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RobertJohnson

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If you have a fishing line and something with which to cut through ice, you can ice fish. It isn't rocket science, you find a spot where you won't fall through the ice, punch a hole in it, drop your line and wait. Here's a

of people ice fishing in Kentucky.

I see no reason why you would think that a character proficient in fishing couldn't manage this. It should be more challenging than fishing in warmer months due to greater exposure and the extra step necessary, but wouldn't that make it more interesting than simply nixing fishing in winter altogether?

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To be fair, ice fishing is really rather different tactics-wise than normal fishing. To say you could ice fish with much success just because you can fish isn't necessarily any more true than saying you can go fly-fishing just because you can fish normally (also untrue, from experience). It's certainly not impossible, but I think it is, at the least, plausible that you might catch nothing trying it if you weren't armed with the knowledge of how to do it.

In fact, I was at my company Christmas party last night and of the guys at the table, 3 of them had gone ice fishing multiple times before and none had ever caught anything- and this with the correct equipment! This is obviously completely anecdotal, but the point I'm trying to illustrate is that an average chap who didn't know what he was doing and with the wrong gear might not catch anything at all for a whole season.

HOWEVER. This is all not keeping in mind that in Muldraugh, at least, the average temperature in the winter is not even low enough for sizable bodies of water to be freezing solid as I recall. Have to keep in mind this is based on a real place. More likely than not, it would just be cold water fishing (which is still harder than in the summer months, but by no means impossible).

You both have somewhat valid points, but at the end of the day I think it's going to be the healthiness of the gameplay which will decide. Either way is fairly plausible solely judging on reality.

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Gameplay-wise it's obvious enough that the intent is to make players rely on food stores through winter. Preservation is more novelty than anything else at the moment though, since the stuff required is either limited, uncommon or both. Most players that actually intend to play a long term game won't want to rely on limited resources to survive winter, which means they'll use cooking or foraging instead. When those are both nerfed there'll need to be a sustainable preservation method to prevent the maximum length of the game from being limited to how long the nonperishables and jar lids last, unless that's the aim.

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I'd just like to know if the river near the location the game is set freezes, and if it does, whether it's safe enough to hole for fishing, and if fish will be present close enough to wherever the the safe-zone is (be it frozen or not) for you to get a bite.

If the answer to any (most?) of the above is "No," then having fishing disabled in winter is just a convenience to keep people from coming here and shouting about their inability to catch anything, and how they've wasted their lives.

If the answer to any of the above is "Yes," then you're either going to need specialist equipment, more time, and/or a mass decrease to the speed at which fish can be caught, to realistically portray winter fishing.

It doesn't have to be about artificial difficulty, or gameplay, or the system trying to cheat you. It can still be realistic enough.

Savvy?
 

Gameplay-wise it's obvious enough that the intent is to make players rely on food stores through winter. Preservation is more novelty than anything else at the moment though, since the stuff required is either limited, uncommon or both. Most players that actually intend to play a long term game won't want to rely on limited resources to survive winter, which means they'll use cooking or foraging instead. When those are both nerfed there'll need to be a sustainable preservation method to prevent the maximum length of the game from being limited to how long the nonperishables and jar lids last, unless that's the aim.

This is how you died. Not how you found a renewable resource and lived indefinitely, until the person playing the character died (though feel free to do so in sandbox). (And yes, Moose, that probably means foraging needs more love.)

Surely people have starved in towns and cities located by bodies of water before, particularly in the winter. Why shouldn't you?

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If the popular answer to killing people before they reach end game is make Winter the unbreakable wall for anyone who isn't farming and/or canning their food, I can't see the logic or enjoyment. This is turning into water collection requiring Carpentry: one solution, no alternatives.

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If the popular answer to killing people before they reach end game is make Winter the unbreakable wall for anyone who isn't farming and/or canning their food, I can't see the logic or enjoyment. This is turning into water collection requiring Carpentry: one solution, no alternatives.

Looting and trapping?

I mean, the fun of the game comes from some sense of struggle. The moment that goes away, you've already won.

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What about worms in winter?

So far I know, the optimum temperature for most of earthworm species is 10 to 14 ° C. In addition, they need moist soil. Thereby, in summer and winter earthworms are less or not active. Earthworms spend the winter months (December to February) 40 to 80cm below ground level in a kind of hibernation. Entire colonies of bundled worms can be found frequently under ground heat storage structures such as tree stumps or stones. The ground under a tightly closed snow cover is usually protected against cold and not frozen. Thus, in some places you can find earthworms that are even in winter active in the area of the surface soil.

Therefore, you are able to find worms in winter! If you keep them in a little box with a bit of moist soil in it, they should be able to survive for months.

From what I understood, when it gets to the point of freezing, the worms either go deep (about 5 to 6 feet underground) or they simply die, since the eggs are freeze resistant its why they don't completely die out. Even if you "can" find them under tree stumps, right now its too convenient of a food source, and needs adjusting.

