Buff Snow Shelter


Sharky

Should the snow shelter be buffed?  

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Hello, TLD Community!

I've been trying Interloper the past few days, and after some experience with it, I think that the Snow Shelter should be significantly buffed. As of my knowledge, a snow shelter provides 18 degrees Celsius of warmth (15C from the shelter itself, and 3C from the rest interface). At first, I thought this would be a viable alternative to building a fire (you don't have to use up those precious matches!). However, I didn't use them as much as I thought I would, and I feel like the Snow Shelter is a bit underpowered (at least in Interloper - in other difficulties, the weather isn't nearly as bad). 

In my opinion, it's too expensive, not in the materials required to build it, but in the condition you lose from freezing during its construction. Building a snow shelter takes 45 in-game minutes, and in Interloper early-game, you start freezing in about 1-5 in-game minutes. This means you usually lose about 10-15% condition before you can use it. Imagine you're stuck in a blizzard, and you've got yourself completely lost, and you want to build a shelter. It's quite difficult to find a flat enough spot for your snow shelter, so you'll probably start freezing and lose 5-10% condition finding a spot to place it, and then you lose 15% more building it. The shelter usually isn't warm enough to stop you freezing during the blizzard anyway, so you've just wasted 25% for no reason. Usually, you can just look around and find a warm cave or a building, with only about 10% condition loss. In blizzards, snow shelters aren't that useful. Now, I guess they are useful for fighting cabin fever, but again, they're usually not warm enough to stop you freezing, so you just build one right next to a building, rest for an hour until you start freezing, then go back into the building to warm up (does that make sense?). The alternative would be to go fishing for 48 hours, using the pot-belly stove to keep yourself warm. You lose some condition from exhaustion, but it's more productive. Basically, the point I'm making is that I don't think they're not very useful as they are right now. 

To buff snow shelters, we could improve their warmth bonus, decrease their building time or reduce the amount of resources to build it. I think it would be best to just increase the warmth bonus. Maybe increase the total warmth bonus to 30 degrees Celsius, give or take a few? 

TL ; DR - In my opinion, the Snow Shelter is kinda useless in higher difficulties, so we should buff it by making it warmer and / or decreasing their construction time and / or reducing the amount of resources needed.

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Hmpf. The true Interloper player would never ask for anything to be buffed. I say debuff the snow shelter. Make wolves move in while the player is out gathering firewood. Make it collapse and suffocate the player. Or leave it as it is so we can verify Drifter Man's bold theory that TWM-only Interloper runs of any substantial length are possible...

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If you position your shelter right, you can take advantage of windbreaks.  It gives you a slight increase if the wind is going hard.  I my longest interloper game so far I lucked out because I was able to set the shelter up in a lee where I could keep a fire going.  Was able to run the fire during just the coldest parts of the night.  Too bad I starved to death. :)  In the end, I think the snow shelter really should just be an emergency thing, unless of course you're trying for the TM "achievement".

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31 minutes ago, Jolan said:

If you position your shelter right, you can take advantage of windbreaks.  It gives you a slight increase if the wind is going hard.  I my longest interloper game so far I lucked out because I was able to set the shelter up in a lee where I could keep a fire going.  Was able to run the fire during just the coldest parts of the night.  Too bad I starved to death. :)  In the end, I think the snow shelter really should just be an emergency thing, unless of course you're trying for the TM "achievement".

I'm using a showshelter in a lee in my current Interloper game -- it's awesome!  I'm about 100 days in and I've never FISHED (because I'm off the beaten path) nor had cabin fever.  *hugs snow shelter*

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18 hours ago, Sharky said:

 Imagine you're stuck in a blizzard, and you've got yourself completely lost, and you want to build a shelter. It's quite difficult to find a flat enough spot for your snow shelter, so you'll probably start freezing and lose 5-10% condition finding a spot to place it, and then you lose 15% more building it. The shelter usually isn't warm enough to stop you freezing during the blizzard anyway, so you've just wasted 25% for no reason. Usually, you can just look around and find a warm cave or a building, with only about 10% condition loss.

I hate to be the "but that's what it'd be like in real life" guy, but that's what it'd be like in real life ;) In fact, in real life you'd probably be lucky to get a structurally sound shelter up at all in a blizzard before you froze to death!

It's a good idea always to keep a mental note of where the nearest warm shelter/house is so you can sprint to it if a blizzard suddenly appears.

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42 minutes ago, Jolan said:

@Ruruwawa100 days :o and here I was proud of my 17 days. :D

The whacky thing is that I have another 50 days of both meat and water stockpiled already, plus 600 sticks and 150 coal.  And I'm not working hard... only 32% of the world map uncovered and most days are quite leisurely.  I have a 50+ day run on ML and another on CH where I mostly fished and the hunting-not-fishing way seems much easier.  Far less time and condition lost to gathering fuel.  And matches.  I've used 1 match in the past 50 days.

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1 hour ago, Ruruwawa said:

The whacky thing is that I have another 50 days of both meat and water stockpiled already, plus 600 sticks and 150 coal.  And I'm not working hard... only 32% of the world map uncovered and most days are quite leisurely.  I have a 50+ day run on ML and another on CH where I mostly fished and the hunting-not-fishing way seems much easier.  Far less time and condition lost to gathering fuel.  And matches.  I've used 1 match in the past 50 days.

Although it's good to see zeroes next to fish caught and eaten at the end of a long run (and also rabbits snared), it can start feeling artificial when you're trapped in a fishing hut by a blizzard...

