River minibiome, work for rewards

Amon · 2020-04-05 10:50:37

Just an offshoot idea regarding risk and reward. It's something that has been on my mind for a bit.

A river mini-biome that is a straight impassable line. Vertical or horizontal, it has a beginning in a spring and it ends in a pond or sinkhole.
It would have varying lengths, some being really short, others being really long. Perhaps they also bend? Creating unique features the otherwise predictable landscape does.

Risk and reward
You can't get water from the river with a bowl, you'll just get a splashed bowl instead of the water since it's so fast-moving. So that won't do.
So how do you use it?

The river floods one tile left and right from it, meaning there is a one tile belt around the river which gets flooded. The land there is fertile and ripe for planting. Since it's next to a river it gets automatically irrigated, meaning you don't have to water it and only need to expand soil and tools on it.

Sounds too good, but here comes the risk. The river periodically floods, washing away the planted crops and rows into a blank slate. (or perhaps it turns all rows into soggy rows, the river variant of a hardened row)
Most plants take 5-ish minutes to grow and two more minutes to be harvestable. Every ten minutes, the river floods for 1-4 minutes, destroying whatever crops you left behind, regardless of their growth state. The water does not take anything else that's not planted in soil.

You will have to be mindful of how many crops you can plant and harvest, if you overextend yourself, you will be wasting resources. And of course, cooperation between multiple people is key this time around if you want to reap a maximum harvest out of a single flood period.

-With this timing, I wonder how the berry bush will fare...
-I have a feeling griefers would dump and till all soil around a river to waste it, but if it turned into a 'hardened row' after flooding it would be easier to just cart the soil away and honestly, I've never seen any person grief a town that way lol so...
-Value of soil, water and iron will get a knock since water is overvalued right now.
-The river could benefit from an 'overflowing' period one or two minutes before it floods as a warning. And maybe a minute long 'dry' period one or two minutes after flooding.
-This is mostly because of how Amon thought keeping crops in their rows was silly with no 'planting' periods and no 'harvest' periods, especially with zero crop failure. You just plant it and leave it and return to it when you need it.

Natural barrier and orientation point
Go north to the river, then go west and cross the second bridge and you'll be home.

With a variable nature, it could prove as a nice border between towns/villages and serve as an important landmark between them.
But of course, it should not be absolute. What about building bridges across a river?

Expanding work
An expansive project like a watermill or a saw would be absolutely bonkers to have. You sacrifice one of three tiles of fertile land to ground stuff or have a longlasting saw.
It probably shouldn't work while it's flooding and some maintenance after long periods of usage would need to exist. Like replacing the saw and the like.
It should be perfect and allow room for better options down the line.

Expanding fishing
Perhaps you can fish in it. With the fish fished different depending on the biome you fish it in. This would leave us with three exclusive fish for each speciality biome race but also four more fish for yum.

As they go:
Bream for the artic. Gamitana for the jungle. Nile perch or tilapia for the desert.
Grayling for grasslands. Common carp for the swamp. Grundling for mountains. Mooneye or catfish or freshwater sunfish for the plains.

Whites
This would need to toss the fishing idea out if only white people could operate the river. Or maybe it's an exception and they can still fish in other biomes lol.
If they have nothing useful to grind from the oil grind, give them fishcake. I'm still not a fan of race restrictions, but hell. Why not.

Last edited by Amon (2020-04-05 10:51:15)

Morti · 2020-04-05 13:41:42

I've always wanted water to play more of a part in the landscape.
I know people have made rivers on modded servers, or at least, have put forward the ideas in the past, and shown how they'd work, and I really wish Jason would see the importance of water, for more than just watering crops, or for even fishing ice holes or making rust, but I don't know if he has spent enough time next to a large body of water, to understand the reality of it. Let alone, it's value to life on this planet.

But he always has a lot on his plate.

Keep this pot boiling and the lid rumbling, and sooner or later, he'll get to it.

Then pein can assume all credit for this idea. >_<

or pretend it was never a good one. ;-)

Amon · 2020-04-05 13:47:29

lol morti.

Honestly, my second home is the sea. You don't even need to swim in it for it to be real. Just the infinite scary blue expanse that says. You are safe here, do not go forward would be enough for me.
Anything, anything that would confine this world and give it bounds.
You will never get lost, the river will guide you, the water will turn you around.

Morti · 2020-04-05 14:53:54

Amon wrote:

lol morti.
Honestly, my second home is the sea. You don't even need to swim in it for it to be real. Just the infinite scary blue expanse that says. You are safe here, do not go forward would be enough for me.
Anything, anything that would confine this world and give it bounds.
You will never get lost, the river will guide you, the water will turn you around.

We are in such a weird place, with this game.
One the one hand, we have Newcomen Engines and Canada geese, but, who is Newcomen? And what, is Canada, to us?
We have, essentially, Africans, but no Africa.
We have gingers, but no Scotland. Forgive me, but, that's the only place I know on Earth where people with Ginger genes come from, genetically.
Like, 90% of the population on Earth, might fall somewhere in the brown skin category, yet they are associated with the jungle??
And blacks; the desert, which, is kind of a stretch, given the darkest skinned people on Earth are found in the SUB-Saharan part of Africa, nearer the Congo.

