These strategies have been developed and tested in stalker mode. If you are playing in voyageur the numerical analysis is different but many of the strategies will translate. If you are a new to TLD, I recommend avoiding this guide for now. There are numerous spoilers and exploitative gameplay mechanics that will detract from the wonderful atmosphere and design that TLD offers. This guide has been developed to patch .236. Future patches may render any or all of the following tips useless. Updates may or may not be posted.

2.56 Update - Deep Forest -PocketsLLP
I have been busy with work/school obligations and have not yet produced a commentary on the new patch. Although the mechanics have been altered, there does not appear to be significant changes to how you conduct long yourself on long runs other than the need to be constantly searching for wood. It'll be slower going these days.

2.71 Update - Desolation Point -ABookCase

• Added rules to Kraelman's Challenge: Mega Hard Mode
  
• Changed recommendation for raw meat
  
• Edited wording
  
• Added note to Camp Office Base
  
• Added Desolation Point Base (includes note on the Forge)
  
• Added acknowledgments to nTeeples
  
• Markup editing
  
• Strikethrough of certain information
  
• Added note about new wood foraging
  
• URL editing

If you are struggling to reach the 100+ day mark, you will find numerous other guides on the forums. I would recommend and endorse the following, in no particular order:

LMG: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=314178187
SniperBob: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=329661571
GrindGod: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=392149014
Kitesailer: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=329643162
Willkwi: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=385390954

This guide assumes a significant amount of knowledge:

• Maps. You should be able to navigate all the zones without map aid. The goal is to be able to do this in a blizzard, without assistance.
  
• Items. You should know every possible spawn location for valuable tools.
  
• Wolf patrols. How many wolves patrol the Coastal Townsite? Mystery Lake? You must know this and should do recon before entering dangerous areas to avoid accidents.

If you are not comfortable with this assumed knowledge but find the game easy, I recommend playing the game on Mega Hard Mode created by Kraelman:

• You cannot go into any building with a loading screen with the exception of transition areas.
  
• You cannot enter either of the two Ranger Stations (can't even loot them).
  
• You cannot sleep in the Fishing Shanties. You can loot them/fish/start fires in them.
  
• You cannot sleep/start fires in ANY place with a constant temperature.
  
• Sleeping in the back of caves ("indoor" constant temperature portion) is forbidden. Starting fires in the back of a cave is not.
  
• Only the outdoor workbench on Coastal Highway may be used to craft.
  
• You are not allowed to loot the Safe or the Lockers in the Hydroelectric Dam.

These game settings force you to learn wolf patterns, item spawns, and the maps (especially during blizzards).

The remainder of this guide is structured into two parts. The first part discusses strategy needed for long runs and the second discusses tactics that can help you preserve resources and navigate the world like a pro. This guide offers one view of how to maximize resource efficiency, but users should note that runs may theoretically last decades but be wholly unplayable. Hibernation strategies do not make for action packed games. There are certainly alternative methods, but these tips are tried and true for many of players at the top of the leaderboards.

Just remember: take the guide as an ideal to strive for, but realize you will come up short. I do all the time.

If you like the guide, throw a thumbs up for better visibility! Share the wealth the community :)

This guide would not have been possible without the collaborative efforts of many TLD players. This guide is as much theirs as my own. Thank you to the following people for their insightful contributions and comments on this guide, as well as their continued contributions to the wonderful TLD community:

• ABookCase[www.twitch.tv]
  
• Casei_Magnus[www.twitch.tv]
  
• CodeOptimist[www.twitch.tv]
  
• GreyRookTV[www.twitch.tv]
  
• Kraelman[www.twitch.tv]
  
• Ungoliant33[www.twitch.tv]
  
• nTeeples[www.twitch.tv]

Check out their live streams to see some of these strategies and tactics in action!
You can tune in to my runs here: http://www.twitch.tv/pocketsllp

Any errors remain my own.

Mind Set
A few words concerning gameplay mentality. You need to have a plan for every day. Sleeping is a plan. It is also important to have contingency plans. Few things ever go strictly according to how you plan it (even sleeping).

An example: Today I will go hunting for deer/wolf combo (plan), but I'm hungry enough that if I can't get a combo, I'll eat perishable food (contingency), and I will only hunt until my condition is 30% (contingency). Adapt your plan to changing circumstances. Tunnel vision can be deadly. If you net a wolf/deer combo but are freezing at 32% condition, you might reconsider that harvest button.

