Cabin Fever on Interloper

[Bobfrid]

Hi!

Interloper has been an interesting challenge, but I'm finding cabin fever and the risk of cabin fever to be a little too prevalent in my playthroughs. I think it fills the purpose of keeping you spending at least some time outdoors. However, given the ungodly cold temperatures in Interloper and the near daily blizzards, it's becoming more of a hassle and, to me, taking me out of the experience.

In my 119 day playthrough I survived 90 blizzards. In the current playthrough I've had 24 blizzards in 28 days. So, it seems on most days it's likely that at least part of your day will be consumed by waiting out a blizzard. Mornings are cold enough that even with all the crafted clothes you still can't hang around forever outside. Sure, you can build fires, but as matches are limited and magnifying glass fires require direct sunlight, match rationing is needed.

So, I'm finding myself needing to obsess about the amount of time I can get outdoors. The cabin fever warning pops up frequently and I've got to find ways of spending even more time outdoors in conditions that scream "For crying out loud, it's too cold and nasty out to be outside!" If I don't, then I get full on cabin fever and insist on taking a nap in an air temperature where Fahrenheit and Celsius collide. Thus, I forsake my perfectly good indoor stove/fireplace/etc and take the risk of building a fire outside to cook, boil water, or other activity, knowing that I'm a strong wind away from losing the fire early or a blizzard driving me indoors to avoid my clothes disintegrating.

I don't think a major adjustment is in order, just a slight one on Interloper to be a little more forgiving on the indoor/outdoor ratio. From what I understand, it was initially implemented to combat hibernation. In Interloper it feels like it's trying to get me to kill myself, rather than the game having to do it. Believe me, in Interloper the game doesn't need that help.

Perhaps a "sliding scale" for the cabin fever ratios would work on Interloper? Earlier in the playthrough it could be a bit more forgiving and as time progressed the ratio could be adjusted so you needed more time outdoors to avoid it. Easier said than coded, I'm sure.

Another suggestion is to make cabin fever key off of excessive use of the combination of sleeping and indoor "passing time", rather than a purely indoor/outdoor ratio.

Yet another suggestion would to have indoor activities count less against your cabin fever "meter". For example, performing crafting, repairs, or reading indoors for an hour would only add 20 minutes to the cabin fever meter, but passing time for an hour would add the full hour. Sleeping indoors would not raise or lower the meter, as you're unconscious.

My last (off topic) suggestion with cabin fever is to have some fun with it. I don't know if it's been suggested before, but instead of a text warning, maybe the character would start saying odd things like, "I could taste the chickens plotting against me all the way from next Tuesday", which would indicate you were getting close to cabin fever. If nothing else writing the lines and having the voice actors record them would be fun.

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come off as too whiny or critical. I really do love the game, appreciate the work you've done, and appreciate Interloper (I do miss the rifle, though). I'm sure there are things I can do to improve my gameplay as well. It just seems that I'm fighting cabin fever as much as nature right now, and I'd prefer to keep more of the fight against nature.

Thanks!

[mystifeid]

To temporarily be rid of the risk of cabin fever all you need to do is to spend a night in an open air cave - for example: Forest Cave in Pleasant Valley or in Desolation Point you can kill the bear and use the bear cave.

Quote

In my 119 day playthrough...

Ouch, bet that hurt.

[Muk_Pile]

Better yet, rush to your nearest fishing hut and spend the night staring at a hole in the ice, wondering why the hell you really need to be there outside in the cold and not inside sleeping in your nice warm bed.  And when the sun is high in the sky, the air above 20^o F, and you can just barely keep your eyes open, just head on over to the nearest car and catch a few "zzzs", if you happen to be on CH or PL.  

Easy as pie, you sleep-deprived, mental-unstable individual!  

[Sapped]

20 hours ago, Bobfrid said:

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come off as too whiny or critical. I really do love the game, appreciate the work you've done, and appreciate Interloper (I do miss the rifle, though). I'm sure there are things I can do to improve my gameplay as well. It just seems that I'm fighting cabin fever as much as nature right now, and I'd prefer to keep more of the fight against nature.

Nope, not whiny at all - I've been thinking the same thing.  I'm up around 50 days of my current play through on interloper, and cabin fever has by far proven to be the greatest risk to my health, as it keeps forcing me outside into situations that beggar belief.  Recovering from a wolf attack and food poisoning, and there's a blizzard with a windchill of -52C outside?  Well you've been in recovering a little too long - out you go m'boy. 

[ChillPlayer]

Live in a place where there are fishing huts and your risk for Cabin Fever is pretty much gone. It used to give me trouble until I recognized that I just need to pile huge amounts of wood all the time so I can stay outside for how long I want. On my current day 40 run I've spent 322h outside and 302 inside and didn't get a risk warning yet.

