The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

Morti · 2018-09-11 15:08:37

So, another life, born to a mother wandering about, with a name, not an Eve, but someone away from home, that appears lost.

I say little, I don't beg for food, I just watch.
She pulls milkweed, makes thread, stands there looking at it for 10 seconds, probably going through the Tab menu, looking at options, then she carries me away.
Next she pulls some clay from a pit, looks at it a few moments, grabs a stone, makes bowls, looks at them for a second, turns them into plates, then carries me away.

This continues as she is moving along. She is experimenting, making items on the spot and leaving them where she finds them.

I will be very patient with this person.

I'm a few years old and she carries me far from those items, first to the west, and then to the south. A bell rang and it was 4.4k away the year I was born. Pointing south. We've traveled roughly 100 meters west and nearly 100 south, but the distance doesn't change. I grow hair on this journey. Eventually she can no longer pick me up.

So, I ask "Where / is / your / home?"

What word did she use? I can't recall. She basically said she was orphaned or that things were tough where she came from.

I decided not to ask more about that. I'm just guessing she ran off to gather food at a young age and never found her way back home.

"So / what / do you / want / to do?"

"Let's find a village" she says to me.

"Or we / could / make / one?"

She seems a little reluctant at first, but says "There is no water here."

"We will / find / some. / But / first / set a / home / marker / so we / have a / point / of / referen/ce."

She agrees, I set mine, ask her to do the same, but she doesn't. Instead she makes rope, a hoe, and uses flint on a berry to make a seed while I am off scouting and find a nice place where the grassland and desert borders meet a swamp with ponds. I return to her and her her know I've found a good place. I take her to it, explaining how it's nice and warm and show her the ponds.

Around this time my sister is born, the one who will go on to give my mother her only grandchildren. I tell my mom I'll get rope and for the next 20 years, go through the motions of running out to gather everything that is necessary at the time to basically tech up.

The farm is just getting started, the hoe my mother made where we were when we decided to start a home has broken and there are 8 tilled plots of soil, 6 of which have gooseberry seeds growing in them. My mother says she's too old and is just wasting our food but I assure her her presence is welcome and that she should stay and live till she is sixty. She agrees to stay alive.

I then decide to set off to get a rabbit for the bellows and I am near the spot where my mother made the hoe and skinned the berry when we decided to make a home. I bring back the seed along with the rabbit. She's still alive at the farm.

"Do you remember when I first started talking? When we decided to make a home? You made a hoe and skinned a berry for the seed. This is that seed." All the while she is making teary faced emotes; T.T and saying how happy she is.

"Shall we plant it here?"

She agrees, we should, but as I am typing "Would you like to do the honors?" she says "byee" and passes away.

--

This was the first time I cried this life.

--

I plant the seed. Find a basket, gather up our mother's remains, circle the camp for a place to rest her body and settle on a spot north of the forge about 30 meters and a warm corner of the desert.

Now I would like to let you know something I do, or at least try to do, every life that I find myself the son of an Eve, or any mother, who's other children do not survive to have children of their own. Rather than stop playing, I focus all my efforts on the forge; so that I have the tools necessary so that I may bury my mother and mark her grave. If I have time I will also bury the other members of the family that stuck around to work as long as they could, maybe even marking the grave of a helpful brother, but there isn't a whole lot of time to do all that.

If the family is still thriving, I will try to bury our mother, but my attention is very often divided between that goal and ensuring that there is enough food an resources to support the mothers and their children. But if it's just me, I will try to stay alive until 60 no matter what and once my mother is gone, the only thing left that matters is giving her a proper burial with a marked grave. A grave I will also usually decorate with an item that reminded me of her.

Now the clock is ticking.