You need to know the easiest locations for bears, wolf+deer combos, and rabbits. Wandering around in the wilderness increases risk. Hibernating for long periods of time leads to sloppy gameplay. You fire the rifle less, dodge wolves less, and pay less attention to where you are. To combat this complacency you should always develop a plan to respond to wolf attacks, sprained ankles, a blizzard, or if you see a wolf chasing a deer.

You should always bring the following items on short runs:

Painkillers, bandages + anti-septic or OMB (see below), clothes, 1.5-2L (half gallon) of water, low weight high cal food (e.g., energy bar), flare, knife, hatchet, up to 10 matches, and up to 10 tinder.

You can afford to bring fewer matches/tinder as your skill in starting fires climbs, but on a fresh run you do not want to be looking for sticks to make tinder in the middle of a blizzard if you cannot get a fire started. Bring a newspaper roll with you to harvest in an emergency (just don’t use it by accident). If you need other items for the particular run you are engaging in, bring those items! (Lantern, Prybar, etc.)

I regularly travel with about 17.5kg (38.5lbs) of weight, including coat and rifle. You need a knife to fend off wolf attacks and harvest carcasses, and you need a hatchet for quick wood if you find yourself isolated, lost, and in a blizzard. This is particularly true if you have been attacked by a wolf. 10kg (22lbs) of empty space lets you loot, and if you drop a wolf+deer you will not be terribly encumbered. Plan for that encumbrance anyway: it may mean playing more cautiously to avoid wolf patrols.

Hibernation
Long games require resource management and hibernation. Starvation causes 1% damage per hour. You can sleep for 100 hours before dying if you take no damage from other sources. I comfortably sleep 80% condition (80 hours) away before I eat. Sleep 11 hours to avoid taking dehydration damage and drink water between every interval. You will tack on approximately 3.5 days to your count per drop from 100 to 20%. Eat food near 20%, and heal up.

Perishable food, clothing, and matches will degrade during this period. Animal meat degrades 10% per day raw and 2.5% per day cooked in the current patch (UNKNOWN ON PATCH .271). This means you can sleep for up to 40 days on a single “batch” of meat. My experience is that requires 13 pieces of meat, whether deer, wolf, bear, or a combination.

As of the Desolation Point update (.271), food poisoning has been fixed. If you eat raw meat, you are more than likely going to contract food poisoning no matter the condition of the meat. We no longer recommend eating food raw.

You need not remain idle during these days. You can (and should) gather wood and/or make water. If your matches are going to expire before the end of your hibernation period, there is no reason not to start a fire and melt snow/boil water. If you have more food than you can eat (bears), you may consider crafting clothing through exhaustion and starvation damage (remember to drink!). The food is going to go to waste, so you might as well eat it. The same applies to collecting wood: if you are overstocked on food, feel free to take freezing damage and heal up. The meat is just going to disappear anyway.

Hibernate with snares by placing two or three outside when you are at 100% condition. Sleep to around 40% and then go outside. Eat raw rabbit, rinse and repeat. Make sure you have other food in your base if you get unlucky with snares. You will take freezing damage if you harvest rabbits by hand. There is a risk of being attacked by a wolf even at the Pleasant Valley Farm House. If you are unlucky enough to have a wolf chase a deer across the fields, you might draw wolf aggro when you harvest the meat. Be cautious, particularly in fog.

Due to the current state of snares, your rabbits will “appear” the first time you step outside. It appears that the chance for catching a rabbit increases the longer you are inside. The 12 hour time window that appears on other guides appears to be outdated, although the experiments I and others have conducted are not conclusive.

Base Options - Updated for .225
Long term runs require establishing a base. You cannot play leaderboard length runs mobile. The Farm House in Pleasant Valley is currently the best location. The house sports abundant storage space, the safest rabbit area, and the safest foraging location. You must check the area for a bear before moving out to collect your snares, but the risk of a bear attack is worth having 30kg of food on your doorstep.

Coastal Highway is popular for reasons unknown to me. Jack Rabbit Island has a wolf problem, has no workbench, and is remote. The rabbits are offset by wolves that will charge up to your door chasing them. Quonset requires permafire, or sleeping in clothing. Not an option, especially with a new bear friend. Homes with fireplaces in the Townsite are an option, but constant wolf threats while foraging and difficult bunny access makes it risky.

