Winter Survival News

Welcome to another development update for Winter Survival. As we’re slowly but surely approaching the Early Access release date (February 28th, 2024) you can expect more and more updates from our side. As promised on Monday, we’re back with the second part of the sanity system devlog. If you’ve missed the first part you can freely check it out here. I highly advise you to do so, since it covers every essential details you need to know about the sanity. Without further ado, let’s jump into it!



[h2]Psychosis Disorientation ⛰️[/h2]

Wolves might be a pain in the butt, but so are the imaginary parts of the environment. Let me give you an example – Imagine that you’re running away from the pack of wolves or a bear, and suddenly you see that a rock is blocking your way back home. Obviously with wolves being right behind, the adrenaline and stress will probably significantly lower your ability to think clearly, so you might end up in a dire situation. Oh… I forgot to mention that sometimes you might see some collectibles that might not really be there.



[h2]Hunger Delusion 🍖[/h2]

Simply put – think about it as some sort of a mirage but with food. Imagine that you’re preparing yourself for a venture into the wilderness in order to search for some goodies. You double check your backpack to see if everything is in its place. After spending some time in the wild you’ve realized that your character is hungry, so you immediately set up a fire and cook a meal, right? Well, what if I tell you that the food you brought all the way up here was fake. That’s exactly what a hunger delusion is. Next time triple check, okay?



[h2] Panic Attack 😱[/h2]

Well, I honestly don’t think I need to explain it much. Just like in real life too much stress, fear, or adrenaline might lead to a sudden panic attack – the state in which you’re not thinking clearly. In the worst cases it might even lead to fainting, which is exactly what this symptom does in Winter Survival.



[h2] Castle of Lies…🏰[/h2]

So far we’ve been talking only about the negative symptoms, but what if I tell you right now that there is also a room for some symptoms, that are tough to obtain but have some positive effects on your body? Castle of Lies is exactly one of them. I don’t want to spill the beans right now – all I can say is that it’s not a symptom that you’ll be able to choose. It’ll suddenly pop-up next time you go to sleep, you have to collect a certain amount of… Something 🤫



[h2] Stay up-to-date 📰[/h2]

So, that’s it for today’s development update for Winter Survival. As always, I’m waiting for your feedback regarding the devlog itself as well as our game in the comment section down below. If you still haven’t tried our demo, you still have a chance to play before the Steam Next Fest ends on February 12th, 2024. And last but not the least, if you feel like Winter Survival is your cup of tea, make sure to add the game to your wishlist, so you won’t miss the release on February 28th, 2024!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1394960/Winter_Survival/

~Your humble marketing guy – Sewek

Join Fisk as he tries to stay alive as much as he can in Winter Survival. The stream will be live at 7 pm CET time tomorrow (9th of February) and will last about 2 hours. Don't miss it out, folks!

Join us today at 7 pm CET time on our live stream and learn more about our brutal survival game and challenges that it has to offer. So, grab some snacks, your favourite drink, and join us on this chilly adventure. Don't hesitate to ask any questions you might have. Enjoy!

Welcome to another development update for Winter Survival. I hope you had a fantastic time over the weekend and you’re ready to face the challenges awaiting you ahead. Speaking of challenges, in today’s devlog we’re gonna have a closer look into one of our features which will make your survival experience more unique and challenging. In other words - today’s devlog is all about the sanity system. I just hope it won’t drive you mad after reading this 🙀



Just before we jump into the nitty-gritty details, I just wanted to let you know that Winter Survival is a part of the Steam Next Fest event which is already live. If you’re on a lookout for some challenging survival titles, Winter Survival is the game to go. What is more, if you still feel like you’d like to learn more about the demo and game itself, we’ll be live streaming tomorrow at 7pm CET time over on Steam and our official twitch.tv account. If you have any questions for us, don’t hesitate and visit us tomorrow.



[h2]How does the Sanity System work? 🧠[/h2]

Alrighty, let’s start from the very beginning. In Winter Survival you as a player must take care of certain needs in order to stay alive. This includes: hunger, thirst, temperature, energy, and your mind. What is more, during your gameplay you’ll face a variety of different debuffs that you will need to treat as well. Every time you neglect taking proper care of yourself, it’ll have a negative effect on your mind.



