Update: Apocalypse 2.0

jasonrohrer · 2018-12-28 01:13:53

First, a few important fixes that you all should be aware of.

There was a bug in temperature weighting on mothers. It was supposed to make ideal-temp mothers more likely to have a baby, but it was broken and not working. That has been fixed now. Furthermore, a Yum multiplier factor has been added to this weighting. If you have a large Yum multiplier (from eating a chain of unique foods), you will also be more likely to have a baby. If you're warm in addition to being on a yummy diet, you will be even more likely to have a baby.

And the way that Eve spawn locations were remembered---when Eve died of old age---was buggy. Thus, the surprise appearance of Eves near villages. This has been fixed. But even when it's working correctly, it's meant to only function on low-pop servers, and not as a way-of-life for reviving collapsed villages, so that has been fixed as well (your last-Eve-death location will only be used for your next Eve spawn if there are fewer than four fertile females on the server currently). This fix is even more important in light of this week's update, which I will describe in detail below.

In last week's update, I talked about how there will be no magic in the game. What I meant to say is that there will be no non-inherent magic.

Some things about the game are inescapably magic. Reincarnation---a reality for any commercially viable game---is the prime example of this.

But the map itself, and the servers, and how they get set up, and how they get updated, and how they get cleared, is another example. I'm doing all this stuff behind the scenes to keep things updated and working. I'm making choices. I'm adding things. I'm in control of the parameters that control when and how certain parts of the map go back to their natural state.

And the map is huge---unnaturally huge. 36,000x larger than the surface area of the earth. Walking from one edge to the other in the game would take you 34 years of real-life time. Walking around to visually see the entire map would take you 14 billion years.

It's a big map. Mind-mindbogglingly so. Yet I can change the entire thing with the push of a button, like when I add a new biome, or wipe it back to its natural state in the blink of an eye. How can something so big be changed so fast? Through procedural generation and the properties of computer file systems (where deleting data of length N is a constant time operation on N). It's not magic, really.

But when we try to square these possibilities with a simulation of the real world, the end results are nothing short of miraculous.

And what does that make me, the guy pushing the buttons behind the scenes?

There's an amazing idea lurking in this game, and credit for the idea goes to Edmund McMillen. When I visited him a few years ago, in between petting his hairless cat and having him kick my ass in a Magic draft, I told him about the game I was working on. In a game that starts back at zero as a premise, a question arises: how did we get to zero in the first place? And what if, Edmund suggested, players were in control of taking everything back to zero? What if, at the top of the tech tree, the most difficult-to-craft item was The Button?

It seems that, after all is said and done in this game, after all my updates are out, and the game stops evolving due to developer input, this just has to be the way that it will work. Otherwise the game will stagnate. Edmund was right.

But what about along the way? In the arms race of player progress in the face of my weekly updates, players always win.

So, the idea of an along-the-way apocalypse arose. What if The Button was a moving target? Some item at the top of the current tech tree that represented the current endgame?

The problem here is that players can get to the top of the tech tree ridiculously fast.

This means that the apocalyptic item can't be technological. It needs to be magic in some way.

Long ago, shortly after the game's release in early 2018, I tried something like this. A monolith in the desert that you could use to conduct a kind of absurd ritual using a bit of material that was high-level tech at the time. This experiment was an utter failure, as the first apocalypse was triggered four hours after the update, and subsequent apocalypses were triggered hourly after that until I gave up and disabled the whole system.

I left that failed experiment behind, without thinking about it any further. Players can get through the tech tree---and craft any imaginable thing---way too fast. This even planted seeds of doubt in my mind about Edmund's Button, even at the end of the update process, once the tech tree was gigantic.

Still, I really liked the shared collective event that had occurred. People who were playing that fateful day will never forget that flash of white...

In the mean time, other ideas surfaced, like the bell tower, which involved slowing down player progress toward a goal and ensuring trans-generational cooperation. A bell tower takes 18 hours to build. In order to build it, your village has to survive that long.

