A Difficulty to Call Your Own

[cekivi]

With the new update there is finally a custom difficulty mode! What's better is that you can share your settings! While not perfect (for instance, I didn't see how to disable knives and hatchets in custom mode) it should lead to a lot of very interesting experiences! What's better, is that you can share difficulties by exchanging codes. So, here's a new forum where you can post experience modes you play with or are interested in trying

[cekivi]

I'll start off by posting the following code: 8sHM-/z8P-Dz+j-AXeW-LAEA

Unless I misunderstood how the custom mode selections work this should make Interloper seem easy. I have no interest in playing it myself though! The weather should be even worse, wildlife super agressive, and you may not even be able to recover condition. Good luck if you're crazy enough to try!

And here's the same setting except you start the game at midnight in a blizzard, enjoy!

8sHM-/z8P-Dz+j-wXaW-FwEA

[Vinceofpyrenees]

This is my experience for the maximum ''realism''.

With  mainly : 

- a doubled duration of day,

- minimal loot, but minimal calories consumption

- minimal fauna but deadly.

8olV-AQQn-Kk5T-WGBV-bwAA

[Vinceofpyrenees]

The code seems not working properly. With the same code I have different parameters all time.

It is impossible to enter lowercases, It is maybe why.

[tortuosit]

3 hours ago, Vinceofpyrenees said:

The code seems not working properly. With the same code I have different parameters all time.

It is impossible to enter lowercases, It is maybe why.

It displays "-" in the code, but I think the "-" should not be pasted. Sharing is not perfectly working and clunky I'd say.

[Vinceofpyrenees]

1 hour ago, tortuosit said:

It displays "-" in the code, but I think the "-" should not be pasted. Sharing is not perfectly working and clunky I'd say.

the ""-"" can't be written. But it is not the problem.

[stratvox]

Yes, I'm with @Vinceofpyrenees here. I think the problem is that while the code is in mixed case, one can only enter upper case. I think that given that a mixed case alphabet allows for many more strings, it's impossible to specify the large number of potential combinations of config options with an upper-case only alphabet.

This looks very much like a bug; I'm wondering if it exists across all platforms (running linux here... seems possible that it could be a *nix only bug (i.e. linux/macosx)). I'm wondering if the testing folks are not doing complete regression testing outside of the Windows environment.

[cekivi]

@stratvox Pity. I can confirm the same on PC. There is no recognition of lower case characters.  

Update: @Patrick Carlson posted on another thread that even though the characters don't appear to be lower case the game will still recognise them as such. So the feature should be working as intended. 

[Patrick Carlson]

19 hours ago, cekivi said:

@stratvox Pity. I can confirm the same on PC. There is no recognition of lower case characters.  

Update: @Patrick Carlson posted on another thread that even though the characters don't appear to be lower case the game will still recognise them as such. So the feature should be working as intended. 

Yes, this was the case. We've since fixed the code input issue in last night's hotfix. Should be working fine now. 

[Boulay22]

On 2017-12-07 at 9:25 PM, cekivi said:

With the new update there is finally a custom difficulty mode! What's better is that you can share your settings! While not perfect (for instance, I didn't see how to disable knives and hatchets in custom mode) it should lead to a lot of very interesting experiences! What's better, is that you can share difficulties by exchanging codes. So, here's a new forum where you can post experience modes you play with or are interested in trying

Why would you diseable hatchet and knives ??

[June]

12 minutes ago, Boulay22 said:

Why would you diseable hatchet and knives ??

He refers to the normal hatchets and knives that you can find. They are disabled in Interloper mode - you have to craft everything yourself.

[Boulay22]

On 2017-12-10 at 8:42 AM, June said:

He refers to the normal hatchets and knives that you can find. They are disabled in Interloper mode - you have to craft everything yourself.

Thanks mate ! I for instance find very , VERY unrealistic that somebody would venture in the wild without a knife ... even a folding one ?! I respect the craving for challenges but realism for me is the main things I search for  Even in Quebec city ( im a corporal in the CF ) I ALWAYS have my benchmade bushcrafter on me !

