One Hour One Life Forums

None of that has anything to do with being born and immediately abandoned, or with too many babies arriving simultaneously and thereby overwhelming the mothers. Those are the two issues I'm complaining about, and are the reason I've suggested increasing the baby cooldown period during this period of newbie influx.

I have the same issue happening off and on. I also have occasional crashes; the crashes seem to only happen when I'm typing.

What can I do to help troubleshoot these issues?

As a new player I for one appreciate that sentiment, and to the degree that I'm an experienced player now (I can forage! I can smith! I can farm! I can make stew! I can make roads!) I feel the same way. But I will also note that experienced players (in all games!) tend to expect too much from new players, even when being charitable. They forget how bad they were when they started off, or they're hardcore gamers and learned better and faster than most people ever will.

For anyone else who might be reading this: You can do nearly the same thing without having to set up a private server just by playing on one of the official-but-unpopulated servers. Most of the time you'll be free to play as Eve without anyone else spawning in. Go to http://onehouronelife.com/reflector/ser … ion=report and pick a server with a small population, then manually enter that in the Settings menu, checking the "Use Custom Server" checkbox.

So wells regenerate water, but only if they're not being used? Is that right?

No one is going to use birth control even if Jason adds it, because it will always be easier to simply not feed your children.

Note that having fewer baby spawns necessarily means that there will be more Eve spawns.

Jason once pointed out that having too many Eve spawns is a problem. He used an example like: if there are 30 players on a server and three Eves, each town will have ten players. But if there are ten Eves, then each camp will have three players, and that's not enough to sustain a town so the towns will all die. But boy, let me tell you, right now that is NOT an issue. The servers are littered with failed Eve camps and it's not because they didn't have enough people to sustain a town. It's because they had TOO MANY BABIES for the skill level of the current playerbase. Fewer babies and more Eves is exactly what the game needs right now - specifically, more Eves who have fewer babies and therefore have more of a chance to explore and discover and learn and practice.

I'm trying to understand the logic here.

People were running off to die a lot because they didn't like their spawn. So then mothers could force-hold them to keep them from running off. But then only for one minute, and during that minute the player could /die anyway if they didn't like their spawn.

So as things stand now:

If you don't like your spawn you can run off to die. Unless your mother wants to keep you, and is fast enough to grab you first, in which case you have to wait until she lets you go, or until one minute passes, whichever comes first, and then you can run off to die. Or, you can say /die when she grabs you, and then you don't have to run off. But you can't /die unless she grabs you; if she doesn't grab you you have to run off.

What is the point of all of this?

Looking back on this thread now from the other side of the Steam release it seems like a discussion from Bizarroland.

I came in with the Steam crowd. I occasionally see a baby run away from its mother. The first few times it happened I was utterly puzzled, but I eventually realized "Oh, okay, they don't want to play this particular scenario." I still see it happen, but it happens so rarely that I would rank this maybe #11 in the top ten problems with the game right now. The pressing issue now is not baby suicide but rather baby abandonment. I've shared my view on this in another thread.

On this thread, I'll add my voice to those imploring Jason to give up trying to force players to play a game they don't want to play. I completely understand the aesthetic he is shooting for; I love that aesthetic and admire him for creating it. But Jason, please consider this: your aesthetic is lost on those players who are so desiring of playing only Eve, or playing only in a small camp, or playing only in a big town, or playing only a boy, or whatever, that they will spend life after life killing themselves in hopes of eventually getting to play the game they want to play. You can't force them to play your game your way; more importantly though, you can't force them to appreciate the game you want to make.

But at the same time, your aesthetic will not be lost on those of us who do appreciate what you're trying to do... even if you make an optional UI that caters to those who insist on the perfect spawn. The rest of us will just ignore it and keep on clicking "Get Reborn" and take the hand that fate deals us.

And without such an optional UI, the game is worse off for ALL of us. THEY have to go through the tedium of spawning and dying just to get to play the game they want to play, and WE have to deal with babies popping in and then running off. Better for us if they never spawned near us to begin with.

"Pick your own birth location" isn't going to happen thanks to the lineage ban. People are never going to return to their old town to keep it going. You've fixed that already. What's left is "Pick your own birth circumstances" - Eve, small camp, big town. Just offering those few choices - as options for those who want them - would likely be enough to satisfy most of those who are riding the suicide express to find a satisfying spawn.

