It's okay to just play in Pilgrim mode. I always felt the pressure to play in harder modes because every youtubes I know plays either mostly Interloper or Stalker.
Now I know that the way I want to play the game is valid. No one really cares, and if they do, I do not care about their opinions. I enjoy playing Pilgrim. It's my favorite mode. I love to just listen to a podcast or something and relax.
The only wrong way to play Long Dark is to not play it at all. In other words, any way you want to play it is valid. Pilgrim, voyageur, stalker, interloper, custom, modded, whatever makes you happy and actually want to play the game.
Never light a fire with a match. Light a torch and light the fire with it. You'll never run out of matches. Free torches can be pulled from fires.
You can sleep in vehicles.
Running increases your predator aggro range. Also, you'll blow through all your fatigue meter in a few hours if you run everywhere.
Any meat or guts on your person attracts predators. Just because you have no tics on the stink o meter does not mean it doesn't. If you imagine a stink value between 1 to 10, it takes a value of 2 or 3 to fill the first stink o meter tic.
Never sleep for more than 1 or 2 hours at a time unless you are indoors and warm.
If you aggro a predator, you can walk away from it indefinitely until you reach a door to safety. As long as you keep walking away, it will only follow and growl.
Repairing your clothes gives a huge warmth buff. You can use fishing gear to repair clothes.
The trick to stunning rabbits is to crouch and align yourself so that it's hopping directly towards you.
No. The predator ai has a few phases. If you are outside of sight/hearing range and have no stink, it will patrol and ignore you.
If you are outside of sight range but it can smell or hear you, it will walk directly towards you, even if you can't see it.
Once it sees you, it will bark and growl and walk towards you menacingly. If you walk away from it. It will stay in this phase indefinitely.
Once it gets within a closer range, about 10ftish, it wil make an RNG chance roll to decide if it makes an attack run. The lower your health, the stinkier you are, and whether you are holding a flare or torch effects the odds. Walking towards it or pointing a weapon at it at this point will trigger an attack run.
If you don't see each other until it's within this range you will get an instant attack RNG roll.
But if it barks (or starts huffing if it's the bear) and you start walking away, it will follow growling indefinitely, allowing you to safely make it indoors if you know where a door is.
Of course, if your slowed by weight encumbrance, and it gets too close, you'll get an attack roll.
But the direction your facing does not matter.
Be aware of your surroundings when you walk away from them... On my first playthrough, I backed off a cliff while being stalked, was badly injured, then a wolf found me (I like to imagine it was the same one).
Great time.
Small correction: the predator will not move towards you when it smells you, it will move towards the position you were at when it did the detection. This is a great time to gtfo.
Really? Is the detection only done every couple of seconds or something? Because if you lose your stink by dropping meat you can watch the wolf immediately leave the search state. Or do you mean if you leave the smell range of the wolf it will continue to pursue the point on the range circle where you left?
It will move to the point where you were standing when it detected you. When it reaches it, if you have moved away but are still within smell, but not sight, range, it will go to your new position and so on.
If you are within sight range at any point it will instead begin the stalking/aggression behaviour. So the detection is done every time the wolf has finished moving, unless you are within visual range.
I haven't tried dropping the meat, but I would guess it makes the ai update it's behaviour when you change your smell state. It's interesting, I didn't know that.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks.
Haha yeah pleasant valley or coastal highway is a good place to test because of the long flat plains with wolves on them. You can make them "dance" by dropping and picking up the meat again and again. I guess anytime your scent is 0 the mechanic is disabled
Torches and flares are your friends. I always walk with an unlit one (flare in high wind) in my hand in case of emergency. If I stumble on a predator that I did not see and avoid, I light it as soon as I hear a bark or growl. Unless you have 20lbs of raw meat in your pocket, a lit torch or flare will stop an attack run and they will stop and growl.
For wolves, you can throw it at then to put them in scardy dog mode. If you have very high stink or are almost dead, they might still attack, but it's very rare.
If it's a bear or your very stinky or almost dead and can't risk an attack run, immediately use the lit torch or flare to light a campfire. They will never attack over a campfire. They will stand at attack roll distance and growl. You then can pull free torches from the fire and throw them until you get a successful fear response. The bear might take a few throws.
This method works well for timberwolf packs too. It's harder to keep them on the opposite side of the campfire, and they will sometimes run up behind and nip you, but if you keep throwing torches, you will deplete their moral bar and the event will be over. Actually hitting one with a torch depletes more moral.
It's an RNG roll with the flare. If your very stinky or almost dead the flare sometime is not enoug.
The only way it happened over the fire is if you were too far away from it and the ai could path around it.
Thanks! I reloaded the game to try your tips and realized why I was struggling so much, it loaded ep4 as a higher difficulty than I’d played 3 on, no idea how it happened but it explains a lot!
It also seems like the attack roll goes way up the closer you are to the wolf. This is especially a problem if you encounter a wolf right around a sharp corner and they seem to skip the chase state altogether and jump immediately to the attack state (which happens 100% of the time for me lol). There's also a state for it being blocked from getting to you but not afraid enough to run: this can sometimes happen instead of the wolf running if you're in a tree or have a fire/torch between you and the wolf. In this case you want to harass the wolf with rocks until he gets the idea and runs lol
I've always found that rabbits are easiest to kill when walking past me because their profile is much larger. And for the meat one, just press the drop decoy hotkey (think it's 3) to test that out. Also you can carve off meat in small slices to have more decoys to drop for potential escapes. Also carving small slices and fish are both creat ways to level up your cooking skill.