I've only just returned the rabbit for the bellows, there is only 1 piece of iron at the kiln that I brought while gathering rope. I bring back 2 full baskets of iron and by that time I have about half of my food meter left. Luckily one of my sister's children takes an interest in the forge and starts helping me by making charcoal and gathering branches. We make the hammer and the ax just as we are on our last piece of kindling and branches are far off in the distance. Next I make the shovel and the chisel and let my sister's kid know that I only want to make enough to mark my mother's grave before I die. Someone comes up and asks for a hoe. I only need the adze, for the mallet, so I agree to make the hoe as well. And with the adze, chisel and shovel done, I run the shovel up to my mother's grave, bury her, find a headstone, return back home, place the chisel and mallet in a basket, bring up to my mother's grave and set off for three skewers to make the M. As I am returning home I read "I found some abandoned tools north" and while darting around for the flint and sharp stone in town to make the M I say "they were not abandoned, please return them" I wasn't sure I was going to have to take anything more than the M up with me. I didn't think I was going to make it. Everything needed was so far apart, but, in the last year of my life, I managed to bring it all together.

M on the grave, chisel, mallet, done.

And I sat there. Tools on the ground as I looked at her grave. And I began to cry again.

Stomach nearly empty, hot water welled up in my eyes, it was an instinct to go for the nearest cactus, but, an instinct that kicked in a little too late. I'd stopped looking at the meter, my mind was full of the highlights of the last 59 minutes. I died at the cactus.

Not shown in this picture are my sister and her kids, for them, see the link.
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1056665

Well done, Sue.
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1056665

Thank you.
All of you.
Thanks for making and playing this game with me.
Thank you, for being human.

jessiibear · 2018-09-11 17:09:38

I was born in that village. There was a spot in the desert that got turned into a graveyard. I think you'll love to know that the berry farm is doing well, last I was there. It's so nice to read about how our small village started.

Anshin · 2018-09-11 17:45:06

Lovely, Thank you

Megglomania · 2018-09-11 19:35:13

Morti, I was your Mother in your very next lifetime! I named you Sam, and hope you had a good life because I lost track of you, but thank you for showing me your Mother's grave. Nice post, hope we will meet again

~Mom

Morti · 2018-09-11 21:12:28

Megglomania wrote:

Morti, I was your Mother in your very next lifetime! I named you Sam, and hope you had a good life because I lost track of you, but thank you for showing me your Mother's grave. Nice post, hope we will meet again
~Mom

I remember, Mercury.
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1057751

Unfortunately I was the second to last person there. The only girl left at the time, Baby, didn't have kids that stuck around.
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1056665

And, none of her nameless sisters kids stayed around either.
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1056665

And so, in an unfortunate twist of fate, I was the first person on the site, and the second to last one. Survived only by a boy who was smithing for, perhaps, if we are lucky, an Eve who spawns there. Then maybe we can all see it again, and have another shot at making it beautiful.

jessiibear wrote:

I was born in that village. There was a spot in the desert that got turned into a graveyard. I think you'll love to know that the berry farm is doing well, last I was there. It's so nice to read about how our small village started.

Thank you jessii, it was nice, a little messy in the end, but I spent my second life there trying to clean the place up. I found a second horse and cart near an iron mine to the west and brought 12 iron back with me, but I think it was a little too late. Everyone was working so hard in the end, and when I noticed there was only 1 woman left, I asked her to balance her temp and keep her food meter full, but she just kept working until her hair went grey.

At this point, I almost wish I wouldn't have shared this story, and let it just be another nice experience for me to keep to myself. Every other life today, so far, has paled in comparison. There is just something I love about helping new players, new Eve's and new mothers; fresh homes, and this person, whoever it was playing Ellen, my mother... it took so little for me to care so much about them.

Please, Jason, if you read this, please do something about infants running away from their parents. I know people can always quit the game and restart, but they so seldom do that when it's faster to run away and die. I seem to recall you saying in an interview that you didn't want people to be able to quit the game, but that you added the hidden hotkey combination for testing. It really breaks my heart when player after player abandons the life they have been given to live just to cycle through families like we are cheap food at a buffet. Whatever their reason, it's just a bad practice.

I can't say I've never, ever, abandoned a mother. I can't even tell you how many lives I've lived in the over 900 hours I've played, but I'm fairly certain that I've stuck with more than 95% of them. Even if I am born to the newest of players; they are my favorite. But even if I am born into a town that has been around for days, I will still find my niche and persevere. I have a great deal of pride in the lives that I have lived, and as such, I go to great lengths to make those who share them with me; happy, healthy and stocked with the resources to weather any situation.

