a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Because the game's development philosophy is 'everything runs out' https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=63, it's known ahead of time by any intelligent person that everything will run out in game. Your family that you play in is doomed to die out one way or another. Your village that you live in is doomed to collapse. There is no suspense here. There is no need to play to see the eventual result of things. There is no ability to overcome the foregone conclusion. There is no fairness to players who try to keep things going, since they *cannot* keep things going solely by their own accord (an update *will* kill off your in game family if nothing else did so; your character will die).
Last I checked people mostly like it when they didn't know the end of movies ahead of time. They mostly like it when they didn't know the ending of a murder mystery ahead of time. And even stories involving good vs. evil often end up more interesting when it becomes believable to the viewers that the evil forces will win. People often are against "spoilers".
Everything runs out implies a fixed and predictable conclusion. One of personal death. One of family death. One of town death. It is all so utterly certain ahead of time. One would have to be a fool after having read the 'Everything runs out' post to not realize the end result. The "Everything runs out" philosophy implies the equivalent of spoilers for the end results of the game.
In the real world, the future is open and uncertain. That uncertainty and many other uncertainties makes the real world more interesting.
Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-12-03 05:22:32)
Danish Clinch.
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Yeah. This is pretty much why I hated the Rift.
It was a box of death.
At least the open world gives you the illusion of hope.
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At least the box of death gave us 300+ lineages and actually promoted resource management and hoarding. As well as not necessarily knowing how it ended. An update in the rift did kill families but it didnt kill the towns or the work people put in pre update. Now towns are lost in a day or so and hundreds of hours of work are left behind in each of them.
You had people fighting to keep families alive and people fighting to end the arc. The eve window was always an interesting time to play as well. The only problem i saw in the rift was it being to small but it was always interesting seeing what people built and how the towns and families developed throughout the arc. Everything is hollow now. Families are only as important as their utility and only distinguished by their race. There is no personality there is no culture, no history, no legacy. Nothing runs out, we just move across the land like locusts eating up everything as we go. Families die and are immediately replaced. There is no weight to their death, no reason to prevent that death and no reason to invest time into something that will be dust in the wind in no time.
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Everything comes to an end eventually, unlimited growth is impossible. everyone eventually dies; every country will eventually collapse, every species will eventually go extinct. You need to enjoy the present and enjoy the good while it lasts.
Life would be boring if everything stayed the same; people come and go, institutions rise and fall, nothing lasts for ever.
I hate to break it to you but in the real world some things are certain too, One of personal death. One of family death. One of town death. Family death and Town death may not happen in your lifetime but they will happen eventually. You need to make the most of the moment you are in, love the people around you because they won't be there forever.
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For me, it isn't the inevitability of death that is the problem, really. It is the rate of decay. If families lived for weeks, I could get invested and make interesting stories in towns that I have helped to build and expand. I would have the chance to play in the same place multiple times and watch it slowly grow and change over time. I could go to bed at night, knowing that I would be able to play in that town tomorrow. We would have time to really put down roots in one place and develop traditions. And when a good town finally died, it would be of old age after a long and interesting life that provided adventure, good memories, and fun stories to its many inhabitants.
The problem is that the current pacing of the game is so much faster and more brutal than it once was. You can't take your time climbing the tech tree, because water is running out. You are on a clock and stagnation equals death.
I actually made a lengthy post on this subject way back during the rift days, when Jason started tweaking the water systems to "increase the survival challenge". A direct consequence of the current water/iron/oil system is that villages are forced to rush the tech tree to keep the village well running. Failure to do so means the village runs out of water and dies, so by process of elimination, all successful villages do this. But the tech tree is not that long. With the current meta, you get to the end in less than a full day.
Once you hit the end, what more is there to do? Where do you go from there? What purpose does your village have? Why keep playing in that village?