Mystery Lake’s Cabin is popular, although the nearby wolf can end runs easily. Stove, bed, and workbench make this viable, as well as proximity to deer, rabbits, and fishing huts. The availability of easy bear meat makes this location an option, although still inferior to PV Homestead in my view. Trapper’s Homestead risks wolf attacks while foraging. Travelling for bunnies puts you at risk for wolves and a bear. Trapper’s is also VERY remote, making travel and movement difficult. Not recommended. Hydro Dam requires clothing or perma fire. Not an option for long term play. The Camp Office does not have a base temperature that will warm you. Sleeping in beds or having the proper clothing will negate this.

The Factory is favored among various players:

It has the only workbench on the map, has indoor fire, warm beds on the upper level, and lots of storage. And due to the holes in the floor in the factory if you light a fire in the barrel it lights up the whole factory. -nTeeples

In addition to this, the Forge is quite near to this location. The forge is needed for making arrowheads and is only located in Desolation Point. Information for Forge crafting is not yet available.

Resource Management - Updated to .228
Long term runs test resource management. You are more likely to die of boredom from hibernating. Repetitive tasks become automated and you end up forgetting to drink water. Pay attention and double or triple check your water, particularly if you are doing something else (watching Game of Thrones).

The current state of the game does, in fact, allow you to survive forever. However, your life is going to be both very boring and very dangerous when you're down to a mag lens, no clothes, and no weapons or tools. You want to prolong this game state for as long as possible (unless you're a masochist, and if you're doing long leaderboard runs you probably are). So, with that in mind, every resource should be considered before consumption.

Consider maximal resource utilization. You can make mistakes, but every mistake will cost you (theoretical) days on the leaderboard. Don't be afraid to use a resource to save your life. In any case, there are easy ways to determine when you should and should not repair:

Repaired those jeans? That piece of cloth just cost you two bandages, which you could use to fight 2 wolves that you chased a deer into. You have potentially lost two wolves, two deer, four gut, and however many rabbits you can get from the snares you would have made with that gut. This is a minimum 60 day, and potentially 100+ day, loss from your run. Note that all you gained was an extra degree of warmth protection. Harvest jeans. Profit.

The amount of anti-septic, antibacterial meds, and OMB spawns in the world will limit the number of wolves you can fight. If the number of bandages (from cloth) on the map exceeds the amount of anti-septic and antibiotics, you can afford to use cloth in other ways. OMB bandages are a one stop shop for wolf bites, allowing you to go outside without carrying 0.5kg (1.1lbs) of anti-septic.

Others have suggested that the two cloth yield from harvesting wolfskin coats permits infinite bandages subject only to your anti-septic/OMB reserves. This theoretical argument ignores the reality that you will fight wolves and will not find their bodies, using cloth but not retrieving any.

With respect to looted clothing, it currently does not appear that there is any value in repairing non-crafted clothing during long runs. Crafted clothing requires assessing resources used to repair as against crafting a new item. If you use two wolf pelts to repair 25%, but four wolf pelts yields a new coat, the choice is obvious. This philosophy will get you through every patch. It's just basic logic.

There may situations where this is not so, particularly if the repair values change: if you are late in the run with no looted clothing, your wolfskin coat is at 50%, and you are starving, you may not have the hours to spare crafting a new coat. Do not lose the run because you wanted to save two pelts.

A final point on clothing: strip naked if you expect combat. Wolf or bear attacks will destroy your clothing and consume wasted resources in repairs. You will take extra damage though, so be wary of your health.

Tool Management

The following section has been included for academic purposes, even though as of Deep Forest the wood foraging mechanics have changed drastically. Sticks, branches, and limbs may now be harvested, the latter with a hatchet. Please take note, however, that the decisions one had to make about tools once before, still apply now.

There are competing views as to whether accumulating wood is better done by hatchet or by hand. Both views are presented here.

By hand: where actions can be done by hand, do it by hand. Every time you use a hatchet or knife you take days off your run. There will be moments when you MUST harvest wood in 12 minutes, instead of 30. These are cases when you need a hatchet, or you will die. Collecting all of the hatchets and subsequently ruining them will leave you with a lot of wood but no way to harvest frozen corpses, among other things. Harvest wood for your base by hand; use the hatchet in the field.