This takes a page from the Clock of the Long Now.

The insight this week was that these two ideas can be combined. An apocalypse, for the time being, is a magical, not technological event. So there's a ritual. What if it was a very slow ritual? What if people had plenty of opportunity---and warning---to interrupt the ritual before completion?

That was always the idea with Edmund's Button anyway---that people would be fighting to stop it along the way.

So, I give you a new and improved apocalypse. It has:

--Rare, unsustainable ingredients that you cannot procure while working completely alone.

--A map-wiping wave that is limited to one server only (no more chance of an Easy Apocalypse on a vacant server causing wipes on the populated servers).

--A map-wiping wave that you can live through and come out the other side.

--World-wide warnings as the ritual gets closer and closer to completion.

--The ritual itself is very fragile and easy to set back along the way.

--The entire ritual, if uninterrupted, takes 24 hours to complete.

And, for the time being at least, it's magic.

CrazyEddie · 2018-12-28 03:59:15

With the village-revisit bug fixed, my prediction is that we will never see another bell tower, let alone an apocalypse, on a public server. They require 18 (bell tower) / 24 (apocalypse tower) hours of continuous existence by a single lineage. Has that happened even once in the last several months?

I suppose it could be done on a public server by a "private lineage", i.e. where everyone in the lineage is part of a coordinated team (working in shifts around the clock), using /die to return to the lineage and skirting the lineage ban by either having enough people to ride out the ban or suiciding at age 29, and meanwhile killing anyone who is born into the lineage that isn't part of the team. Not sure if that "counts" or not (not that that matters).

Tarr · 2018-12-28 05:15:38

While I personally don't like the apocalypse and blah blah blah I'm glad you learned something from round one. It ended up taking about two lives (one was from scratch, the other a village our eve spawned into) for me to get all the blocks needed. The Eve run ended up with the first tier sitting in the village as a show piece and the village spawn I ended up getting all the endstones prepped and ready for the future.

To think if you wouldn't have added a timer to setting the blocks we would have had our first apocalypse within two hours of the update going live.

lionon · 2018-12-28 05:52:41

Is there an .ini file setting to disable it on custom servers?
It's okay if it can be all build, it just shouldn't cause the apocalypse...

Okay easy enough to find, settings/apocalypsePossible.ini

Last edited by lionon (2018-12-28 06:38:29)

WalrusesConquer · 2018-12-28 11:20:05

Can we survive through it? Nice! We'll have to work together, and be more like family.

Strilar · 2018-12-28 12:10:51

I got this game on May 3rd (luckily a month after the previous APOCALYPSE) and it quickly became my #1 favorite game, sadly i can rarely play it besides one day during weekends, but i try to play it whenever i can.

I've been loving all updates every single week so far, and i have to say, this is the first one i really dislike.

I fail to see the "point" of the Apocalypse... things decay and decline pretty quickly in game already and at least to me, the beauty of this game is the cooperation between players to achieve something productive, i try to be as productive as i can in every single life... and this is just basically... destructive!

@Tarr: From what i read on the forums, i see you are a very respectful, skilful and friendly player, but out of curiosity, if you say you don't like the Apocalypse either, why are you working so hard to cause it? It's like building a Nuke just because you can.

One thing i would really love to see is relationship between nearby villages/cities, either trade, war, migration to refill population, different families living in the same village, increasing it's odds of survival, etc....

But in over 6 months, that is yet to be. People rarely build walls or buildings because they consume lots of time and resources and will decay if unattended. The Bell is always too far away to allow anyone to go to another village and return back, and since it takes the "slot" of home marker you can't have both destinations to avoid getting lost.

I see many people trying to build roads (some even tried to build railroads) out of the village in hopes that in several generations those may connect to other villages... what's the point of working so hard if in the end we get a reset and all our hard work is erased? Knowing that all my hard work can be cleared up, makes me feel that my one hour... one life... was wasted!

jasonrohrer · 2018-12-28 17:32:29

We'll have to see what happens.

