Sustainability items

[episodezero]

After a few hundred hours of sandbox, various modes, there are a few things I would love to see added to the game. 

Suggestions that would affect game balance / sustainability:

Crafted Whetstones - I'm sure this has been discussed in the past, and I understand that adding them will change the balance of the game by allowing for greater sustainability of your most important tools, the knife and the hatchet. They don't have to be exceptionally effective or durable, but it really is one of those things that both makes sense and doesn't deviate too far from established mechanics in the game.

Craftable Jerky - At the very least a way to smoke meats to keep them from degrading so quickly, every primitive civilization figured out how to do this, and for a survivor who lives through the early game snacking on gas station beef jerky, it really does seem like glaring omission.

Traps and bait - The snare is great, I love it, but using that rabbit to catch a wolf would be even better.  Simple wilderness traps might take time to craft but most don't really require any special tools - deadfall traps might be a little tricky to set up, but they're not out of the question for a survivor with a hatchet and some time. 

Firebow - Probably the most telling of suggestions, but making a fire drill/ hand drill/ fire plough as a firestarting tool is kind of survival 101, and even a green amateur would attempt it because they saw it in a movie once, and it might work for them.  

Flint Knife / stone axe - Knapping flint is one of those beginner survival techniques that most of us would try if we were dropped into a desperate situation, flint tools are brittle and prone to chipping/breaking but in a pinch they're too useful and historically prevalent to be ignored. Maybe they would degrade very quickly, but they have a home in this game. 

Quality of life Suggestions :

Nameable containers - I'm sure it's not just me that would like to be able to label things, especially multiple drawers of a file cabinet.

Trail Markers - Tying bits of different colored cloth to things to help you keep straight what you've done and what you intend to do seems like a simple enough addition that would really help players that haven't memorized every map yet.

Miscellaneous:

Siphoning Gas - Looks like this is a planned implementation, based on the fact that gas caps can be opened, so just here for completeness. A little extra accelerant would be handy sometimes.

[Prestermatt]

I like the trail marker idea.  People already use random things (sticks, stones, water bottles...) to mark paths, it would be nice to have a more elegant solution.  Using cloth would be good, since that is often a valuable resource and you'd have to balance marking trails against repairing clothes.

[Mroz4k]

Anyone who would suggest building any kind of a friction fire in Long Dark has never actually tried to build a friction fire in their whole life before.
Because if they did, they would know that even in the best scenario, building a friction fire is very difficult - put into consideration that there is significant humidity in the air everywhere and all the wood is at least partially soaked... and your chance to build a friction fire is nonexistent. There is a reason why tribal people who live in arctic locations never build the fire through friction. Attempting it would be a pointless waste of energy, you would never succeed in even getting it to smolder.

Tools are already renewable. Both scrap metal and cloth can be found through beachcombing. So as long as you have toolkits and a hammer and keep it repaired, you will never run out of the tools. As such, the craftable Whetstone is not necessary nor a good idea.

Once you reach master cooking rank, there is no more risk of food poisoning or parasites, so as long as you keep your meat ruined and raw, you can cook it and get it to 50%, then eat it. Jerky basically exists once you become good enough cook, you learn how to preserve and safely eat anything. So, again, unnecessary.

As much as I would like to see more traps in game, I have a feeling they will qualify as tools and will be build out of materials used for more important things, for example, all "spring" traps would require cured guts and saplings, seeing as those are the items for a bow which is much more important, I doubt they will be very popular. I would like traps to be in the game if there was some sort of skill necessary to make them properly, and a risk in building them. For example when setting up a wolf deadfall, if the player made a mistake, the deadfall would fall on his/her leg and sprain the ankle and cause bleeding, on top of some condition hit.

Flint tools would be ok, if we had flint in the game. Cured gut, two flints and a stick with 3 hours on a workbench could produce a decent flint axe. Wouldnt be very durable and it would be slow to work with, but it would be better than nothing. What is much more overlooked is bone tools. Bones have been used for tools by arctic natives for millennia. Iron is difficult to get out of the frozen ground, bones are plentiful to come by, very hard and durable, but I imagine they would not be very effective. But still, nothing like taking a piece of your dinner and use it into something that you can use to get more dinner.

Labeling containers would be a waste of time for the devs, it is not necessary, just a lazy addition. Remember where you put what, or just throw it on the ground or place it somewhere not in a container.

Trail markers are meh - waste of cloth, debuffs the point of having storms which are something I don't really like, and as far as "navigation" goes, just learn to use landmarks - this has nothing to do with knowing a map or not, if you can notice that there is a building on the top of a hill, you can use that knowledge later on when you are trying to backtrack, can still see the house but from different angle, and you can pinpoint your current location to the previous experience that way. Rather than making it easy for players, the players should learn to read the terrain around them.

[episodezero]

Mroz, Good points all, and I agree with the risk of injury when setting up deadfall/spring traps vs a 'trapping' skill that increases through use.

Crafting jerky however has value over storing ruined meat, not exceptionally making the game easier but making a choice for the player - a 1kg slab of (~700 kcal) meat being reduced to a .25kg package of ~350kcal jerky at the cost of time seems like a viable tradeoff.  Yeah I can keep piles of ruined meat in my home, but making jerky so I can take it on walks really makes sense. 

Trail Markers may be a waste of cloth for some players, but a lot of players use things like ruined flares and spent torches as markers or reminders already, so let me waste cloth.

As far as friction fires go, if you're using tinder (that you're keeping dry in your pack obviously) then friction fires are definitely possible, if you had a firestarting kit in your pack, a hand drill & tinder, all it becomes is a heavier, slower alternative to matches. I've lit fires with friction tools before, it takes patience but it's not complicated. 

I love the idea of Bone tools, everything that strikes me as a wasted resource in this game is a little bothersome considering how efficiency is the whole key to survival.