a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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This really says everything. The idiots already organize against useful players sometimes. Having a structure to empower them would only reinforce this. A king never does any work in his life. He roleplays for sixty minutes. The important things are getting done by busy people that don't have time to participate in a popularity contest. I'd make a point to assassinate every king on principle.
tl;dr
I had a very similar experience today. Born in a ginger bell town. They have no water, just a dry newcomen well with a torn seal. That pump never ran in my entire life. We somehow had a stockpile of sulfur but no junglers to gather latex or palm oil. I rang the bell twice and nobody ever showed up. SO I spent my life working on an unfinished road to a distant shallow well. Carted buckets back and forth and upgraded to a deep well when it ran dry. I kept up the tedious grind for half an hour because the town had a bell and that gave me hope that it could survive.
Some kid with the town's only horse cart is riding around with a bow and arrow accusing someone of griefing. He's wearing a crown and says he's the king. So he shoots someone. Then he shoots someone else. Then a third person. It's quickly becoming obvious that he's a liar and a murderer. I killed him and an idiot comes running with the king's bow to shoot me. We do the chase thing for a while, but I only have a knife and no tool slots left to learn the bow. I visited tarr's igloo to warn him about the idiot and he says he'll protect the town. It's tarr's current hometown I guess.
It's like the current game is 10% doing all the work, 10% trying to ruin the town and 80% oblivious berrymunchers. Things can still work with a population like this, but not when the workers are handicapped and handcuffed by tool slots and family specialties. Rather than doing everything, it becomes functionally impossible to even do enough to survive. We're soft locked in a perpetual state of dry wells and newcomen hell. It's boring and frustrating and hopeless.
The game is ostensibly about family and civ building.
Practically every town is doomed to fail as soon as a primitive well runs dry, so playing feels pointless. Who wants to work on building up a town that's just going to die an hour later?
You're born into a place with a dry deep well. There's only one family in town. It's immediately obvious that this family and civilization are doomed. The whole point of the game is defeated. That's the experience in every town right now.
So let's say you try to force the issue with stopgap measures. Make a map or a waystone. It leads people to your long-dead town. Migrate your family. All you find are long-dead towns. Gather pond water and build distant wells. It's a waste of time, the town is doomed, nobody will ever find it and there's no point trying.
We're at a point where I've seen people just running around killing everyone in town and nobody cares. Nobody runs or questions it. They all know they're doomed anyway. That's the game right now.
Also, quick VOG survey shows things looking vibrant enough.
There are currently two fams with Newc pumps.
Are these two families living in the same town? Are they the two specialties required to make rubber? Those two are the basic requirements for survival past primitive technology. I surveyed the surviving families earlier today. There were a couple of brown families and one white family. All of them lived in single-family towns and none of them had rubber. A single-family town that has a dry newcomen with torn rubber seal is not vibrant. It's doomed.
I wanted to play the game and I couldn't because every single town was doomed. The only option was to roam bland uninteresting wilderness and hope that I stumbled upon a nearby neighbor and that they would be the right color. It's hopeless. This is ten times worse than the rift ever was, and that was total hell. The game is completely unplayable right now.
How easy is it to make the second car compared to making the first one?
I feel like cars and planes are currently the equivalent of 7 wonders. But in the real world they are mass produced goods: anyone either has their own car or can rent one, and anyone can buy a plane ticket. They are actually extremely cheap compared to their utility. They were never viable without factories.
The main problem here is that we need content. A lot of it, whole industries worth. Modern society is heavily based on infrastructure and any facsimile of modernization in game would require heavy investment into it as well. I'm talking about tractors planting, watering and harvesting produce in mass quantities. Bulldozers paving endless stretches of roads. Trucks to transport goods. Quarries, foundries, warehouses. We would need proper cities that are huge and ultra-productive, where public and personal transport are a necessity because just walking around town is too slow. If you want to make it to the bakery any time this year you're going to have to catch a bus.
Of course that's not the game we're playing and it never will be. Jason is just one man and it doesn't seem like this fits in with his vision anyway. We were promised atomic-powered robots and instead we got... tool slots and family specialization soft locking us in the stone age.
Yesterday I was born in a doomed town. Not surprising, nearly every town is doomed from the start now that newcomen technology is impossible to build. It was a nice place but there was simply just no water. Nearly everyone had died and I was the last girl in town, so I took responsibility to try and find a way to survive.
