Update: Temperature Overhaul

jasonrohrer · 2019-02-17 05:49:13

The problem of temperature in the game was much harder to solve than you might think. The old model was based on a thermodynamic cellular simulation, which would supposedly allow for heat from fires to be captured in rooms and flow out open doors. The model was accurate, but it was based on thermal conduction, not convection (which is much harder to simulate), and the result was hot areas right around heat sources, and cold areas everywhere else, even in enclosed buildings. In other words, buildings were pretty useless for keeping warm.

Clothing also fit into this simulation, but in a bit of a strange way (it served as extra insulation in the tile that you were standing on). Clothing would amplify any heat source in your tile, turning fires into extreme heat death traps. Finally, biomes were also part of the simulation, adding small heat sources (or sinks for cold biomes) at every cell in the simulation grid. Again, clothing, which insulated the center cell of the simulation grid (where you were standing), would also amplify biome heat. And biome heat effects would blend at biome boundaries (a thermal grid simulation is actually a form of blurring between the grid cells). This meant that there were near perfect areas at the boundaries between hot and cold biomes.

Players, being the rational folks that they are, reacted to the peculiarities of this thermal simulation by avoiding buildings, founding towns along desert boundaries, wearing minimal clothing, and generally not depending on heat sources for warmth. This was never my intention for the game, of course, but that's where things stood. I envisioned a game were buildings, clothing, and heat sources brought crucial advantages to a civilization, and all of the more advanced civilizations would depend on all three.

So, how could I fix this? A different thermal model of course, but what model? And if I wanted both hot and cold biomes (which make a lot of sense), how could I prevent exploitation of the boundaries? I really wanted there to be no "perfect" spot on the map that would make temperature regulation technology irrelevant. If such a spot existed, the smart players would find that, and settle there, always. Cold biomes should be too cold. Hot biomes should be too hot. There should be no "middle ground" in between.

First of all, many thanks to all of the players who engaged in a lengthy discussion in the forums. Also thanks go to my local designer friend Casey, who stuck with me through at least three hours of in-depth discussion about this topic (at the end of our first two-hour discussion, we had pages full of notes, diagrams, and graphs, but still no workable solution to the biome boundary problem).

Okay, now the solutions.

I should mention that what I'm calling "R value" here is different than the standard term as used in the insulation industry. My R value is a fractional heat retention value between 0 (no insulation that loses all heat) and 1 (perfect insulation). This makes it easier to reason about and program for. I suppose I should call it something else, but I don't know what to call it, so I've been calling it R.

First, for walls, I really want to simulate some kind of convection, so that heat spreads more evenly in indoor spaces. Instead of a cellular simulation, I'm now walking through the entire airspace around the player, flood-fill style, until I hit a boundary of insulating walls (or the edge of the 8x8 simulation grid). After that, I find the insulating boundaries, and compute an average R value for those boundaries. The heat sources inside that airspace (which may be the entire 8x8 grid, if there are no walls) produce heat which is spread evenly throughout the tiles of the airspace. That heat is modulated by the R-value of the boundaries of the airspace (if the average R value is 0.5, then half the heat is lost, and the rest is spread evenly in the enclosed space). Floors themselves count as part of the boundary of the space (if there's no floor in a tile, that tile counts as one of the air boundaries, thus reducing the average R value).

So what happens in this new model when you open a door? Suddenly, your airspace gets much bigger (the inside of your house plus the area outside your house), and your airspace boundary also gets bigger---and likely includes some air boundaries at the edge of the 8x8 simulation grid---so the average R value of the boundary decreases. Thus, opening a door, if a fire is running inside, will cause the house to get colder. Closing the door causes it to warm up again.

Thus, we're essentially modeling perfectly even convection throughout the entire enclosed airspace.

But shouldn't standing next to a fire also warm you up, even if there are no walls at all? Yes, but that's not due to convection. There's also a radiant component in the new model, which is based on your distance from each heat source that is in your airspace (which might included everything in the 8x8 simulation grid, if you are outside). So, getting close to a heat source, indoors or out, warms you intensely (perhaps too intensely, depending on the heat source). In other words, up close, radiant. Further away in a house, convection. The effect of radiant heat becomes negligible beyond a few tiles away.