With tools: the other view is that you are going to use your hatchets eventually anyway. If you have five hatchets, you could use four of them to harvest enough wood for years. Use the remaining hatchet to build fires next to carcasses, if necessary, and repair with scrap metal. Maintaining hatchets with scrap metal will take away from knife longevity, but also makes the game less cumbersome. Foraging 30 minutes at a time to avoid blizzard damage is not a fun experience.

My experience thus far suggests that both views have their merits. Hand foraging preserves resources, but is monotonous and always dangerous. Tool foraging accrues wood faster, is slightly less dangerous (less exposure to elements, wolves), but consumes the tools. To date I have not played a game into such lengths to determine which method is preferable, but theoretically the hand method is superior. Practically, doing it by hand can lead to mistakes. I leave the decision to readers, and invite discussion on the matter.

However: no one likes harvesting bear meat by hand. In fact, maintaining a thawed bear requires fire, which increases meat degradation rates. You will struggle to get all of the meat by hand before the bear decays. Reduce damage to the knife by harvesting the bear when the kill is fresh, or warm, below 50% frozen status. Also, do not use knives or sewing kits to craft clothing. All you lose doing it by hand is time. Anything that takes time adds days. Relish the 50 hour wolfskin coat craft.

Rifle Ammo
Ammunition is the best return on resources. One bullet/arrow can kill a bear, net you a wolf and one (or more) deer, or save your life in an emergency. Theoretically, metal must be used to repair the rifle such that you can fire all the ammunition you have. In practice, you will find multiple rifles and not need scrap metal to fire all your bullets. You want to use bullets/arrows only in cases of wolf+deer combos. Bears are actually not ideal because of the wasted meat and the lack of use for the pelts.

One bullet/arrow will yield about a month’s worth of food, properly hibernated. The 10 gut from a bear, or 4+ gut from wolf/deer(s), will yield snares for an indeterminate amount of time. Forty-eight bullets will net you over 4 years’ worth of meat, not including the snares. Ammo is not the determining factor in run length.

You should remember this fact when you attempt to save a bullet/arrow at the cost of your life. If you are running around naked at 50% you should fire if you are in danger of being jumped by a wolf. A failed flare here = run over. If you are facing a situation with the potential for a double mauling, a failed flare could end your game. Make the decision beforehand: flare, shoot, or run. The second it takes you to think about it will end up in a wolf on your face, and often a missed shot.

Perishable and Non-Perishable Food
Some food items are non-perishable. Beef jerky, soda, granola bars, crackers, coffee, tea, and cat stalks will not decay. These items are your lifeline if things go wrong. Perishable foods include candy bars, MREs (strangely), pork and beans, tomato soup, and peaches. These items decay at a slower rate than meat but over hundreds of days they will disappear if not eaten. Consider leaving perishable items where you find them around the maps and come back for them when you need them. Looking at items (clicking on them) starts the decay rate immediately. Also consider leaving non-perishable food in a common resting place for long match runs. Having food and water in forward bases is a good safety net (Credit: Ungoliant33).

Matches
Degradation is most important with respect to matches. If you pick up every match pack on the map before day 100, you will not have matches after day 300. You need to mark in-game matches you find on a map, notepad, or word doc, and return for them later. Avoid looting containers that may yield matches. This is worth repeating: avoid looting containers that may yield matches (Credit: Kraelman). Plastic containers, metal containers, lockers, glove boxes, and bodies can yield matches. You will not find anything you need and you risk wasting matches.

Use matches to prep water and meat for hibernation cycles. You must cook meat, preferably at 50% condition – cooking adds 50% condition to raw meat condition (Credit: Abookcase), to ensure maximal caloric value over time. Wood and tinder are infinite due to hand gathering. Technically, a magnifying glass renders matches redundant but in practice lighting a fire inside your base is invaluable for avoiding accidents. You can continue living off a magnifying glass/firestrikers but the additional labour hampers the rate at which you accrue days.

