Sakhal update Nov 2024. Review of my review!! TLDR - Sakhal isn't a great addition, and it may not be worth your £$ money.

Updated late November 2024 as I have played the Sakhal DLC a lot, and feel like I have probably had enough of it now. Here are the criticisms of Sakhal and the other changes that came with version 1.26.

1 - the cold mechanism. It's unrealistic, and essentially you are going to be lighting fires a lot to stay alive. Even the best insulated clothing does not keep you warm for long. Eating warm food and drinking warm liquids does not maintain or increase your temperature beyond the baseline. Putting warm or hot items in your inventory is the same. The only way to get one, two or three + marks next to your temperature is to sit by a fire. There is no wind chill. If you heat a stove and a room up, it's stone cold and then freezing as the fire goes out. However - sit in a car with an engine running - you'll stay warm all day, even if the car has no doors! It's almost the same with the boat- sit in it and get it running, and most of the time your temperature will stay constant or occasionally increase. This is an open RIB in the subantarctic.... I wish the real things kept you as warm. Basically it's a very poorly executed mechanism.

2 - the boat. No cargo capacity at all. Nil. Zero. Sweet FA. You can't drop a rucksack on the floor and motor off, the rucksack stays where you places it on the shore. Easily stolen as all you need is a spark plug and maybe a water bottle of fuel. Can't be camouflaged or otherwise dragged up a beach and hidden. There is no way to row or paddle them. I also have a feeling they despawn if not used.

3 - snow. You can put it into a pot, the filter bottle, or a bottle and it melts straight away. Unless you filter it, you get heavy metal poisoning, but you can cook all your food in melted snow with no issues at all. I wonder if the devs have ever tried to melt snow for water? It's painfully slow to do, and quite energy thirsty. The real life solution is to look for chunks of ice. There's none of this in game - scoop the water into your pot, and bingo it turns into water. After all the unreal fire lighting you need to do to stay warm, this goes to the other end of the scale of unrealism. Oh and you can't use salt water for cooking either.

4 - wolves. No matter how many of them you kill in a wolf spawn area, they keep coming back. Their flesh now has a chance of giving you salmonella even when cooked (60% i think). You can only escape them by getting in a building or on a car, or by spawning out quickly. There are also wolves that approach you silently and bite your bum, then you really are in trouble if you are solo, and don't have a decent firearm or access to a building. Can you climb one of the millions of trees to escape them? No you can't, the game won't let you. Why is this an issue - because a lot of areas on Sakhal away from the coast are wolf infested, and it's been the biggest cause of deaths in my playtime.

5 - this isn't just Sakhal, it's the overall game. You can log out and respawn on any of the three maps on the Official branch. Why is this an issue? Well on Sakhal there are some locations that are loot spawn gold mines - the military containers that wash up on the islands. Farm away, and you'll have M4s, AK 101s, plate carriers, pouches, and the ammo and magazines to fight a small war. Want warm gear to survive on Sakhal? Play Livonia or Cherno as no one seems to want balaclavas, ushankas or white hunter clothes there; lighters and matches aren't priority items, so a lot of loot that is vital on Sakhal is left lying around on the two other maps.

Overall - I am taking my team off Sakhal to play somewhere warmer. If the devs had put more effort into the body heat mechanism to keep it semi-realistic I could have carried on, but they didn't.

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The new DLC brings several new challenges to the game, and has got me hooked again. The big changes for me are that you now will spend a lot more time fighting the environment, and less time worrying about high tier looting.

The DLC uses a crude heat loss mechanic that requires you to build fires for warmth, and on a regular basis. As well as your drink and food stats dropping more quickly, if you get hypothermic you lose health. Which is fair enough, but even with the best clothing on for insulation, with a load of hot food inside you, you still lose body heat far too quickly when jogging or sprinting.

The map has the top tier loot on a peninsula reached by a vary narrow isthmus, so I would imagine quite tricky to get there on a busy server. You could look for a boat, but... you can't put cargo in a boat, you can only take with you what you can carry. That's rather poor isn't it?

There is a side game, finding keys to a briefcase found on a body on the volcano, which will give you a couple of Gucci items, and a glow plug to let you access the locked bunker in the Tier 4 area. Again, like the bunker in Livonia, it'll be a popular place for ambushes. At least you can try this side game single handed if you really want to.

The game generally is very good. The player base is on the other hand toxic, and full of kill on sight idiots who would shoot you even when you are cooking them some hot food. Not recommended unless you are a juvenile psychopath with behavioural issues.

And hackers still seem to out there, but not as much on Sakhal. Middle of nowhere, doing nothing, low pop server, and you get sniped from behind. I would avoid the official servers and play on a whitelisted community server with active admin.