This was a major issue in the Rift, because after the initial rush at the start of a new arc, the surviving families would usually be stuck in the same towns until the arc reset. But there was very little direction regarding what to do or why you should be doing it in an old established town. People would end the arc to escape the depressing resource depletion that left your town crippled by constant shortages of basic materials, but more than that, it was to escape the boredom and lack of purpose and ugliness of those old worn-out towns where nothing was worth doing anymore.
Now we are constantly being dragged westward by the Eve spawn and biome restrictions, leaving our old towns abandoned behind us, scattered like leaves on the wind. The pace of westward movement is too fast. Towns struggle to stick around long enough to develop their own unique stories and character. They are just carbon copies of the previous towns that grew and died the day before, built by the same people, and gone before you can grow to care about them ... or get bored with them. On the upside, it "solves" the issue of end game stagnation but replaces it with an equally problematic situation. We are still moving too fast. There is still nothing to do after we hit the tech ceiling, except tread water until you drown.
I think the game needs to slow down and let us breath a little. We need more time to enjoy each stage of village development. More time to appreciate the unique challenges that are present at each step in the tech tree and more time to get to know our fellow villagers. More ways to expand and develop our towns in unique ways, so they are not all carbon copies of the ideal setup. Less resource depletion and more freedom to create our own individualized villages and to grow them in interesting ways.
And something worth doing with all that oil, instead of just endlessly pumping water forever.
Last edited by DestinyCall (2020-12-03 05:20:56)
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Everything comes to an end eventually, unlimited growth is impossible. everyone eventually dies; every country will eventually collapse, every species will eventually go extinct. You need to enjoy the present and enjoy the good while it lasts.
I've heard this before. Plenty of times. I think it's rather predictable, at least in hindsight.
Life would be boring if everything stayed the same; people come and go, institutions rise and fall, nothing lasts for ever.
This also seems rather predictable.
I hate to break it to you but in the real world some things are certain too, One of personal death.
What is the self? What does personal identity mean? Why haven't philosophers been able to resolve what underlies those questions so that answering those questions become a matter of science instead of matters of philosophy? There exist different notions of what the self is. I don't see how personal death is certain with different notions of the self.
One of family death.
People disown biological relatives sometimes in the real world. Because of that it's not entirely clear what a family consists of. Do disowned biological children count as in the family in reality, or does the social nature of family define its reality? Also, people get adopted in the real world. The last genetic person of a family can adopt someone else. So, I don't see how family death is certain.
One of town death.
I would say that no town death exists in the real world, because there is no town life. In other words, towns don't live, and thus they can't die. Or do you think that towns live, and thus they can die?
Danish Clinch.
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There should be an end game, a way to "win the game", something that is extremly difficult to achieve but serves as an alternative, a very advanced tech like a spaceship for example, if you manage to build it then you can travel to another planet and keep the lineage going.
But worrying about the running out aspect of the game is pointless, villages die in a day or two anyway and not due to issues with ressources.
It doesn't feel like a persistant world, it just keeps exanding and getting lost.
You say running out is boring but the opposite like having infinite iron and water would be even more boring, no challenge.
Instead of just adding more water to wells and create uninteresting stagnation, it would be much more interesting to have more usable wells, then you have to travel for that water, make secondary towns, outposts etc, same with iron.
But with how springs and mines work curently it would be just way too confusing.
The rift didn't hit the nail because it was way too small but the current ever expanding map is really not better than that.
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It's about how long can your family survive. It doesn't matter that your family will die out. What matters is when it will die out. Surviving 5 generations is not a challenge, but if your family could survive 200 generations and more, it's satisfying that you were part of this achievement. http://onehouronelife.com shows that longest family line survived 813 generations, why don't you try to beat it?
To me infinite resources are more boring. It's like playing with cheats... We can not care what we do with water, we can waste it whatever we like as long as someone is getting new water, and there is always more water in an infinite world. Isn't it boring?
Your family that you play in is doomed to die out one way or another.
If we had no server resets it could be possible to survive even 100000 generations in an infinite world like we have rn.
