One Hour One Life Forums

I did a life yesterday born into one of the bigger towns (for the fourth time). Wealthy town, plenty of resources, reasonable layout, but everything keeps turning to shit because nobody knows how to maintain things. I guess that's the curse of this game, and learning to live with it just part of the experience.

Anyway. Me and a brother were born to a baker mom right there in the bakery, and from the very get-go she said "You will be bakers."

[ shrug ] Okay, I guess I'll be a baker! Haven't done that yet, should be fun.

Well let me tell you me and my brother worked our asses off for sixty years! I already knew most of the baking trade, but I taught my brother as well (always love teaching things! very rewarding). The bakery had gotten completely cluttered with the usual garbage that people leave everywhere, PLUS it was being used for cooking stuff like rabbits and eggs and stew. So right away I put a stop to that nonsense, moved everything out that wasn't needed for baking, and gave us room to work.

And then after that it was just ramming-and-jamming on pies, non-stop for an hour. It was great! As we went we got better at it, more efficient, continually upgrading our capacity, adding more storage and keeping it filled, adding more plates and keeping them in use, shortening the turn-around time for wheat and flour and mutton, managing the fire better, keeping the bakery clean and organized, etc etc etc.

The best part was when the two of us - plus an occasional helper - had built up a gigantic inventory of uncooked pies and nearly run out of cooked pies. We looked around, said "Okay, time to bake", lit the fire, and then just had a coordinated frenzy of baking pie after pie after pie after pie. And when it was all done and the bakery was stuffed to the gills with boxes and carts full of baskets full of pies, we just kind of stood there with this exhausted glow. "HIGH FIVE!" It felt great knowing that through our hard work and dedication to the craft we had fed the whole town even while half the berryfields were lying brown and empty due to neglect.

TLDR; Baking is awesome, highly recommended.

David Gingery has a series of books called Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap that provides a game plan and detailed instructions for building everything you need for a machine shop - including a lathe - starting with nothing more than a drill, a hacksaw, charcoal, and scrap aluminum. It's not the only path forward from the stone age to the industrial age, but it shows that it is possible, and provides an understanding of how such a thing could be done by one person with minimal tools and resources.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

Buy the series on Amazon: http://a.co/d/fCBc7Vs

"The hobbyist starts by constructing a small foundry capable of melting silicon-aluminum and zinc alloys from recycled automotive parts. Then green sand castings are used to make a metal lathe. The lathe is the first machine built since it can be used to help build itself. The lathe and foundry are then used to make more complicated machine tools."

"Beginning with a simple charcoal fired foundry you produce the castings for building the machine tools to equip your shop. Initially the castings are finished by simple hand methods, but it isn't long before the developing machines are doing much of the work to produce their own parts."

To put it somewhat less tangentially than Morti's otherwise excellent explanation:

There's three things to balance in any settlement: consumption, extraction, and renewal. Consumption is food and is determined by the number of people you have and how well they keep their temperature regulated (plus things like not overeating, not overfeeding, not getting fever, etc). Extraction removes resources from nature and converts it into food - some of it is already food (berries, burdock, bananas) and some of it has to be processed to create food (soil, water, and iron). Renewal replenishes nature's supply of resources.

In the short run, your rate of consumption can't exceed your rate of extraction. In the long run, your rate of consumption can't exceed the rate of renewal. (I say "your rate of extraction" and "the rate of renewal" because you (the townspeople) determine how quickly you can extract, but nature determines how quickly nature will renew.) This means the maximum population of a town now is limited by how quickly you can extract resources. But the population of a town later is limited by how quickly those resources get renewed once they've run out. Both of these are difficult constraints to deal with, although the second is much harder than the first.

There's a limit to the amount of resources you can extract and a limit to how quickly you can extract them, and the physical size of your settlement affects them both. You can find more resources by sending your gatherers further and further away from the town center, but doing so dramatically slows the rate at which they can be gathered. Road building is a way to get the increased-extraction-limit of gathering across a wider area while mitigating the reduced-extraction-rate that doing so would otherwise entail. In other words: "roads to nowhere" increase the number of people that can survive in a town in the short run.

In the long run, you're faced with the renewal limit. You extract close to town and are limited by your extraction rate. Then it runs out close to town and you're limited by the renewal rate close to town. So then you extract further away and are limited by the reduced extraction rate from extracting far away. Then you build roads, and improve your far-away extraction rate. Then you run out far away, and are limited by the renewal rate of your larger gathering area. So at some point, you reach a maximum number of people that can survive in your town, and in the long run that number will be much smaller than it is while you are still expanding, building roads, and exhausting the resources in a wider and wider area.

The only way to have more people is for them to be so much further away that they're not drawing upon the same resources.

Which leads to another conclusion: the closer together your towns are, the less population each one must have. And conversely, the less populated your towns are, the more easily they can sustain themselves within a smaller area, even after the resources are exhausted and you're living within the limits of renewal rather than extraction. In other words, you can sustain more people by spreading them out in small clumps than by putting them all in one spot.

