If you’re playing in sandbox mode, 90% of it is knowing the maps. Some general tips.
Don’t eat during the day. If you eat right before you sleep, it will heal up the damage from the day overnight. You save a ton of food this way.
Don’t be afraid to explore and die, it will happen a lot. Again, map knowledge is probably the single biggest key to a lot of days survived. I actually played the game on the easiest settings for a while, just to learn all the maps, and then bumped the difficulty up.
If you crouch while you are getting into a car, you will be crouched when you exit. This is a good way to get away from pesky animals that won’t seem to go away.
Trapping and fishing can go a long way to stretching your longevity. Sources of “found” food don’t respawn, but animals do. You’ll pretty quickly clean out an area of scavenged goods, so there are a few different ways to approach things. You can just keep moving from map to map, or you can hunker down and fish / trap. Moving from map to map is a lot more dangerous, as you’re more likely to run into a patrol/bear that you don’t know is there over a hill etc.
Get good with a bow, as it’s also a renewable resource.
Get good at hitting rabbits with rocks.
Store food outside (this used to work, not sure if it still does). Food doesn’t degrade outside, or at least it didn’t used to. Very handy for those big game stockpiles. If they fixed/changed this, the game will be much harder. You used to be able to seriously stockpile and just hunker down somewhere. I’ve had games where I had months worth of supplies stacked up.
Good tips, thanks man. So far so good but learning the aggro range of wolves has been tough. Two survived attacks and still going.
I think I had a leg up from the start, I spawned near what is called the trappers cabin or whatever. The new cooking makes it a pain in the rear for water and meat cooking. Unless you hoof the pot around with you, cans can only melt and boil a very small amount at a time. I’ve found two pots. I left one at the trapper cabin and one at the lake office. So beyond that, topping off water along the way is … slow.
I haven’t found a hook, a hatchet, nor a prybar. Those were key when I last played so I’m pretty gimped right now, even with the rifle.
@Ultrazen what do you mean going between maps? Is that possible, aka leaving Mystery Lake during the same game, or do you mean a game in another map entirely?
I go back to this game every once in a while. I am waiting on Chapter 3 to get serious about a big play through, however doing challenges, and getting more feats unlocked is still happening. I think survival mode is a much better game than the story mode, but that may change next update as they are making lots of improvements. @Ultrazen gave some great tips. Here are a few more:
Pick every single cat tail you can. they are a never spoiling source of food that is fairly light, and also tinder
Don’t travel during storms. Storms sap your will to live a lot faster than you may think.
Try to get a couple of rabbit pelts curing on the first day if you can. The gloves you can make from them are very nice, and you will need lots of cured gut for the days to come.
Storing food outside still works =)
for cooking water use a couple of tin cans instead of the pot. It’s pretty heavy and weight will be the thing you struggle with most once you get the mechanics down.
while waiting to eat until bedtime is still a solid plan, don’t wait to drink. make sure you keep your water meter full.
Make sure you carry an extra pair of gloves and a hat. Wolves tend to rip those apart the fastest, and even a crappy pair of gloves is better than exposed skin.
So many more tips… It seems like such a simple game, but getting 30-100 days on Interloper is pretty complicated =)
More great tips, thank you. I have a snare up for rabbits at the Trappers Cabin, but I -suck- at throwing rocks right now. Prior to the moose attack I had found the prybar. So I’m still short of a hatchet and hacksaw, and with no scrap found, I have no hook yet.
If I live after that attack, that moose has my name on it.
The challenges are actually really really fun, and really tough. Much harder to do when you don’t know the maps, but a great way to learn how to manage sleep/food/travel. All of those challenge objectives want you to get from point A to point B within a certain time limit, and it’s a great puzzle to solve. The one where you have to make it to the top of a mountain in Pleasant Valley is amazing.
Oh, one more tip. Always carry a few brewed coffee in your inventory when going on any kind of trip. You’ll be really happy when you’re out of energy because a big storm hit, and you’re a long way from a shelter. Saved my life more than once.
Well the moose attack ended up being the first domino to fall. It was still early game, but I failed. I learned a lot though. Roughly, there was the attack, that broke ribs, that cut carry weight and health, I was out of food and low on fire supplies, I went out in a storm to try to find something, hypothermia set in, frostbite warning set in, drowsiness and spinning due to low health set in, dead.
I restarted this morning and landed again in the Trapper Cabin. Score!
Interesting story. Sounds like good news overall for the game.
Just to quote the important bit for people with current campaign saves:
The darker side of the bright side (I told you it’s complicated) is that existing saves won’t be compatible with the Redux release, so Hinterland will be deleting them. If you haven’t started playing Wintermute yet then you should probably wait until the Redux chapters are live, and if you’re in the middle of a playthrough and want to finish it, get on it.
Just bought, perhaps inspired by the subfreezing temps here last night. I haven’t played this genre much but this game seems like a good starting point, especially with story mode.
Yeah, we’ve known that for a while. You literally posted the dev diary from November that the news story you quoted up-thread on the 8th of November was detailing.
Next week the new update goes live, with the new redo-ing of the first two episodes in the story mode.
Any saves in story mode in either Episode 1 or 2 will be wiped. If you’ve completed episode 1 and 2 both, you won’t need to redo them when Episode 3 drops next year, though.
Also, if you have ongoing sandbox games in any of these regions:
Mystery Lake, Milton/Mountain Town, Forlorn Muskeg, Broken Railroad
and have a supply stash/cache housed in any, they recommend moving it before the update hits.
As much as I like the sound of the new REDUX I don’t relish playing through some of the more tedious parts of Eps 1 and 2. I particularly hated waiting for the random Aurora event to unlock the dam so I could escape to the new area! I recall just wandering/surviving for days, waiting for the event to occur. Pretty sure they increased the frequency but even so, I’m a bit wary of starting over…
However, I hope they give us a way to get that sweet spear early in Episode 3 to make up for missing out on Redux!
