Troxism

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  1. I agree that in theory the Hacksaw being the best for quartering would be 'realistic' but frankly this game has never taken realism very seriously (it takes immersion seriously, and while that looks like realism on the surface it isn't the same thing). Gameplay has generally and should generally come first, and I outlined a case for why it should be a weak tool for gameplay balance reasons. I also don't really understand talking about realism and then saying something else is just 'creative use of game mechanics'. If you want to talk realism, I'm not really sure why cancel harvesting should give you experience about 5 times faster then just harvesting normally in a 'realistic' world. Or why using a hacksaw/hatchet suddenly becomes less effective on frozen bodies once you reach a certain skill level. Or why tools don't degrade if you cancel quarter rather then just doing it normally. My point is that arguing that the Hacksaw being fast would be more realistic, but then being okay with other completely unrealistic mechanics outlined in the exact same post (and as everyone knows there is a list a mile long of unrealistic mechanics in this game, I'm just bringing up the ones discussed here specifically), seems contradictory.
  2. I've been compiling various feedback/observations on the game recently, and the section related to Quartering and Harvesting has gotten so long, I figured i'd just post it on it's own. I am aware none of the issues this thread brings up are new (I made a post VERY similar to this but with less numbers back when quartering was first added to the game well over a year ago, although nothing actually came of it), and I'm aware that there have been other threads on this subject before (that haven't really gone anywhere), but I've tried to be as specific and accurate as possible in order to provide as complete and accurate of an overview as possible for various issues. Hopefully it is of some use. The reason I posted in this section is because pretty much all of these issues are related to Carcass Harvesting Skill in some way either directly or indirectly, and that only exists in Survival Mode. Quartering Balance Issues I think that the following changes to quartering should happen: Allow quartering with the Hacksaw (or remove it completely from the quartering menu, as currently it's just a red herring) Make quartering times scale with the hide/gut harvesting bonus of Carcass Harvesting skill (just add it in, same %s) Make quartering with a Hacksaw (if it is enabled as a valid tool for quartering), Improvised Knife, or Improvised Hatchet take 40% longer then with a Hunting Knife or Hatchet, so that there isn't a difference between difficulty modes on quartering effectiveness Make it take 2.5 hours baseline (150 minutes) to quarter a Bear or Moose so that it's at least break even with the drawback of having to harvest all the gut. Keep in mind this would be sped up by Carcass Harvesting skill, so this would actually be faster then before at higher skill levels with a Hunting Knife/Hatchet, although still slower with Improvised Tools/Hacksaw. The reasoning for the first bullet point should be obvious; right now the Hacksaw shows as an option in the quartering menu when selecting tools, but it gives an error message when you attempt to use it. It's an inconsistency in the game, and it should either not be on that menu at all (Heavy Hammers aren't for example), or you should be able to quarter with a Hacksaw. The reasoning for the following 3 bullet points is more complicated to explain (as they are all connected), but it is as follows: Baseline it takes 40 mins to harvest a hide by hand (but can only be done while not frozen), 40 mins to harvest a hide with an Improvised Knife, and 30 mins with a Hunting Knife. All other tools are slower, so they aren't really relevant in this case. So it takes 30 mins on Stalker and below, or 40 mins on Interloper, to harvest a hide at Carcass Harvesting Skill 1. Baseline it takes 10 mins to harvest Gut with a Hunting Knife, 15 with an Improvised Knife, all other methods are much slower so aren't really relevant to the discussion. So it takes 10 mins to harvest 1 gut on Stalker and Below, and 15 on Interloper. Note that a corpse being frozen or not has NO effect on harvesting hide or gut, unlike meat. The only difference is you can't hand harvest frozen corpses until higher skill levels of Carcass Harvesting. These values are scaled directly by the Carcass Harvesting skill bonus, 10/20/30% off for skill 3/4/5, so skill level makes all methods faster at an equal rate. Now, quartering a Bear/Moose always takes 2 hours. Quartering a Wolf or Deer always takes 1 hour. However, you can't quarter frozen corpses until higher skill levels of Carcass Harvesting. So if you had lvl 1 Carcass Harvesting, harvesting a Bear Hide + 10 guts takes 130 minutes with a Hunting Knife, or 190 with an Improvised Knife. These values drop to 91 and 133 minutes respectively with Carcass Harvesting 5. As mentioned