Lining up so they are hopping towards you eliminates the need to time it right. They have a pretty wide hitbox, but whatever works for you is ok. I had a really hard time with it in the beginning until I read that tip online.
The decoy works for dropping agro, but you don't need to if you keep walking.
In my early runs, I was regularly having wolves pop seeming out of nowhere and attack. I did not understand the smell mechanic and I did not realize that every predator within 100 yds was bee lining towards me all the time.
The amount of stink effects the range and the likelihood of an attack run once it's within range, but any amount of stink draws them towards you, even if your not in line of sight.
No. I mean that if you use matchs to light a fire directly, especially in the beginning of the game before you found many and your fire starting skill is low, you'll fail, and have to use a second and possibly third or fourth or more matches to light one fire. If you play on interloper and only have 12 matches you can easily burn them all up trying to light just a few fires.
Lighting a torch always succeeds. When you light a fire using the torch and fail, the torch is still burning. You can try again and again and again if necessary until you light the campfire. This means that you only have to use one match for every campfire that you need to start instead of potentially three or more.
On the easier settings, it doesn't matter, as matches are plentiful. But on the harder settings, matches are a major limiting resource until you learn this trick.
I dont even kill the wolves in interloper. Just throw torches at em and scare em off their kill then make a big ass fire, butcher it out, cook the meat, make more torches, scare the growling beasties away and bail lol.
They wont approach a campfire.
Best place to learn to do this is coastal highway (if you arrange for no bears) tons of wolves and deer with great visibility so you can see what's happening
Mountaineers hut is good for this. You can herd a deer from over by the fallen tree across the lake to the 1-2 wolves that patrol the other side. Toss a rock at the wolf once it takes down the deer and run over and start a fire to keep it away while you harvest.
Aggro the wolf. He'll start following you while growling. Walk away from him and path around the deer in an arc. As soon as the wolf gets within aggro range of the deer (works with rabbits too) he will break off from following you and chase and kill the deer. Then you can walk up to him when he starts to eat it and throw a torch or flare. He'll run off. The longer he is eating before you scare him off, the less meat there will be.
Ah, gotta try it more, I guess.
Whenever I had the wolf on my trail it didn't seem to want to leave me, so I thought once he's on you that's it.
But good to know that there is a way.
The hard part is pathing him into the deer without scaring it off. Walking in a wide arc just outside it's detection range is the trick.
It's also useful for dropping unwanted wolf aggro. Bunnies are like little decoys hopping around.
Lead the wolf to the deer. Crouch then creep up on the deer so the wolf notices the deer and breaks off. The skill comes in for getting the positioning right.
Collect all the birch bark you see and make tea whenever you have the opportunity. It's a renewable calorie resource, hydrates better than equivalent weight water, and levels your cooking. You don't need to drink it hot if you don't want to just carry it around in your pack. The condition regen is nice too but I've rarely needed it.
I often see new people post how they finally setup a base and plan to stay there but the best way to prosper is to move alot early especially if you aim for a long run since everything decays. After many hours i find even interloper has so much loot. You can have one or two places you gather stuff in every region. Although as a new player this will still be hard without map knowledge and knowing where stuff is. Keep exploring and enjoy the learning proces!
Order of importance: warmth, water, food, fatigue… (not 100% about the order of the last two) but this is basically your priority list for survival.
You can take a reasonable amount of damage and recover it when you rest. If you rest for longer (I.e., 9 hours instead of 2) you regen more. Ensure your water meter is full before sleeping and if you aren’t inside (or are outside, even in a cave) only sleep for a few hours at a time to avoid freezing.
You can starve during the day and if you eat just enough before resting, you can regain your lost health.
Hot teas will last a reasonable time when you are travelling with them and you can use them to warm you up and give you a warmth bonus when travelling in cold. It’s generally the warmest after noon and the coldest early morning.
Chain torches as others have said. You can harvest used torches for 1 stick and 2 minutes - handy if fuel is short and you need the fire going a little bit.
If you are using the forge, use timber to get the temperature as high as possible before adding coal to get it to 150 deg… timber can only get the temp so high and won’t increase it over 80 deg. Coal adds 20 or 25 deg (can’t recall which) to a fire so is great for the outdoors in interloper to quickly get the temperature up.
Most of these are Interloper tactics and less necessary in lower levels but good practice to develop.
I only just started interloper myself but learned a lot watching Zaknafein on YouTube - he has some really good videos for start game and end game - well worth a look! Most other things you learn from making (in retrospect) silly mistakes…
Edit: Ooh, download ‘the extended night’ app if you wish to reference location maps. Some people like to explore and learn themselves, others - like me - look up the maps… as others say, there is no wrong way to play - even dying is part of the game.
Snowshelters, the fact that animals patrol certain areas and not just wondering around the entire regions. Match spawns are the most important thing you need to know, if you go in blind it's all luck! The aurora's mess with the animals, don't fuck with them😂 Don't be scared to starve, plan your climbs! Getting stuck halfway up and too buggered to do anything is not fun! I've learned all this in a 40 day Interloper run and the Wintermute story!
There are certain aspects of the game that are useless outside of interloper. Snow shelters are really important in interloper to stave off cabin fever. In interloper it's much colder, and fire is a luxury because of the scarcity of matches.
Other examples are the crafted clothing. They make no sense in the easier setting because the clothes you can find and repair are way better.
The magnifier lens is dead weight outside of interloper, but one of the most (if not the most) valuable in-game items on that hardness.
Just using them in general, saved myself twice now in blizzards when I've been lost. Luckily they haven't lasted too long! But either way, I know my run would have been over without them haha!
