There's a flaw in your game logic


Rolandtigerfish

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Ok so at 65 days I've started to note something.

 

There are a few key materials/items that are uncraftable once you have depleted the world resources.

Here they are in order of importance:

1: fire making implents matches magnifying glass and Flint strike.  Once these are gone you can no longer make water or cook. There needs to be a craftable  fire starter.

2: sewing kits/fishing line with hook.   While the line is indefinitely spawning with animals the hook is not.  Ergo once you have scraped all of the metal into hooks or arrow heads that's it no more.  To fix this we need a craftable hook of bone or wood.

3: arrow heads.  Not only as in number 2 but you can only craft them with the heavy hammer which requires 1 for wood and quality tools. To fix this same as number 2 bone tips possibly stone. 

4: no craftable hat. While the manufactured gear will eventually break and you run out of cloth once you do have fur everything being minus a hat kinda sucks.  To fix this a rabbit hat would be nice.

5 knives.  Same as 3. Fix: bone knives.

6 axes.  Same as 3 fix: stone axe.

7 snares.  Limited amount of reclaimed wood. Fix: be able to craft snare wood from sapling.

This would enable you to survive indefinitely in any mode.

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@pillock you do realize the matches degrade no matter if you store them or not.  The magnifying glass does have a % bar not sure how or what makes it fall apart or even if it can be repaired I haven't used it much (bad weather).

The reclaim would last a very long time unless you use it for fires or torches.

Similar with scrap the hammer will die before the scrap runs out,  And the cloth runs out quick if you build snow shelters along with keeping all your gear at 80%+ (including failed attempts).

I'm just pointing out these few resources as key due to the fact you can't reproduce them and a simple non game breaking way to implement a realistic fix.

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1. The magnifying glass doesn't degrade with use. The status % is just its starting condition. Yes, it could be a random item lost/destroyed during a bear mauling, so, ya know, avoid those.

2. Fish hooks... I haven't used one for sewing in forever and that was just for an experiment, but if I remember correctly, I don't think the hook was consumed when sewing. Someone correct me if that's wrong, but that's what my memory is telling me.

3, 5, 6. As @Pillock said, you're going to get killed or bored and stop playing a sandbox long, long before you run out of scrap metal. As to the heavy hammer, well, the fir wood to repair it is an infinitely renewable resource. You're going to repair it many, many times with just a single quality toolbox... a toolbox that is itself repairable with a piece of scrap and simple toolbox. I can't speak for stalker and interloper, but once you loot everything on voyageur, you should have at least 3 hammers, a handful of quality tools, and a bunch of simple tools. So, yeah, hammers shouldn't be an issue either. I'm betting someone would be far more likely to get into a scrap harvesting frenzy at Hibernia and lose hacksaws by neglecting their repair before they even harvested all the available metal.

4. Hat... Yes, a craftable fur hat would be nice and I hope we get one someday. Not the end of the world though. A hat isn't worth so much warmth/wind chill reduction that lack of one creates a life and death situation. There's so much cloth available across all regions that it shouldn't become an issue either.

7. As for snares... you get a reclaimed wood back when you harvest a broken snare, so that's not even an issue. Beyond that, reclaimed wood may be a limited resource, but heck, across all regions there's got to be a couple thousand units of it available; again, Hibernia is a huge treasure trove of reclaimed wood.

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@SteelFire

#7 Ok fair point didn't know that one.

3,5,6 can you repair the tool boxes now? I haven't updated yet. But brings to bear the issue with having so few and running out.

 You sound like you have played longer than me so tell me do the arrow heads actually get ruined?

#2 ok I will have to go on a repair frenzy with one.

 

#1 also good to know. I just assumed it got used up like everything else. But having a sunny day in pleasant valley is like finding ammo in interloper you can look but it's not going to do much good with all the teeth around.  With this one I'm most concerned as we should be able to craft a fire bow or fire piston; (survival man Alaska) which uses air pressure to turn tinder into embers.

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I've never repaired a quality toolbox, never needed to worry about getting to that point, so I'm going by what the internet tells me with that one. They only degrade with use and I've never used a heavy hammer enough to even need to worry about repairing it. Current sandbox I crafted a knife, hatchet, and 20 arrowheads and I think it took the hammer down about 20%.

Haven't played nearly as long as a lot of the folks here; haven't quite hit my 500 days of total in-game survival across various sandboxes yet.

No, arrow heads don't wear out, just the arrow shafts and then it's just a matter of harvesting it for the arrow head and a couple feathers. You will end up losing some whole arrows to prey running off and you not finding them after or to an animal falling on top of the arrow and not being able to recover it. Across all regions, you should be able to come up with about 40-50 birch saplings, at 3 arrow shafts each. Others have also pointed out that saplings occasionally show up when beach combing.

