One Hour One Life Forums

Yes, the wiki is a decently large project being handled by a very small operation at this point.  I wrote the framework for the starting and baking guides (the latter still largely incomplete) and then fell off the face of the world -- there are still some write-ups I had wanted to work on but they will likely be obsolete by the time I get around to it.

I'm not sure about that.  Last thing he changed regarding wild carrots is here https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeD … 9f0b3baa7c where he deleted this transition file.

Nicely done.  Thank you for letting this mic-less tourist take part near the end!

And as a bonus you can turn them into very fashionable boots!

If you and a motionless hostile animal occupy the same tile then you are killed.  Yep, pathing through a snake's resting tile would do it (unless, again, it is moving around).  A semi-related trick is that animals cannot land on tiles occupied by items, so if you ever need to be idle somewhere in bear country it's possible to avoid getting mauled by standing on the same tile as your basket or cart or whatever. 

Apocalypses have been disabled for now.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, it might be possible to argue that the achievement was "unfair" to a segment of the playerbase should it influence the balancing of future features.  Jason is currently in discord chatting about upcoming updates and continues to tease a mysterious "multi-generational" project.  He expressed interest in this group's achievement, asking how long it took to accomplish and what ended up defeating them, and mentioned he may aim for roughly half the invested hours as a requirement for his new feature.  If that results in a feature that's tuned in such a way as to be out of reach of all but groups coordinating very carefully I'm hopeful he will tweak it accordingly just as he tweaked in the wake of the original soil update as well as the apocalypse update.

The consensus seems to be that the usage of voice chat is an inevitability much like the usage of external wikis and guides and that there is very little to be done about it.  Instead, the dev's focus appears to be on making these kinds of achievements extremely difficult even with voice chat (hence his concern that what ultimately undid the family line was boredom) and how this is accomplished without alienating too much of the population remains to be seen.  We are all in this ride together, and I think part of the charm of this game is the fact that it inspires such heated debate about what essentially boils down to a high score with (hopefully) very little impact on the game itself.  Provided the discussion remains civil I really do think that's a good thing!

Forgive me if it was not your intent, but you are reading as very hostile and I would point out that I have never concretely defined my own stance on this matter.  I was not a core member of this generational project and I only participated for the span of a single life (not counting the six or so minutes I was alive before falling to a connection error) an hour or so after the event was opened to all who wished to participate on discord.  What's more, I do not personally own a mic and was limited to in-game text.  Having played in excess of 140 hours entirely "in the spirit of the game", I thought the experience of joining others whose voices I could hear might make for a novel experience.  It did.  It was never my intention to die on a hill in defense of a high score so there is no need to treat me as an enemy combatant. 

What about players who live together and can speak to each other outside of the game?  How do we handle "real life" voice chat?  OHOL also has a system wherein players cannot accumulate a list of known recipes (relying instead on mousing over objects and tabbing through a list of immediate byproducts).  It was perhaps Jason's intent that players teach each other, yet he also acknowledged the value of external information:

"Please make as many guides as you want to make.  They often teach ME things about the game that I didn't even realize (like how much milkweed is needed to make a backpack from scratch), which in turn helps me balance the game.  The only thing I can control is what's INSIDE the game.... like what hints are given there, etc.  But OUTSIDE the game, I expect people to talk about and write about anything and everything!"

What about baby codes, such as the one currently proposed to identify "forum readers"?  Would that sort of thing not also represent a pre-organized group of people should it result in the widespread abandonment of "F babies"?

It's also fair to point out that Jason has also changed his mind on certain topics.  For instance, Jason was initially against wells refilling:

"A lot of people ask to be able to repair or refill the well, but that’s not interesting to me.  It’s one weird trick you can use to recover from catastrophe and it becomes busywork. It’s much more interesting if there’s a hard failure, it’s a very dramatic turning point for the community if the well done gone dry! That’s interesting, and if there isn’t a good way to recover from it players have to come together and have a culture around well usage."

You raise a good point about why the effort was done on the public servers rather than on a private server.  I cannot speak for the group in question but I imagine the reason boils down to, "because it's more fun if the result ends up being displayed on the website."  I personally have no opinion on the matter.