before, it takes 120 minutes to quarter a Bear. Lets look at the numbers for Deer/Wolf: 1 hide and 2 gut each, so 50 mins baseline with a Hunting Knife, 70 minutes with an Improvised Knife, reduced to 35 and 49 respectively at Carcass Harvesting 5. It takes 60 minutes to quarter, so again, you have inconsistency where it's sometimes faster to quarter, and sometimes not based on skill and tools. So looking at those numbers, it becomes clear why I think quartering should receive the Carcass Harvesting hide/gut harvesting time bonus as well, since quartering is effectively harvesting the hide + gut from an animal, plus it has the added bonus of giving you meat bags you can carry (keep in mind, you CAN still harvest meat bags in place if you don't want to haul them, so there isn't really much drawback to quartering, or you could just harvest the meat first if you can do it fast enough to avoid the corpse freezing/have carcass harvesting 5 anyways and then quarter to quickly harvest hide/gut in cases where it is optimal. Also, since it takes about 40-45% longer to harvest hide and gut (problem is the scaling is different for gut vs hide, so the ratios vary a bit) with an Improvised Knife, which is the best tool you can use for this purpose on Interloper, it becomes clear why I think the tools available on Interloper should be 40% slower at quartering. Otherwise you will always have a fundamental mechanical imbalance between difficulty levels because one thing (hide and gut harvesting time) scales, but quartering time doesn't. Ultimately the point of quartering should be to cut up the body to transport the meat to harvest it in a warmer place, not to just 'speed harvest' hide and gut from a corpse you have already harvested the meat from, or are just going to cut the bags up in place from. So what would the numbers look like if the suggested changes were made? At Carcass Harvesting 5 it would take 105 minutes (1.75 hours) to quarter a bear with a Hunting Knife or Hatchet, or 91 minutes to harvest all the gut and hide with a Hunting Knife instead, making there be some actual trade-off for the advantage of making the meat transportable. At Carcass Harvesting 5 with an Improvised Knife, it would take 147 minutes (about 2.5 hours) to quarter a bear (150*1.4*0.7), or 133 minutes to harvest the hide/gut. Again having an actual trade-off rather then just being a clearly superior option. For a Deer/Wolf, the revised numbers would look like this: For a Hunting Knife at Carcass Harvesting 5, it would be 42 minutes to quarter, or 35 minutes to harvest hide/gut directly. For Improvised Knife at Carcass Harvesting 5, 58.8 minutes to quarter and 49 to harvest directly. Since quartering and harvesting hide/gut would scale equally with skill level, Carcass Harvesting 1 numbers would retain the same ratios (this is why making quartering time scale is important), just it would take longer for both. In general this would nerf quartering for Interloper except at high skill levels where it would be almost the same (very slightly faster), and buff it for Stalker and below, which makes sense, because quartering is already very weak on lower difficulties as it's easy to stay warm on them and harvesting is generally faster due to superior tools, while on Interloper it's currently a faster way to harvest a corpse then actually directly harvesting a corpse in most cases, which is really backwards and presumably not the intended purpose of the mechanic. Keep in mind you would still be able to use for example a Hacksaw to quarter and then hand harvest the meat bags indoors to save on durability on your Knife, so there would still be a reason to quarter to save durability, as Hacksaws are cheaper to repair in terms of Scrap Metal, then it is to re-craft new Improvised Knives. And just in general, if you didn't actually have a knife (for example only a Hatchet or Hacksaw), quartering would be better than trying to harvest hide/gut off the corpse directly, so again, quartering would still be very useful in some cases if you had sub-optimal tools. These changes would not make quartering useless on Interloper by any means, even with the severe 40% time increase, just a bit more balanced and consistent. Issues with meat harvesting times/mechanics at higher skill levels Since at higher skills, the threshold for a corpse being 'frozen' goes up, and at lvl 5, a corpse is never considered 'frozen', this actually creates a situation where levelling up Carcass Harvesting is detrimental on Interloper difficulty. Here is why: A Hunting Knife on an unfrozen corpse takes 8 minutes to harvest 1kg of meat at skill 1. It takes I think 15 or 20 mins to harvest 1kg of frozen meat (exact value is not relevant), so it's absolutely terrible at it and the hatchet/saw is much better for frozen bodies. A Hatchet/Hacksaw takes 10 minutes to harvest 1kg of frozen meat at skill 1. Or 16 minutes for 1kg of unfrozen meat. An Improvised Knife takes 12 minutes to harvest 1kg of meat at skill 1. I think you can see the problem pretty quickly here. Since on Interloper your