[cekivi]

6 hours ago, Boulay22 said:

Thanks mate ! I for instance find very , VERY unrealistic that somebody would venture in the wild without a knife ... even a folding one ?! I respect the craving for challenges but realism for me is the main things I search for  Even in Quebec city ( im a corporal in the CF ) I ALWAYS have my benchmade bushcrafter on me !

I fully agree that a knife is essential to real world wilderness exploring!

It would be nice though to have the option for Interloper loot in custom games though. Removing the hatchet and knife forces a shift to crafting for long term survivability. It also makes the remaining tools much more important. 

[Troxism]

The 1.17 hotfix fixed the issue cekivi, setting 'Baseline Resource Availability' to 'Low' will now set it to Interloper patterns, and disable most higher end loot unlike before. To be honest I am considering writing up a little guide to the customization settings, because a lot of them are VERY vague (as an example, in the case of 'Baseline Resource Availability', there is very little difference between Very High/High/Medium but a huge difference from Medium to Low because of this, and for things like freezing time, the difference between Low and Medium is literally 4x, while the difference between say Medium and High is only 20%). To summarize, many options have little actual effect on gameplay (because their effects are VERY subtle, or only noticable in the very long term), but a few options and a few 'breakpoints' have a very significant effect on overall difficulty. Also, a few options that don't seem like they affect difficulty (at least according to what I see people saying in various places as it doesn't seem most people understand the implications of certain settings) actually have a pretty huge impact on it due to subtle reasons.

[EricTheGreat12]

On 12/8/2017 at 4:15 AM, Vinceofpyrenees said:

This is my experience for the maximum ''realism''.

With  mainly : 

- a doubled duration of day,

- minimal loot, but minimal calories consumption

- minimal fauna but deadly.

8olV-AQQn-Kk5T-WGBV-bwAA

So does the code definitively work? I would like to try it out

[Ruruwawa]

45 minutes ago, EricTheGreat12 said:

So does the code definitively work? I would like to try it out

I tried that code yesterday to check out the fix to code entry, using plain ol copy/paste.  It worked fine, and the tweaks Vince described showed up in the settings.

[Pillock]

2 hours ago, Troxism said:

To be honest I am considering writing up a little guide to the customization settings, because a lot of them are VERY vague (as an example, in the case of 'Baseline Resource Availability', there is very little difference between Very High/High/Medium but a huge difference from Medium to Low because of this, and for things like freezing time, the difference between Low and Medium is literally 4x, while the difference between say Medium and High is only 20%).

Please do, if you have time/inclination! I'd certainly be interested in it.

I've yet to try the sandbox post-update because I'm still playing through Wintermute on 'Hard' (or whatever it's called), but I was rather looking forward to tinkering with the custom settings for Survivor Mode when I'm done. If I understand what you're saying, the settings correspond to the existing Experience Modes (so, instead of Resource Availability being called 'VeryHigh/High/Medium/Low', they could equally be named 'Pilgrim/Voyageur/Stalker/Interloper, and so on for the other variables)?

It's a little disappointing for me if that is indeed the case, as I was hoping to be able to create a similar experience to Stalker, which I enjoy quite a lot, but just with less loot. However, I don't want it to quite as sparse as it is in Interloper, which I find makes the world feel somewhat barren and lifeless; I was looking for something of a halfway-house between the two. I'd like to be able to find a rifle or a hatchet or a knife, but not to be able to accumulate several of each from the same map. In Stalker Mode, I rarely do any hunting or crafting (or any type of "bushcraft" at all, really) within about the first month or so of a character's life, simply because I don't need to: all the food and clothes I need (in fact, much more than I need) are available from visiting the abandoned buildings, and I just travel around taking what I need and moving on. I'm fine with the predators, I like climate and the weather, I'm fine with the parasites and the cabin fever - maybe I'd slow down the condition recovery a bit.

Do you think it's possible to create something like that with the current options?