 

 

This is how you died. Not how you found a renewable resource and lived indefinitely, until the person playing the character died (though feel free to do so in sandbox). (And yes, Moose, that probably means foraging needs more love.)

Surely people have starved in towns and cities located by bodies of water before, particularly in the winter. Why shouldn't you?

 

Yeah, right now foraging simply........isn't functioning right, and if it was nerfed as RJ stated I honestly can't tell the difference. I've already posted several concerns when it comes to food sources, and honestly level 4 and 5 cooking is something that needs addressed, since as long as its in the game, I can rooftop camp forever. Foraging and worms are the next big thing that needs looking at.

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Then perhaps the sense of struggle needs to come in other ways, rather than arguing about difficulty of sustaining yourself with food at the expense of gameplay.

 

I don't have a problem with difficulty, and I don't have a problem with dying. But when it feels as though you're being pushed in one direction (level Carpentry, or else; level farming, or else), this -also- takes away my enjoyment.

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If the popular answer to killing people before they reach end game is make Winter the unbreakable wall for anyone who isn't farming and/or canning their food, I can't see the logic or enjoyment. This is turning into water collection requiring Carpentry: one solution, no alternatives.

Looting and trapping?

I mean, the fun of the game comes from some sense of struggle. The moment that goes away, you've already won.

 

 

Fishing nerf I am fine with, as it was a high reward low risk endeavor. Trapping and foraging on the other hand "can" be risky (once their mechanics have been adjusted more properly). Right now foraging is too rewarding (and probably not functioning right) and trapping will probably be a lot more riskier when it has a real chance of attracting hordes to your trapping zone.

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Then perhaps the sense of struggle needs to come in other ways, rather than arguing about difficulty of sustaining yourself with food at the expense of gameplay.

 

I don't have a problem with difficulty, and I don't have a problem with dying. But when it feels as though you're being pushed in one direction (level Carpentry, or else; level farming, or else), this -also- takes away my enjoyment.

 

I'll admit, we probably do need a water alternative to carpentry. Two easy alternatives would be to allow you to boil water, and to allow you to place buckets/pots on roofs. That would defiantly make cooking pots and buckets a more valuable resource to find when scavenging.

 

Right now, if a server is looted pretty heavily, you don't have a nice alternative to water like you do with food. Your only other option is to try to reach 1 of 2 wells since water collection is limited to carpentry skill + garbage bags.

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Alters difficulty quite a bit, actually: you can now loot twice as many homes in the same period of in-game time .etc

Not a fan of the change, though. :P

 

Something I've noticed about the new timescale is that hunger and thirst are passing at the "faster" old rate. Try starting a new character with no traits and the starter kit at 7am, eat your chips and fast forward. You'll be peckish by around 9am, and hungry by noon. Playing before the change with the Hearty Appetite trait, it felt like I'd be peckish at around 10am if I ate breakfast at the same time, and hungry by around 2pm if I put off lunch. It also seems like I'm finishing a bottle of water in a day, whereas before that would take a day and a half or so (including using some water in recipes during that time).

 

I'm curious if its just me, or if anyone else has noticed hunger and thirst being a bit faster than before? I'm liking it if this is intentional, staying fed and hydrated felt too easy before (unless you inflated the difficulty by making food loot extremely rare), and it feels like the Hearty Appetite trait is an actual drawback instead of the "free points for better hunger rates" that it was.

 

Edit: I should note, no, I didn't change the hunger / thirst rates in the sandbox settings. Sleep is still passing at the proper rate.

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Gameplay-wise it's obvious enough that the intent is to make players rely on food stores through winter. Preservation is more novelty than anything else at the moment though, since the stuff required is either limited, uncommon or both. Most players that actually intend to play a long term game won't want to rely on limited resources to survive winter, which means they'll use cooking or foraging instead. When those are both nerfed there'll need to be a sustainable preservation method to prevent the maximum length of the game from being limited to how long the nonperishables and jar lids last, unless that's the aim.

This is how you died. Not how you found a renewable resource and lived indefinitely, until the person playing the character died (though feel free to do so in sandbox). (And yes, Moose, that probably means foraging needs more love.)

Surely people have starved in towns and cities located by bodies of water before, particularly in the winter. Why shouldn't you?

I was making a statement of fact. I don't particularly care if the developers want a character's survivability to be limited to the number of winters they can last before they run out of food sources. It's an artificial wall as far as realism is concerned - yes, plenty of people have starved in winter, they've also found ways of surviving it even without the advent of jars or tinned food, that's why you and I are here today talking on the Internet - but there's no way I would ever want to play a game indefinitely, it gets painfully boring just sitting around surviving year after year.
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I was making a statement of fact. I don't particularly care if the developers want a character's survivability to be limited to the number of winters they can last before they run out of food sources. It's an artificial wall as far as realism is concerned, but there's no way I would ever want to play a game indefinitely, it gets painfully boring just sitting around surviving year after year.