That's why we need roads.

This is a great idea.

Maybe something that overrides the Home beacon temporarily, perhaps for fifteen seconds if you're close, decreasing to five seconds if you're far away but still in range.

For that matter, the Bell Tower should work similarly, overriding your Home for a few seconds if you have a Home already, so that even people with a Home set (which should be everyone, seriously, people, SET YOUR HOME) can still know more-or-less where the tower is.

Well said. I believe this is exactly the experience that Jason wanted to convey.

Instead of doing shitty things and ruining other people's fun just to get into DonkeyTown, why not just run a private server when you want to play all on your own?

Go to https://github.com/Awbz/OneLife/releases/latest , download the "win_full" zipfile, unzip it, and in the "server" folder run "runServer.bat" with administrator privileges (right-click and choose "Run as Administrator". Then in the game client connect to "localhost" and hey presto you have an entire server all to yourself.

Don't be shitty.

Some particularly long and difficult method for clearing the jungle, planting farmable banana trees, and wiping out mosquitos would be an awesome addition to the game. An epic quest with an epic payout.

Welcome to the game! A great story and some lessons well-learned.

Having the hot-rock timer not get reset with each new omelette would be a good nerf. It would require better management and coordination of the cooking station, which is a good thing. Well-run camps in the early pottery stage would get a bonanza of food to carry them into large-scale farming; poorly-run camps will scramble around frantically trying to get a paltry few omelettes made while chewing through their kindling.

This is good.

And it ought to be technically straight-forward to implement, right? Use the same timer mechanism that ovens, kilns, and forges use?

And while it's possible for a decent-sized civilization to subsist on wild eggs alone, in practice this never happens. People farm, and farms drain the ponds. Eggs are an early-game food, then they're gone. Sometimes you see them later but no one bothers cooking them; pies are a better use of plates, stew is a better use of coals, and the ponds are too far away to collect eggs in quantity.

Prior to bananas, getting a settlement up and running was a knife-edge challenge (which is great!). A hopeless task for a newbie, but just barely doable with some experience. The main dynamic is that until you get a well-run farm going, you have JUST ENOUGH natural food to carry you through - but you can feel the time pressure as you see it running out. You have to go further afield to get what you need, which itself adds to the time pressure since it takes you longer to get anything done.

Every now and then you run across a sizeable cache of food - a cluster of cacti with fruit, a new grasslands area with berry bushes - and a wave of relief passes over you as you realize you've bought a little more time. Getting the kiln up and making plates opens up omelettes and marks a major milestone; you're not out of the woods, and it has trade-offs, but it represents a big breakthrough and grants a well-earned respite.

This is awesome gameplay.

Bananas are so filling, so plentiful, and so quick to regrow that it basically takes all the pressure off. It's no longer a knife-edge challenge. And you can take advantage of it immediately without any precursor technology (like plates). This is not awesome gameplay.

I wouldn't want to see a nerf to berries, cacti, eggs, and rabbits, or to the quantities of the non-respawning foods. They seem to be just right. Bananas are the outlier to be fixed. I like that they're high-reward and high-risk, or at least are supposed to be. But we the players have figured out how to minimize the risk while reaping the reward, which makes the mosquitos annoying and disruptive rather than dangerous. I'm not sure how to fix that.

My first priority as an Eve is to make a portable fire kit: basket, sharp stone, hatchet, fire bow. If necessary I'll make that kit in one biome (a grasslands with lots of milkweed) and then carry it away in search of a good spot to build a kiln and start a farm. The same kit could be carried by one member of a nomadic tribe, and then making a campfire is as easy as finding a maple branch, maple leaf, juniper tinder, and another branch. Would be good for cooking rabbits, geese, and fish, or even omelettes if you've brought some plates with you.

High tech would definitely make the nomad life easier. My personal interest is in seeing what can be done as paleolithic nomads - stone, bone, and fiber; no farming, pottery, or iron.

I'd love to try riding horses + backpacks (or even saddlebags!) as a paleolithic nomad, but Jason would have to add tech tree branches that don't require steel tools and domesticated animals to get there. Maybe hitching to a tree instead of a fence (but without the ability to tame), and using a mouflon hide as a saddle (instead of sewing a saddle from the hide of a domestic sheep killed with a steel knife). Perhaps the downside of riding an untamed horse is they escape immediately if ever released from your grasp.

I'm considering trying to start nomadic lines, and my first order of business each time will be to teach the children what being a member of the tribe means. I've concocted a few simple short rhymes to serve as "the lore of the tribe" that hopefully each generation can pass along to the next. If it works I'll post about it.

FTR this is awesome. I wouldn't use it myself, but it's great that you did the work to make it possible.

When I saw the thread title ("Controller support?") I said to myself "Oh, someone's asking for controller support? Yeah, sorry, not likely to happen, better get used to the mouse", and then when I saw that you weren't asking for it but offering it and had already done it I did a shamefaced double-take. Kudos to you, and to Jason for open-sourcing the game.