Pillock

I really like the new "pain" aspect of sprains and the "headache" affliction that results from the energy drink. It's a big step forward in the health and afflictions management part of the game, and the blurring/tunnel-vision effect you get from pain is a good addition, too. But I can't help thinking they could go a whole lot further with it. I've suggested this a few times in the past, long before Steadfast Ranger, but it suddenly feels more relevant now that it's been implemented in part. What I'd really like to see is a separate "health bar" measurement to go alongside the other 4 health meters that currently indicate Hunger, Thirst, Fatigue and Warmth - a bar that indicates your pain level. It could range from "comfortable" at one end, through "irritation", "soreness", "in pain" and "agony" at the other end. All other health statuses and afflictions could affect it, increasing the severity accordingly. Every point of condition loss would reduce your comfort level; if you're starving, dehydrated, exhausted, or freezing, it'd all cause the comfort>pain bar to reduce; if you have an affliction, it'd cause discomfort, the amount varying according to the severity of that affliction; being over-encumbered could gradually add to your pain level over time, to simulate the strain on your shoulders from your heavy pack. And they'd all stack on top of each other to increase your overall pain level. The visual effects would scale according to your level of pain/comfort as well (a bit like it does now in the final 10% of condition loss, except over a wider range). There could even be some colour-coding of the blurring effects in order to indicate the cause of the pain without checking your inventory/status screen (whether it be from injury, sickness, hunger, thirst, exhaustion or cold). Taking pain-relief meds could increase your comfort level (temporarily) by a big chunk, the amount of meds you take affecting the amount of the bar that is replenished; meanwhile, eating a hot meal or drinking a hot beverage, sitting by a fire, or lying in bed could make smaller (again, temporary) buffs to the comfort meter. Curing the source of the pain would have to be done separately and independently, and would remove that part of your pain 'count' permanently once the treatment was completed. There could also be a link between your level of comfort and your efficiency at performing other tasks - sewing, repairing and crafting would all take longer and have a higher fail-chance the more pain you're suffering from. The same could go for lighting fires or harvesting materials, using weapons, and even searching containers. The UI assets for including this are all in the game already, I think - the visual effects, the limping, the voice cues, etc. - but this would bring them to the forefront of your attention and give you an intuitive system for dealing with it. Everyone knows from real-life experience that pain is debilitating and can consume your entire conscious attention if it's bad enough - I just feel at the moment that it's still a bit too easy to ignore things like injuries, sickness and condition-loss in the game, because they're not terribly prominent in the interface and they don't affect your regular activities very much. It might feel annoying to begin with, but pain is annoying! The interface should make you want to fix your health problems as soon as possible, and I'm not sure it really does currently. I think this would solve that.

The point here is, animals will not detect you during the harvesting process. If you're on or near their patrol route, they might walk past you during the accelerated time, but they will likely just move away again as if you weren't there. If you're unlucky, you might finish the accelerated-time action just when they're right near you, and then you'll have to react quickly. But that's a pretty rare occurrence. On the other hand, if you have anything in your inventory that's smell can be detected by a predator, then you're running a big risk if you start harvesting. It could be the tiniest morsel of cooked meat. That stuff still emits a scent - too small to show up on the scent-o-meter, but a scent nonetheless. If a predator detects it before you start harvesting, they WILL be on top of you when you finish. They don't interrupt your task, but they'll be standing there waiting for you when you're done. I've been attacked by a wolf up by the Lake Overlook cave above ML Camp Office before - wolves never go up there normally, but I was carrying one cooked venison steak, and I started harvesting a tree limb. I saw a black shape zoom across my vision during accelerated-time, and then I got a wolf attack immediately after I finished chopping. I've been attacked by a bear outside the fishing hut just below Jackrabbit's Island. I was harvesting a deer in small increments, cutting bits of meat and putting them on to my campfire to cook. But I wasn't dropping all the extra meat on the floor in between harvests, and the bear must have detected the smell from over by the Fishing Camp. He walked over to me during the accelerated-time phase, and then whacked me right when I came out of it. I've also been gored by a moose because I didn't see him before starting a map-sketch. (But he must have seen me!) Again, I saw the moose running up to me in fast-forward during accelerated time, and when I'd finished the mapping he immediately jumped on top of me. Having a campfire next to you while you harvest a carcass will keep you safe from wolves and moose, because they're scared of fire. But bears aren't, and they apparently have quite a good sense of smell. They will travel quite far out of their normal patrol routes if they detect a scent, and they might be well out of sight when you start an accelerated time task, so you don't always know they're on to you. Meat and guts don't emit a scent if they're on the floor, but they do if they're in your inventory. Cooked meat still emits a scent, even if it's only one single tiny piece and there's nothing showing on your scent-o-meter. If you make sure you drop all meat - cooked and fresh - and all fresh guts onto the floor before you start havesting (and check there's no moose nearby!), you will probably be safe.

