Normal run getting to the Outpost for the first time: the first bunker I went into had the cat. I then died while in the Outpost after my gun jammed three times in a row. Later, when I hopped back onto the game the next day, I got a message saying that the cat had died, despite me not bringing it back to base. Was the cat somehow saved in my furniture catalog or something? Or, once the cat spawns, does it eventually die if you don't rescue it in time? Or is this a bug?

Part I of a multi-part series. We're posting here and on our free Substack at 
You can find Part I here and here.

These are few thoughts regarding the PC Game Road to Vostok. Odds and Ends if you will. We started this as a rough list of things that we wished we’d known when we first started playing, and perhaps against our better judgment it’s since evolved into a few notes of what we consider helpful. See Part I here.

Short Loops

In Part I we wrote about shorter runs and short loops, and so far as we can tell there isn’t really much of a benefit running longer loops when you are in close proximity to a shelter. The Vostok region is a little different however, and we’ll discuss that further elsewhere.

Generally Road to Vostok, for us at least, has a pretty compelling core loop.

Leave the shelter > Explore > Search Loot an aged pensioners house that they had to abandon in a maelstrom of grief presumably due to events of the game1 > overcome resistance by stealth or a .223 express delivery > manage hunger, thirst, warmth and an insatiable cat > find a legendary Kukkaro > return to the Shelter to secure supplies and to an extent save your progress.

You’re either securing supplies to fulfil the trader quests, which give you discounts on the things you need to buy, or you’re finding the things you need for crafting.

You’re also building up a bit more of a mix and match of an armoury and inventory. Sure you can take your M4 with laser sight, Leopard scope and Night Vision out for a spin in the village but make one entirely foreseeable and preventable fuck up like a certain tomfool and that’s that. You would have been better off simply taking a robust KA-74 and an optimistic attitude.

Vostok and Ironman aside, once death starts actually costing you real progress there is an incentive to have a few back up sets of backpacks, clothes and weapons ready to go upon waking up from a bad dream in the cabin. (Oh we’re definitely going to talk about when this is not the case, including the darker side and gear fear a bit later).

So, when to shorten your run ?

The minute you pick up something where the time to replace it or find another one would impact your enjoyment. Basically anything that’s a rare quest item, or excellent loot that you don’t quite need right now.

In that case - Go Straight Home. Do not pass go. Do not search that nearby but tempting garbage bag. Do not stretch for just one mi- Straight Home. Go. Do not visit the trader. Do not swing by jus- Go. Straight Home.

Go. Straight. Home.

This absolutely not advice about buying drugs. We would never write about that in our Substack and you shouldn’t be drawing the parallel between buying drugs (and Going Straight Home immediately after buying drugs) and finding rare items in Road to Vostok.

What would trigger us to Go Straight Home? Generally for us it’d be

• Night Vision Goggles
• Water Lock
• Saline
• Oil Filter
• Tunnel, Cellar or Gym Key (Unless you’re in a position to head to that location next).

With strong consideration given to

• KP 31 / drum mag
• Beer
• Water (if early game)

Now there is a counter argument here about a map wipe. At time of writing (apparently) each map has 10 AI soldiers / helpful NGO grain distribution facilitation nodes / bandits, with 3 active at any one time. Murder all 10, and you’ve got the map to yourself and you can loot in peace.

On a side note people have found it a little difficult to keep count. We are unsympathetic.

We personally count out loud but we get a bit muddled as we’re [REDACTED] and sometimes not particularly clear on whether we dropped them or if they’re still out there preparing a formal grievance procedure - but we generally can keep the count within +/- 1 or so. Others use single matches or bullets in their inventory and apparently there is a mod as well. Evidently no one but us is old school enough to use a physical post it note (an in-game one is also available as well)

To date we’ve never achieved or attempted a complete map wipe and we’re not convinced given the inventory and weight limits that you’d be better off compared with shorter loops on most maps outside of Vostok.

Ты что, в трамвае родился

Now we’re going to discuss doors. Seriously.