Fortunately, we were desert people and had several horse carts. During childhood I geared up and loaded the cart with seal skin coats and backpacks full of steel, the most luxury goods in town. Gifts to show goodwill in a new home. As soon as I was old enough to ride I got on the back of that horse and followed a map to another town.
When I got there it was dead. Abandoned. The well was dry and they had no rubber. This would become the theme for that life. I dropped a couple of babies off, found a new map and kept riding. During that life I traveled over ten kilometers and found at least half a dozen towns. All dead, with dry deep wells.
After I'd already reached old age I found a map to a multicultural hub city several kilometers away. I saddled up and rode directly towards it, hoping to at least leave my goods with people that could use them. The final song played when I was just a few hundred meters outside of town.
Right now the map is just a huge wasteland full of dead towns that failed to """bootstrap""" past an impossible challenge. It's virtually impossible to get past early game tech now. Every town is just a crappy little eve camp struggling and failing to survive on the impossible hope that the right family will find them in time.
Just imagine, page after page book after book of nothing but "need content" permanently marked in ink.
Seems like the consensus is mostly to watch and learn. If you don't know how to do something, watch someone else do it first. Look out for players that are well dressed or quick at what they're doing. Asking for a job is asking for a teacher and that's very inefficient in a game like this. Most things require multiple items and steps. Explaining a basic job could take ten or twenty years in-game. Skilled players that can teach are usually too busy with important work to spend that much time on you.
Instead I think that figuring it out (mostly) on your own is the best way. Look for things that you want to learn then research the tech tree and figure out how. Usually it's simpler than you think, after one or two tries the recipe becomes intuitive and easy to remember. A new player asking a specific question will get an answer. "How do I make bait" is a lot easier to answer than "how do I hunt?" for example because it implies 1. that you're specifically hunting rabbits and 2. you already know everything involved other than just baiting the snare.
Bell towers are only relevant for ancient cities. They don't work for this application. Even if there was no delay and you could just stack your tower only the ginger family can get gold and they're useless at getting rubber.
I think so far this update has proved everyone's worries that getting early game rubber for a newcomen pump will be impossible. Before the steam sale only a couple of towns managed to make it work, notably the four families mega city. Even then having four families in one place presents its own problem of overpopulation.
Last life I decided on going back to basics and making food for the town. Before that I tried smithing and everyone starved. Back to basics: make food.
I gave my son a backpack because he said he could farm. We didn't have sheep or wheat for compost yet so I gave him my backpack, one of only a couple in town. If he's ranging for wild soil he might as well carry two loads at a time. Ask him to plant wheat, he doesn't know how. He doesn't know how to water berries either. He fills up his backpack with four pies then grabs a basket full of three more. Says he wants food for life.
That's pretty much how my time in the kitchen went. Dozens of little five year old babies eating all my pie. I wish they'd go munch berries instead.
The tool slot update really puts a hard cap on bootstrapping new towns right now. We have twenty people running around and only two actually working. Everyone else is hoovering up food, stealing tools and making a mess of the place. Someone is working the smithy, great. Someone is baking pies and making omelettes, good. Nobody's farming. Nobody's getting a sheep. Nobody's making compost. When you need to do everything yourself it just doesn't work. I can't even ask people to do things -for- me because they're totally clueless. I'm standing there with an adze, bucket and two straight shafts begging everyone walking past to just hit the thing for me and getting zero response. Meanwhile, the shallow well is dry and we're all starving.
It's a little frustrating and crazy but I also kind of like that. Living to sixty in the middle of a mass grave is actually pretty gratifying.
I think it's fine. The game was worse when it was released on steam and plenty of people still played it. A few stayed long term. Yes it's heck and life is a struggle. That's part of the appeal in this type of game. It's a novel experience when mom abandons you in the woods to die because there are too many babies and not enough food. When new players are born into prosperous cities they have boring lives. Just eat pie and walk around picking things up for an hour without knowing how to craft stuff. At least mass starvation puts some pressure on them to learn.
So you're noticing an uptick in volume today?
Yes, there are a lot of brand new players wandering around not knowing how to do things and forgetting to eat. I was in a big city that you jasoned into earlier, you named my baby. Shortly after that I think my family died out, the the big city might still be going.
