One Hour One Life Forums

...Can there at least be a minimum amount of uses before this is possible for the Newcomen Pump? Since it's a structure instead of a tool, maybe it changes from a regular "Dry Newcomen Pump" and 5% chance to become a "Drying Newcomen Pump" and then another 5% chance to become "Exhausted Newcomen Pump"?

Also, I submitted a request on the Github for an inconsistency w/ the Newcomen Pump destroying the Stanchion, while Diesel pump returns your Stanchion Kit used.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues/286

Imagine for a moment if the current Goose ponds we have were modified to look something like the below:

Canada Goose Pond

Number of uses: 5 (No change)
Chance to use: 20% -> 25% (Less probable uses)

Spawn rates

Swamp: 9% (down from 14.08%)
Jungle: 6% (dangerous place to get water from, unless the mosquitos are fought back)
Snow: 3% (generally uninhabitable, so not a big deal to have water available alongside saltwater)
Grassland: 2% (Source of berries/branches/soil. Branches & soil should be diffused to other biomes to reduce Grassland's powerful soil+pond combo)
Prairie: 2%
Badlands: 0.5% (having a water source near your source of late-game material [Iron] should be possible, but very rare)
Desert: 0%

If ponds were able to spawn in more biomes, and had a generally-lower frequency of appearing, the 'jackpot' chance of finding a good clump of ponds is still low, but the possibility of setting up a society in other biomes goes up. You could potentially replace the Goose pond with the 'Springheads' that was proposed just recently, sure, but for dynamic gameplay, maintaining the RNG is my personal bias and what comes to my mind for the topic of making water harder, but also not easily game'd.

That's totally fair. There are villages where the amount of ponds has definitely made it very simple to progress up the water tree at a slow and steady pace. I believe reducing the % spawn chance of the goose ponds (and buffing how much uses or the use % chance they have) would be preferable to an evenly-distributed method of correcting the over-abundance of water we've been benefiting from.

I slightly disagree about people not depending on Newcomens. In villages where there were only 3-4 ponds, the deep wells still would dry out after a couple of generations of living, and a Newcomen pump is setup w/ Cisterns to hold its water.

I honestly think that the Newcomens were properly paced to upgrading a town's water supply, but as players started memorizing the steps to efficiently building the Engine, the 17-steel cost to make a Diesel Well became easier to 'rush' right after getting the Oil Pumpjack online. In my last few lives where I've been in Newcomen-tech villages, I've seen plenty of use of the Newcomen pumps, but very few of the Kerosene. I think if anything is to 'run out' it should just be the charcoal-based Newcomen Pump, but the Kerosene/Diesel pumps remain untouched; Oil I think can have an eventual loss of supply, and forcing the town to have to travel farther, or to find other oil wells, to sustain high-tier technology would separate towns from eventually going dry.

I think this "even pond distribution" thing is us approaching the problem backwards. We're no longer trying to get a proper solution to making unique village setups occur, this feature is implementing an "equality of outcome" by guaranteeing every village has 1 pond, no more, no less. This is removing the significance of Ponds/water as a resource entirely by making it uniform, non-random, and a given for any village.

Resource scarcity/resource discrimination is the 'spice of life' in playing survival games. I experienced it very slightly in CivCraft, and it's a very common feature in Age of Empires II, an RTS where the resources dynamically generate on each map to prevent a perfect meta. Even if you were to implement this change, a player/Eve starting a new village will not worry about ponds as a resource; they're expecting to get one, and are searching for the next important 'Jackpot' that people value in an initial base setup, such as soil. Is the next step to make soil evenly distributed across the map like pond? After that will be iron, and so on and so forth.

Here's my lists for making the Photographs and Black cloth.

Black Cloth Making
You need one to store every 5 unused photos

<Infrastructure>
* Loom
* Berry, Carrot, & Sugarcane Farms
* Sheeeeeeeeeep
* 2 Hot Coals

<Tools>
* Round Stone
* Steel Axe
* Shears
* Drop Spindle
* >=6 Bowls
* Wrought Iron

<Ingredients>
* 12 Fleece < 72 Gooseberries, 12 Carrots >
* 2 Bowls of Water
* 1 Alum
* 1 Iron Filing
* 1 Bowl of Salt Water
* 1 Sugarcane

Photography Making
Produces 5 Photos for storing

<Infrastructure>
* Newcomen Hammer
* 2 Hot Coals
* Firing Forge
* Loom
* Black Cloth

<Tools>
* Tongs
* 2 Flat Rocks
* Round Stone
* >=6 Bowls
* >2 Plates

<Ingredients>
* 6 Paper
* 3 Water
* 2 Niter
* 1 Sulfur
* 1 Malachite
* 1 Coal
* 1 Alum
* 1 Ashes
* 1 Electrum

If you truly honor your ancestors, you'll get a horse-cart to dump their bones further away from town; it gets messy when you leave them too close to the village.

I think that's okay, personally. There are a lot of 'uninhabitable' regions IRL, and initially, society was only able to form within 'fertile crescents' for life to sustain itself. There's an argument against this, that a game doesn't need to be perfectly realistic, sure. For the sake of OHOL, I think it would be an interesting option to avoid being away from the 'ideal' biomes, occupying a space that might be better in the long-run by gambling the lineage's early stability.