Next, the biome effect is based only on the tile that you're currently standing on, and it's added into the heat calculation after the heat at your tile is computed based on heat sources and walls. If you're in an enclosed airspace, the biome heat contribution is modulated by the average R value of the airspace boundary, but only if the entire airspace also has floors. This means that an enclosed house with a floor can make a hot biome cooler, and a colder-than-normal biome, like the polar biome, warmer.

Next, clothes are applied in a separate part of the code, and they slow the transition from your body heat level to the environmental heat level (as computed based on walls, heat sources, and biome). If you're naked, you change temperatures pretty quickly. If you're fully clothed, you change temperatures very slowly. Thus, you can warm up in a house, near a fire, until you are just right, and then put on clothes before a journey to "hold it in" for a long time, and keep yourself close to perfect along the way.

And finally, the hard part: biome boundaries. As the new system is described so far, the old boundary-blending issue is fixed (because only your current biome tile contributes to your heat equation, without blending), but an exploit is still possible: by jumping back and forth across a boundary, between a hot and cold biome, you could warm yourself up to perfect temperature without fire, clothes, or walls.

So, I added a system for thermal shocks. This occurs whenever you go from a too-cold biome into a too-hot biome, or vice versa. Your temperature instantly jumps from the cold side of the scale to the hot side, right to the new biome's target temperature (or from hot to cold, if crossing the other way). This shock effect is also modulated by clothing. More and better clothing reduces the magnitude of this shock. Furthermore, the shock is never allowed to bring you closer to perfect on the other side of the temperature scale than you were before crossing. So if perfect is 0.5, and you were at 0.3, you will jump to at least 0.7 when you cross into a hot biome, no matter what clothes you are wearing (if you're naked, you might jump all the way up to 0.9, though, so clothing still helps).

This means that you can never improve your food consumption rate by crossing between hot and cold biomes. In the very best case, your consumption rate will remain the same, but it will usually get a bit worse (and if you're naked, it might get a lot worse).

There is also still a small body heat effect inside clothing, so in a cold biome, clothing will gradually warm you up over time. This effect is somewhat larger than it was before. The general idea is that, in cold biomes, clothing gets you 1/3 of the way to perfect, while fire and walls take you the rest of the way there. If you actually want to work in one area and remain at a perfect temperature the entire time, you're going to need all three bits of technology.

One other problem in the old system was that the desert, while hot, was not as hot as the other biomes were cold. The jungle was too close to perfect, and the mosquitoes didn't offer enough of a trade-off. So the jungle is now as hot as the other biomes were cold (moving between prairie and jungle now results in no change to your hunger rate), while desert is now as hot as the polar biome is cold. You've always been freezing to death in the snow, and you are now cooking in the desert. Think of it like hot snow.

The other biomes remain unchanged for the naked player. Thus, the game isn't really any harder now than it was before, unless you count the loss of the desert-boundary exploit as making the game harder (yes, that was easy, but the game was never supposed to be easy like that). Clothing and walls are so much more helpful now, that the game might even be easier, ignoring the old exploit.

Here's hoping that the new system leads players toward advanced civilizations full of heated buildings and clothed residents.

Nepumuk · 2019-02-17 06:47:37

I very much doubt this sort of technical posting is gonna sway the casual player base.

CrazyEddie · 2019-02-17 07:02:12

The heat shock is hard to understand, hard to reason about, and hard to deal with. It also solves a problem which I can tell has been high on your mind but which I think is actually of very little consequence, and thus doesn't need (and shouldn't have) such a complicated and frustrating solution.

People don't jump back and forth between hot and cold tiles, except in two cases.

The first case is Tarr, trying to show how much he can bend and break your game rules. But even here it doesn't really buy him (or anyone else) anything of interest. The second case is babies, who are the only people ever likely to park themselves on a single spot for a protracted period and try to keep a perfect temperature by dancing back and forth between two tiles.