[Troxism]

Not every setting directly correlates to a difficulty mode. There are a few settings that are completely new (and were the same for all difficulties so far, such as plant spawns), and for some settings that do change with difficulty, there are options that were not used before that allow you to go higher/lower in some cases. As an example, Condition regain from sleeping/over time was always 'High' on Pilgrim/Voyageur/Stalker before, which gave you up to 90% condition regain in some cases per 1 night of sleep (but more commonly about 60%, it heavily depends on exact length of sleep because every hour of sleep gives more then the last one), and 'Medium' on Interloper, which gives about 30-32% in the 10 hours you are allowed to sleep on Interloper before suffering dehydration with it's high thirst setting. The new 'Low' setting is completely new and gives about half as much as Interloper, and is definitely much close to 'realistic' (whatever that means in this game) as it means it can take nearly a week to sleep off a near death experience. It also nerfs the ridiculousness of abusing starvation a lot (as it actually starts to cost much of your condition budget every day), but to be fair the way to deal with that is to just ban starving for yourself personally. You can even now totally disable condition gains with the new 'None' setting for both of those, which allows for some cool new short term 'hardcore challenges'.

You can do SOME of what you describe, but as an example tools/rifle are pretty much 'all or nothing' at the moment, as their spawns aren't influenced by for example the loose loot amount setting since they are effectively hand placed. The settings to 'fine tune' loot primarily end up mostly changing how many matches, sewing kits*, food items, and clothing items you find in containers or on the 'loose' (since the majority of the loot tables consists of those items, plus 'trash' items like newspapers), outside of ofc the whole 'Set it to Stalker and below with Hatchets/Knives/Bedrolls laid out in relative abundance with many spawn points being very common or 100%', or 'Set it to Interloper where loot distribution is more random but more even at the same time, with many items simply being gone.

So you could set it to Stalker Loot, with low loot chances, but that would mostly lead to finding few matches other then preplaced packs, and few clothing/food items (it might help make really good clothes a rare find, but even so, the TWM cargo containers are pretty OP on 'Stalker' settings regardless and would likely have every major clothing item anyways. You would still find basically the exact same amount of tools/bedrolls/lanterns in basically the exact same places as you would on a normal Stalker game. 

*Yes I name sewing kits specifically because they actually are pretty common 'random' loot and the available settings heavily influence that, meanwhile for example Whetstones are almost exclusively pre-placed and 100% spawns, only differing in exact spot but not total amount. It's a good example of the 'details are important' with some of these settings, as many of them sort of clash with the fact that there are loot items that are almost totally random vs 'randomly distributed' and the settings just can't really tweak the latter in a fine way without presumably the devs doing a bunch of work to edit loot distribution logic and probably involving them literally editing the map files to create new loot 'maps', although ofc I don't actually know the details of how this would be done and this is probably way off the mark.

Either way there are a lot of little details and in some cases hard numbers that can be offered (in others data collection would take a ton of time or is simply not really feasible) on many of the settings. My hesitation in sharing such information mostly comes from the fact that Hinterland seems to frown upon detailed information being given out about the game and prefers a more naturalistic approach to gameplay rather then a details and numbers oriented one. That and obviously while I do take a lot of notes and observations, I still only play so much and don't have time to exhaustively test everything, and I dislike giving out incomplete information as it can often end up being inaccurate in some situations.

[Pillock]

54 minutes ago, Troxism said:

You can do SOME of what you describe

Thanks man! That's a great help. I'll see what I can come up with.

I suppose that, like many relatively-experienced players, I know fairly accurately and precisely what results I want to get from changing the settings - but as you say, the descriptions are sometimes a bit vague and I don't always know how the combinations are going to pan out. And I would rather just set up my game and play it through to the end, rather than constantly be stopping and restarting with small differences in the set-ups, becoming some sort of configuration junky. The beauty of the pre-defined Experience Modes was that you weren't led into doing that.

[cekivi]

I for one am looking forward to testing some of the scenarios people come up with

@Troxism: I'd wait another week before making your "how to" guide just in case there's another hot fix. As it is though, good catch on the interloper loot tables now being included. That's definitely a big plus for custom mode! 

