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Oh, neat! Glad to see Goonpa wake up from his one-day coma. e: gah, update in previous page!
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Feb 26, 2019 18:08
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Black Robe posted:Fair enough. I figure if there's food growing anywhere it'll be along the river, so yeah, might as well just get to moving. Set the trap whenever we stop to sleep, we might get lucky. Shame we can't flip the fishing line into the water while we walk along; maybe we fish for an hour before sleep every night, or an hour every morning before we head out? Mechanically, fish work much the same way as encountering edible plants or animals - we might randomly come upon spots with signs of active fish whenever we travel by a body of water, but we're not allowed to attempt to fish just anytime or anywhere we please. I'm guessing this is a game play conceit to force the player to keep moving, but it's kind of a shame since being able to fish by the fireside every night/morning would make the food situation a whole lot easier.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:37
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Yeah it's time for Goonpa to hit the ol' perma-frozen trail.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:57
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Will the rivers freeze over? If so, we should keep the stove for water. Otherwise we can probably get by without it.
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Feb 26, 2019 22:52
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Kangra posted:Will the rivers freeze over?
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Feb 27, 2019 00:07
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  Goonpa wakes up nice and early after a long night's sleep, ready to get on the move again. This is the state of our inventory, after leaving the stuff we decided against on the ground. Sorry, park rangers! Also finger's crossed Goonpa didn't accidentally forget to bring along anything important   We're packed and done bright and early, making sure to not waste more daylight than necessary.   After three hours of walking we have arrived at some form of pretty sharp bend in the river where we stop for second breakfast, since Goonpa is once again very hungry. This diet of rice really isn't up to his usual nutritional standards, but I'm mostly rationing to keep his hunger at so-so while on the march. We also picked up our trap along the way, which unfortunately still hadn't caught anything.   Three more hours of walking, and we are treated to a nice view as we start rounding steep mountain. Seeing Dogleg River disappear beyond the horizon is both a good way of seeing where we need to go, but also fairly demoralizing when you get a full sense of the distance Goonpa needs to cross.  It's extra demoralizing when you see how relatively little ground he covers in almost three hours of walking. Also, here's our rough compass heading, for reference. I've been slacking in showing it off, since we're gonna be following the river for a good long time.  After the final leg of the day, we can at least tell that we're soon going to be leaving steep mountain behind us on our left.  Also, here's what we see if we look directly behind us. You can kind off make out what I think must be Intheway River in the distance, so at the very least we can be proud that we've come a fair way!  Again, the map for reference. Now, let just look at our statistics before making camp and   Okay, the frostbite is back. It seems it's something that we can't reliably keep away just by an occasional day of resting by the fire, and anyway having to spend entire days not moving forward is less and less viable. I guess we could compromise by decreasing how much we walk in a day, thus spending more time resting and keeping warm? Thus far, the whole "trying to catch animals to make mittens"-plan has been even less reliable, and probably not something we'd want to count on. I'm not sure if there's a huge difference mechanically between longer continuous fire rest at the end of the day and making a fire for a longer rest period in the middle of the day, but if there is indeed enough light during the day to use our magnifying glass for fire making we could also try that. Campingwise, the river shore has the issue of not having trees around for hanging the backpack while sleeping, but we had no issues with nightly animal encounters in the last spot either, so hopefully it'll be fine. We've also encountered no fishing spots during a whole day walking by the river, hopefully we've just been lucky. Regarding the frost bite: A) Resting for a day cured it last time, we can do it again and hope for the best. Our caloric burn rate should be a lot less painful when we're resting at least. B) Walk less, rest more by the fire. Feel free to suggest how many hours a day away from the fire we should limit ourselves to. We've been on the move for around 11 hours today with short breaks, for the record. This option also includes a new routine for short fire rests around lunch time daily, assuming the magnifying glass helps us here. C) Soldier on - we can't afford to waste more time what with how abysmally slowly we move to begin with. At this rate, hunger will kill us before the frost bite does anyway. Food rationing: A) Keep food levels at "okay" whenever we eat - we're gonna need that energy. B) Ration food intake to keep hunger at "so-so". Food is what sets our time limit for survival, at the moment. C) Strict food rationing, allowing us to spend longer periods of time as "very" hungry. Goonpa can stand to lose some weight anyway, and starvation takes a good long while to kick in.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:05
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C, C At least until something alarming spools up
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Mar 3, 2019 18:30
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I agree with C, C. Goonpa moves so slow that if we keep trying to rest away his problems, I suspect we'll just waste increasingly large amounts of time trying to cure frostbite instead of getting closer to our goal.
