Cabin Fever,Frostbite,Trichinosis,becoming not a fun game anymore!

[rooster]

Dont know how everybody else feels about this stuff but think it is getting a little out of hand?Maybe its the tuning of these items that needs to be addressed?I am in all favor of a more realistic game play but to a certain point.I have logged well over a 1000 hours of game play and have been playing since only Mystery Lake was the only region so im in it for the long haul and love the game.I have survived interlooper for over a hundred days and loved it,was a true challenge.I started off into the new region on my interloper save and was eaten up and spit out right away.There is a lot to be said for knowing a map before going into it on interloper,thats for sure.

That brings me to my current run which resumed on a Stalker save of 100 days and happened to be left off at Mystery lake so i decided to jump into that one and head to the new region.I can say without a doubt that Stalker is like playing Super Mario Bros. with a 100 free guys!Wow,much more forgiving and the weather is bueatiful!I Made a Bear skin jacket right away and with all my other clothing i was up to +41 on the temp,made me much slower and took away almost all running but i am ok with it.

Fast forward into the New region and i contacted Trichinosis!This was my first time with this infection and its a Pain In The Azz let me tell you,at least there was plenty of shrooms around to combat it for the next 10 days.So the new region,FM,is lacking many,if any "inside"sleeping places.I was just starting to make the Farmstead a place to hang out for a while when i woke from my slumper with FROSTBITE!!This came out of nowhere,nothing was said about it,and had no idea i was close to getting it!I was perfectly warm every night i slept in my bearskin bag.i tried starting a fire to stave off the last bit that was still progressing but was to late!I ended up with from what i can tell,4 toes maybe frozen?I got one foot with a 4X on it and now my best conditon on can achieve is 60%!Holy cow!Mind you i am still dealing with the Trichinosis.Ok,i thought,i can deal with this,and i am going to have to anyway,even at 60%,stalker is almost a walk in the park compared to interloper at a 100%!So i decide to head back to the hunters cabin in Mystery Lake and regain myself.Once there,i get rid of the trichinosis but a day later get infected by a 70% condition rabbit meat!What is going on,i thought,get that gone in a day or so but now im getting Cabin Fever!!Holy Cow!,i know this is a survival game but COME ON!I dont want to be playing doctor the whole game here!

Love the game and will continue to play but think this is getting a little carried away?The Frostbite is what really gets me,unless you go into your New clothes screen all the time,you will never know its coming to get you.You can be perfectly warm but it is still not enough,only thing i find to fend it off is having to stay"indoors" for a night ever few days.Enough of my rant,let me know,what you think and any experiences.OUT

[sarudak]

I think you just had a bit of a run of bad luck. To be honest I like most of the mechanics (except cabin fever, I don't think it really provides any value to the game).

For frostbite we just need better visual indicators of what's going on. Maybe a status icon above your 4 bars whenever you press tab so that you don't have to go through normally rarely accessed screens just to know something horrible is about to happen to you.

For parasites I think it is a good balancing idea to abundant predator food I just think a different mechanic would be more enjoyable. Maybe a constant long term condition debuff that is proportional to how much carnivore meat you eat. A sort of parasite burden that you accumulate and goes away naturally very slowly.

[Ohbal]

The only thing I don't like about frostbite is that I have to go into the clothing screen to see what's happening. One thing that I'm really surprised about... each of your toes counts towards the health penalties? So you got four toes frozen and you perma-lost 40% of your total health? This seems a bit too much doesn't it?

Just for clarification, I think that what happened to you is mostly due to the new area exploration, The boots and socks tend to get really soaked in FM and you need to dry them quite often. I'm pretty sure there is a frostbite risk warning though, you probably just missed it. The second parasite afliction for a rabbit at 70% (was it cooked? ) sounds like super-bad-luck. 

 

[togg]

Cabin Fever is bae

[AZHockeyNut]

Store some clothes and sticks...Make shelter...

Leave a sleeping bag in a fishing hut with wood....Stay there once in a while...Cabin fever sucks but it can be avoided if u plan.

What sucks worse is making a nice fire to cook that deer and accidentally eating the raw meat when u have a hot fire in front to cook it....Eat some shrooms...No where to lay down....Pack of wolves.....Dead....150 day run down the tubes....

[bikingviking]

I think Cabin Fever is an important mechanic. It forces players to avoid hibernating too long, which was a huge problem in the earlier days of the game.

