500 days in the cold, empty world of The Long Dark – part 1

Steam tells me that I've played The Long Dark for over 1200 hours over the last several years. I've jumped in & out of other games but TLD has been a consistent mainstay. I can't get away from it.

It's a survival game set in the eternal winter of a post-apocalyptic Canadian island (named Great Bear Island) where you're the only survivor, battling against the elements and the wildlife for as long as possible. The world is too cold for you to just walk around forever; shelter and warmth are critical otherwise you'll die in hours.

You'll initially get by with lightweight clothing, racing between man-made shelters where you can eat packaged snacks and canned goods to avoid starvation, but eventually you'll need to embrace what's available from Mother Nature; spending more time hunting & gathering, and upgrading your clothing using natural hides from the animals you've killed along the way. In the Long Dark, the only goal is to survive as long as possible, and since permadeath is enabled, one major mistake might end your run forever.

500 days is often seen as the 'finale' of any Long Dark run; if you're able to survive that long then you can essentially survive forever, and it's an achievement that is taken fairly seriously in the TLD community. If you've done that, you've practically mastered the game.

The Long Dark 500 days - Camp Office, Mystery Lake

The difficulty level of your TLD run is the main way you can set the tone of how you play: changing it drastically changes the amount of hostile wildlife, the type of loot you can find and the harshness of the environmental conditions – which can either make your life in Great Bear frantic & uncertain or peaceful & straightforward. But regardless of play style, ticking off 500 days in any difficulty still shows a level of perseverance and determination.

There's no denying that the game mechanics can get repetitive after the first 100-200 days; there's only so much you can do in a cold, harsh, mostly-lifeless game world, so most experienced TLD players end up defining their own goals. Kill every single bear & moose spawn in the world. Fill up the jerry cans you find with oil generated from cooking the fish you've caught.

With no goal but to survive, you really do have to choose your own adventure. What's always grabbed me about TLD is the mindfulness of just living in the game world draws out in people. The 'cosy' atmosphere of setting up your base with chairs and rugs while a blizzard rages outside will work for some players, while others will crank up the custom difficulty settings to truly test their skill. You can get seriously attached to your run, especially if you have the intent of playing it without an end date in mind. This game often generates the most heartfelt writing I've seen about a computer game, simply paying homage to a game world that dominated their lives for several hundred hours or more through their personal memories (give this and this a read if you like).

Roleplaying and execution

As for me, I've enjoyed the quasi-cosplaying element of a lone survivor, journalling his thoughts using the in-game note function every few days when he has a chance to collect his thoughts. The solitude element of the Long Dark is hard to avoid; there is hardly any dialogue apart from the occasional complaint of being too cold/hungry/thirsty/tired (although if you want, the Wintermute story mode has plenty of characters to interact with) – and I've found that the journaling aspect is a reasonable way for a lonely survivor to avoid going completely insane.

I almost exclusively play on the Interloper difficulty, which was the hardest difficulty until mid-2024 when the brutal Misery mode was released. On Interloper, loot in general is hard to find, most high-end clothing and food items don't exist at all, and the overall temperature of the game world gets colder over time, affecting how far you can travel without freezing and requiring you to craft good clothing as a high priority.

The Long Dark 500 days - Blackrock Prison, Blackrock

Nobody would be advised to play on Interloper when starting to play The Long Dark, of course. The world of Great Bear Island is formidable at first, and the variety of regions with their unique challenges mean that if you're unprepared in the slightest your run is over. At the very least, you need to learn the region maps to a general extent if you're going to attempt the harder difficulty levels – at the very least knowing where the main shelters are (and the best paths between them), knowing where to find forges & workbenches, and where certain types of wildlife can be found.

I also enjoy 'loper because of the urgency to execute on a regular basis, otherwise your game run is over. Interloper forces you into forward planning; you need to kill that deer otherwise there's no decent food source in easy access. You need to gather more wood otherwise this fire will die out and you'll freeze too much and then you'll die before getting to the next cave. You need to carefully avoid this bear seeing you, because your arrows are all broken and if it mauls you, you're done for. And so on and so forth.

So yes, the game is completely out to get you (that's the point) but if you put some preparation into what you're doing, you'll stand a good chance. You'll learn what kind of contingency plans work for you, such as carrying a few pieces of coal so you can always warm up with a fire in the toughest conditions, or always having an emergency stim (or two) to get out of a tough situation with timberwolves or a rampaging moose. It's all manageable, at the cost of your precious inventory space.

My 500 day run – the first days

Every TLD run is a hugely personal journey, and many players love sharing key moments & experiences of their survival (or lack of). I've relied on my in-game journaling, and some select screenshots to recall my time during my current run and selected some of my favourite moments of the run.