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Mar 3, 2019 19:17
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Yeah, C C
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Mar 3, 2019 19:23
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Covski posted:Also finger's crossed Goonpa didn't accidentally forget to bring along anything important You left the rock behind, didn't you. Covski posted:Now, let just look at our statistics before making camp and Now look what happened.  I'm not sure what the best course is for the first choice. A would be fine if we were sure this wasn't going to keep happening, but stopping every two or three days for a full day is not sustainable. I have no idea how brutal the game is and how quickly the frostbite will have an impact on us, especially as it doesn't tell us where it is; if it's his ears or something we can keep going and ignore it but if it's his feet we're in trouble, and hands would depend on how many fingers. I think we need to go with B and use the magnifying glass for a short fire break in the middle of the day, and if the glass doesn't work then have a longer rest at night instead. At least try it for a couple of days and see if our food situation is getting too dire to keep it going. I'd hope after 11 hours of walking we might have spotted something edible. As for the second choice, I say C - we're running low on food anyway and aren't having any luck restocking. Goonpa's doing surprisingly well, losing weight can only help him at the moment. fake edit - Majority say C for the first option as well, I'll defer to the thread. I assume the game will warn us when the frostbite gets really severe, we'll worry about it then. C, C
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Mar 3, 2019 19:25
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 Good news, we're about 1/3 of the way to safety! C,C, drive it like you stole it.
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Mar 3, 2019 21:16
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in a strict survival situation there isn't a great answer to this one. pushing yourself harder is going to cause further injury, but without supplies stopping to rest will just mean you're starving to death. so in case anyone is wondering, no, there really isn't a Good Solution to this situation. we're really just choosing what manner of poo poo we want to deal with. for the rationing portion, i'd remind you that as far as the game is concerned, you only need 2000 calories a day. at least that's what the manual says, who knows if the game's code itself is a little different. start counting calories.
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Mar 3, 2019 22:22
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Goonpa's worst nightmare.
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Mar 3, 2019 22:33
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Time to tighten the effing belt. Might as well go C, C. I immediately wanted to go B on food since I know how much it loving suuuucks hiking on an empty stomach, and that's not very safe either. But yeah, goonpa is going to have to learn to be at least somewhat hungry because our supplies are dwindling and I don't know how this game handles "starvation" (you can walk for at least a couple of days on an empty stomach no matter what shape you're in).
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Mar 3, 2019 22:45
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Speaking of counting calories, the manual helpfully provides a list of all the food stuff we can get from the plane: This list do not cover food we find in nature, so the plants we're carrying around are a mystery as far as nutrition is concerned. We've been eating stuff in a rough order of calories per oz, so far. During this last day of travel, we've consumed 16 or 17 oz of rice, which adds up to 1760-1870 cal (and Goonpa was still very hungry when we left him). This suggests that Goonpa needs more than 2000 a day, or that hunger level is at least to some degree decoupled from the amount of calories we need to sustain ourselves.  lofi posted:Goonpa's worst nightmare. On the plus side, he'll soon be down to a diet of bacon, nuts, and candy bars, so he'll feel right at home!