[Winnsford]

On ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 7:44 PM, Troxism said:

 To be honest I am considering writing up a little guide to the customization settings, because a lot of them are VERY vague

Please do at your earliest convenience. I understand more updates may be coming soon.

[LucidFugue]

I'll post up the experience code when I am convinced I have the settings correct, but I've been loving the low condition recovery.

I'm trying to get a mode that revolves around long term condition trading.  Basically trying to have more deaths come gradually, rather than losing it all in an ill fated wolf struggle. 

So far I am going for interloper level loot and the harshest, coldest weather. Then, decreasing wildlife spawns, decreasing item decay rates, lengthening the day/night, lowering thirst/hunger requirements, and minimising the impact of wolf struggles. Considering whether to do away with wolves altogether, but at the highest fear and lowest damage they're barely an issue. 

The idea is that every meal is hard to come by, but lasts you longer. The low condition recovery means starvation and excessive time spent out in the cold will require a lot of recovery, but you will need to keep moving as you quickly depopulate a region.  So even though the moment to moment threats are lower, condition loss builds if you haven't had the opportunity to rest up for a few days. 

[JAFO]

On 12/11/2017 at 11:44 AM, Troxism said:

To be honest I am considering writing up a little guide to the customization settings, because a lot of them are VERY vague

Please do!

[Troxism]

In response to LucidFugue:

Increasing the day length makes you freeze/starve/dehydrate that many times slower when doing anything that isn't time accelerated (cooking, harvesting, breaking down, repairing), so it makes the game MUCH easier (as it makes collecting sticks, collecting plants like cattails, looting, exploring/traveling all come at far far less risk of freezing, starving or dehydrating. Since chopping limbs is usually a waste of time anyways, this basically means the only activity that isn't made 2/3/4 times less punishing in terms of calories/thirst/fatigue/freezing outdoors is harvesting a carcass and cooking (but being next to a fire makes cold not much of a concern).

So if you are going to play with that setting, realise that it basically makes freezing a non factor if you turn it up (as you are effectively lowering the freezing rate massively) outside of harvesting a carcass. To be honest the settings you describe are really lenient overall (of course that may be what you are looking for, I have no idea if you play on Interloper a lot or no), as the only thing that is made harder is condition regain, but because of the slowed down time and slowed down starvation in general it barely makes a difference. And nearly removing wolves basically removes the only real threat of death remaining (freezing and wolves are by far the two most common causes of death, and as I said changing day length basically neuters freezing, so yeah). 

Also even the lowest wildlife settings (as long as you don't literally set it to 'none') are very very abundant for Deer and Rabbits. In fact I never even realised you actually get less Deer on higher difficulties (as I almost never played lower ones) until this update because the effective difference is so small (you still get herds of 3 deer on 'low', you just get more herds spawned at the same time on Very High).

In response to JAFO: Another reason I am hesitant to do so is that I simply don't have enough information on some settings; I know what about half of them do pretty well (the only reason I brought it up at all is looking at various places it seems many players have literally no idea what any of the settings ACTUALLY do in terms of numbers/practical effect, so it seemed like even limited advice would be better then absolutely no information), and the rest I am more hazy on, and some of the testing that would be required to find out exactly what they all do would frankly just be way too much time.

[LucidFugue]

Thanks for the advice re: day length. I was in the midst of seeing how it interacted with sleep/thirst/hunger and hadn't noted the slowing down of freezing as well. I'll leave the day length as normal for future experiments,as I definitely want travel to be about trading condition to move to new areas. 

I do play interloper. I'm trying to smooth out the curve so that you don't have that "it's deadly at first, but once you get a foothold you're okay" sense. My approach was trying to throttle wildlife population so you have to keep moving,  and punish the starvation cycle so it isn't a crutch. 

I realise the difficulty curve may be baked into the design somewhat, but I personally abandon games when they get too comfortable. Most often this is because once you have clothes and tools, the respawn timers on deer are such that you can survive on just one or two that keep respawning outside your home of choice.