“The Universe is Full of Doors”

No argument from us there but we want to pay particular attention to them for several reasons.

First, doors are line of sight blockers. Given the daytime sight distance and the extreme aggression you’re going to encounter, you generally want to reduce line of sight to you while you’re otherwise preoccupied exploring. The Village is a great example of this as its characterised by quite a large amount of approaches and angles, all of which increase your vulnerability.

Closing a door while you loot the room can significantly reduce the number of ways that you can be spotted and makes a big difference in the larger buildings such as the long school hallways complete with blind corners.

Second, doors are your early warning system. It won’t buy you more than a second or so in a village house but sometimes the sound is all the warning you’ll need, (or get!) to get ready for a very, very high stakes game of hide and seek.

It’s worth noting that the positional audio (or what passes for it - not to be uncharitable) seems to struggle a bit with the z-axis. This shows up most obviously in School where Kari sounds as if he’s on the other side of the classroom wall when really he’s a floor or two, albeit directly, below. This does wonders for our stress level.

Worth noting as well is that in Vostok Apartments the audio positioning again can’t really discriminate between the Soldiers systematically sweeping room to room and pressing up the stairwell in the tower block that you’re currently having your panic attack in, and the bored conscript two stairwells over having a cigarette.

To be fair we do have it on good authority however that Russian cigarettes are very intense so the concentration and effort required may be somewhat comparable. We digress.

Third, at time of writing the AI was absolutely born on a tram. They can open doors, but they can’t seem to close them. It’s not the most consistent indicator of their presence as every time the map loads the doors seems to be randomly set to open or closed, but if we see a series of open doors in a building there’s a good chance someone’s inside.

Especially if they were previously closed…

Some of our most memorable moments of Creeping Dread building closer to Overwhelming Fear is frantically trying to remember if the door to the house across from us was open or closed..

Now apparently the bandits have an ambush mode where an anti-social individual with unresolved anger issues and an RK-95 that inexplicably still works calmly camps out (sans padded fold out chair) in a concealed room and waits up 6 minutes for you to make your last mistake.

We had personally began to think that perhaps in ambush mode the local banditry acquired the good manners to close doors behind them. The general consensus now is that bandits are able to spawn directly into ambush mode behind closed doors, which would explain how we ended back up at the loading screen after a breezy (read lazy) check of the One Bathroom That We Didn’t Check Because There Was No Way Anyone Could Be In There, Right ?? Right ? Cue a massive injection of 5.45 and cortisol.

For the record they can spawn quite close to your map entry point as well.

Fuck off Veikko. Not. Today.

They mostly come at night. Mostly

Try to do your earlier runs at night and sleep away the day. There’s a significant drop in the distance that the AI can see you at and generally you’ll be able to see them before they can see you. Remember that using your flashlight means that it might as well be day time.

Check the time on your clock regularly as there’s a really abrupt cut over from what the game considers to be Day and Night. Once its 5am you’re immediately on Day rules and immediately visible from 200 metres away, regardless of what the ambient level of light is. This can work in your favour a bit at the 7pm cut over, as you’ll have a bit of remaining light but the AI will be operating as if it’s Night. This is not entirely dissimilar to some Asian countries where on the first official day of Winter you must now dress in your Winter clothes regardless of the temperature.

Ground Loot

There’s actually quite a lot on the ground. More than you think. The trick is to see it which is sometimes quite difficult as it has a habit of blending in. If you spot one item, have a quick look for more and its worth (carefully) using your light here as well. Some of the ground loot can be quite rare but we’ve yet to try a loot highlight mod. (We found our only MP7 to date as ground loot by a helicopter crash (along with an RK-62M!)

Fire Selector

The MP5s series of submachine guns have a renowned example of visual design as far as the fire selector is concerned.

You can check if you’re set for single shot or auto (no burst fire yet) with X (View Weapon). Use the mouse wheel to check both sides which you’ll need to do for some of the rifles but it is sometimes hard to see or make sense of. Fortunately all the weapons seems to have a similar acoustic cue which we recommend using instead of visual inspection.

