Nomadic life

Jadelink · 2018-11-26 11:53:04

I've started to experiment with deliberate nomadism as a seeding strategy for both new and failing communities.

Having spent enough (mostly male) lives living in the wilderness, often due to lineage death, sometimes I just got lost as a teenage forager, I spawned again as an eve.

The area was crappy for a startup, I could have had a half arsed shot at a village that would die by gen 3, maybe 4. I could have abandoned my offspring and wandered for ages. I decided to use the jungle biome to start a line that would be intentionally nomadic, until finding a very solid spot. You can live indefinately in the jungle, if you are prepared to move every generation or so, and send out foragers and make baskets.

I trained a generation of kids to live in the jungle (mostly newbies) with a high yellow fever casualty rate (dammit kids, when I say 'go cold', i mean NOW, now when you're dead). The more experienced or smarter ones were taught to do this, and it went on, with one daughter trying a settlement in my very last days, as we trecked across the map (losing a few boys to wandering off on the way).

The line hit gen 4 before dying out.

Then I was a daughter of an eve, and our spot was crap, I tried it again. Eve died with me on the road, with me as the only surviving kid, but we had 4 gens, without even an attempt to settle. (Vast jungles, but no good water sources near to green biomes).

The nomadic way of life works in the banana era, but you lose vast numbers to yellow fever, but over half those loses are avoidable (STAY ON THE COLD, dammit kids). The worst problem was losing prime adult males due to simply losing each other in the endless moves. Experiments with moving spawn stones helped somewhat, but the big issues was keeping the nomad band together, whilst still having members wander to explore for good sites and forage.

Nomadic experiments I would like to try include:

Making fire on the roll. So far haven't done this, but seems easy enough if we have rope (and I've had rope for potential camps carried for two generations in baskets).

Building nomad tech. If we can get a (knowingly unsustainable) site up, long enough to make carts, that would make nomad life richer and more complex, quick setup kilns would then be easy, possibly allowing kiln setups (firebows and even bellows in carts can make for fast setups, I speak having built out of ruins/civil strife a couple of times)

'Budding' nomadism, from a functional society.

I have several times fled a disfunctional/famine ridden/griefer filled society, to give a better life for my kids, essentially becoming a somewhat equipped 'eve', or with intentions of returning after it all blows over if I'm male. I've got a sort of sub-village up in once case, but that involved taking a bowl with me, so I didnt need a kiln before farming. I have also wandered off and set up an 'eve' camp, as a male, and told select females where it is (dont think it turned out to be needed, but was interesting as a 'lifeboat' experiment for that line when a murder epidemic followed a berry gobbling famine).

I would love to experiment with a horse and cart 'gypsy' style high tech nomadism. The catch is that the current tech tree is backed by player experience in established settlements only. Long term nomadism may be one of the ways around the resource crisis, and one I'd love to experiment with. Horse drawn wagons + backpacks would give nomads some serious capital, with what they can haul from a fast setup, with bellows, firebow and axe/hatchet. I may post more of my other idea/experiment for long term societies later.

What I'm looking for here is stories or tips of those who have tried this, and what made it succeed or fail.

My own tips.

Good things for nomad life - baskets, bananas, sharp stone in basket, treating 'home' stones as temporary navigation markers, and letting them be shared.

Long bonding sessions in the banana jungle with the kids. When you're spawning like mad, sit and eat bananas, and train the newbies (and the veterans unused to the concept of multi generation nomadism) about your quest for a new camp, how to avoid yellow fever, and most particularly for vets, the means of meeting up again. Nomad societies need closer bonds in this game, given the lack of infrastructure to tie the group together. If you lose half your A grade adult males due to missing each other on the map, that really hurts.

I have been trying to work on a simple coded message, that would leave the direction of a new temp home/banana patch to the foragers returning. Line of 3 objects with an agreed on 'pointer' meaning 'camp' to show direction. If you ever spawn in one of my groups, 2 same objects and 1 different in a line, the camp is the 'different' one. The line is usually placed so the base touches a 'homestick' if we have one.

