The rules were simple, and running with and without my mods to test their survival tweaks and recipes. (The original purpose of the experiment actually).
The experiment:
- Should use only things that can be harvested from kills or from resource nodes. No loot could be used unless it was either from a dead thrall of mine, or my own.
- Should use only building resources available on the base game.
- The settings were tweaked to mirror the ones in the hardest level profile from the game.
The result:
Less than 1 hour game time the threat of hunger and thirst was minimal. Established in one of the “many” places you never need to fight to get stuff in the desert, under the broken bridge. After having leveled a bit, moving through the river, east of the “voice stele” you find on the other side of the broken bridge. In there you can live for a long time with all the iron and coal you will need. You will always find defenseless hunt and nodes to live off of. No threat at all.
From there, you can build a whole lot of mid game tech without touching loot except from skinning and resource gathering. You might even quickly get ready to go around the whole map, often unchallenged. It is a good time to learn the “ancient secret” that will get you probably “invincible” against the AI:
From that moment on, you can give up on loot and play the game mostly “unbothered” by it. Most of combat become “fun” because you probably will win if you dont just run and get hate from a dozen enemies of your own level. At which point, desert enemies you can just mow through them like scything grass.
The result indicates that this “survival” game is a survival game in the sense that the game is to find a way to get self imposed rules that prevent you from surviving, because the game actually forces you to survive.