a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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It's comforting to know that both irl and in-game some people understand: graveyards are a waste.
Threshed-Wheat piles pls
Maybe we could have a similar system to the dung buckets? Bowls of wheat fill a bucket, buckets fill a box? They do create a lot of clutter on the farm and moving wheat from the farm to the kitchen is a pain.
Piles of straw would also be nice, and complements the grain storage. Something like, straw stacks and using a rope makes the stack into a portable bale.
I have to ask... why keep the road going? Especially if it hasn't even caught up to the westward expansion?
Today I was born in brown town. We had a diesel well but no kerosene, so I went out looking for oil. A bell rang two km away and I set that as a tentative goal since I wasn't familiar with the current map. Found several dead towns along the way. Located waystones for the desert family and found that they were relatively close to my own. About five hundred meters west-northwest of the bell I found a bell town I recognized from a couple days ago. Finally, I reached it to find the Tarr monument. I searched around and didn't find much else, but some tanks of crude oil and rubber seals. Sorry if someone had plans for that, but I'd rather take it where it can be put to good use. So I loaded my cart and set out for home. Just before leaving a white man arrived. He told me that his home was around two km west as well. That puts three families in roughly the same area. I'm assuming the gingers are also nearby. Went home, processed the oil into kerosene. Ran the well, filled as many cisterns as I could. Died happy with a couple tanks of fuel to spare.
Next life I'm reborn in the white family. We only had a newcomen pump, but there was some rubber in town so I ran it and filled cisterns. We were about seventeen hundred meters from the eastern bell at Tarr monument so I felt like I could find our neighbors. There was a diesel engine waiting in the smithy so I decided to try and get some rubber, dry out the newcomen well and install a new diesel pump. I looked around for maps and found one marked 'brown town - five hundred meters away - five centuries old.' It was a safe bet. I went with a horse cart and stole all the rubber I found the previous life. Back home I managed to use it all up, went through about a dozen rubber seals altogether. I had to build a new cistern to hold all that water but I managed to use all the rubber... and the well still wasn't exhausted. Could have probably found the desert town, but I was getting old and I wouldn't have time to finish the project anyway so I just upgraded the bakery doors with springs and went off to die naked in the woods.
Anyway, the point is: all four families are relatively close together. Older towns are distant and empty. Why build a road to nowhere? It seems like you'd be better off connecting existing settlements than working on a road nobody's using.
Stacks on stacks on stacks.
Thanks.
Another thing, can posse for outsiders be smaller than for our family in towns? I mean if they come for something they should feel the threat, we should be able to prevent stealing.
I agree. Castle doctrine. Kill all outsiders on sight.
I'm sure that this trade is coming, as a way to promote war when we finally adapt to the new meta and become comfortable.
I don't want to contradict you in your own thread but the fact is that we are only strong alone. Isolation is a pillar of existence. Every man is an island. Everyone dies alone.
Don't let it get you down though you helpless idiot this just makes our shitty flawed human contact all the more precious for how shitty and flawed it is. Every day I make a conscious choice not to kill you, and you love me for it. Together, that's how we make society work.
I was and still am against the persistent curse-mark system since it's blatantly antithetic in a game where every life is a self-contained experience. Jason agrees and that's why we don't have any way to identify friends in-game. He doesn't want players organizing independent of the built in anonymity. Somehow this dumb curse mark bs is acceptable though. In my mind, either we're all anonymous or nobody is. If I can curse someone to mark them as trouble, why can't I bless someone to mark them as a friend? It's ridiculous. Ironically, I really think that it would expose the hypocrisy of the cursing system and that's a big part of why blessings will never happen. To find someone you cursed in a previous life and learn that they're actually a great person would shatter so many smug self-righteous pricks worldviews. That kind of moral relativism is not welcome in a game where any perceived offense can be impulsively interpreted as "griefing."
After actually playing this I like it a lot. It might just be how new and fresh it still is, but this feels like what the family specialization update was meant to be.
It also neatly solves the problem of giving birth when you're a woman far outside of town.
With this and the slight rework of tool slots recently I'm really happy with the state of the game now. Feels like you finally worked out all the kinks.
Something like, the individual child gains a small personal bonus for each line of a foreign language spoken near them and a single genetic bonus that's retained for their family line. Not the family as a whole just that individual's descendants.
That way there's a generational aspect of two languages gradually coming together and a more personal aspect involving yourself and your children. It provides an incentive to teach your immediate family for their personal improvement AND to act as a language teacher in other villages so that the newer generation can understand a little more during their lifetime.
Basically providing a greater variation in language proficiency depending on the individual ancestry and childhood environment. With a multilingual family and childhood tutor you may be fluent in 2-3 languages. Without you may only have your native language.
