a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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A couple of days ago, I was born to an Eve whose first words to me were "SHHHH." Not that that helped much, but apparently she was stealing CARTLOADS of carrots from a nearby village and moving them not too far away. (Why no one noticed is beyond me.) Knowing how difficult it is to get from farming carrots to building carts, a part of me was scandalized by what my mother was doing, but I threw myself into the role play and found it quite...thrilling to be the child of a reckless and shameless thief. Did I feel bad about what we did? Yes, definitely. But it was nice to experience a different way of playing the game as well.
(That said, I might have been the only one role playing. When I asked my mother why she was stealing, she replied that that was her only way of surviving since she was new to the game.)
That's awesome, and makes some real world sense too. If a kid was raised by parents that stole to get by, they'd probably figure that's just how the world works, and you're supposed to steal what other's have. See, things like that are interesting because of the emergent game play that comes of it.
I have to say, if I was raised by a bandit mom once, I'd probably roll with it just to have some fun.
Also note that MANY people are mistaken about which stage is the fruiting stage. I've seen plenty of people pick the milkweed when it is FLOWERING, not FRUITING. So often, even people who think they're doing it correctly are not. (Not implying that's the case with anybody here, just pointing out that it's an issue.)
Yeah, I called someone out on this yesterday saying to only pick it when it is fruiting, and they said 'I did'.
Then I spent the next couple minutes trying to explain to them in 2 to 4 word sentences why they were wrong while they were running all over the place doing things.
Don't think the message got across.
You know, I think that the real problem with both the gluttony and the murdering is that there's just no warning, and by that I mean that there's no way to see a sign that something bad is about to happen.
You only know someone is killing if you happen to be on screen and are paying pretty close attention, otherwise bones are just bones, most people figure the other person probably starved. I've heard some suggestions of a scream when someone gets killed vs starving, I think it's a great idea because it wouldn't save everyone, but would alert a group that something's up and let them react to it in some way.
So the gluttony thing... yeah I think it's just a stupid thing to allow. I'm sure the number of times a single person walked into a tribal camp, ate all the food in a minute, and walked out through history is exactly zero. However, the number of times a group of bandits showed up, pillaged a camp, and took off with food and valuables is actually very high, and that's what I'd like to see happening. Not some 6 year old eating everything.
You can't tell that a 6 year old is planning on wiping out the camp by eating everything. But if you saw a group of people show up with knives and arrows, and one of them is pulling an empty cart around with them, that looks like a raid about to happen.
Don't try to tell me that dealing with 6 year olds eating all the food is more interesting then dealing with raiders attacking the village.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=229
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=257
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=267
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=217There are already several threads about this very thing. Limits on food consumption seem pretty pointless for a number of reasons (why should overeating kill you when you've spent most of your life naked and running barefoot and eating one kind of vegetable? It smacks of band aid videogame logic to a balancing issue.)
The real solution at the moment is what some of the community members have been offering whenever frustration happens: players need to come together and use what they're given without the game's assistance (i.e., the tech tree climb will have to be interrupted because now you must make a bow and arrow, and one person needs to have this bow and arrow at all times and effectively be useless.)
None of the above is really practical, so maybe the real answer is either the boring one (overeating limit), or something interesting requiring players to work together to restrain/kill a troll.
(It could be anything, guard dogs, stones as projectiles/melee weapons used by several players, lock and key storage... )
Limit on food consumption absolutely makes sense. A person can't eat an entire pantry of food in one sitting. It's physically impossible.
Also, a troll should have to work at trolling just as hard as others have to work at stopping them. Why should they get a free ride to wipe out an entire group on their own in half a minute almost effortlessly? If they want to steal and hide all the food somewhere to cause a famine, great, more power to them, but they'll have to work at it and not get caught. If they're a dumb thief, they'll get caught and all their stolen goods will get taken back. At least that way, the group has a way to recover from it and it is much more interesting gameplay than "Oh, someone deleted all the food again. Oh well, start over."
Letting someone just go around and delete all the food and forcing someone to stand there for an hour watching for that behavior, that's what is boring.
A silly plant is the bottleneck holding civilization back.