Bow drills for firestarting are already on the road map, so problem solved.

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6 hours ago, SteelFire said:

2. Fish hooks... I haven't used one for sewing in forever and that was just for an experiment, but if I remember correctly, I don't think the hook was consumed when sewing. Someone correct me if that's wrong, but that's what my memory is telling me.

Fishing hooks lose 10% condition per repair. I don't consider this to be a problem at all, though. If you harvest all metal structures in all regions with a hacksaw, you end up with several hundreds of pieces of scrap metal which you could use to craft almost 1000 hooks if those are important to you. Good luck doing 10.000 repairs without dying of boredom.^^

2 hours ago, Rolandtigerfish said:

#1 also good to know. I just assumed it got used up like everything else. But having a sunny day in pleasant valley is like finding ammo in interloper you can look but it's not going to do much good with all the teeth around.  

I'm lighting 90% + of my fires with a magnifying lens on Interloper. All it requires is some planning and patience. Just have a decent water and food reserve all the time and don't cook raw meat immediately, but store it outside until a sunny day hits. There's at least a 2-3 hour window of sunlight every second or third day on Interloper no matter the map. You just need to wait for it and have both enough sticks and some raw meat/fish ready. If you wait for a sunny day to go hunting, you're doing it the wrong way round.^^

2 hours ago, SteelFire said:

I've never repaired a quality toolbox, never needed to worry about getting to that point, so I'm going by what the internet tells me with that one. They only degrade with use and I've never used a heavy hammer enough to even need to worry about repairing it.

You can use one toolbox to repair another one. Just keep two of them and you'll never have to worry about running out of them unless you run out of scrap metal which is highly unlikely as I've pointed out above.

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11 hours ago, Rolandtigerfish said:

@pillock you do realize the matches degrade no matter if you store them or not.  The magnifying glass does have a % bar not sure how or what makes it fall apart or even if it can be repaired I haven't used it much (bad weather).

The reclaim would last a very long time unless you use it for fires or torches.

Similar with scrap the hammer will die before the scrap runs out,  And the cloth runs out quick if you build snow shelters along with keeping all your gear at 80%+ (including failed attempts).

I'm just pointing out these few resources as key due to the fact you can't reproduce them and a simple non game breaking way to implement a realistic fix.

Going back to your original post, I do agree with you that it'd be nice to have some more ways to craft tools, as you suggest. I like the idea of using stone or bone to make primitive knives, hatchets or arrowheads. And I like the idea of being able to make fire by rubbing sticks.

It isn't necessary for the specific reasons you gave - ie. running out of resources - but it would make sense within the context of the game world to introduce the things you suggest.

Basically, if you played the game long enough to use up absolutely all of the pre-existing cloth, metal and reclaimed wood, it would take you so long that by the time you finished you'd be good enough at the game to be able to maintain your character's survival without using knives or hatchets or arrows anyway, and on extremely frugal resources such as clothes and fire, to the point where you could keep going nearly forever.

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Im not posting this to brag, but to prove youll be bored with the game before you ever run out of resources:

Ive gotten to day two hundered + on just timberwolf mountain and pleasant valley (voyageur, i like the easier wolves), and im not even remotely low on unrenewable resources. The only things Im running low on are sewing kits and whetstones, but I have 4 backup hatchets and 5 knives, and scrap metal is very plentiful for fishing hooks, plus using 7 quality toolboxes on a hacksaw that only needs scrap metal to be repaired means I still can break down wood, metal and meat if I have to.

If you kill a bear and take all the meat and store it in the trunk of a car, and dont cook all the meat at once (I cook it 5 units at a time) the bear meat will last you for well over a week (not even starving yourself), thats one to two rifle bullets per week, not to mention you can make so many bows and arrows... and ive found enough arrows to not need to visit the forge even!

Of course you have to get to cooking level master first before you hunt bear for food, but that can be achieved by the tons and tons of tea and coffee you can make. I have about fifty reshei teas in my fridge and they dont degrade either.

Oh and as for cloth, you wont run out unless you make snow shelters.

 

Tldr; you can survive at least a year without even visiting the forge and living off two maps on any difficulty other than interloper. So long that all your skills will be "master" by then

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Magnifying Lens lasts forever and it's quite possible to never use a single match/firestriker charge past day 20-30 or so on any mode (Yes even Interloper) (ie you can keep your 100+ matches for an emergency since they don't degrade anymore).

Arrowheads literally last forever if you don't lose them (and there is something in the order of 800 scrap metal in the game world).

You would run out of everything else before you ran out of fishing tackle to repair for the same reason. You would never be able to get enough cloth/hides to repair that much as you can do 30 repairs per scrap metal.

Crafted hat would be nice (more for role playing/convenience sake though) but i'll talk about cloth later.

