u/NightDragoOfficial

Convinced my weird dressing preferences makes me less appealing even if it makes me more comfortable.

Hello all! I made a post a few days ago here⊶https://www.reddit.com/r/SonsOfTheForest/s/lYPWMBwg92⊷and I have some updates!

I changed my save to normal/low custom difficultly, no building destruction as I said and I’ve been off on my way exploring! I figured out how to craft some basic stuff. I’ve made a bow, some arrows and a club. But I’m really bad at combat haha. The enemies are quite unforgiving. Once my bow is out of arrows I feel useless. Good thing is my walls keep everything out very effectively. I sleep in a bed in the middle of my “property” as suggested and that works great.

For winter I decided instead of trying to block off the ice I want to make a winter home which is only surrounded by land so that I can put walls around it completely. I haven’t decided where to place it yet. More on this later.

My question is, how do I progress at all?

Some background first. I’ve come into the game blind. I don’t like to know much about the games I start besides what the gameplay looks like -ish. That way I can have a full experience of the game. Because of that, I don’t want to be “spoiled” on stuff super heavily. I only know what I’ve figured out myself besides a few things I’ve seen in passing. I know there’s better tools than mine 🝗 I have the axe, a club, the knife, a bow, spears and some bone/creepy armor 𐑶, I know the game has an end and some kind of boss fight, and I know that there’s some kind of oxygen tank or diving suit 🝗 A cave I went into has an underwater section I couldn’t make it through╌so one must exist in some form 𐑶.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve found 2 of the dead crew mates or whatever they are called; I’ve found 2 of the 3 dead people. But the last one is under soil. Since that I’ve been searching around for where I can get a shovel but I can’t find anything after hours of looking around. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough. But I feel like I should have found something by now,,, I’ve attached a map of where I’ve been with the key ⌄
• yellow circle — where I spawned (I think, hard to remember)
• yellow line — immediately after starting I looked at the map and found a lake that seemed like a good spot and ran there with nothing
• orange circle — my base
• red lines — the paths I’ve explored down. I’ve also deviated into the forest a ways and explore thoroughly
• dark red lines — places I’ve been on a sprint to get from point a to point b to complete an objective. I haven’t explored these much.

I feel like I’ve done a ton of looking around but all I can find are dead ends: a cave that needs a diving suit, a cave that needs a keycard, the dead dude that needs a shovel to be used. I also found something called solarfite that I must not be able to use until I progress. But I feel stuck. Can someone give me a general area I need to be to progress without being super specific as to not spoil exactly what I need to do? Think of it like a circle area on my map I should be. If I know where to focus my effort in a small area I should be good. I think I must just be missing something hidden that gets me the shovel. If it’s somewhere I’ve passed right by in a thoroughly explored area you can just tell me exactly where I need to go. But don’t tell me what’s there. I’m so picky, haha!

Usually my exploring looks like heading out from my base and looking around and checking on the cannibal/mutant camps and collecting some items. I go in caves as long as there’s no enemies. The only cave with enemies I’ve been in I died 15 times to get through a room and then went into the next room to find more enemies. And I wasted all of my armor and supplies and bullets to do that. So I must need better gear before I go back. Anyways, I get a bit away from my base before the sun starts to set and I head back to sleep and put all of my items onto my shelves for storage and use later. I can’t make it too far in the span of one day and I die a lot if I try to sleep away from home. It’s day 64 if that’s relevant.

Knowing that, where would it make sense to set up a small outpost╌which works as my winter home╌with some basic amenities such that the output location will effectively facilitate my progression requirements?

Apologies for the long-winded-ness of this post but I enjoy writing. The TL;DR is just read the bolded text. Thanks for the help in advance 🙂

Here's some photos of my base. I'm a new player, playing on Peaceful. I started in normal but got very annoyed of getting attacked so often I could barely set 2 planks down a few days in so I converted my save to peaceful mode.

For that reason I've been neglecting doing any exploring. When I go exploring I want to set it back to normal mode so I can fight stuff. I just don't like stuff constantly killing me and making me relog when trying to build. With that said tho, I basically have no cloth or rope so don't mind the unfinished torches sitting around. Let me know your thoughts.

I do have a few questions╌tho. I will be keeping building destruction off as to not have my base destroyed. but that wont keep the cannibals from jumping over trees right? I created a clearing around my outside wall so that cannibals (hopefully) won't jump over? Do I need to clear more space to stop them tho (last image)

My other question is what can I do when it comes to winter? I assume the cannibals will be able to walk on the ice and come at me that way completely negating the effect of my walls in the winter. How can I stop from them from doing that tho?

Last question is, is my base too big such that enemies can spawn inside of it?

