thelockj

What sort of equipment do you recommend for regular use? My inventory space is quite limited in the early game and I find I quickly run out when collecting miscellaneous items. I have hunter backpacks, so I have 26 total inventory slots. At the moment, I keep 1 of each common tool (spear, knife, axe, shovel), a crude bow and arrows, spare materials to make tools (ie. a stack of sticks and flint), and sometimes mining tools (pickaxe and prospecting pick). I generally scavenge food on the way from berry bushes. I want to make the linen sacks, but I'm too close to winter and I can't plant any more flax for the materials. For healing supplies are your suggesting keeping a stack of horsetail reed poultice? idk. I'm on the fence about this, since it feels like it takes away all of the stakes involved in playing the game. If I disable it here, then I would also be disabling it for hunting, caving, temporal storms, and everywhere else that I still want some challenge. I would prefer to find a way to play within the base game before taking shortcuts with console commands. What type of armor do you recommend making first? On the wiki it looks like maybe maybe cloth gambeson armor is the way to go? Will it last many hits from a bear? It seems like black bears are the dominant bear species in the area, but I think I may have seen some a couple of brown bears too. When you do this, how do you pass the time? Unless I am mistaken, it doesn't seem like there is a waiting mechanic and straw beds only let you sleep for 7 hours. Depending on the season, there are still a few minutes in the night before it is safe to go out. Okay, that helps. I assumed they were random or somehow related to the rift status in the character page.

I have been playing for about 26 hours and things have mostly been going well, but I keep running into one big issue. Exploration. Whether it be searching for crops, minerals, or prospecting, it almost feels like I am soft-locked to the area within 1-2 days walk from my spawn point. I'm not sure if I am just missing something, so I thought I would make a forum post to ask for advice. After thinking about it for a while, I think my difficulty with exploration comes down to 3 main issues: Risk of death during exploration Ability to shelter during night and temporal storms Ease of recovery after death Point 1 largely means how do I avoid random deaths during low-risk exploration activities. By 'low-risk exploration' I mean walking around on the surface during the day while making an effort to avoid confrontation. Generally speaking, this just boils down to avoiding/escaping wolves and bears. The wolves are generally fine, since they make themselves known, and seem to mostly just exist in forests. However, I have yet to find a good solution for dealing with bears. They make no discernible noises, are easily hidden by leaves or behind grass, seem to spawn in almost every biome (save for maybe gravel plains and mountainous terrain?), are very fast/persistent, extremely tanky, and can deal around half of my health in a single attack. And to top that off, they seem to be at least twice as common as wolves in my world. From my perspective, I can attempt to either reduce the chances of a confrontation or attempt to make confrontations more survivable. So far, avoiding confrontations seems impossible. I have seen advice to avoid forests, but that frequently requires lengthy detours and I still encounter occasional bears in other biomes. I haven't actually been attacked that frequently to bears, but it is enough to make me seriously hesitant to travel very far from my spawn point. At this point, avoiding bears just doesn't seem like a feasible solution. That just leaves me with attempting to make the encounters more survivable. If I see the bear before it sees me, I have a decent chance at running away. If I don't, it will likely get at least one hit in on me before I can react. At that point it is a toss up in terms of if I can avoid taking damage (ie. death) until it loses interest. Can armor effectively mitigate this risk? Based on what I have read, it sounds like armor can help, but it is very expensive and will be quickly destroyed when attacked by bears. I'm just not sure if it is even worth the cost at this point in the game (late copper age). Is that just the recommended play style? Point 2 is a bit more straightforward. Due to monsters spawning at night and temporal storms, I need some form of shelter to sleep at while exploring. Traders seem like a fairly easy/common solution, but they are not always available and it depends on my ability to find them. From my limited experience, it seems like I need to way-point each one, then do backtracking each night to the last trader I saw. Is this the same for others or are people building tons of outposts instead? If so, what materials do you bring with you? Inventory space is valuable, so I'm wondering how other people handle this (I have hunter's backpacks and don't have enough time before winter to grow flax). Do you try to scavenge materials on site as needed or prepare key supplies (ex: doors, wood, bed)? Lastly, point 3 is how can I reduce the impact of dying. If I can reduce the impact of dying, then I don't mind dying every so often to bears or other enemies. From what I understand, you always spawn at your original spawn point unless you use temporal gears to temporarily move it. However, I don't have any temporal gears at this stage of the game (late copper age). Overall, this makes death during exploration seem extremely punishing. If I die 20min away from my spawn point, then I need to spend another 20min to get my stuff. And that assumes I don't die again in the process. Should I be searching for temporal gears at this stage of the game? I have been avoiding reading spoilers, so maybe this isn't as bad as I am imagining? I have being avoiding most caves due to the difficulty of dealing with enemies and the danger I have heard about online. Overall, it feels like I must be missing something. Does anyone have any tips for dealing with these issues?