All the berrymunchers and babies eating pie really overloaded the town. I actually starved for the first time in months. Multiracial settlements mean that most of the game's population is in that one place. Several smithies, several bakeries, several farms, tons and tons of items covering every tile. It could work, but with so many new players not contributing life is tough even in a developed town. There just aren't enough people actually working, and older players don't have the tool slots or time to do everything.
Me and two other people actually had to team up with a cart full of baskets to gather about two dozen mango leaves because one griefer used up all the corn breeding cows. The game's not designed to support large populations but individual families are too spread out to make specialties work.
You have to shift-right-click to tattoo
That's a little unintuitive, but I appreciate the answer. In hindsight I guess the "deadly" tag on onetech hints at this. Looking at them now, snowballs have the same tag. Next time I get a chance I'll try it.
Can you tattoo yourself then, or only other players? Can you make more than one tattoo on a single player? If not, does the newest tattoo overwrite the previous one?
Has anyone been able to make tattoos work?
It's an interesting way to add in-game culture to jungle people in this update, similar to how only desert people can get alum to dye clothing. You need a jungle person to tattoo. So, sometimes jungle people have tattoos or if they're lucky a white person might be able to get one too. I've tried to craft them a couple of times now. It's a little difficult because you need salt water from a tundra biome to make the ink. It doesn't seem to work, even after today's update. I've tried using several of the item combinations from onetech like short shaft and tattoo needle, rubber tree cutting plus tattoo needle etc. I've tried tattooing other people or them tattooing me. I've tried doing it inside of the jungle. Nothing is working.
The tattoo textures on onetech say they're uncraftable. The craftable ones like "Stomach Tattoo no_replace emot_26_-1" have no texture. Onetech tells me that the tattoo needle itself is deadly.
Is this just broken or am I missing something?
Afaik eve spawns were tweaked to be slightly closer together with the race update. In practice it doesn't seem to have changed anything though. Earlier I spent a half hour searching and never found a single trace of civilization. It was tempting to spend my entire life just to prove a point. Seems like the only way to feasibly make this work is to /die until you spawn as a black girl. Get yourself a horse (since they're the only race that can) and abandon all your babies in the wild while searching for a brown family. If you get lucky you'll find brown town and have at least one girl there. Right now that's the only realistic way that any player of any skill level can progress a town past the deep well. If you're another race all you can really do is desperately bide your time and pray that a black girl on a horse rides into town one day.
Thing is, most players don't even know about this very important update. They live blissfully ignorant lives where water and food is infinite because other people make it happen for them. I tried explaining the problem to a few browntowns. Why do we need black people? Why do we need sulfer? What does the newcomen do? That was the response I got from pretty much everyone. Especially with steam's promotion adding brand new players the game is going to be broken for a while. I'm expecting a reaction like when it was first released on steam. A bunch of primitive camps full of nothing but dry wells and starving babies. It's not going to be a good time for new players with the notification that mom gets. When everyone is starving another berrymuncher is just a liability.
If you're really busy, there's also the option to just name your kid and abandon them at the nursery.
It's awkward if they survive and you see them later around town though...
Typically take them for a walk around town while feeding so they know where things are. Find some clothing or a backpack for them along the way. If there aren't many items for them I might ask if they know how to hunt rabbits or make wool clothes. Sometimes this becomes a first job for them in early life, making their own kit. Then after they die it's passed on and contributes to town use. Typically I avoid assigning jobs outside of eve camps but if I'm busy and something fairly simple needs doing I might ask. For example I recently found an abandoned town with dead berry bushes. Chopped up the bushes and piled it as kindling then had a baby, and a second baby. So I asked the first one to replant berry bushes. Simple jobs like that. When I'm near death I also like to pass down my kit to a grandchild and maybe ask them to do a job in return. Burying me in the graveyard or finishing some work I was doing. I think it's important to keep jobs simple and easy, otherwise people will just end up skipping them.
When I get a brand new player I prioritize clothing other children first because honestly, the new player will probably forget to eat and starve. I never ever give them a knife, although they love to ask for one. If I'm not busy I might ask what they want to learn about and spend some time teaching. A brand new son recently wanted to learn hunting, so I showed him how to snare rabbits and shoot turkeys. He didn't even lose the bow! I also make it a point to remind them to eat. Always carry emergency food and remember to eat. When they grow hair I always drop my kids off at the berry bushes and tell them good luck. Usually don't see them again until they're adults and they come around wanting help with something, or just to roleplay.
tattoos:
https://onetech.info/3261-Tattoo-Prepar … -biomeReq6havent seen people do it yet though....
