Personal House-Rules?

[critterdust]

I like to make a few personal rules, some for roleplay reasons, and some engagement reasons. What I have keeps me enjoying the game more as I play it.

1) no drying meat! this must sound mad but I really do think so much of what is available in the game is flatted over by the fact that it is incredibly simply to accumulate far more even a couple years of food in a single winter, dry it on even just a simple shelter, forget about it, put it in a cellar, and be set on food for as long as a player is likely to play.

I don't dry meat anymore. This means my main food preservation technique is *Smoking*, which requires an investment in construction (though I'd love to be able to do it in a kota) and active maintenance for a time, and doesn't last Forever in a cellar (but still lasts long enough!). This means I sometimes will even value salt for salting meat! Additionally, it lends value to agriculture and cooking too. Suddenly- a lot of mechanics are more interesting and more worth engaging with. It certainly is still easy enough to amass enough smoked meat to be overloaded with food for the year and take some to sell- that's fine! but I like that it takes more than just one day and a shelter to do it basically anywhere anytime while cold. Try it- you wont miss it.

2) For usual "general sacrifice" I only sacrifice flatbreads. Again, this lends me to developing infastructure. If you want to do it on the go bring some flour with you and make them in town. I do sacrifice fish for the waters and I also allow myself one sacrifice from the cut of meat from kills (but not birds), for roleplay reasons among others. Because of this, I care more about agriculture, buying grains, and cooking breads- something I probably would normally mostly just completely ignore. I like to imagine that breads are especially favored as sacrifice by the spirits, and that they usually aren't interested in offerings that are worthless to me. I *always* add seasoning to these breads- usually just nettle leaves or unneeded turnip seeds etc.

3) I don't drink marsh water. This is certainly stagnant water that would probably make you sick! Now that boiling water is so easy as to do it in a birchbark can we have water quality please? I understand the sea water and river water being safe, even possibly lake water, but there is just no way it would be safe to drink stagnant marsh pool water. If i am in an emergency I let myself drink or use it if I leave a container of it by the fire for about 30 minutes.

4) No infinite Dogfood!! dogs are incredibly powerful and it's easy to amass a mountain of spoiled cuts that the dogs will eat forever. I do two cleanups per year- one in Fallow Season and the other in Fall Season. During this i throw away all my piled up spoiled food not from the previous month. It's still easy to keep a mountain of dog food around of course, but I cannot keep infinite dogs forever. This goes without saying, of course, that I also do not allow myself to starve any dogs and if any dog is left hungry for 3 days and I can't feed it right then I imagine it gets loose and runs away.

5) Dogs may only sic once per day- Another dog rule. Except against human foes, I consider my dog's to have a limit to the amount of perfect obedience they're willing to participate in and will only sic them on an animal once per day. If I bring multiple dogs I can do them all at once or chain them if I need multiple attempts to catch the animal. Just so that they don't entirely trivialize persistence hunting. Roleplay additional: If a dog actually helps me in catching an animal I always feed it one of the cuts from the animal as a reward. This isn't a hard rule I just consider it proper decency and incentive to a good helper to get to enjoy some proper, fresh meat.

6) (Roleplay) Taste Preference- I don't take this one *too* seriously but if I have food that isnt bland, I always eat the non-bland first unless the food situation stressfully demands it (if food is scarce I will try to eat stale food first to get it all in etc.) But if I am doing fine I am certainly not going to sit here eating bland unsatisfying meals while my delicious cuts are sitting right there! Normally this is optimal- you want to sell your delicious and tasty cuts and keep the bland ones for yourself to optimize cash value. That is easy for YOU to do, as someone separated from your character by a screen, but I can almost guarantee that unless you were in dire straits, you would do the same if it was your body and senses in play

[Plotinus]

I really like these and I'm going to give them a try.

I usually do robber start. I start in whatever the current season in real life is. I travel zoom-ed in until I find a village. I'm allowed to zoom out on mountain peaks to look at the view. I always build a house and a farm. No more than one new farm animal per year, though I'm allowed to replace my beast of burden if the last one is killed. I try to protect my animals from being killed. Every year when I get the harvest in, except the first year if I started late and don't have a homestead yet, I roll the dice and then move to a new region, set up a new homestead or move into an old one if I lived in that region previously. I bring only what I and my animals can carry in a single trip, prioritising perishables like food -- which is a problem because farms produce a lot of food and that leaves me with less room to carry valuables, though I always bring a knife and axe.

[Homocommando]

1. Can you imagine how awesome it was back in the day for people to hunt an elk and be set for months? And there was noone to tell them they cannot just build a hut in a random place in the forest and live there... Or that they cannot travel from one region to another... Or that they need to pay taxes...

3. You cannot drink sea water though... You will get sick immediately... Marsh water will hydrate you, and you may or may not get sick later.
On the other hand consequences of drinking marsh water can be potentially much higher... But still, drinking sea water is pointless, it only dehydrates you.

[Bert Preast]

The Baltic Sea around Finland is brackish, which means you can drink it.  Water from marshes, though, would need to be filtered and boiled.

And yeah, I pine for the age of anarchy, too!   

[Homocommando]

The Baltic Sea around Finland is brackish, which means you can drink it.

I asked google and he told me it's still too salty

And yeah, I pine for the age of anarchy, too!   