I've had the revolver for all of about 5 minutes, and i've already done that at least 726 times. I also shot a man who was sitting in church when all I really wanted to do was rob him. It felt really bad. But I'm a fast learner. Now I put the revolver away if I don't want to shoot it.

Today I finally got my hands on the revolver for the first time (and deafened myself within 1 second of picking it up due to being in a very enclosed space and not realising that it might be already loaded - scared the crap out of me!). And now I'm walking around feeling like a boss. Wolves can't come near me. All I have to do is fire off one round in their general direction to send them squealing. This is nice. I like it. But it does make me wonder why we shouldn't be able to do the same thing with the rifle? It makes just as loud a bang. Right now we can only use the rifle to scare wolves if they haven't already spotted us - you can't fire it without aiming, and as soon as you aim they charge, undeterred by 'warning' shots (that's what I like to call them when I miss). I don't think it would unbalance anything, especially given how much rarer and more precious rifle shells are than revolver rounds anyway.

Finding matches! Seriously, I died of thirst 3 times in a row today within the first 2 days of starting new games due to not being able to make fire!

Why?

Another interesting aspect to this might be whether or not you would be able to use the bear spray in a struggle. It might seem odd if you couldn't, but it would probably present a bunch of knock-on issues of you could?

That's s fair point, but it still leaves the player with a decent choice: you can micro-manage your cooking in order to get the most benefit, or you can leave it on the stove while you read for an hour and accept the fact that you might be losing a handful of calories due to overcooking.

Well, rabbits need to be much harder to get close to in general, I think. I play with animal detection distances maxed out, and I can get within about 6 yards of a rabbit if I'm crouched. I don't think this is right, or good for the gameplay. If they introduced a bear spray, they could also adjust the animal behaviour a bit so that you simply can't get into range of a bunny in order to do that. Edit: The other thing is, I would expect bear spray to be pretty rare (at least as rare as stims, for example), so are you really going to want to use something that's in relatively short supply and finite just for the sake of 400-500 calories?

Half of these don't work with a bear, though. And having played a 2 or 3 in-game months (across about 4 starts) since Steadfast Ranger came out without having found a single revolver yet, I'm starting to think that they might be some kind of urban myth.

I think it's a really good idea. In earlier versions we could scare bears off with flares, torches and campfires (sometimes!). I miss that: it provided some exciting and tense moments. Now there's no way to prevent a bear charge other than keeping your distance, shooting it with firearm, bow or flare gun, or moving yourself on to a bit of terrain that the animal can't get to (which feels pretty glitchy and exploity to me). Bear spray seems like a good way to redress that, without making it too easy to avoid them.

This was an issue that surfaced a couple of updates ago, when they changed animal behaviour so that it continued to move while you were doing a time-accelerated task (before that, the outside world would just go on "pause" while you did whatever you were doing). And it was an issue that was fixed, as far as I know. Bears, wolves and meese do not approach you while you are in accelerated time, unless they had detected you before you started that task. So, the solution is not to start a time-accelerated task unless you know there's nothing following you. If you are carrying anything that emits a scent, a bear or wolf may be tracking you from some distance away without your knowledge, and they will continue to track the scent while you are in accelerated time. So drop your smellies before you harvest!