Totally agree though, it's tuned far too aggressively and ruins the fun. I spend a considerable amount of game time outdoors and it still comes up regularly. The fact that it still happens when I'm fighting other afflictions like Hypothermia or Frostbite is ridiculous.

Cabin Fever should definitely come up if you stay indoors continuously for several days. In its current state, it's pretty broken and makes the game less enjoyable.

[Troxism]

3 hours ago, bikingviking said:

I think Cabin Fever is an important mechanic. It forces players to avoid hibernating too long, which was a huge problem in the earlier days of the game.

Totally agree though, it's tuned far too aggressively and ruins the fun. I spend a considerable amount of game time outdoors and it still comes up regularly. The fact that it still happens when I'm fighting other afflictions like Hypothermia or Frostbite is ridiculous.

Cabin Fever should definitely come up if you stay indoors continuously for several days. In its current state, it's pretty broken and makes the game less enjoyable.

Cabin Fever doesn't really do anything to prevent hibernation; you can still hang around one place and basically do nothing forever due to starvation. Just now maybe you might do your water boiling outdoors in a wind sheltered place (plenty of those, fishing huts among others) to reset cabin fever instead of indoors, but the fire time bonus outdoors already made that a good idea regardless of cabin fever existing or not. If the goal was to 'fix hibernation', they should have added calorie debt to stop starvation instead so you actually had to go out and get food (and firewood to cook it, materials to repair your tools from harvesting it, ect) and couldn't be as sedentary. Nothing is really fixed by 'oh now I just go to a cave 15 feet away and sleep/pass time in the back with my bearskin bedroll and it's literally just as warm as indoors and there is basically no difference'.

Having said that, Cabin Fever is fairly easy to avoid even on Interloper via the method I mentioned above (do your cooking/boiling outside in places like fishing huts, top of the Riken in the cabin, the church, caves, ect). It's only ever a problem if you don't proactively prevent it and then have it come up at a really bad time while there are other problems at the same time. So in that sense it does serve some mechanical purpose; it makes you plan things a little more and at least encourages a LITTLE more variety in your activities. But it doesn't really stop hibernation at all (I should probably make another topic to discuss this subject in greater depth).

[togg]

You should all look at the roadmap, they plan to add the emotionoal cost of survival which probably would add layers to all of this. In the meantime cabinfever just push you to do stuff, it adds pressure, it's important that it stacks with other stuff or you would never get interesting scenarios.

[bikingviking]

On 12/25/2016 at 3:23 PM, Troxism said:

Cabin Fever doesn't really do anything to prevent hibernation; you can still hang around one place and basically do nothing forever due to starvation. Just now maybe you might do your water boiling outdoors in a wind sheltered place (plenty of those, fishing huts among others) to reset cabin fever instead of indoors, but the fire time bonus outdoors already made that a good idea regardless of cabin fever existing or not. If the goal was to 'fix hibernation', they should have added calorie debt to stop starvation instead so you actually had to go out and get food (and firewood to cook it, materials to repair your tools from harvesting it, ect) and couldn't be as sedentary. Nothing is really fixed by 'oh now I just go to a cave 15 feet away and sleep/pass time in the back with my bearskin bedroll and it's literally just as warm as indoors and there is basically no difference'.

Having said that, Cabin Fever is fairly easy to avoid even on Interloper via the method I mentioned above (do your cooking/boiling outside in places like fishing huts, top of the Riken in the cabin, the church, caves, ect). It's only ever a problem if you don't proactively prevent it and then have it come up at a really bad time while there are other problems at the same time. So in that sense it does serve some mechanical purpose; it makes you plan things a little more and at least encourages a LITTLE more variety in your activities. But it doesn't really stop hibernation at all (I should probably make another topic to discuss this subject in greater depth).

@Troxism When I mentioned "hibernation" I was talking about the olden days of TLD where you could sleep without being tired, no Intestinal Parasites and no Cabin Fever. It was pretty easy to take down a few animals, cook the meat, then spend days (or weeks) doing nothing but sleeping eating and drinking. People were scoring ridiculous runs on the leaderboard and it was a boring way to play the game. I figured Cabin Fever was a response to this.

You're right that it's fairly easy to avoid. Even if there isn't a cave nearby you can just build a snow shelter. My complaint was that it's way too aggressive. In Stalker I'd be spending 3-4 hours outside every day and still run into the risk regularly.