I wanted to try this so I /died a few times until I was born in a jungle family. Making the dye I ran into a problem: getting salt water for rust. Since the game's buggy right now I was hoping that I could find ice holes spawning outside the arctic. Nope, they're inaccessible even when you're standing outside at the edge of the biome. During a trip around town looking for saltwater lying around I found an old fishing hole. For some reason the biome had turned green but those two ice holes remained accessible.
Finished the dye, found a needle and went looking for a mango tree. After a little searching I finally found one. Made the tattoo preparation, dipped my needle and... nothing. It didn't work. Tried emoting then using it, still nothing. Twenty seconds later the ink faded off my needle and it was all a waste.
The recipe is listed on onetech's front page so I figured that it had been released rather than waiting for monday. Maybe you can only use it on other people and not yourself. Some quadruplets were born after I came back to town and they seemed interested so I told them where to find the resources and to bring a friend. I wonder if they managed to figure it out after I died.
Wait a second, the page on onetech says:
Tattoo Needle
Pickup at Age: 3
Cannot be placed in container
Deadly
Deadly. Is this needle a weapon? I don't get it.
Woah, we finally have libraries for realplay reasons!
Writing supplies are pretty essential too. I think jason said he's nerfing the rate of language learning to like 10% per generation. Rubber balls aren't toys for babies any more, they're useful erasers.
Couple thoughts from one hour of life.
1. Searching for other towns is more difficult and time consuming now that you can't follow fault lines through certain biomes.
2. Most towns are still too distant to feasibly make a road between them.
3. Maps are absolutely essential, I'm seeing them mass produced and stockpiled in multiples.
4. Players overwhelmingly prefer moving to create multiracial towns over traveling and trading between them.
5. As a result outsiders are often welcomed with confused smiles instead of being treated with suspicion or hostility like before.
Aside from the bugs it's... sort of? working.
Planes/Trains/Automobiles update
That would break the resource & player distribution balance which was very carefully crafted as the entire point of our long rift experiment.
I completely agree that some way to streamline production of engines (production line) should come soon after the introduction of cars but that's obviously not happening. At this point it's clear that the game is never progressing past diesel engines as the highest form of technology.
Tractors, steamrollers, trucks. These are all examples of appropriate next steps. None of them will ever be introduced. Forget cars and asphalt, horses and cobblestone will be meta forever.
the next months will be about tweaking... without anything on addition for the players
That's what the updates have been about for almost a year now. Tweaking small things without introducing new content. We got oil for xmas last december I think and just about nothing since then. No electricity. No solar panels, no nuclear reactors, no atomic powered robots or ray guns. Game time froze in the 18th or 19th century and hasn't moved since. It's not about staying one step ahead of the player with new content updates. It's about tweaking current content to try and find some kind of perfect game that mr jason saw in a fever dream.
It feels like he's given up on releasing new content and just playing around with levers and switches trying to fix something that was never broken. I don't really mind, the game is still fun and unique. It's just a little bit sad to see how it's wasting its potential.
Yeah true, if you cheat with mods it would be really easy to /die a few times and have the coordinates of each type of settlement. Would be really easy to cooperate with a couple people through discord to congregate at one too. The problem of finding and trading with other families becomes trivial when you introduce cheats and third party communication. A lot of these sickos actually like playing eve in the wilderness so I'm sure they'd be happy to start their very own mixed town somewhere too.
Moving in together and starting a bigger town would make a lot more sense than 'trading' too.
Realistically, this is going to be the situation for any town that survives long enough.
This is more likely to turn into "give me all your rare resources and ill give you my knife in your belly"
And this in any town that's having trouble getting there.
I like it enforce a culture on the races.
help pls the suave ebony man in froot boots keeps giving bedroom eyes and hubba hubba at my daughter pls help
What staple exports could the jungle biome produce equal in value to iron or oil? Rubber is essential for a newcomen pump or diesel engine but it's definitely not as valuable currently.
What kind of other uses would it have to make the jungle biome competitive?
I think iron should be left out of this unless some alternative to iron tools is introduced. Otherwise you need to find a specific skin tone at the eve camp stage just to be able to dig a shallow well.
Seems like iron ore would still spawn in badlands, so you could gather enough to support a town until trade is established. You'd need to find a desert town to get rubber anyway.