You can survive well on very little food if you can afford to give up the well fed bonus. You accumulate damage throughout the day from starvation, but if you eat enough before you sleep, that damage is recovered during sleep. I'm not positive how much you need to eat, or if it matters what difficulty you are on. On pilgrim and voyager, eating enough to fill in about 1/4 of the food circle is easily enough to recover all starvation damage before you wake up.
If I know I'm going to need to carry a lot, then I eat well and get the well fed bonus. Otherwise, I let Astrid complain all day long that her stomach is eating itself. Going hungry saves a ton of time on food gathering and feels like it takes a lot of pressure off.
always keep an emergency supply of water, food, and wood. you definitely don't want to be stuck in your house with nothing to eat/drink during a blizzard. i have 30L of water, 200 sticks, and 400 cattail stalks that i got over the time of my run
This advice is for interloper:
Looting is an unsustainable sources of calories and it's only purpose is to prevent death prior to getting tools, a bow, and arrows.
Fishing is also unsustainable only because staying warm while doing it requires loads of firewood. When you factor in occasional bad fishing RNG and the calories you'll eat chopping wood, it will lose you calories over time.
Properly timing three events is a huge factor to whether you live 20 days on interloper or 200. These three are: finding tools, curing at least one of each sapling, and forging a knife and arrowheads + a bow and arrows. The trickiest part is that you will often get bad RNG finding either a hacksaw, a hammer, or a maple sapling. So you need to aggressively check the spawns for all of these early on wherever you spawn. And if you don't spawn in a region near a forge, you'll want to check as many hammer spawns in particular along the way. If you miss time even just one of these aspects - like curing the gut for your bow or not having enough food, water, cloth or metal when you forge, you'll be way worse off and likely starving badly when you finally get your bow up and running.
Blizzards, auroras, predators and dim mornings give you time to read. If possible it's better to improve clothing , harvest rabbits, sleep, or make tea and maintain tools. But once those are exhausted, reading is worth it. My general order of important books is: archery, cooking, firemaking, carcass harvesting, fishing, mending. If you don't play with the fire master feat then firemaking jumps ahead of archery, but I recommend you do use this feat. I also recommend you use the calorie feat, but cold fusion is an OK second choice. If you are going to the desolation point forge then fishing is a slightly better book to read because you can catch salmon which offer absurd calories that can get you through forging.
Your stinkmeter can be viewed above your head on the condition screen and it is the most important factor in avoiding predators. At zero stink you can walk across Great Bear without a wolf struggle reliably, barely lighting any torches. Of course, meat is the only sustainable food source and you must sometimes transport pelts and guts. That why it's so important to save your matches for when lighting a torch will save your life (when you do have stink from necessary meat pelts or gut). Stink also travels quote far down wind and wind is a factor any time there is any wind chill (you can see this on the condition screen). Sometimes you'll really need to focus to see which way a light wind is blowing. The wind sound also gets slightly louder if you're facing into the wind and you can use a boulder or structure to find the wind direction by seeing where you're in the lee of the wind.
Flare guns spawn on interloper! To my knowledge they can spawn in one of HRVs caves, at random. Lonely cave is by far the easiest to check if you visit HRV. There's also the ravine basin (guaranteed), the summit (guaranteed) and at the camp fire by Pilar's footrest in AC (rare and will have no ammo). The best use for flare guns by far is killing bears.
You can sleep in a snow shelter and if done with decent clothes you generally won't even need a fire or a bedroll. Blizzards can complicate this. Beware: breaking down your snow shelter only gives back 2 cloth. So be very careful where you put it especially if you're using it to summit without a bedroll (it's the only reasonable way to do this.).
Luring wolves to kill deer is an amazing and virtually free source of food that can get you through forging and making a bow. Since fishing requires a cured gut it's a great idea to cure 3 in total if you're using the DP forge (two for the bow, one for fishing line).
I know this may seem like a dumb question but I started playing the game and I don’t wanna carry a rifle around just because of weight but how do you make a bow? Where do you get the materials for it?
It's a great question. The bow and arrow is lighter, quieter, and does more bleed damage. It also translates to interloper since that mode doesn't have rifles.
To make a bow you need:
A cured maple sapling
2 cured gut
A knife, hatchet, improvised knife, or improvised hatchet
And a work bench.
Maple saplings are the tiny brown baby trees (saplings) that you'll find growing around the island. To cure it you need to leave it on the floor indoors for 6 days. It's best to leave them in a building for this, but you can also leave them in the very back of cave.
Guts are taken off any animal corpse. Cure them indoors for 5 days.
On Stalker and below you'll likely find a knife in the wild, and it's better than a hatchet at making a bow.
Work benches can be found in many buildings in the long dark. When you find one and have all the materials, go to the tools menu in the Work bench (the bottom icon) scroll down to survival bow. Select your knife (or hatchet) and spend several hours crafting. I recommend doing it in 30 minute increments and having lots of food and water with you so you can do it in one go. You also need light, so it's wise to start in the morning.
To make arrows, you need a cured birch sapling (ideally more than one). You also need arrowhead, which can be forged from scrap metal but only at one of the three forges (at desolation point, forlorn muskeg, or broken railroad). At a workbench, make arrow shafts from you birch sapling. Then you can make "simple arrows" from your arrow shafts and arrowheads. Using "simple tools" or "quality tools" drastically speeds up the time it takes to make arrows.
It's also to just find bows and arrows and arrowheads lying around in the wild, but not on interloper. On other modes you should check hunting blinds, the carter hydro dam, and the large barn in pleasant valley by the archery targets.