I'm trying to ensure that there is a dramatic arc to the game. No steady state. That's boring. Toward the end in a steady state, life is meaningless, and no contribution matters. The building up from nothing is what matters. Forever is boring (I made another game about this long ago, called Immortality).

Even if the apocalypse never happens, the possibility of it happening is interesting and adds tension to the game.

Anshin · 2018-12-28 19:07:33

Can't we have something to work towards that is positive?

It is way too easy to make an endblock, and then the only thing you can do with it is add an endstone towards nihilistic destruction.
There should be a way to destroy endstones, and there should be something positive to balance all that negativity.

How about a utopiastone?

How about the final tower dishes out something based on the ratio of positive to negative stones you put in it?

All four being red bringing the apocalypse, but all four green could change that server into an Eden.
... and somewhere in between could have moderate outcomes ...
3 green + 1 red = spawning a new good and useful species,
3 red + 1 green = spawning a new foe.
2 red + 2 green = ???

This would be much more interesting than forcing the notion that humanity is inherently evil.

Gabby · 2018-12-28 19:43:45

I really don't like anything I read about this update, but I'm a somewhat new player so what do I know. I'll wait and see.

Gederian · 2018-12-28 23:32:38

This will fail just like the first apocalypse.

Everything can end, but let it exist first.

We want dozens of towns connected with hundreds of cars. Then you can blow it up.

seth · 2018-12-29 01:42:17

I like what you're going for here - I think the main thing is that the GIF animation is a little misleading - it's presenting the apocalypse as a mere 2.0, instead of potentially major new dramatic tension.

If this works well, I can imagine people setting out on sacred missions to disrupt the apocalypse. And if it's easy enough to disrupt, then great!

Perhaps this will require griefers to collaborate if they wish to bring on the apocalypse, and then try to kill anyone who comes to disrupt it. Now we're getting into conflict on a macro scale - moving from the individual to the civilization.

With the focus of global concerns instead of just local ones comes the need for better infrastructure - a network of roads, so that any time an army can be dispatched to remove the threat of the apocalypse.

... Anyways, sounds pretty consequential! Looking forward to see how it plays out. Either way, I appreciate the constant innovation and iteration - Great work as always!

Last edited by seth (2018-12-29 01:42:42)

Kinrany · 2018-12-29 20:52:02

This is basically The Dark Tower reversed!

And I predict that it'll go really meta really fast.

Here's what's going to happen:

Someone, let's call them the Man in Black, will start building the doomsday device.
They'll eventually get swarmed by people who hate everything vertical.
The Man in Black will find a few pro players, cooperate in Discord and start in a new village, no outsiders allowed.
Other people, aka Gunslingers, will eventually learn about the doomsday device.
Attacking another village is pretty much impossible due to distance. So the Gunslingers will have to repeatedly suicide to teleport.
With careful gating attacking a village by being born there is also impossible, so they'll eventually have to infiltrate the Man in Black's Discord server.

I predict that there'll be way more metagame than before.

I also predict that the first apocalypse will happen in 2018 anyway.

Ilka · 2018-12-29 21:19:15

Anshin wrote:

Can't we have something to work towards that is positive?
It is way too easy to make an endblock, and then the only thing you can do with it is add an endstone towards nihilistic destruction.
There should be a way to destroy endstones, and there should be something positive to balance all that negativity.
How about a utopiastone?
How about the final tower dishes out something based on the ratio of positive to negative stones you put in it?
All four being red bringing the apocalypse, but all four green could change that server into an Eden.
... and somewhere in between could have moderate outcomes ...
3 green + 1 red = spawning a new good and useful species,
3 red + 1 green = spawning a new foe.
2 red + 2 green = ???
This would be much more interesting than forcing the notion that humanity is inherently evil.