To be honest, I hadn't realised there were new environmental effects with the Steadfast Ranger update, but I did have a similar experience to what you describe just the other day while playing. I was trudging through wind and snow in poor visibility between Jackrabbit Island and Misanthrope's Homestead to pick up some animal hides and deliver them to my sweatshop at the townsite. My character was cold and tired and hungry and I just wanted to get him inside as soon as possible, warm up, have something to eat and put that particular day behind me. But just as I was passing the fishing hut between the two islands, the weather started to ease. The snow ceased, the cloud lifted and the wind dropped, and suddenly I could see the mountains in the distance and the ocean off to my right. I could hear the waves lapping on the ice and a flock birds chirping as they flew overhead. It stopped me in my tracks. I just paused to stand and admire the view of the landscape and the evening sky, my character's pressing survival needs suddenly gone from my attention. I've had many real life experiences where the natural environment has had this effect: walking in some beauty spot and coming across an amazing vista, and just stopping to stare for a while. But I never really even considered that a videogame could provoke that feeling, or anything approaching it. I've never been to Canada, so I couldn't comment on how authentic it is as a representation of that part of the world, but it does remind me of Highland Scotland sometimes. It's a massive achievement, I think. (Apocalypse, by the way!)

Personally, I would like there to be a chance for some more houses (at random), as well as cars, to be locked and require a prybar or finding a key in order to open them. Also, some interior doors or basements, maybe. And even some electrically operated ones in industrial places that only work in an aurora, like in Wintermute. As long as players are warned of the changes - they could put a notice on the news screen when you first open the game after an update, or on one of the loading screens - then it'd be fine.

No, it was before that, I'm fairly sure. But anyway, it's a welcome change.

On that (vague) topic, I just noticed earlier today that we now have 360° rotation for looking around inside cars. When did that happen?

The cars are all pretty old-looking. I'd imagine most of the doors would be frozen shut, even if they weren't locked! (though in gameplay terms, having to boil water and pour it over the door might be a bit of an unnecessary faff!)

This is very important to me. Thanks! I always played on "Low", because I thought that would mean less frequent respawns; then someone on the forum posted that it was the other way around, so I started a game on "High" respawn frequency. To be honest, I haven't really noticed much difference, but it will be good to know which one the is correct setting for what I want my game to be like.

This is excellent news! Thanks for confirming this.

Yeah, I get that and I agree. But I've managed to forget/get past that niggling unintuitive aspect, and it has the advantage of putting the challenge back into survival in a big way (I also have maximum rates of thirst, freezing and fatigue). The quest for food is really what drives everything in the game in terms of making survival challenging. If you got food, you don't need to go out and expose yourself to any danger; if you don't have food, suddenly you have to start exploring, traveling further, exposing yourself to the cold and to dangerous animals, to getting lost in a fog or a blizzard, and to finding yourself out in the boonies with nowhere safe to sleep, and to consuming much more of your more valuable resources. If you're finding the game too easy, you've really got to make calories harder to come by and maintain. Everything else follows from that.

Custom settings, my friend! Put all the animal populations on Low, all the animal awareness/detection settings on maximum, and the Wolf Fear setting on High (this makes them run away from you quite often, which makes them more unpredictable and harder to hunt). If you combine this with low general loot settings, and also highest rates of calorie burn, you will find that you don't always have enough food, especially in the early game. You still might not find it useful to fish if their populations are set to 'Low' as well, since like that you might only be able to catch 2 or 3 fish in an entire day - that's still a calorie profit (a small one), but you will have to spend a lot of time (and calories) collecting enough firewood to do it safely, which often puts you back into the red. I think what I struggle with the most is remembering where I've put stuff, or getting distracted while out exploring, and then running into trouble because I end up too far away from the safety of my home base and my provisions.

In both Episodes, Mackenzie finds the maps or is given them by an NPC (you don't have it at the start, if I remember correctly. Personally, I would prefer the map not to have sat-nav capabilities in the harder difficulty mode, though. And I'd prefer the objectives not to magically appear on the map, as well. It makes some of the missions, especially finding caches, pretty trivial. You don't even need to look for the things in the 'real' world, because you can just move your character until the map auto-location icon is over the thing you're after.

This is a glaring continuity error in the game. The description says "what looks like pork" before you even open it to see for yourself. I demand that this be fixed immediately.

I haven't got a clue what this sentence means, except for "Improved Rifle aiming..." Sounds good!

It would. Just yesterday I got caught in a blizzard, and built a campfire so that I could sleep in a snow shelter without freezing to death. It turned out there were no valid spots to place the snow shelter near enough to the fire, so had to build a second fire abiut a foot away from the first one, then painstakingly take and harvest torches so as not to waste all the fuel. The ability to move and or dismantle fireplaces would be nice for 'cleaning up', but the ability to damp down and reuse fuel from existing fires would probably have a more noticeable gameplay benefit.