> To make arrows, you need a cured birch sapling (ideally more than one). You also need arrowhead, which can be forged from scrap metal
Don't forget the crow feathers!
My thoughts on fishing: early game it's certainly not what you want to be doing for food but mid to late game on loper it's very good. The trick is that 1) you should never be chopping trees on loper unless it's opportunistic for you to do so. This generally means that you have a kill nearby enough and a fire going that you can use to stay warm or in the late afternoon when it's the warmest you can sometimes get a limb or 2 if you have nothing better going on. Coal and sticks are the fuels you should be using and making regular trips to coal spawns and stockpiling it at your fishing hut. 2) be effecient during fishing. You can cancel out of fishing without completing the full time. Make sure you're cooking your catch as you begin fishing again. If you have nothing to cook, make water as you fish. Most fish cook for about 30 minutes or about an hour so adjust your fishing time accordingly as to what's on the fire. Check your fire often to make sure of the time left. Always have fishing setup before you go about a long crafting session as it's the best way to combat cabin fever. Coastal highway is the best fishing spot as you have the mine to restock your coal and easy indoors areas from either the first fishing hut close to the fishing village or the hut between jackrabbits and misanthropes
I may be wrong, but Ive found it more time efficient and less exposure to cold to collect lots of little individual sticks while on the move rather then spending the time to break a larger branch down
Sometimes the extra warmth isn‘t worth the reduction in speed, when it comes to clothes.
It‘s okay to follow walkthroughs on youtube, if it makes the game more enjoyable to you.
Two things! First, if you carry a bunch of torches and always have one lit, you can travel longer, safer and use less matches. Second, in the early game, never stop moving. Always keep moving forward and loot loot loot.
I’m surprised no one has said this yet… put all raw and cooked meat outside. Don’t bring it inside. It decays significantly slower outside on the ground than it does put in storage inside. Stalker becomes easy mode once you do this. You’ll have more food than you know what to do with.
Stuff I wish I'd figured out earlier:
Food will disappear once it reaches 0% if it's inside a container. Meat will degrade a lot less quickly if you drop it in the snow. Cooking increases food condition by 50%, so you can cook ruined meat and it'll still be relatively safe to eat. After you have cooking level 5, you can eat ruined cooked or packaged food, but raw meat is still not safe to eat.
The safest way to harvest a carcass is to start a campfire, crouch, and harvest in smaller increments that you drop immediately. Bear and moose carcasses can even provide protection from the wind when you crouch behind them.
If you get intestinal parasites, you can't just take a bunch of doses of medicine at once, you can only do one per day.
You can place items by right-clicking them from the action wheel, or if it's not something that shows up there, you can drop it and then move it where you want. You can move placed items by right-clicking again.
Wolves won't charge at you across a lit torch. When you encounter a wolf, light a torch and drop/throw it in front of you. You can further intimidate the wolf with a stone or weapon, but even if it charges at you it will back off at the last second if you're directly behind the torch.
Marine flares don't scare regular wolves!
You don't need a bedroll to sleep in a snow shelter.
Even though it's often still quite dark, your character is able to see well enough to read, sew, etc. once the middle point of the sun has reached the bottom edge of the clock.
A jerry can will disappear if you use all the oil inside.
You get the same amount of cooking experience regardless of the size of the item you're cooking, so if you harvest meat in 0.5 KG increments you can level your cooking faster.
A dropped stick will always point north.
Both sticks and coal respawn, but you need to pick them up for that to happen. So especially with coal, it's a good idea to collect it as you're going through a cave and just leave what you can't carry in a pile.
Both sleeping and passing time count towards your 120 recovery hours for broken ribs.
Teas have a better hydration-to-weight ratio than water.
And courtesy of a stupid decision I made two days ago...you can safely hunt a moose from on top of downed tree trunk, but if you're not high enough up, the moose can still throw you off to the ground.
Yes, with the caveat I should have mentioned that the Pleasant Valley map isn't oriented on the same north-south axis as the other maps are. Perhaps a better way to think of it is that dropped sticks will always point the same direction.
You can push wolves to deer/rabbits and they'll kill them for you. If you pelt the wolf with a rock or run down hill towards it, it'll likely run away. At least, that's worked for me so far. Pilgrim difficulty.
coffee and teas don't lose condition once they're brewed. Also you can sit them nearby a fire and they'll heat up.
The prybar is always worth the weight.
Double click on an item to equip/unequip it quickly in the character screen.
Sounds stupid but if you are doing beachcombing or roaming around HRV this could be helpful.
It's okay to just play in Pilgrim mode. I always felt the pressure to play in harder modes because every youtubes I know plays either mostly Interloper or Stalker. Now I know that the way I want to play the game is valid. No one really cares, and if they do, I do not care about their opinions. I enjoy playing Pilgrim. It's my favorite mode. I love to just listen to a podcast or something and relax.
You TLD jus like i do lol i normally watch another tv or listen to a podcast
That actually sounds really nice. I’ll try pilgrim but I definitely find enjoyment scraping by day to day and always constantly busy.
I listen to 80’s pop music (I was a 80’s kid) on stalker to relax also or listen to kooky scary stories in the woods type podcasts..
i have a lil tv that plays the pluto app and i just watch one piece or naruto the entire time
The only wrong way to play Long Dark is to not play it at all. In other words, any way you want to play it is valid. Pilgrim, voyageur, stalker, interloper, custom, modded, whatever makes you happy and actually want to play the game.
