a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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As originally suggested on the One Hour One Life reddit, perhaps there is some scope for the creation of radically different societies regardless of technological development with this new biome specialisation update? How about this as an idea.
What:
1: Water down the specialisation so that, say, a brown-skinned player in a tundra is not totally unable to interact with anything. Instead, what if we had it so that if a character is in an inhospitable biome they become hunger a lot more quickly. What's more, if a character is in their speciality biome they grow hungry slower than in neutral biomes. This will make more sense when considered in relation to point 2.
2: There have been jungle-civilisations and desert-cities in Earth's history, imagine how entertaining it would be if they existed in One Hour One Life. How about eves spawn in biomes according to their race, in which they find things easier, and it becomes possible to start a town in such biomes. Adding springs, some sprite-modified milkweed and allowing bananna trees to be planted would mean that towns could develop in Jungles, for example. In future updates nation-specific wear could also be added so that those living in a certain biome can make themselves some cosmetic items from exclusively local materials.
Why:
- More variety across lives.
- More interesting relations between tribes.
- A degree of culture rather than one city being little different to the next.
- Races would no longer need to work together because of an in-game mechanic. Rather, they would need to work together because cities will develop and grow to control certain resources in their speciality biomes. Traders might buy bannanas in one city and sell them for plenty in a distant plains city. Leaders might be forced to negotiate for rare resources such as sulfur as all the nearby sulfur-pools are controlled by a single civilisation. This would encourage wide-scale trading and the development of more complex societies.
- It would mean that no matter your race, any territory or any biome can still be invaded. There's nothing to stop the peeps next door from taking over your valuable tarry spots simply because they don't have ginger hair any more, unless you're willing to actually defend them.
- This would make it easier for explorers from all races to explore the map and create multicultural cities, if they're willing to stand the heat/cold that is.
Thoughts:
While this update would involve the addition of quite a few new items, I think the effects on the game would be immediate, massive and beneficial for the gaming experience. All that would really be needed would be a few extra plants/properties/item skins and a tweaking of the current specialisation system for OHOL to play host to some cool types of metropolis. Imagine being part of a trading caravan from the mild clime of your youth and arriving in a desert city, a place like nothing you had ever seen (in that life anyway). Imagine hearing a story from Mad Old Uncle Joe about the Tundra City as he shows you the old seal-skin coat he made for himself back when he lived there. Mechanics aside, I think such an update would encourage cross-civilisation interaction simply out of a desire to meet new cultures and have an unusual life.
What do the rest of the forum-members think about this? Please leave your comments below.
Last edited by Greenwood (2019-11-18 14:40:07)
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Having a fully functional town on tundra or desert or jungle would actually be fun. But lower hunger isn't the only factor that would encourage people to make towns there. There are necessarry resources in grasslands, yellow prairies and swamps to start a town. Having goose ponds or other sources of water on desert would be just weird, how would you solve this?
Imagine being part of a trading caravan...
Stop asking for trading pls, it probably will never fit this game, unless roleplay only. Also stop trying to find a way to make trading a thing (I'm saying to everyone, not specifically to you). Over time the game will be more complex as more updates will happen, maybe eventually trading will fit this game, but it's not something that development should focus on.
Last edited by Coconut Fruit (2019-11-18 15:10:31)
Making own private server (Very easy! You can play on it even if you haven't bought the game)
Zoom mod
Mini guide for beginners
website with all recipies
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I'm all for this. I feel like the spirit of the update is fine and dandy, but the way it's been implemented is less-than-ideal to say the least. We need changes like this one or the one that 13jonathandavid suggested in the original update post's comments.
Buffing Natives' abilities per biome while nerfing Non-Natives' is FAR more realistic (if that's what Jason is trying to emulate with this game), and also just way more enjoyable than magically losing function in your arm/hand muscles when your toe crosses the desert border.
I always name my first daughter Amala, and my first son Damen.
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Replying to Coconut-Fruit, the existence of ponds is a good point. Some sort of jungle-pool could work, or a desert-lagoon. The idea is that not every family that has brown skin would build their town in a jungle, but enough would that they would exist. It could be that there's a perfectly good spot in a nearby temperate pasture they'd choose to settle instead. But as long as it's possible then a few cities will develop in these speciality biomes, and that's enough to make things more interesting. As for tundra it would be harder than desert or jungle to make it liveable. Perhaps snow could be taken from snow drifts in bowls and put over hot coals to get water? It dosen't matter if its much harder to survive in the tundra than in other areas, the point is it's possible. That way we might get small groups of tundra-dwellers hoping to hold on to that one tarry spot area for their family down south. Having only a few people in tundra areas would also be more realistic anyway. Such an update as this would need to be carefully balanced so you don't start getting lots more people living in jungles and deserts than in temperate biomes. Perhaps starting resources could be slightly more scarce in such biomes?
As for the economy side, I know that OHOL can't really support capitalism due to its small communities and short lives. Still dosn't stop us from trying though XD. The few lives I've had on a private ranch have been fun at least.