But yeah, this game is hard and people can't make it that far. It's actually sad that longest family line this week had only 63 generations...
It's very likely that incoming update will change it tho.
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JackTreeHorn wrote:Everything comes to an end eventually, unlimited growth is impossible. everyone eventually dies; every country will eventually collapse, every species will eventually go extinct. You need to enjoy the present and enjoy the good while it lasts.
I've heard this before. Plenty of times. I think it's rather predictable, at least in hindsight.
JackTreeHorn wrote:Life would be boring if everything stayed the same; people come and go, institutions rise and fall, nothing lasts for ever.
This also seems rather predictable.
JackTreeHorn wrote:I hate to break it to you but in the real world some things are certain too, One of personal death.
What is the self? What does personal identity mean? Why haven't philosophers been able to resolve what underlies those questions so that answering those questions become a matter of science instead of matters of philosophy? There exist different notions of what the self is. I don't see how personal death is certain with different notions of the self.
JackTreeHorn wrote:One of family death.
People disown biological relatives sometimes in the real world. Because of that it's not entirely clear what a family consists of. Do disowned biological children count as in the family in reality, or does the social nature of family define its reality? Also, people get adopted in the real world. The last genetic person of a family can adopt someone else. So, I don't see how family death is certain.
JackTreeHorn wrote:One of town death.
I would say that no town death exists in the real world, because there is no town life. In other words, towns don't live, and thus they can't die. Or do you think that towns live, and thus they can die?
Inevitable death is predictable but what isn't is how long you can enjoy the company of people you love, life is fleeting so make the most of it.
People have differing thoughts on the afterlife however what is certain is that one day the body will stop functioning and the person that was will cease to share this earthly plane of existence.
Science has a hard time pinning down what the self is because definitions change from one person to the next. It's the type of topic you could spend your whole life researching and still get nowhere.
Family is whatever you make it and it will end eventually, our species cannot live forever. The earth will eventually become uninhabitable, hopefully we can start colonising other planets before that day comes.
Towns can die too if you think about them in the metaphorical sense that you would consider Ohol towns to "die out". In the real world we call those towns ghost towns or ghost cities this often happens when the "lifeblood" of a town leaves. I've seen my fair share of ghost towns in the Australian outback, old mining towns that once the mining left town the town couldn't function anymore.
Last edited by JackTreehorn (2020-12-03 08:57:18)
Eve Audette
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The map is infinite, so resources are infinite. Checkmate spoon
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You say running out is boring but the opposite like having infinite iron and water would be even more boring, no challenge.
We wouldn't know how such would end or if such would end. There would exist more uncertainty and more suspense to the ending. There wouldn't exist any "spoilers". And there exists plenty of difficulty in doing the same thing over and over and over again, because it's difficult to believe that one does much at all, instead of turning into some kind of automaton. So, I completely disagree Dodge. All I can infer is that you just don't have what it takes to play with infinite resources of some sort for some reason, or you want players to experience a certain sort of poverty in terms of possibilities.
Danish Clinch.
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shows that longest family line survived 813 generations, why don't you try to beat it?
At 20 minutes per generation, which might be a bit high, we have 3 generations per hour. So, 813 generation is 271 hours. 271 hours is a little more than 11 and a one quarter days. The Steam advertisement talks about weekly updates, and though that hasn't happened recently, it's still the expectation for many players at some point in time, I think. Updates kill off lineages. No lineage can survive an update. Why would a family thus try to beat that record, when the average situation implies that they cannot do so? It would be like one of us humans trying to fly by flapping one's arms, I suppose.
We can not care what we do with water, we can waste it whatever we like as long as someone is getting new water, and there is always more water in an infinite world. Isn't it boring?
