One Hour One Life Forums

Yesterday there was a black Moni family. The brown Moni family from a week ago was the longest lived family since the server update. The Brown Monis were unique in that they were a thriving town that was very far away from the cluster of towns that comprised the other families. I wanted to see how the black Monis were positioned relative to the other families and old Monis.

Sure enough, the Black Monis are another outlier, and right next to the old brown Moni town!

The Orange arrow points to the old brown Moni town location (already a positional outlier) while the black Monis are denoted by the turquoise arrow. Not only is the new Moni town next to the old one, someone connected the two towns with a road! This can't be a coincidence. The black Moni town is also super far away from the other families.

Whoever eve-d the black Monis, I'm on to you...

The thinking behind town layouts needs to be revisited. all towns seem to have a grid area for farms, a building for bakery next to nursery, and separate areas for forging, holding animals, etc. With the new focus on yum (and the need to not have to walk across town multiple times to do something productive), I think a new layout philosophy should be considered.

Layout Goals:
* People should be able to yum as quickly as possible without having to search out or make arcane foods. All the yum foods need to be easily eaten all in one place.
* Reduce the distance traveled cost to do simple items such as farm, cook, and serve food.
* Reduce overfarming. There is a serious cost to overfarming. Water runs out fast and people eat crops instead of finished foods.
* Increase the ease of achieving food diversity. Instead of making 10 stew pots and frantically having a late stage town on the brink of starvation constantly, lets make it easy to make food and easy to teach new players how to make it.
* Reduce space footprint. Take as little space as possible while getting as big a bang for your buck as possible.
* Increase produced food quantity as well as diversity. Each type of yum food should be about 20 bites deep. That way, it's easy to restock before that unique food runs out.
* layout should be achievable in stages instead of all at once. That allows benefit to be derived from the yum station while it's being completed.

Ok, so here is what stage 1 looks like:

This is a 12! point yum station already. You get 1 yum for 3 liquids * 3 containers = 9 yum (broth, skim, whole milk * bowl, bottle, pouch) and 1 yum each for green beans, popcorn, and berry in bowl. The 3 foods on the table are there because they all can be eaten right from the bowl, making it easy to eat from the table. Also, all the foods here are pretty efficient if you eat them each only once. The one tricky part is making sure you harvest the green beans with a bowl before they dry out.

Stage 2 adds in bread and fried foods:

At first, it will be a +2 yum with bread and buttered bread. If you can get oil, it will quickly become +2 more with corn chips and french fries. If you can get ketchup and salsa going from a different farming area, then that's another +2, bringing this stage of the yum station up to +6. In total, the yum station provides 18 yum now.
Things to consider: I forgot to include shears for the chips. You'll need shears. The oven is here to bake bread. Keep it close to make it easier to make without having to carry bowls of wheat over to the main kitchen. You can also cook palm kernels here to make palm oil. The space under the wheat is to allow for easier threshing. You might have to hold off on making chips until you set up the mesa kitchen... if so, just fill all the tables with bread and buttered bread to start out. The tables are offset from the main thoroughfare because the foods on the tables can't be eaten from the bowl. They'd have to be taken off table and set on floor anyway before being eaten. For those who don't farm potatoes, to get potato tubers you have to take a raw potato and place it in a bowl of water. After it sprouts, take it out of the bowl and cut the sprouted potato with a knife or sharp flint. Now it can be planted. Don't forget to put the second dirt pile on the young potato plants.

Stage 3 adds in a mesa kitchen:

This will at first be a +2 yum improvement with bean tacos and burritos. If you have pigs already, you can get to +3 yum with pork tacos, bringing the total yum of this station up to 21.
Things to consider: The tables are offset for the same reason the fried foods are offset. For those who don't know, the forge and limestone are for the mesa dough. The stacks of bowls are to allow you to make a bunch of mesa doughs at once... it's very bowl intensive. The stacks of plates are for stacking corn and flour tortillas once they are cooked on the hot stone. Also for making beans. Before you put the hot stone on the coals, cook your soaked beans and possibly your carnitas. When the fire is just started, you can make popcorn from dried cob in bowl (not corn kernels!)

Stage 4 adds in the pig pen and carnitas tables:

The carnitas will add +1 yum, bringing the total yum of the yum station up to 22. If you eat fresh corn and baked potatoes (which I would advise against), it brings the yum station up to 24 points. That's more than most people get in a lifetime, and they haven't even eaten the easy foods yet! (I'm talking about crops and pies). The picture also includes some items I left out of previous pictures, like a shovel for the potatoes, a skewer to whip the cream into butter, a stone to make flour from wheat, and a sharp flint to cut crops, make the potato tubers, and turn dried corn in bowl into corn kernels in bowl.

The space under the pig pen could be used to increase the yum station even further, by just stacking food there. Whatever's available. I would suggest turkeys or boxes of pies. The crops (pepper, onion, carrot, tomato) should be put in backpacks for babies so they can carry some food around with them. The main kitchen would still cook the pies, mutton and turkeys. The bread oven could probably cook some turkeys too if nearby.