What if the family that last claimed a well is still alive somewhere but no longer inhabiting the town that well is in?
What if it's a rarely used backup well on the edge of the main well's tapout zone?
Are well claims permanent as long as the family is alive, or is distance or frequency of use a factor?
Have you ever been born in a town where they have tech they couldn't possibly have made? A small ginger town with midgame tech and mysteriously, a bunch of bottles. Where'd they get glass? I imagine white towns will be like that. Nobody knows how, but at some point a white guy managed to get his hands on a couple horses, some sulfur and a bell. If you play your cards right you can find a brown fam to give you latex and palm. It just takes a little smooth talking, and you know that's your specialty.
First for castle doctrine, trespassers will be shot on sight.
Hey, I get it. You're happy to sit by yourself barren and childless in a shitty little igloo with no friends. Clicking an ice hole and fishing up nothing but empty boots. That's your idea of fun on a friday night.
Maybe you should take a break from this game. Spoonwood was right. The vitamin D deficiency is really getting to you. Trust me, you won't be missed. At this rate you may as well be afk on the town fire, as useless as you are.
Ah yes. The horse cart. In my hypothetical ginger town with no horses, because racism. And no water. Makes perfect sense.
You're not very bright are you?
u ghey
Good luck finding all those wild edibles near town, and have fun running around for 10 years to make your free wool happen.
Unless you're way out in homesick land with your very own personal sheep pen u dum for this one kiddo.
Technically fishing relies on water even for arctic char because you need to domesticate rose bushes for hooks, but that's minor.
Shrimping is actually pretty expensive water-wise in comparison since the net requires 2 wool to fix and it tears very often.
You can't fish sustainably without relying on having lots of wool or lots of worms, which are a non-renewable resource only in wild soil deposits.
Maybe my next life I'll try to live 100% without water. Nothing produced by water. Not even pond water. The easiest way would be to live feral off foraged food and wild materials but that's boring. What kind of foods can you make with no water? Turkey, goose, rabbit, omelette. Arctic char if you're ginger? You need a domestic rosebush for the hook though and that takes water. Dough requires water so any kind of baking is out. Milk? There's no wild corn, that takes water too. Hmm. Carnitas from a wild hog. Mutton from a wild mouflon. Seems like hunting and foraging really is the only way to live water free. That doesn't seem sustainable either though. If everyone did it we'd each need a lot of territory to support even a small family. Seems like the nomad gypsy lifestyle is ultimately the only one that's ultimately sustainable.
So, some predictions.
Every town will rush a bell tower. That's the most beneficial thing. Every town will need translation stations, with premade phrases to aid transaction. Valuables will be stored in specialty biomes and families will settle in areas with a lot of that biome around. Their family's survive depends on access to these resources. It offers protection and prevents theft. Horses, sulfer, palm and latex will dominate the early game. During this time gingers will be poor and must hunt gold veins so that they can trade bells for sustainable rubber. Alchemy may become meta in black families for players that know how. White families will also be poor, but their translation ability allows them to leverage a greater number of people. Newer players that don't necessarily know the deal can potentially be recruited to provide valuable specialty resources.
Black and brown will be the power couple. Horses can not be bred, only tamed, so they will be extremely valuable as a non renewable resource. Horses are essential for travel, travel is essential for trade, trade is essential for survival. I have a feeling it's going to end up like the car in a way though... extremely valuable and expensive and oh some idiot just lost it in the woods a mile from town never to be seen again. That, or it'll result in the lynching of traders in black towns as everyone just assumes they stole the horse they rode in on. Black fams early game will hoard horses, providing only a trickle to other families in exchange for carts full of resources. Ginger fams late game will hoard kerosene in the same way. Maps and waystones will be standard issue as people struggle to find each other, communicate and trade. Everyone will be frustrated as nobody can do everything and many people fail to do even one thing. One person gathers, one explores and trades, one makes use of imported goods. Lots and lots of spinning plates that the family struggles to keep in balance. Each family gradually spreading further and further from each other as old towns die out and new ones search for untapped resources until entropy kicks in with the heat death of our ohol universe.
I'm most curious about how we're going to calculate the relative value of this stuff. How much is a horse worth exactly? How many buckets of latex does a bell cost?
Would you sell me your soul for a tank of kerosene?
So, I had a couple of lives today that seem relevant to the topic.
