The Long Dark update expands map and scares off wolves

Next time you're wandering the Coastal Highway in The Long Dark , you may stumble upon a new region you haven't explored before.

, you may stumble upon a new region you haven't explored before. Pleasant Valley is a new 10 square kilometre stretch of "rural mountain valley" land, added to the survival sandbox since the its most recent v.192 update. You'll find "abandoned fields, farms and caves". Sounds lovely.

Lovely, except you'll probably get attacked by wolves, right? So it's lucky that you can now brandish torches to scare them away, also thanks to the new update. Meanwhile, the update adds harvestable plants and a new inventory interface.

That's not all: among a large list of updates and bug-fixescomes the news that studio Hinterland Games is hearing our pleas for a better-optimized experience, though we may not see significant improvements until Unity 5 releases. In the meantime, they warn that CPU speed is a bigger factor in the game's performance than the GPU.

"We've seen quite a few notes about people with high-end systems experiencing lower than expected performance in the game," the post reads. "We're continuing to work on optimizing the game world, but unfortunately some of the issues are related to how our core engine -- Unity -- was built, and how it utilizes multiple CPU cores for physics objects."

Unsure what the game's about? Here's Tyler giving it a go: