One Hour One Life Forums

Lots of fixes this week.

Straw piles get damp after an hour of neglect, and decay to nothing after another hour.  Simply touching the pile fluffs it back up again and dries it out.  Unwanted straw will no longer accumulate eternally.  Shelves can go on stone walls.  You can now bottle sugared cream and mango-infused cow urine---separately, of course.  The chisel now has a visual change when it enters its first semi-used state (when it can no longer be installed in the mining rig).  Visual glitches in the overlap between cart tracks and open doors have been fixed.  Paved roads no longer visually hug nearby walls.

A seemingly small update this week, but it actually involved changes to 170 different objects.  You can now fully manipulate all bottles on top of tables, including filling them with funnels.  Before, you had to move a bottle to the ground to fill it with a funnel.  All the bottles also now have better looking positions when held.

Players who want to build an Endtower, which triggers an apocalypse that wipes the entire world back to zero, face many obstacles, since most of the other players will do anything in their power to stop them.  There hasn't been a successful apocalypse in quite a long time, but hope, apparently, springs eternal for the most purpose-driven players.

The threat of an apocalypse creates macro-scale dramatic tension, so I don't want to detooth it entirely.  But these purpose-driven players are a creative bunch.  The latest trick is to try to get as far away from the population center as possible.  They want to get way more than one lifetime's worth of walking, so they have babies along the way, and the babies grow up and keep walking.  Eventually, they get ridiculously far away from all the other players, and they build an Endtower there.

While this kind of perseverance is admirable, it's also not that interesting to defend against.  Just walk forever yourself, and have babies along the way, until you eventually find the tower.  Many, many hours later.

The Endtower can now only be built within 10,000 tiles of at least 50% of the active player base.  It can be somewhat far and hidden away, but not ridiculously far away.

Some bugs in cursing people during the five minute window after they die have been fixed.

You can now say GOODBYE FOREVER in your final utterance to disable the feature that has you born automatically to your own descendants if you live to old age.

There's a new method of interacting with moveable containers:  right clicking on the ground around the container will swap your held item for the container itself, instead of inserting it into the container.  Right-click the container itself to put the item in or swap it with contained items.

Photography has been part of the game since 2019, but the photos themselves were somewhat ephemeral.  After the click of the camera, the image itself disappeared from the game world and appeared in a permanent archive on the public-facing website.  This was cool, in that otherwise-undocumented and invisible moments from inside the game world could produce a kind of permanent record visible outside of the game.

However, the fact that photographs worked this way was a little magical and weird.  You put photo paper into the camera, but took nothing out.  After taking a photo, you ended up with an empty camera.

While it was cool that in-depth photo chemistry was represented in the game (making photo-sensitive silver nitrate solution from scratch), some important real-world steps were omitted.  What about fixing the negative?  What about making positives?

The photo chemicals in the game start out clear and become dark when they get exposed to light.  Essentially, light breaks up the molecules, releasing elemental silver.  When more light produces a darker spot on the paper, we get a negative image.

Of course, once you have a negative, you're not done yet.  If you wave it around out in the open, it will get exposed to more light, making it darker and darker.  By soaking it in a fixer, the remaining unexposed photo chemicals are dissolved, which halts the darkening process.  After that, you have a negative that is safe to look at under normal lighting conditions.

To get a positive, you need to make a contact print with another piece of photo paper.  The light areas in the negative let more light through, which creates darker areas in the positive print.  And of course, you need to fix the positive too before looking at it.  After that, you have your finished photograph.

All that said, photographs, both positive and negative, are now objects in the game that can be stored, traded, moved from place to place, and looked at by whoever handles them.  A full-resolution version  pops into view on the client whenever you handle a photograph.

And by using one negative to make multiple contact prints, you can duplicate a photograph as many times as you want.

Imagine visiting an abandoned village and rifling through a storage box to find photographs of the people who used to live there.  Imagine viewing a photograph of your own great great grandmother.  These things, and more, are possible now.

A number of people have said that they will be "sent to Donkeytown for five years."  That is a distortion of how this system works.

To start with, you have one player saying, "I don't ever want to play with you anymore."  That lasts for five years.  This is "soft" compared to pretty much any other service that supports blocks (twitter, discord, etc.)  In those services, blocking is forever, and it never expires.  Here, we force it to expire after five years, whether the blocking player wants it to expire or not.

You only "go to DT" if lots of players who are currently playing have you blocked.  If no one who is currently playing has you blocked, you don't go to DT.  Full stop.

