What about clothes?


Wasteland Watcher

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How about a fur hat? or hide under garments as the Inuit made them? Society has lost a lot of primitive technology. There should never be an excuse to not have warm clothing if one has access to furs and hides. Often our indigenous people simply used big buffalo robes or a bear skin robe. Winter was the starving time so supplies had to be laid in. On the coast, this would have been salmon. In the prairies, it would have been pemmican and whatever could be dried and cured with smoke.

Only caribou furs are suitable for winter survival since they have hollow hairs. Other ungulates such as elk and deer lack hollow hairs but they are light and open in the interior to provide winter insulation. In TLD we don't seem to get the -60F weather typical of the Arctic winter. -40 seems more typical in the game. If the wild life is surviving, it must be because their furs are warm enough. If the geomagnetic anomaly has altered the weather patterns, only the animals from the far North will have the adaptations to survive.

Further reading: http://www.aitc.sk.ca/saskschools/arctic/clothing.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribou
 

Caribou hair up close:
128626953-color-enhanced-sem-of-caribou-

 

Deer hair closeup:

deer_hair_40t.jpg

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4 hours ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

I tend to only repair things that I highly value, which I know or expect to use or need. I don't like depending solely on crafted clothing b/c you never know what might happen and the replacement time can be quite signifiant, so having a good set of repaired "civilized" clothes as a back-up is a very good idea. Then again, I have a psychological aversion to running around the world naked, that not all of our players share. :)

 

3 hours ago, elloco999 said:

I agree. Even when I have a full set of crafted clothes (augmented with non-crafted clothing for all those items we can't create (yet)), I always try to keep a full set of non crafted clothes as a backup. I even go so far to keep at least 1 light wool sweater and 1 heavy wool sweater and 1 light jacket (like the skiing jacket) and 1 heavy jacket (like the marine pea coat). That way I can choose if I want to wear warm but heavy clothes or if the weather permits and I need to carry a lot of stuff I can wear lighter clothes. I also mix and match crafted and non-crafted clothes to get the warmth I need for the least weight.

Like others have mentioned, I generally do wear all non-crafted clothes until their condition have dropped to the point I find them useless and only harvest them then. A lot of the time you don't really need the warmth bonuses a full set of crafted clothes provide, especially when you're operating near your main base.

But do you use cloth to keep those clothes in good condition? Or just use cloth for making bandages?

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  • Hinterland
2 hours ago, Wasteland Watcher said:

 

But do you use cloth to keep those clothes in good condition? Or just use cloth for making bandages?

Depends on what I need at the time. If you can avoid locking in to certain decisions it's better -- you have to balance being prepared against leaving raw materials available to do create what you may need at the time.

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8 hours ago, Wasteland Watcher said:

But do you use cloth to keep those clothes in good condition? Or just use cloth for making bandages?

I usually have plenty of cloth by the time I've crafted a full set of clothes that I don't have to choose between making bandages and keeping my clothes in good condition. So I do both. If I'm all out of bandages I will prioritize bandages of course, but keeping my main clothes and my backup set in good condition is important to me as well.

That said, I don't injured much so I have little need of bandages. In my current stalker run I'm nearing 300 days and I haven't had to harvest cloth to make bandages yet.

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That's one of the great things about the way your approach to gameplay can evolve, particularly as you face different challenges. I went from harvesting everything into basic materials and hoarding in my early games, to leaving stashes of materials around, essentially making little bases all over, to eventually only taking what I needed and leaving as much untouched as I could - not just to preserve condition of items that begin to deteriorate when you touch them, but because you realise you're expending all these calories and time on activities that won't really help... You can't really plan for every possible problem, but you can maintain an awareness of your environment and what resources are readily available around you. 

It feeds into that sense of mastery in the environment, when you can be minimalist and adaptable, instead of focusing on building up that survival infrastructure around you.

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On March 3, 2016 at 10:27 AM, Raphael van Lierop said:

Depends on what I need at the time. If you can avoid locking in to certain decisions it's better -- you have to balance being prepared against leaving raw materials available to do create what you may need at the time.