The current topic of trading is incredibly flawed; even though I believe in the practice, no society in OHOL is beyond the stage of their tribal state of economics to be able to hard-transition into privatization and bartered trading. Trading is a massive burden locally, as any sort of transaction involves spending between 15-60 seconds discussion, which is equivalent to 3 months to a year. It is also, in one sense, not justifiable, as trying to prod private ownership into a community economic system is going to lead to a breakdown of cooperation.
- Who owns the kiln/furnace? It provides us with clay pottery and a place to smelt resources, if you gathered them yourself.
- Who owns the fire? It keeps everyone alive, and is generally centralized to literally avoid burning through wood faster.
- Who owns the sheep? Someone gathered them first, and is now allowing everyone to use them. Were they 'paid' for doing that?
- Who owns the baskets/farmland/food? Someone had to spend time tilling the soil, planting, watering, picking the food, refining them at a bakery, cooking them in the oven. Who decides the value of them when the village will die if you try to put a price tag on them?
- Who owns the Iron? Someone had to go out and gather those, either from the surface or from an Iron mine. Did the person gather all the materials to make the Pickaxe used to mine that Vein? Did they gather the rope, the butt logs, the bow saw, the flint-tipped bow drill, the Adze/Froe, to make the Stanchion Kit?
- How many interactions have people trying to privatize their own space and resources had with the village they live in that result in them having to 'take' or borrow their tools? What gives them the ownership of resources that they gathered using the village's resources?

Our gameplay loop is not adequately timed for us to be able to do these things, even more so because the moment we die, none of the things we 'owned' or gathered will belong to us the next time we come around that village. The only trade I consider legitimate is initial bartering between villages of different family lineages, because they are exclusively in their own space.

I agree that people can be useless (I prefer the term 'braindead') and/or griefers and that's still up to us, as people, to control. Do you just make a single baton, two, three, to protect the village? Are you making sure, like Knives, that they get handed down to people that 'seem' responsible? At the very least, we're dealing with significantly-less lethal tools being handed out to ensure people keep a village 'safe'.

Being able to disarm griefers/murderers is a good goal to have; but at the same time, if the situation were flipped, what if you were trying to kill the griefer/murderer with a knife and they disramed you at range? Having both Baton and Knife be close-range tools to combat others feels like the most balanced approach to it.

The Guillotine should not be controllable by a single person, and should probably have an age restriction on it so that you're not off'ing people way too early in life, but at the same time, that's up to the individual, isn't it? Would you want to live in a village where a group of people managed to coordinately kill you 'for the lulz'? I am certain that if Jason were to consider implementing such a tool, there would be safeguards to make sure it's checking for enough people being involved; you could require the Guillotine needs to be prepped while the griefer/murderer is held via rope, that way at least 2 people are required; you could require them having to be stuck in said Guillotine for a minimum of 3-5 minutes, so that someone is forced to keep them fed while they await their execution, and so that people can see that it's happening. After all, it did draw in crowds when it was first introduced.

I think I understand what Jason's pointing at, Money = Water/Iron in OHOL, since those are the life-blood of growing crops and tools. What is a village to do when it hits Diesel wells, when it has plenty of water from all the Kerosene being run through said wells, and when Airplanes are able to bring back dozens of new ingots?

The issue I have on this is that we're questioning the late-game, when the late-game technically isn't even fully fleshed out. We still have a lot more technology to progress through, yes? Newcomen systems came with update after update, but we're at a standstill for now on seeing new technologies from from them. The loom just gained clothing for making people more individualistic/unique from one another, which is significantly helpful in picking people out from one another when griefing/murders happen. Objectively, once a town becomes fully-established and is at Diesel well, their primary concerns are making sure to continue pumping for oil, keeping the people fed, and exploiting more and more iron/gold veins, right?

I think what we're missing is more choices in the late-game to do once your village has hit the Diesel/Airplane tiers. We need new technologies that replace the 'perfected' technologies of prior, and simplify them or make them less , as we continue moving up the chain of technology.

The early-game Eve cycle has been nearly perfected because there is really only one way to advance; kiln, rabbits, furnace, farm, steel, sheep, compost, clothing.....I don't think we want people to do the same thing over, and over, and over, throughout the entire gameplay loop from Eve -> Diesel well town. Since Jason brought up RTS, we can draw solid parallels that the early-game is pretty standardized, while the 'build order' moving into the mid- and late-game diversifies based on the environment. If we want to see a better endgame, the resources in the end-game need to be rarer or scrutinized not on the biome scale of rarity, but on a map-wide scale. Not just building an end-game where everyone is forced to go through the same "build path", making the same things in the same order.

'craftable Zoom' option: Glasses.

Use a rock on molten glass to make 1 Convex lens
Use a rock (instead of hammer) on Hot Wrought Iron to craft crude frames. Hit it again before it cools and you get a monocle frame.

Monocle frame + 1 Convex lens = Monocle
Crude frames + 2 Convex lens (1 at a time) = Spectacles

Wearing them over the eyes could add a basic level of 'zoom' to the player that they could adjust by wearing/removing the glasses. Maybe they can be adjusted, idk. The lens could "become blurry", aka decay, after a couple hours, so they require glass upkeep to keep using them across generations.