I was reading through The Long Dark’s (TLD) wiki the other day, when I came across the missing piece of the game’s puzzle: it’s okay to starve. Mind. Blown.

Fundamentally, you die in TLD when your Condition meter reaches zero. There are four separate meters (Needs) that affect the Condition meter: Warmth, Fatigue, Thirst, and Hunger. If any of those meters reach zero, you start losing Condition. However, you can still do things while a Need is zero, e.g. chop wood while hungry or thirty or cold. When at zero, the Condition loss per hour is:

• Warmth -20%
• Fatigue -1%
• Thirst -2%
• Hunger -1%

While you technically regain Condition as long as all four Needs are above zero, the gain is like 1% per hour. Meanwhile, if you sleep in a bed for 10 hours, you can regain up to 65% of your Condition bar in one go. The requirements? Drink some water before bed and consume ~600 calories. That’s it.

The exact calorie cost depends on a lot of variables.

To understand the implications, here is a paragraph from the wiki:

2800 calories would be consumed during 14 hours harvesting carcasses. But if no calories are available (Hunger is empty), about 15% of condition would be drained instead. Only 600 calories are required during 10 hours of fully replenishing sleep. So eating only 600 calories prior to sleeping can maintain a character with only briefly lowered condition taken as a trade-off. This is a great reduction from the 3,400 calories that would have been required to keep hunger satisfied the whole day.

In other words, instead of consuming X calories a day, you really only need ~600.

I always thought it was a bit too gamified how I had to maintain such a large calorie intake for normal things, but I chalked it up as one of those weird genre requirements. Turns out that was not the case. So, if you were like me thinking The Long Dark was a bit too brutal of a survival simulation with the constant juggling of resources… just stay hungry, my friends.