a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Commoners wrote:It's probably the knife that I made and left laying around. Not exactly the legacy I wanted to leave lol
Haha, I got someone to test a bow and arrow on me and it still worked for some reason, my understanding of the code was that setting deadlyDistance to 0 would stop that, will have to poke around some more.
Haha, I saw that go down in the house.
A fully-clothed child walking up to his mother and saying "Use the bow and try to kill me."
A peek at what transpired after:
A pile of bones and clothes. I said "Damn." Mama said "LOL"
Okay, think I've figured out how to disable murders (set deadly distance to 0 for knives and bows and arrows), shutting down the server to restart and give it a go.
Bril! Here's a q: Does that deadly distance also apply to animals? Does this spell the end of the hunt?
ugh, murder troll is really obnoxious in there. Might be time to hide the knives after he's logged out.
I'm taking a break because it's just really annoying to get all set up for your task just to be murdered by knife in the middle of baking a pie.
Constant farm tending is super crucial now. ABH - Always Be Harvesting. Don't let them flower if you don't need the seed, because you lose the soil.
If there's a carrot surplus and all the stocks are filled, it seems best to leave the carrot plots unwatered until there's room in the baskets. Keep the compost nearby to replace the wheat and emptied carrot seed plots as soon as possible.
Tend the berry bushes just as carefully as the carrots, and it seems worthwhile to reap the occasional wheat for pies. 1 bowl of dough makes 3 pie crusts. One mashed carrot or one skinned rabbit can make a pie. So 1.2 plots equals 12 servings of food if you're harvesting 1 wheat and and a carrot. As long as you can keep enough bushes to compost, this just makes tasty sense. And it feels so civilized to be eating pie, especially if you're wearing a shiny new seal fur coat.
It really is like a free-play crafting mode. Perfect way to learn you way through the tech tree. I'm loving it. Working on a fence behind the big house...
I learned how to prepare dyes, so the next step is to wrangle some moulons and raise sheep in the pen I'm building! Soon we'll be sporting multi-colored wool clothes.
I'm way too excited by this.
Edit: I have to say, also, the farm work is beautiful here. The stocked carts, the carrots, the wheat, the berries, the milkweed. It's the well-tended abundant kingdom we all dream of in the savage servers...
I stumbled on a totally walled-off milkweed garden that was luxurious and protected from filthy industrial hands.
That is some devious shit.
It's kind of mad and brilliant. It's the first true shrine in the game, dedicated to the sacred milkweed. Like a museum of the holy fruit, never for plucking and only for worship and wonder.
4 berries on the bush is enough to fill a bowl. fewer than 4, you cant fill the bowl, more than 4 fills the bowl, but uses all the berries
Really? This is incredibly valuable infos. So you can only get one bowl per fruiting. I guess you should always pick all berries minus 4 before pulling a bowl.
Oh my god, it tickles me endlessly when a bear wanders into a village. It's so funny. Everything - everything is upset. The whole order of a place is thrown into chaos, with everyone dropping what they're doing to run from the bear. I laugh every time. Even if we're making great progress and things are going swell, the bear just makes for a hilarious time. Or when everything seems just ducky, and then someone runs through your screen shouting 'BEAR!' and then sure enough the bear shows up a second later. Oh my sides...
I've noticed they only seem to get terribly aggressive when they've bit hit with an arrow. I've sat my baby ass in front of a fire and just watched the chaos as a bear wanders around mostly harmlessly - I've had bears walk straight through my tile and not been killed.
But the bears with arrows sticking out of them... You bet I'm running for the hills.
And yet there are so many accounts in the real world of near-death experiences in which people witness what's going on around their unconscious body, floating above much like our top-down view of the game world.
So why not? There's no reason it isn't realistic. I don't always need to watch what's going on afterward, but I have to say, I have had some deaths I would have loved to spectate after. The time I offered to gather carrot seeds for an ailing farm as an aging man. A young farmer gave me her backpack, but made me promise i would bring it back. I did.
I loaded it and a basket with berries, rabbit meat, and a carrot from the dwindling stores, and set out for the prairies.
They were drained of wild carrots, so I continued. On and on. Growing older. Wondering if anyone was still alive in town. Going through my food, struggling to find wildberries.
eventually I came across a prairie with a few wild carrot flowers. I filled my bag and basket and set back toward home at a full sprint. At this point I was ancient, wrinkled, but no worse for wear. I was out of food by the time I reached home.