There already are craftable hatchets/knives. You can repair the hammer with fir and you can fix the hammer with a toolkit. There are about 20+ toolkits in the game world (Even Interloper has a TON). Even if you couldn't repair toolkits with other toolkits, you would have 1000 repairs or 30000% hammer durability. There isn't enough scrap metal in the world to forge that much.

Keep in mind that in the end game you have no real need for tools; you can gather sticks and coal for firewood, and you can harvest by hand (used to be with a fire, but now with carcass harvesting 5 it doesn't even matter as you can always hand harvest).

One thing that can 'run out' are arrows (but there are at least 70-80 birch across all maps now, which means at least 210 arrows, and you can use an arrow for 4 animal hits, which means you could kill 840 bears. Even if you intentionally never starve, that is enough food for ages. And even when you ran out you could just snare rabbits forever. Or you could abuse wolf AI to get free deer kills even without a weapon (although I consider that strategy exploiting and don't do it).

The only actual limiting factor is cloth and antiseptic/antibiotic as if you get attacked by a wolf you NEED a bandage and either antiseptic or antibiotic (to prevent or cure the infection which has a 95% chance of occurring). But I'll be honest, again, there is easily 600-800 cloth in the game world on Stalker and below (there is less on Interloper due to more buildings being burned out). And there is enough OMB for over 150 bandages, and enough Mushrooms for over 200 (this is probably an underestimate) doses of Antibiotics even on Interloper. Not even every wolf attack results in a 'Blood Loss' condition and if you are really getting attacked by wolves this much you are doing something really wrong. Honestly you should never get attacked by a wolf past the early game at all other then by freak accident.

Clothing wise, you can do with only crafted clothing (you can either manage frostbite on head or just keep a hat around and use some cloth only to fix that), esp on lower difficulties where temperatures are much warmer. And even if you don't want to play with only crafted clothing + a hat, as long as you avoid wolf struggles and don't wear fast degrading clothing (like sports socks, sweatshirts, T-shirts ect) and don't wear it as an outer later (to avoid wind/animal attack damage), you can easily stretch the 600-800 cloth I mentioned for at least 10000+ days if you play correctly and only use 'cloth efficient' setups (hard to summarise but I think you get the idea).

Finally, beach combing exists as a way to (slowly) renew resources like cloth, scrap metal and birch saplings. So if you aren't wasteful you can literally live an infinite amount of time. Frankly the more you play this game you will realise that A: Resources are practically infinite if you know how to conserve and B: This game is almost pointless to play past 100-200 days anyways as it would be more fun to start over at that point (repeating the same tasks over and over is not very exciting after a while). Worrying about 'limited resources' is only an issue if you are wasteful with them (I have an Interloper game where I intentionally keep my Sports socks repaired because I'm trying to be 'realistic' and actually wear socks, but this has cost me a ridiculous amount of cloth; not that it matters since I won't play that save past day 100 most likely so I will never actually run out of cloth).

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It's the old phenomenon that some players seem to feel better knowing their avatar could live forever, even if they never really make use of it. Interestingly, for me it's the other way around - knowing that my avatar will eventually die makes his/her actions more meaningful to me. Life is fragile and time therefore precious.

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12 minutes ago, Hotzn said:

It's the old phenomenon that some players seem to feel better knowing their avatar could live forever, even if they never really make use of it. Interestingly, for me it's the other way around - knowing that my avatar will eventually die makes his/her actions more meaningful to me. Life is fragile and time therefore precious.

Couldn't have said it better. 

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It might be an interesting thing to test: deliberately attempt to use up all the resources in the world and see how quickly you can do it without dying of something else first!

But even then, there's beachcombing, which replenishes things like cloth, reclaimed wood and saplings, albeit very slowly. Does scrap metal wash up on the beach as well? It'd be odd if it does - given that, y'know, metal sinks in water...

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I lament this science having done it now.

 

So far improvised hatchet an knife -3% per use = 34 uses until broken. Heavy hammer -2% per item forged requires quality tools+ fir wood to repair quality tools (wiki says either simple or quality but repair screen says quality) -2% per repair needs quality tools+scrap to repair @ approx 4% repair rate on it and -2% from box used to repair it. Assuming RNG runs true to for you will likely not get a positive feedback loop in the repair chain until your repair skill hits end game level. Which brings up to only repair with things that are an indefinite resource ie first+gut+fish hook. At the very least it would take the first 175-235 days of not using anything but bare hands with only the scavenged hatchets to claim 35-50(RNG base -2% per harvest) large limbs each holding out the last hatchet for all of the whetstone (max found so far 8 gaining 3% per sharpen with slow curve up). And bearing in mind coal has not as yet respawned for me; stocking up on sticks (x550) and 1 fir + 3 coal to reach 150°C + 1 cloth+2 scrap = 34 limb harvest per hatchet.  So using this method you could feasibly have a fire constantly going as long as you spent it ONLY at a forge made 2 hatchets; 4 arrow heads; boiled 10 liters of water; cooked at least 10kg of food and restocked the fire to 11hr 59min then foraged for food (given fishing would be out bc of how far away the nearest hut is) averaging 5-7 bunnies per day plus a wolf and a bear every 3-5th week you would still break survival because of the heavy hammer... True sticks could get you very far but at 10min a piece and averaging about 70-210 (RNG) per wind storm (RNG) and branches (3 sticks @ 5 min with tool @ 10min without) your fire frantic running plus wildlife and exhaustion (provided running with 39.55kg load) you would still faulter without the 1 hr cedar and 2 hr fir.