I think we need other solutions. Anarchy doesn't make sense, because hierarchy will evolve naturally, and there is nothing to stop it, and the odds are such primitive hierarchy will be even worse than the current one.

[Plotinus]

Do you mean google's AI overview because google's AI overview is lower quality than most other AI.

These days I mostly trust Wikipedia:

The open surface waters of the Baltic Sea "proper" generally have a salinity of 0.3 to 0.9%, which is border-line freshwater. The flow of freshwater into the sea from approximately two hundred rivers and the introduction of salt from the southwest builds up a gradient of salinity in the Baltic Sea. The highest surface salinities, generally 0.7–0.9%, are in the southwestern most part of the Baltic, in the Arkona and Bornholm basins (the former located roughly between southeast Zealand and Bornholm, and the latter directly east of Bornholm). It gradually falls further east and north, reaching the lowest in the Bothnian Bay at around 0.3%.[67] Drinking the surface water of the Baltic as a means of survival would actually hydrate the body instead of dehydrating, as is the case with ocean water.[note 1][citation needed]

[note1]A healthy serum concentration of sodium is around 0.8–0.85%, and healthy kidneys can concentrate salt in urine to at least 1.4%.[/note]

[Plotinus]

So I guess if you want to go for realism, you might decide the sea water down by Driik/Reemi is too salty to taste good but will still hydrate you if you're dying  of thirst, but the water in the northern territories tastes better and not salty.

[Bert Preast]

I like to play the last of the Neanderthals, and roll a good Kaumo who will avoid all human contact whenever possible.  I start in spring, as in a winter start the cold will almost certainly kill you - usually from starvation rather than directly, as you have to keep setting fire to fallen trunks and so can't stray far from the fire to hunt or fish.  In summer and autumn, you can live from berries etc., so I find spring is the sweet spot for the challenge.

I use the "custom - too easy" to roll my skills, as I will need good fishing and spear skill to have a hope of surviving more than a couple of weeks.

I reroll the world until there's a reasonable size island off the far north eastern coast, then get a start as close to that as possible.  Normally I won't get closer than a three or four day hike from it.  On spawning I discard everything I have except any fur clothing, just enough to stop me dying of cold as I head for the island.

On arrival, I begin the first game course to build my stats a little.  I'm starving by now, so the pike it gives early is very welcome.  It doesn't last long, though.  I hunt and fish, and try to get through the game course whenever I am nourished.  To complete the game course you need to visit a human village, which I do.  I trade what skins or cords I have for what food they have, and am usually starving again by the time I make it back to my island.  The building part of the game course is painful - with just stone tools, it takes a couple of weeks just to make one wall section.

I don't allow myself to trade for anything other than food, and I don't murder anyone.

The watercourse part of the game course gives a handaxe, which I don't use until I give it to the companion you need to finish the course.  I allow myself to plant maybe 20 of the seeds the agriculture part of the course gives me, mostly hemp, flax, or whatever else I might be able to make yarn from, as nettles are scarce in the far north east.

I use the BAC mod, so as spring turns to summer the mission is to make a metal knife.  It's an enormous amount of work, but must be done. 

The biggest difficulty of this scenario is the stone knife - an elk that with a metal knife might net 250 cuts of meat or more, with a stone knife will get you 50 or 60 at most.  Of course, restricting myself from trade and it being summer means there is no point in having more cuts, as with only stone tools there is no way I can build a cabin for smoking by this point.   

So, I mine ore and cry as I try to chop firewood for charcoal with a rough stone axe.  Trust me, it's more torturing myself than gaming.  But that feeling if I survive long enough to make the first metal knife... man, that feels good.  And it gets even better when I manage to forge my first axe.  Love it 

EDIT:  Around day 115 I managed to produce a rough small knife, and on day 140 I made a rough handaxe.  Food has been a real struggle, but I noticed lavarets spawning, and making an inferior lippo landed me 64 of them over a couple of weeks. I produced a decent broad knife and handaxe by day 180, and winter has arrived so soon I hope animals will be wandering across the ice to my island.  Things should start getting easier now 

[Matti-patti]

For me big one is that I heat in excess of requirements as the game is bit too kind in that regards. Once the temperature approaches zero I burn firewood daily in my cabin (I start with 6 pieces a day in Dirt, increase by 2 pieces per month until Center and then decrease by 2 pieces a month until Swidden) and always make post spruce and small campfire when travelling in wilderness. I also bring my animals inside with me during winter once the temperature drops below freezing.

[JP_Finn]

I also prepare post-spruce, but only light campfire fall through spring. Summer only small fire to prepare meal.
Any village I spend more than a night at, I tend to give them food, birchbark shoes for shoeless, birchbark hats for those without. Any poor quality crafting of fishing rods, lippo, loop snares, paw-boards, clubs, or javelins, I always donate to the first kids I see. When you got none, even poor quality is great.

Most characters won’t hunt any water fowl, as they were messengers to the dead Tuonenjoki(Deaths’ river) separating dead from living. If one is found dead in a trap, it will be burned on small pyre.

In wintertime first thing in the morning is to light a fire, usually 6 firewood. Last thing before bed, is to light fire again, with 6 firewoood. Still low end of wood burn, but I grew up with wood stove in the kitchen and remember mom heating it up every morning during winter.