One Hour One Life Forums

I think the technology in the game currently makes it quite difficult to move past clothes / farms as the height of civilisation... but it's not stagnant. The proportion of games where I am entering a village or area with lots of "recoverable progress" is definitely rising. As the amount of clothes just "lying around" increases, the amount of time needed to be devoted to farming is going to get smaller and smaller; when you're fully dressed from the time you're a baby, the proportion of time devoted to survival needs drops sharply.

Well done on making fire! It's a big step!

haha, good point, Twinsen!

I wonder why people say "yes"?  I ask "new player?" because basically while I'm nursing I'm not doing anything else, so it would be useful to teach some simple skills during that time. But when someone says they're not new, I just wait around... don't want to be patronising. 

...maybe other parents are routinely abandoning babies who say they are new, so people learn they have to say they already know in order to get a chance to play? I know I often go through a long series of "false starts" before I get a chance to actually play the game.

You could have a "spectator mode" that allows you to watch over the actions of one of your living descendents. That might give you a sense of continuity without breaking the spirit of the game.

Doesn't this rely on having a good source of fresh soil, though? Either compost or a soil pit?

If there isn't soil around, wouldn't it be better to harvest all carrots and replant from wild seeds?

Thanks, Jason.

It seems there are many more new players now? When I spawn as an Eve it seems like most of my kids - no matter how much I try to take care of them - just doom themselves. And when I spawn as a baby the mothers don't know how to take care of me either. Combination of new players and tougher mechanics feels pretty punishing. I don't mind having mechanics that make farming less sustainable than it initially appears, but at the moment I think if you can get a fire going, living purely off rabbits is actually more viable...

I think hostile behaviour is OK as part of the game, and part of the puzzle of playing the game is to work out what the best responses are. Selfish and greedy people exist in reality, too. 

However, there probably should be a limit on how much you can physically eat and how quickly. A thriving community shouldn't be able to be reduced to starving to death because one person went on a spree for 30 seconds.

What if we assumed that every community that we built was going to collapse? Rather than building on the assumption that it can somehow be kept going forever, what if we designed it with the idea in mind that it will collapse, but it should be possible to resurrect it, too? 

For example... building a surplus of carrots is no guarantee of a village's survival. A few noobs can easily eat through those in a short space of time and then wander off. But what if you build a large reservoir of carrot *seeds*? Rather than going for a farm that only-just produces enough seeds to restock its farms, why not have an excess of seed rows, so that every generation you make it through, you end up with a larger and larger seed surplus? Then, when a wanderer arrives in your dead village, they can replant everything quickly and easily...

Is there a 'death scream' or 'murder scream' in the game? When you hear a baby crying a screen or two away, you know that "something is going on". You can choose to react however you like, but it give you some awareness outside of the range of your immediate vision. If there was a blood-curdling scream each time a person was killed violently - either by an animal or another person - it would give you some warning that you were near a dangerous event, and give you a chance to respond as you saw fit; run away, fight back, etc etc. 

Another possible change is that you could give people a random chance of fighting back. In reality, if you run around killing unarmed people with a knife, you are very likely to win most fights... but there's a small chance that you run into someone faster / stronger / luckier and they kill you instead. If one time in ten, stabbing someone killed you instead of the victim, it wouldn't eliminate griefing, but it would make it slower and more complex to do it consistently.