One Hour One Life Forums

Jason, do you know that temperature management is important exactly one time in each life - when you are a baby, and your mother (assuming she is a decent player) is trying to keep you fed without starving herself? Good mothers will tell you to keep your temperature mid-range, and good babies will do so. But here's the thing - that doesn't rely on clothing. Instead, the baby has to park themselves on a tile bordering a hot and a cold biome, and move back and forth between two tiles as needed.

Doesn't it seem a little weird that in a single camp, whether your baby lives or dies depends on whether they're standing on tile coordinate X,Y or X+1,Y ? That standing HERE means you'll lose a pip every four seconds, but standing five feet to your left, THERE, means you'll lose a pip every fifteen seconds?

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Here is a suggestion for making clothing and buildings important, but also desirable rather than despised:

First, drastically increase the size of the regions within which temperatures are roughly the same. If your town was established someplace warm, it should be warm everywhere in town. If your town was established someplace cold, it should be cold everywhere in town. It's just plain weird, to say nothing of inconvenient and annoying, that you need to be naked when going to the pie shop but fully clothed when going to the carpentry area.

Towns are larger than biomes, and are composed of multiple biomes. But towns shouldn't have big swings in temperature. Climates should be larger than biomes as well. Maybe do something like this: Every tile has a temperature, and that temperature is determined by the average biome temperature of all tiles within, say, a 50-tile radius. There will still be hot, warm, cool, and cold places all across the map, so Eves will still want to keep searching for a spot that isn't too hot or too cold. But when they find a spot they like, the entire camp (and eventually, the entire town) will be roughly that temperature, and people won't need to don and shed clothing just because they're heading into the nearby jungle to grab some bananas or into the snow to kill some seals.

Clothing would still matter, because most spots would be too cold - only the middle of a very large desert or jungle would be warm enough to be naked without significant penalty. But putting on and taking off clothing wouldn't be necessary just to walk around town and do the routine tasks of running a town. And that's good, because putting on and taking off clothing isn't interesting gameplay.

Next: have warm clothing and cool clothing. Warm clothing raises your temperature, and will keep you warm in cool or cold climates but heat you up in warm or hot climates. Furs and wool. Cool clothing moves your temperature towards neutral - in cool and cold climates, it insulates you; in warm and hot climates, it protects you from the sun. Reeds, straw, cloth. This provides a reason to not be naked in every climate, and provides some diversity: you have to construct the right kind of clothing depending on what climate you live in.

Next: make clothing easier to live with. Make a new container: "Pile of Clothing". Give it enough slots that someone can drop all their gear in one pile. I'm sure it will take some engine changes to implement (so that, for example, you can't store non-clothing stuff in a pile of clothing) but at least this way someone putting on or taking off their stuff won't take up SIX TILES with a bunch of crap. Free space is precious, please don't make it even harder to come by than it already is.

Next: Buildings. Make buildings move temperatures towards neutral, not universally make things hotter. Once again, in cold climates buildings provide insulation; in hot climates, buildings provide shade (and floors provide insulation from sun-warmed ground). This would provide a reason to make enclosed (or even semi-enclosed) spaces in any climate. Maybe walls and floors could radiate "temperature neutrality", and not have to deal with the question of enclosure.

Next: Fire. Fires and coals should bring your temperature close to neutral in a cold or cool climate, and have little effect in a warm or hot environment. In other words: when cold, fires are for heat and utility (cooking, forging); when warm, fires are for utility. Avoiding fires in a warm climate isn't an interesting challenge, it's just weird. People in warm climates don't stay away from fires because they're too hot, even though people in cold climates cluster around fires to stay warm.

Fires and coals should heat things up (when cold) within a short radius. Lighting fires and letting them burn down to coals needs to be a reasonable alternative in Eve camps to getting a lot of clothing in a big hurry.

Finally: Fires in buildings. Buildings should make fires much more effective, including possibly heating up buildings in warm climates (despite what I just said above about fires not making warm climates hotter). Here's maybe one way to do it: from each fire, flow outwards X tiles in every direction (manhattan distance and direction), stopping if you hit a wall. Count the number of floors and walls you encounter. Increase the temperature on every tile you encounter, and increase it by an amount that depends on how many floors and walls you encounter.

