Dan_

The hammer is a must have for ice breaking, it only decays minimally when breaking the ice holes and you can repair it infinitely with some tools and fir. Honestly, fishing without the tip ups just doesn't cut it for me. It made fish a staple in my diet whenever I'm in a location that is fishable. Mountaineer's hut in TWM comes to mind, just leave a tip up in front of the cabin and go break the ice every now and then and harvest your fish. The excess lamp oil is also handy when cutting limbs and you need that extra couple degrees of warmth to minimize cold damage.

It is already canon that you can't get into the community center basement because it's his dungeon. I think you can fill in the blanks as to what type of dungeon it is.

I managed to spend 50 days there with my long term loper, it is a great region. Food is plentiful on both sides of the map if you know where to travel, I found there are 6 deer hunting spots ( 4 on the west side and 2 on the upper eastern side ). That and the bear meat to tide you over is plenty enough to survive long term. I also tried my hand at fishing there and it's 100% doable with two tip ups and a snow shelter, there's a spot near the waterfall you can set up a shelter and two holes you can interact with from the inside, you can also run back to the old corral and make a wind protected fire there for emergency warmup. Helps that is a close to the mines and you can ferry tons of coal there to fish with permafires. Weather is also very maglens friendly, I think I only used 6 matches in my time there. Overall, I think it's a fantastic region and I do prefer it to FA tbh. The only thing I wish they allowed us to do is to damage the machine so it doesn't produce glimmer fog anymore, it is a lore friendly feature but it does gets old sometimes. My potato computer gets frame drops when close to the mine buildings and the fog hits.

Are you using the Tip ups or just manually fishing? With the tip ups I get noticeably larger fish when using bait, not sure if the lure has any practical effect. While just fishing straight up I don't use anything, as the lure does seem to decrease bite rate from my cursory observations ( might be confirmation bias on my part ). I wonder if there's any flaw in the implementation of the mechanic where it works for the tip-ups but not for manual fishing.

Hi Yoli! Yes, they did change the guaranteed match spawns for Interloper within the first few drops of TFTT. A lot of the spawns changed and some still remain, if you want some spoilers for PV matches:

I just love the fact that it gets creepier and more dodgy looking the more you go down. Buried Echoes spoiler:

Thank you so much for the update and all the hard work you folks put in this year. Tales made this an amazing TLD year for me and I'm very grateful we'll be able to finally give wintermute the amazing send-off it deserves next year. Can't wait for Tales parts five and six! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!

That's actually pretty clever advice. I have most of the middle of the map filled and all points of interest/caves, but there's plenty of dark spots and unmapped unnamed trails, gonna start paying more attention to those and using the map. Also, mapping the vista spots, haven't done that even though I've mapped the Boss' lookout before getting the polaroid. In your experience, can you conceivably find 10 birch saplings in this region? I got the ones near the wall of the waterfall closest to the pond by Unquenched Extraction and a single one standing before the river crossing just before it. I need to comb the upper and lower parts more carefully to see if I can find an extra 5. I want to stay here at the zoc for 100 days, but I only brought 15 arrows and some extra arrowheads, I'm down to 6 arrows now after 35 days and a lot of killing. Oh, and spoilers about particularly easy to spot birch stands would be appreciated. Thanks Hozz!

I set up final camp by the river cave, near Miner's Footpath. The river It's the only place with warm outdoor shelter nearby and enough game to sustain the character longer term, west side best side is my motto for this map. I appreciate how it isn't an empty vastness like the airfield, but then FA has killer safehouses to counter that, the cabin at Drift Island is just TLD perfection distilled to a high concentration. ZoC has points of interest are only a short stone throw away from each other, which is nice in my books. My only complaint so far is a perceived lack of birch saplings, I think I only found 5 so far in the days I've been here, maybe need to go off the beaten path a bit more to locate those other elusive saplings.