And the entire effect of having a hot tile near a cold tile that you can dance between is nothing more than you would get by building a fire. You can make a fire anywhere, but you have to be lucky to have a hot/cold border near where you want to be standing. I think even without this heat shock mechanism, there will be very little hot/cold dancing going on. People will just make fires.

The big change you've made is to make deserts as bad as arctic and jungles as bad as the others. This alone solves the real problem that's been taking place, which is people settling near the borders of deserts and swamp so that they can build the bulk of the town on a good temperature (desert being much better than the others) while having water close enough to make a farm. THAT is why there are towns built on hot/cold borders... not the relatively minor (nearly trivial) effect of being able to stand on a perfect tile.

Because nobody stands on a tile. People move. They're busy, they have work to do.

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-02-17 07:14:34

Nepumuk wrote:

I very much doubt this sort of technical posting is gonna sway the casual player base.

+1

Also on the jungles and mosquitos not offering a trade off difficulty, my experiences and family lines when in the jungle tend to differ. Sure you can combat it but it was not something easy, and even when we did there were still victims of mosquitoes that killed towns and lineages.

Dodge · 2019-02-17 08:06:34

Playing the game right now feels the way it's meant to be played, really good update

New heating tech and maybe rabbit farming soon?

Spoonwood · 2019-02-17 08:21:28

Thanks for this post Jason. I do appreciate the information. However, I want to talk about one particular change though.

jasonrohrer wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/C69TYGq.gif
This means that an enclosed house with a floor can make a hot biome cooler, and a colder-than-normal biome, like the polar biome, warmer.

Ok, I think this means that smithing progression might need some rethinking, as the froe and adze seem more useful earlier.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Thus, the game isn't really any harder now than it was before, unless you count the loss of the desert-boundary exploit as making the game harder (yes, that was easy, but the game was never supposed to be easy like that).

Wait what?

1. What about the jungle now being more difficult? Many people before were picking desert over jungle, because the mosquitoes needed handled. They still need handled for anyone choosing the jungle (but why should an Eve bother with jungle now? for the rubber supply? but that's too far down the road), and in my opinion, they require more time and effort than handling snakes or boars.

2. Sure, wood flooring might make a smithy, a kitchen, and maybe animal pens good enough that for a jungle or desert, things might be pretty good for people working there. So, sure for some the game might be easier. But, earlier it was at least possible to setup your farm well either by using the desert edge and neutral biome "exploit" or being bold enough to set your farm up in a jungle, including a true jungle where your family tackles the mosquitoes. Is wood flooring really enough to provide enough benefits to make things good enough for farmers? You can't till soil over a wood floor, correct? I doubt that wood flooring will be enough for farmers, especially if they are nude. If the game isn't easier for the farmers, I doubt the game becomes easier overall. And if farming is now less easy than smithing or cooking, it seems even more likely that players who know the game will NOT do much farming. Plenty of people who could do so, I think, were already avoiding farming, leading to seeing newer players do things like using a clay bowl on a cistern, because they were more likely to farm than more experienced players. Now it seems like more experienced players will avoid doing so even more. If things work out that way, does this really make for an improvement? Does the game become easier if the food supply is weaker?

Edit: Oh... and settlements might want to think about growing trees for more butt logs. Settlements sometimes were already struggling with growing enough trees before of finding a good branch picker to keep things running smoothly. I suspect they will struggle even more with this now.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-02-17 14:16:56)

InSpace · 2019-02-17 08:29:39

It get's old playing with people running around naked their whole life, also nice to have a reason for houses finally. Kudos

Christoffer · 2019-02-17 10:49:31

This looks like a major, MAJOR gameplay improvement to me. Hope and expect to see many more buildings in the settlements, as well as less naked people.
I understand that there was a lot of work required, but I think it was better invested here than in any other aspect of the game.

Maybe it will turn out that something is unbalanced and needs to patched, but the foundation is much more sound than it was before. I’m very hopeful

Good job!

