One Hour One Life Forums

I think you might be overestimating efficiency of randomly grouped people with limited communication abilities. Villages are virtually guaranteed to mismanage their resources, and leaving uninhabitable areas behind, without trees or water, will just lead to starting fresh being the only option. IMO the "wait an hour" issue is the lesser evil. A way to nerf that could be introducing decay, so waiting for resources to replenish would lower the tech level of the area you're waiting on. I think it's a bit too easy to pick up after a long gone civilization anyway. And it makes sense for food to spoil and wood to rot. Heck, given enough time metal will rust away and even buildings will collapse. And it's unsightly how much random trash is strewn across the world. Plus I reckon it'd make things easier on the servers if old items were culled.

I definitely agree on being forced to climb the tech tree, though. Ponds shouldn't replenish fast enough in a reasonably local area to indefinitely sustain a small farming community. A well should be enough for one, but building wells should require a bit bigger community with more specialized roles for making the materials. This community would deplete a well faster than the groundwater would replenish, so you'd need an even bigger community to build an aqueduct from a nearby spring, etc. Now, the issue is that you can have the well building civilization collapse and a new small community taking the well and being sustainable indefinitely, or  simply the civilization contracting after building their infrastructure so they can sit on it forever. This is where decay can help, because the well will eventually collapse and they'll be down to unsustainable pond regeneration. In other words, climbing the tech tree should require a large and sustained civilization, rather than short bursts of advancement continuing from previous such bursts (ie a series of dead civilizations). I do like the idea of getting some use out of marvels of a lost civilization that you can't recreate or even properly maintain yet. So maybe decay for infrastructure could be usage based, that way it won't be all gone and reverted to basically a fresh start if it takes a bit too long before somebody reclaims the site.

Also, once a community reaches a certain size it's virtually guaranteed to implode even without external stresses. Size combined with lots of specialization and poor awareness of what exactly other people are doing is sure to breed distrust so civilizations will easily collapse for purely political reasons. Efficiency generally drops with size of a group, so people will feel like others are freeloading even if they're not. And it's all cranked up by the way in which communities gain and lose members, and the administrative nightmare it is to get the new members into correct roles.