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HFW Discussion
This is a bit of a random thought. But smoking was pretty big in a lot of cultures of the tech level we see in the games, in this exact region, in fact. And yet I can't recall a single instance of someone smoking a pipe or what have you.
It could just be a minor censorship thing; sometimes the rating system can be weird about smoking. But we've got alcohol, a few references to drugs even outside of medicine. So do we think smoking exists?
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As far as I am aware. There are no references to smoking in HZD or HFW, that I have found or seen even after my countless hours in HZD and couple of hours in HFW
Best guess is that plants supposed to be smoked are not considered essentials and thus left by GAIA to be developed by humans with the help of APOLLO, which of course did not occur.
That makes sense... I mean why waste resourses you could use to repopulate earths biosphere, on non esential plants.
Because there isn't such thing as non-essential plant. All the living beings that exist are part of a food chain, and any changes to this balance would upset the ecosystem and the biosphere.
the ecosystem and biosphere were already messed up by the time, so GAIA is like building it from scratch? and with the help of machines, she could left out something, just like there are not lion/horse etc
In the context of the story, there absolutely are "non-essential" plants. The ecosystem and biosphere were already long gone. GAIA was responsible for the plants and animals most necessary to stabilize the ecosystem. It was intended to be up to future humans to create and spread the more exotic and complex species. Of course, APOLLO being wiped prevented this plan from being followed through.
Simply put, there are several plants that aren't found I the world because it wasn't GAIA's "job" to plant them.
There is rope in the game, which is often made from hemp which is derived from the marijuana plant, but it is possible they use a different source for growing material for rope.
Didn't they mostly just use future-wire?
Mostly, but not completely. Just like in real life, where we still use hemp rope right alongside plastic rope and metal wire. Different materials have different advantages.
Hemp was never the only material used to make rope, there's so many types of materials that were used throughout history.
maybe it's a type of marijuana that can only be use to make rope, no effect for smoking them
tobacco plants were originally used as analgesics. seems pretty essential in a world without modern medicine?
But they weren’t supposed to be starting from that level of technology, modern humanity would have been educated to the same level as the ancient ones if everything had gone according to plan and would have been able to use the systems and resources left to produce modern medicine, which includes planting all the plants in the seed vault that GAIA wasn’t in charge of doing herself.
ah, that's a good point!
Technically, there is one reference. An audiolog at the ZD facility has Travis Tate, the later HADES Alpha, smoking a classic cigarette, but I get what you mean.
Oh yah I forgot Travis was a smoker... that guy was Metal AF🤣
Grow up
Your post history is so strange
I haven’t found any in the 31st century, but ZD gave us a datapoint in which we find out that Travis Tate smoked tobacco cigarettes, which in the context of the dialogue seems to be a rare trend in the 2060s. It’s possible that Demeter still has the seed stocks in storage, never cultivated due to the loss of Apollo.
Drugs themselves exist in the form of medicine. There's no way in fuck that the tribes, especially the Utaru, haven't found medicinal plants with psychedelic/inebriating properties.
I'm not saying they're rolling joints or anything, but a society this far into a societal cycle have absolutely found drugs, and they're probably not far from literally smoking it.
So far the only confirmed drug in Horizon is drinking machine oil.
A pretty deadly one, too. :P
That Oseram camp in No Man’s Land was so creepy to find along with the note they left.
The moral is - don't drink weird shit just because other people do.
Other than alcohol.
Opium poppies are in HZD too, theyre familiar enough with it to give it a common name based on its medicinal properties.. Though we dont get to see it used for anything other than medicinal purposes. Theres this sidequest where you collect "Dreamwillow" for some deahtly ill people and it sounds pretty potent, name makes me think it could also have some psychoactive effects.
Oh yeah, how could I forget about the Oseram’s love of drinking! And good call about the dreamwillow, you’re probably right that it has some mind altering properties based on the name and purpose.
There's that one salvager-contractor in Tenakth territory who seeks "inspiration" in getting high from plants the Plowhorns leave behind.
I thought she was excited to make delicious drink from them, not get high on them.
