots. Allow bottles of Antibiotics to be found on the beach with about 1/3 the probability as painkillers. Allow gear to be raised and lowered from any rappelling location using a 2nd rope in the players inventory. The game mechanic could work by having the player place say 30kG of items in a container at the base of the rope, then once you're at the top, you can raise or lower those items at the cost of some energy (exhaustion). That way you could move items more efficiently up and down at climbing spots, without having to carry your entire body weight each time you bring items up/down a rope. Typically, people haul their gear up a rope separate from their bodies. It is what I do when I go hunting to haul gear (my gun and backpack) up and down from the tree stand or elevated blind. Add a new penalty for Interloper players who have maintained a pure carnivorous diet for more than 2 weeks. Make it function similar to Cabin Fever, but call it something like Scurvy. Require that the player get some nutrients from edible plants, which could be made more renewable , especially the Rose Hips and Reishi Mushrooms. Right now the only only renewable edible plants are Cat Tails (from beachcombing) and Birch Bark tea. Add seaweed or kelp to the game as a renewable edible plant. Sometimes obtained via fishing with 5 to 10 percent probability, sometimes found via beach combing. Add Instant Oatmeal to the game. Oatmeal would grant the "warming up" bonus, would quench 250ml of thirst, and provide 200 calories per pouch. Every box/carton of instant oatmeal would contain 10 pouches. Very lightweight, just 0.05kg per pouch, or 0.5kg per carton. Degrades very slowly if at all. Mix 1 pouch in a recycled can or pot with just 250ml of water. Quenches 250ml of thirst in addition to the 200 calories. Ready in 6 minutes over a fire just like Tea/Coffee. Allow the creation of a Firepit using 30 stones. Firepits would allow you to build a fire that couldn't be blown out completely by a blizzard. Firepits wouldn't be as nice as the fire barrel, but you could maintain a small 10 minute fire by adding sticks to it every 10 minutes and even during a blizzard. Firepits would take 30 minutes to build, and have either 1 or 2 cooking slots, depending on developer preference. Firepits could only be built by players with level 4 or higher skill in Fire Starting. Allow the crafting of red flares using gunpowder, paper, and red rose hips. Add a new craftable throwing weapon to the game -- the javelin (or Improvised Spear). Make it very inaccurate with highly random/variable effectiveness. To craft it you would need to use the forge to make the spear head -- (4 scrap metal). For the shaft you would need a Fir log or reclaimed wood. Make the spear heavy -- 2kg each. This could be used for hunting whenever no Maple or Birch Saplings can be found to make a bow or arrows. Another drawback to using a spear to make a kill would be that the spear damage reduce by 20 percent the amount of harvest-able meat from the carcass. Allow the creation of Wood Matches using gunpowder, water, reclaimed wood. Matches would need to cure (dry out) for 48 hours after you mix up the paste and apply it to the end of the match sticks. Only players with level 5 fire starting could craft matches. Allow degraded (but not always ruined!) T-shirt and Dress Shirt to be found via Beachcombing on Interloper, but with low probability. Add seasons. Everything would still appear graphically the same with snow everywhere, but just make the outside temperatures fluctuate with the time of year and seasons. Also, make the available resources a function of the time of year. So in "winter", temperatures would be extremely cold with blizzards that can last 1 to 3 weeks and summers could be warmer with more abundant wild game and renewable edible plants. With each passing year, average annual temperatures would drop by 1 degree C up to a maximum of 10 degrees C after 10 years. Interloper players could start in the late Fall, and Pilgrim survival players could start in the early Summer. Add seals in coastal areas? You can hit them with an arrow or spear, but risk losing your arrow/spear head if the seal survives the 1st hit and they jump back into the ocean. If you kill them, you have to risk falling through the ice when you go out to retrieve their carcass. Thoughts? What do other players do to make Interloper less boring? Thanks in advance for your feedback.