In v.388 Cabin Fever seems to be retuned and it works great now. If I spend an obnoxious amount of time inside (ie. long crafting projects) it comes up, but otherwise not. I think it's a solid mechanic and with the right tuning it makes the game a lot more interesting.

[Troxism]

Ironically now that you have to be tired to sleep this only further encourages starvation; you lose more calories passing time then sleeping so there is more cost to NOT starving. I know you were talking about the olden days, I was mostly just lamenting that nothing has really changed despite mechanics that seemingly attempt to address the issue (and yet I often see people acting like it's completely different now when it really isn't).

[bikingviking]

19 minutes ago, Troxism said:

Ironically now that you have to be tired to sleep this only further encourages starvation; you lose more calories passing time then sleeping so there is more cost to NOT starving. I know you were talking about the olden days, I was mostly just lamenting that nothing has really changed despite mechanics that seemingly attempt to address the issue (and yet I often see people acting like it's completely different now when it really isn't).

Can you elaborate on what you mean by further encouraging starvation? Even if you lose more calories passing time, you also don't regain condition. I don't follow.

As for the mechanics on Cabin Fever, I think they do fix the hibernation issue. Caves are not always nearby. You need a lot of cloth and sticks (not always available) to build and maintain a snow shelter. You can still freeze in a cave or a snow shelter; maybe not after you craft the bearskin bedroll but that's 30-40 days in.

Of course if you're really good at the game, you can work around it easily, but I think that's the point  

[Troxism]

To put it simply, lets say I don't have anything to do and want to rack up time survived as quickly as possible; ie hibernate. How will my food and water consumption change if I am starving vs not starving?

Before the addition of 'can't sleep while not tired', you could just sleep the whole time, as long as you had enough food/water (obviously about 5+ times less food was needed if you were starving). After the addition of this mechanic, you now have to mix passing time and sleeping to accomplish this. Passing time costs 125 calories per hour in Voyageur and Interloper (100 on Stalker and please don't ask why it's so weird like that), and Sleeping costs 75/60 respectively per hour.

Now if you are starving, you still only lose 1% condition per hour of starving, regardless of how many calories you would have burned (this makes starving while breaking down stuff ridiculously efficient btw, which makes zero sense as breaking stuff down is a highly physical activity: hard to do when starving IRL). So you can still do the exact same thing; eat only when your condition is low enough to not waste any 'sleep healing' and right before you sleep. You are not penalised extra for having to do some passing time (as long as you only eat right before you actually sleep).

Now imagine if you are intentionally playing without starvation (ie choosing to make it harder for yourself). You would have to mix passing time and sleeping, just like if you were starving, but now you would be paying the extra calorie cost of passing time over sleeping, while a starving player doesn't pay the extra cost (again they lose the same condition for starving regardless of what they are doing, so there is no extra cost to passing time when starving).

So the change to add 'can't sleep while not tired' actually served to make NOT starving MORE difficult, and only further widened the gap between starving and not starving; it made it so there was MORE advantage to starving then before.

Oh, and this ignores the fact that if you starve for a while, your max fatigue goes down. And when your max fatigue is down even 1%, you can sleep as much as you like and don't need to pass time anymore. Why does this matter? Well you also consume more water per hour while passing time as well. So this means that due to this mechanic, for part of a 'starvation cycle' you actually consume less water as well then a non starving player since you can spend more of the time sleeping vs passing time.

So this change both increased the calorie cost AND water consumption difference of not starving over starving over periods of hibernation, even though it was supposedly to discourage this sort of behaviour. To use fake made up numbers; before this change it might have been a savings of 8000 calories to starve vs not starve for a given period of time, and 0L of water savings. Now it might be something like 10000 extra calories to stay fed AND 5L of extra water too over choosing to starve on purpose. Now obviously those aren't real numbers but you get my point; the relative value of starving went up.

To try to summarize it even more simply: The cost of passing time vs sleeping when starving is basically the same (just more water used), but the cost of passing time vs sleeping when NOT starving also has a calorie cost added on top of the water cost. And, due to the mechanic of 'if you've been starving for like 24+ hours, your max fatigue starts going down', you can therefore spend more time sleeping vs passing time when starving for extended periods and stretch your water supplies as well compared to not starving.

Now I'm simplifying it a bit since the length of a starvation cycle varies based on difficulty (it's less on Interloper since you can't fully restore your condition in 12 hours of sleep there unlike Stalker and below), but I don't want to get bogged down in all the math. Basically starvation is relatively better off vs not starving then it has ever been before; ie it's actually even more efficient to starve now due to this change then it was before.