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Mar 3, 2019 22:55
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I went back to double check the manual, which had the following to say (emphasis mine):The manual posted:Wilderness assumes that peak performance requires at least 2,500 calories a day. If you consume much less than this amount, you eventually feel the effects of starvation. Though lack of food will not lead to death within a month, your physical condition will deteriorate and your stamina will diminish. Both result in slowed reflexes, weakness, and slower travel time.
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Mar 4, 2019 00:49
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Coolguye posted:in a strict survival situation there isn't a great answer to this one. In the real world, the correct answer is almost always to remain in place if able and assume someone is going to come looking for you. Problems arise when people don't know you're gone, or assume you're somewhere else entirely, at which point you get "shelter for weeks, resort to cannibalism, decide nobody is coming, walk over a mountain range to find help". I assume this is pretty much where the game picks up Goonpa's story.
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Mar 4, 2019 01:05
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Vando posted:In the real world, the correct answer is almost always to remain in place if able and assume someone is going to come looking for you. Problems arise when people don't know you're gone, or assume you're somewhere else entirely, at which point you get "shelter for weeks, resort to cannibalism, decide nobody is coming, walk over a mountain range to find help". I assume this is pretty much where the game picks up Goonpa's story. yup pretty much. in a real survival situation it's pretty unlikely that rescue teams won't have a reasonably good idea where you are unless you did something like walk into the woods and disappear. you leave tracks and traces fairly readily, and in the case of goonpa's plane it's literally the law to leave said traces when you file a flight plan. a strict survival situation (where none of this is true and it's simply all you) is when hostile weather + insufficient supplies really combine to become a bigger problem than their constituent parts.
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Mar 4, 2019 01:13
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C, C. Besides, losing an arm to frost bite and coming back as a skeleton will make for a better movie based on our written experience out there.
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Mar 4, 2019 05:34
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C C Soldier on my goonward gramps
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Mar 4, 2019 05:58
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C, C
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Mar 4, 2019 17:44
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I'd like to argue for spending a few extra hours resting for at least two days, just to see if it makes a difference. Then we'll know whether we have to stop for longer when it worsens, or if we can continue at a slower pace. Starvation diet should be fine, though.
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Mar 4, 2019 19:27
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  I foolhardily push Goonpa to walk another hour, and suddenly it's very dark. I'll have to make a mental note that the sun sets around 6pm. I spend a use of the flashlight to not make the tired and hungry old beast do all the tent raising and fire making in the dark. We get a nice look at the big dipper behind the as of yet unnamed mountain top.  He gets a good 10 hours of rest, and... drat IT GOONPA WE HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED ON THE STARVATION DIET YET  At this point however, it seems that "starvation" only indicates the very first stages of malnutrition, and isn't SUPER problematic just yet. We do the usual morning routine of eating, drinking, packing the camp, almost forgetting to pack the tent, attempting to leave but being reminded by Smokey the Bear to douse our fire first, etcetera. After barely an hour of walking, we receive a boon in the form of a whole slew of edible insects! While not super nutritious, that's around a fourth of a days food right there.  Unfortunately, we carefully do a taste test and they turn out to have a very bitter taste, possibly indicating that they would be harmful to eat. We'll still bring them along (presumably by filling Goonpa's jacket pockets with bugs), and we'll try boiling them later to see if that can help neutralising any potential toxins.  Here I accidentally stray from the river shore (the game is a bit finicky with the exact facing you need to have in relation to the river), but this turns out to be a blessing in disguise as we find signs of small game in the area! This is also when I realised that I probably misunderstood how trapping works earlier. I now believe that trapping works the same way that fishing does, with only certain randomly appearing areas being usable for trapping. It's weird, but I can understand it as a gameplay conceit as the goal of the game is to constantly move forward, and also since the game controls don't exactly lend themselves well to navigating repeatedly between a basecamp and a trapping location. I'm not POSITIVE that this is how it works though, since the manual is kind of vague on that point.  We ALSO stumble over a handful of edible nuts, in the very same spot!  