Essentially, some people have said, "I don't want to play with you anymore."  In order to honor that, we have to find a spot for you to be born where you're not near these players.

If we run out of places for you to be born, we have two choices:

1.  Violate the wishes of a player who says they don't want to play with you anymore, by sending you near that player.

2.  Send you somewhere far away from everyone (Donkeytown).

Since we only run out of place for you to be born if you've bothered a lot of different people who are currently playing the game, we err on the side of all those people, and slight you (2) instead of violating their wishes (1).

And yes, there is a global component of the blocking radius, where "how far away do you need to be born from blockers" gets bigger as the total number of people who have cursed you grows.  But again, if you haven't bothered that many people, the chances of them all being online at one time, to block you everywhere, is very slim.

Regardless of this global component, if no one online is currently blocking you, you do NOT go to Donkeytown.  Even if 1000s of people have cursed you.  If no one currently online objects to playing near you, you get born into the world as normal.

If you are truly cursed by accident.... framed or whatever.... you have channels that you can use inside and outside the game to make amends to that person, ask for forgiveness, etc.

The idea that "good players" are going to be affected by this system, on a mass scale, and all end up in Donkeytown---this seems highly unlikely to me.

A curse is a mechanism by which you can say, "I don't want to play with this person anymore."  After you curse someone, it prevents that person from being born near you---or you being born near them.  Originally, this block was only supposed to be temporary, perhaps a few days.  But over time, my thinking about curses has changed.  If you really don't want to play near this person, why should the game second-guess your wishes by applying a time limit?  So the duration got longer, eventually reaching 90 days, which is where it stayed for quite a long time.

But even 90 days isn't that long, in the grand scheme of things.  Especially in the face of griefers who have dozens of accounts and cycle through them every 90 days after their curses wear off.  You thought you had taken care of this annoying player.  Having them buy an alt account is bad enough.  But then facing the original account 90 days later, popping up like an eternal and glacial whack-a-mole, is even more ridiculous.  How many times do you need to say it?  You don't want to play near this person anymore.

For this update, I had originally increased the duration from 90 days to 50 years, which is effectively permanent.

However, there's also some concern about the effect on innocent players getting cursed unfairly, either through intentional framing or simple mistakes.  If curses are permanent, won't these spurious curses slowly pile up on the most active players, even if they are innocent?

Again, we should remind ourselves that curse just prevent you from being born near these accidental curse-givers.  However, there's one more effect in place, which is that the radius of the block (how far away you need to be born) grows based on how many living players currently have you cursed (how much you've been bothering the people who are currently playing) and based on how many total people have you cursed, whether they are playing or not.  The radius formula is 50 times the number of living people who have you blocked plus square of the number of total people who have you blocked.

That second factor starts small, and is pretty much a non-issue for people who have a handful of accidental curses.  But for a serious griefer, who is bothering lots of people, it grows fast.

However, if curses essentially last forever, you could imagine innocent players accumulating enough accidental curses over time to bring that second squared factor into play.

The first step in figuring this out was to actually look at the current curse database on the live server, which tracks curse counts over the past 90 days.  That data is as follows:

      2 24
      1 21
      2 17
      1 13
      2 12
      1 11
      3 10
      4 9
      3 8
      7 7
      2 6
      7 5
     22 4
     33 3
     36 2
    155 1
     46 0

2 people had 24 curses, 1 person had 21 curses, 2 people had 17 curses, and so on.  At the bottom, you see that 46 people had 0 curses, which is just the people who had their last curse expire in the past week (these get cleared out every time the server restarts during an update).  In total, 329 people received at least one curse in the past 90 days, which seems like quite a few.

But not when you consider the fact that 9746 people played the game in the past 90 days.  Thus, over 96% of the active players were not cursed at all in the past 90 days.

This gives us a rough upper bound on "accidental curses" for the vast majority of players (1 or less in a 90-day period), which also gives us an idea of how many accidental curses might accumulate on someone for a given expiration window.

All this information feeds into the choice of 5 years as the expiration time for curses, which means that the vast majority of players would not accumulate more than 20 during that time, which is something we can live with.

Meanwhile, active griefers who are bothering lots of people will get their accounts tarnished for five solid years, which is as good as permanent.

Along with this change, the ability to CURSE MY BABY has been disabled, since curses are more serious now, and you have no chance to change your mind and forgive them (since your baby is often dead already).

Solo Eve spawns on low-population servers can now crave all foods, including higher-tech foods, from their second life onward.  And several bugs in property inheritance and fitness score have been fixed.