Also the top of the lighthouse in DP ist a great spot to spend the night outside

[Ruhroe]

The cabin fever mechanic is actually pretty necessary, and works fairly well. It prevents holing up inside where it's warm, where you don't have to put wear and tear on your clothing (you can run around naked) or use matches.

What's happening on Interlopper is the average temperature gets progressively colder (it's much quicker and lower on this mode than the others). I'm on day 50 of a play through and on a sunny day mid afternoon (when it's warmest) it's still minus 32 degrees. It's very hard to stay outside for any length of time even with the best clothing provided. It only takes a minute or two in game to go to freezing. I might as well run around naked--which I do. So, what happens is I'm basically just letting myself get frozen and use my health pool to determine how much I can farm wood, hunt or whatever. That's the real problem, as it's making clothing pretty much invalid outside. I've lost incentive to farm up and make a wolf coat, or worry about clothing at all pretty much (save for inside it helps me unfreeze a little quicker).

TL;DR: I'm not digging the cold dropping over time system as is. They need a better way of progressively making the game harder without invalidating much of the basic game mechanics (such as clothing). Perhaps add stronger winds that deteriorate clothing more quickly, while making the use of clothing necessary to avoid Hypothermia even when already freezing (unless that's already a thing). Let clothing retain some use outside somehow, even if it's to keep from freezing a bit longer. Anything which reduces the effectiveness of what is provided, but not invalidate it on such a large scale.

[mystifeid]

Which map have you based yourself in? What % of the world explored?

At the moment I have 21/14 clothing, it is mid-afternoon, there is a cruel wind blowing and it feels like -23C. I have a reasonable distance to travel and don't really want to get there with my health below 80% (because my destination is a cave and I normally sleep 3 hours at a time without a fire).

There is no way I could do that if I took my clothing off. (Just checked and it does feel like -57C without clothes - must've warmed up a degree in the interim !)

But I think that if you could get 80% or 90% or more of the world explored while naked then you probably have a valid point.

[exeexe]

On 18/10/2016 at 5:13 AM, Bobfrid said:

Yet another suggestion would to have indoor activities count less against your cabin fever "meter". For example, performing crafting, repairs, or reading indoors for an hour would only add 20 minutes to the cabin fever meter, but passing time for an hour would add the full hour. Sleeping indoors would not raise or lower the meter, as you're unconscious.

Wrong. Firstly you do get cabin fever by sleeping inside and 2nd because the same could then be said about sleeping outdoors. Sleeping outdoors would not lower the risk of getting cabin fever. So if you got cabin fever you would have to stay awake for 24 hours to get rid of it outside. Not ideal

[ElvisHunter]

3 hours ago, exeexe said:

Wrong. Firstly you do get cabin fever by sleeping inside and 2nd because the same could then be said about sleeping outdoors. Sleeping outdoors would not lower the risk of getting cabin fever. So if you got cabin fever you would have to stay awake for 24 hours to get rid of it outside. Not ideal

It was a suggestion, and by it's nature can't be wrong. How abrasive. 

[exeexe]

5 hours ago, ElvisHunter said:

It was a suggestion, and by it's nature can't be wrong. How abrasive. 

The last sentence was not a suggestion

[Izmeraldas]

I like this topic a lot

Look at it this way.

In my current Interloper game, I have been to Pleasant Valley, Coastal Highway and Mystery Lake.

The game has not spawned a bed roll, a knife, a hatchet, a rifle, bullets.. much of anything actually.

What it has spawned are several hacksaws and a bag full of sewing kits lol

Best two spawns I have gotten are a lantern and a lighter.

I started it from the Halloween Event so I had two pies, otherwise food is rarer than rare and I have had

to survive off what ever I find in the world.

 

I had to end it when I got hypothermia returning home after a food hunt and got caught in another

blizzard. Which has become much more frequent. I would have been fine except for one thing.

After returning home and sleeping my health back up from 2% to 36% the game decided I was at

risk for Cabin Fever, I barely spend any time in doors because I have to hunt for food and wood

for water on an every day basis. I can't even avoid blizzards, I have to be out there collecting

what I can.

But now that I'm at risk for cabin fever along with hypothermia and a condition of 36 I'm stuck shelving

that game or allowing myself to suicide. Yes it's just an at risk right now, but I can't cure the hypothermia

outside.

16 days halted by a cabin fever threat *smh*.

So yeah. Cabin Fever needs to be re examined to do what it was intended to do. Unless you spend nearly

a month in doors, you shouldn't be at risk for cabin fever. This is the third time this has happened.

Best challenge I've had on TLD, though

[mystifeid]

1 hour ago, Izmeraldas said:

The game has not spawned a bed roll, a knife, a hatchet, a rifle, bullets.. much of anything actually.