Unless Gaia intentionally seeded plants with psychedelic/inebriating properties they simply wouldn't exist,there would be nothing to find. This isn't an Earth with billions of years of evolution that led to endless variety of life, but a careful cultivated garden with only a limited number of carefully selected species.
HZD has poppies, so at least one plant species of that sort was purposefully introduced. Its product is considered a essential medicine (despite being wildly abusable) so its not hard to find a reason why
Medicinal plants, like the ones Rost taught Aloy about at the beginning of the very first game, ate absolutely in use within the different tribes.
Tanaka naoto forget to incubate psychedelics... or lets say smoking wasnt great in 21st century so he intentionally left it out
The Utaru don’t even know what tea is
The ‘tea’ they drink to clear their minds as the one Oseram salvager says….
Drug use probably exists in the horizon universe, but considered that drug use and smoking and particular are heavily censored internationally it’s just better and easier to included at all
Drug use does exist, for example getting high on machine fluids
I imagine that someone, somewhere, must have figured out how to smoke leaves, but so far Aloy hasn't met a person who actually does it.
It wouldn't surprise me if this has more to do with irl circumstances, considering how smoking has gone increasingly out of style. Which is obviously a good thing.
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Uhh, no. Estimated 42.6% of US adults smoked cigarettes in 1965. 13.7% now.
20.9% in 2005. 11.5% in 2021 per CDC https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm#:~:text=Current%20smoking%20has%20declined%20from,every%20100%20adults)%20in%202021.
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Unless you can cite evidence, you are just blowing smoke for your claim.
Putting this into some perspective; here in the Netherlands, where Guerrilla is located too, our government has been actively campaigning for a smoke-free generation by 2040, and has been increasingly restricting where you can buy cigarettes, where you can smoke, and upping the price of tobacco.
Meanwhile, alcohol is still mostly considered fair game, and our more left wing parties have been making a bid to legalize xtc and the growing of weed plants.
It could be a cultural thing, but in the Netherlands at least, there is currently a push to get rid of smoking, and there has been a decrease in people that do it.
Tobacco or similar plants may not have been seeded yet.
I'm not Australian but i do listen to this aussie gaming podcast and they do lament the censorship they have to deal with, maybe you're right - Sony/GG just wanted to sidestep potential problems with distribution so they pulled it completely?
if not, maybe it's a Gaia thing. Like if the primary usage isn't helpful then she just didn't consider it. But it'd be very easy to take one of those plants and smoke it, maybe the tribes based in America just haven't figured it out
in any case, I just know The Enduring has one of those long pipes or a beat up hookah, i can feel it in me bones
Primary usage wasn't really GAIA's concern. She was tasked with restoring and stabilizing the biosphere, and recreating the plants and animal species necessary for it. Some thought clearly went into sustenance for animals and humans, as we see with the Plowhorns in Utaru territory. But GAIA already had her list of things to lay out, and it was supposed to be up to the APOLLO-trained humans to recreate the more complex and exotic plants and animals.
yeah that theory isn't very strong, I just added it as an 'eh maybe' thing. I'm more leaning on the censorship myself, esp since horizon is a very clean game series (like it's almost out of place when Aloy curses!) even if smoking was included.
it's really hard to imagine someone didn't roll up one of those plants in the non-smartphone non-PS5 boring day to day. I like my non-America theory, makes me excited thinking about tribes in the east
There's the possibility that those plants just aren't indigenous to the area. Perhaps Gaia only produced natural/non gmo plants that can only grow in their native areas: so coffee is in south America or India. Local tribes won't have access to them yet because they haven't traveled that far 🤷♀️
Knowing human history someone WOULD FIND A WAY 🤣
Realistically there would be smoking But I am certain it is censored, countries wants to phase them out sfter all
It is explicitly mentioned you can get high by eating enough medicinal berry.
In terms of reseeding - tobacco is just not uniquely useful enough to be singled out for reseeding after the end. Hemp is much more likely to have made the cut, and within the limits of censorship for international release and inconsistent laws worldwide, the Utaru are coded as though they either smoke DHT bearing cultivars or eat psilocybin
There are lots of plants and animals that haven't been reintroduced yet... they were supposed to be rolled out by Apollo-educated humans. Yet again... Fuck. Ted. Faro.
