I missed the locusts.

Naeght · 2018-11-12 03:59:58

I really did. Its like a famine event suddenly hits the settlement.

Today i helped my noob mom survive, we had to migrate since there was little food around. It took a while to find a green biome, but i had my sharp stone so we feed on wild carrots. All along, mom would try to raise many kids, until i coldly told her to pick one.
We eventually settled in an area with easily 20 bushes in the close radio. Seeing that my surviving sister actually knew her way around, i left them to forage some basic tools. We had it good for a while, but beeing a dedicated forager i rarely visited the village.
Twenty years later, while returning i take a detour to feed on some faraway berries (leave the close one for the noobs). To my surprice, i come across three sisters beeing followed by many kids of diferent ages, who jumped from bush to bush, fighting for the last berry.

I laughed at my sillyness, expecting to find food back home and delivered the tools before i died.

The story has a good ending though, since later i reincarnated as a baby boy in that family, and a few survivors seemed to idolatrize the matriarch who had gotten them through the famine years. You can't really blame her if her offspring died without leaving a fertile female behind.

EDIT: Damn, i just checked and i had 12 brothers and sisters.

Last edited by Naeght (2018-11-12 04:04:53)

MultiLife · 2018-11-12 06:55:40

Yeah, for the longest time ever I saw a mom tell her baby "we are berry farmers". I was like, "oh yeah I remember this happening". Which is funny as I haven't played for that long, few months.

It seems that I experience a berry famine every life now. In my latest life, I cooked omelettes when I saw the famine approach. Sadly the town was dry, most ponds had been converted to wells (dry) and a man was shooting geese in the wilderness around the town. I ran far to get eggs (thank goodness Tarr gave me a backpack) and I had to restart the omelette fire twice due to the long distances. Then someone burnt an omelette even when I had left a plate there. I went to make pies and told a toddler to watch (she walked around saying she is dumb).
The biggest issue in that village was a surprising one. We had one knife afaik, and it was on a new player, a trapper man who didn't kill sheep for us (the pen was tiny). He told me he had made more sheep, and there were three woolly sheep and a moufflon sitting staticly in the pen. I asked him to slaughter them so I get mutton to fry or put in pies, but he was super hesitant over my request. When he did kill them, he didn't slice them up for me before I told him to. So yeah having the knife on a newbie can be a death sentence for a town, too.
I wish I had noticed the pen issue earlier. I delivered water when newbies couldn't find it; this probably made them rely on berries even more, even if it made them survive a bit longer.

In a way it's relieving to see a berry famine happen, it's a natural purge. I know that things will quiet a bit.

Last edited by MultiLife (2018-11-12 16:30:49)

Ifeanyichukwu · 2018-11-12 12:50:06

It seems that every life I live lately is just a crowd of people mass feeding on berries and then dying off.

My most recent one started just like this. As soon as I could I ran off and got some rabbits to fry/make pies off of. After that was done, I realized we had a pen, but nobody was making compost of feeding the sheep. Actually, everyone was ignoring the pen's existence. So I try to start some wheat (we had carrots planted, fortunately), which took me like 20 years, because I was having kids every. Single. Minute. (Idk what people are saying, but the number of births needs a cap, especially now that we have so many players. It's no fun having like 20 kids in a single lifetime)

Of course, as soon as the wheat is grown, someone comes by and just cuts all of it. Welp.

I manage to make some compost regardless, thanks to the other like, two people that know what they're doing out of twenty.

At the same time, my fifth cousin is just sitting in the berry field, growing older, gorging on food, the only knife in her backpack. Mind you, we have like 3-4 sheep that need slaghtering, in order to make pies from their meat. Our food is running out again; another famine is almost certain.

I'm considering asking her for the knife. She looks like she is looking for a trustworthy person to have it, and really, I've been working hard my entire life. She's seen most of it, too.

She dies before I can ask her, though. And who does she pass the knife on to?

Not the hard-working woman that's been struggling hard in front of her eyes most of her life. No.

She gives it to a kid.

Just some random kid. Who's too young to hold a knife. Who also happens to be a noob who doesn't know how to use it. Who, before he even becomes a teen, goes off and dies somewhere far away from the settlement, and now our only knife is lost forever.

Aaand another famine hits after that.