best harvesting tools are an Improvised Knife for unfrozen, and a Hacksaw for frozen (Improvised Hatchet is just a slower Hacksaw for harvesting meat), this means that: -You actually want to wait for corpses to freeze if possible on Interloper to optimise meat harvesting times, although with quartering usually being the best choice on Interloper with existing mechanics as described above it usually doesn't matter anyways. This is pretty logically backwards. -Carcass Harvesting 5 actually penalises you in some situations, as at that level corpses are never considered frozen for the purposes of harvesting, meaning your choice becomes between an Improvised Knife at 12 minutes base, or a Hacksaw at 16 minutes base per 1kg of unfrozen meat, instead of the faster 10 minutes base per kg of frozen meat you could achieve earlier with a Hacksaw. Now it's more complex than that, because going from Carcass Harvesting 4 to 5 means going from 70% meat harvesting times to 50%, so in reality you still get faster, as 70% of 10 from the frozen Hacksaw is 7, which is still slower than 50% of 12 from unfrozen Improvised Knife, which is 6. But the gain isn't as much as it should be, or is on Stalker and below where you have access to the much faster Hunting Knife. But it's still kind of an inconsistency and a weird mechanic. The way the 'carcasses aren't considered frozen' from Carcass Harvesting 5 should really work, is just allowing you to hand harvest/quarter from 'frozen' bodies, not simply flagging the entire carcass as 'not frozen'. This would remove all these inconsistencies. Yes this would mean it would be slower to harvest a 'frozen' body with a Hunting Knife/Improvised Knife at skill 5 then before, but it would be faster with a Hatchet/Hacksaw, so I think that is a fair trade. Or alternatively, the ideal system would basically give you the best of both worlds, where a 'frozen' body at skill 5 would take the fastest time of either frozen or unfrozen for any tool used, ie 4 mins for a hunting knife, 5 for the hatchet/hacksaw, 6 for the improvised knife, instead of using the unfrozen values across the board. Issues with hide harvesting times As I mentioned above, at skill level 1, it takes 40 minutes to harvest a hide by hand, 30 minutes with a Hunting Knife, 40 minutes with an Improvised Knife, 45 minutes with a Hatchet and 60 minutes with a Hacksaw (Don't remember with Improvised Hatchet but it's absolutely awful at it so lets just ignore it). While obviously you can't hand harvest frozen bodies, you can at lvl 5, meaning on Interloper tools become useless for harvesting hides after lvl 5 (as you are just paying durability for no reason), which makes little sense. Also even on unfrozen bodies, it is silly that it actually takes longer to harvest a hide with a hatchet then by hand. You would think using a tool would help you, not slow you down in this situation. Hand harvesting hides probably needs a nerf, as it's very effective for some reason, while for example harvesting gut by hand is worse then harvesting gut with ANY tool, even a hacksaw or hatchet which are pretty bad at it as well (40 minutes per gut by hand, 30 with hacksaw, 20 with a hatchet, 15 with Improvised Knife, 10 with Hunting Knife), and obviously hand harvesting meat is far worse than any tool as well. Solution: This obviously isn't a major problem, but I think the Hatchet should be a little better at harvesting hides (40 mins instead of 45), and bare hands should be a bit worse (maybe 50 mins instead of 40). Currently it doesn't make much sense. Power-leveling exploit for Carcass Harvesting Currently if you 'cancel harvest' tiny slivers of meat from a quarter of meat or carcass you will get far more skill points then just harvesting the same amount of meat normally off the quarter/carcass. There seems to either be some kind of 'floor' that causes you to get skill points even for small slivers of meat, or maybe it's counting cancelled actions as if they spent the full amount of time and giving skill points based off that, but either way it's quite obvious you get many times more skill points cancel harvesting this way then is intended (like 4-5 times more). This also seems to actually degrade the tool used faster then normal, lending credence to my theory that it's acting like you never cancelled the action, but I haven't exhaustively tested this as it's quite difficult to track skill point gains as there is no hard value in the game just a vague bar. Tool durability exploit with quartering If you keep cancelling your quarter action, doing only about 4-5 minutes at a time and just restarting it over and over until you are eventually done, you never lose any durability off your tool you use to quarter a carcass, compared to actually losing durability if you just let the action continue. Anyways, if anything is unclear (as I kind of tossed out numbers without always explaining much), I'll be happy to clarify, but I hope this post clearly illustrates some of the issues that currently exist with the harvesting system and carcass harvesting skill.