That said, I feel like this is a small problem. It apparently was a big problem before Steam, but Steam releases have a way of changing your entire world.

Not one person you're saying "Are you new" to knows what you mean by "new".

Everyone has their own idea of what "new" means, and the perspective of a new player (I'm not new, I've played five times and I know how to eat berries and feed babies) is different from that of an experienced player (You're a noob until you can start a camp, make an axe, and live until 60).

This isn't going to be any better.

This is not "common sense". This is something that people have to be taught. Don't use it as an excuse to blow off an inconvenient player; use it as a chance to help someone learn something valuable.

Selectively ensuring that new players have a bad experience (spawning and then being abandoned is a BAD experience) is about as dumb as picking berries but not fetching soil. You'll make your current run more satisfying to YOU, but you'll starve the game of new players and cut off Jason's income source.

This moment, right now, is the one and only time that this game will launch on Steam. There will never be another chance to bring in new players like this. This is the WORST possible time to make the game MORE difficult and frustrating than normal, but that's exactly what's happening BECAUSE of the influx of new players.

Jason can compensate for this by dialing up the baby cooldown timer. That will create fewer spawns as unwanted baby #4 and more spawns as Eve. That is vastly more preferable for a new player. They may die soon as an Eve, but they'll at least be given an opportunity to explore and discover. If they spawn as an unwanted baby they can do literally nothing; all they will do is spend a minute or two waiting to die.

I'd even suggest tweaking the spawn algorithm to increase spawn frequency in established lineages and decrease it - dramatically! - in new lineages. Expose your new players to towns; even if there's increased baby pressure because of it, they will at least survive to early childhood because noob moms will feed them. And if towns collapse from the pressure, the new players will start to learn WHY the towns collapse (no berry maintenance! no branching out to other foods! no basic tech and tools!), and that learning experience is an important part of the game.

But even more important is decreasing the number of babies born to Eves. Noob Eves need a big, big break from baby pressures so that they can spend time exploring and learning about how to start camps. Right now if a noob spawns as Eve, they have a fighting chance to learn something and survive for a while; but when they get their first baby, they are basically doomed. Now is the ideal time to relieve that pressure, at least a little bit...  Now, while the new players are flocking to your game.

I bought the game on Steam a few days ago, after Jason sent an announcement to his mailing list. I watched the trailer and then bought it instantly.

I started the game blind. I played the tutorial, which was excellent. Being a curious and ornery sort, I decided not to pet the rattlesnakes and instead found the optional challenge. Using the challenge (which is also excellent!) I taught myself how to make fire, pottery, and steel. It took me four lives to get up to steel ingots before dying of old age, and even at that I didn't get the tools to break free. I was a little curious, so I did a quick search and discovered that it's possible to break free in under nine minutes!

The challenge was lots of fun, slowly figuring out how the game works and what some of the recipes are. And being ornery, I kept retrying the tutorial, saying "Okay, I did better that time, I just know I can beat it this time!". But when I learned that I was close to beating the challenge but nowhere near doing it as fast as experienced players, I decided that was a good time to go ahead and start playing for real.

I decided early on that I didn't want to look up the recipes and tech tree online; this felt like a game that would reward learning through exploration and discovery. And I was right!

Everything I've learned so far has been through trial and error, observing other players, and being explicitly taught in-game. Occasionally, after I've been exposed to a basic concept, I'll check the wiki or onetech to fill in details I might have missed or gotten confused by. But I try to minimize that so I can maximize the fun of discovery.

I taught myself firemaking, pottery, and forging (but not smithing!) with the guidance of the tutorial. I learned berry bush replenishment after spawning into a large, well-run town with a big berry farm. In a different town, one that was struggling, an elder patiently walked me through more advanced farming. I learned omelette-making by watching someone do it and then taking over from him. Later I used my firestarting, plate-making, and eggsmithing skills to pull a small town back from the brink of collapse, which felt *awesome*.

Just from being in the game and seeing what's been built by others I'm starting to get a sense of what's possible in the game and a vague idea of how the big picture works. But I can tell that I've only just scratched the surface, and that's *great*.

Right now when I spawn as Eve I'm working on my foraging and start-up skills, and when I spawn into a town I try to teach what I know ("GO PUT SOIL AND WATER ON THE BERRIES!"), practice what I've learned (carrot farming, pottery, and forging), and learn what I don't know (stews and pies next, I think, plus well-making).

"See one, do one, teach one."

It's fun.