Something must be done about this problem and I think it makes sense that infants should have to crawl for the first minute or two of their lives. I can imagine this will make it harder for people who are abandoned by their mothers in towns to find a suitable wet nurse or player willing to give them food, but right now, as far as game play goes, it's more of a problem that people are cycling through mothers and less of a problem that mothers are abandoning their children.

Maybe if some of you that do that sort of thing have a good reason for it you can chime in. I don't think I will ever be content with the behavior, and I already imagine what you will say in your defense. I just wish you would give more lives a shot.

Maybe there are other options that would curb this sort of behavior. A lot of them would make things worse though, like, if babies got to choose their mothers from a list, so the people who want to be born to their friends could pick. This would really screw over Eves.

I just don't know at this point. I'm done thinking about it for now. All I can do is discourage people who are doing this and encourage people to stay with more of the mothers they are born to. Besides, I have a feeling the people that do this most often probably don't read the forums much anyhow. Maybe I'm wrong and this is normal behavior for most of you and I'm the oddball here.

Who knows?

Enjoy what lives you do live.

Wolvenscar · 2018-09-14 05:25:41

Really touching story! T.T

EllynEve · 2018-09-14 06:30:33

She had a good name! I haven't had a life that made me cry yet, but I've had lives that make me laugh my butt off. I have something to look forward to trying to achieve! Thank you for this touching account.

DiscardedSlinky · 2019-08-07 06:25:22

Pretty sad to read this when the game is in the state it's in. It was so unique and good...why are we in a box killing each other?

DestinyCall · 2019-08-07 07:02:45

Just logged on to check out the current state of the game. First life, I was abandoned by a mother who was too busy working on building a fence to feed me. Next life I was born to a red haired eve who ran off without picking me up. Fortunately, I was rescued by a brown-skinned man who fed me and kept me alive for a few years until he found my mom and returned me. His name was Alex Williams. My reunited mother and I traveled north where we found the Williams town, full of people. We were standing outside of the fence when one of the women walked over and stabbed my mom with a war sword. Then she stabbed me. Lovely.

Next life, I was born a Williams. How Ironic.

My new mother named me Pretty. She was traveling to the northwest. I never saw the town where I died. Instead we ended up at another town, ruined and abandoned, but still seemed somewhat functional. I wandered around to see what was missing and what I could do to get this town back to being fully liveable. We had some buildings, berry bushes, plenty of sheep and some crops, but no iron. No iron tools. No pies. No sustainable food other than wild berries. No clothing except sheepskins and wooden shoes. I decided to try to get the compost cycle up so I could bake some pies. Oh wait .. no tools means no shovel. No shovel means no compost. So I left the "village" and went looking for iron/iron tools/anything useful.

I was in the far north, so I headed south. And further south. And further south. I passed dead towns and more dead towns. No iron. No iron tools. No milkweed. No food. I lived off wild berries and cactus fruit. I was mostly clothed and had a backpack so I was in no real danger, except perhaps from all the bears. I kept going south until I hit the bottom right corner. Still not a single tool or piece of iron anywhere in any of the towns or badlands I passed through. I headed west and found a random horse loaded with loot. A bowl of milkweed seeds. An arrow. A bowl and snare. Heading further east, I found an interesting place filled with backpacks and clothing and at least four iron tools. I'm guessing it was a raider's camp. The entire place had been property fenced and stuffed with "riches" before the fence came down. I took what I could use and left. I decided to head back to the village in the northeast where I started, in hopes that I could reunite with some of my family, but when I arrived I found another family there, building a property fence around the town, so I left. Without a home to go back to, I wandered the map aimlessly on my horse. I saw bears and bears and more bears. I saw banana trees stripped completely bare. I saw not a single wild milkweed bush. I saw collapsed iron mines in every badlands that I passed through. Very rarely, I encountered other people. At one point, I came across an Eve raising two kids and gave her some of the stuff I was carrying in my horse cart. I had no use for it and helping her at least gave me a purpose.

