One Hour One Life Forums

Actually you can get kids everywhere as long as you stay in your biome band. The problem is iron unlocking, as you can only unlock iron spots ONCE with the first well site your family (usually the Eve) creates. So any pseudo Eve town you create afterwards will not be able to get iron and evolve. It's an annoying system that isn't explained in the game and is hard for new players to get into, you have to dig through old forum posts or ask around on Discord to understand it.

My biggest problem with the game, though? Race. Restrictions. I hate this mechanic so much and the longer I play this game, the more I despise it. There is nothing redeemable about it in my opinion, it makes the game less fun, less accessible and encourages elitism. AND it keeps experienced players from doing productive things because they have to travel between towns to get resources instead.

Recent example: I was in a Jungle fam and our pump broke, so I wanted to make an engine. I had all the iron ready but noticed there was no timing belt (even though I thought I saw one lying around earlier) and of course no sulfur either. So I ended up riding to the Desert family (I think they were like 1k away) just to get sulfur for that ONE component I needed. By the time I was back, I was old, so I couldn't even finish the belt. The sad thing is, the entire time I was wondering if it was all even worth it because even if we did make the engine, it was unlikely for our family to somehow get our hands on oil during a newbie boom.  Now, had it not been for race restrictions, I probably would have been able to at least finish the damn thing OR spend the time wasted on traveling between towns on setting up an oil pump. But I guess making it so everyone has to pray for Gingers to get them oil instead is more “fun”?

I can live with magic fences, I can live with magic iron … but magical racism? T E R R I B L E

Oh neat, I just noticed that I got access to it today.

Guess it's time to say goodbye to OHOL for now…

Yea, I noticed that, too … it seems no matter how hard Jason tries to force it, people just refuse to trade for resources and will rather do literally anything else to get around it. Even if they have to SID until they get whatever race they need t be. Such an awful mechanic. And especially awful for new players. Sometimes a leader will order something like “we need latex” and someone will eagerly say “I'll go get it, where can I find it?”–and then it feels so bad to explain them that they have to find brown people first because they literally can't access it otherwise. Where's the fun in that?

Not to mention it's pretty off putting for many people when they hear that they can't do stuff because they got born as the wrong race. I remember explaining that mechanic to my husband when he tried out the game and his first reaction was something along the lines of “wtf that's pretty racist” and I couldn't disagree with that. Who wants racism in a game they play to escape from reality? No wonder the player count mostly hovers around 30 these days.

How about just make it so that bears don't follow people on horses or cars? Assuming, of course, that Jason will one day return and work on the game again...

Need someone to advertise it on tiktok again. I'd love to see some more players on a server

I feel like Jason added race restrictions without putting much thought into it and now refuses to remove them because in his eyes, they do their job which was to encourage “trade”. And since there's people being forced to get resources from other towns, he thinks trade is working. No matter how frustrating it is for the players, no matter that dumping resources is not the same as “trading” them and no matter the fact that most use a third party mod (which shouldn't be allowed on the main server in the first place) to at least be able to communicate with each other and ask for help. It's even worse now because there have been no updates for months and people are stuck dealing with a broken mechanic in the meantime.

This is very true and also something that rubbed me the wrong way when Jason claimed to understand how new players feel because he doesn't play the game that much. Yes, he doesn't play it but he still knows how all those complicated mechanics are supposed to work that most new players never get to understand before they quit the game out of frustration. So in a way he gets the best of both worlds whenever he takes a peak into the game: not playing it long enough to feel the frustration that comes with being an experienced player trying to keep a town alive and at the same time not having to deal with being a confused noob who doesn't know how to do anything.

This would be much less of a problem if Jason had some people he actually trusts play the game and give him advice on what does and doesn't work but right now, it seems like he's getting tired of the game in general and just wants to wrap things up and move on.

Strangely enough, it was a random roleplaying experience.

I was still very new at that time and the only thing I knew how to do was carrot farming (which I was very proud of since it already seemed to make me so much more useful than some of my berry munching family members). The other thing I knew was that you seemed to get more babies if you stayed near the nursery fire, so I was just hanging around there waiting for someone to pop out.

