Wilderness winter start with no cutting tool sends his regards.
Where your likelihood of not freezing to death is decided by which side of the large boulder your are hugging.
Interesting challenge!
If youâre limited to a winter start and never crafting a cutting object, I could still see it being possible to manage long-term survival though. However, youâd be pretty much forced to pick the Far-Sighted trait to get a pair of reading glasses, since you canât craft a fire drill.
With 2 in Survival and Fabrication, you can make a stone shovel with no cutting tool required. That means crafting a clay pot is still possible for food and water. Plant fibre is more difficult since you canât get it from cattail rhizomes without cutting, but the stalks can still be harvested, so ultimately itâs just more tedious to make clothing.
So in the end, fire, food and clothing is absolutely possible in a game where you never craft a knife, but still pretty tedious.
You can craft cutting. You just donât start with it with many professions.
And getting to survival (3) takes time, which you usually only have until dusk. (If you start with survival (3), itâs much easier.)
Stalks arenât available in winter.
The challenge isnât their availability in abstract. Itâs the race against time as each night gets colder. And campfire only provides limited warmth.
Ah, nifty! I think Iâll try this challenge later. Also, during my playtesting I found that chucking a bunch of wood into a fire pit quickly raised temps above the normal single piece feeding from a firewood stockpile. I often used it to get through a cold night. I think that strategy will work for a naked winter game.
Now to figure out a way to get clothingâŚ
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Unless this was a recent fix, thatâs not really how it works.
I mean, you can raise the campfire temperature somewhat, but you can never get the same temperature from a single campfire you can get from setting a single tree on fire âuncontrollablyâ.
In abstract, you still have the usual options:
- turn your existing cotton into better stuff (e.g. t-shirt into balaclava)
- tan leather/fur from animals, use sinew, make leather gear (leather cloak is one of the best, in my experience)
- get plant fiber from cattail rhizomes, craft rags from it, etc.
In practice, there are a few caveats:
- getting the raw materials, required skills and tools takes time (and it keeps getting colder)
- processing raw materials into rags/leather/fur takes even more time (and it keeps getting colder)
- plant fiber is no longer a substitute for cotton thread in many recipes
Update time!
I generated a new world called Winter Wonderland starting Winter 1, 0 city size, in 0.E.2.
Enter Meat Popsicle the First, a Naked and Afraid survivor spawning in the Wilderness. He would pick up nothing man-made, use no tools save those he crafted himself from nature, and brave the worst the wilderness could throw at him.
After grabbing a look at the map, I head to a forest tile on the corner of a large swamp, the cold nipping at my extremities. Setting up camp here gives me tile range from the centre to infinite water and salt water sources for crafting. I quickly craft a stone knife, a stone hammer, a digging stick and a fire drill.
With fire drill in hand, I dig out a shallow pit and throw down a fire for warmth. Not too bad at this stage! Evening is approaching and I have basic tools completed. Iâve taken about one bar off both arms in cold damage, but Iâm rapidly warming up now.
From here, itâs digging pits all evening until I have enough clay to craft a clay pot. I manage to finish it as Iâm reaching dehydrated status and boil up ten units of water, gorging myself on this to stave off the inevitable.
I smash down the nearby saplings for long sticks, using my knife to deconstruct them and make cudgels. Cutting these cudgels returns 7-8 pieces of splintered wood each, and a hundred or so of these into my fire pit creates a roaring blaze.
A fitful nightâs sleep by the fire begins the theme of my future. Iâm alternating between coughing from smoke and being too hot from the blazing fire. I manage to get through the night but Iâm tired from poor quality sleep.
Over the coming days, I mostly just tediously harvest cattail rhizome and collect wood, working on making enough plant fibre to craft clothing. My goal: to craft a blanket. This would fill all clothing slots bar the head, and give a whopping 50 warmth to them.
However, my run isnât optimal. By my calculations, a blanket will require 35 rags and 20 plant fibre to produce. Each rag takes 80 plant fibre to create. Two cattail rhizomes produce 50 plant fibre with 40 minutes of work.
Doing the math, this means my blanket will take 114 cattails of material, requiring 38 hours of work to convert into plant fibre. Between these, I still need to spend time fetching firewood and making water.
Poor Meat Popsicle the First survived a little over a week all told, but fatigue from poor sleep was his undoing. Constant smoke exposure frequently interrupted his rest, and his stamina was running on empty too long each day. One night, he lay down, knowing heâd put too little wood in his fire but too tired to go fetch more. As the fire flickered out, the winterâs cold crept into his tiny patch of warmth in the woods, turning his extremities blue, then black. The morning arrived to greet another frozen corpse, his pile of rags next to him only half complete.
Overall, this challenge has taught me a few things about playing. I feel like Iâve got the starting strategy properly organized, but my focus after setting up camp wavered. I spent too long collecting stones for a fire ring, only to deconstruct it when the warmth from the fire decreased significantly compared to just using a big pile of wood chips in a pit. About a hundred seems to be the sweet spot for a nightâs rest. I think Iâll retry this one using what Iâve learned, and experiment with setting trees on fire for warmth and profit this time too, just to see if itâs enough to avoid constantly fetching firewood.
