Unrealistic Rest + Caloric Requirements


[wOrm]

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My biggest gripe - which makes the whole experience unrealistically tedious after 25 days - is the rate at which you lose energy. I am on day 30 something of survival and am SO tired (pun intended) of becoming fatigued so quickly. Example: I sleep for 10 hours, repair my rifle, and my energy has decreased almost 25% (im 100% serious). Three hours later I become encumbered because I cant carry the 50 lbs in my backpack anymore. Mind you, this is after eating 6.6 lbs of bear meat (2700 calories), drinking water until i'm about to pop, and being 100% warm.

This makes it very difficult to travel/explore with any sort of basic rations + tools that could get someone through a few days of unkind weather, and bad luck. Every day I find myself starving to death and exhausted after just 8-10 hours of gameplay.

I've done a lot of hiking and backpacking - which are the exact conditions in the game - and manage to get by with 10% of the food and rest required in this game.

:!: So, to make the game far more enjoyable in the long haul, and also more realistic, the food and rest requirements needs to be eased back, considerably!

P.S - I've logged 45+ hrs in this game, and this is the only real issue in my opinion at the moment

I love The Long Dark.

Keep up the amazing work :mrgreen:

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Actually, the game is much more lenient than real life for those conditions. It's not unusual for the body to used up 600 calories/hour - it's in constant overload fighting off hypothermia as well. The real biggest killer is dehydration (and yes that can kill you in your sleep).

There's a difference between hiking or backpacking in those conditions [i'm assuming you were fully equipped, had proper clothes, and weren't camping outside exposed for more than a week at a time] and living in that type of condition. As a kid, I grew up in a very similar area to the game, and even with proper clothing and stuff, you learned to pace yourself (and again, we made sure to keep well hydrated, and our meals were big).

For many city visitors, a day in the country [where we were] was "a nice day out, but damn that was exhausting"... for weekend travellers it was "I'm not gonna miss this, and I just want to get home and be warm again"... for week long visitors it was "WTF would you live out here?!?" ;)

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I don't question that under extreme conditions the body uses up a lot of energy. This is, in part, reflected by certain actions having a cost in calories.

The problem lies in the base consumption. No one should be of the brink of starvation and dehydration after sleeping for 12 hours on a full stomach and slaked. If memory serves, drinking until full before going to bed and then sleeping 12 hours will result in the character already having lost some condition to dehydration when waking up.

Hanging around indoors and doing nothing than sewing, etc. uses an insane amount of calories - I think that is what people complain about.

And then there is the whole issue with scale. Because of the distorted time-space-continuum in this game the amount of energy you need for walking for a certain amount of (in-game) time is probably fine, but the amount of energy needed for walking a certain distance is way of the charts. Because what looks like 100 yards in the game world, is actually 1200 yards.

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No one should be of the brink of starvation and dehydration after sleeping for 12 hours on a full stomach and slaked.

If you sleep for 12 hours straight you will be mildly dehydrated when you wake up(consider the dry, frozen environment). And you'll probably be a bit peckish as well.

Is your character actually starving as soon as you hit 0 calories? No. You're fine. In fact, you'll be fine for quite a while. Same with dehydration. Don't get obsessed with the Hunger and Thirst bars. Maybe your condition drops a couple points. So what? A few percentage points don't mean anything. The way I think about it is this:

90-100% - My character feels great. If you're above 90 you're not "on the brink of death" or anything like that. You feel peachy! But you do want that drink of water sometime in the near future!

80-89% - My character feels fine. Oh, maybe slightly bruised with a few aches here and there.

70-79% - My character has felt better, but we're still okay. But he wants a nap and a day off.

60-69% - Well, now he's feeling pretty lousy. The first bad day of a bad cold kind of lousy. Call your boss and take the day off.

59% and below - My character is wishing there was an emergency room or urgent care center he could go to.

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^ This is what I've been realizing on my first stalker character. That just because the thirst/hunger bar is red and empty and looking VERY URGENT, you still have quite a while before you'll die from it.

Regarding my comment on backpacking. I'm from Vermont. I've Been in in the woods all four seasons all my life doing everything. I Have back-country snowboarded, backpacked and camped for days on end with overnights - but have never spent more than 1 week in the bush, or in temps any colder then 15-20 degrees F. So, I could be wrong.

