Matches

[nicko]

I have a box of matches and was shocked as how much they weigh? nearly half a kilogram for 50 matches. Surely this is an incorrect weight?  Do any others see this issue in game?

I think I will also post this in the bug forum.

[CGTv]

You've got a point there.
There's also a lot of other items that arguably have their weight incorrect.
A t-shirt for instance is 0.25Kg, there are other items that weight exactly the same but should be heavier.
Another example being the woolf scarf, it only weights 0.10Kg, compare that to the cotton scarf/toque and wool toque and you will see it doesn't really add up.
I recon most is done for balancing but i agree that some items should be reworked.

~CGTv

[piddy3825]

On 10/1/2018 at 1:58 AM, nicko said:

I have a box of matches and was shocked as how much they weigh? nearly half a kilogram for 50 matches. Surely this is an incorrect weight?  Do any others see this issue in game?

 

yeah, these are some big wooden matches however with a considerably ample match head wouldn't you know.   Normally, you wouldn't even notice but in this case it looks like the box you are carrying contains considerably more matches than is typically found in any given pack of wooden matches.  i suspect you have multiple boxes that had the same condition and those boxes merged into one.  Happens to me all the time when I put multiple packs of matches in the same container for storage.  Otherwise you probably would be carrying 3 or 4 boxes each weighing .15k and you wouldn't even think to question the cumulative weight.   You have made me curious, however, as I have a pack of matches with over 80 matches in it in my current playthrough.  Gonna have to see what that weighs now.  

[s7mar7in]

On ‎10‎/‎1‎/‎2018 at 4:58 AM, nicko said:

I have a box of matches and was shocked as how much they weigh?

These weights are evolving and maybe are intended to show the importance of fire-starters...not RL weight.
Perhaps the TLD developers will continue to add balance to the game item weights and we may see additional tiers of fire-starters.
(It seems we have matches that are not damaged by water, so the wooden matches are already a top-tier loot item)

Of course you are correct @nicko, the RL weight for 50 stormproof top tier matches would be 0.10 kg,
(Note: pictured item is weight of 25 matches and case).

[Wintermut]

On 10/2/2018 at 9:59 PM, s7mar7in said:

These weights are evolving and maybe are intended to show the importance of fire-starters...not RL weight.
Perhaps the TLD developers will continue to add balance to the game item weights and we may see additional tiers of fire-starters.
(It seems we have matches that are not damaged by water, so the wooden matches are already a top-tier loot item)

Of course you are correct @nicko, the RL weight for 50 stormproof top tier matches would be 0.10 kg,
(Note: pictured item is weight of 25 matches and case).

I don't know that it's fair to claim the weights of items are "evolving." Many individuals have brought up the riduculous weights for various items over the years and I've seen very few changes or balancing. 

It's clear that management of your encumbrance is one of the biggest limiting factors in the game. That's also why it's so frustrating that so many items are far heavier than they are in real life. I understand that this is a game and not real life, but determining the average weight of an item isn't that hard to do. The game has many factors to the difficulty, artificially inflating the weights of various items is unnecessary, unfair, and un-fun. Quite frankly much of it makes little to no sense at all.

Take for example old man's beard. Each one weighs 0.01kg, and it takes three to make an antiseptic poultice. This used to also be a bandage and required one while crafting, but it no longer does. Now apparently,  you are just weaving three pieces together or something I guess. When combined the three 0.01kg pieces suddenly weigh more than three times the sum of the parts...i.e. they weigh 0.10kg. How does this crazy math work? Almost every item in the game is like this if you think about it for a second.

Take bandages...they are made from cloth. The cloth weighs 0.1kg. You tear it into two bandages that apparently each  also weigh 0.1kg a piece instead of 0.05kg....which would actually make more sense than creating mass from thin air.

Rabbit mittens...takes four 0.1kg hides and two 0.1kg guts. Do they weigh 0.6kg, or less to account for trimming excess hide and guts while crafting? Nope, they weigh 1.0kg or 2.2 pounds. Are you aware of any gloves that weigh over a pound per glove? I mean other than intentionally weighted boxing gloves, or some sort of exercise glove?

Never mind the fact that the process of curing hides (or anything really) typically involves drying the hides and the loss of excess water weight. Yet uncured and cured anything in this game weighs exactly the same amount.