This would have the effect of causing people who spend most of their lives inside buildings with fires (i.e. smiths and bakers) needing to wear cooler clothing than the other people in town. People stopping by briefly would get hot, but probably wouldn't bother changing clothes; smiths and bakers venturing out briefly would get cold, but again probably wouldn't bother changing clothes. But people expecting to spend a lot of time there would find it worth their while to take off some clothing (especially if they could keep it all in a Pile of Clothes container!) and then put it back on when leaving for a long-enough time.

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All of this provides some interesting and useful reasons to have and manage clothing, buildings, and temperature. In most climates it will always be possible to improve your temperature by using the right kind of clothing and the right kind of building (i.e. with or without fires). Different circumstances will call for different amounts and kinds of clothing. There won't be a need to doff and don clothing for routine matters, but a long-term change in plans may call for a change in clothing, and could provide strong incentives to do so.

Food for thought.

Tarr's point reinforces my "rethink temperature management" exhortation. Do you know that the current meta is that Eve camps must be built on desert or jungle? The reason is simple - food consumption goes through the roof when naked on neutral biomes vs. naked on desert or jungle. Eve camps don't have the luxury of clothing for a long, long time and are critically short of food. Putting the berry farm (where children and mothers spend most of their time) on desert vs. grass very often makes the difference between surviving vs dying within three generations.

But that has made the Eve meta very stale.

I know you're about to mention what you see as the problems, but I'll go ahead and mention what I see as the problems.

I don't care about the mechanics and mathematics of heat transfer as you've outlined them above. The basic problem is that in the real world, one rarely travels outside of one's biome, and when one does (or, when one goes from inside a warm house to a cold snowy day outside and then back again) it takes the tinest fraction of one's life to retrieve one's clothing from a convenient storage location and put it on, and then reverse the process when one returns.

In OHOL it's absurd to consider putting clothing on and taking it off again when moving from one biome to another or from the inside of a building to the outside. The intuitions one has from from real life become unworkable when mapped into the game.

This makes both clothing and buildings close to useless.

I've never heard of the Bob cult.

I've seen a lot of sheep pens, though. Kudos.

The first thing any noob learns is to lie when asked "are you new", because of assholes and idiots who kill them when they answer truthfully.

I call 'em like I see 'em. You're not pursuing an optimally efficient town, you're simply imposing your will on others because you can.

That's not an "opposing view" worthy of respect.

The problem is that you need empty space to work in the pen. You need room to set down a basket, and you can't do that unless the pen is substantially less than full. If there's only a few empty spaces, you still can't use any of them because the animals occupy them instantly by moving around.

The ideal pen has some dung so no one has to wait when ready to make a compost pile, a mouflon so you never have to worry about shearing the last sheep, one or two unshorn sheep so you never have to wait for a lamb to be produced when you have a food bowl ready, and plenty of empty space so you can work. The shepherd's job is to restore this balance whenever it gets out of balance temporarily due to fluctuating demands.

If someone is doing the work to make food bowls and feed shorn sheep to harvest wool, then increasing the size of the flock by one or two additional sheep makes sense. But if all you're doing is making compost and pies, a small flock and an uncluttered pen is better.

Most animals will not cross biome boundaries. There are exceptions, like bears.

I believe the determining factor is the "Move Behavior" parameter. "Random" and "Flee" will stay in a single biome, "Chase" will cross biomes.

Pen space is a limited resource. Creating dung consumes it, and it requires significant labor to get it back. Creating more dung than is needed at any given moment strains both the space capacity of the pen and the labor capacity of the shepherds.

Even worse, sometimes some genius will realize that the pen is too full of dung and will start moving it out of the pen and onto the ground nearby, which uses up the shovel.

Efficiency in this game is all about recognizing which resources are currently scarce and which resources are currently abundant. If there's plenty of dung already, don't feed lambs.

Yup.

After a bit of interest in seeing what others thought was so important to say that they committed it to paper and left it there for others to find... I quickly determined that none of them had anything to say that was of any interest to me.

quoted for truth

With the current zoom level, directing others to follow a trail is a sad joke. And leading others there yourself (i.e. traveling as a group) is a slapstick farce.