00:03Hello everyone, this is Raphael, Creative Director on The Long Dark. Thanks for checking in on the next update to
00:08our survival mode, which we're calling Vigilant Flame.
00:12In Vigilant Flame, we've added a few things that have been long requested by the community. A new, entirely wilderness
00:18region, and a major overhaul of our cooking system.
00:22Hushed River Valley is a multi-leveled region that connects to Mountain Town, extending some of the same difficult terrain
00:28you see around the town of Milton.
00:30Hushed River Valley is full of waterfalls, rivers and streams, and lots of cliff areas.
00:36We've used Hushed River Valley as a way to prove out some new techniques in environment creation, trying to find
00:41ways to create more layers and variety in our environments,
00:44so that our landmark-based approach to navigation continues to throw new and interesting challenges at our players.
00:50There are no human-made structures in Hushed River Valley, so you need to be on the lookout for natural
00:55shelters,
00:55whether they be the hollowed-out trunks of a large tree, a rock formation providing a natural windbreak, or ice
01:01caves.
01:03Despite being a highly challenging wilderness region, Hushed River Valley isn't entirely without hope.
01:08Keep your eyes open for mysterious signal fires that might lead you to useful shelter locations,
01:12and make sure you explore every nook and cranny, behind every rock and waterfall, in your search for supplies.
01:20For years now, our players have had to watch a progress bar to represent the experience of cooking food and
01:24preparing water in the game.
01:26Since the food you find, kill, prepare, and eat is such a big part of the survival experience,
01:31we've been trying to find ways to make it more engaging for our players.
01:35Replacing the progress bar-based system required an overhaul of several other systems,
01:39but we're happy to share that we're rolling out the first iteration on a new manual cooking system.
01:43It works as you'd expect it to.
01:45You place cookable items on hot surfaces, namely stones near burning campfires around the surface of a lit cook stove,
01:51and wait for them to cook.
01:53Each food item requires a different amount of time.
01:56If you remove the item too soon, it'll be undercooked, and eating it could result in food poisoning.
02:00If you wait too long, you could overcook the item to the point where it becomes an inedible burned lump,
02:06thus wasting the valuable food and fuel resources you spent on it.
02:09Since you can cook multiple items at once, you now have to manage multiple timelines.
02:13We've provided a few helpers for this, including the ability to pass time until individual items are completed,
02:19but you'll still need to keep an eye on multiple items and timelines.
02:22Preparing water works much the same way.
02:25We've added two cooking tools, the pot and recycled can.
02:28Both can be used to cook food and prepare liquids, and each has different properties relating to cooking volumes
02:33or susceptibility to burning food or burning off liquids.
02:38We hope you enjoy how we've overhauled the cooking system.
02:41We'll be reviewing your feedback to see how we can continue to improve the system,
02:44as well as to apply the real-time approach to some of our other common time-based actions.
02:51As we've shared in some of our developer diaries, we're adding a new narrative collectible to survival mode in the
02:55form of buffer memories.
02:57Think of these as the last documents or images stored in a computer's memory
03:01before all the technology around Great Bear and beyond was suddenly rendered inert by the mysterious Aurora.
03:07Now, when the Aurora appears at night, you might find some computer terminals display snippets of notes, emails, reports,
03:14information that provides more world background, and could in the future point to hidden locations and supply caches.
03:21We've implemented a first series of buffer memories in Vigilant Flame, across a series of specific locations,
03:26and plan on spreading more around the world in the future.
03:29Just keep in mind that one location may have more than one memory to offer.
03:33You can track discovered memories in the Collections section of your journal.
03:38As a result of our manual cooking work, you can now place items directly from the radial menu.
03:42This means that you no longer necessarily have to go into your pack to drop items for later placement.
03:48Radial placement will be useful for quickly arranging various items,
03:51and is something we plan to use for more gameplay-oriented placement in the future.
03:55For now, the primary benefit is placing items from your food radial directly on campfires or stoves, for cooking,
04:02or placing pots and recycled cans on cooking surfaces so that you can cook food or melt snow for water.
04:09In addition to these four main features, we've made dozens of bug fixes,
04:13made performance improvements across the game,
04:15and added several minutes of new survival mode exploration music.
04:20We hope you really enjoy Vigilant Flame,
04:22and we look forward to reading your feedback in the community hub at hinterlandforums.com,
04:26in our Steam forums, and through our social media channels.
04:30You may also notice that we've added a mailing list sign-up form to the game's main menu.
04:35If you'd like to be notified of update news and general information about the Long Dark,
04:39and other go-ins on at Hinterland,
04:41please take a moment to sign up for this newsletter.
04:44Thanks again, and be safe out there, survivors of the quiet apocalypse.
04:50to be continued...
04:50...
04:50Grazie a tutti.
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