With infinite water people could also play games where they assume as if the water was finite. Some low pop players have done something like that with iron, as they are usually Eves they can get as much iron as they want by digging up more springs. Like playing with only one spring and one vein *by choice*. Players could also play as if they only had a fixed number of buckets of water, say 200 buckets. When you have infinite resources, you have the option to play as if there existed finite resources or play as if there existed infinite resources. There exists more possibilities with infinite resources than finite resources, since the infinite contains the finite, and thus everything possible in an finite world is possible in an infinite world, while everything possible in an infinite world is not possible in a finite world. Thus, there exists more uncertainty in an infinite world also with respect to what will happen. There's more suspense and more possible stories for the future in an infinite world than in a finite world.
If we had no server resets it could be possible to survive even 100000 generations in an infinite world like we have rn.
I don't think that the oil supply would keep up locally for 100,000 generations. Also, spawning mechanics often weaken lineage prospects, food generational decline exists, and perfect play isn't going to happen.
But yeah, this game is hard and people can't make it that far.
The game is impossible as a family survival game, because it is inevitable that your family will die. And there is no agreement among family members about how long a lineage should last or even if such is a goal worth pursuing in the first place.
Danish Clinch.
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The map is infinite, so resources are infinite. Checkmate spoon
The map is finite. It has a boundary in terms of it's edges. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't speaking truth. Relevant resources don't renew also fast enough. So, resources are finite.
Danish Clinch.
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It's about how long can your family survive. It doesn't matter that your family will die out. What matters is when it will die out. Surviving 5 generations is not a challenge, but if your family could survive 200 generations and more, it's satisfying that you were part of this achievement. http://onehouronelife.com shows that longest family line survived 813 generations, why don't you try to beat it?
To me infinite resources are more boring. It's like playing with cheats... We can not care what we do with water, we can waste it whatever we like as long as someone is getting new water, and there is always more water in an infinite world. Isn't it boring?
Spoonwood wrote:Your family that you play in is doomed to die out one way or another.
If we had no server resets it could be possible to survive even 100000 generations in an infinite world like we have rn.
But yeah, this game is hard and people can't make it that far. It's actually sad that longest family line this week had only 63 generations...
It's very likely that incoming update will change it tho.
First of all, there is no "beating" that record. Lineage length has next to nothing to do with players. It has to do with how jason structures spawns. Over the years youll notice dramatic shifts in lineage length after some adjustment to spawns. It used to be next to impossible to break 100, then after a change people hit 300 right after the update. Not sure what enabled the 800+ lineage but i know for a fact it wasnt player effort. Jason is the only person who can actually change the lineage length and has adjusted things many times to get the average where he wants it. The short generations this week are likely due to the player influx.
Last edited by Eve Troll (2020-12-03 14:10:04)
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NoTruePunk wrote:The map is infinite, so resources are infinite. Checkmate spoon
The map is finite. It has a boundary in terms of it's edges. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't speaking truth. Relevant resources don't renew also fast enough. So, resources are finite.
It is infinite. There being bounds doesn't mean it's finite. Eg, there are an infinite number of fractions between the numbers 1 and 2.
There's a boundary north/south past which certain resources don't spawn. But east/west resources will continue to spawn endlessly. All you need to do to get more resources is go further out. If it's not possible to reach them in one lifetime and return then it's still possible to do so over multiple generations, either by instructing your child to return to the village or outright moving the village to a new location.
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It is infinite. There being bounds doesn't mean it's finite. Eg, there are an infinite number of fractions between the numbers 1 and 2.
There does not exist an infinity of points at fractional locations on the map. Integers get used to determine every location on the map, and well you use Hetuw mod where you can tell this. The map thus is of finite size, since it has boundaries also, and always has been a finite map.
There's a boundary north/south past which certain resources don't spawn. But east/west resources will continue to spawn endlessly. All you need to do to get more resources is go further out. If it's not possible to reach them in one lifetime and return then it's still possible to do so over multiple generations, either by instructing your child to return to the village or outright moving the village to a new location.
