Here are 10 survival tips for getting started with The Long Dark
The Long Dark is a beautifully rendered survival game with a unique hand-drawn style and engaging survival mechanics. The world of TLD is cold, desolate, and brutal, and players will need more than just a warm fire if they want to survive. The nuances of surviving in the apocalyptic north take time to learn and skill to execute, meaning it can be a bit difficult for new players to last longer than a couple of days.
Though we could write two entirely separate lists for players playing either survival or story mode, some aspects of the game remain consistent. These ten tips should help you get started in The Long Dark and set you up to survive Great Bear Island in the long run.
1. Always be Ready to Start a Fire
When the cold sets in, fire is everything, it can cook food, boil water, keep away predators, and (most importantly) keep you from freezing to death. While it’s usually best to build your fire inside where it is safe and warm, you may not always have the luxury of waiting until you reach a shelter.
The weather on Great Bear is unpredictable, and getting caught out in a blizzard will kill you more surely than any wolf or bear. For that reason, it is vital that you always carry enough supplies to build a fire quickly, especially in the early game.
Specifically, carry materials that light quickly and burn hot, such as books and firelogs. We recommend always carrying at least one tin of accelerant to guarantee you can start a fire quickly and a few pieces of coal. Coal burns long and hot and isn’t nearly as heavy as other fuel.
2. Trust Your Ears
The Long Dark is a rather quiet game. Aside from the constant crunching of snow beneath your feet and the howling of the wind, the heavy blanket of snow over everything mutes most extraneous noise. This makes it much easier to hear distant and important sounds, which can save your life.
This game has very little pointless ambiance, so if you hear a wolf howling somewhere in the distance, that’s because there are wolves over there. Following the cries of ravens can lead you to animal carcasses, creaking ice can alert you to dangerous footing, and your character’s shivering means it’s time to check that temperature meter. Even when inside, the intensity of the wind against the walls can tell you exactly what the weather is outside, even if all the glass is frosted over.
3. Only Carry What You Need
Much of The Long Dark’s survival mechanics focus on managing resources, including limiting how much you carry. While carrying much more than your allotted weight limit is possible, it isn’t recommended, especially when traveling. Overburdening yourself will not only slow you down, but it will increase the speed at which you burn calories and energy and add a constant risk of spraining an ankle.
Gear is heavy, and it can be difficult to determine what you do and do not need. Water will be your greatest challenge by far, as it’s not easy to carry liquid of any kind in bulk. Just remind yourself that you only need one tool of any kind, and you can always melt more snow as long as you can start a fire. Think about what you need for travel and what you can probably find when you get where you are going.
4. Keep a Stockpile
This tip is usually more important for players of survival mode games, but it can also be extremely useful to stash supplies in story mode, too, assuming you will be remaining in one place for a while. Accounting for how heavy items like firewood, crafting materials, and metal tools are, it’s great to have one central location where you can return to and have access to whatever you need.
Make sure to choose a location (and container) you will remember or mark it with spray paint so it appears on your map. Another practice is stashing small bundles of extra necessities, such as food and medicine, in locations you will pass through regularly. This helps create safe houses where you can ride out a storm and wait for predators to lose your scent.
5. Maintain Your Tools
Everything you can carry that isn’t consumable will degrade. Clothing, tools, guns, and even can openers will all eventually need to be replaced or repaired. Because of this, it’s important to prioritize carrying repair items like whetstones and sewing kits to keep your gear in working condition.
This tip is especially important when considering clothing. As clothing degrades, it will steadily become less waterproof and provide less warmth. Especially in the early game, a hole in your jacket can get you killed. Patch up your clothes, sharpen your blades, and make sure you have the resources to do all this. A good practice is to harvest any gear you don’t need to save space and to reuse their materials to repair the equipment you are using.
6. Manage Your Time
In many survival games, the player can butcher and skin an animal in 5 seconds or less. The Long Dark is unlike those games, and everything you do will take a reasonable amount of time. Everything from reading to starting a fire to gathering wood to harvesting an animal will all take a set amount of time.
Some actions, such as sharpening a knife, may only take a few minutes. Others, such as crafting a new jacket, may take hours. It’s important to meter out your time so you don’t get caught out in the cold and dark or freeze to death because a blizzard rolled in while skinning a deer.
Most time-consuming actions, such as repairing gear and reading manuals, should probably be performed somewhere warm and safe if at all possible. The dark hours of dusk and dawn are great times for this.
7. Keep Moving
This tip is much more important in story mode but is also a valuable piece of advice for survival mode players on harder difficulties. Staying in one location for an extended period of time simply doesn’t serve much purpose in story mode, so staying on the move is simply the most reasonable way to progress the story.
There is another, more important reason to stay mobile, however. All hostile animals, such as wolves and bears, can track the player using scent. Everywhere the player goes, they will leave an invisible scent trail that lingers for a time after they are gone. The longer the player spends in one place, the stronger that scent becomes, and the farther away predators can notice it.
Staying in one place too long on higher difficulties can result in players being trapped inside a shelter by a pack of timberwolves who won’t leave until you scare them off or kill them.
8. Mind the Weather
As we mentioned previously, the cold is one of the deadliest enemies of survivors in The Long Dark. While it will always be cold and snowy, there are weather elements that are much more survivable than others. The ambient temperature is not static and may climb or drop dramatically as the weather or time of day changes.
In addition to just a drop in temperature, changing weather also introduces three additional dangers: precipitation, wind, and visibility loss.
- Precipitation will cause your clothing to become wet and decrease its ability to keep you warm.
- Wind will rapidly decrease your body temp, make it difficult to hear predators, and spread your scent downwind.
- Visibility loss is self-explanatory but can make it extremely difficult to navigate or spot predators before they spot you.
However, one benefit to storms is that they tend to clear your scent away from your trail and make it much more difficult to track you at a distance.
9. Choose Your Clothing Carefully
What you wear is often one of the most important aspects in determining whether or not you make it through a survival scenario. This is even more important in the cold, brutal winter of the Canadian wilderness. Sure, running shoes are more comfortable and easier to run in, but wolves will be the least of your worries if your toes freeze off.
You’ll likely wear whatever you can find in the early game. However, once you find more clothing, carefully consider how to best insulate yourself from the cold, wind, and snow. A high water or windproof outer layer with a warm inner layer is a great way to keep the weather out and your body heat in.
Remember that some clothing, namely animal-skin clothing, will sometimes have additional effects, such as additional carry capacity, decreased scent, or even the ability to sometimes scare away predators. Heavier clothing will usually decrease your ability to sprint, so keep that in mind as well.
10. Enjoy the Scenery
The Long Dark isn’t an action-packed or thrilling survival game, instead relying on its incredible atmosphere and steady pace to tell a story or encourage the player to tell their own. You’d be missing out on one of this game’s greatest aspects if you didn’t take the time to stop and take it all in now and then.
From beautiful sunsets to peaceful snowy clearings to the colorful auroras that sometimes light up the sky, there are so many things to see that we simply can’t recount them all here. Some of our best memories from this game are when we simply sat down to take in the world around us and ponder how we would feel if it were us in our character’s boots.
Final thoughts on getting started with The Long Dark
Hinterland Studios created a marvelous combination of simplicity and complexity with The Long Dark. Though we couldn’t possibly cover all of the more complex systems inherent in the game, we hope these tips can help you get started on your own journey through the frozen wilds and, just maybe, survive just a bit longer than you could before.