 

On March 3, 2016 at 5:21 PM, elloco999 said:

I usually have plenty of cloth by the time I've crafted a full set of clothes that I don't have to choose between making bandages and keeping my clothes in good condition. So I do both. If I'm all out of bandages I will prioritize bandages of course, but keeping my main clothes and my backup set in good condition is important to me as well.

That said, I don't injured much so I have little need of bandages. In my current stalker run I'm nearing 300 days and I haven't had to harvest cloth to make bandages yet.

 

On March 3, 2016 at 5:23 PM, LucidFugue said:

That's one of the great things about the way your approach to gameplay can evolve, particularly as you face different challenges. I went from harvesting everything into basic materials and hoarding in my early games, to leaving stashes of materials around, essentially making little bases all over, to eventually only taking what I needed and leaving as much untouched as I could - not just to preserve condition of items that begin to deteriorate when you touch them, but because you realise you're expending all these calories and time on activities that won't really help... You can't really plan for every possible problem, but you can maintain an awareness of your environment and what resources are readily available around you. 

It feeds into that sense of mastery in the environment, when you can be minimalist and adaptable, instead of focusing on building up that survival infrastructure around you.

 Gentlemen, thank you very much for the input. It's some good guidance and has given me a better way to move forward than I had originally planned. 

 I'm so used to using "standard operating procedure's" that I'm a little narrow-minded sometimes but I see now that I should just  have about as many bandages as I have Old man's beard  and antiseptic. 

 Anymore cloth and I will use it to repair my second set of clothes ("civilian clothes").

 Thanks again for the guidance, much appreciated! 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Anyone make multiples of crafted clothing (coat, boots, mittens)?  At this point I have so much surplus hide, I'm pondering if there's a strategy or benefit to creating multiples.  It seems more efficient to keep repairing them (I generally repair my coats/boots/mitts when they drop to 70%), unless they are badly damaged during an animal attack.  But I'm pondering if there's a benefit to multiple sets that I haven't considered yet.

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You're better off repairing items. For instance, you don't know what will get damaged first so you made wind up harvesting your deerskin boots to repair your deerskin pants for instance. Plus the hides themselves should be lighter and easier to store/transport.

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11 hours ago, Vhalkyrie said:

Anyone make multiples of crafted clothing (coat, boots, mittens)?  At this point I have so much surplus hide, I'm pondering if there's a strategy or benefit to creating multiples.  It seems more efficient to keep repairing them (I generally repair my coats/boots/mitts when they drop to 70%), unless they are badly damaged during an animal attack.  But I'm pondering if there's a benefit to multiple sets that I haven't considered yet.

I have had a spare set of crafted clothes before, but don't do that anymore. They take up a lot of storage space and they degrade slowly even when stored in a container (just like all clothes). As it never happened that I needed my spare set for any reason I decided to just make sure I always have at least enough cured skins and gut to craft an entire set if I ever need it. I do always keep a spare set of regular clothes so I can always fall back on that if I really need to.

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  • 1 year later...

With recent enhancements, Cabin Fever, Clothing Layering, Clothing wetness and attendant effects, there are many more considerations to the use of cloth. For one thing, it can be much more important to have cloth available to build and maintain a snow shelter to avoid cabin fever. I am thinking that this thread is the closest to a discussion of clothing strategy however maybe a separate thread for discussion. I know clothing strategy definitely would play into long-term strategy for Interloper and Stalker runs. I have not seen much discussion of the topic nor of the wetness factor, the effects of wetness and so forth. Moderator: what say you? New topic thread? I'm inclined to think so; of course you can always merge back to this thread.

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On 4/16/2017 at 4:09 AM, SteveP said:

With recent enhancements, Cabin Fever, Clothing Layering, Clothing wetness and attendant effects, there are many more considerations to the use of cloth.

Agreed.. given all the changes of late, it would be well worth revisiting this topic.

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