The plants might not exist. They have alcohol since lots of foods can be fermented. But only specific plants can be smoked.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw herbs being smoked but I can’t think of any drugs that persisted other than alcohol.
It is entirely possible that they just haven’t figured out how to yet.
Yes they have come up with alcohol and have definitely discovered psychedelic plants/animal byproducts going by what we see in game and read from lore items. Because discovering how to find and make those two things is as simple as trying out new plants for new cooking flavors and discovering that boiling these things together makes a drink that makes you feel good.
The in game humans just might not have made the particular intuitive leap. Which is; burn these plants and breath in the resulting smoke to feel an effect. Especially since most people quickly notice that our bodies don’t typically like to breath in smoke of any sort. Also even if they have found that burning certain plants in a fire results in ‘good’ smoke. They might not have made the intuitive leap to; stuff it into a pipe/roll it in leaves, light one end and breath in the resulting smoke from the other end.
Also Gorilla just might be anti smoking. Which isn’t a bad thing in my opinion.
If it exists, the carja are smoking it lol.
Which is actually one of the reasons I thought of this. "Wait a second, I don't remember any Carja nobles being all haughty with one of those long delicate pipes."
I can't remember if hookah's or anything similar to them are ever mentioned at all in horizon. I know alcohol exists. I couldve sworn the northern tribe(I can't remember their name) the ones that live in the harsh North I couldve sworn they messed with psychedelics but I'm not entirely sure.
I posted something similar to this a few days ago:
https://old.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1cqh0py/where_are_all_the_bad_things_toxic_plants/
My guess is that mind altering substances do exist to some extent in universe (see Brin's drinking of Machine Blood and the development of alcoholic beverages) but GG has chosen, from a creative standpoint, not to highlight/glorify their existence as doing so is not required to tell the story they have in mind.
There are drugs?
They definitely get high and drunk but I do wonder if tobacco plants simply weren't included in the world reseeding.
Maybe ZD intentionally didn't preserve tobacco seeds in Gaia's archive?
That's... Actually a good point. I kinda forgot to think aboot those things in these post apocalyptic worlds
It may be a censorship thing, but it really isn't a major issue. In-world, the concept of smoking would need to be rediscovered by the people of the new world.
Does tobacco naturally grow in the regions of the U.S. the game takes place in? My guess would be some kind of smoking exists where the plant grows naturally, but I don’t think we’ve been there.
Considering how listed the biosphere is, it's not surprising. There are statues of fairly common animals in the Frozen Wilds that are unheard of by the people of that time.
Additional flora and fauna may be scheduled to be introduced at a later date, but it appears there are limited species existing currently and tobacco is not one.
I'll bet the Banuk do...
I think it's just never mentioned. Though realistically, smoking is probably down quite a bit by the time the world ended anyway, it's anyway trending down and has been for years (vaping on the other hand starting gaining popularity with younger people entirely independent of that trend). Not that I remember vaping ever mentioned either, but they were pretty advanced tech-wise before the Faro Plague, it's likely that vaping or something newer and even healthier than that were the more common trend by then.
Not in Horizon. The world is clean and smoothed out, perfectly marketable and sanitized.
These are adventure games, for girttyness, look at something else.
References to smoking would effect the age rating. Games avoid it unless necessary for the plot
Feels likely a design decision not to include such depictions to keep it more family friendly. The same reason they didn't show a certain very "old" person. Or have any sexual, romantic depictions.
I was scrolling my feed and it took me a second to realize what sub this was posted in.
I watch machines go up in smoke all the time >.>
Nope. But the Tenakth are all potential "mad hatters" and all likely to suffer grisly fates because of the red pigment in their body paint and maybe tattoo ink. It's cinnabar, aka mercury. Not good.
eh cinnabar is not as dangerous as it sounds, its a very stable and insoluble form of mercury (sulfide), but its not without its issues. i would worry more about the guys extracting and processing it from the mines than the ones wearing it as paint.