Food values decline over the generations. Families can't unlock more iron veins (Eves can... seen that you play low pop lately.. that's different since you can dig up a new well and thus get more iron veins unlocked every new Eve life... water can even be renewable in a single location if you haven't figured out that well reset can enable such, and it's only one stone and shovel charge to dig up a regressed well site) than the early group did (assuming that they did). Moving the village would involve an issue with getting iron for tools. Moving the village would involve an issue with food values, because of food generational decline, an issue that becomes tougher and tougher to overcome as the family gets older and older. Children can't ride a horsecart until 13 if I recall correctly, while they can't lasso a horse until 15, and it's 16 for a car or truck I think. Not sure what a cart is... I'm guessing 13 also. But, even if it's 10, that's still 1/6 of their life out in the wilderness with mostly 1 pip food around and very little yum, or yum foods imported from a living town. And finally, just because something in principle is theoretically possible, doesn't imply that it is possible for many or even most people. One's child will usually be a random player. So, it still seems rather certain to me that the village will die. Though not exactly as certain that an update will kill off lineages.
Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-12-03 17:38:16)
Danish Clinch.
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Lineage length has next to nothing to do with players.
Lol... It's only up to players how long their family will survive. If only expert players played this game, no family would be dying out (except server resets).
I don't think that the oil supply would keep up locally for 100,000 generations. Also, spawning mechanics often weaken lineage prospects, food generational decline exists, and perfect play isn't going to happen.
Your town can't last that long, but your family can. You can always move on to the new spot after each 150 generations or so. It doesn't really require perfect play. Even with food generational decline it would be pretty easy to start new place if you take with you enough food, iron(better to take tool heads, so you can start farming and stuff right away), kerosene (to skip newcomen well), buckets, bowls, plates. 3 trucks would be enough.
There exists more possibilities with infinite resources than finite resources,
Do you play games with cheats, because "infinite ammunition" gives you more possibilities? It's stupid IMO.
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Im sorry coco but player influence has next to nothing to do with average length. It doesnt matter how many pros play. It has to do with how the game is structured around families. We do have an influence on how short a lineage can be but that takes a calculated effort to sabotage the family's success. After a certain point the game does it for us.
Its just how it is.
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Because the game's development philosophy is 'everything runs out' https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=63, it's known ahead of time by any intelligent person that everything will run out in game. Your family that you play in is doomed to die out one way or another. Your village that you live in is doomed to collapse. There is no suspense here. There is no need to play to see the eventual result of things. There is no ability to overcome the foregone conclusion. There is no fairness to players who try to keep things going, since they *cannot* keep things going solely by their own accord (an update *will* kill off your in game family if nothing else did so; your character will die).
Last I checked people mostly like it when they didn't know the end of movies ahead of time. They mostly like it when they didn't know the ending of a murder mystery ahead of time. And even stories involving good vs. evil often end up more interesting when it becomes believable to the viewers that the evil forces will win. People often are against "spoilers".
Everything runs out implies a fixed and predictable conclusion. One of personal death. One of family death. One of town death. It is all so utterly certain ahead of time. One would have to be a fool after having read the 'Everything runs out' post to not realize the end result. The "Everything runs out" philosophy implies the equivalent of spoilers for the end results of the game.
In the real world, the future is open and uncertain. That uncertainty and many other uncertainties makes the real world more interesting.
I agree with you spoonwood, but unfortunately it is not the only reason why the game has become boring
The complicated, illogical and clumsy mechanics, the lack of challenges, the large amount of unnecessary "magic" and the implementation of new nonsense objects have made OHOL a very boring game.
http://onehouronelife.com/reflector/ser … ion=report
http://publicdata.onehouronelife.com/publicLifeLogData/
https://onemap.wondible.com/
You are... Megan, Max, Morgan, Masha or Misha? u are my kid!
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You can always move on to the new spot after each 150 generations or so.