I sprinted to the farm, old and hunched and pantsless, my backpack full of seeds, and died while through the empty rows. I glimpsed that people were still alive there, though the farm was in bad shape.
The woman who loaned me her bag was there to see my return and my promise hilariously kept, and oh man I would have loved to watch a minute a or two after such a colorful homecoming.
I haven't seen this happen, but I did see some strange things tonight that made me wonder if these biomes may have been changing somehow. A settlement in a prairie, and one in a swamp. Perhaps they were attempts to create specialized industry settlements based on fur or farming? If so, they did not look to have succeeded.
The marsh settlement was particularly eerie. So much clear-cutting, and I couldn't see much for ponds nearby. It was quite lonely and desolate. People raised there or that came through tended to leave. Somehow there was no stone hatchet to be found anywhere, making fires impossible but for the few remaining piles of kindling. The usual milkweed shortage. I found another abandoned settlement to the north, but spent the rest of my time in the marsh. The farmer running water took a handcart some ways out of town full of pouches. This definitely suggests a heavy farming focus, but there weren't a lot of rows, and again, very strange to not be located in a pond-rich area.
This place was pretty dried up - The marsh just seemed eerily empty. where were the ponds? The overnourished jungle trees? No clay in sight, and even the reeds were sparse. Fields and fields of firewood and logs. It looked like something out of the Lorax. The mood was something I hadn't come across. It seems so much darker in the middle of the swamp. It was just me and the farmer for most of our lives - A few people came through, and we helped them with food, but they always moved on. This was no place to raise children. We were both males, so it would soon be a lifeless ghost town. He did a great job filling massive stores of carrots for anyone who came by. We built a second handcart and loaded the two up near the food stores - An outpost on the road to somewhere greener.
This final task accomplished, I showed him how to make compost, and we used it to plant one more milkweed.
We said our goodbyes. I died first, but he was old and not far behind.
We really should beware of how much resource we choose to consume. While really dense jungles can be hard to navigate and may hide deadly near-invisible wolves, there's something so alive about them. Looking back, I wish I had focused on building a road through that place - a hint that it's merely an outpost now. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here"
A building with wood floors and walls is a great permanent way to keep children warm. If there's a building in the settlement, there's no need to burn through so much firewood to tend the children - the swamps will become empty if we keep the fire going round the clock.
Build a small adobe house for the sole purpose of raising the children. Near the food stores so the mothers can grab a quick bite when necessary.
I find it remarkable how much things have changed in such a short time in this miniature world. What my lifetimes looked like only a few days ago compared to today - As people learn the ways of the world and live out their own cautionary tales, and as more people spread awfully-gained wisdom, the world is beginning to look a little different than it did. The place is wildly alive.
Yesterday - Sunday - was brutal. Infant mortality rates sky-high. Children abandoned more often than not. Massive village settlements with populations that never ventured beyond the nearest marshland. I guess this may continue to be the case on weekends when more people are logging in and creating havoc.
But this evening I noticed a distinct difference. I never died once as a child. Every mother brought me up, whether in a settlement or in the wild. They managed me even with their other burdens, out on trapping missions, or on distant seedhunts and plundering missions. All that was asked of me was that I keep up and cry when starving. I have been brought out of town to neighboring settlements to rebuild. I have been kept and raised at fires that remained fed. I have been clothed and cared for. And I managed to live very full lives in these sessions.
I hear word that some regions are fraught with murderers, marauders, bandits. This seems unthinkable just a couple of days ago. And I have yet to see it firsthand.
For a time, domestic berry bushes were frowned upon and considered wasteful, and now that composting and animal husbandry have been discovered, the farms themselves are changing. Before long we will start seeing a lot more wool clothing on people - But I have yet to see any!
Fur clothing, backpacks, steel tools are becoming the norm in so many places. It is commonplace for milkweed to be re-sown in desolated lands and dried ponds to be rejuvenated. The delicate balance of resource and waste has many villages on a precipice. Soil can be renewed now, but at great cost. Carrot plots can always be recycled. Some regions have clear-cut their precious branch-and-leaf giving trees. Some large villages may be doomed to ruins, ghostly outposts on the road elsewhere, their tools plundered and taken to more fertile country. It's quite touching to see these ghost towns now, to realize that the surrounding country is desolated, and to wonder at the hectic clamor of their building. Somewhere else, it is happening anew, but a little better than before.
I hope to keep some tabs on these changes as they go, at least those that I notice, and I'd love to hear others' experiences of how things have been changing for them.