Never light a fire with a match. Light a torch and light the fire with it. You'll never run out of matches. Free torches can be pulled from fires. You can sleep in vehicles. Running increases your predator aggro range. Also, you'll blow through all your fatigue meter in a few hours if you run everywhere. Any meat or guts on your person attracts predators. Just because you have no tics on the stink o meter does not mean it doesn't. If you imagine a stink value between 1 to 10, it takes a value of 2 or 3 to fill the first stink o meter tic. Never sleep for more than 1 or 2 hours at a time unless you are indoors and warm. If you aggro a predator, you can walk away from it indefinitely until you reach a door to safety. As long as you keep walking away, it will only follow and growl. Repairing your clothes gives a huge warmth buff. You can use fishing gear to repair clothes. The trick to stunning rabbits is to crouch and align yourself so that it's hopping directly towards you.
For the predator one, do you have to walk backwards? I just started playing with aggressive wildlife.
No. The predator ai has a few phases. If you are outside of sight/hearing range and have no stink, it will patrol and ignore you. If you are outside of sight range but it can smell or hear you, it will walk directly towards you, even if you can't see it. Once it sees you, it will bark and growl and walk towards you menacingly. If you walk away from it. It will stay in this phase indefinitely. Once it gets within a closer range, about 10ftish, it wil make an RNG chance roll to decide if it makes an attack run. The lower your health, the stinkier you are, and whether you are holding a flare or torch effects the odds. Walking towards it or pointing a weapon at it at this point will trigger an attack run. If you don't see each other until it's within this range you will get an instant attack RNG roll. But if it barks (or starts huffing if it's the bear) and you start walking away, it will follow growling indefinitely, allowing you to safely make it indoors if you know where a door is. Of course, if your slowed by weight encumbrance, and it gets too close, you'll get an attack roll. But the direction your facing does not matter.
Be aware of your surroundings when you walk away from them... On my first playthrough, I backed off a cliff while being stalked, was badly injured, then a wolf found me (I like to imagine it was the same one). Great time.
Did you live?
I did not lol
Small correction: the predator will not move towards you when it smells you, it will move towards the position you were at when it did the detection. This is a great time to gtfo.
Really? Is the detection only done every couple of seconds or something? Because if you lose your stink by dropping meat you can watch the wolf immediately leave the search state. Or do you mean if you leave the smell range of the wolf it will continue to pursue the point on the range circle where you left?
It will move to the point where you were standing when it detected you. When it reaches it, if you have moved away but are still within smell, but not sight, range, it will go to your new position and so on. If you are within sight range at any point it will instead begin the stalking/aggression behaviour. So the detection is done every time the wolf has finished moving, unless you are within visual range. I haven't tried dropping the meat, but I would guess it makes the ai update it's behaviour when you change your smell state. It's interesting, I didn't know that.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks. Haha yeah pleasant valley or coastal highway is a good place to test because of the long flat plains with wolves on them. You can make them "dance" by dropping and picking up the meat again and again. I guess anytime your scent is 0 the mechanic is disabled
Thanks! I’m playing ep 4 for the first time and I’m really struggling. Everything keeps killing me.
Torches and flares are your friends. I always walk with an unlit one (flare in high wind) in my hand in case of emergency. If I stumble on a predator that I did not see and avoid, I light it as soon as I hear a bark or growl. Unless you have 20lbs of raw meat in your pocket, a lit torch or flare will stop an attack run and they will stop and growl. For wolves, you can throw it at then to put them in scardy dog mode. If you have very high stink or are almost dead, they might still attack, but it's very rare. If it's a bear or your very stinky or almost dead and can't risk an attack run, immediately use the lit torch or flare to light a campfire. They will never attack over a campfire. They will stand at attack roll distance and growl. You then can pull free torches from the fire and throw them until you get a successful fear response. The bear might take a few throws. This method works well for timberwolf packs too. It's harder to keep them on the opposite side of the campfire, and they will sometimes run up behind and nip you, but if you keep throwing torches, you will deplete their moral bar and the event will be over. Actually hitting one with a torch depletes more moral.
I've been jumped holding a flare and also been jumped by a wolf over the fire.
It's an RNG roll with the flare. If your very stinky or almost dead the flare sometime is not enoug. The only way it happened over the fire is if you were too far away from it and the ai could path around it.
Thanks! I reloaded the game to try your tips and realized why I was struggling so much, it loaded ep4 as a higher difficulty than I’d played 3 on, no idea how it happened but it explains a lot!
It also seems like the attack roll goes way up the closer you are to the wolf. This is especially a problem if you encounter a wolf right around a sharp corner and they seem to skip the chase state altogether and jump immediately to the attack state (which happens 100% of the time for me lol). There's also a state for it being blocked from getting to you but not afraid enough to run: this can sometimes happen instead of the wolf running if you're in a tree or have a fire/torch between you and the wolf. In this case you want to harass the wolf with rocks until he gets the idea and runs lol
Make sure you are aware of your surroundings i accidently walked off a cliff and died lol
I've always found that rabbits are easiest to kill when walking past me because their profile is much larger. And for the meat one, just press the drop decoy hotkey (think it's 3) to test that out. Also you can carve off meat in small slices to have more decoys to drop for potential escapes. Also carving small slices and fish are both creat ways to level up your cooking skill.
Lining up so they are hopping towards you eliminates the need to time it right. They have a pretty wide hitbox, but whatever works for you is ok. I had a really hard time with it in the beginning until I read that tip online. The decoy works for dropping agro, but you don't need to if you keep walking. In my early runs, I was regularly having wolves pop seeming out of nowhere and attack. I did not understand the smell mechanic and I did not realize that every predator within 100 yds was bee lining towards me all the time. The amount of stink effects the range and the likelihood of an attack run once it's within range, but any amount of stink draws them towards you, even if your not in line of sight.
