Pillock

Wouldn't the eggs just freeze solid? Are there any types of birds that nest and lay eggs in the depths of a Canadian winter? I wouldn't imagine there are many, if any.

As far as I can tell, there is is very, very little point in doing manual fishing any more at all! Why would you sit there wasting time watching a progress bar, when you can put down an automatic fishing machine to do it for you? The materials needed for the tip-up mechanism and the basic fishing lure are so easy to come by (and you don't need any tools to make them - just a workbench) that it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense not to use them, as far as I can see. You just leave it there, then go off and do whatever you want for a couple of hours, come back and you've caught a fish! Even if you want to stay nearby, you're better off setting the tip-up instead of doing it manually - you can tend a fire, boil water, cook, prepare food, do repairs, whatever. And if you catch a fish in the mean time you can see the tip-up trigger, and stop what you're doing to deal with the fish and reset the line. It makes fishing really, really easy (almost too easy?). I've caught loads of fish at Mystery Lake. Absolutely loads. Granted, it might be a favourable location compared to others, but I do play Custom mode with all wildlife (including fish) set to "Low" spawn chance.

I've found 2 rifles in the 3 regions I've explored so far (DP, CH, PV). I've found about 8 pistols! I'm playing on Medium "Base Loot" (to enable hatchets and knives), with all the other loot spawn options set to produce minimum quantities. I've got about 70 revolver shells in storage and maybe 20-30ish rifle shells. Personally, I think that's a bit too much for my liking, but I can't turn down the loot spawns any further without disabling hatchets and knives, which I don't want to do. I have noticed that guns are spawning in some different places from before, as far as I can remember.

Find matches, then go exploring! I'm not going to spend hours and hours doing stuff I've done before, when there's new regions to get lost in. Might even start the game with matches for a change, and skip the panicky running-around phase so I can get going straight away.

For me, the most important feature that's ever been implemented to TLD since I started playing it has been the Custom Survival Mode. I honestly don't think I'd still be playing the game without it. As long as the Custom mode continues to support allowing players to tinker with which features they want to include or exclude from any particular game start, I will never have any concern about whether or not some new feature will 'break' the game for me. (I personally always play with Timberwolves switched off, for example, because I don't like them.) If the new Trader feature changes the game for some players to the extent that they lose some fundamental aspect of their enjoyment (the feeling of total isolation and aloneness, perhaps), then I do think it's important that we're able to disable it in the Custom menu and play without it if we choose to. That way, no-one need have any complaints or concerns.

"Trader, where are the eggs? ANSWER ME!"

I read novel a while back called "Out in the Open" by Jesus Carrasco. It's about a young lad who goes on the run from his village in central Spain (early 20th century-ish?), and is constantly being chased down by the evil local magistrate/sheriff. The setting is kind like an antithesis to The Long Dark's: hot, dry, arid plains. The kid has to survive by staying cool rather than warm, water is difficult to come by, food is scarce; and he has to keep moving on while staying out of the way of civilization, in order to avoid the lawman. He finds a donkey, which helps him carry stuff. And he acquires a goat, which provides him with small amounts of milk (as well as bruises when it's not in the right mood to be milked!). Both need to be fed, watered, rested and kept cool as well (or eaten?), posing him dilemmas. It's very bleak, as a story. But while reading it I was constantly thinking of TLD, and how the book's premise would be a good basis for a similar game. I mean, I'd love to take Hinterland's advice and make it myself, but that'd be a bit like asking me to build myself a new car from scratch! Here's hoping the idea finds its way somehow to someone with the capability to do it, I guess.

abundance of cattails, mushrooms and rosehips. I think it's Ok. But then again, I don't play Interloper so I don't really care either way!