I could go on and on....none of it makes any sense and none of it is particularly hard to fix. You can find the weight of anything with either a scale or the Internet. Changing weights doesn't involve writing new code, it's just editing the values for the item's weights after agreeing upon more sensible values for everything.

All of these things add up to the player being constantly over encumbered. While I do appreciate the addition of the moose satchel and having worn clothing weigh slightly less than carried clothing, but neither of those changes/additions fixes the root issue. Stuff shouldn't weigh that much in the first place.

 

 

[s7mar7in]

13 hours ago, Wintermut said:

The game has many factors to the difficulty

I guess my intended meaning is that the game is constantly evolving. The current item weights to me are simply a "placeholder" which can be refined as the game development team continues adding updates and content. Very slowly, the game is changing, and that has included tweaks to the weight of clothing we wear vs. the clothing we carry, processed plants vs. raw plants, and at long last a satchel for additional carry capacity. In the future we may see additional tweaks of wet vs. dry clothing weights. My great wish is for proper slings and holsters to enhance mobility, tweak carry weights, and reduce condition loss to items. A quick search of the forum found that many feel the crafted clothing is too heavy, but also many believe we need a variable rate of condition loss during various temperature exposures to make clothing worthwhile. It is a matter of everything effects everything when we try to discuss game changes, and I enjoyed reading your many insightful comments @Wintermut. Good luck my friend.

For what it is worth, the rabbit fur mittens are a great example item, (these are even made in Canada):
Item Weight: 0.227 kg. / 0.5 lbs.
 

[Wintermut]

23 hours ago, s7mar7in said:

 

For what it is worth, the rabbit fur mittens are a great example item, (these are even made in Canada):
Item Weight: 0.227 kg. / 0.5 lbs.
 

I too Googled rabbit skin gloves/mittens to try to find a comparable item that included it's shipping weight in the description. I found those and a few others. They mostly weighed 12-16 ounces for the pair of gloves. So 0.4-0.5kg would be a "sensible" in game weight. Unfortunately the game ones weigh double....

[Kauffy]

I would definitely say that the weights in-game are meant to be somewhat reflective of encumbrance and "displacement".

Even though a clothing item on a scale may not weigh as much as in real-life, it is somewhat plausible to reflect how much space it takes up in your pack, etc. then, the only real break is that this weight is considered absolutely for the purposes of your movement.

Matches, being somewhat fragile, probably shouldn't be packed in with everything else, using exactly every bit of available space.

As it is, I think the weight is a decent analogue to weight + displacement + preciousness-- if they added some kind of volume dimension to every item, this may start to become too much to manage, and then we'd want a Tetris mini-game for most-efficiently packing our pack, or a Deus Ex - style inventory system.

I do believe there's room for improvement in the inventory system, but I don't know that the game would gain very much by being this uber-micro about it.

[Pillock]

On 10/7/2018 at 1:16 PM, Kauffy said:

I would definitely say that the weights in-game are meant to be somewhat reflective of encumbrance and "displacement".

Even though a clothing item on a scale may not weigh as much as in real-life, it is somewhat plausible to reflect how much space it takes up in your pack, etc. then, the only real break is that this weight is considered absolutely for the purposes of your movement.

Matches, being somewhat fragile, probably shouldn't be packed in with everything else, using exactly every bit of available space.

As it is, I think the weight is a decent analogue to weight + displacement + preciousness-- if they added some kind of volume dimension to every item, this may start to become too much to manage, and then we'd want a Tetris mini-game for most-efficiently packing our pack, or a Deus Ex - style inventory system.

I do believe there's room for improvement in the inventory system, but I don't know that the game would gain very much by being this uber-micro about it.

I think if they simply added a 'volume' value to each item, and had a fixed capacity in your backpack, that'd do fine. That wouldn't be too much micro-management, nor create irritating Tetris-inventories. But it would utterly change the balance of that part of the game. You wouldn't be able to carry nearly as many sticks or logs, for example, because they'd take up all the space without taking up all the weight.

If you allow, say 10kg (to use a round number) for clothes, we can already carry 20kg of stuff in the pack without it causing the character any problems - that is quite heavy, especially if you're going on long walks and climbing up ropes! I suspect that if they made all the items have realistic weights, but balanced it by having realistic item volume and pack capacity, we'd be able to carry far, far less than we can at the moment and people would be wanting the old system back again.