AmyJ · 2019-02-17 11:40:43

I am loving this new update. Finally clothes are preferable to running around in the nude!

Ellesanna · 2019-02-17 13:07:16

As much as I wanted clothes and buildings to play more of a role, him making the game more difficult to force players to adopt clothing and buildings was the wrong approach by far. Maybe adding some sort of bonus? A reward for doing it instead of a punishment for not doing it? It is extremely hard for casual players like me to enjoy the game or even for rper to have much of a story telling as everyone is too busy rushing to get clothes and buildings up in order not to starve. Being an eve was already hard enough but now is impossible except for the lucky and exceptionally skilled few. I'm starting to feel like Jason has disconnected himself completely from the majority of his player-base, casual players, and is just throwing out whatever he can to make the game harder to the point that only the most extreme of players could feasibly enjoy playing. I will, like everyone else, continue to try adapting to this new update but I am not at all optimistic if it is even remotely similar to how things were yesterday. My only regret now is not playing this game more back when it was still playable and fun and not just frustratingly difficult and disappointing.

Last edited by Ellesanna (2019-02-17 13:09:06)

Rage · 2019-02-17 13:39:54

You have succeeded in your goal of making this game unplayable or at least not enjoyable to all except your good buddies. Congrats. I WANT A REFUND.

CrazyEddie · 2019-02-17 15:24:38

The convection mechanism has weird consequences.

Consider a fire in the middle of a 7x7 room. If you are standing in the middle of the room, your airspace is 49 tiles with one fire and an average border R value of W (whatever the R value of a wall is). If you are standing two tiles away diagonally, your airspace is 25 tiles with one fire and an average border R value of W/2 (since half the borders of your 8x8 grid are now open space, with a zero R value). So the convection heat is about the same as in the middle of the room: same number of fires but half as many tiles, so twice as hot, but half as much insulation, so about the same heat after the heat loss through the airspace borders.

But if you're standing in the corner, your airspace is only 16 tiles with one fire and an R value of W/2. That means that the corner furthest away from the fire is about 1.5 times as hot as the center of the room!

Yes, that's compensated for by having less radiant heat in the corner. But the point is that the convection component is behaving in strange, counter-intuitive ways. It doesn't depend on the airspace around the fire, it depends on the airspace around you.

CrazyEddie · 2019-02-17 16:30:19

Clothing slows down your heat loss if you go from a warm tile in a cold biome (example: a building or a fire) to a cold tile in a cold biome (example: almost anywhere else). However, it also slows down your heat gain when you are moving from a very cold biome (arctic) to a merely cold biome (most of them).

So if you venture out onto the ice to club a seal or gather stones, when you step off the ice and back onto the grasslands or prairie, be sure to take OFF your clothes until your temperature has risen back to merely "cold" instead of "very cold".

This seems odd. Take off your clothes to more quickly become less cold.

CrazyEddie · 2019-02-17 16:44:28

Jason wanted clothing to be desirable in any biome, so he made it slow down temperature changes:

Now clothing is always beneficial, everywhere. It slows down temperature change. So when you walk into the desert, it helps you instead of hurting you (keeps you from getting hot too quickly).

However, clothing is still undesirable in jungle and desert, because in addition to slowing down temperature changes, it also adds heat:

There is also still a small body heat effect inside clothing, so in a cold biome, clothing will gradually warm you up over time. This effect is somewhat larger than it was before.

The consequence is that if you are wearing clothing and spend time in the jungle, your temperature will eventually reach max hot - even though the target temperature for jungle is only as hot as the other biomes are cold. Clothing does not protect you from hot climates, it only protects you from short-run heat shock if you temporarily walk into or across the hot biomes.

Note, though, that as I mentioned immediately above, that same clothing harms you when you cross from the jungle or desert back into the other biomes. While you are in the jungle or desert, your clothing pushed you further away from the center because clothing adds heat. That means when you return to the other biome, your heat jumps back to the cold side, but stays that further distance away from the center (because Jason doesn't want you to ever move closer to the center when you cross biomes). But then your clothing KEEPS you further from the center and STOPS you from getting warmer, because clothing slows down temperature changes.

