Pillock

Start a new game with Custom settings and turn the hunger rate to its lowest setting. That should mean you have to eat a lot less. But if advise you to also turn the loot availability and animal populations right down as well, or else you might well find that you have so much food that you don't have anything to do. Finding food is what drives players to get out into the world and expose themselves to danger. That's why the calorie consumption is unrealistically high (and animal meat yields are unadjusted low) in the standard modes. Without that, you're just sitting around waiting to get cabin fever.

I found a whetstone in the Camp Office and also another one in the lookout tower. Not used either of them yet, because I haven't used the hatchet or the knife either!

The real moral dilemma was whether or not you wanted people to find out that you're a psychopath. I didn't think about the knife until later, when I went back to town and found the deer carcass. I just assumed that the knife would be in my inventory - I just found it weird when it wasn't. If it's deliberate, then I think it's a poor design decision (because it breaks immersion by reminding you that you're playing gamerules); if it was an oversight, I think the devs should fix it.

What's the thing you're most excited about in the Redux? The biggest improvement as you see it?

If you 'interact' with a carcass (even if it's just to check how much meat there is, without harvesting anything) the carcass starts to decay. If you don't touch them, they should stay where they are. I'm not sure if custom settings affect the rate of decay of spawned carcasses like the can do for general loot items, but you can be pretty sure that if they do, the decay is set to the fastest possible rate in Deadman!

There are millions and millions of cattails everywhere, so finding food isn't much of a problem. If you're armed there is a lot of hunting potential, and even if you're not there are plenty of rabbits. There's also loads of mushrooms and rosehips, so if you're running short it's a good place to get them. There are ready-made snares and improvised hatchets and knives lying about. The problem is staying warm. The weather is terrible.

During 4DON people were speculating about what Day 4's "Fire" challenge might mean, with many players on the forum apparently moving their gear stashes outdoors or into caves in case the buildings were all burned down! Do you think it would ever be possible (technologically) to have buildings or other structures catch fire or be destroyed or damaged during the course of a single game (by fire, or perhaps severe weather)? Do you think this would be a desirable gameplay feature?

You can make it quite efficient now, with the new cooking system. Collect your dead rabbits and reset the traps (I've been getting 4 or 5 at a time from the same area in my recent game), take them to place where you can build a sheltered fire (I'm using the cave at ML Overlook) and get it burning. You then harvest a bit of meat from the first rabbit and put it on to cook, then harvest the rest as you're cooking the meat in sequence. You can harvest the pelts and guts after that if you need them, and make water at the same time, or just leave them. You can get a day's worth of calories and hydration like that, and it only takes you a couple of hours. It's a damn sight easier than hunting, in my opinion.

When I played it it wasn't like that. There were wolves everywhere that there could possibly be, and several at a time. There were also deer, rabbits and bears aplenty. But I only lasted a few days - the animal population depletion rate is set to its maximum, I believe (and the respawn rate to its minimum?), so a depopulated world is likely if you last long enough to see it. But it shouldn't be like that at the start - maybe check you got the code correct?

Or of interest, what's the game like to play with no animals? I imagine it's pretty difficult? Where do you get food from? Did fishing and trapping work?

Just a thought on this. Getting parasites doesn't actually cost you any condition, if I remember rightly (it's been a while since I got them in-game!). All they do is gradually decrease your maximum condition level, down to 70% or something, over the course of the infection. Is that right? So, if your condition is already lower than that, you can't regain any through sleep/staying healthy and you don't have enough stims to restore it above that level anyway, are they not effectively harmless in this scenario? Edit: The same is true of Frostbite, I think. You can get the affliction even if your 'feels like' temp never dips below 0, if part of your body is uncovered. Frostbite doesn't actually cost you any condition either - it only reduces the maximum to which you can restore it. And in this scenario, you can't restore it anyway!

How do you feel, as a developer and creator, about "exploits" that players find in the survival mechanics? Do you regard them as undermining the experience you're trying to create and feel the urge to code them out of the game? Or do you regard the world of TLD as having it's own "science" separate from reality, and are happy for players to explore its limits? Do you enjoy hearing about players pushing these limits, or does it annoy you that aspects of the survival system are pushed to the point where they run contrary to real-world intuition or possibilities? Or a bit of both? Is there a line somewhere? Or are you indifferent to it?

Tips: This is completely brilliant. Insanely brilliant. Brilliantly insane. Being honest, reading this has completely ended any interest I had in playing Deadman (I did try it out, and if I persisted with it I reckon I could get to a week or so). In a way it's a relief - I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to play The Long Dark in this way, and your strategy advice utterly confirms that my continuing would therefore be pointless. But I'm in awe of the lengths you've gone to to find and exploit (and share) the limits of TLD Science. I salute you!

Well, I'm officially crap this! My best is 3 days so far,from a start in Desolation Point. Was about to head out towards Coastal Highway, when I made The Wrong Decision. And death followed. My advice : don't make the wrong decision. Ever.

