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You do it. You know what's best. We don't need poo poo like "clothes" or "Food." We need Oxen. 9 of 'em.
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May 11, 2019 22:39
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 20:22 |
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6 months, 7 oxen, and a mule named Lowtax. In my head these cutscenes are going to gradually get less and less chirpy till it ends up like When the Wind Blows.
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May 11, 2019 22:56
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Skip the packages and buy your own supplies. Then spend 12 hours trading with people in town until you have ten times your original starting cash. Then spend it all on grandfather clocks.
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May 12, 2019 02:26
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Of course the game has to work perfectly the day I get it, then decide to stop loading save files when I actually try to do the LP.... Gimme a bit folks.
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May 12, 2019 02:35
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Deadmeat5150 posted:I don't care what you buy as long as you have a couple clocks that you take to the very end. I'll second this notion; one main clock and one backup clock.
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May 12, 2019 02:35
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chitoryu12 posted:Of course the game has to work perfectly the day I get it, then decide to stop loading save files when I actually try to do the LP.... For best results, I recommend running it in a Windows 98 virtual machine, anything else always gave me problems out the rear end.
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May 12, 2019 02:39
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Looks like "6 months and 7 oxen" is the most popular vote here, so that's what we're going with! In honor of adventures past, I made sure to purchase the only grandfather clock in town as well. Our current inventory: quote:Cash: $779.48 All in all, this is quite a haul! However, its status as "6 months of supplies" is dependent on us basically never losing anything. As our wagon tips or gets swamped in the river, we'll likely need to continue purchasing, hunting, and foraging on the trail. .png)  "The bylaws and regulations drawn up by your self-elected council will be your only law on the trail. You got to keep out the bad element and make arrangements for settling disputes. I have here a completely and elegantly scripted constitution, suited to all upright citizens. Drew it up myself. I had a year in law school, you know. If you let me join your wagon train, I'll be glad to offer this here constitution to you free of charge!"This quirky top-hatted man appears in many guises throughout the game. They had maybe two or three dozen actors who appear to have one costume each, so they all appear repeatedly as different characters. While you can't add anyone to your wagon train, the presence of constitutions for wagon trains was not an unusual one. Wagon trains would usually settle into one of three types of governance: monarchy (one person controls everything), democracy (the train or their representatives vote on what to do), or anarchy (every wagon for itself). Some companies drafted bylaws and serious legally binding paperwork before ever setting out, while others developed informal rules as they traveled. Many trains changed leadership repeatedly as families fell behind or leaders got ousted from conflict or died on the trail. After a few weeks the train would usually elect its captain (of course only the men got to vote). There was rarely any kind of secret ballot, so there was a lot of campaigning and manipulation to become the leader of the expedition. The usual method of election was for each candidate to walk off in a different direction and have the men supporting him follow behind, with whoever had the most people winning. .png) Because you can't save during this prologue, I chose Train 2 for us. .png) And now we're off! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgW5l-mWrJY Jed has a strange tendency to always seem like he's staring above your head when he talks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ6CVAe1rqI Make sure to play this on an endless loop when reading the thread for the proper experience. .png) We've only made it 5 miles out of Independence before hitting our first obstacle! The conditions of the river are displayed in the bottom left corner. It's a pretty easy river, one of the easiest on the journey, but the random number god can be a cruel mistress. We have two options here. We can ford the river and hope we don't swamp or caulk the boards in the wagon and float it across. Later rivers will have ferries or bridges that we can pay money to use, usually just a few bucks. Whenever we reach a stopping point like a landmark, river, or spring we'll also have some other options that you can suggest we take. Hunt: Lets me go out and hunt for food. You need a gun, gunpowder, and bullets (or shot for shotguns) to hunt. Gather: Lets me go and try to gather wild fruits and vegetables. You won't know the identity of anything until you pick it, so hopefully your own botany knowledge will come into play! Trade: Talk to another member of the wagon train to trade. You're given a limited number of items (including money) that you can offer them and they'll tell you what they want in return. You can haggle, but too much haggling will rapidly get you an awful deal that isn't worth taking. Turn Around: Turn the wagon train around and go back down the trail. This obviously doesn't help get you to your destination, but it might be the best option if there's a vitally needed doctor or supply post nearby. Dump: Just throw poo poo out to lose weight. Rest: Spend however many days you want just resting. While fishing would ordinarily be available, my copy of the game is currently bugged and I can't get fishing to work for the life of me. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 02:46 on May 12, 2019 |
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May 12, 2019 02:41
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Ford the river. Look, I know it's a meme to caulk under 3 feet depth and ford over 3 feet depth at every river, but Chitoryu says this game gets legitimately difficult later on. Let's give it a chance to demonstrate that before we deliberately screw things up on purpose.