This isn't You Are Hope or an old version of OHOL. How will the family get more iron if they move? A family can't unlock a second set of iron veins along a ley line after the first set has gotten unlocked. So, they have to keep importing iron from the original spot, which raises the question did they move? Also, food generational decline exists. Many foods have half their original value if not less after about 150 generations. You want to move a family when food values are so low? You think that's easy, especially easy on new players or even semi-new players?
Do you play games with cheats, because "infinite ammunition" gives you more possibilities? It's stupid IMO.
I certainly did use a lot of cannons and artillery proper in several games of civilization III. It wasn't infinite ammunition, but it was more interesting to weaken enemy units to 1 hitpoint and then crush them using my people's soldiers, then to use the single tactic of having soldiers fight other soldiers straight up. I also used a tactic involving the trading system which qualifies as a scam, for some situations, at the highest default game level. That isn't to say that scams would be interesting in OHOL, but one never knows I suppose, and maybe even some scamming has already existed. It was more interesting to use that tactic which many would call a "cheat", because the difficulty of that game at that level is extremely high, and in my opinion beyond the difficulty level of OHOL. And the tactic enabled a scale of play that felt epic to say the least. It's also simply not interesting when games are too difficult. It becomes boring, because there is little IF ANY possibility of success.
Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-12-03 18:26:16)
Danish Clinch.
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I dont necessarily think infinite resources or harshly depleting resources are good. I dont think the game is at either of those poles in its current state. In fact with how oil is structured i think we are on the more infinite end of things. The issue i see more is stability. Its not resources that we run out of too quickly, its towns. Towns and families are forced westward in order to survive. Too far of a distance from the other families is a death sentence. This disables towns from reaching their full potential and the constant need to shuffle resources west wastes valuable time while leaving behind an obscene amount of work. What you end up seeing is a trail of half built towns. Gingers have it worst, despite being the strongest family in terms of resource strength. Oil tapping out pushes them west more than anyone, and its easy to presume everything east of a ginger town is tapped. Often a decently long ginger lineage has cleared 1-3k west of their original site. This forces a ginger eve to move even further west to find a fresh area. God forbid they settle in a already tapped zone. That pressure west is the biggest killer and disables any form of stability in a town or family. It seriously needs to be adjusted. Banding has made drilling oil easier but it has also made the westward movement even more aggressive. Moving 1-3k a day is not good.
Last edited by Eve Troll (2020-12-03 19:50:22)
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I'm wondering if we need thicker north/south bands.
If the tundra zone was extended northward, it would allow gingers to search for oil to the north of their current town, instead of driving them ever westward.
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How will the family get more iron if they move?
I think you forgot about diesel mining.
You want to move a family when food values are so low?
Yeah, take tons of food with you with trucks. Take many hoe heads so people can make farms fast. Take engines and kerosene, so you can skip deep well and newcomen well, but you will have constant easy access to water. Take many plates and bowls, so people can start cooking right away.
Yeah, it wouldn't be that hard with a good preparation. The mistake people do is that they want to move when they are out of kero and water, and that is way too late.
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Yeah, take tons of food with you with trucks. Take many hoe heads so people can make farms fast. Take engines and kerosene, so you can skip deep well and newcomen well, but you will have constant easy access to water.
Have you played this week or watched streams? Also, you lose out on an estimated 33 buckets of water by skipping a deep well. I don't see any reason to lose that much water which doesn't require kerosene or rubber.
Danish Clinch.
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Have you played this week or watched streams? Also, you lose out on an estimated 33 buckets of water by skipping a deep well. I don't see any reason to lose that much water which doesn't require kerosene or rubber.
I haven't played this week, I'll play this game again after the update.
Yeah, it's a bad feeling to lose 33 buckets of water from deep well, but there is plenty of new resources and water around in the new place.
Moving to a new place and surviving there is probably the hardest thing in this game, because of how little value foods give in later generations - that's why you would want to make the process as much easier as possible. Having super easy access to water (diesel pump) makes it easier and may save your family. Unless you have tons of tires prepared for newcomen pump, skipping deep well is a good choice in my opinion.
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