First life, I'm born into a darkskin black village. Just as I grow hair my cousin runs into the bakery screaming for help. He's bitten by a wolf. I act fast and managed to save him. A few minutes later he walks up holding a wolfskin and makes a hat from it. A gift as thanks for saving him. He's older so I ask for his help lifting something heavy. I dig a big rock on the side of the road, split it and make stone blocks. There's a bell tower being built, it's three levels high and stable. Together we add another level. I remembered reading about chemistry on the forums and how you can make gold with alchemy. All the materials come from desert biome, so today I'm a black alchemist. I hopped on a horse and found that they were surprisingly easy to gather. At least around our small town where nobody recognized their value. I set up my station and got to work. It's one of those things that seems hard until you actually do it. A little of this, a little of that, some time in the forge, some time on the coals. Acids and copper foil and gold flakes. I'm some kind of supergenius.
Now, the town had a diesel well but obviously no kerosene. While I was working a ginger woman wandered into town and dropped two notes. We can help you get oil. We live four hundred NW. Nobody cared, myself included. I was busy doing science.
The second product of my alchemy is the final ingredient for photo paper. I've never taken a photo before so I wanted to try. I made a black box, a spring, a glass lense, camera done. Only thing I couldn't finish was the black cloak to protect my photo paper, because there was no way to get sugarcane for the dye. I remember a brown man wandering into town near the end, I asked him to help but never saw him again.
Second life, I'm born in a ginger family. Four hundred closer to the NW bell than my previous life. We had a newcomen pump with torn seal but no rubber. I headed southeast, found some dry springs and managed to locate the black family. I left two girls there- this would have been impossible if I was homesick. That was all I could give them, I didn't even know where to find a nearby tarry spot. There was no hope of my drilling oil in that life. I took a horse cart with eight rubber tires and went home at 40. Ran our pump eight times and filled a couple of cisterns. Left a map with the location of the black town with my family, explained the situation and promptly died.
The bakery is a work space with a lot of traffic, so organization is very important to prevent clutter. That means lots of storage and items that are clearly separated into categories so anyone can see oh, pies go here. Raw pies go here. This slot box is full of mutton. These tables hold plates and bowls of food. Baskets, bowls and plates are neatly stacked. The same way that boxes in the nursery hold clothing. Babies are born, carried over and clothed. They immediately learn: this is where clothes go.
Slot boxes in the center of a 3-wide carrot patch are an interesting idea. The plots on either side would neatly fill the slot box in the center. Carrots can produce a lot of clutter though, people often get carried away growing too many and a lot end up going to seed too. So I like having a slot box on either side, because realistically people would just end up loading bowls with carrot seeds or stacking carrots on the floor to the side anyway.
One thing I'd like to see more of in large farms: tables. Seed bowls add up fast and they end up producing a lot of clutter so it would be nice to have clear, dedicated storage space for them. Boxes would be more efficient but I'd worry about people turning them into slot boxes which defeats the purpose. Although I guess you could always go back and fix it later. These large storage containers on farms would also be a good way to store spare buckets and bowls in a stack, or to keep a supply of dung next to the composting station.
Does anyone have any good solutions when it comes to transporting wheat to the bakery? A lot of people thresh it right there on the farm but all the piles of wheat end up being clutter. It would be nice if we could have a rail to transport them but that would take up a lot of valuable space on the farm and end up defeating the purpose. Is using a cart to haul stuff around really the move here?
Really though, I miss seeing different strategies like settling in a desert and living the nudist life with that ambient heat and using nearby ponds as free well sites. It would be nice if we could turn ice holes or hot springs into well sites. Some diversity in where we can settle would be appreciated. Maybe hostile biomes require a little more tech so that developed towns can go exploring and create satellites in difficult places.
That sort of thing isn't really possible with the population of this game though. Any more than 2-3 spots and each of them starts looking like a ghost town. I feel like lowkey that's half the reason behind the family specialization update. Forcing everyone to live together because otherwise the community splinters too much.
T h e n w h y a r e y o u s t i l l h e r e ?
Just to suffer?
Ironically the lack of water scarcity stems from the family specialization update.
Now there are only 2-3 towns and they're all running on diesel with several bells. Anyone that cares to can easily return to the same town every life. The difficult process of acquiring oil becomes much easier when all it takes is a little autism over several hours. Within one lifetime it's lucky if you can check each of the dozen marked tarry spots for viability. With six hours of intense unemployment it's easy to find and exploit any point within a thousand tiles for easy oil.
When you cheat with mods it's even easier. The game is clearly broken.
We need a pond based no-wells economy that only consumes omelettes and turkey, with foraging and furs. That's the ultimate endgame here. Anything else is unreasonable. Fuck content and technology. Jason wants everyone wandering through the woods with nothing but free wild food.
A sociologist would have a lot to say about modern society and urban multiculturalism here.
The one-free-use mechanic from last week's update helped A LOT with the limitations of tool slots in my opinion. Before I'd end up wasting a tool slot on some minor thing like dying my clothes or building a box. Now you really only use tool slots for heavy-usage items. You can't do everything, but you can do enough to do your job and still have a life outside of that.