How? Well, let me give you an example. Let’s assume that you have a bleeding debuff (because you weren’t careful enough and got bitten by a wolf, right?). As soon as the circle around your debuff fills, each time it affects your mind by a certain percentage. Once your brain fills 100%, the next time you go to sleep the sanity system will kick in.



Depending on which part of your brain got affected, you might either be presented with a set of negative symptoms to choose from or random parts from your adaptation tree will be burned out temporarily. There might even be a situation where your health will be lowered till the moment you finish a given challenge. Let’s focus for a while on the adaptation part, as I’ll come back to the symptoms later.



The way it works is simple – let’s assume that the first section got burned out, which means that in order to create an ax for example you’ll need three branches, four rocks, and two ropes, instead of two rocks, one branch, and one rope. If you want to pull everything back to the normal state, you’ll have to complete the given challenge – from walking 5,000 steps, to killing two random animals, and so on.



[h2]Symptoms 🤒[/h2]

Now, let’s talk a little bit more about symptoms in Winter Survival. For those of you who have previously played our prologue, you know that those might make your blood boil. However, since the prologue release, we’ve been working tirelessly on some brand-new symptoms as well as improving the old ones. Let’s start with the coimetrophobia 😱

[h3]Coimetrophobia☠️[/h3]

Simply put – fear of the graves. If you’ve already played our demo (if not, I highly encourage you to do so) you might have noticed that there are quite a lot of graves scattered around the area. What this symptom does is every time you’re close to a grave you’ll slowly run out of stamina. The closer you get, the faster your stamina will deplete.



[h3]Delusional predator 🐺[/h3]

If you thought that wolves are gonna be your pain in the butt (I mean, they will be eventually) what do you think about phantom ones? Yes, that’s right – if you decide to go with the delusional predator symptom, sooner or later you’ll start seeing fake wolves scattered around the map. Don’t worry tho – if you take a closer look, they slightly differ from the normal ones. How cool is that?



[h3]Delusional prey 🦌[/h3]

Apart from the delusional predator symptom, we’ve also managed to add the prey as well. From now on, you’ll be hunted (pun intended) by phantom deers and rabbits during your voyage and fight for a tiny piece of meat.



[h2]Languages[/h2]

With the demo being available on the Steam Next Fest, we've also managed to add a bunch of heavily requested languages. From now on you can play Winter Survival demo in your mother tounge – how cool is that?

[h2]Stay up-to-date 📰[/h2]

Phew…That’s a long devlog, isn’t it? I can already say that it’s just the beginning as we’ll have the second part for you ready by this Friday. Anyway, let me know down in the comments how you like this devlog and if you have any suggestions regarding the future devlogs and game itself, make sure to leave your feedback in the comments down below. Last but not the least, if you feel like Winter Survival is your cup of tea, check the demo which is currently available as a part of Steam Next Fest, and add the game to your wishlist, so you won’t miss the Early Access release on February 28th, 2024! 🙇

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1394960/Winter_Survival/

~Your humble marketing guy - Sewek

It’s been three days already since we’ve released our brand-new demo, and we’re so thankful for the amount of constructive feedback we’ve gathered so far from you. Without your support, we wouldn’t be able to track those pesky bugs & issues, and bring the solution to you as fast as we can.

Today, I’d like to announce that we’ve already implemented most of your feedback into the demo. This means easier wolves on explorer difficulty, improved tutorial system, more hiding bushes and healing materials, and so on. Full patch notes are available down below 👇

[h2]Patch Notes: 7810[/h2]

[h3]General:[/h3]

• Wolves should now again grant experience when killed.
  
• Disorder hits perks now properly and applies negative perks.
  
• DLSS no longer breaks when loading or changing level.
  
• You should no longer get stuck if Wolf attacks you while you are solving the padlock puzzle.
  
• HDR options removed as they were not working correctly. Will likely bring them back in future once we can apply fixes. (You might need to reset your configs if you previously played with HDR options).
  
• Added Hunting Station and craftable spear recipe to starting shelter in Sickness scenario.
  
• Fixed issues related to wolf attacks when two different wolf attacks occuring fast one after another, would cause loss of input.
  
• More eating animations added (will add option to allow skipping of these in Difficulty settings in the future.)
  
• Dollar Coins can now stack.
  
