Stuffed Plush Chainsaw

I guess one could have this discussion indefinitely. So yeah, why have it? It's not like anyone would actually care at this point. But hey, it's better than doomscrolling, so ... What's a fact - and sorry, there is no elegant way around this - is that TLD was initially advertised as a story rich, narrative driven survival experience with an apparent mystery to solve. This still has not been delieverd on, and I think people begruding this fact should neither be belittled, nor "educated" that this all happend for a good reason. One must absolutely understand that after this ridiculous amount of time a certain subset of buyers feel scammed. I'm glad the majority of the player base has found the survival part of the game since then to be more than enough compensation for the missing story mode, and I personally always was a stalwart defender of Hinterland because of the outstanding quality of the game (at least between patches ...). Yet I cannot fathom this kind of moose crap to fly with a normal company that has a normal community. I think it's pretty much unheard of that a game is nearing completition while at the same time already being considered a classic, and while it clearly isn't obsolete by any means, it's dated in a lot of ways. A modern smartphone could run this game ezpz simply because it is that old. (I still believe they should port it to iOS btw... freezing Apple TV could run it) So if people wanna vent about that - let them. It's hilarious.

Well, fair is fair, and for whatever reason the issue is gone without any update. Maybe it was me, maybe it was a strange play of fate. Who knows 🤷‍♂️

Meh. Just meh. Apparently the right mouse button is broken on mac. Clicking right sometimes registers more than once, so moving objects becomes a struggle, and holding right doesn't work properly either as when you move the mouse or something there's a press and release registered so you stop aiming and then start aiming again with weapons. Or you don't start again. Or sometimes when you release right you start aiming. Don't ask me. And nope, sorry, I'm not gonna report this to the support page nobody ever answers.

I kinda like how I do not like that. Yeah, that'd be tough as nails.

The one thing Methusaleh definitively is is a remnant from a time the TLD story had a much more "David Lynch" kinda taste to it, and less of the "The Walking Dead" (or "The Road" if you are generous) tone that started in EP3 and got overly loud in EP4. It goes to show how well placed Methusaleh is that over half a decade later people are still speculating about him, what he is, what's his symbolism and how he fits into the entire story. He's a really great example of how to design a mystical "meta character" for a story that lives off mystery and metaphor, and stokes the reader's / viewer's / player's curiosity. As such he's there to both provide exposition to the metaphorical layer of the story and add to the mystery at the same time. For that it isn't really that important if he's real or not. It isn't even required for his "true nature" to be revealed to the player ever, because, in a sense, his place in the lore made him "realer than real". Sadly we lost Methusaleh to the more mechanist turn the story took. Mathis, I'm sure, originally also wasn't planned as this very worldly bad guy, but had a very specific role to play in this up to and including EP2 very metaphorically heavy story. I know, EP5 ain't even out yet, and I'd be happy to be shut up in awe once it's finally there, but I seriously doubt it, and I really wonder what TLD could have been had the writer stuck to his original intend. It's really sad that Wintermute, in all likelihood, forever will be one of those great projects which crumbled under the weight of its own ambition. As to Methusaleh's actual nature: I always regarded him as "the force of inevitability", something that puts personal desaster into a geologically sized frame of reference. A hint to the fact that not just we as individuals but human civilization as a whole is a tiny spec of dust hardly noticeable in the grand sceme of things; that we have our time, that this time will inevitably end, and that despite the illusion that we matter we are but a droplet in a bucket so vast we can't even begin to cromprehend it in any other terms but mythical ones. So, yes, nature, in a sense, but spanning not just space, but time.

For the sake of love and understanding I wanted to point out that neither strategy - turning always right or left - is innately superior. Also that, while I support people's ability to change their minds upon discovery of new perspectives, this is the one occasion where you either stick to the left or right, no matter what. One could say it's the ultimate partisan issue.

Now try walking. 😄

I hardly ever chop down wood. Like maybe once every couple of games in a very specific circumstances. Either you have enough sticks anyways (on everything except loper) or it is to cold to actually do it without spending at least half as much resources to do it as you get from it .... like on loper. Also never once had dysentry, not even in my first stumbling days. Never got Mending to level 5. Not once. Not in over a thousand days. Same with the stoopehd revolver. Still hate that thing. Actually never have been down in the mine in CH in a survival game. Always felt too little reward to risk my entire run on. Never hid on a tree or something like that to kill agressive animals. Always felt like a hard exploit.

