Take the time to teach the 3 laws

Xuhybrid · 2018-03-23 01:00:50

As a parent, you should take some time while raising a baby, to make sure they know the laws of the land. To make sure the land can always sustain life and civilisation, before they go and break one of the laws, and destroy the natural resources. After all if you're just sat at a fire feeding them, you can spare the time to type.

What are the laws?
Never dry ponds
Only hunt family animals
Only pick fruiting milkweed

Everything else doesn't really matter in the long run but these laws are important so that future generations aren't unable to survive.

Edit: Thinking about it, shouldn't there be a fourth, to not cut down wild carrots?

Last edited by Xuhybrid (2018-03-23 01:03:25)

EaterOfBerries · 2018-03-23 02:38:12

The Three Laws are outdated. Milkweed is now very renewable with easy compost, and drying ponds isn't really a problem (it's not permanent damage), unless it has a goose. Family animals is still important though. I'd add don't chop down maple trees, and yeah carrots is important, but not super important.

Xuhybrid · 2018-03-23 02:45:18

EaterOfBerries wrote:

The Three Laws are outdated. Milkweed is now very renewable with easy compost, and drying ponds isn't really a problem (it's not permanent damage), unless it has a goose. Family animals is still important though. I'd add don't chop down maple trees, and yeah carrots is important, but not super important.

The problem is, if you pick milkweed in an area and it never grows back, you have to travel miles to find new seeds to start another farm or have any at all. This is the same thing as killing the area's resources. If you take the time to setup a farm of milkweed, are you suggesting that people just pick it all when not fruiting? Drying a pond is permanent damage if they do it to all the ponds.

Last edited by Xuhybrid (2018-03-23 02:45:41)

EaterOfBerries · 2018-03-23 03:07:38

Neither of those are PERMANENT damage. Permanent means non-reversible. If you drain a pond completely and the goose leaves, that goose will NEVER come back. If you hunt a non-family rabbit, the hole will remain empty FOREVER.

With milkweed, I could repopulate an entire area using just one seed. In fact, a couple of my lives have consisted of taking one or two seeds and turning it into a large field of milkweed. Ponds are similar.

I'm not advocating that we should not teach when to pick milkweed, only that it is less important than the rabbit problem, or the tree problem because it is reversible.

lesslucid · 2018-03-23 03:52:40

"Don't die in clothes on farms" is super important, but I'm not sure it deserves to be made a law. Losing a full set of clothes means the destruction of a ton of rabbit fur and milkweed thread, but OTOH that stuff is all fully renewable.

Thorware · 2018-03-23 05:09:28

EaterOfBerries wrote:

The Three Laws are outdated. Milkweed is now very renewable with easy compost, and drying ponds isn't really a problem (it's not permanent damage), unless it has a goose. Family animals is still important though. I'd add don't chop down maple trees, and yeah carrots is important, but not super important.

Completely agreed.

Ponds are easy to restore, even if it means traveling to the next biome to reseed the water. Geese are not critical, and die permanently when they get used anyway. You only need one to make one file, and that is enough to service a village practically forever, files don't get lost too easily.

Milkweed is harder to restore as you must potentially travel a great distance to find more, but milkweed damage is completely reversible. As more players gain experience, milkweed patches are becoming more common and easier to find. Not to mention that the huge milkweed patches required by large villages are big enough to easily survive a few noobs picking incorrectly. Only a determined griefer can do major damage, but he's working to upset sustainability anyway, and there's nothing he can do to clear any stumps that have already been picked.

Rabbit hole preservation is the most important thing to teach noobs as they are so easy to permanently destroy if you happen upon snares lying near non-family holes. Every time this mistake is made, permanent damage is done. A noob trying to clothe himself could wipe out an entire field. Eventually no rabbits will be left, permanently crippling nearby villages. Goodbye backpacks, no additional water skins, and the village will have to rely on reed skirts and wool (for at least shoes, if not hats and coats if no wolves or seals are nearby), both less warming than rabbit fur, or else transport furs over great distances. And sheep are extremely high tech compared to furs, needing shears off the top of the blacksmith tech tree. Clothes have to constantly be remade after being lost from dying on farms and bones, whether through ignorance or accident, so sustainability is very important. Pies are crippled too, without the skinned rabbits.

