Just finished Hard Survival: Here are my thoughts

[ConflicT Zv]

What actually makes Hard Survival more challenging?

There are a number of components that attribute to the added difficulty:

1. Slower health regeneration from healing sources
Pretty simple one, health takes longer to regenerate after consuming healing items. This makes finding appropriate times to heal much more important rather than healing mid combat, since any further damage taken will negate all regeneration effects. This is a good change in my opinion.

2. Slower stamina regeneration
Stamina regeneration is painfully slow in Hard Survival. It makes menial tasks like chopping trees and running distances even more tedious and more importantly it makes extended combat encounters even more difficult than they already are. Because it only takes a few weapons swings to completely drain your stamina bar, you very quickly find yourself having to wait for your stamina to regen. But while waiting you still need to be on the defensive, leaving you two options: blocking and dodging. Blocking slows your stamina regen even further and dodging usually requires sprinting, using more stamina. It becomes a pit that can be hard to climb back out of. I think this needs to be dialed back, or tied to other mechanics like being cold or low on energy.

3. Non-respawning loot containers
Any container that is opened by the player stays open and the loot does not respawn. Items found on the ground do respawn however, so you can still similarly abuse the system by frequenting spots with ground spawns, it just takes longer. This change on paper sounds worse than it is in practice. You still get plenty of loot and ammo if you know where to look. Still some tweaking needed to be done here for this to add any amount of difficulty.

4. Less food and pills from crates
You do get noticeably less food and pills from crates, but the ground spawns are static across all difficulties so same as above, if you know where to look this isn't really an issue. If they want this to be part of the survival difficulty, ground spawns also shouldn't respawn.

5. Enemy aggression
So here's the main part of what makes Hard Survival (or any difficulty really) challenging, ironically it has nothing to do with the "survival" elements. Once you start to anger the world by opening caves, killing cannibals or chopping trees, you will begin to get raided. Enemies spawn near your location and make their way directly to your position. These raids scale up quickly as days go by, increasing in frequency, number of enemies and variety of enemy types. It gets overwhelming at times. It can feel as though you are constantly being swarmed and bothered with very little breathing room to eat, drink, sleep and heal. Overall the spawn and raid system for enemies needs to be tackled more elegantly. Right now it's just horde mode 24/7.

6. Lower animal spawns
A step in the right direction from the default animal spawn rate, there are much fewer animals. Deer and moose are still pretty common in certain areas, I would take this value down even lower to make hunting feel more challenging and rewarding.

7. Hunger/thirst/energy drain
These meters drain a bit quicker and take more resources to replenish. 4 cooked meat/fish/limbs to fill an empty hunger bar, 9 sips of water to fill an empty thirst bar. This doesn't really add to the difficulty as these are not scarce resources to come by. It's more just tedious and annoying and only really affects you when you are constantly getting interrupted by enemies. The main problem with this system is that there will never be a shortage of food, when there is no downside to being a cannibal yourself. What we need here is the calorie system from The Forest Hard Survival. A reason to care about what, when and how much you are eating, that directly effects the growth or diminishing of character stats.

Conclusion:
I finished the main story on day 35. I'd say probably 80% of it was spent building a base while being under-geared, which was the main challenge (and most fun) part of the playthrough. Sadly Hard Survival does not place much more emphasis on any of the survival elements absent from the other difficulties. Many of the same issues are present leaving this mode quite lacking for players looking for a truer survival experience.

[KEEB]

yeah, I was hoping for a challenging survival experience, the combat isn't satisfying enough for me to justify the harder difficulty, as everything just 2 shots you rather than being a challenge. Kiting and bow use feels like the only viable strategy as you do such little damage and take so much more. parrying with melee just won't get you through a fight (not to mention inconsistent attack telegraphing). I was hoping for more depth to combat but all this difficulty did was make me get good with the bow and kite good. the only real option with the caves was to sneak past the enemies, because clearing them out is such a resource sink (or time consuming if I used the bow).

the lack of loot re-spawns is good, but they didn't commit to it so it ends up just frustrating rather than difficult. all they did was make the grind more annoying, rather than different or non-existent. I was hoping for a Project Zomboid kinda deal where if you want to last long, you eventually have to start growing your own stuff (since all the food goes off or gets looted up). But there are no interesting crops to grow, other than stuff for meds and stamina.

Shame they haven't changed anything in all this time. I was hoping for a good challenge because there is potential in the combat system, it just hasn't been harnessed.

[jswarpaint]

This is just now it was with The Forest - The Warm Winter Jacket does noting to help anything this is an indicator they are serious about NOTHING that has to do with survival... or anything