Here’s a perennial favourite: what features would you like added to the Long Dark, or what features would you like to see simplified or removed entirely?
(This is a decathread because we are too small to have megathreads yet)
(This might end up being my own personal gripe thread, so buckle up)
You should be able to select what tool you use (cutting saplings, digging burdock, cutting fishing holes) if there are multiple choices, like you do with matches lighting a torch. I almost never want to use my axe or knife when my hacksaw or crowbar is available.
@rbos My biggest gripes are mostly interface / convenience related.
I wish the mouse wheel worked in more contexts like the horizontal ‘place’ cooking menu (hate that thing - what I want is always at the far end).
I wish tool selection was ‘remembered’ so every time I break down a small branch I don’t have to reselect ‘hand’.
Agree that the recipes are too specific. Allow any kind of meat in stews. 💯
We need another utility slot.
Travel is just way way too slow. I always sprint.
Here’s one: Cooking has too many recipes right now. There shouldn’t be six different stew recipes, there should be one stew recipe that takes (say) meat, flour, oil, and vegetables as input. The resulting calorie value, and perhaps bonus properties, should depend on what you add to it.
Acorn flour should be able to sub in for old mill flour.
I’d also say fish oil should work in lieu of cooking oil. Maybe some fish give you lantern oil, some fish give you cooking oil.
@rbos I don’t much fancy the idea of pancakes cooked in fish oil 😝
That’s pretty fair. :D
Some renewable source of oil though, and they’ve already established the mechanism of getting leftover oil from the feesh.
@rbos a nut or seed oil makes most sense. Acorn oil?
Oh, totally! I wish I’d thought of that! Excellent.
edit: Though you need a press to get oil out of seeds and the like, if we want to follow IRL at all. It’d maybe stretch the imagination a little.
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@rbos These are great. I absolutely agree. Esp about the flour. Need more synergy between recipes & ingredients because it’s just not realistic to carry all these things with you all the time.
Another cooking gripe: A lot of the new recipes don’t use “prepared” versions of ingredients, like everything else. This makes them inconsistent with other recipes. Why rosehips and mushrooms and burdock, and not prepared rosehips, mushrooms, and burdock? Why is acorn bannock calling for acorn grounds instead of raw acorns?
For that matter, why aren’t we preparing carrots, potatoes, and such? The entire “preparation” dial when you start a new recipe should be separated into steps done ahead of time, when you don’t have to worry about your fire. The preparation for meat should be cooking it first.
@rbos yeah, agree. Where it trips me up is that rosehips are a usable item now, so it’s no longer a no-brainer to prepare them as soon as you have a minute.
Plus for me, that’s an extra line to put in my already extensive inventory spreadsheet.
Quality of life:
- Merge half liter containers of oil with kerosene jug and with each other.
- Half opened cabinet/fridge doors can be closed to gain another storage area OR the doors can be removed fully and the area treated like a shelf.
- Reading books in smaller chunks/time is cumulative; you shouldn’t not read something because you only spent 55 minutes on it.
- I want to be able to clean out cobwebs and papers on the floor. :( The mod for that broke after the update.
- Holding rightclick with no item held while near a cave wall puts your hand up against the wall, creating a sound as your hand moves across the stone, meaning you have a means of finding your way out if you lose all light sources.
- If you’ve made it to the workshop in Bleak Inlet once, you can set up a rope to bridge the gap between it and the pier. You can set it from the nearby warehouse.
- You should remember what you last used to build a fire and set that as default.
Equipment:
- Draggable sled: with multiple pieces of hardwood, birch and/or maple saplings, deer hide, cloth and guts, can build a pricey but useful sled. Your movement speed decreases 30%, you can’t run unless you drop it, but you can store 75+ kilos, making it useful for processing large game and moving bases. You can’t take it over train tracks but you can take it over nonbreakable ice; breakable ice means you lose it immediately.
- Hammer the candy machines in Milton for candy.
- Make the horns of cars startle wildlife; all deer/rabbits, and any predator that hasn’t sensed you yet. Not sure about moose.
- From Archery 3 and up, your survival bow can include an option to add a piece of wood sticking out of the front of it; a crude sight.
- (Possibly controversial, but I like base building) If you can make arrowheads you can make nails, and thereby build furniture. Maybe not boxes/containers, but a table could be useful.
Issues:
- I know there are cabinets that are facing the tail of helicopters, but because my character sits facing the tail, they can’t reach them. Need to add an option to face the front, like how you can move to the back in cars.
I’ll probably think of more at some point. I don’t want to fuck with the game TOO much, because the contemplative loneliness mixed with moments of high stress are what makes it fun.
Awesome list, hard agree on most of this, lots of good QoL and simplifications. I love things that simplify gameplay, the charm of TLD is that it has (mostly) intuitive “physical” mechanics.
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The cave wall thing is innovative, and could be an interesting sound design idea. Certainly less cheesy than putting down a bedroll and trying to “grope” your way out.
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Being in BI right now, I’m super 110% power-tool on board with putting in a shortcut once you’ve done it once. Requiring a rope is a good thought that would add additional challenge and planning, I would have done it as a board you can push over or place or something.
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I don’t see how car horns would work without electricity though. Maybe only during an aurora? Or maybe they’re air horns with pressure still remaining and you get a couple charges. It’d be nice to have some option when there’s a bear huffing around the vehicle you hid in.
Speaking of vehicles: being able to turn around in vehicles to look behind the stupid car.
Maybe one day I’ll go through this thread and curate a master list of ideas.
Yeah, I’m the same way. I’m happy with most of vanilla TLD because I can see how gameplay is balanced with intuitiveness, buuuuuut there’s something a bit silly about having 14 oil bottles that you can’t merge.
I would have done it as a board
Oh sure, like a board from that adjacent warehouse to the roof of the workshop? That could work, and it’d be easier to implement than a rope bridge.
The gap between the main pier and the workshop has always bugged me: there’s no way a timberwolf couldn’t jump that gap, so maybe extend the gap some more as well?
I don’t see how car horns would work without electricity
I forgot about that, lol. XD
I like the multiple uses idea. Maybe something like the flashlight wherein the aurora charges it up but there’s a limit? It could either be total usage or days since the aurora, which forces you to remember that detail. You’d want some sort of external indicator it was charged, but not headlights as in an aurora. If it was JUST the internal lights, would that be too subtle, or would that reward careful players?
If it broke a timberwolf pack’s morale that could be lifesaving.
I had another idea: customizable in game maps.
I tend not to use the rock caches, since most of the time there are containers and landmarks everywhere, but the plethora of rocks to build the caches suggests another option: drawing trails. Click and hold both mouse buttons/3rd button and that indicates the beginning of a trail that either ends when you run out of rocks or when you release the button. Then it shows up on your map as a drawn line, letting you mark up your map in the way you tend to travel.
Something like that would keep me from checking the wiki all the time…
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Moar wishlist items:
- The water jugs that you find in bunkers and FA should be usable like the lantern fuel. Plastic bottles should have some non-zero weight like the spawned lamp oil. Quick experiment here with a yogurt container suggests 20g base would be reasonable.
- I wish we could “open” cupboards and drawers instead of having a search action. They pop open and items are on shelves.
Another wishlist/gripe: Cooking stews and pies should require cooked meat. You don’t really cook those with raw meat IRL, you’d either cook them, or at least sear them in oil, first.