  3. My 2 cents: For me, mods have basically been the only way I can play the game (somewhat of an exaggeration, but honestly not that much of one), ever since the new breath effect was added shortly before 'release'. The 'fix' for it a few updates ago hasn't changed anything in that regard (I honestly couldn't tell any difference post update). It's so obnoxiously bright/contrasts so much with everything else indoors/in darkness I basically can't play with it on anymore (it actually gives me a headache after a while). Mods allow me to get rid of it (ideally I'd just dampen it's brightness by about 90% when it's dark so that it's not any brighter then the surroundings, but outright removal is close enough). My point isn't really about that specific gripe (while it is a deal-breaker for me personally, it obviously isn't for everyone), but to show that in some cases mods are basically the only way some people are able to enjoy the game, and not always because of game play changes but simply by adding what amount to extra configuration options. It's just not realistic for the devs to add configuration options for every possible player demand, and mods allow that demand to be filled. It worries me that soon enough (once there is a new update that breaks mods again) there will be no way for me to address this problem, and the game will be come essentially unplayable for me (as I don't feel like getting headaches constantly) until mod support is added (and at this rate it looks like that will be years in the future).
  4. In that case there is an issue with your specific game, or some other setting is interfering with it as 'Low condition regain' works perfectly for me in both 1.16 and in 1.17. I simply proposed a possibility as to why you were experiencing the problem. In my experience on this forum, often the solution is something simple. I am sorry if it seemed patronising.
  5. Aurora is always pretty random so a few days sample size isn't really conclusive of anything. The reason you are getting no condition recovery at 'low' is likely because you are only sleeping 1-2 hours at a time, and it depends on the bed type. Condition recovery is not linear, and you get more condition for every consecutive hour of sleep; you get way way way more condition back for sleeping 10 hours in one go then 1 hour at a time 10 times in a row (this was actually a method I used to nerf condition from sleep previously to make the game harder). Also sleeping in a bedroll gives less condition then in a bed (and trappers bed is magic and gives even more). Note that the game does keep track of fractional condition. But for example, sleeping in a bedroll on 'low' condition regain from sleep for only 1 hour will only give you 0.25% condition back, so even doing so a few times in a row may not actually tip you over to 1% higher. A bed would give you 0.5% for 1 hour on 'Low', but around 19% for sleeping 11 hours in a row, assuming you don't dehydrate first (depends on your thirst settings if you actually can do that even with a full thirst bad). Either way I can confirm (since that is the setting I have played on almost exlusively since the update) that 'Low' condition regain functions properly, and appears to be about half of what 'Medium' is; which is what Interloper is/was by Default. High is doubled again from Medium. So it's basically something like 64/32/16% for 10 hours of consecutive sleep in a bed, but those exact values may be off (and like I said, depend on the specific bed used as well) and obviously if thirst is set to very high you will dehydrate before 10 hours of sleep pass and lose condition from that instead of gaining it.
  6. It's pretty hard to do a very long Interloper run, because it's so damn boring past 50-100 days (seriously, long runs in this game on any difficulty give you IRL cabin fever). In theory you can basically live forever on Interloper (if you really want to scrape by with nothing but your magnifying lens, crafted clothes, and your bare hands plus a hat), and you have enough supplies to live 'comfortably' (ie with actually clothing/a bow + arrows to make hunting easy) for about 3000-5000 days depending on how carefully you manage things, and that isn't even factoring in anything you get from beachcombing. So even if you don't want to scrape by with nothing but a lens/your bare hands, you can easily do a thousands of days run. I don't think most people realize how much of a game changer having lvl 5 in Carcass Harvesting, Cooking, Firestarting, and Archery actually is (it really makes everything very easy, and with lvl 5 carcass harvesting there is little need for tools at all). And for that matter, I don't think most people realise you can make it to day 200 on Interloper only using 2-3 matches in total (and no firestriker charges), and all of those only in the first 20 days (although obviously it depends on luck at the start to use that few, but even if you are very very very unlucky you wouldn't need more then about 12 matches to get started and then never use one the rest of the game), meaning matches aren't even close to the actual limiting factor. (there are over 200 matches on Interloper if you count all the firestriker charges/flares you can use to make fires) I only mention this because the common response I hear from people inexperienced with interloper is that 'well you would run out of matches eventually). Clothing wise: Not like it makes any difference if it is -100C or -10C Feels Like outside so clothing hardly matters