On the subject of strategies, I would argue that it's quite difficult to define what is and isn't a "legitimate strategy" in this game because OHOL is and has always been in a constant state of flux.  While Jason often stated that the goal of the game was to work together to "rebuild civilization", he has also stated that "[he does] want all civs to crash eventually."  To that end, he has changed many mechanics and eliminated many strategies that players could not have known were "illegitimate".  Apparently, it was an unintended exploit that players were able to survive on carrots indefinitely while ignoring wheat and berries.  Players adapted and began to understand compost cycles to sustain their farms, but this too was deemed unintended and worms were added.  Players adapted to that change and developed the current strategy of relying on wild carrot seeds.  Jason is planning on eliminating that strategy, as well. 

While voice chat is a strategy that he cannot so easily remove, he did give us the ability to choose which public servers we spawn on.  In so doing, he (perhaps unintentionally) allowed players to accomplish certain things that might also be considered outside of the intended experience.  As I write this, there are six official servers with 0 players and two servers with 1 player.  By spawning on these empty servers, a single player can build a civilization entirely by themselves utilizing the solo-eve-old-age respawn mechanic to accomplish what would ordinarily require many players and many generations.  When the apocalypse was added at least one player managed to trigger it by doing just this.  Certainly the effects of that were much more impactful than what this group accomplished.

I was able to participate today to reach the goal of 111 and it was quite an enjoyable experience.

Re: oppositional posts, I assume the argument is that in order to be considered legitimate, a family line would have had to consist only of unrelated players coordinating exclusively in-game.  It is not an unfair argument, but it does boil down to differing opinions on styles of gameplay.  Since the game's creator has never expressed opposition to voice chat, it then falls to players to define what is and is not within the spirit of the game and, of course, it is unlikely everyone will agree (for instance, to a purist, all forms of external communication violate the spirit of the game -- including these forums).  Once upon a time, the fact that raiding in MMOs was facilitated by external addons and voip was something that also inspired bitter debate.

It is fair to point out that, yes, voice chat and player vouching played a large role in accomplishing the generational goal.  All parties should be able to agree that it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to have achieved such a high number using only the tools available within the game.  Perhaps a more fruitful avenue of debate would focus on why that is: I know that Jason has repeatedly indicated that his desire is for all civs to die out eventually, but what is "eventually"?  I would wager that few natural generations extend into the double digits.  If these generations are meant to be extending into the 40s and 50s, it is likely that more tools are needed to allow for neutralizing of deliberately noxious playstyles.  With a willingness to learn, a new and/or inexperienced player is a liability only for a short time; a player truly dedicated to undermining the efforts of others is quite difficult to effectively combat (there are undesirables in real life too, of course, but real life does not offer the ability to respawn).

For an opposing viewpoint, I will readily admit that I most enjoy games with punishing -- even unfair -- levels of difficulty.  I personally find the "balls-out frantic survival" to be the most enjoyable part of OHOL: selfishly, I would be inclined to oppose a concerted shift towards a gentler and more social experience.  Admittedly, a civilization-building multiplayer game is an odd choice for a player who generally resents social and creative/building additions to games so my opinion on whether certain parts of the game are enjoyably balanced might not be very representative of the playerbase's views.

We both might agree on finite resources, however: I would prefer that the difficulty remain tied to player ability and not to a world of vanishing resources.  While I don't know if I like the idea of simply adding in resource respawns (because I know allowing players to become "entrenched" and comfortable is something Jason is against), I would like to see it possible for players to restore the world as much as they can destroy it.  It's possible to dedicate one's life to replanting milkweed everywhere, for instance, but not trees, wild bushes, or dug carrots (to say nothing for wildlife or stones).  It shouldn't be easy, necessarily, but I wouldn't mind having the option to play more than a milkweed nomad from time to time.

I will always pick up and run with the first child that spawns with me as a wild eve.  This does usually involve forgoing the production of a sharp stone and basket, but with the exception of extremely unfavourable starts (e.g. poor choice of initial direction resulting in a much-delayed discovery of a berry biome that has been recently foraged) our survival is almost guaranteed once we find grasslands.  It is actually much harder once the child matures as the food requirements effectively double -- the time pressure to produce carrots is intense.  If the child is experienced and our circumstances are good, the pressure then branches to needing clothing ASAP as well as needing to ensuring a large enough farm for more children.

Sometimes the rushing involved is intense enough that I am unable to find time to teach a child that knows little, but I try to squeeze in at least the main environmental rules and some basic tasks.  After the carrots start maturing there is slightly more time for teaching or answering questions.

Happy to have helped! 

Thank you for pointing this omission out, I have updated the page to clarify.