This at least used to be different. Curing itself never, afaik, stopped the actual decay process, until the curing process was finished. So you can indeed end up with a hide, especially bear hides, which you have beem carrying around too long, and now they will decay beyond 0% until they cure. Happend to me more than once taking hides with me on my travels, curing them in caves or other indoor locations when I am resting, mostly during loot&scoot interloper games when I score an early bear or moose, and don't want to return to the region, at least not for a while, like AC, HRV or BRR. You can do the same with other hides and saplings, it just requires a bit of micro management. Doesn't work with guts for obvious reasons... unless you have even more than a death wish than playing interloper alone already indicates.

As far as I know the maglens doesn't degrade by suffering from excessive downward accelleration which is known to periodically happen to inhabitants of Great Bear. But, yes, I agree that this probably will not affect actual gameplay.

It would take 8 to 12 weeks before you would feel the lack of vitamin C - provided you were on a vitamin C sufficient diet before, which we can assume for our "survivor", having fallen out of the sky by some means not further disclosed. So it makes sense that this has a rather forgiving grace period. Regarding the flask: I'm not a fan of unrepairable items from a gameplay / incentive perspective. For a lot of people it is very prohibitive if a resource, almost no matter how pentiful, is not renewable. So they rather choose to not use it at all. They will rather keep the flask at home for when they really need it - just that they will not have it around when that moment occurs. I refer to this as "stacking potions" from old RPG games where you had some unique powerups you would only find once or maybe a handful of, but end up never using them because they were so scarce you were afraid to used them before you really needed them. Apt debaters will now point to the stim and its overwhelming potential and equal scarcety. And to some extend that is true, and I've died more than once with a perfectly valid stim in hand, sometimes because I was too greedy to use it, sometimes because I've just forgotten it because I use them so seldomly. But at least the stim doesn't punish you for having it around when you have a minor mishap like jumping from the Summit. 🫡 I guess this is more of a psychological barrier for some people (I clearly used to be among them) than an actual gameplay issue. I just wanted to raise awareness of this perspective, although I'm confident this has been raised in internal development meetings already, so honestly it's just me talking a lot again I guess. 🤷‍♂️

A bug is a design oversight by definition 😉 (except your memory literally being hit by a cosmic ray flipping a bit.... that's devine intervention)

Sure it's possible. Point is: they don't want to.

Well you can make the argument that if you don't use a tool to harvest you are doing it wrong anyways. Not for realism sake, but simply because you invest too much time into the harvest to make it worthwhile both from a time spent and caloric expenditure perspective. That being said: I consider this change to be one of the worst changes made to the game, period. Simply to cram down the new harvest animations a feature previously present has to go since showing the character "harvest" an animal with bare hands would be upsetting to some people.

It sure will be in my head every time I come across a bucket in the game now. 😵

The problem, in all honesty, is a bit more complicated. Technically the travois is a container like any other container. Like any other container once you put in stuff for which there is no futher need (like 0% sewing kits) it gets "recycled" into the nether, never to clog up the world again. HL could have changed this regarding meat ages ago. They didn't. Because, I assume, they don't want to. So, in essence, this is yet another issue of the age old discussion of whether or not spoiled meat should persist in containers or should be removed from the world outright, so I do not assume this is going to change in any shape or form. Yes, it would be more "consistent" if either was the case, but probably for reasons of not fixing "bugs" players have come to rely upon it's going to remain in this weird kind of limbo. It's the same with the fact that you cannot eat spoiled meat from the radial menu, but you have to actually access the inventory. I'm rather confident that this is being left in the game to not upset long standing players while at the same time choosing to not further promoting this. This is compounded by the fact there apparently is no infrastructure in place to actually check if an item placed in the scene (a house, the outside, all of those are scenes) has decayed to 0% and hence should be discarded. This probably is due to the fact that this would request frequent checks of these entities, which could end up being hard on computational powerhouses like the Jaguar Consoles (PS4, xbox .... uh... the one before the current one) or the Nintendo Switch, which effectively is a 2017 midrange smartphone CPU wise. Long story short: Not gonna happen. Buuuuut..... if something were to happen it would be the right gameplay choice to a) prolong the time meat (and food in general) stored outside, i.e. being frozen, keeps be a factor of..... a lot. Like 5. Seriously. Or maybe 10. b) remove spoiled meat from the game the moment it get's spoiled (all spoiled food for that matter), whether it's outside, inside, in a container, in your backpack, no exceptions. c) remove the Cooking 5 bonus that makes you immune to food poisoning. It's outright OP. But..... still not gonna happen.