I am for this.
After all, this new update introduces black magic - the apocalypse requires human sacrifices.
So he can give the opportunity to save the world?
Personally, I'll smash every tower they find.

But what has this to do with the game of building a civilization?
It's getting more and more strange. And I have noticed that murderers - playing rolers are more and more.
Jason encourages them to kill.

I understand the intent but it is all useless ... in this particular game. It's not an RPG.

antking:]# · 2018-12-29 21:47:34

from life to death, heat to cold, joy to sorrow, this is a good idea!

while I can say most will be unhappy with this update, I am quite pleased, this update opens the door to magic, which in itself is pretty cool,

for those who think that now their hour will be waisted with this update your hours are already being wasted, I have noticed a pattern their will be a thriving town thanks to the working force but then, do to negligence it all comes crumbling down. its nice to have a restart button.

all in all I think it will be nice to have more rituals with positive and/or negative affects in the future.

please bring the monoliths power back

Monolith_Rans · 2018-12-30 05:57:26

No. I refuse. Come on people! Don’t do it! Don’t destroy the old stone walls. No more death and destruction. I can’t take any morez

Monolith_Rans · 2018-12-30 06:03:17

I lived through the first apocalypses. That’s how I got my name. It sucked and it was a bad idea: As soon as people start to like the game and build things bigger and stop spawning as eves so much we all have to die? This game was supposed to be about progress. That’s not progress.

antking:]# · 2018-12-30 18:27:18

Monolith_Rans wrote:

I lived through the first apocalypses. That’s how I got my name. It sucked and it was a bad idea: As soon as people start to like the game and build things bigger and stop spawning as eves so much we all have to die? This game was supposed to be about progress. That’s not progress.

while you have appoint you are forgetting a small detail…. how can you progress, when their is nothing to progress too? when you enter a world where every one has cars, and horses, where their is so much compost that you can't find the end to it, where stew and turkey and pies have been prepared for eons to come. What do you do? their is nothing to do.... why would you play in a city of every thing? for in there you can do nothing! destruction is the only way to make meaning out of perfection! even so cities like these fall the fastest as with nothing to do people bring out the worst in themselves!

That's why we need a reset switch, you wish to prevent evil "monolith" well then give people a reason to work and not kill!

Last edited by antking:]# (2018-12-30 18:28:13)

lionon · 2018-12-30 20:14:58

antking:]# wrote:

That's why we need a reset switch, you wish to prevent evil "monolith" well then give people a reason to work and not kill!

While you are theoretically right and Jason argued exactly that way, the issue is, it hasn't been an issue yet... not even close.

antking:]# · 2018-12-30 20:41:45

while you are right that it is not that big of a problem it is still one. I can relate how many times I came in as a baby ands was in the middle of a massacre or war or justification or whatever you may call it I noticed a pattern this is more likely to acure where there is more food and development, but this is just my opinion.

Kinrany · 2018-12-31 12:33:08

I really like the idea of turning the apocalypse monument into a general purpose wish-fulfillment artifact, where causing the apocalypse is just one of the options.

The other option is to add tools for being creative, so that there's something to waste spare resources on. That's what will happen IRL, anyway.

Gederian · 2018-12-31 18:43:03

antking:]# wrote:

how can you progress, when their is nothing to progress too?

Focusing more on the tech tree than the apocalypse would solve this problem.

It's not just about crafting the most difficult item then calling it game over. It's how you use those items to advance a city.

We haven't even gotten close to a true civilization but we are on the second round of world ending updates...

Stormyzabeast · 2019-01-01 15:05:25

I've said it once and I'll say it again. This game is being ruined for me. It's already gotten so damn hard to play as a successful Eve that the game is barely fun anymore, it's stress stress stress. Instead of introducing "magic" that you said you wouldn't do (Christmas update) and giving us all yet another way to just kill each other, focus on the damn tech tree! People grief when they're bored! We're bored because in cities there's nothing more to do!