On a liberal estimate, you need 1.5L (.39gal) per 24 hour period (technically 0.67 / 12 hours, .18gal/12 hours; or 1.34L/day, .35gal/day) but better to err on the side of caution. That is 150 liters (39.6 gallons) for every 100 days. You can make two litres (.5 gal) of water per hour of fire. It takes 20 minutes to melt and 10 minutes to boil. That is 50 hours of fire, or just over 33 Fir pieces, 50 Cedar pieces, or 428 sticks (max), to create water for 100 days. Matches are only good for a maximum of 200 days (100% x 0.5% per day), so make sure you have enough water if you are going to sleep away your matches. If matches are near expiry, you may consider boiling water just to use up matches, or starting fires outside to up your fire starting skill.

A pack of matches should get you through 3-4 hibernating sessions of 30 days. You will need to procure matches or use a magnifying lens/firestriker, to cook meat after your matches expire. Match runs will form the substance of your outdoor adventures. You can live off of rabbit meat without cooking it due to the current food poisoning system. In .244, rabbits yield gut. You can live off rabbits forever (contrary to real life!).

Map Navigation
You should know how to navigate to each and every point of interest on the map. Short, objective based resource runs avoid blizzard and encumbrance problems. Blizzards absolutely destroy your clothing. The freezing mechanic in the game does not distinguish between wearing clothes and not wearing clothes. You take the same amount of freezing damage naked as you do with all your clothes on. The amount of freezing damage you take in a blizzard is insignificant against the power of the force… er, the waste of resources it takes to repair. When blizzards hit, ditch the clothing. Your sewing kit will thank you.

Plan to carry enough resources to last a multi-day trip if you are doing match runs across zones. You do not want to be wandering around coastal highway with 40% condition, so bring food to keep that condition up. The only place you may want a bedroll is Hydro Dam. You might consider leaving a bedroll there permanently while you are making trips into Mystery Lake.

Surviving Blizzards
You should know what you will do if a Blizzard strikes at every second. If you are harvesting a wolf+deer kill, line the animals up so that you can get a straight line to shelter. Stand behind the wolf or deer such that the wolf, deer, and shelter are in a straight line. Do this BEFORE a blizzard comes. When a blizzard arrives, put yourself in the same position and simply walk forward. Do not be confused by changing blizzard directions.

If you find yourself hopelessly lost, find shelter and start a fire. You can start fires using trees, cliffs, or other objects to block the wind direction. Keep yourself warm using tea, coffee, or cookable food (pork and beans, peaches, tomato soup, etc.). If the blizzard is short you will emerge no worse for wear. If the blizzard goes on, you need to assess the risk of moving and wandering lost as opposed to staying put. If your fatigue is high and you do not have a bedroll or coffee, you will likely need to move. You are more likely to get lost on the ice in Coastal Highway, and the perimeter of the map in Pleasant Valley. Know where the closest caves are in PV – they save lives.

Blizzards can be your friend. Blizzards despawn all wildlife, except wildlife in immediate line of sight at the time of the blizzard. Use this to your advantage by raiding dangerous places (Derailment) during a blizzard.

.218 Zone Transitions
The new zone transitions pose unique challenges for long term gameplay.

Traversing the mine between PV to CH, and CH to DP requires light. Flares, torches, lanterns, or matches are your only options here. None of these resources are infinite, and each of them has other uses. Lantern fuel may be plentiful, but it cannot support infinite runs through the mine. Plan your travels accordingly: either move into PV or settle in PV for as long as possible, if already there. Once you exhaust the match supply, you will either need to move or keep using resources to travel through here.

The ravine poses a different challenge. If you are streaming, do not get distracted by chat walking across the log. You will die. There are enough resources in this zone to merit exploration, but similar to the mine, you want to be traversing this space as little as possible.

The expanded dam location gives a runaround to PV, effectively connecting all the maps in a circle. There are resources to be gathered here, including saplings, but this is most useful for avoiding CH and doing match runs straight to ML.

Tools
Prybars and can openers are an excellent source of scrap metal. Not using a can opener causes you to lose between 10-30% (approx.) of caloric value. One rifle bullet can yield 30kg (66.6lbs) of meat from a bear. In a competition between keeping that can opener and firing the rifle, the choice is easy. Prybars have limited uses: once you open every container on the map, you no longer need a prybar. Scrap prybars to repair knife/hatchet as needed.