I shall try (and fail at) this! Why allow even 2 feats, though?

For me it isn't about making the game harder for the sake of it, or about changing features just because a few individuals don't like them. These are things that damage the balance of the game because they exploit flaws in the mechanics to gain advantages that aren't intended. Can anyone really argue that the Devs deliberately designed the game so that you could use up three times the amount of calories you're actually eating, and suffer no ill effects, for example? These are aspects of the game that don't work properly, or that cause balancing problems with the value of certain items, or the difficulty of certain tasks. From an objective point of view, fixing them would make the game better.

I think you're exaggerating a bit

OK! Here's my suggestions: Infinite torches: campfire-pulled torches capped at 25% condition, and only torches that are 26% or above can be re-lit once they go out. Lighting a campfire or walking on to 'inaccessible places' always scares away wolves: the AI could have an intermediate behaviour-mode between 'aggression' and 'running way'. In this mode, they could stay locked on to you, but would run around you in an erratic way, making it difficult to shoot them. Staying near the fire or on a rock/tree/whatever where it can't reach you would keep you safe, but you wouldn't be able to escape the situation unless you took another measure, like firing the gun or throwing a torch/flare at it. Starvation: I think we need a 'malnutrition' affliction, similar to how Cabin Fever works - that is, if your calorie intake over, say, five days does not exceed your calorie expenditure, you get the affliction (there could be a warning phase first). If you get the affliction, your tiredness and freezing rate is doubled, and your general condition-loss rate and condition-regain time is also increased. You can cure it by bringing your five-day calorie in/out rate back into the positive. Night-time illumination making it easier to navigate indoors at night than in the day: Just get rid of the weird bluey illumination at night so that it's dark! Consistent condition-loss for freezing: scale condition-loss rate according to temperature - every few degrees of "feels like" temp below freezing could increase your condition-loss rate by a bit. That would make it advantageous to stay out of the wind and wear your warmest clothes, even if you're still freezing (which it isn't now). I'm not sure how you'd fix the ability to spider-man down very steep cliffs, rocks or dam faces without a big overhaul of the physics. But maybe some kind of 'tumbling' phase for movement might work? A bit like when you fall short distances and pick up bruises, minor injuries and clothing damage, except you can't arrest the falling until you reach a 'safe' bit of ground? I don't how that work really, in terms programming it, but it would be nice if the Devs could have a look at the situation, at least.

What's the stupidest / funniest / most embarrassing way you've died while playing or testing TLD?

Good list. The most niggly ones for me are these: ability to pull infinite re-usable torches from fires negates usefulness and value of other light-sources walking on to narrow rock-ledges / other inaccessible places causes wolf/bear to activate flee-mode - it's a bit too easy to exploit campfire-lighting is too easy/reliable/resource-cheap for scaring off wolves STARVATION EXPLOIT!!! the weird blue-ish illumination you get indoors during night-time means you can navigate mines/cave systems without light - but only at night! Consistent condition-loss rate for freezing, regardless of how close your temperature is to 0°C, makes it advantageous to go about naked in some circumstances

Not sure if you are able / willing to answer this at this stage, but when Wintermute was first released a year ago, it was announced that Episode 3 was planned for late 2017, with Episodes 4 and 5 planned for release in 2018. Obviously with the redux, this has now been put back. Is the schedule the same as before, except for being 12 months later? So is it fair for us to assume that Episodes 4 and 5 are now both planned for release over the course of 2019, or are you anticipating further adaptations due to player feedback on the new version that's coming out in December, and therefore a longer timeframe for the last two Episodes?

I've got a question about the health and afflictions mechanics. Currently our characters seem to be able to get 'minor' injuries like "bruising", but those don't seem to actually do anything. Are these remnants of past-planned mechanics that have been partially disabled in some way, or do they actually have an effect that's not immediately obvious to the player? Are there any plans to expand on the health and afflictions mechanics that are in the game already, or even to add new ones? I know there has been criticism of the way parasites and cabin fever are implemented, but personally I think they are really good additions to the gameplay - when your character gets one of those conditions it forces you to change your approach to the game and do something a bit different from the norm while your character recovers, and I think this drives interesting gameplay choices and strategy elements that wouldn't be there without those afflictions. Pain management, malnutrition, sickness, longer-lasting injuries are all things that, off the top of my head, might afflict a person stranded in a world like TLD's - might we see more of this sort of stuff somewhere down the line? (Sorry if this looks like more of a request than a question!)

Another related issue I have is that the ignition source defaults to the mag lens if you're carrying one. This doesn't matter in the general run of things, but if it's a cloudy day and you're surprised by a sudden wolf encounter, you don't want to be spending any extra time than necessary changing options in the firestarting menu - you just want to get the thing smoking as soon as possible. (And yes, I have died because of this a few times before. I've even now resorted to leaving the mag lens behind at base when I go out, for this exact reason.)

What's the closest real life experience you've had to that which faces the player-character in The Long Dark? (or anyone else in the HL team?)

Croatia or France on Sunday?