Give us glass to make windows, tornados (since you can't do weather) so we have to take shelter giving a purpose to houses. Give us new crops, fruit trees, recipes, clothing, harsher biomes, wild dangerous animals that destroy crops.

A day/night cycle that forces us to make candles out of beeswax or torches, kerosene lamps in more advanced cities. Packs of animals that ravage the food at night (bears, hyenas etc).

Overall health not just hunger and temp. We have to bathe to stave off disease and illness. If someone kills a player, let there be an increased chance they get a blood born pathogen that required medical care.

Bug nets for mosquitos. Locust swarms. Overnight freezes that kill anyone who doesn't take shelter whether it be an Eve "tent" or a huge heated castle". The freeze cracks roads forcing repair. Just darken the screen and introduce watches or sun dials. We have cars but still no water irrigation, mosquito repellent made with herbs..... Cooking fire pits....a real use for buildings? -_-

Come on man..... All the effort (if any) it takes to do this shit that ruins everything we spend countless hours of our real lives on, could actually be spent on giving us what we all paid for! A game to work to build empires! To leave a family legacy, to work together, fight griefers, advance, fail on our own (happens alllll the time anyway, I don't know why you think you need to aide it by wiping all our progress away)....

A damn milkweed seed or rabbit needle, God forsaken 4 Flint chips a node aka CLUTTER lasts longer than our steel tools we bust our asses off making. Fix that! If a place hasn't been seen in 24 real life hours, automatically wipe that section, not the whole damn world. It just sucks! Do you even play your own game anymore?

Sorry to come off aggressive, I just adore this game and I want it to get better, not worse I've logged almost 500 hours since the steam launch alone, probably 1-200 before that. PLEASE! Just actually work on the game, don't rehash old shit you know people hate. Get that tech tree rolling!!

jriver_13 · 2019-01-04 22:13:53

Its the end of the world everyone; the servers are closed for maintenance! This probably won't be relevant when your reading this, but the servers are in fact shut down at the time of writing my comment.

seth · 2019-01-04 23:47:11

Another reason I like this idea:

So you think your society is thriving and all is well right? Well how good is it going really if there's someone around who succeeds at building the bomb that will destroy it all. That's like being really proud that your built a garden in your backyard, and meanwhile global warming is 10 seconds away from flooding your entire city.

I've yet to see any notifications of anyone working toward the apocalypse, but when that happens, and our society does not choose to react because we're too busy baking pies, I think that says something quite meaningful.

We walk around with the delusion that our society works because it's been around for a few hundred years. Well, what if our confidence is entirely unearned?

NetherCrow · 2019-01-05 00:10:00

Maybe we should destroy the endblock to prevent the Apocalypse.Most players don't want to see their city turn to nothing.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-12-28 01:13:53

Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#2 2018-12-28 03:59:15

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#3 2018-12-28 05:15:38

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#4 2018-12-28 05:52:41

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#5 2018-12-28 11:20:05

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#6 2018-12-28 12:10:51

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#7 2018-12-28 17:32:29

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#8 2018-12-28 19:07:33

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#9 2018-12-28 19:43:45

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#10 2018-12-28 23:32:38

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#11 2018-12-29 01:42:17

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#12 2018-12-29 20:52:02

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#13 2018-12-29 21:19:15

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#14 2018-12-29 21:47:34

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#15 2018-12-30 05:57:26

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#16 2018-12-30 06:03:17

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#17 2018-12-30 18:27:18

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#18 2018-12-30 20:14:58

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#19 2018-12-30 20:41:45

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#20 2018-12-31 12:33:08

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#21 2018-12-31 18:43:03

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#22 2019-01-01 15:05:25

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#23 2019-01-04 22:13:53

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#24 2019-01-04 23:47:11

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

#25 2019-01-05 00:10:00

Re: Update: Apocalypse 2.0

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