Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Here is an attempt of a map of the unknown areas and a possible search route. Start is Max last stand. then to the East and through the inaccessible parts around the lake. I am pretty sure I will find some stuff on this route but gotta be damn careful not to break my neck in the hills.
As I said many times I will leave the lake cabins alone. But I might combine this with a trip to Carter Hydro, if the weather is not too terrible and haul everything that is left there.
On the way back I will spend 1 night in the Camp Office, where I still have some stuff, most valuable of all: a jerry can with 1.5 liters of kerosine.
Then perhaps I head north again, search the area that I call the "blind spot", roughly between a triangle formed by derailment, logging camp and forestry lookout, but again, this is breakneck-territory.
According to my notebook, there is not much left in the forestry lookout, except a few cans of pork & beans, but I might visit that for another time too.
Now that I think about it, instead of letting the player get an unrealistic amount of poisoning from food and water, it would be much better to simulate scurvy and such diseases, and long term factors that cannot and must not be solved with save scumming. You have to get vitamins and the only way is to eat raw meat, and other food like fruit or grain once in a while.
I believe Christopher McCandles died because he got a special disease that comes from too much lean meat. This is exactly what would happen if you eat only meat, you eat and eat and get thinner and thinner.
And if you eat only cooked meat, you will die of course. In ancient Persia people were executed by giving them nothing but cooked meat.
Yup, lack of fat. Needing to find fat, fruits, berries and vegetables or suffer various maluses and vulnerabilities would be a much better mechanism than unrealistically quick starvation.
Yes, I read Cook and Shackleton etc and always wondered how the Inuit could survive scurvy when there wasn't anything green but a little moss.
The secret is, they eat a lot of raw meat, heart, liver, tongue etc, and of course raw fish. Raw meat contains a shitload of vitamin C and other good stuff.
The game should punish you less for meating raw meat, but more for eating nothing but cooked food.
The Kwanzanian way, huh. I would not recommend that in the long term or you would die a slow death.
I don't know how long you can delay scurvy with ascorbin acid and other over the counter junk, but I would gladly take one apple or potato instead of 10 vitamin pills.
That solution work because the game setting make it unviable otherwise. Where do you find vitamin in cold snow? Without modern transportation to move greens, or local hothouse to grow (which is insufficiently for the needs I suspect), the only answer is pills. You dont even have the option of seaweeds like a shipwreck setting.
On another note, it might be an aspect to advance the game. You have a limited time to find enough stuffs for an expedition to a local known hothouse. You must have it or die of vitamin insuffiency. Forced Endgame.
I learned that humans can eat practically everything from Birch trees. Leafs, skin, fruits, and even mushrooms growing on it*.
Just in case, if I was in a forest and have absolutely nothing fresh to eat, I'd chew some birk twigs and leafs, it should give me a few valuable vitamins.
*The exception to eating is a hard mushroom growing on beeches: "tinder" which you must not eat or you'll vomit.
But dry it you'll get stuff that will burn "like tinder", because well, it is tinder. It was the ideal fire accelerant until the middle ages.
The other birch mushroom is regarded as a precious medicine by some people. A soft mushroom (feels like rubber)
and snow-white flesh, does not give an odor.
It's dried until it looks like plaster. Drinking a tea from it is supposed to cure diseases and invigorate, is supposed to be a miracle medicine. I'm actually drinking it from time to time and can't say it is bad. Tastes a little bitter but bitter is great for the stomach. As with all stuff I would not take too much of it either.
That solution work because the game setting make it unviable otherwise. Where do you find vitamin in cold snow? Without modern transportation to move greens, or local hothouse to grow (which is insufficiently for the needs I suspect), the only answer is pills. You dont even have the option of seaweeds like a shipwreck setting.
Yep that is true. But as I wrote before the Inuits had no vitamin pills and probably could not have lived 30, 40 years with them, so you'd better do what they did and eat raw meat and fish.
Besides, there are plants that grow in mild Winters. I don't know about Canada, but here in Germany I have seen daisy flowers growing between Christmas Eve and 31st December.
Believe it or not you find also apples from last year and berries on shrubs. Of course the temperatures are only between - 10C and + 10C, but even after a usual frost in January you may still find edible fruits and stuff. I assume since you live in Vietnam you can not know that.
There are also people who collect mushrooms during Winter. The trick is: never look down, look upwards. They grow in trees!
Dude that's what most people think but it' all half knowledge and wrong. During the winter the sun is much too low to produce any Vitamin D from sunlight. In January (Germany, Sweden etc) you can spend 10h in the sun and not produce 1 mg of Vitamin D. The sun has to be higher than 50 degrees. In Northern Canada that would only be during the summer, during midday and for perhaps 3 months.
(again something that is different in Vietnam and all countriesclose to the equator, where the sun is always at the same angle)
I googled a few pictures for you so you see, apples and berries are very durable fruits, and this i how they look at the end of December in a normal German winter. During January and February you would still find many apples under the trees, only when it gets warmer they turn brown like shit and start rotting away. You could still eat them though, a rotting apple will not kill you.