This is correct, of course. I also thought of the "hole in the pail" solution (actually a great name for a band, now that think of it), although it would be a little suspect (again ^^) if all the pails had holes in them. But I get your basic stance regarding this. I, too, would wish for the little things to be a little more polished. Interestingly enough I had a discussion about a very similar topic about a very different piece of software I am working on, and how I would wish we (as in my company) could prioritize the little things a bit more rahter than chasing the next big feature. You don't perceive a thing high quality because it can do a magnitude of big things, but rather because all the small details are thought of and harmonize well with the overall appearance. I realize that to achieve this indeed means affording time to things many if not most people will never consciously realize, but that's kinda the goal, coming back to immersion: you are not supposed to be alerted to the fact that the very artificial world you are interacting with in fact is very different from the reality you are trying to escape.

Frankly spoiled meat should be that - spoiled.

Well you have two interests here competing with one another: 1) The developers want a full and vivid world that looks like it could be a real place, albeit a very abstractly rendered one, admittedly. But a world with no pails (or buckets, as an uncultured being like me would call them) would warrant some questions, like: "Why are there no pails in the world?" or "Why have aliens (from outer space, ofc) invaded Canada and stole all the buckets they could find?" or "Are pails the true reason for the so-far unexplained calamity that has befallen Great Bear Island? Is this a conspiracy of buckets rising up against their fleshy overlords?" Shorter and more seriously: you'd find buckets in such a world, and hence they exist. 2) The developers want water manangement to be at least somewhat challenging. Putting a bucket on a stove and let it boil for 12 hours for 12 liters (that's roughly π gallons, my imperial yet mathematically apt compadres) of water would be hella convenient. It would also free up a lot of time to do other things, and in turn make the game easier, which to balance would warrant a difficulty increase, and also make the pail another piece of mandatory equipment to carry around, further adding to what I came to call "equipment creep" in TLD. (Remember when we got 30kg of carry weight and that's it? Felt adequate back then, but it's unthinkable as of today....) So, yeah, immersion is kinda important as even I keep spouting off about on repeat, but sometimes gameplay is the more important consideration, and in this case I wholeheartedly vote in favor of the hacksaw way of life for the pail. --edit More on topic: I don't think the elephant in the room is breakling immersion from time to time. The elephant in the room is that a 10 year old game refuses to reach a state of adequate "polishedness". Yeah, yeah, I know, but the updates! The patches! The free content! All well and good and as commendable as it deserves to be. But I simply want for once the game to work as intended. How bout that for a patch.

Looks like a problem with shaders. If I had to take a bet I'd wager blending in textures at a certain distance (LOD wise) doesn't seem to work quite right. Would be interesting to know your configuration, as in what platform you're playing on, what's you specific hardware if on PC, etc. Maybe you can mitigate this issue be adjusting the render distances in the graphics menu.

As far as I understand it from raw theory this problem is a known issue. Basically just disassemble the entire rabbit from inventory to be safe ...... or wait for a fix.

Guess it's just typical me that's never happy, but if I look at the known issues I feel like I should wait another month before picking this game back up. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that a game this is old is still being actively worked on and I'm rather fond of the direction the game has taken since the DLC ..... in theory. Because, in all honesty, I haven't felt the overwhelming urge to actually play it a lot, and I haven't even seen the new regions. There's always something broken or another update around the corner that then will break existing things anyways as they always did. What can I say? 🤷‍♂️ I'll have another look after Christmas when the usual end-of-year patching is done. Maybe then... Anyways .... thanks for the amount of work you guys put into this. I'm sure you're doing your best.

And here ignorant me though Nevada was basically all desert. Pretty amazing find.

I remember back in 2015/2016 having heated discussions about a linux box for a digital signage project we made the software for, and the point of contention was that it booted too slow. Mind you those things were spun up in the early morning, ran all day, and got shutdown after all visitors had left. Also consider that no user interaction was required other than pressing a power button once and then walking away. So even if it hardly ever mattered how long those boxes took to start up we spent a couple thousand dollars worth of development time to make the screen "appear" in 15 instead of just under 30 seconds. What this tale tells us: people are unreasonable impatient.

It's a psychological thing. It's the same reason I buried a lot of lopers that proudly never used a stim. With this it's even worse because you really have the one and you can't ever "replace" it. @ajb1978's suggestion to use variants as templates to craft replacements is a good one, and I wholeheartedly second it.