This surely is our lucky day! Nuts are EXCELLENT for nutrition at 160kcal/oz, actually the most energy dense food in the game. This also illustrates the benefits of travelling through forests: While going might be slower and navigation more difficult, you are much more likely to find edible things than out on the mountain or barren terrain. We try our hand at bringing down some game (with our huge handgun, for shits and giggles) but no luck  A few more hours of walking, and we get our first good look at Liquid Big Mountain.  We make camp, and are notified that we just happened to camp next to an excellent fishing spot. Everything is coming up Goonpa! ...I'd also like to point out that all this good fortune started suspiciously shortly after we left the rock behind...  We even manage to catch some fish this time! A normal looking fish even! As the manual mentions, you should be on the lookout for fish with sunken eyes, slim gills or flabby flesh or skin. Seafood diseases can be pretty drat nasty.  We boil the fish and the insects, which now seemingly seem safe to eat. It's a veritable feast of candy bars, fish and creepy crawlies!  After all the fishing and cooking, Goonpa is up way past his bed time. You'll note that Goonpa's health isn't looking TOO bad all things considering, despite the beginning starvation symptoms, constant light dehydration, and frozen limbs. I've also noticed that Goonpa no longer seems to get quite as exhausted as he did early on, even after a full day of walking. Whether this is due to the much lighter load, the easier terrain, the use of snowshoes, or that he's turning into a buff superman is anyone's guess. Possibly a combination of all of the above.  We get up a bit later than usual, around 8am, and get back on the metaphorical road. We can now clearly see the end of the slope, beyond which Dogleg River flows through the flatter area between Liquid Big Mountain and Noname Hill.   Once again we come across a fishing spot and stop to try our luck. Unfortunately, no fish this time.  The crest seems rather close now, as does Liquid Big Mountain.  We push on another hour, before it's time to make camp again.  Relatively speaking, Goonpa's health is looking AMAZINGLY good at the moment!  On the face of it, our food situation is looking pretty scary, what with only scraps of fish and insects left until we're down to an all-nut diet. However, as I mentioned nuts are incredibly energy rich, so we're looking at a whopping 10720 kcal right there. That's four or five days of food, depending on how much we're willing to risk starving poor Goonpa!  The map, for reference. This has been a surprisingly good two days with some good progress having been made, and some very lucky finds in terms of food! It's a shame we didn't manage to catch any game, but that was always going to be a long shot. In other news, I don't think I ended up the screenshot I took of it, but at one point the temperature went up from "freezing" to just "cold". If the current weather turns out to just have been a cold snap, the snow melting away would be a great boon for us, now that we're no longer needing to rely on it for water. Might... ...might Goonpa actually make it? No specific vote this time as I can't think of any specific decisions that need to be made right now, but feel free to chime in if you have any good ideas regarding the current situation!
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Mar 7, 2019 22:30
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Go back and get the rock.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:53
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Oh boy, boiled insects! 
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Mar 7, 2019 23:06
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 Bonus screenshot of the view behind us. It's nice to see Steep Mountain from this angle, and see how far we have come!
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Mar 7, 2019 23:22
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The rock was a curse.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:01
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No, the weight of rock strengthened us and by keeping the game, fish, and nuts away honed our survival instincts. The rock was a stern teacher.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:10
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It was like Piccolo's weighted clothing, Goonpa kept the rock to give nature a fighting chance.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:16
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paragon1 posted:Go back and get the rock. Screw the rock. It died to give Goonpa a chance.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:30
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We developed frostbite and began to starve after abandoning the rock On the plus side, hey, actual food. We're doing okay. Shame the unidentified small animals ran away, we could really use some fur from something
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Mar 8, 2019 14:27
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Yeah, well. I guess it's fortunate that Goonpa had a stroke of luck. Now we need to keep on keeping on because our food situation looks pretty dire still. I would suggest keeping alongside dogleg river and passing through the forest whenever we can to search for nuts and animals, as well as monitoring Goonpas health carefully. Once we reach the end of dogleg it ought to be a straight shot west to intheway river and over, where we may be able to ditch the raft and hope we make it to the end.