The moose got Kev again. He is currently on high doses of rose hip tea and is unable to coordinate his hands to type at the moment. In all seriousness, you need to crouch away immediately after a bear/moose attack. If they detect you again they're just gonna repeat the cycle all over. Regarding wolf behaviour, a few updates ago they did change the way the pack deals with the player, beforehand if a wolf was stalking you the rest of the pack would scare off into the distance for quite some time. Nowadays they always scare off a short distance and are in pursuit again shortly, need to stock up on ammo/arrows and be a sure shot ( or use the revolver ) to fend them off. It's not pack behaviour quite like the T-wolves have, but it's a bit scary dealing with 4-5 wolves at once.

I'm honestly fine with having to take the drinks out and pouring a good ol' cuppa, fits with headcanon of squatting down somewhere out of the way and having a nice warm beverage to keep the spirits up during the tough journeys ahead. It's a tool you use on rest breaks, not designed for speedrunning the maps, I reckon. My only QoL wish is that the warmth would last just a bit longer when outside. It's cool that it's 6+ hours when inside but it's half that when roaming outside ( as per my limited testing ). I particularly think it should keep the warmth better if you fill all 8 slots with full teas. Please excuse my lack of knowledge in thermodynamics, but if you have half of the flask filled with ambient temperature air, the overall heat ( energy ) is half of that when there's 8 boiling teas inside. Of course, liquids are better heat conductors than air, so it wouldn't be double heat retention as surface area of the flask lining now has boiling liquid instead of air to cope with, but, my ape brain would think that this relationship would not be linear and positive in the sense that the high energy flask would retain heat better than the half filled flask. Damn, now I want to make two liters of coffee and fill one thermos full and have the other be partially filled to test IRL. Seems like a reasonable pursuit for 10PM at night. 😁

Speaking about the main topic, I haven't got the poisoned affliction just yet. How do the stims help in this situation? Do they reduce the time it takes to heal back, or do they just add 15% max condition back? If so, how much time do they cut off from the recovery process?

I'm fully expecting the trader to be an external character which might remain nameless and unbound to Story mode. It makes perfect sense to me that the trader would not be meeting the player in person, at least not intentionally. Picture this: he/she's used to dealing with Rudiger and probably other unsavory types (Mathis? Forest Talkers? Breyerhouse goons?), you would minimize any chances of you getting shot and left for dead in this such a godforsaken place, like GBI. Buried Echoes Spoiler: I'm thinking you would need to get in range to a specific transmitter and wait for a transmission, then negotiate the terms right in place, ( perhaps the trader has a loot set which is slightly random every time, maybe you request for medical supplies or gunsmithing materials, etc ). A new tales quest/task would then be enabled with the location of your payment. Once you deposit the agreed price ( whatever that is ) you have to wait for another tranmission with the location of the supply cache containing your items/they are already waiting in a set location the trader left for you. The Tales design and roadmap are very deliberate in having the radio as a centerpiece, I'm pretty sure we're speculating here but the design and features are already being worked on or already set. If you think about the roadmap they haven't strayed from the original content scope, even though they made it clear they could reverse course on features at any given moment. I think the radio is a safe bet to be related to the trader mechanic.

I have a sneaking suspicion the Trader is gonna be connected to the end of the third tale, and thus you would only able to make contact using the radio. Perhaps this person was an acquaintance of Rudiger/Foreman/Security Chief. Keeping the crew working deep inside the mountain would demand a constant supply chain, so the Trader makes sense Tales' lore wise. I would also expect to not make visual contact with the them, as that befits TLD's style the most in my opinion. Agree with Art's take on the selection the trader might carry, consumables like food and medicine (including Vit C tablets, maybe?) should be staples for all difficulty modes, perhaps lead and gunpowder for the difficulty modes that have firearms enabled. High end tools and weapons should not be available through this mechanic IMO. I would also love it the selection to be randomized to simulate supply constraints to some extent and that randomization reflects on the price of items. There is so much that can be done with this mechanic to keep the game interesting for years to come, this will finally liberate the hoarder in me to use up my cooking ingredients more. 😁

That's a good design decision, now I can keep my Flask collection intact and on display. Speaking of Flasks, the Fandom wiki ( I know..I know.. ) mentions you can put stews inside the flask, but from my limited testing that is just not possible. Anybody else can store stews inside the flasks?