Starknight_One · 2018-11-26 12:36:20

Jadelink wrote:

I've started to experiment with deliberate nomadism as a seeding strategy for both new and failing communities.
(snippage)
I have been trying to work on a simple coded message, that would leave the direction of a new temp home/banana patch to the foragers returning. Line of 3 objects with an agreed on 'pointer' meaning 'camp' to show direction. If you ever spawn in one of my groups, 2 same objects and 1 different in a line, the camp is the 'different' one. The line is usually placed so the base touches a 'homestick' if we have one.

I haven't deliberately set out to do a nomad life... well, a couple of times when I heard a bell that wasn't M or G tiles away. Neither effort was successful. (The second one *could* have been, but the twins were leeches who didn't lift a finger to help after they grew hair, just kept spamming 'F' the instant they lost a food bar. I should have let them starve.)

I tend to lay out 'arrows' pointing to my camp - 5 or 6 seeds or branches, like so:

   .
.....

... so that someone who spawns in the area, or wanders through, has some guide to a place where there should be some food or the potential to make such. Your method strikes me as much more efficient on time (although pulling 4-5 seeds off a milkweed isn't a bad idea anyway), and I think I'm going to adopt it. Not having to lay out two more items to get a clear directional indicator will save me time and food.

Nomad life is hard, trying to keep the group together without overwhelming the available food sources. Good job if you can make a go of it.

Last edited by Starknight_One (2018-11-26 12:36:47)

gabal · 2018-11-26 16:28:05

Solo, nomadic lifestyle is definetly doable. You can easily get some easy clothes too - seal skin and reed skirt are really easy and useful for easier treks through unhospitable biomes.

The biggest issue with this lifestyle is getting separated on your treks. I would love to try it with carts but they are difficult to accomplish from the scratch as you need several iron tools to make it so it requires settling down at least temporarily. Apart from that, carrying budroots in the basket and eating other wild foods makes it really easy.

I regularly go in the wilderness after I reach menopause to look for iron as by that time I'm sick of homebase and relish a change of scenery.
Reunions with family when you return from your voyages are always interesting.

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-26 16:31:28

How about this for a navigation and marking strategy:

When you establish a camp, set a home marker. Always leave a sharp stone and round stone next to it, and teach everyone to use it. Establish a social norm that setting your home with the home marker is what makes you part of the tribe.

When it's time to leave camp, leave the home marker behind but take the sharp stone, and set a waypoint marker next to it (see below).

While traveling in search of a new camp, from time to time set down a waypoint marker. A waypoint marker is a single road segment, with a round stone set next to it in the direction of travel. I think this makes a good waypoint - it's easy to spot, it's an obvious sign of human presence, it's intuitive as to which direction it indicates, and it can be built quickly using materials that are relatively easy to obtain. For efficiency you'd want to carry a set of stakes as you travel, which takes up a precious cargo slot, but I think it could be worth it to make a standardized, high-visibility marker quickly.

After establishing a camp and setting a home marker, fan out for two or three biomes in several directions and set waypoint markers pointing back to the home marker, so that lagging tribe members can find the new camp even if they shoot wide of the mark while following the trail.

Just an idea. Thoughts?

Floofy · 2018-11-26 17:24:50

I actually did this as a semi trolly strategy. I found a big jungle where the middle didn't have mosquitoes (or very little of them). Then me and my kids put bananas literally everywhere in that jungle. Must have been like 30 bananas on the ground.

The strategy was for the girls to literally stay in the middle and do nothing but eat bananas, and the guys could go ahead and expand our banana empire (since their death wasn't an issue).

When i had kids, i would literally hold them in my arm the whole time since i didn't really need to work at all. This led me to a very low baby death rate. Once my girls kids were childs, i instructed them to stay in the middle with me and do nothing.

When i finally died of old age, everything seemed to be fine... the girls were staying in the middle, and there was enough bananas for like 5 generations...

but they somehow died shortly after of starvation. (????)