I find Bleak Inlet quite enjoyable - but that's probably because I always switch Timberwolves off completely in the Custom settings. I've encountered them in the Story Mode, but that's led directly to me not playing Story Mode at all since shortly after Episode 3 was released! I just can't be bothered with them - they only make the gameplay worse, in my opinion. But the Custom survival mode does allow you to play TLD without them, and it's still a lot of fun. It's got the same feel for me as it ever did - if I hadn't started looking at the forums again recently, I'd have forgotten that Timberwolves ever existed! Bleak Inlet does feel a little empty, I suppose (though there is a bear). But it's still one of the more challenging regions to start out on, even without wolves.

"Did I ever mention that I hate being cold? Because I really do." Yeah, Astrid, you did mention it - like five minutes ago. And five minutes before that. You go to a rural part of Canada in the depths of winter and then complain that it's cold? What do you expect?

There used to be a preppers cache next to Pensive Pond in Pleasant Valley. That was a very nice place to set up home, but I haven't seen it for donkeys years. I don't know if it's been moved, or removed, or I've just been unlucky. But I'd say there. Otherwise, the Signal Hill radio shack thing is nearly as good. I also enjoyed living in the plane wreck on top of Timberwolf Mountain for quite some time. It feels like you're king of the world up there in your mountaintop castle!

"The Wild doesn't care if I am here or not. It doesn't care if I have enough food or not. It doesn't care if I am lonely. It doesn't care if I am so miserable that I start going insane. The Wild is just here. It's The Wild. It's hard to go and try to live your dreams and find that... it's so difficult." -Ed Wardle, from his documentary film, Alone In The Wild, for Channel 4 Television in the UK (2009). Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Wild The film also seems to be available on Youtube!

Yeah, I think you get less condition regen overall if you set it the way you do. But it feels more intuitive to me to have it regain during rest; also, when I first started playing TLD, sleep-regen was all you got anyway, so that feels more natural to me. I don't like completely disabling any single feature altogether (except for Timberwolves!) so I keep fishing switched on, along with firearms and knives/hatchets. Having no sleep-regen disables Herbal Tea, which is another reason I don't do it that way round. With awake-regen on 'none', you still get some from Birch Bark, if you can find it. I have all the natural resources (sticks, tree limbs, OMB, mushrooms, etc.) on minimum, so birch bark is fairly rare. But yeah, there's still plenty of them - more than you tend to need! It would be nice to have more flexibility with the Custom settings to make certain things even more extreme than you currently are allowed.

I haven't finished Episode 3 yet. I, too, got annoyed with the Timberwolves and just abandoned it. I've always played Survival Mode with Timberwolves switched off ever since!

I think the moments I've enjoyed the most are when you are very close to death, but you manage to pull through - either by your own ingenuity or by sheer luck. In fact, the lucky escapes are possibly the most fun. For example, when I first set foot in Pleasant Valley after making the journey through the Winding River for the first time: I was lost (obviously, being my first time on the map), it was evening and a blizzard was starting up (obviously, being Pleasant Valley, though I didn't know that yet). I kept my character awake for an entire night on a hillside, tending a fire stick by stick because the wind wouldn't allow the fire-duration to go above 9 minutes. When dawn broke I was exhausted and starving, but my fire had kept me from freezing to death, and the storm was easing. I came out from behind my rock and looked out over the valley - there in front of me, just down the hill, was the Farmhouse. I think I let out an audible cheer, and just ran straight for it. Once inside, I immediately set about smashing chairs for firewood, got a blazing fire going in the living room, and gorged myself on the contents of the voyageur-stocked kitchen! It was a great moment. The feeling of relief, of being saved, was immense. I've never played another game that made me feel that, I don't think.

If you change the health regain settings in the custom mode to 'low' for sleep and 'none' for general awake-and-healthy regain, you only get about 12% of your health bar back from a 7 hour sleep (7 hours is the most you can sleep for in one go with the thirst rate on maximum). This makes starvation -> sleep-regain tactics fairly worthless, since you only get back at night about the same amount as you lose in a day from starving. If you are also losing condition from freezing, you won't get all of it back from one night's sleep, and you'll be in deficit. If you get attacked by a bear or a wolf, it can take 4 or 5 days to get back up to full health, assuming you're not taking any damage from starving/freezing/thirst/fatigue during that time. You could also put the fatigue settings to a level where you can't sleep very often because you don't get tired quickly - but I think this makes the gameplay a feel bit weird, and generally easier, so I don't do that. You can set wolf, bear and moose spawns to 'low', which makes them less available for food (combined with 'low' spawns for other animals, including fish, this can make food much more difficult to come by. Another thing I do is set the wolf-fear level to the maximum, along with the scent ranges - this means they can detect you from far away, and they often run off immediately, which makes them much harder to hunt for food.

