One Hour One Life Forums

Right. Sometimes I feel like Jason is running a social experiment.

If I understand Jason correctly, Jason doesn’t actually want constant genocide/murderfest. Rather, he wants to see this hypothetical moral ideal of players coming together and getting along with outsiders despite the obvious risks. He *wants* the good guys to beat the bad guys, and somehow it feels like he’s confident that the good side of humanity will triumph despite all the swords and languages and violent temptations.

Tbh I’m not confident at all about that.

I don’t think it’s a given that the “good guys” will prevail, and this social experiment of OHOL might utterly fail and only show off the worst of us — kind of like what you get in Rust and other pvp ganking games.

And I think part of the reason an experiment like this might fail is that I don’t believe that the world is an inherently peaceful/“good” place. Obviously, a person’s worldview reflects their personal philosohies, but history has shown us time upon time again the ugliest parts of human nature — whether it is genocide, nazi/fascism, lynching/racism, gang violence, Somalia, Sudan, Boko Haram, and all the more frightening parts of the world that makes one realize how fragile and delicate of a bubble that we live in, if you grew up somewhere safe.

And then there’s the question of what kind of game Jason wants OHOL to be.

I really dislike the “because it’s realisitic!” argument for why war/violence should be in OHOL. Rape, slavery, and other forms of abuse are also realistic, but I doubt anyone would like to see that added to the game (except for the most disgusting griefers) solely on the basis that “it’s realistic”.

I’ll get back to the tech tree project next post, but today I’ll write a little bit about an interesting conversation I had with my mom this weekend when I was home. My family (grandparents) came from rural China, which back in the 60s/70s was fairly primitive and didn’t have electricity/plumbing. My mom spent time on the farm there, and OHOL got me talking to her what life there was like.

So a typical farming village in rural China c.1950s had around 100 families. There were many types of villages, and some of them had specializations (my cousins lived in a mountain village, which was much poorer than a farming village) depending on what infrastructure/resources were there.

Chinese farmers planted rice, wheat, cotton, and hemp on their main fields (called Tian). Rice in particular needs to be grown on a flooded field, which was essentially made by digging irrigation ditches out from a stream/river. A floodgate (a big rock) would be used to divert water to the fields when rice was transplanted into the fields in the spring (germination/budding is done indoors). Wheat was the main summer/fall crop.

Fertilization was done with anything and everything. Livestock dung (fermented), urine (fermented)... whatever people could get their hands on, and probably wasn’t enough. You could burn wheat chaff to make potash, which was a common early chemical fertilizer. By the 70s, people were using industrial chemical fertilizers and insecticides in additional to the traditional stuff.

Planting seasons were very narrow. If you missed it by a few days you could be screwed.

Rice harvest is done using a scythe. Stalks of rice were then beat into a box (threshing), and then the grains would be left to dry for 2-3 days. Rice grains could be sold or a majority turned over to the government (this is communist China). Polishing rice to make it white could be done later.

Chinese people didn’t really raise sheep, as in OHOL. The pig (and water bull for ploughing) and chickens were the main domestic livestock. Pork is the major meat in Chinese diet. Typically every family would buy piglets (already weaned) from the pig vendor (around 2-3) in the Spring, raise them through the year — pigs eat almost anything — and they would be slaughtered during Chinese New Year, which was the main holiday/festival in the Chinese calendar, and really the only one that civilians slaughtered pigs for.

2-3 pigs was sufficient to produce all the oil/lard a family needed for cooking for an entire year.

All parts of the pig were used/preserved, notably the limbs were salted and preserved for a long while. Different cuts were used to make different things, most of which I don’t know the details to, but generally almost everything was eaten.

Apparently most families slaughtered pigs every year because it was a waste of feeding to keep them more than a year. Sows have litters of 10+ piglets, so it was pretty much always easier (and cheaper) to get piglets from the village pig farm.

In either case it was cool and enlightening!

I'm happy you had such a positive experience!

I think that's one of the most magical parts of a game like OHOL -- when something defies your expectation and proves that a group of people with enough love can overcome and defy a much grimmer/Machiavellian/pessimistic world as a whole.

Even if it is short-lived, ephemeral, or delicately unstable, it's a very precious experience nonetheless.

The problem with the finite map resource war late game idea is that it pushes any eve play out of the game. As a “dominant civilization” spreads out, it consumes smaller towns and makes any small villages/eve unplayable, as the superpower town(s) would presumably strip the entire finite map of iron.

The entire island map would essentially progress at the same technology rate. In June, there might be a bunch of primitive villages. By August, provided no server wipe occurs, every village must be diesel tech or higher and wildnerness eve play is impossible, as iron would be >90% depleted.

There wouldn’t be any means to play early gen on that server anymore. All games would be late gen, with the primary struggle being scavenging/canabalizing smaller villages for their iron. (And I personally wouldn’t like that kind of game).

The first plot is numbers vs. server population.