One of the great things about this setup is that only a few people could maintain the station because everything's close together and about 20 bites deep (except for the carnitas). The only input to the station would be water into the cistern, kindling, salsa/ketchup, and dirt. This area could do its own compost with a carrot patch and some sheep dung, but I'm sure someone could carry those items in for the rare occasions when a new soil pile is needed.

The only tech that is kinda high up there for the yum station is the glassware. Try to scavenge the bottles from other towns or if you're the blacks, make some bottles yourself. it's best to have 3 bottles, but you can get by with 1. it just takes a lot longer for someone to yum up.

I implemented stage 1 of the yum station at a town, and these were the challenges I faced:

* Noobs will try to take the pouches with liquid in them. New payers don't get the idea of yumming. Their instinct is to put any portable food into their backpack to stave off the early death they know is coming. Experienced players need to teach the younger ones how to do it.
* Due to the great food diversity provided here, many players won't even know some of the things here are food. When I put up the yum station, over 10 minutes only one person ate from the popcorn/green beans/berry bowl table.
* New players might not know how to eat the food. Again, it's up to experienced players to teach people about the foods and how to eat them.
* It's hard to get a dedicated amount of space for a large 16x14 project that will take a few lifetimes to complete without someone using that space for their own project. I suggest putting up the pine floors, tables, and fences first (for each stage). people usually won't take bowls and buckets that are at the cow pen or if they have food in them. Just be patient.

Subtle benefits:
* It should be easier to teach new players how to do the game if everything is close together and they can watch it all unfold. I think it would be more rewarding for older players to maintain this yum station because they could literally do it all in a single lifetime.
* If we can move some of the food out of the kitchen, it will make it a lot easier to work there. If the kitchen can be dedicated to pies, mutton, turkey, feast tables and the like, then there will be a lot more space in there to work.
* We can have smaller farming areas for the other crops now. A town will still need a berry/carrot area for compost, pies, sheep and rabbits. We'd still need beans, pumpkin, squash, corn for stew. We'd still need peppers, onions, tomatoes for salsa. Hopefully though, those areas can be reduced to more reasonable sizes. I hate working on a huge farm because it takes so long to run everywhere to get water, tools, etc. Also, it's a huge water sink.

Hopefully this yum station design proposal gets some traction and people start implementing it. If I missed something or the design can be improved, please let me know. At the very least, next time I start this yumming station at a town, hopefully someone will have read this post and therefore know not to take all the pouches .

Lineage depth will probably end at 73. It was a great town with lots of yum, but two griefers killed everyone. we couldn't kill them because they had control of leadership hierarchy.

So this is a map of all the towns over the last few weeks. I think they're all the towns since the last server update?
My thought is this. Would there be a benefit for a server-wide east to west highway? The highway would go through the center of the eve spawn locations... which is roughly equal to the town distribution. This would help eves pick the best town locations along the center line, or far away from the center highway if they want more natural resources for the town.

First I'll describe the problem, then how the highway might help fix some of the issues.

Problem: The game currently has a number of critical flaws that make everything super fragile.

One, the game has gotten pretty unintuitive and complex as far as eves starting towns goes. There's well placement, getting iron deposits, dry spring gradients, homelands, sprouting iron by placing stones in a circle so you can make a shovel so you can dig your first well... it's all super arcane and unless you're one of the 5% of players that understands it all... You're going to use pond water until it runs out then your lineage dies.

Two, in order for a town to survive, there needs to be a black, brown, and ginger family on the map to enable continuous water supply. If one of the races die off, all the other towns are at risk of dying off too unless that racial family can quickly re-establish themselves. If all the towns are old, the gingers are the weak link.

Three with the new yum changes, property gates/locks, leadership/posse, difficulty in getting oil... it has become pretty easy for a group of griefers to kill towns. The fragile balance usually just needs a town to have the griefers understand the arcane rules better than the normal players. If that happens, the town will die.

Now, the solution and how a highway might help this.

An eve's best chance at restarting a racial family is to find an already established town and restart it. The best way of doing this is to find a town, go close to the well to establish a new well she can draw water from to claim the homeland, then just walk back to the established town. If they need water, they can walk to the homeland well a bit and carry water back from there until they get an engine up and running on their well again. The problem with all of this is finding an existing town in the first place. A central highway might make it easier for eves to find old towns. A walk through the wilderness is better if you can walk south, find a road, then follow that to the next best town.

All towns could link up via the central highway. Most towns don't ever actually finish a road between two different towns. If all towns had to do to link up was point their road north or south out of their town, it would make road building have much less risk of creating a road to nowhere.

A fast road back in time (aka east) would help people carry resources from dead towns up to new towns. Some resources are permanent and very helpful for towns, such as horse carts, glassware, tools, and permanent clothes. If these items could be looted all the way back in time it would give towns a better chance at survival.

How to implement

The highway could be mapped out with pine needles at first to make it easy, then paved over with stone if people were feeling there was value to it besides anchoring. The towns located off forks in the highway could be labeled with waystones. This would work kinda like street signs. The edges of eve spawn range could possibly also be marked with pine needles, to give an even better idea of the normal town distribution bounds. There should be fence posts regularly spaced along the central highway, to allow people to anchor horses without having to jump back on every 7 secs.