Thing is, I believe there are people who are trying to harvest it correctly but are mistaking the flowering stage as the proper stage to pick it, instead of the fruiting stage. Had someone that I watched pick one right when it changed to flowering, and I told them no, only pick when it's fruiting. To which they replied 'I did'.
Yes, there's a name when you mouse over it, but honestly how many people are reading all of that constantly? I'm sure quite a few are mistaking the 'pink stuff' as fruit instead of flowers and are wiping out entire crops of milkweed plants.
I've been attempting to fill up a few baskets with milkweed seeds when I can, just so there's some around for others to jumpstart things again, but that creates another issue with soil getting used up.
And do clothes stay around forever or do they get lost if someone dies with them on their body and no one finds the grave before it decays away?
I've only experienced violence once so far. We had a village guard that I saw keeping watch with a bow & arrow in hand for most my life while I kept myself busy with things. She was about the same age as I was, so we both got old and wrinkly about the same time.
At one point she walked over to me and we both kinda stared at each other for a moment, a couple wrinkly old hags. Then she said 'bye gramma'.
You have died!
Shot by bow and arrow.
I was 55, so I was pretty much just a drain on resources at that point anyway. I thought it was funny.
Yeah I've noticed it a few times myself.
I feel like people who eat everything in sight as fast as possible should die from overeating.
It's such a low effort way of trolling people.
I think that captured players may just log out instead of spending time tied to a tree, so the end result is the same, they end up dead. Might as well just shoot them.
In a game like this, I don't really have a problem with trolling, just a problem with effortless trolling. Allowing someone to basically delete all the food in a village in less than a minute leaves you with no real recourse. Damage is already done, even if you kill them for it in their mind they've already won. If instead they had to steal and run off with the food because it was too much for them to physically eat, that creates a new emergent game play where you try to hunt down the thieves to find out where they're stashing your stolen goods to recover them. A good thief won't get caught, a bad one will.
Don't eliminate trolling, just make sure it takes just as much effort to be a troll as it takes to do anything else.
Oh I agree that a lot more can get done with a group. If you have to support yourself completely, you have little time to focus on actually making advancements over just surviving. The problem is that others can be destructive and can actually make the situation even worse for you by using up resources you need to survive without replenishing them. So you have to make a choice if you're going to chance it with a group, knowing that they may just cause a massive famine and cut your life short, or strike out on your own giving you a full hour to do things, but know that you'll be spending like 90% of that time trying to stay fed.
In one of my previous lives I managed to come across an area that already had quite a lot of tools, a cart, lots of snares, and some clothes to start with, but there wasn't much in the way of food. I spent the entire time alone and managed to fill up 5 baskets full of cooked rabbit and 5 baskets full of carrots, and like 4 stacks of furs. Would have made clothing if there had been any milkweed anywhere nearby but I didn't ever find any.
I felt like leaving that behind would give someone else the chance to focus on building instead of frantically running around looking to stuff their face, but there's just as much a chance that a group will descend upon the place like a cloud of locusts and just wipe the food out without much actual progress happening. Seems a lot of people are just standing around and eating still because they're not really sure what else to do. Hopefully that changes as people start wanting to accomplish more than just stand around and eat for an hour, but there's always going to need to be someone bringing in the food to allow others to build effectively.
And there's no downside to watering anything that's planted and dry, right?
There is one that I can think of dealing with carrots. If you water carrots and let them grow but never pick them, I believe they eventually just die off. I saw this happen when I watered a large crop of dry carrot seeds I came across. I planned to let them stay on the plot so they'd become flowering carrots for whoever came next, leaving a bunch of seeds ready to go. I didn't pick them when they were flowering, and after a while, poof! They were all gone.
So if you see flowering carrots, be sure to pick them! At least put the seeds in a basket or something, or replant them.
I do seem to have an easier time on my own, and this worries me. It means that the preferred method of play could eventually be to do just that, leave and live out on your own. Eves may eventually prefer to ignore kids just because they get more done if they do so.