Off the top of my head I can only think of seven or eight locations where I have found a bedroll. It is very important to keep moving very fast in the beginning until essentials like a bedroll are found.

There are no rifles/bullets in Interloper.

For a knife/hatchet/arrowheads you must first find a hammer - again by moving fast in the beginning - and then go to the forge in the Riken where you can make your own. (This is also a popular time/place to get cabin fever)

1 hour ago, Izmeraldas said:

Yes it's just an at risk right now, but I can't cure the hypothermia outside.

It will help if all cooking/snow melting is done outside in a sheltered place or in a cave or fishing hut. When you pass through coal mines be sure to pick up coal. It is worth its weight in gold. Without a bedroll though, things aren't looking good for you.

1 hour ago, Izmeraldas said:

This is the third time this has happened.

I think Interloper is quite hard. Although I have managed to have some longer games, even now, probably more than 80% of the games I start are over in the first thirty days and that can be extremely frustrating. Usually I suffer death by wolf and I cannot actually remember a time when I died as a direct result of cabin fever. Funny that everyone complains about cabin fever though and no-one minds the wolves.

[Izmeraldas]

So.. this happened. It's Voyageur and not Interloper but any way...

I'm out hunting deer and collecting firewood... as usual... I spend the whole day out doing this.

I come home with just a little light to spare, put everything up and head to sleep.

I wake up, and go to cook some of the meat I'd collected (three pieces) and boil some drinking water

and... Cabin Fever. Out of nowhere. No warning or anything.

This was supposed to stop people from hibernating. That's spending the whole game sleeping only

getting up to eat, drink and go back to bed again.

I have never done that. I wasn't doing that. This is like getting sprains while standing still. But worse.

Luckily I can take care of this, unlike in my Interloper game where I can't.

This should be the rarest condition to get based on some hard set criteria. To stop hibernating players.

Not players cooking food and boiling water lol

[mystifeid]

I am not sure why your Voyageur character got cabin fever but from what I understand the mechanism looks at total time spent indoors over the past six days. Also in Voyageur it is not supposed to be possible to get cabin fever in the first 50 days.

My Interloper character just died on day 58. Death by wolf. Again. Ask me how I feel.

[Ohbal]

@Izmeraldas did you use that game within the 4 days of night event? 

Just asking cause I also got the cabin fever affliction on my Voyager game for the first time right after the event finished. Something to do with the game taking the whole event as one day (or so it looked like in the journal). 

[Kyopaxa]

I also think the mechanics of cabin fever need to be revisited. Especially the way it calculates over 6 days, which I think is wrong.

In my last interloper game, no matter spending the day outside traveling from Coastal Highway to The Riken, when I entered inside I suddenly was at 20% risk of cabin fever. Seriously, it doesn't make sense that you travel a whole day outside and suddenly you feel risk of cabin fever by just entering indoors.

Check how Hypothermia works. The risk of hypothermia rises the longer you spend time freezing outside, but it resets whenever you heat again. Cabin fever should work the same way. The longer you are inside, the riskier it is to get cabin fever, but it resets whenever you spend a certain amount of time outside, instead of having to fight against a 6 day long ratio.

[mystifeid]

Quite often, depending on the wind and time spent warming up, it doesn't take that long to walk from Coastal Highway to the Riken and time spent in the connecting coal mine counts as time spent indoors. I've walked from the last cave before the Raven Falls trestle bridge to the Riken with a 45-49kg pack and even that took only about ten hours.

It's not a bad idea to plan to spend a night or two in the cave under the Arch in Crumbling Highway both on the way to (and from) Desolation Point. That way you can spend a couple of days quickly forging a knife/arrowheads and crafting a bow/arrows without fear of immediately being at risk of CF. Otherwise you can just go up to the wheelhouse (or some other protected spot), light a fire and sleep there an hour or two at a time.

Desolation Point is the place in Interloper where CF seems to comes into play the most.

If you can kill the bear, you can go and live in the bear cave near Broken Bridge and this cave is the best place in DP for curing CF.

All in all, overcoming any challenge presented by Cabin Fever is not very hard and helps to break up the monotony of: find a bed, eat, drink, sleep, drink.

Also, suggesting change to make things easier in the hardest mode of this game is maybe not a great idea and if you wished to be kind to me at least, then you might find alternatives that actually increase the challenge.

[Kyopaxa]

10 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Quite often, depending on the wind and time spent warming up, it doesn't take that long to walk from Coastal Highway to the Riken and time spent in the connecting coal mine counts as time spent indoors. I've walked from the last cave before the Raven Falls trestle bridge to the Riken with a 45-49kg pack and even that took only about ten hours.

Thanks for the tips!

In that travel I actually took some time outside skinning and cooking a deer in the cave at Old Island Connector. Also I went through the mine really quick as my light source was scarce. Then I didn't have my sleeping bag yet, so no option for sleeping at that cave.