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So I contributed to the project a bit in the last few weeks (just some minor changes, nothing worth reporting) and finally feel confident enough to propose adding (and actually writing the JSON for that) this tin can makeshift pot.
(image taken from the site)
This looks like something which would fit perfectly into the game, especially since there has been great progress in terms of living off the land items, e.g grass thread, grass skirts, makeshift blindfolds and more in the latest master. Awesome work everyone!
The recipe would be quite simple, a tin can, something to cut/drill with (the rock drill may suffice here?) and a piece of wire. The resulting container may have 10ml less of a volume than a âpristineâ can (you can not fill it all the way up to the top), but I need to look into this a bit more to know if this can be realized with the current fluid system.
Alternatively a twig or branch instead of the wire? This is something I am not too sure of yet. This should not catch fire because you do not directly hold it into the flame. Wire may be hard to find, this is why i think a twig or branch may also do it.
Another thing which I do not know yet is if aluminum cans are also eligible for use as pots.
So what do you think about this?
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Not being able to use cans for boiling just becease they would be hot is a very stupid reason. Just pick it up with something covering your hands or wait for the thing too cool down. The most it should do is you having too wait a little while for it too cool off and your drink not being hot.
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I just discovered that you can use glass jars for boiling, too. Maybe the boiling quality should just be re-added to tin and aluminium cans.
But the recipe for a makeshift pot made from a can can still provide food cooking 2 perhaps to be useful. Although it is inefficient because its very small.
Maybe limit the recipe too only being able to use medium/large tin cans.
That is a good idea but I originally proposed that so you can do some basic boiling of water in the wilds where you usually only encounter small tin cans. I think I will open an issue about that. Glass jars can be used for boiling but tin cans lost that ability may just be a bug or someone forgot about that.
So I made an issue and also a PR to fix this. It is now fixed in master. Hooray!
So update on the whole situation. I finally got to work on the cutting overhaul, for real this time! It looks nice so far but unfortunately there has been another very problematic change:
Shivering. Since you will not have a blanket early on, it will be impossible to sleep, even with a fire going. This essentially sends your character into an endless loop of sleep deprivation.
Can you sleep in that body bag you found in a bush?
Looking for ways to blend in with the undead, eh?
Not with a controlled fire. However, you can sleep next to raging wildfire. Makes for some pretty spicy gameplay loop.
Wouldnât that mean that you ought to be able to sleep provided youâve surrounded yourself sufficiently with fires so you get heat from a sufficient number of directions?
Iâd suggest starting with one in front and one at the back, and if that doesnât help then add one to each side.
Smoke will probably replace shivering as something that wakes you up, thoughâŚ
Fundamentally, no.
Controlled fires are nonsensical in that adding more fuel just makes them burn longer. Instead of, you know, the logical thing of just making them bigger and hotter. And several controlled fires on neighboring tiles donât really stack in terms of temperature (there are harsh and rapid diminishing returns)
While wildfires do get much bigger and hotter than a controlled fire even in a single tile.
For context, I said that in our IRC channel because I actually found one while foraging as bodybags are in the forest_trash group and said âYay I found a body bag in the bushes!â. I also get excited when I find syringes in the bushes, too.
And the discussion got even better. You could theoretically make a sleeping bag from a body bag, right?! And insulate it with dry plant matter. As https://www.survivalschool.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/US-Marine-Corps-MWTC-Summer-Survival-Course-Handbook.pdf states on page 28 while describing the sapling shelter, plant matter is good for insulation. So if you stuff your body bag with withered plants or straw and maybe even put it in a shallow pit surrounded with even more plant matter, it might just work.
Another only semi-related thing: I am working on another wilderness survival PR, now that my cutting overhaul one got merged.
I actually want to implement the sleeping body bag. Then there are some other changes I want to make:
- Expand grass yarn:
- Ătzi actually wore a cloak made out of woven grass, so a grass cloak would be realistic.
- The description of grass yarn even says you could weave it into a crude sheet of fabric but the only thing you can do with it is a grass shirt. If you can weave a cloak out of it, a crude blanket should work, too.
- Might solve the shivering thing.
- Remove recipe book requirement from crude wooden bolts and arrows. They are literally just sharpened twigs and you can make a survival bow without recipe anyways.
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Maybe more makeshift shelters:
- Just like the improvised shelter, but filled with plant matter for more comfort and warmth.
- Maybe just a shallow pit with some straw in it. It is very, very crude but should help against wind and cold just a tiny bit.
- Kind of unrelated, but I took a look at Magiclysm and that would be perfect for goblin encampments.
- There are other shelters, like the tarp and pine lean-on which could benefit from a shallow pit with straw perhaps.
You can boil water in a paper cup on an open fire. Iâve done it many times, just to prove it can be done, because nobody ever believes me. You just need a piece of wood flat enough to place the cup on to keep it level, and big enough it wonât burn out from under the cup. The flames will burn away the top of the cup, above the level of the water, but the water will prevent the cup temperature from rising high enough to ignite the cup. Doesnât work with plastic containers - the melting point of the bottle is too low, much lower than the ignition temperature of the paper cup. Donât know if itâs a doable in-game recipe though. I guess a cup could be reused, but only a very few times, because some of the top always burns away.
Regardless, itâd be very time intensive to produce much clean water. For what its worth.