Weight to Benefit Ratio
Everything in The Long Dark has a weight, but the items we’re most interested in talking about for our survival tips are food and clothing. These are items that will provide you benefits, though some are more valuable than others based on how much benefit they provide per kilogram. Since you can only carry 30kg before you become encumbered, you must make tough choices about what to carry and what to leave behind.
Let’s look at outer torso clothing for a moment; say you decide to craft a Bearskin Coat. If we look at its in-game stats, we can see that it weighs a whopping 5kg and provides us with a 6-degree Celsius boost to our warmth when at 100 percent condition. That’s 1.2-degrees Celsius of warmth per kilogram. On the other hand, the Wolfskin Coat weighs only 3kg, but also only provides 4-degrees Celsius of warmth. The math works out to 1.33-degrees Celsius of warmth for every 1kg. You could argue that the Wolfskin Coat gives you more bang for your buck, but clothing is complex in The Long Dark, so it’s not all about the warmth bonus. Still, it’s good to know.
The same can be applied to food. Let’s say that you have a Military-Grade MRE on you. That bit of food weighs 0.5kg and provides you with 1,750 calories. At the same time, Pinnacle Peaches are also 0.5kg per can, but only provide you with 450 calories. Once you do the math, you can see that taking one Military-Grade MRE with you is going to give you the benefit of several cans of Pinnacle Peaches. This should help you decide what to eat on the spot, and what to carry with you when you travel.