At one point a guy showed up and just started roleplaying as my husband out of nowhere. I thought he was a little weird at first but then decided to go along with it because I had nothing better to do anyway and our fam had more than enough carrots lying around. At one point I got a son who decided play along, so it was like we had a little family. I was genuinely surprised how nice it felt, even if it was just random players in a game that would soon become strangers after the hour was over. When my husband died before me, I actually felt sad. I asked my son how to make a grave for him and buried him with my own hands. Shortly after I died as well and my son buried me right next to him, which I discovered in a later life when that family had already died out. I still remember coming back to those two graves and feeling a bittersweet touch of melancholy thinking about the life I left behind.

Thinking back now, that was probably the moment I realized the meaning of “family building” in this game and that it could be so much more than getting confused by the crafting system and trying your  best not to starve. I had many more great lives after that but this particular one is just special to me. In fact, even my nickname is a slight variant of the name I had back then lol.

Yea I highly doubt the reason why this game appears to be semi-dead right now is lack of griefing rather than general lack of new content and interesting gaming experiences. That said, there's simply no potential for in-game conflict other than griefing right now because all towns so heavily rely on each other. Why would you attack the Gingers for example if you already know you're gonna have to beg them for oil in a few hours? As a result, the game becomes more and more stale and boring, all towns start looking the same, etc. New players leave out of frustration because of the non-intuitive mechanics and old players leave out of boredom. But having less players means everything starts looking even more similar because it's gonna be mostly the same people doing the same stuff over and over again.

Really, the state of this game is pretty depressing right now … when I checked the server list a few days ago, there were just 14 (!!!) people playing on bs2. Does this really count as being in a “good place”? I really hope that once Jason finishes his moving adventure, he'll do some serious reconsiderations regarding certain game mechanics because right now, the game seems to be slowly fading away.

Honestly, as much as it pains me to say it because I do believe most of the vets are genuinely trying to make this game more enjoyable for everyone, I gotta agree that currently it's doing more harm than good. Not only is it keeping up this broken system, the elitism that comes with it also discourages new players who are struggling with the vanilla client while giving more advantages to experienced players (who are already at an advantage in the first place because of their experience).

Now, I see many people say “well the game is not fun without hetuw” but isn't this the actual problem here? The question is WHY is it not fun? Because of the missing zoom function? Because race restrictions are forcing everyone to rely on each other while preventing functional communication at the same time? These problems need to be fixed within the game itself, not by third party mods that really only provide a half-fix if anything.

MAYBE if Jason discouraged people from using mods on the main server, he'd stop thinking that the game is “in a good place” (which it's really not).

Thanks for the replies, from what you guys are saying it does sound like Jason originally had good intentions with these changes, it's just that the execution caused more problems rather than solve the issue. Like with the iron system, I'd really like to see how the game would look like if players could unlock more iron with each well they build rather than just the first one. At least we could build small outposts on a quest to get more resources and maybe these outposts would later turn into proper towns. Or someone might leave their hometown for whatever reason and start a new civilization from scratch somewhere far away. That seems like more potential for interesting stories rather than just taking the truck behind the gate and looting a bunch of dead towns. (Which would still be possible anyway.)

As for the race restrictions, this is probably the mechanic I hate the most because it actually does the opposite of what it was supposed to do (make the game more “interesting” and towns more “diverse”.) It also doesn't encourage “trade”, it encourages looting dead towns and dumping resources in Eve towns because people need to keep all three towns with locked resources alive, since everyone depends on those resources. Even worse, the race system relies on a very specific balance of ideally just four towns that have experienced people shipping resources between them. As soon as that balance is disturbed (like by having too many new players on a server) everything descends into chaos because the race system is so complicated and unintuitive, there's no way new people are going to see through it quickly enough to prevent their towns from dying of dehydration. And even experienced players are going to have a hard time getting resources because a new player isn't going to understand why a weird red haired guy shows up out of nowhere and starts messing around with a bucket in front of them.

If a game mechanic can only properly function on a server with 60 people on it, there's clearly something wrong with that mechanic and it either needs to be revamped pretty substantially or better just abolished altogether like what happened with tool slots.