What was good advice on Saturday is bad advice today - Over 50 generations have come and gone since then, and many lessons brutally learned. Every day I log on, I wonder if things have changed, I wonder what I'm going to step into.
When you hover the mouse over yourself, it reads "YOU" on the bottom of the screen.
There is no such information when you hover over other people. You can click on them - to feed them, clothe them, kill them - but it never designates who they are, as it does with all other objects and yourself.
It would be amazing to see the relation in that little box when hovering over other people. "mother," "grandmother," "brother," "cousin," etc.
Oh my god. I suppose this is inevitable. It's a lot of work to be good and kind. You can work your entire life for your tribe, busting your ass to keep the farm alive, running mad almost-suicide missions into distant prairies in search of seeds, and so on.
I have yet to come across any marauders in my many lifetimes. It raises quite interesting dilemmas of security and paranoia. In my areas there were no murderers in any of the villages - And so there was mutual trust.
But in any region where there are known marauders about, suddenly a bustling village begins to look more like a dangerous city of potential murderous bandits at all times...
Edit: Of course, if you have hidden a knife behind a nearby grove, then you have also volunteered to be the local sheriff!
An apocalyptic event requiring migration would be an environmental shift that causes milkweed in the whole region to cease bearing fruit, no matter if it's planted or wild. Or true of any crops - Carrots won't flower or bushes won't re-berry. It wouldn't be long before everyone would have to get on the move to greener pastures and merciful climes. I've thought about how this might look - Tribes desperately on the run with the remains of their villages - handcarts with tools and food, mothers carrying children, losing family to the wolves and bears on the way.
I imagine a really cool addition to a stage like this would be a kind of fire-horn. A long-lasting ember, like burning coals in a horn. A small tribe, one carrying the handcart of food, everyone with backpacks and baskets and babies, draining the bushes as they go, stopping occasionally to start a fire to cook the rabbits and warm the children.
Bones will decay and disappear before too long! I'd love to see some kind of signage, but one-item-per-tile would make for a pretty massive plot of land to spell out much of anything.
That map view is amazing. All those little villages, signs of life in the wilderness. You can't help but imagine a night view, with the little fires lit showing where the people are settled.
I have noticed that in dense villages, any plot outside the main area is way less likely to be messed with. I was at a pretty busy village, and there was a wee milkweed farm just up north a ways - not very far at all really, but away from all the mayhem, where the ground was still pristine. This milkweed did fine and was oddly rarely touched. If you go out just a little ways, it may be the way to deal with this. I haven't tried this yet, but this is what I'd like to do:
Next time I find myself rebuilding a desolated village, I think I'm going to re-till the rows, with a 4xWhatever in the main farm and a 3xWhatever out a small hike to the east or west. a fence would be grand, but for starters, this could do the trick to getting a bit more life out of a settlement.
That and constant teaching to everyone who helps on the farm and all who come to plunder.
That is wild. How does one know which server they're in?
I feel it greatly depends on what's going on in the village. After getting the hang of things, you'll be able to look at a farm and see where the problem is.
If everyone is naked there is probably a milkweed shortage. Harvesting fruiting milkweed and starting new milkweed plants.
If there isn't a forge you can work toward building one.
If the crops need more water, you can run watering trips - if there's not enough bowls or pouches, you can work toward making one.
Every village will run into food shortages at some point. Be ready to gather seeds and plant and water them. Take a basket out of town and bring gooseberries.
Always try to water a drying gooseberry bush.
Get good at building fires - if there's a lot of raw rabbit meat, build a fast fire and cook the rabbit over the coals when it goes out. Never over flame.
Milkweed is gold in this game. Every stalk is like a brand new mined bitcoin. If you are born into a village that doesn't have a milkweed farm and is running naked, starting a milkweed farm (preferably a good bit away from the bustling center) is a great thing you can offer.
Get very familiar with the surrounding biomes. Where is the prairie, the marsh, the mountain?
Make sure no ponds are running dry.
There's a ton to do - It can be overwhelming in a very bustling, busy place to figure out where you can fit in, but once you can, it may be good to get out of town and gather important resources from the surrounding wild.
Being alone is never as good as being part of a small family of hard workers with a home base. Just having one dedicated farmer and one dedicated trapper can do wonders. It's so worth it to work in groups - small groups are of course easier to manage.
As for getting up to speed with making kilns, forges, and crafting tools, there are a ton of early settlements and hamlets that don't have these things. What you do with your life is up to you - If you come across a small abandoned settlement, stay and spend some time building up a kiln and a forge. Make plates and bowls, gather ore. It's a many-stepped process, but you can do a lot to help a settlement by building these things up there.
