frickoffanddie

If you drag any item into an area-transition zone, it'll go into your inventory. This is to prevent items being stuck past the warp point, unable to be picked up. This is the only way to get unobtainable items like the car battery into your inventory.

Did you ever consider delivering the WINTERMUTE story through other mediums such as cinema or literature? Have you ever felt like you're "confined" by using a video game to convey it?

If you wanted MRE's to be as realistic as possible, you'd have to remove them, since there's no such thing as a Canadian MRE. They're called IMP's here.

The crows don't set anything as a priority because they have no AI. You can actually see multiple flocks of crows circling above carcasses within a close vicinity; they aren't persistent like wolves and deer are. But to answer your question, the crows would prioritize circling above the bear first (as they are the most immediate food source for them, and you need to be able to show to players where your kill is before it decays after 3 days), then several weeks later you might find a flock grounded near one of your lost arrows, then perhaps another week later you see another flock near your last arrow. If the weather picks up while you're outside, any grounded crows would fly off and return when the weather is clear again. An incoming blizzard is more important to communicate to players than a lost arrow. If this type of change is too much to ask, then what about something like a metal detector that only works during an Aurora? That way, we have a reason to explore during an Aurora, might find an arrow or bullet hidden in the snow somewhere. Perhaps you could toggle the metal detector in Custom Settings so you could have a game with or without it if you think it'd make gameplay too easy.

Painting our arrows? I mean, if it'll help find the blasted things, I'm all for it, but there's gotta be a better way. Crows wouldn't be reprogrammed, they'd just have a new behavior attached to them. You go through a loading screen and they'd "pop up" around the site of a lost arrow, you'd never see them physically landing around it, only flying away when you get close.

What about adding some sort of a timer until crows show up over a lost arrow? That way, you can't rely on them as a simple arrow beacon that shows up within a loading screen, but rather something that would assist in their recovery many weeks later. Something like, say, 10-50 days. If you miss that shot, yeah, you're not gonna have that arrow for awhile, but you can count on crows eventually leading you right back to it. I think this is less of an issue of the details of my particular suggestion, but rather the idea that you could recover a lost arrow (which you view as making the game easier), which is absurd to me; why wouldn't you want something vital to your survival? Do you like to suffer? I worked for these goddamn arrowheads and I'll be damned before I allow some fluffy canine bastard to take it from me because I decided to stay indoors to pass time while he bled out. This game is becoming more accessible. By extension, it's becoming easier. I think a suggestion like this would help newer players recover arrows after toying with the bow (which is already punishing enough), and veteran players to survive a couple more hundred days. There's punishing in a good way (getting food poisoning after eating bad food as an example; a direct consequence of a poor decision), then there's punishing in a bad, slightly buggy way (losing your arrow to a wolf after phasing through a loading screen and not knowing at ALL where he lost the arrow). There are NO systems in place to recover a lost item. That, to me, is a feature sorely lacking in an inventory management game. Maybe arrowheads recovered by crow sightings would be of a lower condition? There's no way for them to degrade otherwise, so new bow users who keep losing their arrows would eventually have them destroyed forever as a result of their carelessness (since you guys love to punish people).

Crows are used in-game in many different ways. These include signalling bad weather, alerting the player of a nearby bear, or circling above deceased animals to assist in their discovery. But after losing one too many arrows to hostile wildlife, I thought of a new kind of crow behavior that would result in them landing near broken and regular arrows, flying away when approached, but leaving the arrow behind. Of course, there'd have to be a way to somehow communicate to players that they can't be killed, like if you started aiming they'd immediately fly away. Crows are never seen on the ground, so you'd know that when they've landed, they've taken an interest in your long-lost crow-feathered arrow. They're incredibly intelligent creatures after all. I view the loss of an arrow after shooting an animal as unintentional behaviour. In most cases, the arrow will stick cleanly into the animal, and in other cases, (especially if you go indoors), they'll just disappear. They're so thin and hard to see (I even have difficulty picking them up they're so damn invisible), I'm starting to think it's intentional behavour to make them easily lost. In any case, I think this type of a suggestion would really help long-term gameplay (all while maintaining the spirit of the game), especially on Interloper, where losing an arrow could be the difference between life or death. Thanks for reading.

You beachcomb or you keep looking. Have you cleared out every region, even transition regions? Ravine is jam-packed with saplings.

You play story mode. There are worldbuilding documents available for you to find and read and learn more about the Collapse and stuff. And don't worry, you couldn't burn those books even if you wanted to. You'll get tidbits from survival mode through buffer memories and the occasional loading screen tip, but story mode is where the, well, story is.

To put things into perspective, by the time you've used up every possible manmade and natural resource, they'll have released the next region. Then you'll be able to survive for a couple hundred days more. There is a LOT of stuff in the game. You're not going to run out. The game is basically infinite play, assuming you don't get assassinated by a wolf or something.

Alcohol is currently presented (the opening Episode 1 scenes) in the game as to future-proof it in regards to ratings, but I believe it'd be difficult to implement it in Survival Mode in a way that doesn't glorify its consumption. Alcohol has a lot of uses, like cleaning wounds (infection risk), as a sleep aid (cabin fever), as a painkiller (pain affliction) and even as stress reliever (steadying your aiming when cold). No doubt, it'd be a useful addition. But otherwise, it's offensive to not only glorify the consumption of alcohol as something positive (and construe its effects in a beneficial fashion, even when tempered with negative effects, like everything that comes with being drunk), but also to allow it to exist in an isolated northern setting. That's a fulfillment of the stereotype that people who live in isolation drink a lot, and that probably won't sit well with some folks. Like.. just think about it; you have to binge-drink to stave off being riddled with Cabin Fever just for a night's rest, always looking for a bottle whenever you're scavenging because it's so useful. The Long Dark can be occasionally dark, but that's borderline traumatic. Yeah, I'm probably overreacting, but to be fair, anything alcohol can do can already be done by items of a similar (or lower) weight that exist in the game. If you need to sleep through cabin fever in a pinch, just eat a hunk of raw meat. Boom, 10 hours easy sleep. Plus, you'll save the match that you'd normally use to cook it. It's a win-win.

Wolves are secretly cats in disguise.

Dispatch #7 addressed the brand. It's not coming back.

Some of the themes of this game are the reawakening of humanity's primal nature, the realization of how dependent we have become on fallible, modern technology such as cell phones and cars, and how we'll adapt to their absence or failure (the transition from manmade to natural). My question is: Will we ever see these themes reflected in the personalities of our survival mode character? It's unfitting to see my 800 day character dressed in bear furs looking like death warmed over, yet still complaining nonchalantly about his mouth being dry or wondering if he can eat trees. Even after surviving hundreds of blizzards, living in a cave, covering himself in rotting animal skins and culling legions of hostile wildlife, he's still the same old gleefully cautious everyman that he was on the first day. Maybe he's afraid of turning into Jeremiah. In that case, keep being you, Mackenzie.

Is the main menu cinematic homage to the main menu cinematics in Half-Life 2 and its episodes? Never really saw the similarity until I booted up Half-Life 2: Episode 2, saw the headcrab skitter across the floor in the main menu and went "Hey, that's like the wolf in the main menu screen of the Long Dark.. oh wait." If so, you should consider having the main menu cinematic change to suit the setting of the quest you're on in a particular episode.