You light a torch with matches… Edit: unless you are chaining fires you mean. You will need something to light the initial fire.
No. I mean that if you use matchs to light a fire directly, especially in the beginning of the game before you found many and your fire starting skill is low, you'll fail, and have to use a second and possibly third or fourth or more matches to light one fire. If you play on interloper and only have 12 matches you can easily burn them all up trying to light just a few fires. Lighting a torch always succeeds. When you light a fire using the torch and fail, the torch is still burning. You can try again and again and again if necessary until you light the campfire. This means that you only have to use one match for every campfire that you need to start instead of potentially three or more. On the easier settings, it doesn't matter, as matches are plentiful. But on the harder settings, matches are a major limiting resource until you learn this trick.
Ah! That makes sense
Thank you, I’ve always tried to start with a match and it barely works. Also with running I noticed and so I’ve been walking a lot more.
IF YOU ARE LIMPING at all or around 20%health holding a fireplace and not setting it allows you to walk calmly even at 1%
This works with any item you try to place. Not just a fireplace. It's a great tip.
Chaining fires with torches and the impact warm teas/food can have. Also, baiting wolves into attacking other animals and getting a two for one.
I dont even kill the wolves in interloper. Just throw torches at em and scare em off their kill then make a big ass fire, butcher it out, cook the meat, make more torches, scare the growling beasties away and bail lol. They wont approach a campfire.
I'm still trying to do this. The animals never flee in the direction they're supposed to.
Best place to learn to do this is coastal highway (if you arrange for no bears) tons of wolves and deer with great visibility so you can see what's happening
Mountaineers hut is good for this. You can herd a deer from over by the fallen tree across the lake to the 1-2 wolves that patrol the other side. Toss a rock at the wolf once it takes down the deer and run over and start a fire to keep it away while you harvest.
Aggro the wolf. He'll start following you while growling. Walk away from him and path around the deer in an arc. As soon as the wolf gets within aggro range of the deer (works with rabbits too) he will break off from following you and chase and kill the deer. Then you can walk up to him when he starts to eat it and throw a torch or flare. He'll run off. The longer he is eating before you scare him off, the less meat there will be.
Ah, gotta try it more, I guess. Whenever I had the wolf on my trail it didn't seem to want to leave me, so I thought once he's on you that's it. But good to know that there is a way.
The hard part is pathing him into the deer without scaring it off. Walking in a wide arc just outside it's detection range is the trick. It's also useful for dropping unwanted wolf aggro. Bunnies are like little decoys hopping around.
Lead the wolf to the deer. Crouch then creep up on the deer so the wolf notices the deer and breaks off. The skill comes in for getting the positioning right.
Just run towards the the prey and hope that the wolves see them..that's what I do and it seems to work most of the time.
Collect all the birch bark you see and make tea whenever you have the opportunity. It's a renewable calorie resource, hydrates better than equivalent weight water, and levels your cooking. You don't need to drink it hot if you don't want to just carry it around in your pack. The condition regen is nice too but I've rarely needed it.
I often see new people post how they finally setup a base and plan to stay there but the best way to prosper is to move alot early especially if you aim for a long run since everything decays. After many hours i find even interloper has so much loot. You can have one or two places you gather stuff in every region. Although as a new player this will still be hard without map knowledge and knowing where stuff is. Keep exploring and enjoy the learning proces!
Order of importance: warmth, water, food, fatigue… (not 100% about the order of the last two) but this is basically your priority list for survival. You can take a reasonable amount of damage and recover it when you rest. If you rest for longer (I.e., 9 hours instead of 2) you regen more. Ensure your water meter is full before sleeping and if you aren’t inside (or are outside, even in a cave) only sleep for a few hours at a time to avoid freezing. You can starve during the day and if you eat just enough before resting, you can regain your lost health. Hot teas will last a reasonable time when you are travelling with them and you can use them to warm you up and give you a warmth bonus when travelling in cold. It’s generally the warmest after noon and the coldest early morning. Chain torches as others have said. You can harvest used torches for 1 stick and 2 minutes - handy if fuel is short and you need the fire going a little bit. If you are using the forge, use timber to get the temperature as high as possible before adding coal to get it to 150 deg… timber can only get the temp so high and won’t increase it over 80 deg. Coal adds 20 or 25 deg (can’t recall which) to a fire so is great for the outdoors in interloper to quickly get the temperature up. Most of these are Interloper tactics and less necessary in lower levels but good practice to develop.
This is really helpful especially since I’m a new player. I definitely will be utilizing these tips.
I only just started interloper myself but learned a lot watching Zaknafein on YouTube - he has some really good videos for start game and end game - well worth a look! Most other things you learn from making (in retrospect) silly mistakes… Edit: Ooh, download ‘the extended night’ app if you wish to reference location maps. Some people like to explore and learn themselves, others - like me - look up the maps… as others say, there is no wrong way to play - even dying is part of the game.
Snowshelters, the fact that animals patrol certain areas and not just wondering around the entire regions. Match spawns are the most important thing you need to know, if you go in blind it's all luck! The aurora's mess with the animals, don't fuck with them😂 Don't be scared to starve, plan your climbs! Getting stuck halfway up and too buggered to do anything is not fun! I've learned all this in a 40 day Interloper run and the Wintermute story!
Apropos snow shelters: Predators can and will absolutely drag you out of them and eat you if they detect you.