I think there will definitely be a higher baseline level of murders from now on ever since Come Together — putting so many (hostile) people in close proximity is bound to have that result, and I don’t think it will quite return to the levels from before.

I think it would be interesting to breakdown family murders, outsider murders, and eve murders once a little more time has passed.

I’ve been feeling more and more detached the more violent this game gets.

It’s sort of like a defense mechanism, I guess.

It sucks to experience the slaughter/killing the first few times, but at a certain point you kinda realize that you don’t really need to care anymore. These days I see it almost every game, so why bother get immersed to begin with?

Today I experienced an eve thief for the first time -- she loaded up cart with almost everything important and ran.

Also had a neighboring village claim our gates and almost locked us all in. Super stressful for everyone, esp since our main well was exhausted and the secondary wells were outside of the fence. And our tarry spot got griefed. It was really really bad.

TECH TREE PROJECT: INTRODUCTION

This is just one of my hobbies, so you can ignore posts that start with this heading if you're primarily here in this thread for the OHOL suggestions.

The objective of this series is to develop a semi-realistic tech tree for all of civilization starting from scratch. For most of the items here, I do research on cultures/societies that used certain items and recursively research backwards until I figure out the minimal technology that was required to make something. A lot of the content here will be more redundant/detailed than what is currently implemented in OHOL, but the objective of this series is semi-academic. Whether or not Jason (or anybody making a mod) decides to use this information is entirely up to them.

Before starting, I should clarify there are several major features of the current OHOL crafting system that prevent a realistic implementation of a mega tech-tree.

1. No abstraction. In computer science, an abstract class refers to a parent class that has fundamental behavior. For example, you could have a Rope class that is used to tie a basket to a tree. It doesn't matter if it's a straw rope or a carbon fiber rope -- you can use any type of rope to perform that function.

2. More crafting time. In the real world, time is often a limiting feature of crafting. Primitive objects are very labor intensive and time consuming, and part of the major incentives of technology advancement is to increase efficiency (e.g. time to craft) to make something.

3. No item quality. If one choses to forgo abstraction, an object like "rope" needs some metric of quality. A rope made out of straw shouldn't be comparable to a rope made out of carbon fiber. A numeric property needs to distinguish these two -- potentially on multiple dimensions. A three-parameter numeric quality array is probably sufficient to cover most use cases. Certain recipes (e.g. making a suspension bridge) should require "rope" of particular minimum quality in order to be used.

4. No technical skill barrier. Primitive objects often required higher skill on behalf of the user in order to produce, and unskilled individuals were likely to have a higher failure rate (e.g. starting a fire using a fire plow). In contrast, modern factories require essentially no skill on behalf of the operators, which consequently led to the disappearance of skilled artisans that predominated the world prior to the Industrial Revolution.

5. Decay/durability needs to be revisited. Stuff breaks. Newcomen pumps break geometrically......... Decay/durability is a function of time and usage frequency.

Thanks for the feedback!

Regarding "Controversy" sections -- these are actually quite common on Wikipedia itself, along with "Reception" and "Criticism" sections (example: Famous Kanye West song). I absolutely agree that a wiki should be informational and maintain a neutral point of view, and I hope that presenting both sides of a controversial topic using factual statements (e.g. "Some players disagree on whether 1x-tilling or 2x-tilling is preferable.") can help a reader reach an informed decision on a topic.

The meta is a challenging question, and I hope more members of the community can provide input on this subject.

OHOL is a very unique game in that familiarity with the meta is almost required to play the game; yet Jason does not seem interested in expanding the tutorial or creating an instruction manual. The meta is the hardest thing for a new player to learn and contributes to the barrier of entry to this game, yet there is no place to find up-to-date recommendations in the game meta (forum guides go rapidly out of date, and there is no means to edit someone else's guide). Onetech.info is also superior to the wiki with regards to information regarding crafting recipes.

In my view, the wiki is the best place to present information about meta to new players. Even if most wiki's don't include meta, I do think OHOL's circumstances are unique enough to consider whether we might want to approach our wiki differently.

In the mean time, I think it's important to carefully present information in the most neutral way possible, and assess whether certain meta is broadly accepted or trivial. For instance, "Don't kill the last sheep" and "Say F for food" are virtually universally accepted meta. However, "Don't make reed skirts" is a more debatable subject and needs to be discussed with far more caution.

Personally, I would like to see the wiki include enough information for a new player to understand why they got stabbed for eating too many carrots, etc, because experiences like those are quite jarring for players who are fresh to the game. To do this, I think it helps to document, cite, and review positions from both sides of an argument (and also explain why youtube videos a player may have seen online are out of date -- so history is important in the wiki too).

Thank you for all your hard work Jason! We really appreciate it.

Have fun with your kids this weekend

Bumpidity bump!

Also, I think it would be nice to have a subforum for user stories.

There's a forum for featured stories, but user stories are nice to read too (and it would be cool to have an easy place to find them)