Renewable Food

[aemaccoll]

Hopefully I'm not the only one who feels like there isn't much in the way of renewable food in The Long Dark. Where other survival games, such as The Forest, have been released with a multitude of bugs, The Long Dark has managed to create an almost completely smooth experience. However, the only problem is that I'd like to be able to survive for longer. When I run out of rounds in The Long Dark, I basically accept that, from then on, it's going to be downhill. I appreciate that the player can now build snares for rabbits and fishing tackles for fish, but they're finite too! Once I run out of scrap metal that's it - no more fishing. And since the snares require gut which requires a dead animal, I would have to just wait around for a wolf to kill something in order to make one, which is hardly practical!

[tab=30]Now I'm not suggesting growing vegetables, I mean, it's like minus twenty degrees Celsius - you just can't grow food in those conditions! But maybe make fishing rods that are more practical. You could use cloth to make string for the line, fir wood for the actual rod part, and scrap metal for the hook. (But one scrap metal should make more than one hook, especially when scrap metal weighs something like a kilogram. You could make dozens of hooks for that much mass.) Anyway, just something, anything, that can make the player's life a little less inevitably futile. You could always make snares that don't break after one use.

[elloco999]

You're right, Hinterland has taken the approach of giving us some new features and very little bugs every update instead of giving (almost) all features at once and a pile of bugs that needs to be squashed. That does mean that many features are not implemented yet. They have been focusing on the early part of the game first (getting started, finding the stuff you need, setting up a base etc) and have only just started with the more mid-game mechanics like crafting, trapping fishing etc. Rest assured that more ways to get food will follow.

That said, you can survive for a very long time already. Before the update invalidated my save I was at 144 days while having not fired 1 of the 12 bullets I found. You don't have to wait around for a wolf to kill a deer. You can help things along. Get a wolf close enough to a deer and it will kill it for you. If you're lucky you get some meat from it, if not you at least get the guts.

With the v.163 update snares should last you longer, instead of being a 1 time use item. That should help things a bit as well. You should be able to reuse a snare that has caught a rabbit.

I haven't tried making fishing tackles yet, but 1 hook out of 1 scrap metal does seem a bit odd. Either that's a huge hook, or you discard a lot of metal... Since scrap metal is probably the most scarce resource in TLD I'm not going to waste 1 scrap metal to get just 1 hook.

I like your idea of making a fishing rod. A rod could either increase your chances of catching something/ reduce the time needed to catch something, or make the fishing tackle last longer. Or both.

[Burning Bridges]

I agree in principle, but as long as the maps are rather limited in size, there will never be enough space for an infinite amount of time, and it will always get unrealistic or repetitive after a while.

[tomas_herbertson]

I made 3 hooks out of 1 scrap, FWIW.

That said, the fact that you have to craft gut into line, scrap into hooks, then combine hooks and line into tackle--and any failure means the loss of the crafting materials--does make it harder to make the tackle, since it's double-gated for failure. Luckily, gut is pretty plentiful and you only need one success with the scrap-crafting to get your 3 hooks.

Plus, I fished for several hours and didn't lose any tackle, so it looks like the tackle is a persistent tool, not a one-use thing--unless there's a high change of the line snapping and loosing the tackle, or something, which I've been fortunate enough to avoid.