What's the problem with this? A couple things. One is that living to the point where you can actually fend for yourself can get a bit annoying as you get the cold shoulder and starve at age 0 again and again. But more than that, there's little much out there in the wilds in the way of tech and you can't exactly take much with you in a basket. When you strike out on your own, you effectively start over with nothing unless you come across some abandoned village by chance. You're never going to build an advanced civilization in 60 minutes starting with sticks and rocks, and what you can accomplish in that time is limited by what is available around you. My last life, I pretty much spent the entire hour trying to make what I needed to build a fire and a snare, mostly because I had to travel for a few minutes at a time just to find milkweed.
The thing that is driving everyone to keep migrating is the lack of sustainability in a given area. Yes, if everyone knew what to do, you could make an area last longer. Don't touch the milkweed unless it is fruiting, leave some of the carrots until they seed, don't kill animals unless you see they have a baby, and all that. The problem is that not everyone knows these things, and that will always be the case because there's always someone new to the game that is just clicking on things to figure out what the heck they do, which you really can't blame them for. By the time they learn, damage is done, time to move on and start over.. again.
It's realistic, sure, but it's also supposed to be a game. Most people play games because they want the challenge and feeling of achieving something. If the 'next step' constantly stays just out of reach because you have to migrate and reset when the land inevitably goes dead, people will lose interest. And that would be a real shame if that happened, because I really want to see where this game goes.
You'll need wooden tongs. I believe you use flint on wood in some way to make them, maybe a stack of two carved wood. To be honest, I've forgotten exactly how to make them, but I do know that you must have them.
You'll then need a kiln somewhere. You load it up with some kindling, light it with a fireboard which is just a carved straight piece of wood stuck into a fire pit, and once it is going you take the wet clay bowl in the wooden tongs and stick it in the kiln to make a clay bow.
I probably wouldn't have figured it out if I hadn't watched someone do it.
Just met someone who came in and was eating everything in sight, wiping out the carrot fields that were being held back for seeds. Honestly feel like when you're full you shouldn't be able to keep shoveling food down to curb that behavior a bit because they can destroy a food reserve that took quite a while to build up in a matter of seconds, but yeah the bow&arrow or knife is the player solution to that "problem". Too bad we didn't have either available.
I was born to a mother who was living on her own, in a small village that she said she started herself. I was her first son.
It wasn't long after that I had a brother, and Mother continued busily tending to the carrot fields while making sure my brother and I were well fed. Once I was able, I asked her what she wanted me to do. Her answer was simple.
She wanted me to live.
She did ask if I thought I could figure out how to build a fire while she tended the fields, to which I said I'd try. After fumbling about with it for a bit, I managed to get one going. She said she was so proud of me.
Our family grew, more brothers and sisters. All the while I gathered wood to tend our fire to keep my younger brothers and sisters warm and thought of what else I could do to help out. Mother was obviously a very gifted farmer, but there were so many animals around and no one hunting them. If our family kept growing, it was doubtful that the carrots would keep us all fed. So, I set to my new task, gathering together what I needed to put together a bow and arrow. During this time, the population grew. Some nieces and nephews, some new visitors that decided to join us. To be honest I started losing track of just how many of us there were but it seemed like there were quite a few. It became overwhelming trying to feed everyone, but I managed to get my new bow and arrow completed and struck out east into the swampy area hunting for ducks.
I managed to bring back quite a few, and cooked us up some ducks on the campfire; the same one that I started when I was a kid was still going, being tended to by my siblings. My younger brother noticed what I was up to, and he fashioned a bow and arrow of his own and set out to hunt as well. Turns out he was really efficient at it, even better than I was! As quickly as I could pluck and cook the things he'd bring back more, so I spent more time as a cook than as a hunter in the end.
The little village was bustling with activity during those days. Mother was getting quite old, but she continued to tend the fields all the way up until she just wasn't able to anymore. When she knew her time was short, she told us all goodbye, and she told my younger brother that he could have her clothes when she was gone because she was tired of watching him streak through the woods butt naked. She was funny, but she was also a really good mother.
When she was gone, I realized that made me the oldest one left in our little village. I did my best to help out some of the youngsters in my final years, showed them a thing or two that I'd learned. When it got to the point that I was too frail to travel very far from the village, one of the youngest ones looked around and asked what she should do. I smiled and set my old bow and arrow down next to her and said, "Do you want to hunt?" She seemed pretty excited about that idea.
I think the youngsters will be alright without me.