Part of this idea for an update is that it would offer a wider scope of an incentive for cultures to work together. Rather than making it an economic necessity to trade with other civilisations, which isn't really a mechanic that's consistently possible, this would also encourage civilisations to mingle for the sake of cultural exchange. If you heard of a foreign city in a western jungle as a kid, wouldn't that make you want to go there? Even if it was just out of curiosity. By creating cities in different biomes there'd be more cultural difference between those cities, especially if specialist items were added too. That would give the players in those cities an easier job at creating interesting societies based around region-specific stuff. "Praise the gold-laden ice-queen" and that sort of thing. At the heart of this suggestion is the idea that perhaps the best way to make each life more interesting and diverse would be to focus on creating cultural distinction rather than economic systems. Such an update as this would simply make it easier for players to achieve this goal.
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Good observations: I've provided a framework for this with my three suggestions so far as well as someone else's continent suggestion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OneLifeSuggest … and_goals/
is a way for traditions to form so that we can have unique and compelling narratives
https://www.reddit.com/r/OneLifeSuggest … gic_races/
is a way to allow for civs to form without magic races.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OneLifeSuggest … em_family/
is a way to overhall the curse system for a cooperative framework ( you dont want people in donkey town because they raided an enemey after all).
https://www.reddit.com/r/OneLifeSuggest … ontinents/
is someone else's fantastic idea of continents that works with an eve cluster spawn system.
Last edited by 13jonathandavid (2019-11-18 19:42:37)
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https://www.reddit.com/r/OneLifeSuggest … ontinents/
is someone else's fantastic idea of continents that works with an eve cluster spawn system.
I like the contients idea a lot. I have been trying to think of a good solution for improved navigation in the open world. This idea could solve a lot of problems, by making it easier to figure out where you are and properly orient yourself WITHOUT being locked inside the rift. As long as you stay inside the outer ring, you know that you are still in the same region. Passing through the outer biome means that you are leaving familiar territory and entering the unknown.
Personally, I would swap out desert for jungle. The center could be artic, surrounded by badlands. A huge "mountain" with a cold top. The outer ring could be a dense jungle, bordered by inhospitable desert on both sides. So leaving your home rehion means traveling through a dangerous area that would be nearly impassable by foot. Most Eves would choose to settle inside the ring, rather than try to push outside. But later, when you have horses and cars and planes, long distance travel between adjacent regions becomes achievable. It is "Rift-lite".
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Having a fully functional town on tundra or desert or jungle would actually be fun. But lower hunger isn't the only factor that would encourage people to make towns there. There are necessarry resources in grasslands, yellow prairies and swamps to start a town. Having goose ponds or other sources of water on desert would be just weird, how would you solve this?
The resources of the grasslands or its equivalents would have to be in the snow, desert and jungle too. About yellow prairies and swamps maybe the map could be fixed in a way that they are always next to the "livable" ones, so next to your snow biome you would have water available, just like now you settle on the grassland but you have the water nearby in the swamps.
Another way could be making a diferent version of swamps/grassland/praires for each civilization. For example: desert is equivalent of grassland, new oasis biome with crocodiles instead of pigs as swamp equivalent, and savannah as equivalent of prairies.
Last edited by lilo (2019-11-18 20:59:48)
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If you want an idea of how this could work, check out the Community Crucible custom server. They have giant biomes which are designed to allow early towns to develop everywhere except the artic/desert. Everything you need can be found in your home biome, from a variety of new plants/animals. Other biomes are important, because there are some unique resources, like horses in desert and gold in the artic, but you can thrive almost anywhere.
To make this kind of system work well, the early tech tree would need to be reworked or new content would need to be added to allow for alternatives. Ponds would need to occur in other biomes or entirely new biomes could be added to contain the new resources.
Alternatively, spawn location could be adjusted, so that dirt, pond, clay, iron, milkweed, and rabbits could be found everywhere. They would be most plentiful in their preferred biome, but available in limited amounts all over the map. We actually got a taste of this when the map seed changed, but objects remained in place. Lots of random out-of-biome item placement, mixed with correct item placement.
I hate the out of biome predators and bugs ... but finding a bunch of milkweed in the badlands was pretty sweet.
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Biome viability is limited only by the imagination of Jason.
Need fresh water in the arctic? How about adding the option to: take snowball, add snowball to bowl, melt snow over fire for a bowl of water?
Need a cool/cold room in another biome? How about adding the option to: Take a saw and cut a block of ice out of an arctic zone, cover ice block with sawdust, then transport it to the desired enclosed biome. How else did the warm part of the world get ice cubes and for their drinks and meat lockers in the summer before refrigeration?
Bottom line: Our tech tree needs to be wider in order to support a diversity of climate cultures. There are plenty of real life examples of how cultures adapted to biomes. All our cities look mostly the same because there is only one implemented way to progress them up the tech tree.
The_Anabaptist
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How did hot parts of the world keep their food cold you ask?
Evapoartive cooling. Clay pot coolers have existed in hot dry climates for millennia. They are still used today. No electricty required. No access to the tundra or artic either. Just a couple clay vessels, a little sand, and water.