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Mar 8, 2019 14:40
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we've been a little unlucky with food finds so far in my experience with the game, but not incredibly so. this last update is basically why you try to stick to rivers and forests as much as possible. forests are overall preferable but getting lost in the woods is basically wilderness.txt, so i wasn't about to bring up that point on the forums' first game.
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Mar 8, 2019 18:11
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 We're now on the steepest part of our route.
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Mar 8, 2019 18:40
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I was totally gonna update today, but then Goonpa accidentally sat his fat rear end down fishing for 11 hours straight, ending up half frozen to death in a sudden snowstorm See, when you fish the game won't interrupt you if you catch something, but will happily let you sit for days at an end even if you can't ever catch more than one fish per session, and I accidentally typed "11" instead of "1". I was tempted to leave it in just as a testament to how user unfriendly the game can be and how easy it is to screw yourself over completely if you don't save regularly (which I didn't because of hubris), but given how well we've been doing lately I didn't want to seriously risk Goonpa's life due to LPer error. I'll redo the update tomorrow at the very earliest.Coolguye posted:getting lost in the woods is basically wilderness.txt Oh, I fully intended the next adventure to be a jungle trek without a compass to showcase this.  It'll be more suffering for me to actually have to play it, but it is a worthy sacrifice to give you the true Wilderness experience.
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Mar 9, 2019 15:54
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The Long Dark also won't interrupt you if you accidentally freeze to death, which makes sense mechanically (wouldn't want someone to be too cold to build a fire) but I have lost the odd run going "Sure I'll chop wood for an hour", not cancelling in time when a blizzard rolls in, and fast-forwarding straight into the grave. Some things never change!
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Mar 9, 2019 21:14
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It's amazing how UX design is still pretty hard, 20+ years later  And in general, pretty interesting to consider how the survival game genre has evolved compared to the very first (as far as I know?) game that attempted to simulate it. And Wilderness still does some things better than many games that have come after it in my opinion, interestingly enough!
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Mar 10, 2019 01:37
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i mean wilderness remains the best in a lot of ways imo. even something like Long Dark does a very, very poor job of showing off how the body handles things like frostnip -> frostbite, the progressive effects of too little food/water, and all of the other little thousand cuts that will bring someone down in a survival situation. and that isn't Long Dark's fault as a game, it has to do with the design decision that they have to deal with time compression. an entire day in Long Dark lasts something like half an hour, so 30 minutes real time equates to 1,440 minutes in game, or a 48x speedup. this means that a one minute walk back to camp once you notice you're getting frostnip actually means you've been walking for 48 minutes, and probably a couple of miles. under tons of circumstances you are hosed and that can be some serious frostbite. wilderness is the literal only survival game i have ever seen that dispenses with time compression as a whole. one hour is one hour is one hour in the context of how the simulation unfolds. there's no weirdness to reconcile. there's no strange edge cases to cover. things just...work the way someone would expect. like an actual simulation. i would love to see a redux of wilderness done on modern systems with someone like les stroud advising. but i don't expect to see it.
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Mar 10, 2019 03:01
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I think the passage of time issue is a tricky one for wilderness survival games, my preferred approach is something similar to what URW does since it allows you to get in some more action-oriented sequences along with spending hours walking around in the wilderness, without running into weird poo poo like you get in TLD due to the constant time dilation
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Mar 16, 2019 15:16
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TLD is probably my favorite modern survival game, but I do wish there was one that focused even more on realism instead of having gamey poo poo like "you can't stay inside too much or else you literally can't sleep indoors until you've been outdoors X number of hours straight" to keep the player moving. I know URW is supposed to be good but I could never quite wrap my head around it.
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Mar 16, 2019 19:33
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