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May 12, 2019 02:59
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If only we could all be as cool as Captain Jed Freedman. Also ford the river
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May 12, 2019 03:17
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Ford the river.
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May 12, 2019 03:19
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Yeah it would be nice to not TPK 10 miles out of town. Ford that fucker.
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May 12, 2019 03:26
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Food on the Trail While I went into a good amount of detail on the average diet of an Oregon/California Trail goer, now that we have an actual inventory I can start explaining in more depth exactly what the hell we have.  First off, you'll notice all 510 pounds of bacon (divided among the 6 of us and assuming a 4-month journey, that's roughly 0.7 pounds of bacon for each person every day of the journey; considering that one of the family is literally 5 years old, all of you would realistically be getting a pound or more per day). Far from the thin slices you're familiar with frying in a pan for breakfast, these were huge slabs of salt-cured pork in sacks of about 100 pounds each. It was recommended that in hot climates that they be packed into boxes and surrounded with bran to keep them insulated. The slab in the picture is 4 or 5 pounds, so imagine about a hundred of those and you'll understand how much loving bacon we've got.  The common alternative to bacon was salt pork. This was pork placed in barrels and covered in an absolutely ridiculous amount of salt until no microbe could ever survive in there. Salt pork kept for months, but it required more extensive preparation than bacon; it's recommended to boil it for several hours, changing the water once or twice, to boil off the excess salt. As you can see from the picture, there's far more salt than you could ever try to eat raw.   Milk spoils very quickly in the years before pasteurization, especially in hot climates. It was much more practical to make it into cheese and butter, and hard cheese could keep for a long time. Some families drove milk cows with them and would make cheese and butter on the go. Butter was commonly clarified by boiling it until it was thin and oily and soldered into tins, helping it last longer.   After bacon and salt pork, the most common food was flour (or cornmeal for southerners). The women would take advantage of stops to bake simple biscuits and breads, though they would try to make sweeter treats for special occasions when they had the resources.  The "crackers" mentioned are likely hardtack. This is a very simple baked cracker made from flour, salt, and water. The resulting crackers are edible for ages but are extremely hard, especially if old and stale. It was common for Civil War soldiers issued hardtack to break it up with a rifle butt or hammer and soak it in water or fry it up with some leftover fat from their pork ration rather than try to bite into it.  Beans and rice were usually eaten while stationary for a long period of time, such as in forts, due to the need to boil them. Beans would later become one of the primary foodstuffs of the west due to how easily they kept when dry to the point where the diet on the frontier was "The Three Bs": biscuits, bacon, and beans.  There's no way to really know what the dried vegetables in the game are like, but this is a recent reproduction of the desiccated vegetable ration that was recommended for pioneers in 1859 and issued to the US military at the time. It was a mixture of various shredded vegetables (turnips, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, greens, etc.) that was pressed in a massive screw-press and dried until you had thin cakes about half the size of your palm. You could boil up one of them to create a filling soup portion; one cubic yard was estimated to contain about 16,000 servings. Some liked them, but many Civil War soldiers ended up despising the flavor and could never find a decent way to prepare them. Fruit and vegetables remained extremely important for one reason: scurvy. A lack of Vitamin C over about a month would cause this deficiency disease to start up. Even if pioneers didn't know exactly what caused scurvy, it was pretty apparent that having fruits and vegetables staved it off.  Lard was the principle cooking fat of the time. If you needed to fry anything, pig fat is where you went. This added vital calories to whatever food was cooked in it.  Pemmican is a Native American food that was quickly adopted by colonial explorers and fur trappers. It's made from shredded meat (traditionally buffalo or deer depending on the area) and fat in equal volumes, mixed and dried. You could add berries to sweeten it, but this isn't traditional for plain survival food. Pemmican can last for years in the right conditions.  Saleratus is better known today as baking soda. In addition to yeast, it would be used to leaven bread and allow for yet another taste of home on the trail.  Tea had lost a lot of prestige thanks to the American Revolution and intentional efforts to distance American identity from Britain, but it still maintained some level of popularity throughout the 19th century.  Coffee had replaced tea as the predominate American non-alcoholic beverage. The caffeine jolt was a major morale booster that kept people going on hard days. The usual method of making it is what we would today call "cowboy coffee": boil the grounds in a pot for a while, then try to pour it off without getting any grounds in the cup. This often resulted in a brew that was too weak or too bitter unless the person making it was experienced, but coffee was coffee. Most coffee would actually be carried "green", or unroasted, as it kept better. Coffee beans would be roasted in a pan over a fire and then ground up in a coffee mill or by crushing the beans in a cup with whatever you had on hand before boiling.