The number of hatchet and knife spawns have a significant impact on how long your run goes before you must resort to doing everything by hand. Despite this, you want to save your scrap metal for the optimal use. If you have 4 knives, do not bother repairing them until you are on your last knife. This will take hundreds of days. Save that scrap metal!

.244 - Fishing tackle should be used to repair clothing where possible. Fishing for food is not a viable method for long runs.

Animal Corpses
Do not touch half-rotten deer corpses (models with ribs exposed) until you are ready to harvest them. The corpse begins to degrade once you inspect it. It will have about 1kg of meat on it at a fairly low condition, four hides, and two gut. There is no reason to right-click on it “just to check it”. If you leave it alone, it will stay there forever and be ready for when you need it.

The opposite is true of a “freshly killed” corpse. It is already decaying and nothing will stop that. You want to get those resources as soon as possible. Sometimes, due to weather or other conditions, that is an impossible task and you are forced to return another time. Examine the corpse before you do. This appears to tell the game that the corpse needs to be here the next time you come outside, and it will spare it from any cleanup routines. Cut 1kg of meat off of it just to guarantee that the corpse remains if possible (Credit Casei_Magnus).

Ditching Wolves
Wolf pathing is a disaster in its current state. You can break wolf aggro by reaching high ground that the wolf cannot or exiting its line of sight. This is an easy way to save a bullet/flare/torch. Learning which cliffs break aggro and which do not is a matter of practice. You will need to wait for the wolf to wander off/break its line of sight before moving again. Exercise caution if jumping off. A sprained ankle will result in a wolf bite and damaged clothing. Taking falling damage will cause damage to your boots (courtesy Kraelman, Ungoliant33).

A quick note on torches: never craft these things. You can find them lying around the map (especially in the mine), but do not waste resources crafting them. This may change in coming updates.

Ungoliant33 developed a great tactic for managing wolves. The current game build allows you to “cancel” when eating. The food remains in your inventory with the remaining calories. Eat meat (or beef jerky), and cancel near the end of the progress bar. You can continue to do this until you have a piece of meat in the 50 cal range, or lower. Enjoy your free wolf bait. Be careful doing this with low condition meat - you have a significant chance to contract food poisoning when you use the "cancel" mechanism.

Special Commentary by GreyRookTV: Using Houses to Ditch Wolves
Luring a wolf to the doorway of any building will cause the wolf to camp at that doorway for a time, waiting for your eventual departure into its waiting jaws. You can sleep for an hour and the wolf will resume its patrolling patttern. You can also use this mechanic to your advantage: any building with two doors (e.g. Quonset Gas Station) allows you to lose a wolf that is stalking you, or to lure a wolf away from a desired location. Be careful: cutting it too close can result in an unwanted encounter and if you are bit while entering the door, you will take clothing and condition damage.

In order to ditch the wolf: lure the wolf to the door facing away from your desired destination. Enter door one and immediately cut though the house to the door on the opposite end. When you exit from the second door, be certain to choose a trajectory that keeps the house between you and the wolf camping at the first door. In stalker mode it is possible to reacquire wolf agro if you are in its field of view or range of smell. Exercise caution. Doorways with a large porch and railing tend to provide a safer exit door because the wolf will need to kite around the railing, alerting you that the trick did not succeed.

This method could be used when a wolf is already in pursuit, however you may wish to be a bit less picky about which door you use. You should also keep in mind that if you accidentally select a building with only one door, you could be taking up residence there for a short time.

Check out a demonstration here: GreyRookTV[www.twitch.tv]

NOTE: Variables such as aggro range and door camping duration are regularly adjusted by the developers for balance purposes. Experimentation is necessary with every new build, whether patch notes explicitly state changes or not. Play scientist in experiment or testing runs first instead of risking leaderboard length runs, or watch TwitchTV streams to see what others are finding.

Hunting Bears
I often see players put 5 rounds into a bear. This is unnecessary. You can drop a bear with one bullet every time by waiting approximately an hour (foraging, resting, etc.) after shooting. Listen for the *thump* of the bear when you are in the black screen.

I have success luring bears back to the homestead. Note that this method is no longer necessary in .228 and up as a bear spawns outside the homestead, but the tactic is applicable across the maps. To lure a bear, step into aggro range. The bear will start walking towards you. Inch backwards. You need to stay in the safe zone: out of reach of the bear’s lunge, but still in range of its aggro. A slow walk backwards to the farmstead takes about 20 minutes, but you will be able to harvest the bear on your doorstep. This is crucial for avoiding lengthy harvesting sessions in the cold and ensuring you are able to harvest every piece of meat/gut.