You don't have to read spoiler websites or edit your save in order to do well at Interloper. You have to play differently. You have to run around the main locations where loot will spawn, taking freezing and hunger damage while you do it, and then regain as much as you can with long sleeps. Push the survival mechanics to the limits in order to be as efficient as possible, and keep moving until you have good enough gear to relax and settle down a bit. Apparently that takes upwards of 30 days - maybe more like 50. I don't like playing like that, and I've never made it that far. But give it a try - you might find it rewarding in the end. But if you don't enjoy it or you don't have the patience to die over and over again while you get used to it, then don't play it. I don't. There are plenty of other options for making the game challenging without the constraints that Interloper puts on you.

Yes - because you know where they are. That's my point, really. If you start on TWM you will go to the hut for matches, because you know where the hut is relative to anywhere that you spawn, and you know that there are matches there. If you didn't have countless hours of experience playing Interloper on TWM, you wouldn't know that there are always matches there, and if you didn't know the map all that well you might not even be able to find the hut in the first place. I know that is the case to an extent in all the pre-set Experience Modes, but it is extremely the case in Interloper! In other modes, the loot locations are not as fixed (but there is more loot overall). There are always matches in the PV farmhouse basement on Interloper, but not always on other modes (but there's a shedload of other stuff there that isn't going to be there in Interloper, granted!). My main gripes with Interloper are that it feels formulaic and restrictive compared to the other modes, it forces you to experiment by dying until you know where to go (and not to go) for particular items, it compels you into doing counter-intuitive things like deliberate starvation and freezing, and it removes several items and aspects from the gameplay altogether. To me it doesn't feel like a survival experience, it feels like a videogame with artificial rules. My original point was to reassure the OP that he doesn't need to play Interloper if he's wants a new challenge after mastering the other Experience Modes. The pre-set modes are great for exchanging stories and strategies with other players, because they give you a common reference point. But that's the only advantage to them once you're familiar with the game, because the Custom settings allow players to set the game up however they like (more or less), and the OP should probably do that instead of punishing himself on a mode that he isn't enjoying, and possibly isn't ever going to enjoy.

Really? Well, I stand corrected then. But matches, though? You can't wander (or live!) for long without finding matches, surely. They are in pretty specific places in my experience of Interloper. Is that not right?

Well, they are a bit more randomized on the other levels, or if you use the custom settings. That's mostly why I prefer it. I would wager that most, even very experienced, Interloper players, if they started a new game on a new map that they'd never played on before, would die pretty quickly, purely because they don't know where stuff is. The game doesn't give you a chance to live by your wits in Interloper - if you don't know where you are or where you're going, you just die! I prefer to be able to explore an unfamiliar place for the first time, knowing that I have a chance to survive if I make good decisions based on the current needs of my character, even if I have no idea where I am. In Interloper, a good survival decision is based not so much on the current needs of your character, but far more on prior knowledge of the map and it's loot locations. Indeed, you often have to sacrifice the current needs of your character, like warmth and hunger, and deliberately take damage in order to get where you want to go (safe in the knowledge that you can recover all that lost condition with a couple of chocolate bars and a good night's sleep!). You have to explore a new place in the full knowledge that you will die doing so, in order to learn where things are and thereby do better next time. Death by death, you accumulate map knowledge that enables you to plan better for your next life. That all just feels really unnatural to me! I think you accept Interloper for what it is - a restricted, chopped down version of the complete game with fixed constraints on your behaviour - or else you leave it well alone! P.S. Sorry if this sounded like a bit of a rant, but I just can't enjoy playing Interloper mode! The Custom mode was an absolute God-send when it was added to the game, and I wouldn't probably still be playing TLD after all these years, were it not for that. (Still loving playing it, by the way!)

