What is this guide?
The intended point of this guide was to address the key concepts of survival, the problems and their resolution and to help anyone finding the game difficult.

Who is this guide for?
The intended audience are beginners, begginers that want to learn the essential concepts of the game without grinding for it. Experienced players are also advised to read the guide, rate it and use the comments for suggestions, but remember the guide is for beginners.

Why do you need to be warm?
Warmth is a key factor to survival in the snowy wilderness of the Long Dark. You need to stay above 0 warmth, otherwise you will start to lose condition, which is essentially your health. Another defect of being cold is getting hypothermia, but this is rarer than losing health, as you will need to be 0 warmth for a durated amount of time, which means you will not immediately succumb to hypothermia immediately after starting to freeze, another problem is frostbite[b/b], which is caused by not having a part of the body covered, and being in cold conditions, frostbite will limit your condition by 10% permanently.

How to combat freezing
You will need to stay warm to survive in The Long Dark. To stay warmth you can simply stay indoors, but you cannot stay inside for the whole game, as you will need to travel for neccessities, such as food and fuel for fires. During some periods of the day, there are blizzards, horrible snow storms added to send you into The Long Dark, so steer clear of them. During the finer conditions of the day (no storms), you will slowly lose warmth, but it is not at a devestating rate, thus you are able to survive for adequate amounts of time outside. In the situation that you are imminent death, you should start a fire, inside or out (inside more effective). If you are able to warmup indoors without a fire, do not waste the materials needed, instead make the fire when you are in short supply of food or water.

Clothing
The clothing you acquire at game start is inadequate. You start your journey with some worn down clothes in need of repair. Premium clothing can be found primarily where you would also find a rifle, except not in all places, for example, you would not find high end clothing at the lookout in Mystery Lake, as the gun is only mounted on a rack and there is no safe nearby (where you find the best equipment), but assume you went to the Trapper's Homestead, you would have a chance of scoring some quality clothing, as there is a safe within the building. Another example would be the Carter Hydro Dam, ontop of that, you can find quality clothing in non civillian buildings (exceptions of Trapper's Homstead, and a few others) You should maintain relatively high conditon on all of the clothes you use, just don't waste all of your sewing kits and cloth on clothes you are planning on scrapping once you acquire superior clothing.

What to eat and when to eat?
From the beginning of the game, you should start to harvest animals corpses for their meat, aswell as try and kill some yourself (only shoot at wolves and bears), this is because, natural foods, like meat, do not last as long as processed foods.

When should I start hunting/fishing?
You should start to hunt and go fishing once 1 day has gone past. You should not waste ammo on deers, only wolves and bears. You can use flares and campfires to make wolves run in the opposite direction to you, this sounds like a good defensive technique, but you can use that to force a wolf to attack a deer, then you have just have to go back after the wolf and scare it off again, scoring you an entire deer. (~8kg of meat). Fishing is a very consistent food source as you cannot run out of fish within a fishing hut (as I have noticed), you can spend 2-5 hours fishing and have enough fish to survive 24 hours, and still have some left.

Carnivore vs Herbivore
only applies to difficulties medium or high
When you consume wolf or bear meat, you have a chance of being infected with intestinal parasites, which will kill you inside out. Currently, the sole cure for them is to drink some herbal tea and use some medication (I believe it is antibiotic). Reishi mushrooms are only found in some regions of each map, making them uncommon to come across randomly.

Thirst
Right from when you make your first fire, you should start to boil snow then boil it again, creating potable water that should CERTAINLY be the only type of water you should drink. Potable water can be obtained by draining toliets and basins, heating snow over a fire source, using purification tablets on unsafe water (appears to be a colour of yellow and green) or found over the map in the form of a bottle.

The equipment used for hunting and fishing are:

• Hunting Rifle
  
• Survival Bow
  
• Fishing Tackle (aslong side a hatchet, prybar or knife)
  
• Snares

The Hunting Rifle
The hunting rifle is generally the best weapon in The Long Dark, it is used to kill game at a range, therfore avoiding any defense techniques the target animal has avaliable. Ammunition for the weapon is also rather common. You should use the hunting rifle against only wolves and bears, as you can find rabbit and deer corpses that have been previously been killed by wolves.

The Survival Bow
The bow is an end game weapon, that can be crafted or rarely found at some locations. Using the bow is harder than perceived, it has no crosshairs or iron sights to aim effectively, thus you would have to imagine where the arrow goes, there is also quite alot of sway when aiming, making the difficulty curve alot steeper.

Fishing Tackle
Fishing is one of the most effective ways of getting food from the land in The Long Dark, fishing tackles can be made from cheap resources or found from locations like the Camp Office in Mystery Lake. When going out to fish, you would need a tool to break the ice then use the tackle to fish. If you are even slightly lucky, you will be able to gather an enormity of calories even in one day of fishing. You should be very cautious when fishing, because hours go past in merely seconds, which means, you can die from hypothermia (cold weather) or be stuck in a storm within seconds of initiating a prolonged session of fishing.

Snares
Snares are used to catch small game. They are best used to obtain extra meat ontop of a more reliable source of calories. The snare isn't the most rapid way of getting food, as rabbits do not have much meat, and if you do not put the snare in the correct place, you will not get any rabbits. You should put the snares in areas you see rabbits commonly in, and with a bit of luck, you are able to get a rabbit while doing another task.

Tips

• When hunting, if you are waiting for your prey to walk towards you (for an easier shot or not burn calories going to find the animal), you can create a snow shelter out of 10 sticks and 3 cloth. This will increase the "feels like" temperature and allows you to fire out of it, but be weary, you are still vulnerable to the cold and animals.

The Long Dark wiki[thelongdark.wikia.com]
1[hinterlandgames.com]
2[encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com]
3[encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com]
4[//]
5[www.ianadams.ca]