Last edited by Floofy (2018-11-26 17:26:10)

lionon · 2018-11-26 17:32:37

CrazyEddie and following the Markers for a long time will most likely end up finding a dead body, at most with a backpack, seal skin and some little tools. Often I find skewers actually quite hard to find, making an arrow out of a round stone and a sharper one would be much easier.

About nomading... as a male when the town has a food shortage this always a good option. Coming back with some iron, a backpack etc. can be a little rewarding, or as I also experienced frustrating when you are obviously the last survivor of the tribe.

Once there was a town void of backpacks... I discovered a left over snare and brought 3 rabbits in a basket and put them some place. When I came with the next 3... guess the first 3 "vanished".. I did a third time, gone again. Then I just ran far off and to some grasslands with lots of milkweed and made a backpack myself. Coming the only thing I accomplished in that life it hand it to some child.

I tried this another time when I saw nodody had backpacks in that town... but it was a fairly old town so albeit I traveled quite some while one direction, everything was already picked clean.

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-26 17:37:27

Jadelink wrote:

Nomadic experiments I would like to try include:
Making fire on the roll. So far haven't done this, but seems easy enough if we have rope (and I've had rope for potential camps carried for two generations in baskets).

My first priority as an Eve is to make a portable fire kit: basket, sharp stone, hatchet, fire bow. If necessary I'll make that kit in one biome (a grasslands with lots of milkweed) and then carry it away in search of a good spot to build a kiln and start a farm. The same kit could be carried by one member of a nomadic tribe, and then making a campfire is as easy as finding a maple branch, maple leaf, juniper tinder, and another branch. Would be good for cooking rabbits, geese, and fish, or even omelettes if you've brought some plates with you.

Building nomad tech. If we can get a (knowingly unsustainable) site up, long enough to make carts, that would make nomad life richer and more complex, quick setup kilns would then be easy, possibly allowing kiln setups (firebows and even bellows in carts can make for fast setups, I speak having built out of ruins/civil strife a couple of times)

High tech would definitely make the nomad life easier. My personal interest is in seeing what can be done as paleolithic nomads - stone, bone, and fiber; no farming, pottery, or iron.

Horse drawn wagons + backpacks would give nomads some serious capital, with what they can haul from a fast setup, with bellows, firebow and axe/hatchet.

I'd love to try riding horses + backpacks (or even saddlebags!) as a paleolithic nomad, but Jason would have to add tech tree branches that don't require steel tools and domesticated animals to get there. Maybe hitching to a tree instead of a fence (but without the ability to tame), and using a mouflon hide as a saddle (instead of sewing a saddle from the hide of a domestic sheep killed with a steel knife). Perhaps the downside of riding an untamed horse is they escape immediately if ever released from your grasp.

Long bonding sessions in the banana jungle with the kids. When you're spawning like mad, sit and eat bananas, and train the newbies (and the veterans unused to the concept of multi generation nomadism) about your quest for a new camp, how to avoid yellow fever, and most particularly for vets, the means of meeting up again. Nomad societies need closer bonds in this game, given the lack of infrastructure to tie the group together.

I'm considering trying to start nomadic lines, and my first order of business each time will be to teach the children what being a member of the tribe means. I've concocted a few simple short rhymes to serve as "the lore of the tribe" that hopefully each generation can pass along to the next. If it works I'll post about it.

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-26 18:12:24

Floofy wrote:

I found a big jungle where the middle didn't have mosquitoes (or very little of them). Then me and my kids put bananas literally everywhere in that jungle. Must have been like 30 bananas on the ground.
The strategy was for the girls to literally stay in the middle and do nothing but eat bananas, and the guys could go ahead and expand our banana empire (since their death wasn't an issue).
When i had kids, i would literally hold them in my arm the whole time since i didn't really need to work at all. This led me to a very low baby death rate. Once my girls kids were childs, i instructed them to stay in the middle with me and do nothing.