For anyone who can't make it to adulthood, there are ways you can learn to do this even in rough spots. Every time I sit down, I sit down to live one full life. I always get one going before long. I get a handful of infant deaths for sure, but the second you grow hair and can feed yourself, there's now a decent chance you can make it. Provided it's not in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no wildberries to eat.
If you're born into what looks like a massive, thriving village, you'd better scram quick. It can be just as dangerous here as it is in much of the wild. Famine is always around the corner when the population gets large. A beautiful thriving village can deteriorate REAL QUICK. Try to get clothed while you're young - it buys you a lot of time. Clothed elders especially should be willing to donate their furs to a fire-eyed youngun.
If you're in a tribe with lots of babies, and you can run around on your own - grab a sharp stone and make a basket, or take one if there's a surplus. Fill it with berries and maybe a harvested carrot, or a bowl if there's also a surplus. And get the hell out of there. It may look tempting with all the city bustle - the metalsmith hammering steel, the baker cooking pies, the trapper arranging furs, the farmer tending crops, the firekeepers and mothers tending the children. But the end is always nigh - Get out before you become another pile of bones among the bustle.
Once on the road, look for rabbit prairies and be very cautious here of wolves. Once you've eaten a berry from your basket, bring a wild carrot seed with you. [edits: and refill your basket with berries as you go. pick fruiting milkweed wherever you find it and spread a couple of its seeds - you can always come back to collect them.] You'll likely find a smaller more sustainable homestead somewhere on the path, with enough wildberries to sustain you to grow some carrots. Then the good work can begin. Maybe you can have a small family and make something of the place.
A lovely village I was born into, with a blacksmith working away bringing the first steel tools. It was a small tribe, three adults, a teen, and infant me. I would see barrows there before I died.
Fire was kept, pies were cooked, abundant rabbits were brought, and the carrots never ceased, the farm rich with food and flower.
But what began as a lovely farm tended by an elder who knew how to handle the crop deteriorated after she died. A new young man took up the task but couldn't wrangle the hunger of the growing population. It is a story generations old.
I brought milkweed to the farm to make use of the many rabbit furs, but after a couple harvests, it too was trampled.
So in my autumn years I started a secret garden a ways out of the village, near the southern mountains where nobody ventured. I left it to grow in the little glade and went about my business.
When I reached the age of the crone, the inevitable happened. There were no carrot seeds left, and the plots were barren. A few baskets of harvest were being eaten by what had become a chaotic horde. The famine had come. I knew the secret garden's day had arrived. I asked around the farm who was tending the crop. A young man had taken it on and lamented that the young villagers were draining his crop and making it unfeasable for him. I asked him to follow me. The carrots in the secret glade were bearing food now, and very soon, seed. Milkweed seeds were stored, still awaiting their plots of fertile soil.
The farmer lost me on the way - Easy to happen due to the pathfinding on such a small number of onscreen tiles. But another young woman who was running around the farm did manage to stick with me. I was ancient by now, withering, and this would be my final gift to the village.
I arrived in the little glade of wild gooseberry bushes, with my secret carrots growing. So proud I was to have this ready at a time of such great need.
The young woman promptly plucked all but one carrot and munched them down and filled her basket and spread them upon the ground.
"what have you done?" I asked.
"What?" She replied, her belly full of fresh carrot pulp, a sprig of greens sticking out of her teeth.
"These were meant to grow seeds to save the village! Doom! Woe!"
And with that I was bones.
The lesson is, if you take it on yourself to start a secret garden when you see a growing village struggling, beware who you reveal it to.
Yeah, it's a bit heartbreaking to have to leave children to die, but it's far better to be able to respawn as soon as you want to play - It may take a few very short lifetimes before you can find a mama who is willing to raise you. It also contributes to the character of the world - You can live a decent and useful life in a small tribe. But it is a savage world out there. Most attempts to start what you hope will be a rich full life is fraught with danger and starvation.
It feels even better when other new players gather around to watch this go down and learn for themselves by seeing others do it. Lots of ooh and aahs, it's like fireworks!
If you think firing a clay bowl from scratch is complicated, just wait til you make your first steel tools...
One of the best stories I've heard for sure. Cousins running away from their home village and growing up only to return on a kidnapping caper... I have to think this must have been a riot for the person playing as that little baby. So good, thanks for sharing!