Sakhal update Nov 2024. Review of my review!! TLDR - Sakhal isn't a great addition, and it may not be worth your £$ money. Updated late November 2024 as I have played the Sakhal DLC a lot, and feel like I have probably had enough of it now. Here are the criticisms of Sakhal and the other changes that came with version 1.26. 1 - the cold mechanism. It's unrealistic, and essentially you are going to be lighting fires a lot to stay alive. Even the best insulated clothing does not keep you warm for long. Eating warm food and drinking warm liquids does not maintain or increase your temperature beyond the baseline. Putting warm or hot items in your inventory is the same. The only way to get one, two or three + marks next to your temperature is to sit by a fire. There is no wind chill. If you heat a stove and a room up, it's stone cold and then freezing as the fire goes out. However - sit in a car with an engine running - you'll stay warm all day, even if the car has no doors! It's almost the same with the boat- sit in it and get it running, and most of the time your temperature will stay constant or occasionally increase. This is an open RIB in the subantarctic.... I wish the real things kept you as warm. Basically it's a very poorly executed mechanism. 2 - the boat. No cargo capacity at all. Nil. Zero. Sweet FA. You can't drop a rucksack on the floor and motor off, the rucksack stays where you places it on the shore. Easily stolen as all you need is a spark plug and maybe a water bottle of fuel. Can't be camouflaged or otherwise dragged up a beach and hidden. There is no way to row or paddle them. I also have a feeling they despawn if not used. 3 - snow. You can put it into a pot, the filter bottle, or a bottle and it melts straight away. Unless you filter it, you get heavy metal poisoning, but you can cook all your food in melted snow with no issues at all. I wonder if the devs have ever tried to melt snow for water? It's painfully slow to do, and quite energy thirsty. The real life solution is to look for chunks of ice. There's none of this in game - scoop the water into your pot, and bingo it turns into water. After all the unreal fire lighting you need to do to stay warm, this goes to the other end of the scale of unrealism. Oh and you can't use salt water for cooking either. 4 - wolves. No matter how many of them you kill in a wolf spawn area, they keep coming back. Their flesh now has a chance of giving you salmonella even when cooked (60% i think). You can only escape them by getting in a building or on a car, or by spawning out quickly. There are also wolves that approach you silently and bite your bum, then you really are in trouble if you are solo, and don't have a decent firearm or access to a building. Can you climb one of the millions of trees to escape them? No you can't, the game won't let you. Why is this an issue - because a lot of areas on Sakhal away from the coast are wolf infested, and it's been the biggest cause of deaths in my playtime. 5 - this isn't just Sakhal, it's the overall game. You can log out and respawn on any of the three maps on the Official branch. Why is this an issue? Well on Sakhal there are some locations that are loot spawn gold mines - the military containers that wash up on the islands. Farm away, and you'll have M4s, AK 101s, plate carriers, pouches, and the ammo and magazines to fight a small war. Want warm gear to survive on Sakhal? Play Livonia or Cherno as no one seems to want balaclavas, ushankas or white hunter clothes there; lighters and matches aren't priority items, so a lot of loot that is vital on Sakhal is left lying around on the two other maps. Overall - I am taking my team off Sakhal to play somewhere warmer. If the devs had put more effort into the body heat mechanism to keep it semi-realistic I could have carried on, but they didn't. ******************************************************************************************** The new DLC brings several new challenges to the game, and has got me hooked again. The big changes for me are that you now will spend a lot more time fighting the environment, and less time worrying about high tier looting. The DLC uses a crude heat loss mechanic that requires you to build fires for warmth, and on a regular basis. As well as your drink and food stats dropping more quickly, if you get hypothermic you lose health. Which is fair enough, but even with the best clothing on for insulation, with a load of hot food inside you, you still lose body heat far too quickly when jogging or sprinting. The map has the top tier loot on a peninsula reached by a vary narrow isthmus, so I would imagine quite tricky to get there on a busy server. You could look for a boat, but... you can't put cargo in a boat, you can only take with you what you can carry. That's rather poor isn't it? There is a side game, finding keys to a briefcase found on a body on the volcano, which will give you a couple of Gucci items, and a glow plug to let you access the locked bunker in the Tier 4 area. Again, like the bunker in Livonia, it'll be a popular place for ambushes. At least you can try this side game single handed if you really want to. The game generally is very good. The player base is on the other hand toxic, and full of kill on sight idiots who would shoot you even when you are cooking them some hot food. Not recommended unless you are a juvenile psychopath with behavioural issues. And hackers still seem to out there, but not as much on Sakhal. Middle of nowhere, doing nothing, low pop server, and you get sniped from behind. I would avoid the official servers and play on a whitelisted community server with active admin.