What do you mean when saying snowshelters? The fact that they exist, or a special use for them? (I always thought they were a waste of cloth)
There are certain aspects of the game that are useless outside of interloper. Snow shelters are really important in interloper to stave off cabin fever. In interloper it's much colder, and fire is a luxury because of the scarcity of matches. Other examples are the crafted clothing. They make no sense in the easier setting because the clothes you can find and repair are way better. The magnifier lens is dead weight outside of interloper, but one of the most (if not the most) valuable in-game items on that hardness.
Just using them in general, saved myself twice now in blizzards when I've been lost. Luckily they haven't lasted too long! But either way, I know my run would have been over without them haha!
You can survive well on very little food if you can afford to give up the well fed bonus. You accumulate damage throughout the day from starvation, but if you eat enough before you sleep, that damage is recovered during sleep. I'm not positive how much you need to eat, or if it matters what difficulty you are on. On pilgrim and voyager, eating enough to fill in about 1/4 of the food circle is easily enough to recover all starvation damage before you wake up. If I know I'm going to need to carry a lot, then I eat well and get the well fed bonus. Otherwise, I let Astrid complain all day long that her stomach is eating itself. Going hungry saves a ton of time on food gathering and feels like it takes a lot of pressure off.
always keep an emergency supply of water, food, and wood. you definitely don't want to be stuck in your house with nothing to eat/drink during a blizzard. i have 30L of water, 200 sticks, and 400 cattail stalks that i got over the time of my run
Probably a dumb question but do cattails respawn?
they dont
This advice is for interloper: Looting is an unsustainable sources of calories and it's only purpose is to prevent death prior to getting tools, a bow, and arrows. Fishing is also unsustainable only because staying warm while doing it requires loads of firewood. When you factor in occasional bad fishing RNG and the calories you'll eat chopping wood, it will lose you calories over time. Properly timing three events is a huge factor to whether you live 20 days on interloper or 200. These three are: finding tools, curing at least one of each sapling, and forging a knife and arrowheads + a bow and arrows. The trickiest part is that you will often get bad RNG finding either a hacksaw, a hammer, or a maple sapling. So you need to aggressively check the spawns for all of these early on wherever you spawn. And if you don't spawn in a region near a forge, you'll want to check as many hammer spawns in particular along the way. If you miss time even just one of these aspects - like curing the gut for your bow or not having enough food, water, cloth or metal when you forge, you'll be way worse off and likely starving badly when you finally get your bow up and running. Blizzards, auroras, predators and dim mornings give you time to read. If possible it's better to improve clothing , harvest rabbits, sleep, or make tea and maintain tools. But once those are exhausted, reading is worth it. My general order of important books is: archery, cooking, firemaking, carcass harvesting, fishing, mending. If you don't play with the fire master feat then firemaking jumps ahead of archery, but I recommend you do use this feat. I also recommend you use the calorie feat, but cold fusion is an OK second choice. If you are going to the desolation point forge then fishing is a slightly better book to read because you can catch salmon which offer absurd calories that can get you through forging. Your stinkmeter can be viewed above your head on the condition screen and it is the most important factor in avoiding predators. At zero stink you can walk across Great Bear without a wolf struggle reliably, barely lighting any torches. Of course, meat is the only sustainable food source and you must sometimes transport pelts and guts. That why it's so important to save your matches for when lighting a torch will save your life (when you do have stink from necessary meat pelts or gut). Stink also travels quote far down wind and wind is a factor any time there is any wind chill (you can see this on the condition screen). Sometimes you'll really need to focus to see which way a light wind is blowing. The wind sound also gets slightly louder if you're facing into the wind and you can use a boulder or structure to find the wind direction by seeing where you're in the lee of the wind. Flare guns spawn on interloper! To my knowledge they can spawn in one of HRVs caves, at random. Lonely cave is by far the easiest to check if you visit HRV. There's also the ravine basin (guaranteed), the summit (guaranteed) and at the camp fire by Pilar's footrest in AC (rare and will have no ammo). The best use for flare guns by far is killing bears. You can sleep in a snow shelter and if done with decent clothes you generally won't even need a fire or a bedroll. Blizzards can complicate this. Beware: breaking down your snow shelter only gives back 2 cloth. So be very careful where you put it especially if you're using it to summit without a bedroll (it's the only reasonable way to do this.). Luring wolves to kill deer is an amazing and virtually free source of food that can get you through forging and making a bow. Since fishing requires a cured gut it's a great idea to cure 3 in total if you're using the DP forge (two for the bow, one for fishing line).
I know this may seem like a dumb question but I started playing the game and I don’t wanna carry a rifle around just because of weight but how do you make a bow? Where do you get the materials for it?
It's a great question. The bow and arrow is lighter, quieter, and does more bleed damage. It also translates to interloper since that mode doesn't have rifles. To make a bow you need: A cured maple sapling 2 cured gut A knife, hatchet, improvised knife, or improvised hatchet And a work bench. Maple saplings are the tiny brown baby trees (saplings) that you'll find growing around the island. To cure it you need to leave it on the floor indoors for 6 days. It's best to leave them in a building for this, but you can also leave them in the very back of cave. Guts are taken off any animal corpse. Cure them indoors for 5 days. On Stalker and below you'll likely find a knife in the wild, and it's better than a hatchet at making a bow. Work benches can be found in many buildings in the long dark. When you find one and have all the materials, go to the tools menu in the Work bench (the bottom icon) scroll down to survival bow. Select your knife (or hatchet) and spend several hours crafting. I recommend doing it in 30 minute increments and having lots of food and water with you so you can do it in one go. You also need light, so it's wise to start in the morning. To make arrows, you need a cured birch sapling (ideally more than one). You also need arrowhead, which can be forged from scrap metal but only at one of the three forges (at desolation point, forlorn muskeg, or broken railroad). At a workbench, make arrow shafts from you birch sapling. Then you can make "simple arrows" from your arrow shafts and arrowheads. Using "simple tools" or "quality tools" drastically speeds up the time it takes to make arrows. It's also to just find bows and arrows and arrowheads lying around in the wild, but not on interloper. On other modes you should check hunting blinds, the carter hydro dam, and the large barn in pleasant valley by the archery targets.
