One Hour One Life Forums

Seasons would be amazing in this game, and add some desperately needed variety to play. Even just basic temperature variations to give a better reason to wear different outfits. And perhaps give us more craftable clothing choices as well, some better suited than others for particularly hot or cold seasons.

Having 20-25 minute seasons would work well within the game duration. Personally, I'd be fine with longer as well - if seasons change every 40-60 minutes then back-to-back lives could be more unique. You'd prefer different clothing styles for the changed temps, maybe temperature could even be a variable for other items in the game.

Perhaps onions and wheat are spring/fall crops, tomato and peppers in summer...etc. And if crops won't grow from a watered seed in the winter, then villages would have to either work to stockpile food for the townsfolk, make hard choices on keeping children, or range outwards and forage/hunt for wild foods to sustain themselves until the spring allows for more crop growth.

Having a more dynamic world - increasing the PVE elements of the game...that's gonna result in a lot of interesting life variety and changes in player behavior. And maybe having more PVE elements like this would help encourage villages to pull together in hard times. Make lives a little more rewarding, a little more social and connected to others.

Lol! The never-ending uses of a berry-carrot bowl. I'm honestly surprised Jason didn't decide to use those for horse-taming and feeding cattle/geese/pigs as well. They're so tedious to pick, and overused. Sheep are grazers and grain-eaters - why are they dependent on berries??

Agreed.

Though I can understand why SIDs are penalized - Jason has stated more than a few times that the intention for this game is to NOT choose your life and instead to play through the random lives you get. SID babies subvert the intention of the game, but since people are gonna force-die anyways by being an annoying runner baby at least the SIDs mechanic doesn't penalize the mother as much for her child's suicidal nature. Users of /die still are gaming the system, basically...so a penalty is understandable. Maybe exchange the gene score hit with something like a 5-minute delay before you can be reborn? Still a deterrent, but some people might prefer that to the lowered gene score and less tool slots.

I think one of the problems with tool slots is that you get COMPLETELY locked out of other tool usage. I know the intent is to rely more on others, but it's frustrating when something ABSOLUTELY needs done and there's no time to: find, tediously chat at, hope the other person is 1) listening 2) understands you and 3) is willing to help, go back to whatever needs done, and then find out that your "helper" wandered off who knows where before doing that one simple task.

Current tool slots, and even your profession idea, both feel like a punishment-based attempt to make players more inter-reliant. Vastly restricting the possible actions you can take in a life.

Why don't we try a reward system instead? Choose one profession a life, and be effective or extra-effective with all those tools. But if something comes up, even something fairly simple like nobody's around and the main fire is going out then you still have the ability to fix the problem. And assuming we still want to push inter-reliance, there has to be a downside. Perhaps all non-profession tools are hungry work, or have a somewhat tediously long animation period.

For example, the tailor can make clothing fast and easy, but if a dedicated farmer is nowhere to be found then the tailor can still take up a hoe and plant some carrots for his sheep. But since he isn't wise to the ways of farming, tilling soil is hungry work. Or instead of being nearly-instant, each time he tills the tailor is stuck in a 5 second animation from being slow/inexperienced in that task. Annoying enough to where the tailor is probably not going to be a full-time farmer, or even a part-time farmer...but using tools outside of their specialty is still POSSIBLE.

That's one of the things important to me in games. That things are possible. Some easy, some difficult...but things that magically lock parts of the game away are frustrating. Dropsy on entering biomes, wrong skin color - frustrating. Nobody nearby, fire going out, but oh no all the tool slots are full - frustrating. Absolute inability to harvest resources in the wrong biome - frustrating.

So my view is...Jason: give us debuffs, give us tedious penalties or less-effective harvests from working in the wrong specialized areas / working with the wrong tools. But please don't completely lock us out of interacting with large areas of the game. It's not fun when there's absolutely nothing you can do to help. You've cut out some of the possible stories of trial and tribulation that make lives worth remembering. A white family braving working within a hostile jungle to get rubber - plagued by debuffs/disease and terrible harvest (low percent chance to actually harvest rubber from a cut tree + one-use trees for non browns?), but if the family is strong enough and persists maybe their town can live for another few generations. And then a brown family is discovered nearby! The white family's rubber harvest is so tedious and low-yield that it makes the most sense to trade or pair up with the brown family now, and the rubber trade begins.

But right now stories like that are impossible. If you're the wrong color or if your tools slots are full...then just give up on what needs done. There's nothing you can do. It doesn't make for a good game, IMO.