This game requires perfect balance, which is difficult to achieve! As an alpha participant I just want to offer suggestions on issues that I face. This is the only big one.

I guess we just need to focus on condition more than the bars?

Thanks for the replies/feedback 8]

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The problem lies in the base consumption. No one should be of the brink of starvation and dehydration after sleeping for 12 hours on a full stomach and slaked. If memory serves, drinking until full before going to bed and then sleeping 12 hours will result in the character already having lost some condition to dehydration when waking up.

In stalker, sleeping costs 60 cals / hour. So if you're full (2500 cals) you can sleep for 41 hours and still not be starving.

If you sleep for 12 hours and you drank your fill before sleeping, you will at most have lost 1% condition when you wake up. Most of the time, you will not have lost any condition yet but you are dehydrated at that point.

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Im going to throw in my agreement to scale back the amount of calories and thirst that is lowered when staying indoor and/or sleeping. When you look at the practicality of drinking multiple liters of water and eating KGs of food and going to bed completely full, you should have less than a 25% reduction on both food and water when you wake from 7 hours sleep.

its more of an artificial hassle for the water since you can just boil a ton of it, so it seems to be a mechanic of annoyance more than one of survival. the same can be said about the sheer amount of food you require. An actual deer carcass could feed a family of 4 eskimos for quite some time, in game, I can go through the whole carcass in a day.

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its more of an artificial hassle for the water since you can just boil a ton of it, so it seems to be a mechanic of annoyance more than one of survival. the same can be said about the sheer amount of food you require. An actual deer carcass could feed a family of 4 eskimos for quite some time, in game, I can go through the whole carcass in a day.

There are several things about the game that are wildly unrealistic. The sheer availability of game and their insane respawn rate are two big ones. Caloric values on most of the food in the game is another one... most of the game you shoot/catch would have 2-3x more calories per kg than they do. And of course the amount of meat you are allowed to harvest off a kill is incredibly small. 10kg off that deer would realistically be more like 25-40kg. Instead of 800 cals/kg it could be 1600.

So the massive availability of game offsets the smaller amount of meat you get. The devs are also very generous with the rate at which you burn calories as well(chopping up a limb for instance should really be more like 350 cals).

So imagine the reverse. You go out and shoot a deer. You harvest about, oh, 50000 calories from it. You freeze it and can now live off that comfortably for quite a while. And that

deer isn't going to respawn for over a year. But... now what? It's not difficult to understand the devs reasoning. They want you to get outside and interacting with the world so they make you go out and hunt more frequently and have meat degrade quickly(despite being in a natural freezer).

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There are several things about the game that are wildly unrealistic. The sheer availability of game and their insane respawn rate are two big ones. Caloric values on most of the food in the game is another one... most of the game you shoot/catch would have 2-3x more calories per kg than they do. And of course the amount of meat you are allowed to harvest off a kill is incredibly small. 10kg off that deer would realistically be more like 25-40kg. Instead of 800 cals/kg it could be 1600.

So the massive availability of game offsets the smaller amount of meat you get. The devs are also very generous with the rate at which you burn calories as well(chopping up a limb for instance should really be more like 350 cals).

So imagine the reverse. You go out and shoot a deer. You harvest about, oh, 50000 calories from it. You freeze it and can now live off that comfortably for quite a while. And that

deer isn't going to respawn for over a year. But... now what? It's not difficult to understand the devs reasoning. They want you to get outside and interacting with the world so they make you go out and hunt more frequently and have meat degrade quickly(despite being in a natural freezer).

Couldn't agree more to this.

All these "perfect realism is of utmost importance for me, thus TLD should equal reality in every single aspect perfectly" arguments that are brought up constantly all the time are getting really annoying. Especially because I'm horribly afraid the Devs might take this to heart like they listened to the community's demands for a bow and self-made weapons.

I wish people would think through their wishes WAY more thoroughly with regard to which impact they would have on the gameplay. Then they would probably understand that exploration and struggle for survival are exactly the things that make TLD fun to play.

If hunting trips were only necessary once every 2 months, meat could be dried or frozen, tools wouldn't degrade at all and clothes wouldn't wear out in TLD like it is in reality, playing this game would mean sitting in your home base and doing as little as possible for hundreds of days. Because that's how you survive a harsh winter in damn reality. You sit at home, save your energy, live off your food reserves and wait for spring.

