Bear meat disappearing in under 24 hours

[SteveP]

These are Youtube videos and I have just excerpted my comments here for context. The problem is the bear meat disappeared, presumably due to low condition. This must be a bug. Complicating factors include: entry and exit from multiple doors on PV Farmhouse, food poisoning, overnight sleep and game save & restore, this game particular game originated many releases earlier and is on XBOX. I don't think those necessarily relate to the problem as it is probably across all platforms.

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at 35:28 the bear dies on day 230 days 6 hours 49 minutes.

You check your status again at 35:29 which is when I estimate the death of the bear perhaps 1-2 minutes earlier. I don't know the outdoor temp but will look for that. IIRC it was stormy. At this point you are already suffering hit due to food poisoning so I can see why you didn't go outside to check the bear. Perhaps could have taken half the guts and a sample of the meat to check its condition. Wondering if the slow death had begun compromising it?? I dunno. This is pure speculation. I never heard of this before. I will check the time again when you harvest the guts and meat. Should have checked the quality of one piece of meat before harvesting the rest. 1% meat cooks up to 51% but any raw meat below 20% is iffy as it only comes up to 70%. I don't think you looked at the raw meat so I probably can't calculate the decay rate. It should not decay when frozen; the game would be better if you could keep frozen meat longer. :-(

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you head outside on day 230 23 hours which means the meat is already 17 hrs old. Interestingly it is only 3% frozen. Hmm takes a long time to freeze. Maybe it should be gutted first as that's what we do in real life.

1:21 into episode 51 (next video after this one) you check your status survival time day 230 hr 23 min 38

at 1:47 you start harvesting hide and guts at 2:08 the survival time is 231-1-15

at 2:17 of the video hours you drop the hide off at 2:27 your survival time is 231 days 2 hours and you go in the house

at 2:37. At 3:17 you head outside to get the meat and the survival time shows 231 2 hours 8 minutes.

At 3:21 the survival time shows 231-2-9. the outdoor temperature is -9F and it is very windy and mid morning 10 hrs of daylight left. Not excessively warm weather to induce meat spoilage.

at 3:28 survival time is 231-2-11 and you start to harvest the meat. At this stage the meat is 33% frozen. Perhaps we needed to open that carcass immediately to start the cooling process? That would be true in real life; the first thing you do is open the cavity and remove the guts. This takes only about 20-30 minutes assuming you have the tools and it's fresh. Later on you would process the guts by removing the contents (indoors in a tub) or sinews which would last the longest. Weeks to months.

at 4:05 the meat is harvested survival time is 231-4-17

at 4:18 you are inside the porch survival time 231-4-20 not even 24 hours since death of the bear.

at 4:21 you check your inventory and you have no raw bear meat. From kill to harvest is about 21 hours. I will recheck the kill time & conditions now. What I'm curious about is if your food poisoning had some effect upon the game survival time or data values. You know this bear actually suffered a long time before it expired. In real life, the meat would still be edible but compromised by lactic acid and adrenaline; it might not taste very good. Buddy this is a bug or they have introduced a very significant game change which has not been documented (yet). I'm gonna open a bug on this on the Hinterland Forum. We need to know more about this, if its a bug or what the heck!? Also there should have been a mechanic on the screen indicate when that meat was harvested unless the harvest was interrupted by cancel. Even then you get a partial meat harvest.

[SteveP]

I hope Hinterland will have time to publish documentation on the meat decay algorithm. We really don't know all the conditions that affect meat decay rates. There has been some discussion on the How to Play forum but I do not know how much reliability to place upon the observations there; is this insider information or gleaned from experience or guesswork? I will be making more video captures of game play and meat decay will be something I really want to test out such as the effects of indoor and outdoor temperature, use of containers, opening the carcass to facilitate cooling (important!), wind and so forth.

Also I would like to point out that it's difficult to QA these things without documentation about how they are intended to work.

[RJIII]

Hey Steve,

I think since the game is still in development and at a fast paced development with a small team the likelihood documentation is small. Also I think that they are constantly tweaking how these things work from version to version so one month they may test something out and It may never reappear again. I would say continue to make your observations, tests and post the results. It the least it might get some discussion going.

[SteveP]

I think since the game is still in development and at a fast paced development with a small team the likelihood documentation is small. Also I think that they are constantly tweaking how these things work from version to version so one month they may test something out and It may never reappear again. I would say continue to make your observations, tests and post the results. It the least it might get some discussion going.

I think we have a tremendous community of volunteers who play the game and love it and have produced several wikis to provide excellent documentation. A lot of work can certainly be put into nice, organized documentation and so I would suggest that (developers) going full hog to build a website of documentation isn't necessary, if the relevant information is available.

I like that Hinterland is responsive to the end users of the game. I like the spiral model of iterative development with feedback from the user community. This is truly a way that Hinterland can distinguish superior game products!

[Support]

Thanks for the feedback - I will get this over to our design team to take a look at