@gbeeTen

You see the hours in the EPIC game launcher if you click on the three dots in the lower right hand side.

I have roundabout 25 days on PTS as well as 25 days Live, ONE playthrough each. The lesser time for PTS compensated by tests (messing around) and some game-losses by crashes. I assume that my playtime alone is more than most of the DEVs have as "game experience". And thats likely valid for any other player.

@oldgrumpybastard

How is it killing it?? It stops people from buying high priced equip to do a job and then just selling it and getting what they paid. It forces a player to think about their actions and purchases.

If "price vs performance" would have a positive correlation - I agree. Example whats not exactly working: See the price of a Derry 45 and what it can do with respect to a Voron AE or Azov 53/64.

And plainly from game mechanics point of view spoken - I'd personally would have liked a "depeciation per mile/hour". So if you buy something and use it once, you get a better resale price than something you have already driven for days & weeks. Something like 10% base as margin for the reseller plus e.g. 1% per hour of uptime with that truck "up to 50%" in total.

Again, I do not complain that a hardcore mode exists. My complaint is basically, that the game mechanics with "price vs. performance", "fuel consumption vs performance" are quite broken as it currently does not really matter. You do not like it? Sell it. Fuel economy is junk? Refuel, its free. And if you do not like to drive back yourself as you maybe low on fuel -> recall.

For me "missing" as an intermediate option - a recall costs cash. Ok. But if you run out of fuel - why no "road assistance onsite" charging an extra fee to bring you some fuel?

I like the hard mode. I've been waiting for him since the beginning. I would like the cost of fuel and evacuation to the garage to grow in proportion to the regions. The more you play , the more money you earn. And the fuel with the evacuation should cost the further away, the more. Ideally, it would be great to have no evacuation at all.

Ah, the forums finally let me log in after a week of being locked out for some odd reason.

Whoop! Hardmode! Very glad to see it surface at last, and by-and-large it looks like it's following a bunch of the paths I'd hoped it'd take.

I wanted to drop in a couple of extra suggestions to the format however:

• I can completely understand the point of the limited contest runs - without that limitation, contests become an endless money-farm in a mode that is all about restricting your finances. What I would suggest however is - rather than just a 3x count on the contests - how about have it so that bronze, silver and gold rewards are only available to claim one time each, so you can attempt each contest as many times as you want, but you only ever get one payout per tier. That way you aren't locked out from getting gold eventually (and you can potentially burn valuable resources trying to get it - you'd have to weigh up whether it's worth the cost you're pouring in from fuel/repairs chasing that shiny trophy and payout).
• That, or for an even tighter reward that doesn't reward you more for getting each medal in turn than getting gold first time, have it so that you only get rewarded the difference between tiers if you later step up from silver to gold, etc.

Also...

• One BIG thing I'd like to see is some kind of limit on switching out upgrades (specifically addons). Without anything, it means you can chop-and-change truck configurations endlessly to suit circumstance, which I feel doesn't really fit the Hardmode vibe.
• One possibility might be - have it so that upgrades cost a fraction (say 50% of their base cost... maybe 25%?) to uninstall once they're installed (to account for the engineers' time to refit a truck). This would be somewhat self-balancing, as cheaper upgrades would be cheaper to swap out, and free upgrades like high/low saddles would be free to swap around (as they probably should be, for a minor adjustment of position).

That would make it so you'd tend to specialize each vehicle to a particular role, rather than just using the Tayga for every role, droppng into the nearest garage for a quick, free change of clothes every 20 minutes.

• As an aside to that point, tyres should probably be handled differently - it shouldn't cost money to swap them out, but you probably shouldn't be able to sell tyre sets at all once you've bought them... who would want to buy used, beaten up sets of tyres?
• I suppose that could extend to engines/suspension/gearboxes too...
  -- Perhaps have everything except addons be freely swappable, but unsellable...
  -- and as above, have addons sellable, but cost money to uninstall proportional to their base value.