Jason: Clothing should probably not add heat. It probably should move your temperature closer to the center, so that it warms you in cold biomes and cools you in hot biomes.

fragilityh14 · 2019-02-17 17:26:02

jasonrohrer wrote:

The other biomes remain unchanged for the naked player. Thus, the game isn't really any harder now than it was before, unless you count the loss of the desert-boundary exploit as making the game harder (yes, that was easy, but the game was never supposed to be easy like that). Clothing and walls are so much more helpful now, that the game might even be easier, ignoring the old exploit.
Here's hoping that the new system leads players toward advanced civilizations full of heated buildings and clothed residents.

Thank you! i hated desert living the whole time, and life being frantic and difficult in early game is what made this game so incredibly fun. Living in a city there's plenty of food anyway. I'm sure there's some kinks to work out, but this is a huge improvement.

We really need some more clothes, especially long desert robes that moderate heat well.

Also, one potential solution to two problems is to make it so you get poop from feeding shorn sheep instead of lambs. Then mutton pie is no longer a necessary byproduct of composting (to the same extent) so we'll have more diverse food intake, and there will be more clothing for all the people upset about that.

Spoonwood · 2019-02-17 17:58:03

Thank you for your comments and suggestions CrazyEddie. I guess a consequence of clothing increasing your temperature regardless of biomes, and the extreme difficulty of getting appropriate flooring and buildings for a farm which has significant impact means that farming in a desert or jungle is now inferior to farming in a grassland, swamp, or prairie where at least in principle the farmers can be clothed. That's more early milkweed pressure of course. Is the game easier or the same as before when settlements already struggled with milkweed before and now will need to focus on it even more?

DestinyCall · 2019-02-17 18:22:44

Spoonwood wrote:

I guess a consequence of clothing increasing your temperature regardless of biomes, and the extreme difficulty of getting appropriate flooring and buildings for a farm which has significant impact means that farming in a desert or jungle is now inferior to farming in a grassland, swamp, or prairie where at least in principle the farmers can be clothed.

It's actually worse than that. Farming in a desert is completely pointless, because being naked means the heat-shock will kill you when you cross from any other biome to desert to go farm some food. And if you are clothed in a desert, you have a little more time, but you will soon become incredibly hot due to body heat retention and the biome's high set-point temperature. The same is true in Jungle, just less severe so it will take a little longer to die. Farming in a normal cold biome (grass/swamp/prairie) is much more viable than farming in jungle because you can move between any other cold biome without heat shock and the clothing provides a little warmth.

In contrast, passing into jungle while naked hurts you now. And farming in the jungle while fully clothed causes you to get warmer and warmer until you die from heat stroke. Clothing slows down body temp changes and protects against heat shock when crossing biome boundries, but it also retains warmth. Overtime, your body temperature will equal the biome set-point plus additional retained body heat. In a cold biome, this means that clothes keep you a bit warmer than being naked. But it also means that, in the long run, wearing clothing in a jungle will kill you. And not wearing clothing in a jungle is just as bad as not wearing clothes in a cold zone. You will need twice as much food and need to work twice as hard. Since clothing is not optional anymore, settling in a jungle just doesn't work. You can't protect yourself from the heat properly.

I haven't tested buildings in jungle yet, but I am highly skeptical that they will work any better than clothing and you can't put your whole village in a building. I also haven't played around with how Yellow Fever and clothing interact with the new temp mechanic, but I really doubt it is any easier to survive being stung while fully clothed. If the goal was to keep people from settling in jungles and desert borders ... mission accomplished.