Now yes, you would obviously gain far more condition over the period of time when not starving. But lets be honest here. On any mode below Interloper, 1 night of sleep is a full heal with a decent bed (different beds give different condition restoration btw, bedroll is the worst). Condition healing isn't really a concern on those modes because of that. And even on Interloper, the rate of condition restoration is still really high (too high IMHO): You can get about 40-50% of your condition back if you start at fully exhausted in a decent bed (You would need to sleep 9 hours then 12 hours to get the maximum amount due to how sleep till not tired and condition restore works basing off the time initially set and the fact that you dehydrate fully in about 9.5 hours of sleep on Interloper, and again I'm not going to go into this further in this post as it's already long). So you can still easily starve down to half or so, which is still ridiculously efficient. And the reality is, on Interloper, getting food will often come at a cost of taking freezing damage. And getting the about 3-5 times more food you need to NOT starve over starving will often end up costing you all the 'extra condition' you got back by not starving via taking a few % freezing here or there. Also, most of the extra condition restored by not starving goes to waste anyways due to the 100% condition cap (obviously).

Now, don't take this as endorsement for starvation. I've mentioned before I think it's an exploit and shouldn't exist as a mechanic in the game as it makes zero logical and game play sense. I personally avoid it completely even on Interloper, mostly to prove the point about 'it doesn't need to be in the game for it to be playable'. But if I am going to complain about it, it be hooves me to fully understand the gameplay systems to understand exactly how much better it is and the reason it's probably the #1 most common 'tip' given for players who are struggling in this game: 'Just starve until you are about to go to sleep'.

Edit: I don't really have room to cover this in this post, but there is also the distinction between 'travelling starvation' ie starving when you are out doing stuff all day vs 'hibernation starvation' like I am talking about there. Basically even for actually doing stuff all day starvation is still very efficient, just SLIGHTLY less so, even accounting for the minor condition loss. In summary: starvation is ridiculously efficient in all circumstances and the 'drawbacks' of starvation are so minor as to basically have no effect.

Edit 2: Oh yeah I completely forgot: meat (most food actually, but meat the most) dehydrates you (a LOT in the case of bear meat), so if you are not starving and therefore having to eat a lot more per day, then you are FURTHER punished in terms of water consumption. This is a bigger difference then it might seem: with my rough estimates, if you are eating 3kg of bear meat per day on Interloper to avoid starving (this is based off average calories per day consumed), it's almost 0.3-0.4L extra water per day just to cover the loss from the meat. So yet another way starvation is rewarded.

[Nicholai]

I totally agree about cabin fever and I don't think it makes any sense if we're talking about surviving. I know it aims to prevent people from hibernating but we know "the situation" is big and it's the last thing I have to provide my character is entertainment. Eat whatever you find and hibernate to spend minimum energy, this is surviving. Hibernating exists in nature in same way, some animals hibernate just because of this, to survive. Most particularly in interloper mode, hibernating must be an essential part of surviving.

I wonder -in a nuclear situation- will you leave bunker because of you just got bored inside? go ahead. Again, cabin fever disease opposes with "surviving essentials" and it must no longer persist in game.

[Dirmagnos]

Technically, Cabin Fever only purpose is to prevent players from hibernating and, as result, having long survival times with minimum effort. That in turn places them high on charts.

So, for gameplay purposes, Cabin Fever does absolutely nothing but adding irritant for players who dont care about such things, eg majority of players. 

Worse that that, if that was the problem, issue could have been addressed far easier and in far less intrusive manner. Instead of plain "days survived" this achievement could be presented based on score. Something as simple as hours active(excluding idle time) minus hours spent sleeping would do the trick, resulting in players who do absolute minimum and sleep all the time having extremely low scores compared to amount of days survive(that also could be included, as secondary value, that doesnt affect placement on score table or act as minor multiplayer).

[piddy3825]

6 minutes ago, Dirmagnos said:

Technically, Cabin Fever only purpose is to prevent players from hibernating and, as result, having long survival times with minimum effort. That in turn places them high on charts.

So, for gameplay purposes, Cabin Fever does absolutely nothing but adding irritant for players who dont care about such things, eg majority of players. 

