One Hour One Life Forums

So, if you present these two choices:

Learn to do a 50 step process, but you only need to perform it once and you're done.

OR

Learn to do a 5 step process, but you need to do it dozens of times before you're done.

Most people in the world will take the 5 step process. It's 'brute forcing' a problem over 'thinking your way through it'. Both work, but take different kinds of effort.

Lately, when I'm in a civ that seems to be lacking clothes (which is pretty much always), I've been grabbing a carrot and chilling out near the fire for a while before I head out on my quest for thread. A slow burning fire actually gives you perfect temperature if you stand right on top of it, and it's amazing how long you can stand there without eating and be just fine.

Please tell me you stabbed her.

In my own play time, I have been able to sustain myself for most of my adult life off of just three rabbit pies, which can be made from a single plot of wheat.

You'll have to keep yourself alive until you make those pies which is going to take some time, and since most villages are just farming raw carrots you're still going to be eating quite a few carrots unless you strike out on your own.

But in the Conclusions area of the doc, you'll see where I did some math on how much 'work' it takes to feed yourself for a lifetime.

Clothing really is the most important factor, as that'll cut down on how much work you have to do to survive by a lot. You can get it down to only needing to replace one soil in your lifetime if you focus on making Rabbit Pies, or needing to replace one soil in your lifetime if you leave carrots to seed. Either way, you need to compost, and the Rabbit Pie way gives you one of the items you need that you otherwise have to go searching for.

The main difference is that you can live off of 1 or 2 plots of wheat your adult life, or you can live off of 10 to 20 plots of raw carrots your adult life.

It's up to how much farm work you want to put in and if you care about getting anything else done.

There are some very efficient carrot farmers out there for sure, but I have to ask why they should continue to increase the carrot stores when there's already enough to feed a generation. Wouldn't it be wise to spend some of that time on.. oh I don't know... anything else other than picking even more carrots?

I think there hasn't been a lot of 'study' done on the time efficiency of various forms of food sources.

For example, carrots are fairly easy to figure out. A single field grows in about 4 minutes, and you get 5 carrots. They feed 8 'pips' of food each, so that's 40 food per harvest or about 10 food per minute, give or take (mostly take because of the time it takes to harvest, plant, and rewater slowing it down some) So a single carrot plot can, at best, get you up to 10 food per minute but is probably less than that.

However, I've been messing around a bit with the different pies, and I'm still recording some findings. I've found that a simple carrot pie has about a break even food per minute compared to raw carrots (if you consider that a wheat field takes 6 minutes to grow and you have to wait that long to get your dough for pie crust). You have to use 1 carrot for the pie so that 8 food goes into it, but you get a pie out that has 4 slices at 8 food per slice. You do use a field for wheat instead of carrot growing and the wheat does grow slower, so you have to consider that in the time spent per food output, which is why I say the end result is about a break even for carrot pies and straight carrot farming, but the slower growing could be considered a good thing. Less frantic harvesting. Another advantage the pie has is that it has 4 slices that you can store in a single slot, so you can travel much further away from the village on one pie than you can on one carrot without risk of starving.

Then there are the berry pies. I haven't figured the food per minute on those yet because I've been getting my berries from wild bushes, but if you take 4 berries off a wild bush with a bowl and make a pie out of it, you turn those 4 berries which are 24 food into a pie that is 13 food per slice for a total of 52 food for the pie. That's a considerable increase in food amount. I practically lived off just 2 of those for the second half of one of my lives, and was free to roam around instead of standing over carrot fields for an hour.

I think we should try stretching food supplies further with baking, could free people up to do more things.

I think the bushes will be ok if they have some berries on them.

Only evidence I have is that the 'dry gooseberry bush' comes from a 'languishing domestic gooseberry bush' which I believe is the one with no berries on it, and not from the 'domestic gooseberry bush' which is the one that does, and I see nothing that will turn a bush into a languishing bush that is based on time, only picking the berries does that.

Should be pretty simple to test. If you leave a berry on one and watch it for as long as you can and it never dries out, fairly safe to say that they won't dry out with berries on them.

However, I'm betting that the berries do not regrow unless you empty the bush and rewater it, so the rule should be:

If you eat the last berry, fetch water for the bush.

This can also be taken to mean, don't munch the last berry and then kill over dead from old age before you have a chance to water the plant. If you're old, keep your wrinkly old hands off that last berry.

I've had someone nick my furs that I was stacking together to make myself some clothes and cut them up and sew them into water skins right before my eyes, even though there were many baskets of empty water skins already sitting around.

Water skins are not a priority over clothing, and should be viewed as a luxury item that just makes water gathering easier later. You only make them when you have a surplus of fur and thread. Use clay for bowls and move water with that first. From scratch, a clay bowl is easier tech to reach than a water skin. You need clay and reeds (to build the kiln), a hatchet for firewood, and need to figure out how to build a fire to make clay bows. You need milkweed, snares (even more milkweed), a hatchet for firewood, and know how to build a fire (to cook the rabbit to get the bone needle) to make water skins. The milkweed requirement means water skins are the harder item to make, even if you already have a bone needle laying around that someone else made.

Build farms closer to ponds so the water trip doesn't take long with a bowl to offset the fact you can only carry one at a time.

*Baby gets born*

Baby: "Mom, what's my job?"

Eve: "You stay there and starve."

Baby: "Oh..."

This would be nice. There's a few items that are difficult to tell that they're even in a basket, such as snares.

Yeah, milkweed is the bottleneck, which means it is also a fairly high priority, maybe more so than a carrot farm because you can survive off of the rabbits and random berries you come across while you're out trapping and searching for milkweed plants, and if you're feeding and clothing yourself while scrounging up the materials for clothing, your burden to the village farmers is 0.

We need more trappers. And pants... definitely more pants.

I don't want to see your junk people!

First, try to get some clothes. It is amazing how much this helps you survive. I believe that if you're at the ideal temperature, you consume food 3.5 x less than if you're naked. That gives you a lot more time to explore and figure things out because there's a lot less time spent stuffing your face to stay alive. You won't always have clothes readily available where you're born, but if you do spot some clothes, grab them and put them on as soon as you're able to do so.

Once you're not frantically looking for berries and carrots anymore, you can spend some time picking things up and tabbing through the recipe hints in the lower right corner to figure out what things are used for. I've tried to learn mostly from that and from watching others. I learned how to build a campfire from watching someone do it on the first day that I played, then mimicked what they did in my next life and successfully did it myself while someone was watching me, and that was a really neat experience that I can say I haven't had in other games. The tutorial is just keeping your eyes open and watching what is happening around you.

My 2 cents, for what it's worth.

Have a second hidden food bar, call it the 'over eating' bar if you want, but player can't see it. It only fills up with the excess beyond what your normal food bar can carry. It decays back to 0 a lot faster than your main food bar, which means anyone who normally only eats when they're actually hungry will never be at risk of this hidden bar filling up. Even if you eat food when you're only sorta hungry wouldn't hurt you.

If they do fill up the hidden bar, you could display a warning, maybe, though I have a feeling that there shouldn't be one to avoid them gaming the system. Like, you'd really have to be intentionally stuffing your face as fast as possible to trigger this. But, if you ate something else within a few seconds of filling the over eating bar, you'd die, cause of death 'over eating'.

They know what happened to them and why. The game didn't force them to stop and give them a 'you can't do that' message, it was totally their choice to continue and suffer the consequences.