On Interloper, you get a random spawn – and only in the more challenging regions. However, I was lucky enough to spawn in Ash Canyon, the mountainous region in the north-east of Great Bear:

Needless to say, I was pretty lucky. Matches and a hammer on day 1 is a great start, and heading towards the backpack in the gold mine on day 2 (+5kg of permanent inventory space) was even better. When the cougar was introduced, in Ash Canyon it was placed outside the natural exit of the gold mine meaning that you couldn't easily grab the backpack and exit Ash Canyon efficiently unless you were prepared to kill a cougar, so grabbing it before it spawned on day 10 was a real blessing.

My path out of Ash Canyon was clear & known to me – zip down through Timberwolf Mountain then loot the plane crash, which has a good chance of clothing items lying around.

After this point, the run followed a fairly standard trajectory familiar to all experienced Long Dark players – get all of the various items to make a bow & some arrows, so you can defend yourself from predators and start killing big game for long-term food survival. To do that, you need a hammer to forge arrowheads, you need to cure some birch & maple saplings for the bow & arrow shafts (which can only be cut by using a hacksaw, or by forging a hatchet) and curing some guts from small game that will act as the bow's string.

As you go, you need to start curing hides so that you can craft better clothing to stay warm and better protected (remember, the game world is getting colder as you go), while at the same time you're running all over Great Bear looting all of the major spots and staying out of trouble.

It's at this point that you're incentivised to be as efficient as possible – how many places can you trek to and loot in a day, while also being in a good position to move on to the next region? It feels like you're constantly solving a 'Seven Bridges of Konigsburg' problem, so that you aren't wasting time, retracing your steps unnecessarily, and digging into the reserve food that you're carrying around.

The 7 bridges of Konigsburg, Prussia

You can easily spend 50-60 days traversing the entire game world, visiting all of the major regions. I ended up travelling through the more central regions of Mystery Lake and Pleasant Valley several times, and planned on 'loops' that visited a few regions, bringing back high-value loot to my home base in the Camp Office in Mystery Lake. The loops included:

I left Bleak Inlet and Blackrock for later – you don't want to be fending off timberwolves without a bow & plenty of arrows.

Infact, it took me until day 81 to make my way into the fabled Bleak Inlet workshop, where I was able to use the milling machine and repair my tools:

Round 2, i.e. building up the bases

So what do you do once you've visited all of the regions, you've crafted some pretty good clothing and you're feeling pretty confident in moving around the world?

Well, you visit all those places again.

Instead of the Contiki-like whirlwind tour from the first 60-80 days, it was time to properly build up some bases with food, water and cured stuffs. It's a proper focus on hunting big game, while at the same time looting the out-of-the-way areas. If you're feeling particularly relaxed, you can use some of that charcoal and map out parts of the region you're spending time in.

All of those little trips become mini-holidays in a way – you work on the achievement of building up your stockpiles, spend 10 to 15 days hunting whatever comes around, and all the while the world of Great Bear puts a smile on your face in the oddest moments.

The bear on the tree

Day 100 was spent in the Deer Clearing area of Timberwolf Mountain:

The Long Dark 500 days - day 100 - bear 1

The Long Dark 500 days - day 100 - bear 2

Fun note: that fire underneath the bear kept me perfectly warm while I was on the tree branch harvesting it up!

The first cougar kill

I mixed up the base stockpiling with other mini-goals along the way, such as hunting a cougar for the first time, selecting the Wood Lot in Mystery Lake on day 149 as my first hunting ground:

The beachcombing boat

And I remember the confusion on my face when doing some casual beachcombing along the Crumbling Highway, and seeing an actual boat washed up on shore. And it was lootable!

The Long Dark 500 days - Crumbling Highway coastline, shipwrecked boat 1

The Long Dark 500 days - Crumbling Highway coastline, shipwrecked boat 2

A lot of people say that The Long Dark is all about the early game – the panicked rushing around of finding the best loot as fast as possible, making snap decisions of which part of the world to visit based on your capabilities, and balancing the risk-reward of battling the weather, your health, and the mere potential of finding the next critical item to help you on your journey.

But the unique memories from Great Bear Island tend to come from later on – when your adventures become more of a meander, and the story unfolds in front of you when you least expect it. You also feel a lot more attuned to the wider world as hunting becomes your primary food source.

I'll share some other logs & screenshots of the rest of my 500 days journey in another post. For now, I hope you enjoy your own Long Dark run, and if you haven't gotten into it, maybe give the game a go yourself!