Localized natural disasters sounds interesting. Volcano eruption. Earthquake. Mudslide. Flooding. Things that could "wipe out" an area or decimate a town, but which could also expose or provide access to new resources. Obsidian from volcanic glass? New metals or iron from earthquakes?

I'd love it if the game were more dynamic. Even a very basic cyclical temperature change of winter-spring-summer-fall could make game play more interesting by encouraging people to wear different outfits to better manage cold winters (rabbit furs optimal?) and hot summers (topless + reed skirts optimal?).

And with a more dynamic world, there's the opportunity to make the plants and animals behave differently according to the seasons/weather. Livestock not breeding in winter, or crops not growing in winter - crops needing double water in summer...it'd help add more variety to different lives.

Why are you trying to force trade so hard? Why is the life of a village absolutely dependent on trade? If you consider actual human history, villages were self-sufficient for the absolute necessities of life. They had water, grew crops, raised livestock, and figured out ways to create housing, clothing, fire, etc with the materials that were available to them. They didn't run out of water and die in a generation from lack of trade.

Trade has historically been a way to trade LUXURY items, to get access to new and unique things that aren't available in that location. Villages could live without traded items, but people like variety. People like having shiny stones or beautiful metal ornaments. People like having access to new foods and unique crops/livestock.

You're trying to make people trade in the way you want by punishing their lineages with death if they don't. Think of the "carrot and stick" metaphor...when the 'carrot' approach could get the same behavior and not frustrate the hell out of your player base, why do you always seem to insist on using the 'stick'?

Beautiful, logical response to players that routinely piss off a large chunk of the rest of the player base.

Want to play the cooperative parenting / town settling / building OHOL that the game is advertised as? Then BS2 is your server. Routinely and chronically piss off enough of the BS2 player base in ways that are more suited to the DT server and eventually you'll get permanently moved there.

They're not being excluded from the game itself, simply being moved to a like-minded server so their preferred play style doesn't end up making other players leave the game from frustration. So if you want to play an OHOL that's more based around PVP (such as it is...) and sabotaging other players work? Your play style is obviously more suited to the like-minded individuals on the DT server. Enjoy.

I wish Jason would take this game a little more in the direction of the Community Crucible - https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6794

Biomes larger (hopefully not as large as CC's though...that's massive), but each biome having the necessary items to build up villages and small towns. In the CC for example, grasslands have vernal pool water sources, native muskrats for a non-plains fur source, and onions can replace carrot for compost. Prairie biome has field maples for a non-grassland source of straight branches and leaves, poor soil deposits available, and dried beans can substitute for gooseberries for compost. Just some variety for different flavors of town, without almost always needing to settle in green-near-ponds areas.

Maybe remove dropsy and add in different pros and cons for each family/race that encourages them to settle in certain biomes over others, but so there isn't a magical barrier completely preventing them from settling in other areas if desired.

Allowing biome-specific families to get a much better harvest from biome-specific plants would help a lot as well. Like a ginger may only get a partial bucket of latex from one rubber tree while a brown fam could get multiple buckets or a reusable tree. It still encourages using the correct family for high-tech resources, but doesn't completely hamstring villages that don't have the right race present.

Reindeer, horses, camels - oh my!

But seriously, I'd just about give my left arm to have more variation in this game. Only one draft/riding animal in the whole game. Only one milking animal. Only one wool-producing animal. Friggin' berry+carrot bowl used for what feels like EVERYTHING. It all starts feeling so same and boring across lives.

I'd try it! Although the organizer shouldn't randomly steal kids or trick newbs to enter the bearena - volunteers only. Best would be having some prize to give the winner (BP? Nice clothes?) and have fresh pads and needle+thread inside to patch up losers.

Trapping people who don't want to play is just griefing of another color, but I think voluntary gladiatorial games can be quite interesting.

Ok. I feel like this should be obvious, but....people don't like being annoyed. If you annoy them too much they will start actively avoiding you/your posts. Hell, the incessant thread necro-ing already means that I don't bother opening a front-page thread anymore if the "Last Post" area says Spoonwood.

A "People don't like X. But I know better than those people, 'X' is good for them! I'm gonna do it anyways." is an awful approach. It breeds hostility.

If someone is invested in your idea, they will click through to the relevant old thread for background info. If they're only somewhat interested maybe they won't. But forcing the issue by necro-ing old threads just means that people learn to ignore ALL your posts. You're trading "some people who check out my idea go on to read the old thread and 'get more informed'" (new thread + link) for "everyone gets incredibly annoyed and basically ignores posts by Spoonwood" (pervasive necro-ing) <-- here, many less people are "getting more informed" because now they're actively avoiding the annoyance.

Oh, this sounds like an excellent idea!