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May 12, 2019 03:35
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I never did figure out during my playthroughs of this game if there's an actual benefit to carrying a variety of food vs. nothing but bacon and beans. The game suggests that a great variety of food increases morale, but it never seemed to be a significant increase. And spices don't seem to matter a dammn but (outside of salt to cure my mighty hauls of buffalo and bear meat). And don't get met started on medicine. At least half of it seems completely worthless. Does fishing work in your version? It's the one thing that's never worked right for me on any modern computer.
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May 12, 2019 04:34
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How many weeks of eating a pound of bacon a day do you think it'd take to never want to see it ever again? Also it's tradition to Ford Everything.
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May 12, 2019 05:14
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May 12, 2019 05:48
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Truthkeeper posted:I never did figure out during my playthroughs of this game if there's an actual benefit to carrying a variety of food vs. nothing but bacon and beans. The game suggests that a great variety of food increases morale, but it never seemed to be a significant increase. And spices don't seem to matter a dammn but (outside of salt to cure my mighty hauls of buffalo and bear meat). You get warnings if you have no fruit or vegetables, so along with poor morale I believe you also run the risk of scurvy if you go too long without Vitamin C. In real life it takes about a month to see the symptoms. And yeah, fishing is broken in my version. I might try to fix it but all the fish are totally frozen and refuse to move to the bait. Hope nobody wanted salmon.
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May 12, 2019 05:54
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chitoryu12 posted:You get warnings if you have no fruit or vegetables, so along with poor morale I believe you also run the risk of scurvy if you go too long without Vitamin C. In real life it takes about a month to see the symptoms. I'mm about 30% sure that beans count as vegetables, though you make a good point that the bacon and beans diet would also need some fruit. It's a shame about fishing, because I remember playing this back in the day fishing was actually a really good way to supplement the foods stores.
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May 12, 2019 05:57
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There should be a Oregon-Yukon-Amazon-Africa Trail crossover, with dashes of Lost Patrol (NAM trail).quote:A range of options is then available, from searching area to killing one or even all of civilians Anyway  Ford!
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May 12, 2019 07:20
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Sorry, but I need to call out the historical accuracy on this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgW5l-mWrJY Is that captain dude supposed to be black or just incredibly sun-tanned?
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May 12, 2019 08:40
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Carbon dioxide posted:Sorry, but I need to call out the historical accuracy on this one: I don't know man. Is the dude voiced by a black guy named Jed Freedman black? Who can tell?
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May 12, 2019 09:23
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chitoryu12 posted:Food I just woke up and this sounds incredibly appealing right now. Ford. It's like two feet.
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May 12, 2019 13:05
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Ford, as is tradition.
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May 12, 2019 13:12
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Good catch, I didn't notice the surname and was wondering about how a black guy was just hanging around. Those kids seem hella chipper for people who just lost their ma. Life made them so hard back then. Regarding most of the medicines not doing anything, check out that podcast I linked upthread - "Not doing anything" is probably pretty accurate for the time period.
