One Hour One Life Forums

Aren't families in fact the ultimate "insider's club"?

Getting to know the same people, conflicts and drama, or cooperation and thriving until you start hitting map resource limits, constantly having to come up with new strategies to keep things going. That sounds compelling to me.

If a few people take ownership of the village and only get reborn to each other indefinitely, killing all outsiders... That sounds pretty similar to discord coordination on non-default servers, which is already allowed, and seemingly encouraged.

However, it's true that this would ruin the moment you describe where you are dying of old age and sad because you must say goodbye to your family and will never see them again. I think that's the most compelling reason not to reward old age deaths with family rebirths. Perhaps a difficult crafted item is required to enable the old-age family rebirth, preserving this powerful moment for typical players but allowing experts to extend their play. (Currently they do this by baby suiciding and coordinate tracking anyway.)

And there's always a chance one of the "insiders" could get murdered and instantly banished. Not such an insider anymore!

Eve:
-Sharp stone, basket
-Reed skirt (skip if milkweed scarce)
-Fire bow drill, hatchet
-Scout farm location: Patch of desert near as many ponds as possible (at least 4) with grasslands nearby
-Kiln in grasslands, hopefully not too close to the planned farm location so bored noob farmers don't keep messing with your crafting, but not too far or nobody will find it
-Craft bowl for watering
-Move fertile soil near ponds, three rows is good
-Head to plains for three carrot seeds (in basket)
-Start farm
-Start keeping and raising children!

At this point your children might dictate what happens next, depending on if they are noobs or griefers or helpful or veterans...

Village progress:
-Stone hoe
-Mildly hidden small farm for carrot seeds
-Milkweed farm, I like to make 4x4 patches in various places so they don't all get griefed at once or hogged by one player making too many clothes. With deserts around, clothes are not that useful.
-Potentially bow and arrow(s) if there are bears or griefers
-Snare, cooked rabbit, needle, water pouch. Backpacks are a luxury, a basket is all you will usually need. Best use of backpack is to keep mission-critical items out of the hands of other players who tend to grab whatever you just made or fetched.
-Forge, Axe and Shovel to tidy up common areas, axe brings firewood to keep fire going, clear out the swamp area
-Steel hoe to replace stone hoe
-Next goal is compost. Boxes and carts won't do much to help your village survive so let someone else worry about those. Pies tend to get wasted by hungry children and griefers. So next is a berry farm. Don't make it too close to noob farm. Make plenty of bowls near it so you can ninja grab bowls of berries as soon as they are up before anybody picks them. Something like six berry bushes into six bowls of berries is good.
-Sheep pen (trash pit pen with shovel is very efficient, 2x2 is big enough), rope, bow and arrow if you don't have it yet. Kill mouflon, rope domestic mouflon into sheep pen, feed it.
-Chisel, goose oil, file, knife. This is a dangerous point for your village. Once a knife is out people will start getting all sorts of "creative" ideas. Ideally you could leave it near the sheep pen and people will know what it is for. Realistically you will probably need to keep it in a backpack until you die.
-Cycle the sheep, find some wild wheat, make compost, shovel dung, finally new soil!
-Wheat farm, this will be needed to keep compost going. Your village is now fairly sustainable.

Luxury goals (no order):
-Bell tower
-Pies
-Clothes (rabbit/wool/etc. Dyed wool is coolest)
-Boxes and carts
-Horses, horse carts, fence parking spaces
-Kill snakes for safety, fruit boots
-Spare tools
-Tons of weapons (Griefer deterrent, everyone can defend themselves? Or just sowing chaos?)
-Walls, floors, rooms, doors
-Gold crowns
-Roads

Never make wells or cisterns. They are too hard to use properly, too easy to ruin, too expensive, and provide too little benefit even if they are used right. The stones are better used to make stone hoes. You can only keep farming carrots as long as you can keep tilling the soil. The ten stones for a well or cistern would go a LOT farther as hoes to till soil.

Hmmm that's weird. I spawned as Eve this morning and named myself West. I started a small village and left a few descendants. But it sounds nothing like what you described. Maybe one of my kids liked the name and chose it for themselves when they respawned as Eve.

Maybe I'm missing something big here, but I can't solve this puzzle. Compost looks infinite to me.

Dung comes from feeding a lamb. You have to knife the parent to conserve space, fine, knife use is infinite. A basket to move bones, reeds are infinite. Shoveling dung does not count against shovel uses, infinite.

What about the lamb feeding? A bowl of berries and carrots. Bowl is infinite, wild berry bushes infinite, even domestic bushes are potentially infinite with refilling pond water, no problem. The carrot? Carrot seeds, water, soil, tilling... water is infinite and tilling is infinite with skewers from saplings that regrow every hour. Waiting an hour for tilling with a worm? That seems utterly insane and unnecessary. Each carrot seed can be considered to use 1/7th of a soil, each carrot 1/35th.

You simply add the dung to a watered compost pile to get composted soil. The compost pile comes from another helping of a berry/carrot bowl (another 1/35th of a soil), pouring it on straw. Straw comes from wheat and wheat requires one soil.

That should be all that's needed. That's two soil (rounded way up) to produce four soil. It appears infinite, and the worm seems useless. You seem so confident in your teaser that I think I must have missed something.

If (a + b = c + d) is a core abstraction for design reasons, then features ought to stay true to this vision, and features that do not fit it (such as item decay) should be rejected. Even containers and berry bushes seem to assault this fundamental vision.

Which shall be the authority? An idealistic fundamental founding principle of the game, or your own freedom of design creativity? This is a decision you must make, and it seems that you keep pushing toward the later while clinging to the former.