[Spakerman]

I went out to get firewood and came back carrying 30 assorted cedar and fir logs.  I was moving at a crawl with the encumbrance sure.... but arguing the realism of trying to carry 30 logs without a wagon or sled is ludicrous.  In the end, values need to be set allowing for both balance and fun and then realism can bring up the rear on the priority list.

[s7mar7in]

On ‎10‎/‎7‎/‎2018 at 2:16 PM, Kauffy said:

As it is, I think the weight is a decent analogue to weight + displacement + preciousness

Very well said @Kauffy.

[MarrowStone]

2 hours ago, s7mar7in said:

Very well said @Kauffy.

Was about to say this as well. Oh well, I've more to say anyways.

A strict volume based pack (like Killing Floor that just uses arbitrary units) would have us carrying much much less than right now, and even more so if we had a tetris+weight style inventory like the Stalker games.

A strict weight based inventory would see us carrying insane amounts of "light" objects. Think, a kilo of bricks versus a kilo of feathers.

A tetris inventory (my favourite example is Unturned's) allows upgrades and and is highly custimizeable, yet the micromanagement of sorting all the stuff can get in the way of the fun or get you killed when in a rush.

Slot inventories vary greatly (minecraft has a grid of x slots with stacking while The Last if Us uses a sorta cross grid and invisible inventory with specific slots for specific items and limited stacking.) However, none ive seen would really work for TLD due to the large variety of items etc.

These inventories can also be annoying, (in Cry of Fear your phone takes up just as much space as an assault rifle! Or if you have 1 really important item, and the slot can stack hypotheticallh hold 64 items, you cannot pick up 63 units of a different but equally important item, even if its smaller. Also in Minecraft you can carry 2,304 cubic meters of gold in your pockets... )

In other words, TLDs merging of weight and encumberence is pretty sound aside from a few items like the rabbit mittons that now lower sprint distance drastically too.

ahh, listen to me ramble again. Apologies.

[JAFO]

<fights urge to make a fresh rant about the ridiculous weight of water purification tabs>

 

<succeeds>

[Pillock]

The world of The Long Dark has different physics from Planet Earth. Objects weigh more according to their utility, rather than their actual mass.

[Kauffy]

On 10/10/2018 at 9:19 AM, Pillock said:

I think if they simply added a 'volume' value to each item, and had a fixed capacity in your backpack, that'd do fine. That wouldn't be too much micro-management, nor create irritating Tetris-inventories. But it would utterly change the balance of that part of the game. You wouldn't be able to carry nearly as many sticks or logs, for example, because they'd take up all the space without taking up all the weight.

The trouble with two-dimensional (meaning, two independent dimensions to keep track of in an object) stats in this game is that they don't necessarily read intuitively in the existing interface.

For example, 1kg of meat looks the same at-a-glance as does .07kg of the same meat. Likewise, meat in any condition looks the same (though the color-coding of the condition does give you the broad-strokes, even though this information is not intuitive in the radial). You do have sorts, but you're now into multiple steps for what the character would understand instantly-- is this a slab or meat, or is it a tiny morsel?

A good example where two dimensions for an item works somewhat intuitively is with wetness (though, sadly, it only appears in the C)lothing screen), where a different indicator shows how wet something is at-a-glance, rather than your having to read-and-interpret the individual stat on each item.

Colors, shapes, and sizes "decompose" quickly in the players mind, and are digested very intuitively, whereas letters and numbers are more difficult. This process becomes much more difficult with each added independent measure/stat (not quite exponential, but certainly moreso than it's worth).

In truth, there is no good solution to this to model it "accurately" and still have it be fun. The truth is, if you were actually out in the wilderness, you'd likely bundle up all the sticks you're carrying and tie the bundle to your pack (which the sound effects seem to suggest)-- weight, but no volume-- and you'd have to pack your drinking water close to your body (weight, but in a different place, and out of a different volume) to keep it from freezing, also, stuffing an extra parka into your pack (mostly volume, not so much weight) would displace a lot of other items. You'd also, really quickly, decide to rip down some curtains, form a crude Santa Sack out of it, and just drag your shit through the snow.

The game isn't a simulation; it's an experience. And it's one we obviously all really love.
 

[stratvox]

On 10/11/2018 at 2:40 PM, Kauffy said:

is this a slab or meat, or is it a tiny morsel?

Obligatory. Sorry, I had to do it. 

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