@peteloud I'm certainly no great expert at playing Interloper - my longest survival is probably about the same as your 30 day run. And I think that's pretty good. I don't like Interloper and I haven't played it since Custom games became available. What I will say about it from my fairly limited experience is that it feels much more formulaic than the other modes. I think of it more like a Challenge Mode than a true survival mode: it presents a particular set of problems and solutions that are different from playing on the other survival modes, and with that it is much more restricted and less varied than the other modes as well. You have to know the maps extremely well, you have to know where the spawn points of important loot are, you have to know how the survival mechanics work very well, and you have to game them, exploit them, min/max as much as possible in order to succeed. There isn't a lot of room for improvisation - you have to just know what you're doing, where you're going, and what's likely to be there when you arrive. Eg. loot item X will be at location a, b or c on this map; if X isn't at a, then item Y or Z will be, and item X will be at location b or c. That kind of thing. That only comes either from bitter experience (lots of deaths and restarts) or from using out-of-game help like guides, wikis and maps. Or possibly a bit of both. I don't find that fun, particularly, and it doesn't sound like you do, either. I wouldn't worry about it. I'd recommend experimenting with the Custom game settings so that you can make the game much more challenging than Stalker (more challenging than Interloper in some aspects, if you like), but in a way that suits how you want to play. That's what I do, anyway.

I've never looked at maps from the internet. If someone posts one in a discussion in this forum, I skip the post so that I don't see the map! There are still bits of Pleasant Valley, Timberwolf Mountain and Hushed River where I can get lost (even Mystery Lake if the visibility is bad!). I like it like that. I haven't been to Ash Canyon yet, and I've barely started with Bleak Inlet, but I like to explore new maps by myself. I do use the charcoal mapping thing a bit, but mostly that's just for fun/distraction (not always though - sometimes it helps me figure out which general direction to head in when I'm somewhere unfamiliar). One of the big appeals of when a new map is released is the first exploration. You rely on your instincts and in-game survival knowledge to improvise and survive on the fly, rather than knowing what's going to be where and which route to take. I like that feeling.