Bottom line, wear lots of clothes and live in the cold. Don't go into the jungle or desert if you are naked and don't stay naked for any longer than necessary. If you are clothed, still avoid jungle and desert, because they are now heat deathtraps. Given the choice between running through a big tundra or a small desert while naked or partially clothed .. go through the tundra.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-02-17 18:34:26)

Kinrany · 2019-02-17 22:47:32

Looks like the temperature system is simpler now, yay!

jasonrohrer wrote:

And finally, the hard part: biome boundaries. As the new system is described so far, the old boundary-blending issue is fixed (because only your current biome tile contributes to your heat equation, without blending), but an exploit is still possible: by jumping back and forth across a boundary, between a hot and cold biome, you could warm yourself up to perfect temperature without fire, clothes, or walls.
So, I added a system for thermal shocks. This occurs whenever you go from a too-cold biome into a too-hot biome, or vice versa. Your temperature instantly jumps from the cold side of the scale to the hot side, right to the new biome's target temperature (or from hot to cold, if crossing the other way). This shock effect is also modulated by clothing. More and better clothing reduces the magnitude of this shock. Furthermore, the shock is never allowed to bring you closer to perfect on the other side of the temperature scale than you were before crossing. So if perfect is 0.5, and you were at 0.3, you will jump to at least 0.7 when you cross into a hot biome, no matter what clothes you are wearing (if you're naked, you might jump all the way up to 0.9, though, so clothing still helps).

Does anyone actually use this exploit?

I'd try to disable this feature for a while and see if it can be thrown away completely.

Booklat1 · 2019-02-18 00:05:30

CrazyEddie wrote:

The heat shock is hard to understand, hard to reason about, and hard to deal with. It also solves a problem which I can tell has been high on your mind but which I think is actually of very little consequence, and thus doesn't need (and shouldn't have) such a complicated and frustrating solution.
People don't jump back and forth between hot and cold tiles, except in two cases.
The first case is Tarr, trying to show how much he can bend and break your game rules. But even here it doesn't really buy him (or anyone else) anything of interest. The second case is babies, who are the only people ever likely to park themselves on a single spot for a protracted period and try to keep a perfect temperature by dancing back and forth between two tiles.
And the entire effect of having a hot tile near a cold tile that you can dance between is nothing more than you would get by building a fire. You can make a fire anywhere, but you have to be lucky to have a hot/cold border near where you want to be standing. I think even without this heat shock mechanism, there will be very little hot/cold dancing going on. People will just make fires.
The big change you've made is to make deserts as bad as arctic and jungles as bad as the others. This alone solves the real problem that's been taking place, which is people settling near the borders of deserts and swamp so that they can build the bulk of the town on a good temperature (desert being much better than the others) while having water close enough to make a farm. THAT is why there are towns built on hot/cold borders... not the relatively minor (nearly trivial) effect of being able to stand on a perfect tile.
Because nobody stands on a tile. People move. They're busy, they have work to do.

I agree with everything here except that it's not trivial to have babies in perfect temp due to borders. This is one of the hardest things to have in mind when eveing right now, because no fire no safe spot for babies.

Edit cause I wanna emphasize how very important making deserts and jungles, naturally hot biomes, worse. This and making clothing help with these biomes was a marvellous rebalance, allowing us to see value in stuff that really had ot much use before. It was a much needed fix.

Last edited by Booklat1 (2019-02-18 15:28:42)

JoshuaN · 2019-02-18 05:18:09

My last life i left the village at the age of 3 with a basket and a berry, i brought back in total around 20 iron that life wearing only a reed skirt, eventually the village had made carts with the iron i brought back. Ofcourse i do use Awbz and was able to see where to find food and iron easier but that's not what i want to talk about.

The thing about that life that really got me was... The risk of starving inside a village is greater than it is when you are alone far away as possible from other people. We had no thread for clothing and no milkweed farm. I could have whipped up one but it may very well have taken away soil that was needed for other more important things like wheat, carrots, and berries. So that's all i did that life, look for iron and food. Wild berries and bananas were my primary food source as well as a few cactus fruit and wild onions. I only left behind iron and two daughters, but one of the village elders did great things with it. Perhaps we should learn to gather farther from our village, afterall living off a farm consumes iron, wood, and smooth stones more than anything else. Smooth stones and Iron is the lifeblood of all of civilization, its a shame it was nerfed.