Oh, also, are these hardmode values going to be accessible for modders? I get the feeling I might want to crank up the cost of repair points, and possibly fuel, to ramp the logistical challenge even more for my own tastes.

Aaaand, one additional suggestion while I'm here:

The deploy costs should be weight-based, not fixed - as I see it, you're effectively paying a fee to ship a truck from one place to another, so it should cost a LOT more to chuck a Pacific P16 on a container ship from Michigan to Russia than a dinky Lo4f.
Should still keep a multiplier for inter-regional deployments compared to inter-garage... probably a bigger one, at least 5x.

To that end, I'd say recovery costs should probably just be a multiple of weight too, rather than being a set cost per truck-class. Again, recovering a Tatarin should cost more than recovering a Lo4f.

Hi Devs,

Thanks for doing this. Can’t wait for the official original release. This breathes life into many of the original mechanics of this great game. Specifically- it make scouts more important for finding resources, and it balances out gas guzzling powerful trucks by making the player weigh fuel consumption ratings of engines (looking at you always on awd/diff lock trucks).

• I think the cost for moving non-continent native trucks between Americas and Russia should cost even more than what you’ve already planned

• Don’t know if this is possible d/t the game mechanics, but paying a cost for destroying property (gates/fences, parked vehicles) should be a thing!

Can’t wait!

While I would gladly activate most of hard mode if there was a difficulty customisation menu instead of an all-or-nothing hard mode I don't see myself bothering with hard mode as it is, mainly for one reason:
Since contests become unavailable and other repeatable content does not exist the maximum money earned on any given map has a hard limit. Meanwhile, the cost incurred while playing on that map is potentially infinite.

What that does is urge me to get the profitable tasks done - and without adjusting payouts some tasks certainly do not qualify for that - and immediately move on to the next map. It also urges me to only buy and deploy a very narrow set of trucks since quite a few trucks offer considerably worse bang-for-buck value. Otherwise I increase the risk of running out of money for good, ending that playthrough.
There might be people who see that as part of the challenge, but I see it as turning a game into actual work. So, not my cup of tea.

@CarebearNr1 said in SnowRunner Hard Mode:

@idiocracy said in SnowRunner Hard Mode:

"Refueling in a garage is disabled."
Allow players to refuel at garage, like many would IRL. But you have to go pick up, pay for and bring fuel back to garage every time the tank at the garage goes empty.

Or, you know, you could just buy and place a fuel tank near the garage?

Some garages already have that on the lot. Just needs to be usable.

@gbeeTen and @Albazz, you can change your game mode on existing save by editing it by Notepad.
This method works only on PTS!
The game should be off.

1. Make a backup of your save.
2. Open your save file by any texteditor like Notepad (I am using VS Code).
3. Press ctrl+f and find "hiddenCargoes".
4. Right before the "hiddenCargoes" place this "isHardMode":true,.
5. It should look like this If what happened does not look like the above, then most likely Hardmode will not turn on.
6. Done. Your old save game is now Hardmode.
   

I'll likely try Hard mode after I am done my Mod Only playthru as the rest of the slots are taken with my main save from launch and 2 other Challenge types, but I do have some issues with the way HM is set up as of now. Here's hoping that there will be changes by the time I get to it. I'll break it down like many have others and explain my likes and dislikes with as it is.

1. No markers? How would one know where to go unless they already know the map? I just don't understand how it is written.

2. These costs are fine in late game, but in early game, they are brutal.

3. Nope.. make it cost much more. I prefer to do manual loading.

4. Yup.. maybe even a reduced cost based on percentage of fuel left, damage to vehicle, etc. so that it may even cost you to sell it. (or sell for $0)

5. No. Just no. Deleting trailers should be for when the game glitches (and it does that a lot). Trailers should never have been sold for the purchase price. There should always have been a reduced cost for them. Trailers should be sold at 50% or lower of the purchase price minus whatever resources they may have been carrying. If the trailer was not full of fuel/repair points, then you have to pay to fill it back up, as it were. Purchased fuel trailers should never have come full anyway.