 

Statement of fact? Nature isn't unlimited in the real world, either. Having it's bounty limited in the game (or at least specific actions, because, let's face it, there's no way you're going to starve in the first year or two of PZ at this rate) shouldn't generate opposition, nor the claim that it's an artificial wall. But I feel as though I'm missing the point of this reply.

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I think you are. I wasn't arguing for or against renewability, only saying that it would be necessary to keep the game from ending when you run out of limited resources, unless that is the developers' aim. You don't need to convince me of anything.

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Well, after testing it, I think I can safely say that you CAN still fish during the winter......so perhaps RJ is using the wrong terms to describe this, or its simply not working. Also, perch were ninja added in :D Still no walleye though (or cockroaches from foraging :/).

 

Tested with level 5 fishing, lucky, and very cold settings (with natures abundance on normal) in late December.

 

Edit: Was able to catch fish with even snow on the ground, so obviously the cold mechanics are NOT working properly for foraging and fishing.

 

Edit Edit: I fixed the error in the scavenging.lua and it makes cockroaches appear in game. Now if only they were in by default so I could feed some cooked ones to my friends......

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This game is in Kentucky right? They don't necessarily get winters like Maine where you can't see the ground for weeks and months and everything is basically barren of growth. I don't think it's unreasonable to see wildlife or have streams and lakes that are not frozen over. In New Jersey, I see all kinds of animals roaming around in the winter time, and some plants still grow, the ground is not always snow covered, and I don't always need a thick winter coat. Weather varies and you can have some winters you get hardly any snow.

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This game is in Kentucky right? They don't necessarily get winters like Maine where you can't see the ground for weeks and months and everything is basically barren of growth. I don't think it's unreasonable to see wildlife or have streams and lakes that are not frozen over. In New Jersey, I see all kinds of animals roaming around in the winter time, and some plants still grow, the ground is not always snow covered, and I don't always need a thick winter coat. Weather varies and you can have some winters you get hardly any snow.

Yep, quick look at Wikipedia seems to indicate the two rivers that become one by West Point only very rarely freeze over. So then it becomes a battle of getting your lure deep enough and getting a drowsy walleye's attention, it seems.

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even in the winter, with snow on the ground, you can still catch all the species in the game. even catfish.

the reality of fishing is that quite often you don't use worms or insects, instead you catch some small baitfish or other small fish and cut those into 1/3 or 1/4, then use that chunk to go after larger fish like the big cats in the video below.

 

small baitfish or minnows in any body of water will stay in an area that provides them with cover to hide form larger predators, usually a nice clump of weeds, a rockpile, or other structure. we already have our nets, there is absolutely no reason we cannot still get baitfish with them, in spite of the temperature. those of you who have fished in the game for a while know that the baitfish quite often lead to a large pike or other large fish with significant food value.

 

and lets not forget the lures in the game. giving us 3 basic options in lure type, such as shallow (1-6 feet), medium (5-11 feet) and deep diving (10-20 feet)would be a wonderful thing that would negate any need to use bait at all. and without having to delve into the bizarre world of available fishing lures too deeply

 

BTW, i noticed in the files that Large Catfish is nowhere near the food value of a Large Pike. truth is, there has never been a Large Pike caught and recorded, anywhere, that would come within 34 pounds of the Kentucky record 104 POUND Blue Catfish , which was caught on the Ohio River http://fw.ky.gov/Fish/Pages/State-Record-Fishes-and-Awards.aspx (the 70 pound Pike is a mythical creature that many claim to have caught, but cannot and have not ever proven)

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That's a lot of pages of discussion about winter fishing and I feel actually too lazy to go through the whole thing so I might say some stuff that have been said.

What I think will happen is that fishing will be disregarded compared to other surviving skills capable of providing for you through the whole winter. If fishing must be nerfed, then all the other skills must be nerfed as well. It should be seen as a whole, imo. I think that's what the devs have in mind on the long term anyway. + food preservation.

Maybe the good thing would be to add winter factors that severly impair each of the surviving skills. Like fishing wouldn't be totally deactivated, but the fact you can't find any worm + the rarety of the catch, would make it impossible to survive the whole winter only relying on fishing, players would have to diversify their food sources any way they can, and make provisions.
And then apply the same concept on every surviving skills etc...

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Released a small 30.11 update:

  • Fixed rain barrels not collecting water.
  • Fixed "hours survived" not being reported correctly for coop players.
  • Limit the number of tree-rustling sounds that play at once, and stop clients sending tree-rustling sounds to the server.
  • Reduce zombie-sound packets sent by the server by checking the sound radius.
  • Fixed zombie-update packets being sent to each coop player instead of once to each connection.
  • Fixed seeing-through-walls on upper floors.
  • Fixed stopped animation when opening a window after aiming a gun.
  • Fixed book-reading time being 1/2 what it should be with the new x2 day length.
  • Fixed "Remove Bush" and "Remove Wall Vine" using too much endurance.
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