My Deadmeat mk II character, DottKott, has made much better headway.
By the end of the second week of her adventures (mainly consisting of marathon hiking along the north shore of a river system in Sartola), I had thought surely a Don't Starve-ish end of
bleak freezing-starvation was imminent. After a very scary fording of the partially frozen river got me safely to the south shore, her trek back east was soon bogged down when her berries & fungus
diet led to a drop from malnourished to full-on starvation, prompting me to take the time to craft up a javelin for a desperate spear fishing bid for a nutritional reprieve. Astonishingly, it worked ..at first.
DottKott caught a pike, and that seemed to completely turn things around. But then came the bad weather: lots of snow and a bitter chill. Subsequent fishing attempts were unfruitful. Was this the end?
Nope! I decided that hunkering down and continuing to roll the dice with the crappy javelin was an untenable position, and pushed east.
Found some cloudberries and scarfed them down, and, to my surprise, they were enough to pull up her nutrition out of the red.
Then came the big break: a dead elk on the frozen river! It had been nommed on a bit, but 50 lbs of meat all but dropped into my lap!
Hopefully this isn't a mixed bag package deal of free food + hungry predator fight.
No predator showdown.
Just profits and continued good fortune as I stopped for a day in a village, did a little pick up sticks quest, and traded in most of the roasted elk cuts for enough preserved meat to keep my gas tank in the green for several weeks.
Can't help but compare this to DF adventure mode and Don't Starve.
Falls short of bay12's obsession with minutiae in many respects (not ice though!) but invokes a similar feel of world hugeness, depth of simulation, and the turn-based meticulous micromanagement of high stakes encounters.
As in Don't Starve, winter and stomach are formidable foes. No sanity mechanic, thankfully.
In contrast to these, it handles night in an admirably realistic fashion -- it's just really dark (but not opaque), and the terrors of night are entirely natural ones, enhanced by an acute sense of impaired situational awareness.
And the hunger system is exquisite. I wonder if it's even better than that of The Long Dark?