The berries may survive the whole winter but some of them are poisonous. But the birds practically live from them during winter.
I must however admit that in Canada this would be much less likely.
I just realized the protagonist Will Mackinsey or what he is calles, is a wimp. When he heads out, everything below -5C is cold, everything below -12C is downright life threatening.
Bollocks, when I was a kid of maybe 10 years the schoolbus didn't come one morning and I had to walk to school ca 6.00am (darkness), ~ 3 kilometres and it was -15C.
Guess what my mother made sure I had a wool hat and scarf and that's it, it was a cold winter morning otherwise I would not remember it. But I did not fucking die of hypothermia !!
You can easily spend 8h outside in -15C as long as you got warm clothing, dont stand still and don't get wet, so why can't he? I would suggest that Hinterland should lower the temperatures in this game by at least -10C. Because from my experience in the game this should be just "normal" temperatures in a Canadian winter. With temperatures ranging from -30 to +5, it is overall just ~15 degrees colder than what I used to in Germany, and apart from a few elderly or drunken people, nobody dies in the cold.
From a different angle it would be ok that you get hypothermia if you stand still. But as long as you are moving you can handle such temperatures. The game should factor in that when you burn calories, it also means you burn energy which is turned into additional body heat. Right now it seems calories are just subtracted and not turned into heat but imo that is the crux.
I said boring to watch, many games "suffer" from it ... take Dont Starve, it becames boring to see because for the viewer there is no challenge and its just repeatable actions as the player simply is working to reach the next level, something that might be interesting to play doesnt mean its interesting to watch being played.
Question.
The resource that I am running very tight is cloth. I have only 6 or 8 at the moment.
I have also collected several pieces of clothing still in good condition that I don't need, and stored them in a corpse where they decay only very very slowly.
Do you think it would be better to a) keep them in case something breaks or b) harvest them (15 cloth or so), and use that only for my primary clothing?
The problem I have with b) is that I don't what I would do if something from my primary clothing disappears or breaks. It might be that I never find a particular piece of clothing again in the game ...
Same question with tools, should I repair my extra knifes and hatchets (20%) before they fall apart completely, or do repairs only on one set with the best condition. Same reasoning as above.
It seems I do not need a toolkit for repairs, so my repair situation would be a lot better than I thought (15 scrap metal with ca 10 more possible, 3 fir wood and more coming along the way).
This game has so much potential, really filling a huge gap. I've also been hoping that The Dead Linger might not be another boring zombie survival horror game ... time will tell, but unlikely.
I think if they push towards more real issues in the long dark it will be a lot easier to balance and justify the reasoning and make the game more logical to play - say clothes in a tub in a warm lived in hut last longer than clothes that are damp and wet all the time.
Maybe the ability to make our own stashes rather than using corpses.
Why do things only degrade once the player has found them?
I'd like NPC's but they would have to be so carefully implemented so as to not upset the balance of things. So far its such a fine balance between make or break, of course TLD is still alpha with a long way to go.
I like that survival skills increase the longer your live and succeed at certain actions like lighting fires. Same should go for tools, I think that the player should be stuck using shitty gear for longer that doesnt degrade 10% you cut some wood, I keep thinking more realism. Some might say "boring" but as Burning Bridges is showing, there is plenty to be getting on with.
I hope Hinterland take on the suggestions in this thread regards realism rather than just making it "made up".
I had been able to live my life in relative comfort for several days, which were spent resting, foraging wood from the shack and preparing for my trip.
I postpone the expedition several times because the weather doesnt cooperate. I'd usually be ready to leave at 10 or 11am, but the weather must not be less than -8C. I would not head out in a blizzard or freezing temperatures of -20 , -30 etc
In the end I'd eaten all my venison and it was time I shoot another deer, number 4. I got the hang of aiming it seems, for I have never missed a single shot. It also helps immensely that there are always deer coming to the area around Trappers, it would be much harder if I had to look for them.
I try everything to conserve meat longer, even drying some of it in the sun.
I reached a point where I can conserve 8kg meat from every deer, which is worth 16 meals.
I am extremely lucky that I found the Number 2 rucksack, it is extremely convenient to just walk 100m from the house, relieve myself next to it and have access to 20kg provisions. The meat also stays fresh inside the container, even storing raw meat for a few days will not be a big issue provided you put it in the container as fast as you can.
The technique I used to raw meat was as follows:
1. shoot the deer
2. cut 4 rations (2 kg) of fresh meat (~90%) and rush to the ice container (frozen rucksack or corpse)
3. now cut the rest of the meat, which is for cooking
4. cook the remaining rations and put them into the ice container as well
5. start eating the raw meat, which should now still be around 88% for the next 1 1/2 days
6. the cooked meat will be 99%-100% at this point and can be conserved for many days
If you do it like that, you will probably eat all your venison much faster than it decays. You might even be able to have a little surplus from carcasses, or shoot a second deer, though I dont recommend that.
Several days passed, before I could head out to the East.
One morning the weather was perfect but my fatigue level was low.