It's completely beyond me how people fail to understand that this would be the absolute opposite of fun.

Not saying that it's a bad idea to make certain aspects of TLD a little more realistic. I'm absolutely in favor of less items and hunting prey and longer animal respawn timers myself, for example. (Aim: Make Stalker mode more challenging).

But if one asks for a fundamental change - especially if it's a change for all three modes at the same time! - it's extremely important to make further changes to the game at the same time as well in order to keep things fun to play.

E.g. if clothes degraded less, outdoor and indoor temperatures would need to drop considerably over time to give you ANY reason to ever craft fur clothes at all. Or if animals gave more (and higher caloric) meat, hunting them would have to be WAY more difficult. Like if you try to sneak up to a deer 10 times, then 9 times it notices you too early and runs away before you're in shooting range. Just imagine the flood of complaints if hunting in TLD worked that way. New players would probably starve all the time, experienced players would feel frustrated if their hunting attempt fails and bored for the next 60 days if it's successful.

100% reality TLD would be a great game for sure. * irony sign*

TL, DR:

For goodness' sake please ask yourself what the changes you ask for would mean for TLD as a game before you post them here on the forums.

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This game is about exploration as much as it is about survival. Directly from the store page - "The Long Dark is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience"

For those of us that like the challenge of stalker, the caloric requirements, rest requirements, and clothing degradation make this game 90% survival and 10% exploration.

To ease back on these three main requirements would allow for a more interesting, less repetitive (hunt, skin, cook, store, sleep, repeat) gameplay.

It would not break the game by any means. It would just allow us to survive for a day or two longer during exploration with bad weather, which is what I just went through. I made it 70 days on stalker pretty effortlessly until an incredibly unlucky exploration run in Pleasant Valley.

Within 5 days all my 100% animal clothing had degraded to 70-75%. If anything, the way stalker is set up right now is ENCOURAGING us to not explore. Especially in areas like Pleasant Valley where if you get caught in fog, or a blizzard, you're done.

We are just asking for a slight tweak towards realism with rest and calorie requirements to allow that extra day of survival.

Lets not forget the original reason for this post! Its wasn't to request a complete game overhaul [glow=red]Scyzara[/glow]...

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[wOrm], despite what they may say about the game on the store page, the longer runs turn into a hibernation endurance affair where exploration no longer serves any use and survival is simply about making due with what you have to work with.

However, I see a way of changing this behavior without even touching these requirements. Think about it. You've explored DP, TM, CH, ML and PV. You've collected just about every useful item and have started your homestead in the PV farmstead. You have rabbits in the field just a few paces outside your doorstep. Trees just down the road in whichever direction you choose, and of course ample water from snow. The easy access to all of these resources allows players to fall in to the rut you specify - except at this point it's approximately 0% exploration.

For many of the folks with long runs on the leader board, and in my own runs the game plays out in exactly the same way that Scyzara elaborated on. I stopped playing my runs precisely because of this - the game becomes boring, dull, and predictable when your daily routine simply involves sleeping more than cats do, then peeking outside to see if the weather is kind, checking traps that are drawing from infinite rabbit populations and collecting firewood. Light a fire with the magnifying glass every few days to cook and boil and that's it. Survival boiled-down to a daily routine, predictable events with nothing new.

When looking at the factors that enable this kind of behavior, I don't see a solution to it through the changing of caloric requirements or rest values. Players can still sit in one location and never explore, never feel pressured for their basic needs - Right now, it's the tools, matches, sewing kits and clothing that limit one's survival. The requirements for these are far less pronounced than the basic needs, such as food, water, shelter and fire. If you look at these you'll find that it's as Kraelman said, the availability of game and their respawn rate is really the enabling factor for this type of gameplay.

Simply changing this a little bit would substantially change the behavior required to survive in the game. Imagine if that groups of rabbits would respawn less frequently for every time one got caught in a snare nearby, or if deer could not be found reliably frequenting the same locations over and over again. Imagine that upon trapping and killing of these resources, that they would be reintroduced elsewhere in the world. Soon, players will find that the game near their homestead is too few and far-between to support them and they'll have to explore to find new sources to fulfill their basic needs.