I spawned into a camp like that; maybe it was yours. My mother was roleplaying it to the hilt, and talked about how her mother had traveled from the East to raise a new family in the jungle. But my mother didn't say anything about staying there and doing nothing, and there was already a kiln built right there in the middle of the jungle. There was also a fire kit, some unfired clay bowls, and a chunk of iron ore, but otherwise it was all unused! So I assumed without thinking about it that of course we needed to tech up and start farming, so I started working on clay and steel.

It was a disaster.

There was no room to work in the small cleared space in the jungle. Leaves and tinder were too far away. Tools kept getting lost in the clutter or picked up and taken away. Mosquitos broke through the "banana barrier" from time to time and interrupted everything. Nobody was fetching clay, adobe, iron, or kindling. I died at 59 having made a single cold iron bloom.

If mom had said something like "We're going to stay in here and make nothing", or if the halfway-started fire/kiln/forge setup hadn't been there already, I wouldn't have tried to finish it. Or I would have moved somewhere else to set it up. But as it was I simply died thinking that my ancestors must have been insane to try to make a camp in a tiny space in the middle of the jungle.

This was me: http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1996024 - My sister's lineage made it another five generations; no idea if they stayed in the jungle munching bananas or not.

Dacen · 2018-11-26 18:19:58

Irl societies who relied on nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life never went randomly in the wild. They had patterns. By exemple ethnographic and prehistoric studies on seasonnal mobilities show groups of people using different locations on a large territory all over the year. They move to designated place where they exploit ressources, they can by exemple have very hig mobility on some months in summer and forage, then go on a specific site in winter and rely on storage or specific exploitation during winter.

Of course in OHOL there are no seasons, but it could give some interest to a "nomadic" lifestyle to build several rudimentary settlements, and move in a determined (or not) order, from one to another. And if enough settlements, foods as berries, bananas in a settlement could come back during the time it would take to go in all the following settlement in the route.

And even, why not, have a more advanced settlement in a place not far from all the others, where we could come back when needed to make advanced craft who are more essential ?

Last edited by Dacen (2018-11-26 18:20:23)

Floofy · 2018-11-26 18:53:05

CrazyEddie wrote:

Floofy wrote:
I found a big jungle where the middle didn't have mosquitoes (or very little of them). Then me and my kids put bananas literally everywhere in that jungle. Must have been like 30 bananas on the ground.
The strategy was for the girls to literally stay in the middle and do nothing but eat bananas, and the guys could go ahead and expand our banana empire (since their death wasn't an issue).
When i had kids, i would literally hold them in my arm the whole time since i didn't really need to work at all. This led me to a very low baby death rate. Once my girls kids were childs, i instructed them to stay in the middle with me and do nothing.
I spawned into a camp like that; maybe it was yours. My mother was roleplaying it to the hilt, and talked about how her mother had traveled from the East to raise a new family in the jungle. But my mother didn't say anything about staying there and doing nothing, and there was already a kiln built right there in the middle of the jungle. There was also a fire kit, some unfired clay bowls, and a chunk of iron ore, but otherwise it was all unused! So I assumed without thinking about it that of course we needed to tech up and start farming, so I started working on clay and steel.
It was a disaster.
There was no room to work in the small cleared space in the jungle. Leaves and tinder were too far away. Tools kept getting lost in the clutter or picked up and taken away. Mosquitos broke through the "banana barrier" from time to time and interrupted everything. Nobody was fetching clay, adobe, iron, or kindling. I died at 59 having made a single cold iron bloom.
If mom had said something like "We're going to stay in here and make nothing", or if the halfway-started fire/kiln/forge setup hadn't been there already, I wouldn't have tried to finish it. Or I would have moved somewhere else to set it up. But as it was I simply died thinking that my ancestors must have been insane to try to make a camp in a tiny space in the middle of the jungle.
This was me: http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1996024 - My sister's lineage made it another five generations; no idea if they stayed in the jungle munching bananas or not.

That wasn't me. But yes i'd say working on any kind of tech is only removing room for bananas, and adding a lot of risk. The only "tech" that might be worth it is some kind of adobe wall structure to protect the women.