This would be a fairly big change to how the game handles the player's temperature, and change gameplay habits a lot (so I don't necessarily expect it to be terribly popular!), but I do think it would be a change for the better, and lead to more various and interesting gameplay choices. So, right now, if the "feels like" temp is just 1° C (I'm going to use C as a measure here, because I don't understand the Fahrenheit scale!) above zero, you will gradually get warmer and warmer until your temp bar maxes out - if you wait long enough. Therefore, if the "feels like" temp is positive, you are safe and you don't need to worry; the only advantage to being above +1°C is to make the warming process a bit faster if you are already cold - if you're not already cold, there is no advantage at all. On the other hand, if it is 1°C below zero, you start freezing at a consistent rate and will eventually die if you don't do something about it (if you "feel like" -35°C you will start freezing at exactly the same rate as if you are at -1°C). I've never really liked this state of affairs. First, I would like to see your freezing rate scale with the amount below zero that your "feels like" temp is. This would make it advantageous to stay as warm as possible, whatever the temperature, and utilize wind protection and light sources for heat more often, since it would slow your freezing rate if you keep your "feels like" temp as close to zero as you can. It also makes the system much more intuitive and removes some silly exploits like stripping naked in a blizzard in order to preserve the condition of your clothes, if you are freezing anyway, since it doesn't make a difference to your health (frostbite risk notwithstanding). Second, and perhaps more drastic, I would like to see your character's temperature bar max out at different levels, depending on the "feels like" temperature, assuming it's positive. For example, if you "feel like" +1°C, your temp bar could only reach a relatively small maximum level, while if you are at +15°C it might max out at about half way, and, say, +30°C and above would allow you to reach the top of the bar. Again, this would make being as warm as possible more advantageous. It would especially affect indoor areas where the temperature is just above freezing - it would give you incentive to light a fire in order to get your temperature up. I have always felt a bit disappointed that lighting a fire indoors for warmth is effectively a waste of resources, since you can max-out your temp bar by simply waiting. I was recently playing a Bleak Inlet start (my first time on the map!). I had explored and looted all (I think) of the lower part of the map, and was making my way from the broken lighthouse to the little cabin that's a little way inland by the wooden bridge over the river. I play with no condition recovery when awake, and the lowest level of recovery while asleep, so I don't 'spend' condition like a resource as a general rule, because I don't get it back again easily - and I was already down to about half condition with my temp bar starting to bottom out. The "feels like " temp was about -8°C out in the open, but it was -2°C if I was sheltered from the wind; this meant that I could keep my "feels like" temp above zero if -and only if- I both carried a light-source and I was sheltered from the wind. This I was (mostly) able to on the whole journey back to the hut, by taking a very careful, indirect route, hugging rockfaces and one side of the river gully, and then running across the open areas as fast as I could. This was an interesting dynamic to the gameplay, one which I enjoyed, but one that cops up all too rarely - it only occurs when the combination of your clothing level and the weather leaves you with a "feels like" temperature within just a few degrees of zero. Most of the time it doesn't matter because you are either too cold or you are warm enough for it not to make a difference. Another more general example is with cars - logically, you'd want to jump inside one if you were caught outside in a blizzard, but with the current mechanics there isn't any point: even though it is significantly less cold inside the car than out, you're still freezing either way, so you're actually harming yourself by taking shelter. When I got back to the hut in my Bleak Inlet game, I paused only to drink water before going to bed, where I woke up 7 hours later (7 hours is the most you can sleep in one stretch without getting dehydration damage when you have maximum thirst rate settings in the custom mode - again, I do this to limit condition recovery to a level that feels right for me) and was completely warm as toast, even though the cabin temperature + bed temperature only "feels like" about 10°C - I'd wake up feeling chilly in real life at that temperature, and I'd want to warm myself up further before going outside into the snow! Intuitively, I wanted to light a fire in the grate and have a nice cup of coffee, but I knew this would be a waste of time, matches and fuel since it would make absolutely no difference to my character's well-being - so I didn't. I really think the game would benefit from making temperatures - their effects, at least - just a little bit more dynamic. It gives you a whole load more choices and decisions to make and it would bring more of the current survival options into play more frequently. Currently, indoor fireplaces are almost useless - you don't need them to warm up, and outdoor fires are more efficient for cooking in terms of fuel usage. Factors like wind-chill only come into play on rare occasions, as described above, making it feel like a largely wasted mechanic. Cars and other low-level shelters are even rarer in their usefulness as places to wait out bad weather. Clothing kind of caps itself out as well - once you're warm enough to be above 0°C reasonably consistently, there's no point in being any warmer, and going out of your way to improve your clothing further is a waste of effort; in fact, once you get to that level, you tend to forget about temperature as a survival factor altogether. I think all this is a shame, makes the game more bland than it could be. By scaling the effects on the character according to the feels like temp in more depth, I think the game would be much richer and more fun. I'd be interested in knowing what people think!

This one is genius. I tend to do the closest thing the game lets you with this - keep all crafting materials in or on the bench, then pick up the ones I'm using to craft and replace them when I need to stop - but your suggestion would save me a lot of faffing about!

I think the addition of an on-the-spot craftable bed would improve the game. Yes, there are solutions to the problem of finding yourself out in the boonies facing death if you can't rest, but you don't a bedroll - the snowshelter being the obvious one. But it does lead to some frustratingly unintuitive situations, like building a snowshelter to sleep in that's right outside a cave or trailer where you'd have been much warmer. Situations like this remind you that you are fighting for the survival of a game character against artificial game rules, rather than being immersed in the scenario of being out in the wilderness trying to survive against nature - and I think reducing the instances of those "reminders" generally makes the game better.