much past day 50 on Interloper anyways outside of the minimum required to avoid frostbite, and even that can technically dealt with, it just makes things way harder then they need to be if you choose to go completely naked; crafted clothing is basically free to repair, since there is hundreds of scrap metal to make tackles out of, so the only thing would be having to occasionally use cloth to repair a hat. But if you only wear the hat as needed to avoid frostbite (ie only wear it if outside for a while otherwise keep it off to save durability) and never get it damaged by wolves, the cloth consumption would be so low as to be negligible; it is likely beach combing would give you enough and even if it didn't you wouldn't run out of cloth for thousands of days this way unless you wasted it all early on/constantly waste bandages. Edit: And I completely forgot about fishing too: you can fish with some of the hundreds of scrap metal, which would also stretch your 'easy survival' past running out of birch for arrows (birch and cloth are the biggest limiting factors on 'easy life' so conserving them is the most important thing if you are going for a thousands of days run). Heck if you were allowing starvation (ie exploiting) there really is no reason you couldn't live forever off just rabbits, which you don't need anything but a lens to cook and your bare hands to catch/harvest, so you wouldn't even need to mess with stealing wolf kills which is slightly risky. But either way, I don't think anyone cares about all the minutiae of such a run, because I don't think anyone is ever going to bother, so I'm not going to go into full detail about how you could go about 'playing conservatively'. I just like to ramble about stuff. But really, I would be surprised if anyone actually bothered to keep playing past 100-200 days on Interloper, not because of it being a challenge, but because it's just so repetitive and boring at that point, and the only way you can really die is a massive screw up if you are already good enough to make it that far.
  7. Cabin Fever is a mostly trivial mechanic, since you already are encouraged to do all your cooking/boiling outdoors to gain the fire duration bonus (it isn't a 'duration bonus' per say, but your fire time drops slower if it is considered an outdoor fire... and that means you for example want to make fires in the outdoor parts of caves or in fishing huts), and if you do this semi regularly (I mean, you need to boil/cook a certain amount just to stay alive, so...) you will never get cabin fever. Cabin Fever is a lot more aggressive on Interloper (if you get risk you will quickly get cabin fever if you don't go outside), so the solution is to do the above and never get risk at all. The one complaint I have about Cabin Fever is this: crafting Wolfskin/Bearskin Coats will often give you Cabin Fever if you don't take 'breaks' to boil stuff outdoors (which can be annoying if the weather doesn't cooperate and give you clear weather to use the lens, forcing you to just run out, run back in to warm up, run out to try to prevent Cabin Fever risk before it strikes, or head to a cave and chill out there). Doesn't really make sense to get Cabin Fever while actively doing something, but no simple solution either. As for 'hibernation' I mean tbh I have no idea why Cabin Fever was actually put into the game (it's mostly a mechanic that catches beginners off guard, but is trivial for experienced players to avoid). Because if it was to solve hibernation then tbh the devs should have first fixed the whole starving exploitation which was and is FAR more of an issue (literally can't believe an actual exploit is allowed to stay in the game when the fix is trivial), yet absolutely nothing has been done to fix that for years. And the threat of Cabin Fever has certainly never made me feel like I should move on from an area; I always end up doing that for other reasons (boredom, loot cataloguing ect). I mean it is what it is. This game has a bunch of mechanics that don't really make sense or actively encourage exploitation. Heck, even the recent change to make you unable to climb while encumbered once again punishes you for not starving (because meat weighs a lot and by starving you can cut your food requirement to between about 1/3 to 1/5 of what it is supposed to be saving you a good bit of weight if you are going on an extended trip). So does the 'can't rest while not tired mechanic', since starving players can bypass it (because starving lowers your max fatigue after a while, letting you sleep as much as you like at that point), while non starving players are forced to use the far less efficient pass time (that consumes extra calories and water, while again, a starving player doesn't even have to pay that extra calorie cost anyways). Anyways, I could go on in much further detail about how broken some mechanics are in this game/explain more of what I mean above, but I don't think anyone cares to read an essay and it's wayyyy off topic. As for a 'vitamin mechanic'; this would basically just arbitrarily cap survival times (when currently the game doesn't really put a cap on those at all if you play carefully), unless there was some form of respawn implemented for it (which wouldn't really make much sense). But to bring all this back around to the original topic: my feelings on Cabin Fever are a resounding 'meh'. I don't care too much about the mechanic either way as it has almost no effect on my gameplay for all the above reasons.