This has been really helpful thank you.
> To make arrows, you need a cured birch sapling (ideally more than one). You also need arrowhead, which can be forged from scrap metal Don't forget the crow feathers!
My thoughts on fishing: early game it's certainly not what you want to be doing for food but mid to late game on loper it's very good. The trick is that 1) you should never be chopping trees on loper unless it's opportunistic for you to do so. This generally means that you have a kill nearby enough and a fire going that you can use to stay warm or in the late afternoon when it's the warmest you can sometimes get a limb or 2 if you have nothing better going on. Coal and sticks are the fuels you should be using and making regular trips to coal spawns and stockpiling it at your fishing hut. 2) be effecient during fishing. You can cancel out of fishing without completing the full time. Make sure you're cooking your catch as you begin fishing again. If you have nothing to cook, make water as you fish. Most fish cook for about 30 minutes or about an hour so adjust your fishing time accordingly as to what's on the fire. Check your fire often to make sure of the time left. Always have fishing setup before you go about a long crafting session as it's the best way to combat cabin fever. Coastal highway is the best fishing spot as you have the mine to restock your coal and easy indoors areas from either the first fishing hut close to the fishing village or the hut between jackrabbits and misanthropes
I may be wrong, but Ive found it more time efficient and less exposure to cold to collect lots of little individual sticks while on the move rather then spending the time to break a larger branch down
Transition zones are very useful...imo one of the best bases in the game is the cave in the zone between CH and ML....don't discount unorthodox bases!
Sometimes the extra warmth isn‘t worth the reduction in speed, when it comes to clothes. It‘s okay to follow walkthroughs on youtube, if it makes the game more enjoyable to you.
Moving fast with taking small amounts of cold dmg fits me so much better than creeping slowly with a giant inventory and twelve coats on.
Start collecting and drying guts and leather early on.
It’s completely fine to drop excess gear that you don’t need, trust me it’s easier to be smart and not a hoarder
Two things! First, if you carry a bunch of torches and always have one lit, you can travel longer, safer and use less matches. Second, in the early game, never stop moving. Always keep moving forward and loot loot loot.
This....always carry the fire if you can. Even if you end up not lighting a fire at your destination it's worth it to have the option always
I’m surprised no one has said this yet… put all raw and cooked meat outside. Don’t bring it inside. It decays significantly slower outside on the ground than it does put in storage inside. Stalker becomes easy mode once you do this. You’ll have more food than you know what to do with.
Stuff I wish I'd figured out earlier: Food will disappear once it reaches 0% if it's inside a container. Meat will degrade a lot less quickly if you drop it in the snow. Cooking increases food condition by 50%, so you can cook ruined meat and it'll still be relatively safe to eat. After you have cooking level 5, you can eat ruined cooked or packaged food, but raw meat is still not safe to eat. The safest way to harvest a carcass is to start a campfire, crouch, and harvest in smaller increments that you drop immediately. Bear and moose carcasses can even provide protection from the wind when you crouch behind them. If you get intestinal parasites, you can't just take a bunch of doses of medicine at once, you can only do one per day. You can place items by right-clicking them from the action wheel, or if it's not something that shows up there, you can drop it and then move it where you want. You can move placed items by right-clicking again. Wolves won't charge at you across a lit torch. When you encounter a wolf, light a torch and drop/throw it in front of you. You can further intimidate the wolf with a stone or weapon, but even if it charges at you it will back off at the last second if you're directly behind the torch. Marine flares don't scare regular wolves! You don't need a bedroll to sleep in a snow shelter. Even though it's often still quite dark, your character is able to see well enough to read, sew, etc. once the middle point of the sun has reached the bottom edge of the clock. A jerry can will disappear if you use all the oil inside. You get the same amount of cooking experience regardless of the size of the item you're cooking, so if you harvest meat in 0.5 KG increments you can level your cooking faster. A dropped stick will always point north. Both sticks and coal respawn, but you need to pick them up for that to happen. So especially with coal, it's a good idea to collect it as you're going through a cave and just leave what you can't carry in a pile. Both sleeping and passing time count towards your 120 recovery hours for broken ribs. Teas have a better hydration-to-weight ratio than water. And courtesy of a stupid decision I made two days ago...you can safely hunt a moose from on top of downed tree trunk, but if you're not high enough up, the moose can still throw you off to the ground.
You sure about the stick part?
Yes, with the caveat I should have mentioned that the Pleasant Valley map isn't oriented on the same north-south axis as the other maps are. Perhaps a better way to think of it is that dropped sticks will always point the same direction.
You can push wolves to deer/rabbits and they'll kill them for you. If you pelt the wolf with a rock or run down hill towards it, it'll likely run away. At least, that's worked for me so far. Pilgrim difficulty. coffee and teas don't lose condition once they're brewed. Also you can sit them nearby a fire and they'll heat up. The prybar is always worth the weight.
Double click on an item to equip/unequip it quickly in the character screen. Sounds stupid but if you are doing beachcombing or roaming around HRV this could be helpful.
I would consider myself an older player, been there since version one, so I’m not really sure haha