Special Commentary by Casei_Magnus

Sparklers: It is possible to scare a wolf away from a kill with a flare or a torch. This is very dangerous. You lose the opportunity for a defensive flare but you also save a bullet. If you are out of bullets, this may be one of your dwindling options for food. Sneak up behind the wolf to minimize the risk of the wolf entering “rage mode” and attacking you no matter what is in your hand. Strip naked so that the wolf cannot damage your clothing and be healthy enough such that an attack will not kill you. Sometimes you can sneak up close enough and throw the flare at the wolf, scaring it away immediately. Other times it may turn and challenge you. Be careful and keep in mind that this ploy is a last resort measure.

Fly, You Fools!: This works if you are close to an indoor location. Again, you will want to be naked. Startle the wolf off of the deer and then run like hell for the indoors. If you make it inside safely, you win a brand new, half-eaten deer! The wolf will not go back to eating it, he will go back on patrol, which may be problematic for harvesting. Note that wolves in .228 will enter rage mode which you cannot outrun forever. If you attempt this method, have an exit strategy ahead of time. There is a chance that the deer corpse could despawn in the cleanup routines, so this method is not guaranteed.

Tick tock, the waiting game, a variation: kill time for thirty minutes inside after seeing a downed deer. Do this using time passing mechanisms (forage/water), or by physically waiting. Note that the deer may disappear, and recent changes to decomposition mean it will have less meat on it than if you pulled the wolf off it, particularly if you wait too long. In .236 this method no longer appears viable. The wolf will remain on the deer until the meat is exhausted.

Confused Canis Lupus: If you do not have a nearby indoor location handy, you can use the Fly You Fools method in combination with the Wolf Ditching strategy from above – pull wolf aggro, run for the nearest rock, disrupt his pathing, and wait for him to go away. This has the benefit of using zero resources but it can be dangerous, especially if you cannot get to your destination in time.

Spoils of War: You need: naked, high condition, knife or axe, bandages, anti-septic, a Liam Neeson hat, and a rumble in the belly. Run up to the wolf and dislodge him with extreme prejudice. This method has the disadvantage of using up exhaustible resources and it is exceptionally dangerous. It is therefore considered to be unviable for use in the long-term, however it is included for the sake of completeness.

Kumbaya: This method uses inexhaustible resources (if you are using the Magnifying Lens), but the conditions have to be right and the risk is high. You need equipment to start a single, hour-long fire (though you might want to have enough for two fires just in case, see below). The weather must be calm. Get directly behind the wolf. You might want to get naked just in case something goes wrong and the wolf attacks, so be sure you can survive if he does.

Get as close as you dare and build your fire. When it is lit, approach the wolf carefully from the rear. When he turns to challenge you, run back to the fire. If all went as planned, the wolf will follow, but will stop at the edge of the fire. Wait until the wolf flees and then harvest your deer! There is a chance the wolf will ignore the fire and jump you. Be prepared for this. There is also a chance that the wolf you scared away will be interested in your newly-harvested, bloody cutlets and find his way back, so a second fire near the deer harvesting site might be prudent.

Hibernation runs for the leaderboard can be dull. I download SniperBob’s maps and use paint to make notes on where I have and have not been, so that I need not remember. You can get 200 days in about four hours with these strategies but longer runs take time and it slows down. I play other games to mix it up. I try to stream hunting or match runs and do hibernation sessions off stream. I expect the increased resources from each patch will cause significant leaderboard shuffle in the coming weeks.

I currently hold the #5 position on Stalker leaderboards (#7 as of 10/5/2015) as a result of these strategies and tactics. I'm also aware that there are several players with long runs still going, so I expect that number to go down :(

Remember, never let your guard down in this game. There is no forgiveness. Good hunting.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the guide and that it has been helpful. Again, not possible without the kind contributions and discussions with others. Stop by the stream and say hi:

http://www.twitch.tv/pocketsllp

Tell me you love it, tell me you hate it. Tell me if you have different ideas. Collaboration is a wonderful thing, and criticism is welcome. Good luck out there.