Fifty days supply of meat is a lot of meat if you're not starving yourself. While I could care less how anybody else plays the game, I think it does add extra challenge to never starve.

Oh and I voted not to improve the snow shelter. Already it is the key that allows a Pleasant Valley (Interloper) spawn to go directly to the Summit.

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2 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Although it's good to see zeroes next to fish caught and eaten at the end of a long run (and also rabbits snared), it can start feeling artificial when you're trapped in a fishing hut by a blizzard...

Fifty days supply of meat is a lot of meat if you're not starving yourself. While I could care less how anybody else plays the game, I think it does add extra challenge to never starve.

Oh and I voted not to improve the snow shelter. Already it is the key that allows a Pleasant Valley (Interloper) spawn to go directly to the Summit.

I'm averaging about 1650 kcal/day for the first 100 days.  I don't trap rabbits currently because I have a lot of food.  But I made a lot of rabbit chips on my way to cooking 5 -- that's one thing fishing makes easier.

And yeah, summit.  I've been starting either in PV or TWM and going to the summit in the first couple days.  Makes for a good start!

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On 13/03/2017 at 0:13 PM, Jolan said:

is the loot at the summit really worth it?

It is in the beginning.

Besides the clothes/food/firestarter/hides etc, you get a flare pistol which makes it a lot easier to later get past Fluffy in the Upper Dam after looking for the bedroll in the Winding River cave.

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23 hours ago, mystifeid said:

It is in the beginning. Besides the clothes/food/firestarter/hides etc, you get a flare pistol which makes it a lot easier to later get past Fluffy in the Upper Dam after looking for the bedroll in the Winding River cave.

there's a possible bedroll in the cave!  squee!!!!!  also.... a flare pistol... I forgot about that bwahhhh! er, hm, I mean "gosh, that's awesome!"

 

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1 hour ago, Jolan said:

Rather than buffing the snow shelter, I would love for them to fix the glitch.  Its really becoming irritating - I'm tending not to use the shelter when I should because of it.  

Glitch?  Can you elaborate?  I use one a lot (daily on my current Interloper) and I don't know about this.

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@Ruruwawa there's a glitch when you enter the snow shelter - basically you can't interact with the shelter, so you can't exit, etc.  basically what you need to do is pass time in some way, quit the game reload and then you can interact with the shelter.  You also can't interact with anything outside the shelter - like feeding a fire.  Visually, its as if you're just standing there - stuck.  This ranges from really irritating to deadly depending on circumstances.  And has been going on for a couple of updates now.  I'm finding that either I have it for every single shelter in a particular sandbox or it doesn't show up at all. (It showed up in my last sandbox - ended up dying because of it, Survivor 131 hasn't done one yet because I've almost gotten my first rabbit trap - yay!) Since a number of people have discussed this I thought it was pretty well known.  

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I haven't played on interloper yet so I don't have the same problems but I think the shelter could use some maintenance buffs. Right now if you let the condition drop below a certain % then it will require a peice of cloth to repair it and thats the #1 thing that prevents me from building a snow shelter. Cloth is very precious and I hate the fact that I have to "babysit" my snow shelter in order to conserve my non-renewable resources. 

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On 17/03/2017 at 11:58 AM, Jolan said:

@Ruruwawa there's a glitch when you enter the snow shelter - basically you can't interact with the shelter, so you can't exit, etc.  basically what you need to do is pass time in some way, quit the game reload and then you can interact with the shelter.  You also can't interact with anything outside the shelter - like feeding a fire.  Visually, its as if you're just standing there - stuck.  This ranges from really irritating to deadly depending on circumstances.  And has been going on for a couple of updates now.  I'm finding that either I have it for every single shelter in a particular sandbox or it doesn't show up at all. (It showed up in my last sandbox - ended up dying because of it, Survivor 131 hasn't done one yet because I've almost gotten my first rabbit trap - yay!) Since a number of people have discussed this I thought it was pretty well known.  

Yeah, I've also experienced this glitch a few times... it's really, REALLY annoying. It's already been posted as a bug several times on the forums.

HINTERLAND I BEG YOU PLEASE FIX THIS SOON!

 

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On 3/17/2017 at 1:17 AM, Ruruwawa said:

@Jolan Yikes, that's bad!  I have 1200 hours into the game (PC) and several 50-100 day stretches  where I used the snow shelter and I've never seen it.  I wonder what causes it.

I suspect is a graphics issue.  And since it doesn't always show up it probably difficult to reproduce. :)

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10 hours ago, Pharose said:

I haven't played on interloper yet so I don't have the same problems but I think the shelter could use some maintenance buffs. Right now if you let the condition drop below a certain % then it will require a peice of cloth to repair it and thats the #1 thing that prevents me from building a snow shelter. Cloth is very precious and I hate the fact that I have to "babysit" my snow shelter in order to conserve my non-renewable resources. 

I agree the tight time window for maintenance isn't fun.  But it takes more than 2 days for it to go below 70% (where cloth is needed), and I make a point of repairing every day or two.  On my lnterloper game my snow shelter is about 100 days old now and I've never used cloth to repair it, only sticks.

BTW, cloth is renewable.  In that same Interloper game I get 2 pieces per week, on average, from beach combing.

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On ‎3‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 4:28 PM, Ruruwawa said:

I've used 1 match in the past 50 days.

Off topic, sorry.... but I have to ask.. how do you do that!! you make fire from a stones (that option is missing in this game).. but tellme pls.

tks

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