Now, as has been pointed out, a change like that has some far-reaching implications - but I can't really see any of them detracting from the experience. It doesn't really change the short-term experience much at all - it would only come in to play for those that have made a homestead in one area and have relied heavily upon the local wildlife populations to sustain their need for food. At this point we can make a safe assumption that the player really isn't exploring that much anymore, but living off what they have and what the land can provide. By introducing a system like this that player would have to venture out once again to find new sources of food and upon finding a suitable source, determine if they would rather make the (potentially) longer trip to reach it from their current homestead, or relocate closer to this source of food.

The aspect of having to potentially relocate further pushes the experience further towards a survival mindset as the player will have to carefully select what they are going to take with them. It provides a more dynamic gameplay experience that presents additional choices to players, each with different risk/rewards and consequences. Since it's not something that is thrust upon players that are just getting established it shouldn't really change much of the early game and players facing these decisions are generally going to be prepared for them.

As far as I can see, something like this only adds to the experience of survival and exploration rather than detracting from it, while providing a more dynamic experience existing in concert with player decisions.

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":4s23v3ru]My biggest gripe - which makes the whole experience unrealistically tedious after 25 days - is the rate at which you lose energy. I am on day 30 something of survival and am SO tired (pun intended) of becoming fatigued so quickly. Example: I sleep for 10 hours, repair my rifle, and my energy has decreased almost 25% (im 100% serious). Three hours later I become encumbered because I cant carry the 50 lbs in my backpack anymore. Mind you, this is after eating 6.6 lbs of bear meat (2700 calories), drinking water until i'm about to pop, and being 100% warm.

This makes it very difficult to travel/explore with any sort of basic rations + tools that could get someone through a few days of unkind weather, and bad luck. Every day I find myself starving to death and exhausted after just 8-10 hours of gameplay.

I've done a lot of hiking and backpacking - which are the exact conditions in the game - and manage to get by with 10% of the food and rest required in this game.

:!: So, to make the game far more enjoyable in the long haul, and also more realistic, the food and rest requirements needs to be eased back, considerably!

P.S - I've logged 45+ hrs in this game, and this is the only real issue in my opinion at the moment

I love The Long Dark.

Keep up the amazing work :mrgreen:

Welcome to life modeled on the 40 year old body. Seriously in one day I walked from the Camp Office all the way to the Quonset Gas Station while getting a 3 hour nap in the sun and downing 1 cup of coffee for the trip.

The trick to maximize your utility is to not try to do to much. To accept what you want to do will frequently be derailed/need to be adjusted by events, wildlife or your own conditions as a result of the cause and effects of the experience. This is by design. So you can't spend half of the day on your ass cleaning your rifle and then three hours later march 50lbs around. You aren't in the Marines, this isn't Platoon, this is The Long Dark, you are a 40 year old male who flew bush planes so his daddy who was a hard drinker didn't get wacked by the mob. You probably ride a desk and eat a jelly donut for breakfast when you aren't flying and you don't run 5 miles a day you are Brian Hackett you don't have the energy of a 20 year old.

Another thing you can do if you plan to stay in an area for a few weeks is stage stuff, fuel, tools, water, food, stage it. Make yourself a highway marker system with tinder bundles on frequented routes between stage points so if you get caught in a storm you'll still get to your supply caches. This will allow you to carry less and therefore more faster or become less encumbered. Carrying around 50lbs day will tire you quickly. Remember 40 years old not 18 anymore. You may need blue pills on occassion. Wink wink

And another thing is do those things when it makes sense as best you can so you dont have to carry 50lbs around. Make smaller trips, 25lbs of core gear, 5lbs of specialized mission gear, maybe 10lbs of gear specific to the run. If you are out gathering firewood or chopping wood, do you need to carry your hacksaw and prybar? No. So that is 5lbs right there. If you are boiling water in doors you need lots of firewood, its better to use the hatchet and get fir limbs for that instead of sticks.

Every morning before dawn if I'm full rested I leverage that condition, to sew and harvest, I never want to carry any clothes I'm not actually wearing outside the house, so tear em down or stick em in a pile to do that later, sew sew sew. If the weather turns to shit, go back to sleep for a few wake up with 8 hrs of sunlight instead of 13 hrs, but fully rested. Chances are if the weather improves even a little midday temps will be warmer than early morning temps. Some days it will blizzard all day. Don't go outside, no point unless you haven't already leveraged and planned ahead by stockpiling. If you aren't going outside and you are all sharped and sewed up. Melt Snow Boil water.