Faced with the dilemma of resting for 3 hours till late afternoon or head right away. I decided to head out, BUT THEN .. THE WEATHER CHANGED
I had to turn around after just a few hundred meters
When another morning came with temperatures around -7C, I finally headed out.
But that lasted only for an hour. It seems currently none of my plans survives the next blizzard
Stuck in the mountains everything was fast turning into dangerous, life threatening situation. Caught in another blizzard I was already seeing the Camp Office, but was seperated by a steep cliff right in front of me, and there was a wolf guarding.
In the other direction the same, another wolf.
In the end I had to make a feint around the 2 wolves, slide down the hill just like Shackleton and his men had to, sprain my ankle, limp to the building and then spend a whole night in Camp Office. The wolf was already coming after me so it was a close call.
The next morning I headed North from Camp Office. It turns out much of the unsearched terrain is almost impassable mountains, so I could not achieve much in terms of searched ground, and did not find anything useful.
This hunting stand was a nice discovery and it contained a first aid container. Full of excitement.
I open it and found ..
a fucking candy bar. This sucks.
Fast forward to the Carter Hydro dam, where I had to spend another night because of a sprained ankle (the second on this trip). I decided not to use painkillers and let it heal itself, which it did after ca 6h rest.
So it is not necessary to have painkillers all the time.
6 pills of antiobiotics, nice!
12 more matches. I can never have enough of those, and currently have matches and firestrikers for 60-70 fires.Yes, they DO have an expiry time, and they DO wear out so I will have to keep them in the best possible condition.
Look what we got here, a safe.
I find the combination by playing a around with the A, D keys.
The safe contained another box with 5 rifle ammunition.
This means that I have 20 rounds, plus 1 left in the rifle's chamber.
But you know what they say about the last bullet ..
On the way back, hungry and tired, I'm forced to hit the Camp Office another time.
I witness something special, a Wolf hunting a deer.
Sneaking in the back of the feeding wolf, I can get into the Office unnoticed and plan to spend the night here, get some of the deers meat for myself once the wolf finished and cook it.
I forage an unbelieveable 8 reclaimed wood in one go.
Does the Camp Office give a higher change percentage of foraging wood? This would not correspond with everything I have witnessed before, that every place has the same percentage.
Anyway, my ankle was sparined for the thrid time on this trip and I'd have to spend the night in the camp office. To my dissapointment I found that the wolf had not left me even an ounce on the deer carcass. That meant that my food was running out, I had to eat all cans of pork and candy bars I had collected, when I was still hungry I even ate dog food, a can opener broke through it but I made it to the morning. There was no chance that I would die from hunger, it just was a long time ago that my calories ever were running in the minus for a whole night.
Next morning, healed ankle and I head home early in the morning.
The little thing on the screen above, that's a metal container camouflaged in the snow.
It did not contain anything special (a prybar and a sweater), but it shows that I must keep eyes open all the time.
At home, the carcass in the hut is finally gone, an ominous sign that food might be harder and harder to find.
MY calories meter is in the red, but I have plenty to eat in my storage. It is hard to believe, but this screen says that raw meat was still at 88% after I left for 3 days and 2 nights ??
I must check this, sometimes I put new meat into the container and forget.
It sounds almost too god to be true
I store everything else I brought back from my expdition.
The result of my 2.5 day trip is a partial failure. I got 5 more rounds of ammo, matches, and some medicine which is great. But nothing in terms of a better jacket, hidden things, tools.
Most of the food was eaten on the trip, I don't have to worry much about food.
Gives me a little time to reflect. I survived almost a month, and got most things under control.
I have learned how to provide myself with food, and conserve it. I have dumped all important gear in safe containers where they last for a long time. I have spares for everything except the rifle and the toolkit. I have clothing, sewing kits, and a lot of scrap metal. I did what I can, and could survive for a long time. Perhaps up to 5 months, based on my current calculations.
The next days I will bring everything in order, and make some long term decisions about which items and clothing I will keep. I cannot maintain everything, but I will keep 1 spare for everything.
My ankle hurts like hell but I have faced the Outdoors another time, and it yielded a little bit of everything.
Repaired all my clothing to 70-80%. The first of my sewing kits wore out. Luckily I have 2 more
Is there any way to repair sewing kits?
I am also getting better and better in storing food. I shot my 4th stag, managed to store 11 venison at nearly 100%, plus 4 raw venison at 93%.
This are 17,000 calories total, and should last 3-4 days.
I am also learning how to do it all faster every time, so I use less wood and fatigue, and it's also easier on the knifes
One knife is at 20% and I am unsure if I should repair it. I have 2 more (or 3?) in much better condition and will probably wear this one down, then store it in the ice.
TIP: It's possible to leave the house with a fire running, store cooked meat in the rucksack, fetch raw meat then return to the house and the fire will still be burning.
That way I don't waste any tinder. It actually makes quite a difference if I keep the whole 8 kg meat on me the whole time, or if I store half of it in the cold while I cook the other half, and cook everything in two go's.
It matters a lot both for the cooking times, as well as the condition.
