One Hour One Life Forums

My daughter and I haven’t played in over a year.

When I told her about the legacy chain she was excited and we played again yesterday.

When we died before old age and couldn’t get into the legacy chain (or couldn’t figure out how to get into it) she lost interest again.

The world does whatever Jason wants it to do; he could make resources and animals spawn differently based on proximity to certain people--and then make them spawn normally again if those people make contact with others.

And the whole point is to have *no one* near the cursed person, because part of their punishment is to be far, far away from others.

Make murderers spawn really far away and make their conditions harsher, it explicitly does not make the game harder for *anyone but them*.

Okay here's a less gruesome suggestion: a sacrificial rite of some sort, just not human sacrifice.

For example, a food sacrifice. Every player is responsible for bringing one item of food that is put in a central location. Celebration ensues, and at the end of the celebration the food is burned.

Not sure if the game allows food to be burned. But communal sacrifice is a well-established way of bonding a community.

Well, despite being all brash-assertion-y, I'm open to rebuttal.

If you don't think cooperative focus is the *ne plus ultra*, I'd like to hear your reasoning.

@breezeknight you may be missing the point.

This is not a game-modification suggestion. I am asking for nothing to change about the game itself. This suggestion does not belong on a "requested features" list.

I am suggesting a cooperative activity that people who are serious about civilization building may need to consciously foster.

Ritualized sacrifice would certainly keep people interested, if only to protest it.

It gives me chills, but think about how it worked in old civilizations: the person chosen for the sacrifice was treated like royalty for days and days, got a really lavish lifestyle and was celebrated like a rockstar. And then they were killed.

What would it be like to be born into a civilization and learn that you were the chosen sacrifice? To get a big celebration in your honor before you were killed?

How much coordination would it take between players to select a single sacrifice that the entire community agreed on? How much cooperation to agree on who gets to do the killing, and how?

It's kind of appalling, but it might actually be a brilliant idea. It flat-out *would not be possible* without the implementation of a social heriarchy.

Okay I might be being a jerk by making big pronouncements on a game I only just started playing but hell with it, I've had plenty of experience with the frustrations of the game, so here's my take:

This is a unique game. It's not Minecraft. Get Minecraft out of your head firmly and resolutely, by which I mean this:

The concept that everyone has to know every crafting formula has to die, and it has to be burned with fire. That's a Minecraft mindset. It's death in OHOL.

Jason has made a game in which success depends on the same thing it depends on in actual civilizations: specialization. What's going to have to happen is that players specialize and hand down to each other only the crafting formulas most necessary to their specialization. For someone whose whole life is going to be spent farming to learn how to make steel walls is ludicrous.

The game is difficult to the extent that players aren't grasping the kind of play the game requires. This game purposefully punishes players for trying to have everyone learn every formula on their own.

Jason's smart and he's crafted the gameplay so that it requires very specific strategies for survival. And it looks to me like the strategies it requires are the same strategies real civilizations actually require.

Hi guys, only been playing a couple days, but a couple things are obvious to me.

This game is going to sink or swim based on its players, not on Jason. This is very serious.

For the game to survive it's going to rely on dedicated players building, maintaining, and defending a culture of cooperation.

Let's put it this way: a good civilization needs good mothers. The emphasis on child-rearing is there in the game but not quite there in the players. Of the many many many times I've spawned, I've only once had a mother who did anything more for me than raise me out of childhood. Only once had a mother who tried to tell me "here's how you do this, here's how you do that."

For people who know what they're doing, it may seem like giving training to babies that might be experienced players is silly. But ultimately that training is not going to be about simple crafting and survival training.

Ultimately that training is going to be about culture.

For civilizations to survive is going to take a culture of cooperation, where efforts are not duplicated and no one's time is wasted. And that's going to require specialization of tasks, and that's going to require a system of communication that has nothing to do with the game's inherent UI, and that system of cooperation will probably vary from civilization to civilization, and newborns, no matter their experience level, will need to be taught the customs of the civilization they spawn into.

How is food collected and distributed? How is defense coordinated, how are weapons distributed, how are tasks assigned? How do we ensure the most efficient training of young in the latest and most necessary crafting skills? For a society as a whole to progress quickly, we can't have everybody trying to learn every recipe. We can't have people all making their own baskets, or clothes, or knives.

To accomplish coordination in these matters is going to require the development and continuation of actual civilizations with actual customs and an actual process for dividing tasks and an actual culture of childrearing that passes on those customs and processes to the newborn.

And players are failing at this ridiculously. Even in the most sophisticated settlements I've been born into, when I was old enough to ask "what do I do" the only answer I got was "help."

That's what's unsustainable, not any mechanism in the game.

For a truly great civilization, when a baby is born its mother will not just raise it, but try to find out what tasks it wants to do or learn, and help it find the person coordinating those tasks, and teach it the etiquette by which that particluar civilization assures that resources are equitably shared. A civlization lives and dies on cooperation. And cooperation lives and dies on childrearing, on the mother educating the young--even if they're experienced players--on how that particular civilization gets things done.

Developing and maintaining cultures will be the key to enjoying this game and helping newcomers quickly realize the massive potential and fun of the game. And that's not on Jason. That's on us.

Only in my most recent incarnation have I made an effort to create some organized cooperation in the crowd that I was born into. When I was old enough to talk I said "farm," indicating I knew how to farm, and then I started suggesting to a nearby person that we split tasks, with him getting water and me keeping the fields fertilized. But basically all I could say at that age was "I farm" and "you get water."

His reaction? He said "dumb bitch" and shot me with an arrow. This is a person who was otherwise helping the town grow. The mere suggestion of coordinated effort got me ruthlessly killed. And where was my mother? She was off doing things on her own, just like everybody else, trying to willy-nilly build a settlement by just hoping that everybody doing everything on their own would somehow build something lasting. Feh.

What lasts is culture. Create culture, and pass it down through child-rearing, or perish.

And not just perish in-game, but also in retention of new players. And thus, ultimately, perishes the game itself.

Hm I wonder if you can transplant them then, maybe with a clay pot or something...

The first line of my post is: the only way to stay alive is if your mother has found a sustainable way to live.

I would stay alive near any mom that has a carrot farm.

Even a mom that just has a basket.

But the uber-goal is to be of help to humanity as a whole, and to do that, ultimately, we have to consolidate the population around successful settlements as much as possible.

Look at it this way:
-if moms without camps are going to die *most* of the time
-and therefore their babies will die *most* of the time
-killing yourself instantly, when you'd just die anyway, saves everyone time

Until you find a mother with a stable place to live, killing yourself is merely taking a shortcut through the process that's going to happen anyway.

That said, it also gets boring AF so I don't strictly play this way.

This worked for me with one caveat: I can only run the game by clicking on the executable from inside the folder found by selecting "Open Package Contents".

Clicking on the App icon inside the normal folder still quits without warning.

When I click on the file inside the Package Contents, it first opens a Terminal window and does a bunch of stuff and then launches the app.

I've made this easier for myself by creating a shortcut to the executable inside the Package Contents, and putting that shortcut (alias) in the main folder next to the app icon.