So simple, even a caveman could do it. (Or maybe an Eve?)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator
Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-11-18 21:45:31)
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Thanks for your replies everyone. Funnily enough, that Continents idea on Reddit was also one of mine XD. However, if there were continents with rings of resources then it might not work so well when considered in relation to the current update. If you wanted to make a plane but your continental makeup did not include gingers, you'd be unable to exploit the oil.
What if continents like these were created with three to four families in each, all of the same race, each with their own seperate arcs. To make it work races would need to be advantaged/disadvatanged in certain biomes, but not completely incapacitated in any. This could lead to a rather different outcome. Instead of having jungle cities, you might have jungle empires of people that are adept at farming jungle-goods. With a road, rail-way or connected airports, it wouldn't be too hard to transport or even trade (you never know) with other continents that find farming such goods harder. This would at least encourage a degree of variation. This alternative version would also not need to have loads of new items added, just a change to world generation and a tweaking of racial biome survivability. How about that?
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If we say the main objective of such a suggestion would be to create a sense of town culture, continents could potentially solve the problem. While most towns would still exist in pastures green, you'd more easily have a sense of where your town was in relation to your continent. Each continent would be smaller than the Rift area, after all, so finding your feet wouldn't be too hard. The central tundra would encourage conflict/cooperation to use the valuable resources more effectively than race-induced limitations. However, different races would do better at certain things, leading to multicultural societies being more versatile. It would also mean that some cities would probably come to exploit some resources better than others. For example, a city of brown-skinned players might settle next to a jungle so it could have easy access to mangos and bananas.
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The ability of a town to create monuments and more vanity-wear would also help with town culture. What about a bunch of mango leaves + a rope = a jungle equivilant of a reed skirt? Or perhaps cloth could be died into a banner for your nation. Anything to help distinguish your nation from the nation over there.
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The problem with this, for me, is the content balancing and maintenance issue. One tech tree is hard enough to get right. But three or four independent (and interwoven) tech trees?
I imagine that players would find the "best" one and gravitate toward that, if even the slightest imbalance were present.
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Oh yeah, that's true. Thanks for replying by the way to me humble suggestion XD. I didn't expect it to be so looked-upon.
So we've come to the conclusion that the specialisation update is a good idea, but could use some tweaking for more versatility. We've also identified the desire for more varied cultures between settlements, but ruled out the idea of making extreme biomes liveable.
Hmm...
How about some sort of general culture update? A bunch of random stuff, largely without mechanical effect, which can give villages regional distinction? This, combined with a tweaking of the ability of the races to live in certain biomes, could lead to more cultures forming without any major changes perhaps?
Like let's take the fruit boot item. This is just adding a desert fruit to a shoe, but the nature of the item means that it will be more common in desert-based societies, and those societies will be more common amongst those with the race which gives them an edge in those biomes compared to other races. Working on the same principle, there could be other items of clothing that can be modified or created based on natural materials to give a bit of cultural identity. Like being able to kill penguins and adorn your clothes with their feathers. Other items could help people to build up their individual cultures beyond region. For example, a priest's cloak could be a craftable item by using some dye and rope on a cape. This means that you can instantly identify a member of the clergy. With such an item, any town with a loom would be able to sustain their religions/cults/"clubs" for generations longer and give it more authenticity. Such faiths tend to make peoples' lives more interesting when they are implemented in settlements, although they rarely last longer than a generation or two. Another major tenant of a city's culture could come from the written word. At the moment, pages are very expensive to make and hard to store. Small features like being able to make a book out of a stack of written pages by using a needle and thread would make a lot of difference. Perhaps pages written with ink instead of charcoal could have twice the word count as well? With such tools a society could begin to develop law systems over time. As the local king, you could look inside the Great Library and learn what the great elders of old wrote about their constitutional monarchy rather than simply relying on what mum said. I tried to make such a system once, but I only had three pages to work with and about that many sentences, so the system was rather limited. Items like these could do more for culture than allowing cities to develop in different biomes. Imagine spawning into a town that isn't just populated by different people, but a town with a different governmental system? A classical republic might even form somewhere XD.
As for the continents idea that was just a way of combining the advantages of having a Rift with the benefits of an infinite world. More of a side-idea really. But that too would make city's more diverse and unique. When the Rift was around, players could get a sense of the world around them. Continents could be even smaller and so be more cohesive to live in, with its citizens aware of roughly how their continent is made up. Visitors from foreign lands would be recognisable due to having a different race, creating lots of fun "distant traveller from a distant land" role-play. Who knows? Perhaps continents would even build a road across the harsh jungles and deserts to live together in harmony/perpetual war.
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The problem with this, for me, is the content balancing and maintenance issue. One tech tree is hard enough to get right. But three or four independent (and interwoven) tech trees?
I imagine that players would find the "best" one and gravitate toward that, if even the slightest imbalance were present.
Each one could have something the others dont have so there is no better or worse, and in this game that one life is only one hour i dont see why you will be so picky to refuse to play in diferent ones. Also i thought that the point of the genetic score was to prevent people from dying intentionally to change life.
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