Unfortunately, none of the abandoned shops and farms contain maps or notes about the surroundings. I haven't looked at maps and I don't know anything about the other areas in the game – Pleasant Valley is where I began and it's where I have built my new life. If I don't find it in the game, it doesn't exist.

On the whole I've been avoiding external source of information, like wikis and forums. Predictably, the relative comforts of this new life soon exert their own strange pressure and I feel a need to find new challenges. I don't stumble into the wild, I make plans, whether I'm scavenging, scouting or hunting, and I take what is required and no more, knowing that my safe havens are like links in a chain that I travel along. I have several healthily stocked bases, spread across valleys and tiny settlements, and my loadouts make me a lean, mean exploration machine. No more stumbling through blizzards and getting lost a few hundred feet from home, no more hoarding of water and meat in anticipation of disaster, and no more fear of the dark. My previous adventures in The Long Dark seemed like the actions of a fool.

This wasn't The Long Dark, this was an escape from the rat race, and I was happily prepared for the challenge of Timberwolf Mountain, looming overhead.

That morning, I'd been reflecting on how grand life can be as I cooked freshly caught whitefish on a pot-bellied stove, snug inside a lonely cabin by a frozen lake. Nor would the wolves that seemed determined to keep me on the mountainside. The cold didn't bother me anymore, frostbite having chewed the nerves out of my extremities, and the cold wouldn't claim me. I wasn't quite at the roof of the world but I was definitely in some sort of grim penthouse. Below, a thin crevice carved into the rock.

The long dark timberwolf mountain map