a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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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,
You're saving space, but you're losing water and more importantly a shitton of time which is the most valuable resource in the game.
To plant 3 bushes you need to get bowl of berries, then go find a carrot, then mash, then find reeds/straw and haul them back, then water, then haul three baskets of soil, then fiddle with seeds and then bring three water. And you effectively get 2.5 bushes out of it because you need seeds. If you have a big enough farm where you just need to rewater and bushes keep respawning at the same pace you use them, you just need to walk a bit further to grab the berries and water, which takes orders of magnitude less time. Water efficiency is just a bonus.
This goes doubly for milkweed, because you're burning two soil and two water just to make one thread, which is nowhere near worth it considering time investment in composting. And you don't even have to rewater milkweed! Yet today I ran into some ass who destroyed quarter of a life worth of work on milkweed farm insisting that I can just reuse the tiles. Wouldn't stop after being repeatedly told to, either. Frankly, I think from now on my first priority when spawning in a village will be making a knife just so I can do some actual work without some prick destroying it in seconds.
Sure, you can run an endless carrot farm, but that's about all you can do. I thought this game was about tech development which implies division of labor, and you can't have division of labor when everything is in one pile that everyone is messing with.
Pre-farming stone age society maybe. But I'm pretty sure personal property was a thing as soon as individual family dwelling were a thing, which generally coincides with development of agriculture. I think it makes sense that nomadic cultures wouldn't have much of a sense of personal property, and that sedentary cultures would need to develop a stable property system to avoid bloodshed over farmland.
What happens when someone dies? Can anyone just loot their storage then? Does it become a free for all frenzy of taking dead people's things every time someone kills over dead? Do you allow inheritance, so the children get first dibs?
IMO best would be manually designating who inherits, and if nobody is designated or designated person is already dead it's free for all. Workshops should be handed to apprentices regardless of familial affiliation.
Apparently that's too easy.
I don't like how the solution to dry well is building another well. It's not really keeping with the theme of chasing next tech level to stay afloat. And collecting piles of round rocks from ever further away isn't much fun. I think that repairing dry wells with iron bars would provide much needed incentive for continuous smithing, and the iron shortage it'd create would open room for next tech level - mine shafts.
So I'm sitting in the editor about to add tick-marks on the well stanchion or at least water in the bucket to show you when the well is about to go dry.
But that's simply too simple of a thing to teach. "Don't take from the well unless you see water in the bucket." Or "count the tick marks and stop taking when you see 13."
That leaves no room for player creativity. It's just one more arbitrary rule to learn---a rule that I invent, not a rule that YOU invent.
What's the BEST way to track water in a well, given what you have available?
What about with two piles of stones? When you take from a well, you move one stone to the other pile. When all the stones are in the second pile, we stop and wait half a generation for the well to refill. Then someone is in charge of moving the stones back to indicate that the well is safe again.
Maybe there are other ways to track this or mark the well as "risky" to take from. Maybe building a cistern next to the well is the way to go. Maybe building a well next to a pond. However you do it, you need to teach it to your children so they can continue.
And that's culture!
And that's what I want to see emerge in the game.
"Our village had this really cool way of making sure the well never ran dry. In my next life, I tried to teach the method to my new village, but they wouldn't listen to me. They were doing it a different way."
Between heavy limitations on speech, wonky camera and time being too precious for people to stand still and listen, communicating something like that is virtually impossible in the game. Having a guy responsible for well spending his whole life just sitting there repeating "Don't take water from well" might work, but a life like that isn't fun gameplay so nobody wants to do that. IMO much better design is opportunities for individuals to save the society and feel like a hero, something like bringing carrot seeds just as the town farm runs out. Discrete events like that just feel more impactful and memorable. So yeah, I'd much prefer a complex and expensive recipe for well repair to having to have well sitters. Which we won't, because wells are strictly inferior to ponds so making them is a waste of time, resources and space. They need to regenerate faster than ponds to be worth considering. But even if they did regenerate faster tending the well would be very inefficient use of time, by the time you move all that measuring shit you could've brought back more water from ponds with a pouch filled cart.
Wells should be quite better than ponds seeing they involve a decent tech level, but on the flipside maintenance of wells should require a certain tech level so they're not a one-off tech investment. Maybe something like well walls collapse when you drain it dry, and you need to reinforce them with iron bars or lime and stones or something.
Uhm, flint and any random stone wouldn't work so well IRL. You'll need something like pyrite (fool's gold). There's a reason hunter gatherers still mostly use bow or hand drill.
IMO wells should be significantly better than ponds. Just increase construction cost if balance is the problem. Or maybe add some maintenance cost, like needing to use a staunching kit to turn a dry well into a full one.
So I've been told by several different mothers that I shouldn't pick the last berry from bush or it won't regenerate. I've also seen it mentioned on YouTube videos of the game. The thing is, this is simply not true. What you don't want to do is pick the last berry from *domestic* bush without watering it because it will die. It'll never regenerate on it's own whether you pick the last berry or not. Wild bushes do regenerate on their own, and picking the last berry from them doesn't interrupt that. The game is confusing enough on it's own, can we please stop spreading falsehoods and making it even more confusing?
So what I'm getting from this is that we need more Australian players. What could Jason do to make them feel more at home? Dye the wolves yellow and increase their appetite for babies? Make bears drop from trees? Make women glow?
https://kazetsukai.github.io/onetech/#470/Boards
Basically you need metal tools, froe for splitting butt logs, axe for cutting trees for butt logs, adze for making the mallet. Making those tools is a whole different topic.