I really like aesthetics╌and I know this isn't an aesthetics game╌but I don't want to have traps and such littered around my yard. Maybe that means it's just best to keep it on peaceful mode tho... I don't mind enemies outside of my house haha. I would like to have some challenge when I go exploring. Perhaps I can write a script where I hit a button and it switches the game save data to peaceful and then I relog when I stay at home. And then when I explore I hit the button again to toggle the game data back to normal mode again. But would enemies attack my house while I'm gone?

I've been using my keyboard "layout" for a bit now and I didn't know this subreddit existed╌though, I should have expected. Haha! It's called ⸉xQWERTYa⸉ but, it runs on any regular QWERTY⧼-like⧽ keyboard layout.

At the start of this year I got really tired of juggling OEM software for different peripherals. I like to have different profiles for games or programs I use. And since everything I have are different brands 🜚 Razer, Glorious, SteelSeries, ⌯ 𐑶 I had to switch multiple profiles for different devices and take up space on each device for profile switching. That, or I needed to manually open software for each and switch them. I got tired of doing that.

I've always been big on keybinds. The first thing I do when I open a new program or game is set my keybinds differently and experiment. I'm also a programmer. With that all combined I decided I wanted to make some kind of personal solution for universally handling keybinds and profile switching across all of my devices. The intention of the project was to create a virtual layer that would manage my keybinds rather than creating a physical keyboard to accommodate my needs. Even if I did make a custom keyboard it wouldn't solve the profiling issues I was having.

My solution to these issues is something I call ⸉xQWERTYa⸉╌which mainly just follows QWERTY keyboard rules but gives me a lot more control over what is actually typed. My solution is built with AHK, which means that it has both the pros and cons of AHK's implementation. Image 1 shows a rough construction of what the keyboard looks like virtually using⊶keyboard-layout-editor.com⊷. This picture doesn't show all of my bindings. It only shows the ⸉default⸉ profile and doesn't show combination bindings like ⸉shift + ctrl⸉. Here's a key for the image ⌄
• top-left ⚷ curl
• left-mid ⚷ shift
• left-bottom ⚷ normal | unmodified
• right-top ⚷ alt
• right-mid ⚷ shelve
• right-bottom ⚷ elevate
• front-left ⚷ control
• front-right ⚷ windows

I have extra virtual modifier keys 🝗 curl, shelve, elevate 𐑶 so I can type extra characters for something I'm calling an ⸉English Language Extension⸉ named ⸉xQWERTILE⸉ which gives me some extra language syntax for English. But it's super unofficial. I'm just making stuff up as I go haha. Having fun.

xQWERTYa is a ⟨data driven⟩ system using profiles, inheritance and key mimicking. I've provided a screenshot of a profile snippet 🝗 image 2 𐑶 and a key snippet for the key F21 🝗 image 3 𐑶. Here's an example of what the transformation on a key might look like for a game ⌄

1. in Razer Synapse I bind some key to F
   1. the reason this is done is to map my non-keyboard peripherals to something that isn't used on the keyboard so they don't interfere with other keys when I rebind them later
   2. this binding never changes, so I never need to open Razer Synapse and change anything 🝗 live changes are handled in my software instead
2. assuming that my software is currently in the default profile it uses the key snippet's ⟨"default": ⌯⟩ binding which tells it to inherit from the ⟨default_gaming⟩ profile.
3. the ⟨default_gaming⟩ profile says to mimic the binding for the key ⸢

I'm obviously glossing over a lot of technical details here. But I don't think a comprehensive technical explanation of my implementation is needed unless you folks would like one.

In addition to this system I have a StreamDeck plugin I use for switching profiles. I can configure a button on my StreamDeck to switch profiles or perform specific key actions in my system.

My system has the following pros ⌄
• works across windows devices portable ╎ just run the exe
• data driven ╎ I can change bindings on the fly without editing code, just config settings
• profiles change universally across all configured devices ╎ no faffing about with different software once it's set up
• I'm the one in control of all of the logic ╎ if I don't like something I can change it if I decide

My system has the following cons ⌄
• not cross-platform
• some computers tend to be less happy about running my program ╎ this causes some modifier keys to get stuck down rarely on some devices╌namely, ones which don't have very good hardware
• it works at windows level ╎ admin windows don't obey the keybinds I have set up

Here's some specific things I like about my layout ⌄
• RShift → . | ‹period›
• / → ?
• . → !
• slv + ` → 0
• slv + q → 6 & slv + w → 7 & ⌯
• ` → "
• 2 → '
• 3 → _
• 9 → ( & 0 → )
• \ → ‹delete›
and a lot more

I have no idea what to expect posting this here. Apologies for the wall of text. I've put a lot into making this system coherent. The goals of the layout is capability more than ergonomics. Let me know your thoughts╌I suppose?

Edit: spelling