Chopping down useful trees is another permanent no-no, and so easy to do for a noob when axes are lying around. If it makes kindling or tinder, leave it standing! If you don't know the difference between trees, don't chop down any at all! This is nearly as important as rabbit holes as if enough damage is done a village can find itself in a situation where it is practically impossible to start a fire (tinder and leaves have two minute despawn timers), ending pies and all crafting, dooming a village to eternal carrot farming.

Wells are easy for noobs to drain and ruin for ten hours, but wells aren't terribly useful anyway even if handled by an expert. I believe wells are a waste of space and resources and shouldn't even be built in the first place. I would rather have the stones.

Digging wild carrots is permanent destruction, luckily carrot farms are common and domestic seeds are stronger and sustainable, so while it's nice to have wild carrots nearby for supplemental seeds, losing them to noobs isn't terrible.

In my opinion, the easiest and most common way for a noob to ruin your production cycle is by picking a berry from the domestic gooseberry patch to feed himself when he is young, or is getting hungry at any time. This ruins one bush and therefore one compost for an hour plus the required time for someone experienced to notice and go through an irritating correction process picking the bush and re-watering. This problem is made much worse because new players often spawn as eves in the wilderness and learn to survive by picking berries, and domestic berries look exactly like the wild berries they are used to living off of in the wilderness, so they will have literally no clue that they are doing anything wrong or that the berries behave completely differently and won't grow back automatically. While this problem is not permanent damage, it is common and confusing and disruptive enough that I believe it needs to be promoted above the milkweed rule as a law.

So if I were writing three laws for noobs today it would be these:

1. Trap only family rabbits
2. Do not chop any trees (or only chop trees that do not produce any item when clicked)
3. Do not pick domestic gooseberries

Joriom · 2018-03-23 08:31:52

Thorware wrote:

In my opinion, the easiest and most common way for a noob to ruin your production cycle is by picking a berry from the domestic gooseberry patch to feed himself when he is young, or is getting hungry at any time. This ruins one bush and therefore one compost for an hour plus the required time for someone experienced to notice and go through an irritating correction process picking the bush and re-watering. This problem is made much worse because new players often spawn as eves in the wilderness and learn to survive by picking berries, and domestic berries look exactly like the wild berries they are used to living off of in the wilderness, so they will have literally no clue that they are doing anything wrong or that the berries behave completely differently and won't grow back automatically. While this problem is not permanent damage, it is common and confusing and disruptive enough that I believe it needs to be promoted above the milkweed rule as a law.

I'll just add one thing to that - the rule of a thumb in the wilderness as Eve is to never pick over and over from one bush. Always pick from as many as you can so they are all regrowing at the same time.
This is perfect for wilde bushes. This is devastating for domestic ones.

Potjeh · 2018-03-23 17:44:51

Milkweed is technically renewable but it costs a ton of water and time to replace so one thread is definitely not worth two threads. And with all the other farming going on it can be hard to have enough water nearby for milkweed farm, so it's easy to fall behind on milkweed planting if people are picking it when it's not fruiting,

Lexyvil · 2018-03-23 18:52:03

I have just got this game yesterday, before that I didn't know anything about it other than seeing what my girlfriend mentioned and what the trailer showed.

I quickly learned about the "three rules" from the mothers that have raised me through the few hours I have played, and that alone I find is what makes this game amazing.

The fact that there's hardly any instructions how to advance in technology and how people have to share what they know is interesting, especially when it's your own in-game mother (a player) that has to relay everything to the newer generation about the village you're born in--the direction to ponds, the wildlife, where the farm is. I'm really looking forward to future updates to see whether the rules will be easier to follow or if there'll be new ones that will be crucial for a civilization/generation to survive.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-03-23 01:00:50

Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#2 2018-03-23 02:38:12

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#3 2018-03-23 02:45:18

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#4 2018-03-23 03:07:38

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#5 2018-03-23 03:52:40

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#6 2018-03-23 05:09:28

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#7 2018-03-23 08:31:52

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#8 2018-03-23 17:44:51

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

#9 2018-03-23 18:52:03

Re: Take the time to teach the 3 laws

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