One Hour One Life Forums

PROPOSAL TEN: TUTORIAL TOWN

There should be a secret section of the tutorial where the player can stumble into an abandoned town.

Would allow players to sandbox better; learn how to use and interact things.

Tutorial should cover basic farming and wells.

I think there will always be bucket shortages -- never enough milkweed no matter how much there is.

As for me, I'm fairly neutral about how the resources are distributed. I think the main issue right now is still water over everything else.

@Jason: Is it possible to give different resources different frequencies?

I like the current frequency of round rocks and things like that -- and I think it makes sense this way. There should be rocks everywhere.

I'm fine with other resources being more sparse, like wild food, but there should be lots of rocks XD

This wikipedia page is excellent for filling in things on a tech tree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ … inventions

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PROPOSAL NINE: ADOPT A NOOB

Players who really like teaching noobs could have an option on the login screen:

- "Check here if you're interested in teaching and parenting new players"

Players who check the option have increased likelihood of getting new/younger players (as defined by the total number of games played). It doesn't increase their overall birth rate -- just affects the type of players they get.

Why do this?

Some players just aren't interested in parenting or spending all their patience on teaching noobs from scratch. However, others love it. By increasing the likelihood that noobs are paired with nice moms, everyone comes out happier.

I'm not too surprised, actually. xD

I'm pretty sure the new meta will be something along the lines of:

- Don't get close to any outsider unless you're sure they're not holding anything dangerous.
- If you see an outsider carrying a sword, shout "RAIDER" and kill them immediately. No questions asked.

I would appreciate a slight cooldown too though.

Thank you for your hard work

I'm curious to see how the update pans out -- haven't been around to know what the butterknives were like.

I'm concerned about the sword update in relation to the zoom mod.

There's a ridiculous/unfair/almost-cheat-like advantage to players who use that mod if the game goes in the pvp fashion like this. Would be interested in knowing if Jason has any intentions to address things like this.

So after writing the OP, later on I stumbled on some threads on how the game is coded (and I glanced at the github), and lots of the things suggested here probably aren't that feasible given how the game was initially designed.

Oh well! Dreams, nonetheless, right?

In either case, I can't help my brain wandering and thinking about the what ifs.... and I started thinking about how one might design a more true-to-life simulator, worrying a little less about trying to artificially produce "excitement" in the game.

I'm posting this here mostly for the lol's.

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My first line of thought was that to simulate reality better, 1 hour is a bit too short to cover 60 years. I can't figure out a decent way to fit seasons or day/night cycles into 1 hour. Even if you try to fudge and stretch the lines, most people would experience 1-3 cycles of seasons and then die, which is pretty short for a "lifetime".

So then my mind started wandering towards extending the time to one life to fit more content. I floated towards a 90 minute game to a 2 hour game to even a 3 hour game, but really it was starting to get untenable.

At that point I basically gave up on trying to fit a "life" on a single gaming session, and started considering how to do real-time yet over multiple days/weeks.

I figured that with ~180X acceleration, and using 4 month years and 15 day months, a 60-year life comes out to about 20-30 days.

Yay~ One Month One Life (lol)

The problem is that people won't play games constantly... but that's fine if we tweak human biology a bit, right? Instead of fantasy-humans sleeping on regular cycles, all humans like to have periods of hibernation and being insomniacs (most of the time hibernating I guess), so I guess these humans really like to sleep. XD

I checked a survey on google and most gamers play games 4-6 hours per week, which using the more conservative number comes out to 2% of the time. I kept wavering on this more, and then ultimately decided that it would be a bit silly if 98% of your player base is sleeping in beds all the time. In fact, most of all the space in a "settlement" would be beds with sleeping people, lol.

Then I floated towards the idea of scriptable play (kind of like those browser games where you log on to check something and set tasks for the next 8-24 hours for your character to do when you're offline). However, when you're online you override and take manual control. I later decided I didn't like that a whole lot either.

And then.......

A fun idea occurred to me.

What if everybody were tree ents and dryads.

A tree ent and dryad simulator!

When people log off they turn into trees.

And 200X time acceleration makes sense. If you slow it down, in the game-reality everyone is moving in super slow motion like you expect tree ents to!!!

And then you can make tree ents (the players) vs. evil human NPC ants that are buzzing around constantly deforesting your trees lol.

And then tree ent society and tree ent technology............... tree ent babies with tree ent moms and dads popping out all around.............

It takes 6 days (in game time) for a couple tree ents to have a simple conversation, hello, how are youuuuuuuu....................................

Questions:

Is "never eat carrots regardless of your age because they're better used for something else" still part of the meta?

I can't remember when I learned this one (I think from a youtube video, somebody got stabbed lol), but I just wanted to check!

Also are potatoes good or bad? XD (yes, I have to ask lol)

On why there isn't trade/property... continued.

REASON 2: INSUFFICIENT COMPETITION, DECREASING VALUE OF LAND

If we consider nature, animals are territorial because there are usually more animals than territory. Animals fight each other for limited territory, which contains resources. Winning a fight must leave the winner better off than before.

There are two features of OHOL that prevent this aspect of natural history from occurring:

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The first is that land is unlimited in OHOL. This is the opposite of the way most of the Earth has been through most of history -- where land is limited (and animals fight over territory/defend their territory). In fact, the original etymology of the word "property" only referred to land, and was not used to describe any other kind of material object.

On Earth, property (land) ownership historically had powerful rewards, in that so long as somebody owned land, they could guarantee the fitness of their lineage. Owning land was the holy grail of tenant fairmers and peasants. There was strong incentive to defend their property (land) against landless people, and everybody wanted land.