I find that if I don't have to carry water because I'm staged that I save 5lbs of carry space for more stuff on the way back. You gotta think like a trucker. You do not want to run deadhead either. So if you are staging water. Is it better to carry it out some place or go there, boil it and then come back. Particularly in a fishing shanty it may be better to just boil it. If you want to move a full gallon just carry it, and pick up firewood on the way back. The trick is to always be doing something but try to schedule it to be the right thing.

The time I went from Camp Office all the way back to Station Camp, was because I'd forgotten arrow shafts, and I had meat like a few thousand calories back in the freezer back at the Waterfront cottages along with some guts. So I made the trek back and I did it in one day just to see if it could be done. Planning for the trip meant I'd dump anything I didn't need back at the Dam, sew up some clothes there too, which I did but that took time and slowed me up an hour or two, I also figured an afternoon nap in if I could afford it but I probably should have taken a longer one, like 4 hours because at the end I was still walking around instead of running, and I was out there with less than an hour of daylight left.

It was a great trek though. When I go back for the Camp Office I'll leave a bit before dawn, wont stop to sew, will do a 3-4 hour nap if its sunny or skip the nap and just rely on coffee or just sleep in the Dam.

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  • 3 weeks later...
No one should be of the brink of starvation and dehydration after sleeping for 12 hours on a full stomach and slaked.

If you sleep for 12 hours straight you will be mildly dehydrated when you wake up(consider the dry, frozen environment). And you'll probably be a bit peckish as well.

Is your character actually starving as soon as you hit 0 calories? No. You're fine. In fact, you'll be fine for quite a while. Same with dehydration. Don't get obsessed with the Hunger and Thirst bars. Maybe your condition drops a couple points. So what? A few percentage points don't mean anything. The way I think about it is this:

90-100% - My character feels great. If you're above 90 you're not "on the brink of death" or anything like that. You feel peachy! But you do want that drink of water sometime in the near future!

80-89% - My character feels fine. Oh, maybe slightly bruised with a few aches here and there.

70-79% - My character has felt better, but we're still okay. But he wants a nap and a day off.

60-69% - Well, now he's feeling pretty lousy. The first bad day of a bad cold kind of lousy. Call your boss and take the day off.

59% and below - My character is wishing there was an emergency room or urgent care center he could go to.

You are right that you can't get too involved in looking at those percents as a 'death counter'.

however my feeling is there should be a middle area where the character is hungry, thirsty, miserable, and slightly hindered in speed/stamina...but isn't on the brink of imminent death.

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59% and below - My character is wishing there was an emergency room or urgent care center he could go to.

59-26% Any hospital should suffice.

25% and less - that is for the urgent care center or the emergency room .

Sorry for the nicety.

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  • 6 months later...
On 12/13/2015 at 6:06 PM, Bill Tarling said:

The real biggest killer is dehydration (and yes that can kill you in your sleep).

I do not know even one case of death of dehydration only because of sleeping. Like no one else in this forum, I suppose. Even the light dehydration, 3% of body water or so, making the human thirsty enough to awake. 

It is very unrealistic. Maybe only if hypothermic such (not awaking while thirsty) could happen. But even so the cause of death rather be hypothermia, not the dehydration.

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The survival genre requires gamey mechanics if survival is the primary gameplay aspect.  The simple truth is surviving on earth for a human isn't all that hard, thats why we've been so wildly successful as a species.

A good survival game is constantly challenging, requiring you to continuously put effort into resource gathering, crafting, research etc. and requiring you to adapt to dynamic circumstances. A survival game with a static environment only requires you to solve the survival problem once, a dynamic environment requires you to constantly anticipate and plan for the next change or die. A game that lets you "solve" survival, then just enjoy the view for 100 days+ isn't a survival game, its a walking simulator with some light survival elements (nothing wrong with that, all genre are valid).  

I would very much like TLD to be at least somewhat of a survival game, its special and great as it is, but I think its missing the opportunity to be something more. I'd be totally cool if TLD remained more or less what it is, so long as they add a full featured modding system, then everyone can be happy.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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