I mean, we've had this discussion 100 times in the last 2 years, and each time I come closer and closer to just treating this like chess or pac-man, and less and less like any kind of reality humanity has, or will, ever encounter. Then people argue it's art and any point just gets thrown out the fucking window and run over by a garbage truck. So it's art, okay, it's Jason's art, okay. So, we have to art Jason... into arting the game, into something we can make sense of? But not just any kind of art, because, people have made "actual" art of the springs and rivers and lakes, so not graphics, not that kind of art.

What then? poetry? Do we have to sing songs about lakes and rivers? I mean, here in Michigan we all know the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, or at least, those of us who care about the livelihoods of our towns on the Great Lakes. We know the values of the waterways, when it comes to shipping, fishing and recreation, but not just that, these waters were used by people to keep themselves clean, and the creation myths of people, not just here around the great lakes, but all over the world, have water, as the key set, in their stories.

Then there is just the plain truth of biology, and the history of life on this planet, and the role that water has played in the distribution of material throughout our cells. But, that's a longer timeline and a smaller, and larger, scale, than this game takes place in.

So how are we to get Jason to understand, and incorporate, the beauty, the allure; the mystery, of the key aspects of the hydrologic cycle, into the game?

We have wells. We have wells and we have ponds. We put water into bowls buckets pouches, and now, even tanks. We, are responsible for it's motion, at all times.
There is no flow, in this game. The refilling of shallow and deep wells, and ponds. That flow used to be something a little more obvious. I mean, you could have imagined, that when the pond level rose, that rains had fallen. But not now. Nope. Not now. You are unlikely to see a water level be restored by the appearance of anything resembling a flow, in your whole life, in, any of your lives. Ever.
Swamps, will never be, unswamped, now matter how many times you run an engine on a well nearby them. But that's not terrible, a lot of times the reason they are swamps is because rain water is essentially collecting in, what is, practically, a giant bowl of clay. But they don't last. Water always finds a way to flow, and to level. Aquifers all over the Earth, are connected. If not through the vein-like cracks in the rocks, than through absorption, gravity, evaporation and condensation.

I hate doing this for things.
This is why I don't sit here in the forum, like half of you, and suggest Jason't make changes.
What a waste. What a waste of time and good ideas. No wonder most of you hate each other here on the forum.
You are so unsatisfied, investing your minds here...

He can't do everything even one of you wants, unless you want nothing, but what you get.
Quit fighting for his attention like children, he has those already.

But Jason, if you are reading this, do take MY ideas seriously.
I want to tell my friends "You see that? I asked for that." and then they'll go, "Wtf is that game? I don't even get why someone would want to play that." then we'll drink more beer and listen to Black Sabbath and they'll pass out at the bar and I'll come home and make more dumb forum posts.
And forever be unsatisfied, with the state of things.

Nope. Just, keep the servers goin. I'll make roads till I die, a hundred thousands times.
Whether or not, I have, to route them around, or over, any, bodies of water.

pein · 2020-04-05 16:26:48

hey hey hey, I fixed an idea and only then I called my own

I don't deny that others got good ideas, just their implementation generally lacks any programming knowledge so it really makes hard to implement that way, I would be happy if anyone could fix mine so it gets implemented.

And if you search back, we had rivers idea long ago just the engine won't support changing tiles, it would be fun as limiting factor (just like Stronghold had lakes butt no way to cross them).

Even in rift we were like, okay if we can fly out. Then Jasus said to stay in the rat cage.

I would like some zonal or turf system, unlocking better lands. We still don't have groups of farms or buildings or city-wide bonuses.
The map had quite a few changes, and some of them were my ideas, that the primary biomes should be close, I counted like 4 spots viable for a city in first rifts, the new map had around 20 slightly okay spots.

Map changes and biome additions are always well taken, shakes up things. The current map was mainly designed for the rift so the old one was maybe better for a spiral.

People like to settle, and Jason always tried to force us to move, but the tech of people who move around is limited cause you can't move all the items and you likely lose other family members. And it's interesting the difference between a family and a city, it can mean the same thing at first, but several cities host several families, we got nerfs to several families having more cities. The game theme also won't support moving cities like ships, spaceships. Maybe caravans would be possible.

I still think the whole huge world is more of a bait. Before I had a few hundred hours and the confidence to go explore and still find my way back, I thought the world can be amazing rich, meeting other families could be interesting. It's not. Everything looks the same, adapting to the map and doing techs based on that? Not really. Ever since we got limitations, so you got fewer wells, fixed quantity iron and grids. Everything gets more and more generic.

When was the last time you said "wow look at all those resources, it worth making an outpost here"
With the mine having so much iron, we had a reason to build a room around it, turned out it's a bug, I would really like this infinitely producing mines that can be upgraded gradually, multiple levels of buildings, rich cities with a particular tech to generate income.

It would be nice to unlock new territories and do another kind of activity there, different problems to solve.

Amon · 2020-04-07 09:29:10

Now now morti, no need to be like that or have such a higher than thou attitude, and claiming such an insignificant aspect of live us the lowestof pleasure.
Plenty of ideas slowly evolve and resurface again and again in the spotlight, and I don't think anyone will go foul over such.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2020-04-05 10:50:37

River minibiome, work for rewards

#2 2020-04-05 13:41:42

Re: River minibiome, work for rewards

#3 2020-04-05 13:47:29

Re: River minibiome, work for rewards

#4 2020-04-05 14:53:54

Re: River minibiome, work for rewards

#5 2020-04-05 16:26:48

Re: River minibiome, work for rewards

#6 2020-04-07 09:29:10

Re: River minibiome, work for rewards

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