I rather enjoyed playstyle of foraging. I knew that just by bringing back iron the village would be able to advance further up the tech tree with new comen pumps and hand carts. I may avoid farming ever again! The wild is much safer than any village.

Last edited by JoshuaN (2019-02-18 05:28:49)

robertb556 · 2019-02-18 05:37:35

Huzzah! I'm totally down with making clothing/rooms good. And with making "the wilderness" harder! But some points.

1. Clothing/buildings now cool you off in hot areas? Wait HUH?
2. DOORS. Doors are the most annoying mechanic in game. Annoying enough to just not build buildings. Also, many traditional buildings (long houses, teepees, huts, etc) don't have doors.
3. The main reason villages are built at a multi-biome interface is to have access to the resources of all the biomes. Temp optimizing on a border was just an extra bonus of that strat and only used by mothers and babies.
4. With the current resources/crafting, it doesn't matter how much of a penalty you take for crossing biomes, players will still have to do it constantly just to build a village. It would be awesome if crafting became flexible enough to build single biome villages (eg. like how a water pouch can substitute for bowl). But that's still a pipe dream.
5. "Exploiting" a multi-biome interface for optimal temp was really cool emergent behavior. It never felt gamey, just the opposite, it felt organic. I hope future patches can build on what we have now until new emergent behavior is possible. But it feels like we're getting shoehorned into playing a single "correct" way or whatever. Ironic since IRL mankind has come up with so many vastly different solutions for how to survive and thrive. Including remaining naked. Nevertheless, I think we are hopeful that more pieces of the puzzle yet to come will help make this update make sense.

Shaun · 2019-02-18 06:29:22

One consequence of this update that I don't think you've considered is lock abuse.

With people encouraged more than ever to make buildings with doors, I think we're going to see a massive increase in trolls locking people in/out of places. We really need a solution to this, it's way too easy to ruin a town by locking everything.

Spoonwood · 2019-02-18 12:05:28

Kinrany wrote:

Looks like the temperature system is simpler now, yay!
jasonrohrer wrote:
And finally, the hard part: biome boundaries. As the new system is described so far, the old boundary-blending issue is fixed (because only your current biome tile contributes to your heat equation, without blending), but an exploit is still possible: by jumping back and forth across a boundary, between a hot and cold biome, you could warm yourself up to perfect temperature without fire, clothes, or walls.
Does anyone actually use this exploit?
I'd try to disable this feature for a while and see if it can be thrown away completely.

I don't think any people other than babies used that, to reiterate now non-existent, "exploit" intentionally. However, if you set up a farm on a desert edge with ponds a little bit into a swamp, then when people ran for water, it seems reasonable to believe that this "exploit" came as in effect for farmers. As an Eve I had developed a strategy of looking for a desert with a pond either in it or near it. Since I usually found one or two ponds at most in a desert, I expect that my families farmers had that *effect* in force at some point, since they won't just rely on the primary and/or secondary ponds for water always. Since my families would often choose to grow berry bushes in those borders, that suggests that when picking berries off of bushes to feed sheep that effect came into force also. I'm sure that other families had their effect in force as I saw other families have a desert with a pond in it, and some of their farm at the edge of a desert and a swamp. I'm fairly confident that this sort of advantage for farmers is now impossible for any family. The farmers will be either too cold or too hot, if anyone ever again sets up in desert or jungle, which I find unlikely unless things change, in comparison to before. I think it clear that this entails that farmers will have to eat more necessarily, making soil and water pressure more intense. Since people will go with spots that need clothing that means more milkweed early, which means soil and water pressure also become more intense also. At least unless playstyles adapt. And even if they do, players who aren't Eves or their children have more to think about, since usually temperature mechanics got made smooth to at least some extent (or could be made smooth by Eves and their children) for later players by Eves and their children before. So contrary to what Jason has said, the changes do make the game more difficult, except of course, for those families who were NOT settling in a desert or jungle before.