I don't really blame the noobs. This game seems simple, but is deceptively complex, especially the crafting system. And some things just... don't make sense. They're not done the way they would be irl. You could say that if someone doesn't know how to do stuff, they should just spend more time in the tutorial, but who wants to be stuck on a boring tutorial when they're itching for the real experience? So they just finish it off quickly and get born in game, some not even knowing how to eat (how is that even possible?) and die. Again and again. And then, many of them leave, forever.

Maybe some sort of strategy guide in-game would help. Or a more intuitive crafting guide, maybe with pictures and such, and explanations for how the items being crafted can be used. And a guide search that actually works, lol.

Tea · 2018-11-12 13:07:30

oh god .... the "giving-all-the-stuff-and-knifes-to-your-kid" tragedy is back ...

What I don't really like a bout the tutorial, is that it tells you to go get bit by the snakes to be born to another player. Many don't know that they can continue the road and try out stuff.

It would be great to have the snake room a bit further, so that they don't automatically go die after lightning the torch. Maybe set up some farms and some tools ready, so the player can try them out ?

Some carrot and berry rows next to some empty rows and soil. A stone hoe and some bowls ready to go ? Maybe they will actually try out all those stuff in the tutorial.

Starknight_One · 2018-11-12 13:25:08

Tea wrote:

oh god .... the "giving-all-the-stuff-and-knifes-to-your-kid" tragedy is back ...
What I don't really like a bout the tutorial, is that it tells you to go get bit by the snakes to be born to another player. Many don't know that they can continue the road and try out stuff.

Instant gratification isn't quick enough for some people. And many struggle with figuring out how to even light the torch in the first place. Forcing them to continue playing the tutorial won't make them better players, it will just frustrate them.

It would be great to have the snake room a bit further, so that they don't automatically go die after lightning the torch. Maybe set up some farms and some tools ready, so the player can try them out ?
Some carrot and berry rows next to some empty rows and soil. A stone hoe and some bowls ready to go ? Maybe they will actually try out all those stuff in the tutorial.

You don't 'die automatically after lighting the first torch'. If you did, I'd never have found the optional area on my first run (I'm an explorer by nature - 'what's behind that door?' is one of my favorite games). But most people, being impatient, want to get into 'the real game'. The tutorials in many games are so watered down that playing the real game isn't the same experience. Here, you literally are playing the exact same game as the 'real game' (less, say, the wild animals), but players don't understand that. Admittedly, Jason made sure there's plenty of food in the tutorial, which isn't guaranteed in the real game, but having mass numbers of noobs dying of starvation before they even got to 'actually play' is not good for repeat business.

Currently, you can do almost everything but farm in the optional area. I'd rather see a private server with a 'farming and cooking tutorial' on it, so people who want to try it can go and learn how to farm and cook... it wouldn't even require many changes to the game code, just some work on tutorial stones and getting things set up. I don't have the resources to do that myself (I know how, just don't have a spare box to build a server on or the money to acquire one), but I'd be willing to help with setup/layout/scripting if someone did.

happynova · 2018-11-12 16:35:54

Yeah, I'm thinking that we probably just have to accept that until the newbies find their feet, settlements aren't going to survive for very long. One experienced player simply can't keep a town full of clueless newbies alive indefinitely. I know, 'cause I've tried.

Maybe for the moment the thing to do is to concentrate on teaching over long-term survival. Every player who learns to make stew or compost today is a player who will be a lot more useful tomorrow, and once we hit a critical mass of semi-comptent folks things will hopefully be a little more viable.

Naeght · 2018-11-13 00:20:10

Teach the noobs to forage, and you'll go easier on the camp food reserves.

pein · 2018-11-13 13:17:22

today there were quads on discord, and baker and me twins
we born to same mother
desert side, no water
we suicide, we seen 4 sons, we came back, we came back twice more
that's already 10 kids same mother

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-11-12 03:59:58

I missed the locusts.

#2 2018-11-12 06:55:40

Re: I missed the locusts.

#3 2018-11-12 12:50:06

Re: I missed the locusts.

#4 2018-11-12 13:07:30

Re: I missed the locusts.

#5 2018-11-12 13:25:08

Re: I missed the locusts.

#6 2018-11-12 16:35:54

Re: I missed the locusts.

#7 2018-11-13 00:20:10

Re: I missed the locusts.

#8 2018-11-13 13:17:22

Re: I missed the locusts.

Board footer