Even there are options to avoid cabin fever by sleeping in a cave, I still believe the mechanics should be revisited so spending a certain amount of time outside resets it. I find the 6 day average ratio as a bad implementation that causes some weird situations like this, forced to be outside because 2 days ago you decided to craft deer pants indoors, no matter if you spent the last day walking. The whole thing feels too forced and completely out of logic.

[mystifeid]

34 minutes ago, Kyopaxa said:

The whole thing feels too forced and completely out of logic.

There is an almost countless list of unrealistic things so this does not bear thinking about.

We haven't seen a finished product yet and doubtless some changes will be made. Who knows what will happen.

In the meantime, since it seems to have the highest blizzard frequency, go spend 50 or 100 days in Pleasant Valley (if you haven't already) and tell me what you think about cabin fever then.

[cekivi]

On 2016-11-06 at 9:13 PM, Izmeraldas said:

But now that I'm at risk for cabin fever along with hypothermia and a condition of 36 I'm stuck shelving

that game or allowing myself to suicide. Yes it's just an at risk right now, but I can't cure the hypothermia

outside.

16 days halted by a cabin fever threat *smh*.

 

14 hours ago, Kyopaxa said:

In my last interloper game, no matter spending the day outside traveling from Coastal Highway to The Riken, when I entered inside I suddenly was at 20% risk of cabin fever. Seriously, it doesn't make sense that you travel a whole day outside and suddenly you feel risk of cabin fever by just entering indoors.

 

3 hours ago, Kyopaxa said:

I find the 6 day average ratio as a bad implementation that causes some weird situations like this, forced to be outside because 2 days ago you decided to craft deer pants indoors, no matter if you spent the last day walking. The whole thing feels too forced and completely out of logic.

 

And the cabin fever saga continues...

[Scyzara]

What bothers me most about cabin fever on Interloper atm is that the cabin fever warning (= the cabin fever risk affliction) doesn't seem to work properly, at least not for me.

 After two days of crafting and blizzards in PV I already had the gut feeling cabin fever might afflict my character soon, but my medical interface didn't show any red cross and I couldn't click on it either. I checked the interface every two hours, yet the cross remained white and unclickable. Then all of a sudden cabin fever broke out. 

Afterwards the medical interface began to work as intended and always showed me my current risk status (no red cross, but the interface was at least clickable and showed the affliction risk). 

[Kyopaxa]

8 hours ago, mystifeid said:

In the meantime, since it seems to have the highest blizzard frequency, go spend 50 or 100 days in Pleasant Valley (if you haven't already) and tell me what you think about cabin fever then.

No kidding, this was my last happy walk at Pleasant Valley interloper. Lucky me, I found the farm and survived.

Mmmh... I think I might have some cabin fever, let's go outside, right?

[togg]

That's so strange I've never ever even encountered the risk of cabin fever. I've played a lot of interloper, always died around day 10 but still. Maybe it's because I move a lot and I don't cook or make water indoors.

For me it's always wolves the problem.

[mystifeid]

1 hour ago, Kyopaxa said:

No kidding, this was my last happy walk at Pleasant Valley interloper. Lucky me, I found the farm and survived.

Mmmh... I think I might have some cabin fever, let's go outside, right?

When taking blizzard screenshots, remember that you get bonus points for being naked and showing us the feels like temp!

2 hours ago, Scyzara said:

After two days of crafting and blizzards in PV I already had the gut feeling cabin fever might afflict my character soon, but my medical interface didn't show any red cross and I couldn't click on it either. I checked the interface every two hours, yet the cross remained white and unclickable. Then all of a sudden cabin fever broke out. 

Sounds like a bug to me.

7 hours ago, cekivi said:

And the cabin fever saga continues...

I have a feeling that if CF continues in it's present state the saga will continue ad nauseam. It's strange because with foreknowledge of the cause and planning it's pretty hard to die from CF and also there must be at least twenty other things I find much more aggravating than CF but for some reason CF is the one everyone picks to be near the top of their most unliked features. However, since it is nowhere near the top of my list I will always downplay the significance of cabin fever.

30 minutes ago, togg said:

For me it's always wolves the problem.

Yeah, me too!

[Kyopaxa]

1 hour ago, mystifeid said:

I have a feeling that if CF continues in it's present state the saga will continue ad nauseam. It's strange because with foreknowledge of the cause and planning it's pretty hard to die from CF and also there must be at least twenty other things I find much more aggravating than CF but for some reason CF is the one everyone picks to be near the top of their most unliked features. However, since it is nowhere near the top of my list I will always downplay the significance of cabin fever.

Who said it can't be avoided? Who said CF is the major aggravating thing? And I didn't see everyone picking CF to be near the top of their most unliked features. Take care with that nauseam, you might have cabin fever!