It was such an empty, desolate life, following Morti's amazing road system and looking at the ruins of all these different failed towns, picked clean of anything useful. I considered stopping and working in one of the towns, cleaning it up a little .. but there was no point. There were too many missing links in the chain. I couldn't make them functional, because without a stack of iron, I couldn't make a shovel or an axe or any of the other tools I would need to accomplish anything interesting or useful. It was incredibly frustrating and really really depression. At one point I found a crucible with scrap iron in it. I was so excited! Until I realized that in all the towns I visited, I'd never once seen a smithing hammer. There was literally nothing that I could do with the scrap iron I found, because I needed at least two pieces of iron to do anything useful. And even if I managed to make a shovel ... what was the point? This world was essentially a dead world from the start . A closed system that was DESIGNED to be unsustainable. It wasn't a question of whether or not the world would die out eventually due to our mistakes. It was only a question of how long it would take for everything to be dead so bears could inherit the earth. Why even bother?

This was such a sad life. I spent most of it alone, avoiding people and bears. Exploring a tired world that was so empty and barren that it made my chest hurt.

Morti · 2019-08-07 07:44:04

DestinyCall wrote:

Morti's amazing road system

I didn't make those roads alone. Nothing I have done in this game has been an original idea either, I just saw something a new player did, repeated it, and said "Hey guys, we should do this thing, too."
I didn't make the 3x3 farm.
I didn't make up temp locking.
I didn't make up being a good person.

I didn't do anything, anymore than Jason made a parenting simulator where he'd add 100 objects a week.
Nor did Jason make the 9000th murder simulator...
HE MADE

DestinyCall · 2019-08-07 08:09:16

After playing the current finite map, there's one major change I'd like to see. Instead of making the purpose of the arch be about seeing how long you can keep things going before everything inevitably runs out ... actually design systems that CAN be sustained by group effort. So if we work together, it is possible to have a sustainable world. Allow recycling and conversion of existing materials so there are fewer dead-ends that waste precious finite resources. Allow natural resources, like bananas and squash to renew themselves after an extended period of time, so we can continue to make stew even if past generations lost all the squash seeds. Let us make weak stone tools so if there is a lack of iron, we can still rebuild basic villages and small towns to a functional level.

The current system has a bunch of weird bottlenecks. If we have sheep and carrots and wheat and water ... I should NOT be scouting across the entire map in search of a damn iron shovel so I can move a pile of sheep dung ten feet to the left. It is absurd that I can have every single thing except the designated "poop shovel" and the whole thing falls apart because that's the only way to move dung allowed by the game. There should be a way to make a basic tool like a shovel or an axe that doesn't involve robbing a neighboring village of their only shovel or spending my entire life hunting for an abandoned shovel in a dead town. This is just stupid.

Spoonwood · 2019-08-07 09:06:17

DestinyCall wrote:

After playing the current finite map, there's one major change I'd like to see. Instead of making the purpose of the arch be about seeing how long you can keep things going before everything inevitably runs out ... actually design systems that CAN be sustained by group effort. So if we work together, it is possible to have a sustainable world.

If a system were to work that way, it couldn't make for a finite map system. Not if the game had large enough player base. Jason perhaps might expand the map so that it could work. However, imagine that bs2 had just half of it's maximum population instead of the 42 it has at it present (no joke on that). Same resource problem arises. The whole finite map concept was doomed from the start. Just as swords were doomed from the start (and still are doomed). Jason won't see that though, as he's too arrogant to see the errors in his ways.

Seriously, Jason doesn't show much of an understanding all that much about the psychology of gamers. Not enough of them. I had kind of forgotten until I started playing civ III again, but even with a bunch of things other than killing to do in a game, there always exists a sizeable percentage of the player population which just prefers to go on killing sprees (Always War has been a popular civ III variant for a while... it doesn't fit well with game design... not warring with as many opponents at once as the human player knows, but it's been popular for a while). That and he is/was naive that he can manipulate those sorts of players to his liking.

