One Hour One Life Forums

This isn't a most necessary change. It's important in my opinion but doesn't deserve its own thread so I'm posting it here.

Lockpicking.

As far as I know removing any lock requires you to lock something else in turn. The only exception is if you already have a matching key that can be filed into a lock removal key. Otherwise, you have to make a new lock and key set, then experiment with Lock and Key A-Z to figure out which letter the lock you want to remove is keyed to.

In bell towns you often find locked doors and containers around because people are moving locks from the bakery or whatever to an empty chest to get them out of the way. Locks in general are niche tech with very limited uses. Most players don't know how to build or pick locks, and even if you do know how it's time consuming. Even if you know how AND you put in the time to lockpick the only real solution is a messy one that doesn't really remove any locks, just essentially moves them from one thing to another before scrapping the second set.

To begin with legitimate uses of a lock are extremely rare. For the most part they're only used to grief, and it's doubly effective because lock removal is implemented in such an ineffective way. I wish there was a way to do it with just a key so that the problematic lock can then be scrapped together as a set.

1. There is no choice. I have to do what I must do. If I'm naked there's no other choice than making clothes. Etc. Those tools must be used.

2. Each life is the same. You do the same things you would otherwise. The only difference is which important thing you're left unable to do at the end.

3. There are always more problems. If the town needs something done, do it yourself. Otherwise it's not getting done at all. Tool slots prevent this. Solve one or two pressing problems then watch helplessly as everyone starves, because you can't make compost and nobody else knows how.

4. Which leads to interaction. Begging for some useful idiot to use one item on another one for you and usually being ignored. At best they do it grudgingly and you can make a smidgen of progress- until another tool-locked item is necessary five minutes later.

5. Trade does not exist in ohol. It is a communist society.

6. I've tried assigning jobs to children in the tool-slot update. They're often fairly receptive and want to help. They never ever know how. Can't bake, can't farm, definitely doesn't know smithing. Teaching is agonizingly slow and another baby is coming fast.

7. "Constraints are generally good," is that supposed to be a joke?

I think a big part of the problem with all these recent changes is that they're very much an afterthought. The game was completed, finished, released... and a year later dramatic changes are being made to the core gameplay. Nothing was built to work together, instead these changes were tacked on after the fact without any real integration. Hot coals are a classic example of this. They're used for cooking, making pads and dying clothes. You might only use them once in your entire life, but it still takes up a precious tool slow.

The concept can make sense and I understand the intent behind it. Encouraging people to practice a profession. Many new players embrace this while they're still learning. I know I did at least. You want to learn to cook? Spend a life as a baker. Still not sure how to smith? Spend a lifetime playing in the smithy. It makes sense and it's a good way to learn.

In practice forcing these constraints onto people is absolutely awful, most of all for experienced players that actually know how to craft and make a lot of different things. I said this in the original post introducing them as well. There are no benefits, only disadvantages. It's the wrong kind of difficulty. Difficult games are fun when they empower the player to overcome those challenges, not when they make you weaker instead. It's fun when you find a chunk of some obscure resource like niter and know exactly how to use it. The opposite is true when the game hard locks the desert that it spawns in and prevents you from ever grabbing the thing.

I had a similar idea, naturally generating dirt pathways according to heatmaps or something like that. If an area is heavily traveled, it becomes worn to dirt. Most tiles in and very near town would become dirt. No auto-running or movement speed bonus so it's not overpowered. They just provide a commonly traveled path.

It would make exploration easier if people in town had pathways to follow towards interest points, or nearby travelers had that extra bit of evidence that people inhabit this area. Often you find corpses or discarded items with no real way to know whether there's a settlement nearby or if it was just left a thousand tiles out in the wilderness.

Anarcho-communism is the ideal political structure for ohol. I will not allow useless dukes or barons to disturb the working man with their 'leadership.'

People should do what they want, not what they're told to. In the words of the update, "I follow myself."

It's less of a thing now that you can just run away and automatically escape, but people have always killed by lurking at the edge of town. It's a classic serial killer tactic. Wait at the end of a long road or roam the area around town with a bow """hunting,""" your victims will die before they can ever tell anyone who killed them. Pick off a few that way and maybe then there are few enough defenders left in town to oppose you.

Yes. It's blatantly stupid and should have been ignored like all the other popular and stupid ideas.

It's very much the type of mechanic that should have been included in the base game prior to release if it was ever going to remotely be a thing at all. Similar to tool slots and family specialization. Don't release a game and then dramatically alter its base mechanics in these harmful ways, that's literally cancer. Release a solid base then expand on it with new content. That's what was promised and it was a total lie.

The base game on steam release was perfect, an extremely rare gem that truly rates 10/10. Now it's trash, because it's being actively ruined. There is no excuse beyond ignorance and tragically poor taste.

Personally, my infant deaths come from hopelessness. I'm born and I immediately see that this place is doomed. Yesterday I was born to see that everyone's naked and there's no well. Not even a spring site. A primitive camp with a small farm fueled by pond water. Any work I do here is pointless. What alternative do I have to suicide? Wander through bland uninteresting wilderness for an hour? Realistically my absolute best hope would be to find a dead town, and even then I would be alone since I was a boy.

Rather than waste a real time hour of my life I'd rather just die and try to find somewhere better.

New players know how to do one thing, or maybe two things. "I can make pie!" is something that a passionate new player might say. Most people never use even the very limited noob tool slots. It's strictly a measure to handcuff better players so they can't keep towns alive by themselves. Same as the specialization update. In practice it dooms virtually all towns through rng. If you can't do everything in this game you can't do anything.

The tool slot system is a crappy gimmick that everyone hates, there's no doubt about that. Same with family specialization. It's his way of updating without doing any real work to add content.

Earlier today I was exploring and finding nothing but dead towns as usual. Decided to settle in and repopulate with my children. The town's only fire died because I couldn't kindle hot coals. Apparently adding kindling to restore a fireplace counts as using the hot coals tool slot. This system is beyond stupid.

If you're ginger the snowball works in a pinch.

High tech towns give you the luxury to do what you -want- to do rather than what you *have* to do. That's why I like them. Have you ever made or even eaten ice cream? Maybe now's the time! Want to learn newcomen smithing or the diesel engine? It's a great chance. Breed dogs, plant trees, make an igloo. Have fun with the nice town you were lucky to be born into.

With this awful world of tool slots and family specialization big towns are more fragile than ever. More families mean more people since spawns are distributed by family. They get crowded fast. That means more griefers, more berrymunchers and more murders. A doctor in the current diesel bell town will never want for patients. Same goes for any other profession. Even if you have a diesel pump well the hecking carrots are all gone because of munchers. Suddenly the town is 'bootstrapped' back down to eve levels of agriculture since soil and clothing also becomes locked thru the shepherding process.

Suggestion: add armor that has a % chance of deflecting attacks, with that chance increasing with each piece worn.

This way the smith can outfit trustworthy villagers to act as town guards and take down any potential murderers.

Or more likely make the murderers invincible with the full suit of plate armor they looted from a dead old man as a baby.