xanna

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Posts posted by xanna

    Tool for Ptarmigan feathers

    in Wish List

    Posted

    2 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

    Realistically, @conanjaguar is correct - feathers are plucked by hand.  I can't think of any tool which would make the process faster - unless you have access to an industrial chicken processing plant ;)

    Alas, I only have access to an industrial whale processing plant.

    • Upvote 1

    New harvesting policy and interloper

    in Survival Mode

    Posted

    And don't forget that on Interloper, if you're hunting anything bigger than rabbit and ptarmigan, you must have already been to the forge. You can forge a blade while you forge your bow. So it 'only' affects early game rabbit and ptarmigan meals. I say 'only' because I realise that's still quite a big deal, but with thief strat and ravaged carcasses and cattiails it's definitely not a game-ender. And other changes lately have made loper easier, so I appreciate a bit of balance.

    • Upvote 4

    Tool for Ptarmigan feathers

    in Wish List

    Posted

    20 minutes ago, hozz1235 said:

    I was also somewhat surprised by the amount of time it takes to harvest a little bird - more time than a full size buck or wolf?  I do understand plucking feathers takes time.  Perhaps HL could have given us fewer feathers from each bird and shortened the harvest time.  Then it would have taken more birds to create items.  I'm sure the HL team discussed this and balanced it the way they saw fit.

    It does seem like a lot per bird, in terms of realism. But until/unless you have a bow and fire-hardened arrows, you can only get one bird per nest, and of course the nests aren't always populated. Early game, pre-bow, it's a lot of work to get more than one bird.

    It feels like a tricky thing to balance. I'm happy with it.

    • Upvote 1

    How to prevent descending down steep cliffs

    in Wish List

    Posted

    13 minutes ago, Kycko said:

    My suggestion is not about randomising, it's a way to force players to avoid such cheating. 🙂 If you know that you will slide and get problems, you just will not use this mechanic.

    I understand what gameplay change you are trying to achieve through this, but you said it "throws the dice", that's the random chance I was referring to.

    I know that if I go out in a blizzard or eat predator meat I will be get problems, but I still do it.

    How to prevent descending down steep cliffs

    in Wish List

    Posted

    Goating is a big part of the game for a certain cohort of users and adding any unpredictability to it (or anything) would have very disruptive effects on those players. It's a very well-established mechanic within the game, that players have internalised and rely on. A lot of players have a game style that relies on some predictability and consistency in the effects of their choices, so having there be a random chance of something bad would be a big change.

    However, while what the OP is suggesting  is one of those things that Hinterland wouldn't dream of introducing, if it had been there from the start we almost certainly wouldn't be discussing removing it. There is no doubt in my mind that what the OP describes makes total sense. It fits in the game and has similarity with other mechanics. The fact that we describing goating as 'cheating' means we acknowledge how unrealistic it is, and that it feels outside of the game as intended. This suggestion would bring it inside the game proper. Paradoxically, it might even encourage more people to try it as it would feel like one is 'supposed' to.

    Personally I would love this, but only if I could wave a wand and have it so it'd always been there. The existence of goating as it currently is means it's too late now.

    Particularly, I'd like to have more broken bones afflictions in TLD. A heavy fall can reduce condition by 'major bruising' but really there's nothing affliction-wise between a sprained ankle and death. A broken leg or arm would make heaps of sense. Like a sprain except with a healing time more like broken ribs.

    • Upvote 4

    Tool for Ptarmigan feathers

    in Wish List

    Posted · Edited by xanna

    This is a very classy response to my somewhat ranty explanation. You are an excellent human.
    giphy.gif.ac9293bc522dcf2264a15875a5cb6d06.gif

    I agree that the description in-game could be much clearer. Using the word 'feather', while not technically incorrect (down is a type of feather) is going to be confusing, especially if it's the only word used in the description. And the way it's written it's ambiguous as to whether it is single or plural. Something like "A mass of fluffy down feathers" might give a better mental picture.

    • Upvote 1

    Tool for Ptarmigan feathers

    in Wish List

    Posted

    It's not four feathers, it's four quantities of down. Five quantities of down is enough to stuff into your homemade wrap for your improvised insulation, so each down bundle is 20% of a insulated wrap, that's a heck of a lot of down in each harvest. Four down bundles is a huge amount of down.

    The harvesting of down is already the equivalent of harvesting hides, pelts and guts. Without harvesting skill, depending on your tool, hides take 30-60 minutes, guts take 10-40 minutes each; ptarmigan down bundles take 20-40 minutes each. Very similar numbers. And they don't need to cure.

    Down is a laborious thing to harvest, IRL. It takes time and is very messy. Especially to get that much from one bird we are being very frugal and not letting any go to waste.

    It takes time to process (but not that much more than a deer) but look what you get for it - 2½ birds and you've immediately got the makings of two insulated wraps for a whopping 4°C warmth bonus. Compare it to deer and bunny hides that way and it's so cheap! Around the same to harvest, and you don't have to wait a week for curing.

    Not meaning to lecture the OP specifically but I keep hearing people saying that ptarmigan down takes so long to harvest, and it really doesn't, so I've finally written my debunk.

    • Upvote 4
    • Like 2

    Most common slang used in The Long Dark?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Glad you liked my contributions.

    Some suggestions:

    Please add BRM and BRP.

    Add HTL to mean Hinterland, as I see that in the community as much as HL.

    Your definition of Hibernation Strat and Starvation strat look very similar. If they're the same, better to make them the same and say 'also known as'. If they're different, rewrite to make the difference clearer.

    'Aggro' isn't a noun, it's a verb. It's not what we call the wolf, it's what the wolf is doing.

    'Stick north' is a noun, not a verb, it is the direction, not the act of finding the direction.

    Worth adding to Fluffy that she lives in Carter Dam in earlier versions.

    I don't think your definition of loot table is correct. It's not a literal list of loot spawns so much as it is the set of loot spawns available on a particular run. ie, the table in the code used to determine where things spawn, unseen (but inferred) by the player. I don't know if TLD still uses loot tables since the loot refresh. Might be easiest to just omit this one?

    I don't tbink we should include vocabulary that is very general eg crowbar/prybar, wolf/dog, bird/ptarmigan. If someone doesn't know the word crowbar, general dictionaries already tell them and it's not slang or argot, it's a regional difference. 'bird' is not slang, and noone will need to look it up, people know what birds are. Besides, it means crows as much as ptarmigans, based on context.

    • Upvote 1