Thinking more on this, I did start trying to using that effect, the 'jumping back and forth across a boundary, between a hot and cold biome' intentionally. So, the first sentence isn't true, though it may perhaps still hold that it came as not all that common that people tried to use such intentionally. I tried to place my kiln at the edge of a desert and grassland (or swamp... preferably grassland). I hardly ever found the 'sweet' or ideal spot, as watching my temperature while firing clay bowls I didn't find feasible, but I did happen upon the idea of hoping to find a balance of not too cold spots and not too warm spots to dance around when I would fire clay bowls (or smith if I built say a second kiln later than as an Eve). That said, I probably did get close to the sweet or idol spot intentionally, and I use to comment on people on Twitch streamers who had their kiln in their center of a desert saying things "I don't understand cooking the smith". That all said, for my recent run on a low-population server that "Frost" knows about, I finally tried a sizeable jungle with mosquitoes and parking my kilns a few tiles inside of a jungle is much simpler than finding the sweet spot for the smith to dance around (taken in isolation from the problem of handling mosquitoes).

I do think, contrary to Jason, that the mosquitoes offered enough of a tradeoff. When I saw people with yellow fever I would say things like "get in cold" or "get in grass" and they would remain in the jungle. And sure, they can get trapped and entombed. But, doing so is more complicated than hunting a boar, wolf, or snake. I know I got bite a few times while trying to do so. When I trapped them, I watched my pip meter very carefully and wouldn't try to trap them if I had less than 6 pips or was past 50. Mosquitoes killed a lot of children even if they were players who knew about temperature mechanics. And as an Eve before the bigserver change, I would run past jungles for the most part, as I didn't understand how to handle the mosquitoes then, and even now that I do, I'm not sure that I could teach my children how to do so by the time I died, or feel confident that enough players would do that later on. When I trapped them, once or twice, at the end of one life I thought certain areas were safe. Then I found out that there were mosquitoes who had stopped moving somehow even though they had an open square less than 6 tiles away. They wouldn't start moving until they got "reset" somehow, or so it seemed. And mosquitoes can hide behind trees also.

Jungles once could be or were beautiful (maybe after cleaning up items used to trap mosquitoes). Now they are hot hellholes that reasonable players will only touch to make rubber or to grow mangoes. I find such places becoming hideous like that such a pity. /sad /angry

Spoonwood · 2019-02-18 12:12:55

JoshuaN wrote:

I knew that just by bringing back iron the village would be able to advance further up the tech tree with new comen pumps and hand carts. I may avoid farming ever again! The wild is much safer than any village.

In my opinion many families already struggled with getting good farmers. I found many families barely having any diversity of crops at all. What will happen now? Will good farmers become as rare as gold veins? And how will families climb the tech tree if the smith/smithing team doesn't have enough to eat around camp when smithing?

Peremptive · 2019-02-18 12:15:44

CrazyEddie wrote:

The consequence is that if you are wearing clothing and spend time in the jungle, your temperature will eventually reach max hot - even though the target temperature for jungle is only as hot as the other biomes are cold. Clothing does not protect you from hot climates, it only protects you from short-run heat shock if you temporarily walk into or across the hot biomes.
Note, though, that as I mentioned immediately above, that same clothing harms you when you cross from the jungle or desert back into the other biomes. While you are in the jungle or desert, your clothing pushed you further away from the center because clothing adds heat. That means when you return to the other biome, your heat jumps back to the cold side, but stays that further distance away from the center (because Jason doesn't want you to ever move closer to the center when you cross biomes). But then your clothing KEEPS you further from the center and STOPS you from getting warmer, because clothing slows down temperature changes.
Jason: Clothing should probably not add heat. It probably should move your temperature closer to the center, so that it warms you in cold biomes and cools you in hot biomes.

pretty much this. the update didn't make the jungle as bad as grass/savanna, it made it into a death trap. clothes are way worse now than they used to be for the hot.

I made a suggestion on reddit since apparently there is the preferred location. Please upvote if you agree.

Last edited by Peremptive (2019-02-18 14:31:48)

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