The Long Dark – Lesser Known Things

Useful things to know, that you won’t know immediately otherwise.

Things You Should to Know

Сrеdit gоеs to Jaspo!

0% Condition? Don’t Panic

• Items that can be harvested will not disappear when inside a container at 0% condition. Anything that can’t be harvested will disappear, including food. However, raw unharvested fish will not disappear, likely because it can be harvested into bait.
• Meat at 0% condition can be cooked, and food at 0% condition can be eaten, but only by selecting it from the backpack, and with high risk of food poisoning except after reaching cooking skill level 5, where the risk is removed for everything except raw meat.
• Painkillers at 0% condition can be used if taken via the radial menu. Same might be true of antibiotics.
• Fishing tackle at 0% condition can be used to make tip-ups.
• Bedrolls at 0% condition can be used to make improvised down bedrolls.
• Rifles and revolvers at 0% condition can be repaired at a milling machine.
• Carcasses at 0% condition can no longer be harvested even if still present on the map. They’ll disappear once you exit the area via a loading screen. Leaving a predator carcass partly unharvested will make it remain on the map until it hits 0% condition, causing the predator to respawn later than if it were fully harvested, since the respawn timer doesn’t start until the carcass is no longer present.
• Ravaged carcasses act differently, and will remain on the ground infinitely if untouched but will disappear once their meat has all been harvested, even if the guts and hides haven’t been harvested.
• If you are at 0% condition, it’s too late to panic.

Other Things

• Sprinting burns calories much faster than walking. Like 5 times faster.
• Mapping can be done during auroras.
• Blizzards damage clothing rapidly, but only when not sheltered.
• The only animal that won’t eventually bleed out from one shot by any weapon is the moose. Not counting fire-hardened arrows, of course.
• Wolves and bears can climb some trees, so not all are safe for hunting.
• When checking buffer memories, each entrance to a building, such as the front and back doors of the Mystery Lake camp office, generate a different buffer memory, allowing more than one to be discovered per aurora in such locations unless they happen to be the same.
• If raw fish is removed from the stovetop before it is done cooking and placed on the ground, it will become uninteractable.