Object properties are so useful and versatile in general that I am surprised you are worried you may find little use for them. I can't tell you how exactly they could be used because I don't know what kinds of features you plan for the future, I only know that object properties tend to be very useful in games I have developed, and you have already run up against one spot where they would be useful: item uses remaining.

Certainly the inclusion of object properties does not promise to "simulate everything." It is only a useful tool. What it simulates or promises is up to design. Don't feel like just because it's available that you have to use it for everything.

Properties would be implemented as name-value pairs. The values could just be integers. This would provide plenty of design freedom. However I understand that the use and propagation of these pairs would add much more complexity to the transition engine. One could imagine something like a scripting system getting involved. I understand why this is daunting and unappealing, especially if you don't see a clear use for it in the future.

You mention over-specialization of code and prefer the "mess" (complexity) to be in data. I agree completely. I am suggesting a generic system that would be taken advantage of only in data. A generic property system is less specialized and more reusable than an "object use counter" which is way more specialized and could instead by nestled inside the generic property feature.

If your instincts reject this approach, you know best. I just wanted to share my thoughts.

Mlikweed seeds on the ground despawn after one hour. It's unlikely someone will want exactly to plant milkweed around whatever plant you pulled. For this reason I don't bother picking seeds and laying them on the ground, it only creates clutter with no benefit in most cases. Even if someone does want to plant milkweed, it's not too difficult for them to simply find their own plant to pick, and then they get infinite seeds to make as many plots as they like. There is very little benefit from you leaving some seeds laying around for them, and a good chance the seeds will just disappear. If there is a milkweed plot in active development held up by soil, I'd say this is the only situation where picking a few seeds and leaving them nearby after picking the last milkweed is polite.

In contrast, milkweed stalks on the ground are permanent. For this reason I always pick fruiting milkweed if I happen by it and leave it on the ground. Then the next guy an hour later can get thread there right away instead of just a stalk.

"Strategy" implies a certain approach a player could take to tackle a problem in the game. "Meta" is about the meta-game, the best strategies to use in the game, especially after a rule change or update, such as the one that introduced item decay, leading to this thread. I intended to suggest that given the recent rule changes, this is the strategy we should all be using: It should be "meta" to use this strategy, at least until the rules change again.

Xuhybrid: Two trash pits won't work. Sheep can move multiple tiles at a time (in a straight line only). I think the maximum move distance is 4 tiles. They can easily pass over two filled trash pits. They simply can't STOP on a trash pit. You need a wall behind the trash pit, then they will never decide to go that way in the first place.

There shouldn't be any real difference between lambs and sheep for escaping these pens. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if lambs have a smaller maximum move distance.

Pein: The diagram you've shown where you tried to build a 3x3 version of the 1x1 pen I showed in the Permanent Sheep thread will not work. You say only the lambs escaped, but it will not hold in sheep either. It must have been some other factor or luck that you never saw the sheep escape. My 1x1 cell works because there is no space for a sheep to get an angle to move straight out of the pen. In your version, there are two ways to get straight out by taking the diagonals. Remember that sheep can pass over two item-blocked tiles at a time no problem as long as they move in a straight line. You need a wall behind the item (or trash pit) at every possible angle a sheep could approach it. That's why the corner version is so much more efficient. There is only one possible angle a sheep could approach the pit.

You guys seem to be struggling to grasp these movement rules. If it's still not clear let me know.

Here is my post about permanent grief-resistant sheep pens for reference: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1045

Note that adobe walls are no longer permanent, they decay after 5 hours then have only a 30 minute maintenance window. Meanwhile, fences are permanent. So the decision comes down to which is the bigger threat: Griefers/noobs or the decay timer? It's hard to say, but I'd still lean toward griefers/noobs, so I'm still going the adobe route. The suggestion to use fences for the vertical walls and adobe for horizontal is a good one since noobs can't de-log the vertical fences. This approach also has the added benefit of being expandable with a shovel to move the fences if you ever want a bigger pen. You could go a step further and only make vertical fences, even on the horizontal sections. It will work just as well, it will just look really stupid. Stone walls are another option but each tile requires an entire big rock and it will probably be quite a chore to find so many and haul them over.

Here is a less expensive design for a 3x3 pen:

It has happened to me four times in a couple hours. This last time I was not able to rejoin for about a minute. I presume the server was restarting.

A murderer should drop their weapon while they are debuffed. Then witnesses have a window of opportunity for a choice to pick up the weapon and kill in retaliation, or they approve of the killing and let the player live. This implements safety in numbers. It is appropriate as the majority is typically the group with good intentions that wants to preserve the village.

So many times I have watched someone commit a clearly grief-motivated murder but I can't do anything about it even though they are bloody and moving slowly because I have no weapon. Often they have hidden all other weapons before beginning the murder rampage. All I can do is run and hide, or else watch the murderer patiently wait for the debuff to expire and then it's my turn next.

I think this "drop weapon" solution mostly solves the problem. It preserves the freedom of player choice in the game while bringing more possibility of consequences. People will still get picked off on the outskirts of town alone, but that's not so bad and actually adds an interesting dynamic to the game. If you happen upon a bloody corpse outside of town, you can quickly go back to town and warn your family that a killer is loose, then stick together or have a buddy system until the killer's identity is discovered and justice is served.

Sure, the statistic that 2% of all deaths are murders sounds low until you consider that the vast majority of deaths are from baby suicides and noob kids/Eves quickly starving. What percentage of deaths of those non-Eves older than 15 or so are murders? I'd guess it's much higher, maybe 20%. Suddenly murder is revealed to be a much bigger problem. And it's precisely those lives where you are older than 15 that murder stings so badly, because those are the lives where you have had time to become emotionally invested in your character and your village.