WalrusesConquer · 2018-11-26 18:59:39

I have travelled to the bell as an Eve with NY kids. I had one great daughter who always managed to survive. Ironically whenever I go with someone from a town, we always get lost and eventually die because horses are hard to navigate in a group.
I wish we could attach bison to a cart, turning it into a wagon which people could sit in.
Maybe not as fast as horses, but faster than walking.
Having kids would be complicated..

Jadelink · 2018-11-29 01:58:38

Thanks everyone for the input.

Dacen, this is actually not the case. Migrations of people around the world certainly occurred, with varying levels of organisation. It is a common hunter-gather pattern to move in a cycle around territory (often annually), but we can seldom do this in OHOL because of the total lack of respawns for wild 'weed foods' (burdock, onions, carrots) on which hunter gatherers rely heavily in the game.

Think about the colonisation of the Americas from a small point of entry in the Bering straight through an entire double continent if you want to see how much people moved in the real world.

Eddie, might have been one of my camps. I have been routinely abandoning badly sited eve camps to make a new start for my offspring in the jungle, and getting them to move to a better one. I had a smart girl a couple of times, but thus far they have hit bad luck, either sausaging out the line, or hitting night infertility (common because of my timezone), or finding a hidden rattlesnake.

The idea of making the key portable tools early is a good one, thanks for that, at times when I have less newbie kids, I might be able to attempt that. A 'starter kit basket' would go a long way to help a new village setup, which normally has at least a couple of new players fumbling round in it.

Gabal, yes, given that I have lived over a dozen lives from as young as 3, to being an elder, as a solo nomad, I know it's fairly easy once you have a sharp stone and a basket. The staying together of groups on the move is hard, especially with such a small field of view, which means that a system of meeting point/s is close to essential. I wouldn't mind some tech to do this (a cooee call or a bull roarer sort of thing would be good, like a temporary mobile bell), both are real world tech (and I've actually used both for signalling when separated). Then whoever sets a temporary nice camp (like a banana patch) gives the call signal out which the others can hear from far out of sight.

Last edited by Jadelink (2018-11-29 02:14:51)

CrazyEddie · 2018-11-29 02:44:07

Jadelink wrote:

I wouldn't mind some tech to do this (a cooee call or a bull roarer sort of thing would be good, like a temporary mobile bell), both are real world tech (and I've actually used both for signalling when separated).

This is a great idea.

Maybe something that overrides the Home beacon temporarily, perhaps for fifteen seconds if you're close, decreasing to five seconds if you're far away but still in range.

For that matter, the Bell Tower should work similarly, overriding your Home for a few seconds if you have a Home already, so that even people with a Home set (which should be everyone, seriously, people, SET YOUR HOME) can still know more-or-less where the tower is.

Last edited by CrazyEddie (2018-11-29 02:47:45)

lionon · 2018-11-29 07:55:17

IMO there client simply should be able to handle two beacons. Home marker set and the last bell heared or "whistle".

whistle: would be something mobile with a limited reach (500 tiles maybe? even 250 would be fair). PS: And please makeable with flint/sharprocks/wood/clay whatever as long no need of iron.

Last edited by lionon (2018-11-29 07:56:19)

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-11-26 11:53:04

Nomadic life

#2 2018-11-26 12:36:20

Re: Nomadic life

#3 2018-11-26 16:28:05

Re: Nomadic life

#4 2018-11-26 16:31:28

Re: Nomadic life

#5 2018-11-26 17:24:50

Re: Nomadic life

#6 2018-11-26 17:32:37

Re: Nomadic life

#7 2018-11-26 17:37:27

Re: Nomadic life

#8 2018-11-26 18:12:24

Re: Nomadic life

#9 2018-11-26 18:19:58

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#10 2018-11-26 18:53:05

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#11 2018-11-26 18:59:39

Re: Nomadic life

#12 2018-11-29 01:58:38

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#13 2018-11-29 02:44:07

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