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May 12, 2019 13:23
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAoE_P7SA3g.png) We didn't even make it 5 miles before our first mishap! While we didn't lose a huge amount of food, you can easily see how multiple accidents at rivers and hills could easily cause a cascading problem. .png) Another 5 miles down the trail is Westport, MO. This little town hasn't even been incorporated yet, but in the next few years Westport and Kansas City will displace Independence as the main jumping-off point for the trail. By 1897 it'll be annexed into Kansas City as a neighborhood. Should we replace lost supplies or keep going?
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May 12, 2019 15:26
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Replace the bacon stores. It is only right that we failed to stay upright, as is customary
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May 12, 2019 15:31
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if it helps, Grandma Party is also totally gonna get dysentery and die.
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May 12, 2019 15:33
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also, slow and steady so replace those supplies
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May 12, 2019 15:35
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Dash Rendar posted:if it helps, Grandma Party is also totally gonna get dysentery and die. I'm gonna bury the lot of em. Can't get dysentery when all you've got in your veins is piss and vinegar. If we let you on this trip you'd be run over by our work cows. Keep going. Circlmastr can gather berries for us to eat.
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May 12, 2019 15:45
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We lost ten pounds of coffee?! THIRTY POUNDS OF CORNMEAL?! Replace supplies, consider whether this is a bad omen, stay on the lookout for more.
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May 12, 2019 16:11
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Get bacon and coffee at least. Ask about the Vietcong in the area.
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May 12, 2019 16:13
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Stock up.
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May 12, 2019 16:28
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.png) Thanks. Never thought of that before. .png) Westport is tiny, but their general store stocks most of the essentials. Unfortunately, they have no coffee to replace what we lost. .png) It cost less than $10 to restock all the supplies we lost. Being a high-paying starting occupation really helps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs7RZxYghFk Jed is actually slightly anachronistic here. The Montgomery's story takes place in 1848. In February of that year, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed that ceded a large amount of territory to the United States. Santa Fe was newly minted American, including the relabeling of Mexicans as "white" to grant them voting rights (something that racists in neighboring states didn't take kindly to). At the time we're traveling, Santa Fe is still a remote desert town with little of interest. New Mexico wouldn't even become a state until 1912. .png) And right on time we run into New Santa Fe! This town started as a simple log cabin tavern in 1824 at the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, which was the biggest commercial highway between Santa Fe and the rest of the United States until they brought the railroad in 1880. The town only grew bigger by 1859 when a bridge crossing the Blue River (*shakes fist in anger*) was built, allowing travelers to avoid the rocky roads around Westport and go from Independence to New Santa Fe. Today the town is just another neighborhood of Kansas City; the only survivors of its time as an independent town are a granite marker from 1906 and a cemetery.
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May 12, 2019 16:42
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chitoryu12 posted:Unfortunately, they have no coffee to replace what we lost. 
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May 12, 2019 16:52
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It's okay, we have 26 pounds! Assuming we never lose any coffee ever again, that should last *checks notes* about 3 months at most.
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May 12, 2019 17:01
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Speaking of coffee, these Civil War reenactors show off two different methods for how soldiers would make their coffee. This is likely identical or close to how pioneers on the trail would have done it with nothing but a coffee pot if they didn't have a mill like we do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIKxZCxqXjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T22KXgp0VNo
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May 12, 2019 17:14
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Sounds like a prime opportunity for MORE LAUDANUM
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May 12, 2019 18:15
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Do they have any clocks on hand?
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May 12, 2019 20:33
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Oregon Trail 5 was my jam back in ye olde times. It actually taught me a lot about edible plants and medicine, though I promptly ignored that knowledge to feed my party nightshade and treat every illness and injury with epsom salts.
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May 12, 2019 20:54
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I mean if you don't pickle the sick/injured child at every opportunity what even is the point of Oregon trail
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May 12, 2019 21:34
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 20:22 |
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That seems like quite a lot of stuff to have lost in not much over knee-deep water.
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May 12, 2019 22:18
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