# The Long Dark THE LONG DARK - VISUAL ENHANCEMENTS UPDATE - Now Live! - Product: The Long Dark (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/the-long-dark) - Vendor: Hinterland Studio Inc. - Date: 2025-05-27 - Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/305620/view/512958914879292797 - Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/the-long-dark/releases/2025-05-27-the-long-dark-visual-enhancements-update-now-live What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog. Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'. --- - **added** — Add visual enhancements including Coloured Shadows, Terrain Blending, and Improved Anti-Aliasing as optional features in Display and Advanced Settings - **changed** — Re-enable the use of Ruined ingredients in Crafting and Cooking Recipes - **changed** — Tune several Canned food items to last much longer in the world - **changed** — Tune raw and cooked Meat types to last much longer in the world - **changed** — Adjust Tales From the Far Territory cooked fish decay rates to align with non-DLC cooked fish - **changed** — Tune Canned Dog Food, Condensed Milk, and Tomato Soup outdoor decay rates to align with other canned items - **changed** — Adjust Trader costs to balance against the availability of key items - **added** — Add Canned Peaches, Carrots, and Potatoes to Trader Requests - **fixed** — Fix issue where Travois can fall under specific locations, with lost Travois now appearing in Lost & Found boxes - **fixed** — Fix issue where Lost & Found boxes were hidden under terrain or unreachable - **fixed** — Fix issue that prevented completion of Sutherland's final quest Special Request #5 Hello players, We have just updated THE LONG DARK to version 2.42, build 156298 and WINTERMUTE to version 2.13, build 156040. This is a free update available to anyone who owns THE LONG DARK or SURVIVAL EDITION, and includes visual enhancement options targeted at high-end systems, various bug fixes, and tuning changes. For a description of the Visual Enhancements, please watch the latest Update Video: ##### **VISUAL ENHANCEMENTS** We have added a collection of visual enhancements targeting high-end systems, including Coloured Shadows, Terrain Blending, Improved Anti-Aliasing, and other features mentioned above. Keep in mind these are all optional features, to be enabled in the Display and Advanced Settings, and can be turned on or off depending on your preferences. **RECOMMENDED SYSTEM SPEC** If you would like to enable all visual enhancements and run at a target of 60FPS at 2560 x 1440 resolution, we recommend a PC using an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU or equivalent, 3GHz or faster CPU, and 32GB of system RAM. Unfortunately, with so many different PC hardware combinations available, it’s impossible for us to guarantee your specific hardware combination will work. However, we believe these general hardware recommendations will result in a very consistent, graphically maximized experience. Please remember that these features are targeted at higher-end hardware, and we can offer no guarantees regarding performance on your specific combination of PC hardware. ##### **ALLOWING RUINED ITEMS IN CRAFTING/RECIPES** Earlier this year, we updated the game to address a longstanding exploit around the use of Ruined food items in Cooking recipes. Our implementation was not very robust and introduced other issues. Fixing this issue correctly will involve overhauling various game systems related to food, Condition decay, how wildlife respond to raw meat, and risks involved with consuming low-Condition food items. These changes are likely to change various aspects of the game, including long-running strategies players have employed for years. As the team is focused on finishing Episode Five, we are postponing making these broader changes until the Episode is shipped. Until then, we have reverted back to the previous behaviour -- which allowed Ruined food items to be used in Recipes -- and we will revisit these systems post-Episode Five and provide longer-term fixes for them. ##### **RARE TRADE ITEMS & CANNED GOODS** We also heard the feedback that many players with very long-running games ran into the issue of being locked out of some of the higher-end Recipes (in the Frontier Cooking system) due to key items like Canned Peaches having decayed in the world by the time you unlocked this system. To help address that, until we can make the bigger aforementioned changes, we have temporarily returned the Condition loss for several Canned items, making them last longer. We have also modified some of the Trader’s costs to balance against the availability of some of these key items (including Canned Peaches, Carrots, and Potatoes). These changes should make it more viable for you to benefit from some of these advanced Recipes in your long-running saves. ##### **TRAVOIS** We are addressing multiple issues with the Travois, where it can rarely fall under specific locations in the game world. In the short-term, if you lose your Travois, you should be able to find it -- along with any items in it -- stored in the Lost & Found box in the Region you are in. We continue to monitor this issue and will make additional fixes as we get more information from players who have encountered this problem. There was a related issue where rarely, a Lost & Found box was itself hidden under the terrain or unreachable. We have fixed this issue as well. ##### **FINAL TRADER MISSION** Many players had encountered an issue where they were blocked from completing Sutherland’s final quest, and were unable to complete the questline. While this didn’t block progress _[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/305620/view/512958914879292797]_