Notably, this really only works when you have both landed property owners, and homeless non-property owners.

In OHOL, land is infinite, but resources are finite, which is the reverse of what is needed to incentivize property ownership.

Since land is infinite, there's no reason to own property. Since local resources are finite in OHOL, the value of land (property) decreases with time, particularly when local resources are exhausted. This would be like if the real estate valuation of your house decreased every decade. In OHOL, land is the equivalent of a metaphorical block of melting ice. Given enough time, it becomes worthless. Why would somebody spend $1000 to buy a block of melting ice, when the benefit obtained by having one doesn't exceed the corresponding investment?

As long as this "infinite land with rapidly depleted resources" paradigm holds true, there will never be an incentive to hold landed property.

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The second reason why competition for land doesn't exist in OHOL is that there is an absence of surplus.

It might sound weird that I'm talking about insufficient competition and insufficient surplus in the same post, but let me explain.

People with discrete math might be familiar with the pigeonhole principle:

Consider a thought experiment where each hole (m) is a "person". If a person receives a pigeon, they are a poor person. If a person receives no pigeon, they starve and die. If a person receives >1 pigeon, they are rich.

The general current state of the OHOL is such that m > n. Life is hard. There's barely enough to survive. You're either poor or you're dead. There's no room for the rich, and anyone trying to be rich is viewed as a "griefer".

Surplus is required for specialization, trade, and lots of other features of modern human society. You can simulate animal society in the absence of surplus, but human culture is critically based on the presence of surplus.

When n >> m, you start to have rich people and poor people, and class differences can arise. Of course, there will always be the occasional dead person who has no pigeon, but generally speaking most people have to have a minimum level of sustenance before they're willing to tolerate some degree of inequality.

In OHOL (m < n), if you have a "rich" person hogging all the pigeons, you don't end up with a society with classes/inequality. Instead, you end up with a whole lot of dead people. A "rich" person isn't rich anymore when they're the only one left.

PROPOSAL EIGHT: FERTILITY SHOULD BE A PROPERTY OF GROUND TILES

One of the weird gimmicks about OHOL (coming as a new player who likes other survival games) is that "Fertile Soil" is only found in sparse deposits scattered on the map. A player has to take a basket and physically plop soil elsewhere on the ground. This is strange because... real life just isn't like this.

It makes me wonder: is OHOL a concrete world where the only way to grow something is to physically add soil before planting?

I grow green onions in my backyard and I don't do anything particularly special to the soil. If you take a hoe to the ground and till it, for the most part something will grow (unless your soil quality sucks). Fertility is a concern if you're repeatedly growing something in the same place (farmers), but wild soil is often good enough to plant straight away.

This proposal is a drastic suggestion on how to change the soil fertility system.

If you google how much of the world's surface area is "arable land", the number ranges somewhere between 10-25%. In other words, 10-25% of tiles in the game should be farmable (at least for a short period of time) if you simply take a hoe and till.

To make this happen, the easiest way to simply make "fertility" a property of ground tiles. When you harvest crops from land, the fertility declines, and eventually the soil will be exhausted. Fertility will slowly recover with time, but fertilizer (e.g. compost) is necessary to restore fertility quickly. Additionally, some special areas of the world (e.g. Nile river valley, Yellow River valley) have natural means to restore fertility to soil. The annual flooding of rivers into alluvial plains restores fertility to the soil, and was essential for ancient civilizations that did not have access to "composting" technology.

There are several cool things that can be done when fertility is a soil property.

One is that this can help set the groundwork for key agricultural concepts like Crop Rotation.

In medieval societies, it was common to leave fields fallow for a year or two after planting so that fertility can recover in the soil. Fallow fields would be used as grazing areas for village livestock (so it wasn't entirely useless).

However, implementation of Crop Rotation during the Agricultural Revolution allowed a drastic increase of farming output, since it's possible to grow certain plants in synergistic cycles that don't deplete the soil as much. Crop Rotation might be a cool feature to add to the game.

PROPOSAL 6: SHEEP SHOULD EAT GRASS

Something missing in the current version of OHOL is that farming is the only viable way to sustain a settlement.

In real life, many types of settlements were viable in the past. For instance, it was possible for some villages to subsist entirely on fishing, and others on shepherding large flocks of domestic animals. In fact, trade (and conflict) between nomadic shepherding societies and sedentary agricultural societies is a prominent feature of ancient civilizations.

In the old days, it wasn't plausible to maintain huge sheep farms in Mesopotamian cities because large flocks of animals consume a **** ton of grass, effectively stripping the ground clean. The concept of a massive cattle farm with tiny restrictive pens is a modern concept and invention, made possible only by very sophisticated transportation economies.

Early sheep-centric tribes/civilizations had to be nomadic. They didn't have a choice.

That said, nomadic civilizations like the early arab and mongol cultures were still able to thrive even without farming. In my opinion, having a large flock of sheep should be sufficient to easily sustain a lineage.

By making sheep eat grass, civilizations will:

A) Either need to go nomadic if they like raising more than one or two sheep
B) Trade with a nomadic sheep civilization
C) Employ shepherds that take flocks outside of town to graze and come back. Pens are employed to keep animals safe from wolves at night -- not because animals can be raised inside them.

I had the opportunity to travel to tibet some years ago, and I think one thing that really left an impression on me is how a single shepherd can take a flock of hundreds and hundreds of sheep miles and kilometers away from the nearest settlement.