Hinterland’s survival wintry-sandbox The Long Dark has been updated with a new region to chatter your teeth in. It’s called Pleasant Valley and takes the playable sandbox to ”nearly 20 square kilometres”.
This new area is ”rural mountain valley” and is worth almost 10 square kilometres alone, and features fields, farms, caves and vast forestry. We can now wield torches to scare away wolves.
Our own first aid items can now be crafted from harvestable plants, while wildlife AI itself has been improved, along with a new user interface for the inventory system. Pleasant Valley can only be accessed through the sandbox menu once it has been discovered through the Coastal Highway region.
”We’ve seen quite a few notes about people with high-end systems experiencing lower than expected performance in the game. We’re continuing to work on optimizing the game world, but unfortunately some of the issues are related to how our core engine – Unity – was built, and how it utilizes multiple CPU cores for physics objects,” explained the studio.
CPU speed matters more than GPU, they continued, which is why altering visual settings doesn’t necessarily give a boost to performance. They’re continuing to optimise The Long Dark.
”We are hopeful that the upcoming Unity 5 will address these limitations, as the existing outdated physics engine is being replaced. We’re also exploring our own ideas, the goal being to improve performance without sacrificing the size or detail of the world.”
The changelog for the 21st update to The Long Dark is available here. Since it released there’s been a further hotfix released addressing more optimisations in the new Pleasant Valley, bear detection AI, and stopped AI attacks on players resting in cars. Those changes are detailed here.
The Long Dark remains on Steam Early Access, with only sandbox available right now.