6. Garage repairs should cost less than if you repaired in the field. Let's say I pop just one tire on a scout. 1500 to repair it if I go to garage vs. 50 if I change it in the field. Something wrong here.

7. This should be after 3 Failed attempts in a row. Reset by getting a bronze.

8. Yes. Fuel costs money.

9. Resupply zones are great.. if the players can find them. So many posts talk about how there are none on the map to use. Something wrong here.

10. Travelling from Michigan to Alaska would cost money and sending out a crew to go get that vehicle would too.

11. Host should decide mode regardless of what the client picked. This would allow Normal Mode players to try out HM. But there's a catch: what happens to the cargo on the trailers of clients if they get disconnected from the game unexpectedly? Do they just vanish along with the cargo never to be seen again or does the host take control of said trailer? This is the biggest issue with MP imo. Host trailers and Client trailers react differently on disconnects. If I am the host, I would make trailers for everyone to use just in case. If I am client, I ask for a trailer to use because of how unstable the game is.

Overall, if the game was more stable, then HM would be a good idea. I've had trees reach down, pick up my truck (Azov 6) and flip it into the forest while driving along a paved road. Had my truck get stuck in various signs and fences to either destroy or flip the truck. Something wrong here. This game needs a few things before HM will work out right, but there has been progress. Being able to turn off the pulled truck is a big thing for me. Now I can stop it from trying to flip me when I turn. We still need the ability to have more control over the steering of the pulled vehicle. If I pull a truck over, I want it to steer away from me, not to me. When pulling, I want to lock pulled vehicle's wheels to straight so it doesn't cut the corner. I really want to like this game more than I do, but with it as it is, I would not say it is fully at a 1.0 level yet. Fix the glitches and we will see.

I will start my hardmode game when it goes to stable version, so i can not say anything about balance.

But i wanted to say, thanks for adding it to the game!

A small request .
The in game fuel station billboard price should be the same as the price you pay .

What about day/night cycle ? I don't see anything about possibility to skip time or not.

Hello @frog92, it's not possible to skip time in Hard Mode.

@Madorren said in SnowRunner Hard Mode:

Hello @frog92, it's not possible to skip time in Hard Mode.

However, if you exit the game several times, the time of day you first entered will remain for a long time .... I tried it more than once, I have been playing in the PTS Hard mode for more than 24 hours so I speak from experience.
Obviously this is not the case indefinitely, but you can win a lot with it ...
But this was already the case in the Live game ...

@Tiger1357 said in SnowRunner Hard Mode:

Overall, if the game was more stable, then HM would be a good idea. I've had trees reach down, pick up my truck (Azov 6) and flip it into the forest while driving along a paved road. Had my truck get stuck in various signs and fences to either destroy or flip the truck. Something wrong here

I made a post 'why don't you give me Hard Mode? Very same sentiments, these tress are more like the Triffids, or land base Octupi or Dangerous Land Base Attack Squid.

I would try the hardcore mode, but I find it hard to grasp the relevance when you see the state of the game, these many bugs, its very astonishing and very messy physics: trucks that get knocked over for nothing, trucks and trailers that drift on tarmac as soon as you pick up a little speed and even in a straight line when it is impossible to control the speed in Auto mode, grip problem, weight problems, bouncing trucks and trailers, Scout so light it looks like we're driving remote-controlled miniatures, low impassable tree branches, etc ...

We don't even have a crane that can lift a truck!

I am very skeptical, there will be a lot of frustration ...

The first thing i would have added to hardmode was no winching to anything except large trees or broken tree stumps or cut stumps . I would make winching take a lot longer time wise . The winching has never changed since spintires .

@THE_MASK
I still think my earlier suggestion could be a good middle-ground for avoidance of spiderman-winching.
As others have previously suggested, only allow the winch to extend from the center of the front bumper (where it's actually mounted).
Require that the engine be turned off to attach to a winch point, then be turned back on again to run the winch. I think that would retain the utility of winches while reducing the ability to endless exploit them as a basic traversal mechanic.