• Fixed issue where you could hit yourself with the spear and have it break or get stuck unexpectedly.
  
• Many sound effect tweaks.
  

[h3]Localizations:[/h3]

• Spanish added. (There might be some translations still missing - we are using it as a test before adding more.)
  

[h3]Tutorials:[/h3]

• Tutorials should be more reliably repeatable in "How To Play" section.
  
• Tutorials have been tweaked based on feedback to make impaling and torch sections a little clearer.
  
• Minor tweaks to digging section.
  

[h3]Balance:[/h3]

• Bleeding damage left by Wolf on the player reduced by 60% on all difficulties.
  
• Added few bandages and spears for explorers to find.
  
• Crow detection boxes increased so its easier to hit them with rocks or snowballs.
  
• Set that perception fatigue has 5% chance to trigger (same as on Survivalist difficulty) was on 2.5% before.
  
• Reduced the total amount of wolves on the map slightly to make it less dangerous on all difficulties.
  
• Tweaked the rates that Wolves 'forget' the player, allowing players to 'lose' wolves by hiding in bushes while in combat and sneaking around the bush while wolf searches for them in their last 'seen' location. (Generally we want to make getting into combat with wolves more avoidable and allow for more options other than running or fighting.)
  
• Added chance for Fiber to be collected from Tall Grass, as an alternative to more lucrative berry bushes in order to be able to craft bandages a bit more easily.
  
• Makeshift syrup will now also heal you for 100 health on top of delaying the RRI Effect.
  
• On "Explorer" (easy) difficulty impaling is now automatic as long as you are charging the spear and roughly aiming at the wolf when he jumps at you. (We are working on a custom difficulty options where you can tweak all options individually to your liking but it will likely not be before release of early access).
  
• Tweaked energy losses for the demo, so we lose energy faster (more sleeping required).
  

[h3]Animals:[/h3]

• Animals should no longer see us through buildings.
  
• Animals should no longer hear us when crouched which should allow sneaking in wild and hiding in the bushes to be much more effective (we are still tweaking this further so that you can't walk all the way up to deer in future fixes).
  
• Minor rotation adjustment tweaks to wolf movement that should make them spin in circles less often.
  
• Boars should now be properly skinnable.
  

[h3]Visuals:[/h3]

• Tweaked many places to raise the visual quality (mainly noticable in shelter and hot springs in the sickness scenario)
  
• Work on visuals is ongoing and will continue until early access release and further :)
  
• Reduced flashlight intensity as it was too intense and whitened everything.
  
• Several minor graphical tweaks to raise the quality a little (higher texture sizes on terrain, RVT's etc.)
  
• Noise/Smearing artifact effects removed from Grass and other foliage.
  
• Noise/Smearing artifact effects removed from River.
  
• Refactoring of color grading based on players feedback
  
• Increased view distance on clear weathers
  

[h3]Extra information that might be helpful:[/h3]

• Don't hold the button to swing torch, press and release - don't let the red bar disappear.
  

[h3]Known issues at time of release:[/h3]

• Deer might be slow to notice us. (Due to crouching noise fixes).
  
• Fainting (getting to 0 energy) might lock up inputs and not play the fainting animation properly.
  
• When spear is in hand the Quick Actions Tab (bottom right corner) might wrongly show extra information for auto impaling / to release to impale regardless of difficulty.
  

Apart from making the wolves easier on the explorer difficulty, we've also prepared for you a short video which should teach you how to fight with those pesky, furry friends. Keep in mind that from now on, releasing the spear before wolf jumps on you is only related to the survivalist difficulty. Let us know what you guys think!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

By the way – as you can see in the video, we also have some problems while fighting with them, so there is nothing to be worried about.

Oh... And one more thing – we clearly see that there is a little confusion about where to find our demo, since some of you might think that it's actually a prologue.

You can freely download the demo from the Winter Survival's Steam page. It's definitely worth a try since it's a truly open world survival experience. Go and check it for yourself.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1394960/Winter_Survival/

Before we finish I'd like to invite all of you to our live stream on February 6th, 2024 at 7 pm CET time. We'll be talking everything Winter Survival and we cannot wait to see you there. Feel free to ask any questions you might have – we'll do our best to answer them.



~Your humble marketing guy – Sewek