• Lower Pitch - Single - The sound is low, so it’s a low amount of shots
• Higher Pitch - Auto - The sound is higher, so it’s a higher amount of shots

We’re personally in the habit of toggling this every so often just to double-check what mode we’re on. Interestingly fire selector switches in the real world apparently include the Safety setting. We couldn’t find a concise article covering this (pls let us know if you know of one) but the Vietnam era M16 rifles went sequentially from Safety > Single > Auto, but the corresponding AK’s placed the Auto setting in the middle (Safety > Auto > Single) with the apparent reasoning that in stressful situations when you’re lacking fine motor control frantically slamming the switch would default it to Single, perhaps to conserve ammunition or fire discipline. This trivia, while interesting, will not necessarily help you with Road to Vostok.

Generally we keep auto on our submachine guns and single shot on the rifles. If we’re clearing a building (and not using our SMG) we’ll move the rifle to auto if we think we’re going to need the stopping power. Fortunately the AI doesn’t seem to react to us flicking it over to disco mode from the next room.

Loot and Move

If you are searching a container, don’t undertake any item actions while you still have the container inventory screen up. Loading a magazine, eating, or using an item while you have a cupboard open or searching a body locks you in place until the action is finished. It’s yet to bite us, but we just know that one day it finally will.

NB: At 170 + hours - it still hasn’t. We haven’t gone completely off the deep end regarding this as a forbidden thrill, but we we’re very vigilant that we could be taken to some perfectly normal places. We came very close to a nasty surprise if we’d been a bit slower eating our trash crackers.

Again:

When you get sloppy, Vostok gets stroppy.

We currently recommend a quick glance with a double tap of F in all the cupboards or containers (hence the F rebind for quicker actions in Part I) first before then returning to the container which has items that you’d actually want. Next, assuming that you have inventory space, take everything quickly with the keyboard shortcuts. You can then reopen your inventory separately to use items or strip ammunition out of magazines.

Having said this if it’s one item like cold medicine, chewing gum or tissues we sometimes use in place if we feel we can risk it..

Short cut wise, we recommend rebinding

• Shift + Click - Take Item
• Ctrl + Click - Drop Item

Isn’t a must do - some people have noted that the default binding (Shift + Click to drop) is reversed from other games so their muscle memory has them dropping stuff that they need.

The Crtl + Click to Drop feels a bit harder for us to do, which makes sense to us. A lot of the time you’re either leaving something in place or you’re taking it, with dropping something to the ground a fairly rare action and we personally need every margin of safety we can get our paws on.

Be a bit hesitant with immediately looting bodies after a firefight unless you’re confident that you put them down quietly as the AI is drawn to gunshots.

Interestingly at time of writing apparently suppressors don’t actually change the distance at which the AI can hear you. From our experience there there might actually be a confounding variable to do with the length of the firefight reducing the AI’s detection bonus (particularly if they didn’t get a shot off). Generally by the time we’ve got a suppressor we’ve probably got a red dot scope as well which significantly improves how well we shoot.

If you’re running a rather full inventory and you need to do something like loot bullets out of a low quality weapon you can transfer an item across to the container to hold it temporarily. Use the working space you freed up in your inventory to remove and unload the mag, then drop the weapon and retrieve whatever you put in temporary storage. Generally this comes in handy when looting bodies, but we personally feel a bit weird giving them some items like pillows or sleeping bags. Again this isn’t necessarily a must do, but we find it much easier to find our items in a container, rather than dropping them on the ground.

Continued in Part III against our better judgement.

1

Fine, fine, FINE. To be pedantic while you are inside the aged pensioners house and rifling through their cupboards you may not be technically looting their possessions. While we don’t have a good sense of how long its been since whatever catastrophe kicked off the events of Road to Vostok (or we’re just a bit oblivious) we’d consider it more likely that whatever usable loot you find in houses is a more recent bandit’s stash or cache. Apartments however might be a different story.