 

So even being extremely smart with the resources at hand the whole game in the end regardless of length hinges on your use and repair of the heavy hammer (making new hatchets for fire duration) and ultimately matches (to start fire; no fire = no drinkable water or cooked food).

Which honestly is kind of a let down.

 

The picture came up when I wiki's the hammer omg sooo much salt in the wound.

salt in the wound.JPG

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It may just be more efficient to use the hacksaw for everything then and not even use the forge, you can repair it with scrap and a toolbox, and both are super plentiful and dont even require coal or a trip to the forges. The only downside is you must conserve your knife for crafting and defense, but that decays way slower than the hatchet.

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Just tossing it out there, and this would be a little out of the way but what would you say about giving the Forlorn Muskeg Bog Iron, crush the iron and the option to build kiln from clay. but then you'd have to get it hot enough to smelt the iron(around 1200 degrees C) or if possible mix magnesium with the crushed iron to make Thermite and then make yourself some iron nubs to then stick in the forge

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On ‎14‎/‎01‎/‎2017 at 9:48 PM, Pillock said:

Matches, cloth, scrap metal and reclaimed wood last for so long that it doesn't matter. You would die of old age before you had the chance to play the game enough to use it all.

Well, maybe not matches, but the magnifier lasts forever, anyway.

well you say that fella but im running quite low of a few things especially matches !! down to 50 left. i have a few magnifying glasses but its never good enough weather to use the dam things ..haha. 441 days in so far and loving it.

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1 hour ago, Richt3a said:

well you say that fella but im running quite low of a few things especially matches !! down to 50 left. i have a few magnifying glasses but its never good enough weather to use the dam things ..haha. 441 days in so far and loving it.

Yeah, but that's when the fun starts. You have to start thinking carefully about when to light fires, where and with what materials. You could stretch 50 matches over another 400 days, probably, especially if you utilize the mag lenses as well.

For me, the game becomes much more fun when resources start to get scarce. Interloper is a bit different - it's very unforgiving, and I'm crap at it - but in your game you've had time to get very well established. I imagine you've got loads and loads of resources and food in reserve, so you've got the opportunity to plan ahead and prepare for the Day When Matches Run Out (and/or put it off as long as you can).

The point I was making earlier is that once you get to that point - something's looks like it's starting to run out - you're so well set in the game and you know your way around so well, that you're able to compensate for it anyway.

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@PINGUWell there's that... But given the premace of the game is survive as long as you can against the elements and 2 key stones are non craftable that would mean there is a hard set number of in game days you have. I'd rather die to a bear or the weather than running out of water because there is no source of it in the game except having a fire.

I'm not saying this permanently breaks the game I'm just saying it was a let down to find out the survival days are truly hard set.

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Don't agree that's the premise. To me the premise of the game was that you are doomed and are going to die, the challenge is to see how good a fight you can put up, how long you can put it off and what you can achieve in that time

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Fair enough.  Interesting mechanic I found... Light a fire with a brand instead no idea how far into the burn cycle it will stop lighting fires but it should then serve to light a torch which lasts longer so +an extra 30-45min of carrying a fire instead of using up a match. While this does extend the survival timeline considerably it doesn't extend it indefinitely.

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6 hours ago, Rolandtigerfish said:

Fair enough.  Interesting mechanic I found... Light a fire with a brand instead no idea how far into the burn cycle it will stop lighting fires but it should then serve to light a torch which lasts longer so +an extra 30-45min of carrying a fire instead of using up a match. While this does extend the survival timeline considerably it doesn't extend it indefinitely.

Carrying a lit brand around so that you can light a chain of fires while you move from A to B - thereby keeping a flame going without using extra matches - is a way of extending the lifespan of your matches. But obviously it doesn't work when it's too windy, and a few consecutive fire-start failures can also put an end to your brand as well.

The magnifying lens, however, does extend firelighting indefinitely - it's just that you can't pick and choose when or where to light fires as freely as you can with matches/firestrikers.

All other necessary resources are infinite (theoretically), if you consider beachcombing.

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