Hibernating for the sake of longer survival times sounds more like metagaming than actual game playing... i cannot think of a more tedious way to play this game than constantly trying to sleep time away in order to achieve high survival times on the leaderboards.

 

[Dirmagnos]

12 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

Hibernating for the sake of longer survival times sounds more like metagaming than actual game playing... i cannot think of a more tedious way to play this game than constantly trying to sleep time away in order to achieve high survival times on the leaderboards.

Precisely. And majority of players do not care about those leaderboards. But they still get to "enjoy" Cabin Fever.

[SteveP]

Cabin fever is not hard to cope with especially if you make use of snow shelters. Recovering from parasites is a much greater problem especially if you run short of antibiotics and mushrooms. I think there should be more crafting options to occupy time and to prevent cabin fever.

[Kyopaxa]

And another thread about cabin fever, among other things. As usual in these posts, I add up my opinion that cabin fever really needs to be tuned, to be a little bit more logical at least. As others said, being forced to go out with hypothermia and parasites is ridiculous. I'm freezing to death, getting weak and tired, I'm going to vomit... Oh look at that warm bed, I could really sleep there and recover... but hell no, I'm just going to step out to feel that -50ºC blizzard on my face. Yeah... so refreshing... ---> Fades into The Long Dark.

[Ruruwawa]

Another thread about cabin fever and I'll repeat myself here too.

I'm not a fan of cabin fever because it's stick, not carrot.  I feel the game is better with more good reasons to go outside but I don't think cabin fever makes the game better.  It's not intuitive, and a frustrating surprise for those who don't know how to avoid it.  For folks who do know how to avoid it, the risk rarely shows up.  There aren't compelling tradeoffs to risk getting cabin fever for, like there is with eating predator meat / parasite risk.

15 minutes ago, Kyopaxa said:

I'm freezing to death, getting weak and tired, I'm going to vomit... Oh look at that warm bed, I could really sleep there and recover... but hell no, I'm just going to step out to feel that -50ºC blizzard on my face. Yeah... so refreshing... ---> Fades into The Long Dark.

But since we have to deal with Cabin Fever at the moment, why not learn how to avoid it and make your time in TLD more fun? 

1. Cabin fever is not instantaneous.  You live with the risk of cabin fever for something like a day before you get the actual cabin fever affliction.  If you get hypothermia or parasites you could check to see if cabin fever is creeping up on you too.  Better yet, watch out for it before you get and affliction or let your condition drop to low levels.  
2. You aren't forced to go outside the instant cabin fever hits.  Laugh at that -50C blizzard from the comfort of your home.  You can stay inside for days if you want, you just can't sleep.  
3. You can clear cabin fever by spending time outside AWAKE.  Just because you can't sleep inside means you must sleep outside.  Build a fire, cook, make water, mend clothes, whatever.  The condition loss to exhaustion is exactly the same as starving: 1% per hour.  Eat to stop condition loss from starving, then do other stuff during the night, and catch some Zzzz outside during the warm / clear part of the day.
4. If you need healing now and it's too cold to be outside, use your stims.  You've been saving those for an emergency, and now you have multiple afflictions and low condition.  Your emergency has arrived.  Each stim gives you +15% condition instantly and you can use multiple stims to ratchet up your condition.  You'll be exhausted afterward, but that's just the 1% condition per hour thing.

A little thinking ahead is all it takes.  For myself I don't think even bother to watch for cabin fever risk except in the first week or two of an interloper run (since there's no grace period as with Voyageur and Stalker).  My habits keep me out of trouble: I do most of my cooking and water making outside, and I gather sticks/coal on days I don't have fishing, hunting or crafting tasks.  That's it.  These activities are enough to keep cabin fever away, and I also have lots of fuel on hand so time spend outside is pretty comfy

[Ohbal]

@Ruruwawa It can be noticed by the clarity of your answer that its not the first time you talk about this  Very well exposed! +1 on a whole.  

[Kyopaxa]

I wasn't talking about CF not being avoidable or impossible to deal with. I was talking about CF not making sense the way it is implemented.

[Scyzara]

6 hours ago, Kyopaxa said:

I wasn't talking about CF not being avoidable or impossible to deal with. I was talking about CF not making sense the way it is implemented.

I'm still hoping the current mechanics will be changed once the mysterious 'wellbeing' feature is introduced. I agree that certain aspects of cabin fever are currently unrealistic and counterintuitive, especially the fact that cabin fever increases while you're crafting, cooking or doing other meaningful things.