I'd suggest that you move on and do something else with your time. Jason has proved time and time again that he isn't capable of improving the game significantly, and has a rather consistent track record of updates that don't work out well, nay make the game worse. And it's gotten that way for a while. He's probably still telling himself otherwise, even though he decreased the number of spots where people could enhance their fertility (the bad temperature overhaul), put in a weapon purely for the purpose of killing (swords), put in useless tech (radios, cars, and planes), made new clothes which weren't more insulating than the old ones (the loom update), and gave all advantage to the attacker (changing the 'griefer dance', after seeing Tarr's video). On top of that he has said he feels convinced that he is going to make 'the greatest game ever' and is 'the greatest designer', or whatever he said to that effect. Even though the numbers on steam are consistently in the red or stagnant at best: https://steamcharts.com/app/595690#All And his game really was small potatoes long before that.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-08-07 09:06:59)

Morti · 2019-08-07 09:32:50

DestinyCall wrote:

a damn iron shovel

testo · 2019-08-07 09:41:51

Morti wrote:

DestinyCall wrote:
a damn iron shovel
https://i.imgur.com/risAFmz.gif

Isn´t that Monty Pyton´s King Arthur or something like that?

sigmen4020 · 2019-08-07 09:46:00

testo wrote:

Morti wrote:
DestinyCall wrote:
a damn iron shovel
https://i.imgur.com/risAFmz.gif
Isn´t that Monty Pyton´s King Arthur or something like that?

It is. You should watch that, it’s a great film.

Morti · 2019-08-07 09:46:22

testo wrote:

something like that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

DestinyCall · 2019-08-07 12:47:51

Spoonwood wrote:

I'd suggest that you move on and do something else with your time. Jason has proved time and time again that he isn't capable of improving the game significantly, and has a rather consistent track record of updates that don't work out well, nay make the game worse. And it's gotten that way for a while. He's probably still telling himself otherwise, even though he decreased the number of spots where people could enhance their fertility (the bad temperature overhaul), put in a weapon purely for the purpose of killing (swords), put in useless tech (radios, cars, and planes), made new clothes which weren't more insulating than the old ones (the loom update), and gave all advantage to the attacker (changing the 'griefer dance', after seeing Tarr's video). On top of that he has said he feels convinced that he is going to make 'the greatest game ever' and is 'the greatest designer', or whatever he said to that effect. Even though the numbers on steam are consistently in the red or stagnant at best: https://steamcharts.com/app/595690#All And his game really was small potatoes long before that.

The funny thing is that I HAVE moved on and did other things with my time for the last few months. I was just checking back in on the progress of the game, in the hopes that things were not as bad as they looked from reading the forums occasionally. I stopped playing some time after the Come Together update, since I didn't find it enjoyable to play OHOL while trapped inside a poorly designed prison system that encouraged racist murder sprees. I was really hoping that Jason would figure out that property fences and war swords were making the game worse, but based on reading the recent News post where he describes fences as one of the "important features of the game" that were underutilized, I suppose I was being overly optimistic about that.

I love the idea of OHOL and I have fond feelings for my early experiences with the game and its community. But I am really worried about the direction it is moving in right now. The community is a huge part of any online multiplayer game. It is the heart and soul of the game. But a community is not unlike a child. It is fragile and constantly growing and changing over time. If you don't nurture it and protect it from bad influences, it can become damaged or broken. I worry that Jason has ignored (and even encouraged) the griefer problem for too long. He has allowed the wolves to grow too strong and too numerous and too hungry. There are too few sheep left who are wiling to die for the wolves' amusement. It's an unsustainable cycle, just like the current finite map. I just don't think he has realized it yet. There have always been enough new sheep, lining up for slaughter, so he could ignore the growing wolf problem and label it as a "feature" instead of a bug.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-09-11 15:08:37

The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#2 2018-09-11 17:09:38

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#3 2018-09-11 17:45:06

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#4 2018-09-11 19:35:13

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#5 2018-09-11 21:12:28

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#6 2018-09-14 05:25:41

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#7 2018-09-14 06:30:33

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#8 2019-08-07 06:25:22

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#9 2019-08-07 07:02:45

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#10 2019-08-07 07:44:04

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#11 2019-08-07 08:09:16

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#12 2019-08-07 09:06:17

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#13 2019-08-07 09:32:50

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#14 2019-08-07 09:41:51

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#15 2019-08-07 09:46:00

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#16 2019-08-07 09:46:22

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

#17 2019-08-07 12:47:51

Re: The Best Lives are the Ones That Make You Cry.

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