Uhm, asking if they know how to play is the first thing I do, never crossed my mind people would lie about it XD. It just doesn't factor into my decision to keep a baby. Pretty much every baby I ever had managed to learn watering carrots at least, and that's useful. Of course, they often wind up harvesting seed carrots, but that's more the fault of the organization of the farm rather than the newbie.
That's why you leave them the center and newb farm to mess around in. As a competent player, you should move a little bit away so the newbs aren't under your feet, and if there's no seed farm build a seed farm. If there's one make a bakery or something else. Bring your products where they needed in center, and try to get one of the kids as apprentice, he can take over goods delivery for starter and you can explain to them the rest of the job by the time you die of old age. Male apprentices are better because they don't get distracted by babies.
But yeah, we definitely need a way to tell people apart.
Every place I've been to has everything just jumbled together in the center. It gets impossible to find what you need, and it gets very hard to tell which carrots are for seeds. It'd be much easier if things were kept separate. Here's some area ideas:
- Newb farm - ye olde mass carrots, everyone can pick here and you actually don't want to let any carrots seed here and consume soil. Just make sure there's plenty of clay bowls for toddlers to water, and always fresh seeds in baskets next to the fields.
- Seed farm - a place run entirely by just one or two experienced farmers. Doesn't produce any carrots for consumption, only a little for compost. Main purpose is making carrot seeds for the newb farm, but does make some wheat for baker while making compost for own needs. Put as far away from newb farm as practical. This farm should also grow milkweed with any spare compost.
- Bakery - pies, of course. Bakers can't be efficient in clutter, so they should have their own little area with an oven, a couple of bowls, plenty of plates and enough baskets for those plates. Needs it's own hatchet for making firewood. A cistern might be good if you have too many toddlers on watering crops, some could instead bring water to bakers.
- Smithy/Potter - these are used only sporadically, so they can be combined. An area with half a dozen bowls with matching plates, spare clay and ore stored for when it's needed, and plenty of wood for kindling (workshop needs it's own hatchet). A box for tools (hammer, flat rock, file, tongs) would be nice too.
- Carpenter - where all your butt logs go. All carpentry tools as well, of course. Carpenters need lots of space for tools and materials, so they can't work in central clutter.
- Hunting lodge / tailor - on your nearest bunny area. Store rabbits and rabbit products here. Also a good place for thread. Just needs flint chip and bone needle for tools, but plenty of baskets are still needed for skinned bunnies. Ideally next to bakery, to make baking rabbit pie more convenient.
I think this covers the basics. I'd put a central area which is just random storage and the communal fire, and the other areas clustered around it. When you have a baby, make sure to take it around all the areas and tell them which is which.
Why are you only accounting for water efficiency? What about time efficiency and space efficiency? Using lots of space on outskirts for bushes is better than using lots of space in center for food baskets, IMO.
That's the thing, I tried teaching one kid at a time. Those three were sequential, that's why I burned my whole productive life on them. I guess there's a bit of a gap in understanding of expectations, and I kinda understand it because it's hard to explain it all with the in game chat. But my idea is that I take an apprentice who sticks close to me until he learns the craft, and then goes on to actually do that for the village for the rest of his life. And hopefully takes on an apprentice of his own to take over the shop when he passes. I think this master-apprentice relationship is the only way for long term stability of a community. The problem is, I can't explain all this in game, it's hard enough explaining the craft I'm teaching and I can actually demonstrate that. We need to somehow develop this apprenticeship culture in the game, but I'm not sure how, especially since the apprentices would by definition be newbies and unaware of lots of the game's culture.
On a sidenote, I find tutoring a lot easier if I'm born a man so I can focus on one child, and if the apprentice is a man too so he doesn't get distracted by popping out babies mid lesson. So there's an argument for usefulness of males, I guess.
Also, I wish there was a way to tell who's who, kinda hard to teach when you can't keep track of whom you're teaching.
So I just spent my lifetime trying to teach three separate kids baking, all of them said they want to learn and then bailed mid lesson. It's fine if you need to grab a bite, but come back to the tutoring area and continue. I was just standing there like an idiot wasting my life on waiting for them to come back. I could've been doing productive things, instead in the end the only thing I accomplished is baking half a dozen pies and making an axe, and I could've done a lot more if I didn't spend time trying to teach. So please, if you're not going to stick through the entire lesson, don't say that you want to learn. If people keep doing this I'll have to stop trying to teach.
By the time I turn 50 I'm totally out of sync, every single time. Players are invisible, and items appear to be where they're actually not. If somebody moves a tool from where I left it I'm toast, can't do anything. This is borderline unplayable.
Desync keeps happening all the time. I just raised a village, and half my grandkids were invisible.
I think you'd want to grow wheat for pies anyway, so composting should be happening anyway. With 4 plots of harvested carrots you can make a lot of pie, it's probably more optimal to not plant any more carrots than that and just add enough wheat to use them all in pies. Dunno what would be good field ratios there, though, anyone got data on wheat and gooseberry bushes growth times? We could probably calculate an optimal closed circuit farm (well, except for water).
I randomly got a recommended video by some YouTuber (I might have been watching his Hand Simulator video before or something), I saw the fire making process and that was enough for me to decide to buy. I think YouTube is probably your best advertising channel, as long as it's reasonably competent and entertaining gamers posting the videos. The first part seems to be a bit tricky, I've been struggling to find videos of somebody who's actually good at the game, but hopefully that'll come with time.
I think it requires very specialist knowledge to get lard from animals.
You just cut the raw fat into little cubes and boil it in a cauldron for two hours of so. Like 90% of the mass turns into lard, and the leftover is delicious cracklings. Source: I do this every winter when I help my family butcher and process the pigs we raise.