a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I have to say, I just lived a lovely life until I was a grey old woman. I had two sons and a daughter, and I brought an old desolate carrot farm up to functioning, added a kiln, and started milkweed farming. The daughter ran off with a bear, or something, so the place was ultimately doomed.
But it was me and my two sons, and one worked tirelessly to trap rabbits, gather the furs, and cook the meat.
The other son was hapless, but I taught him the laws and showed him the secret milkweed plots near the swamp just before I died. He kept the carrots well and learned to start fire and use the kiln.
I told them to make clothes and pouches and to leave some carrots to flower. It will be a good place when the next souls happen upon it.
A couple of hard-working sons can really do wonders for the homestead. We were kept well in rabbit meat and furs and carrots. Not a bad lil life!
I prefer to take a burdensome child out if possible then just saying "sorry kid, no can do" - If I can, I'll carry them out to the nearest bear cave, set the little fella down and say something like "Kill this bear and you will rule these lands"
Or
"Great Bear of the Harvest, accept this child and deliver us bounty"
"Live among these rabbits and be free, child"
How tempting it is to tear off with a cart full of goods... A lone child blazing off beyond the eastern borders with a fully-stocked handcart toward bear country.
I keep seeing the same problem again and again - It used to be I'd be so excited to be born into a bustling village with lots of people, but the problem is of course the overpopulation creates food shortages. So i'm doing my best to set out east with a basket of good grub and a bowl.
Once you leave town, it's an interesting journey. Depending on how far out you go, it becomes much like the first round of a game of Sid Meier's Civilization. You are the lone settler and you have to find a good place to set up camp with all the appropriate resources nearby. You need to find a fertile green country with wildberries and soil, near to a rabbit-rich prairie and a marsh with lots of reeds and ponds. Sometimes it's convenient to come across a small empty camp to set up, where some of that starter work is done for you. But it's mighty tough to set up alone as a naked kid. It's been too long since I've been clothed as an infant. I think I've been setting out a bit too young - but it's sometimes necessary when the village is in the grips of a full-on food crisis and your extended family is dying all around you. It's a race to get a good basket, and just hope that you come across a pelt on a fresh fly-ridden corpse on your flight out of Dodge.
How's this going for others so far? I like the idea. I don't want to be a burden on an overloaded village, and it's too hard to wrangle all that chaos, especially as a youngster. Onward and upward...
Still, just to set up small, crucial farms of carrot and milkweed along the wilderness is a good feeling.
I saw this in action once, and I also used this once. Both farms worked a lot better than the usual mess-of-carrot-plots. I think I will always have a couple rows of hidden carrot flowers as I go along and develop settlements. And milkweed for that matter too.
It doesn't have to be far, just out-of-the-way enough to be clear of most of the local traffic. A rabbit trapper may run into it, or a metalsmith gathering ore, but otherwise it's Farmer Bob's plot. When Bob gets old, he can show the apprentice farmer where it is and continue the way of the secret flowers. I can dig it. I'm into the secret garden ways.
I'm thinking more along the lines of role playing/performative aesthetic fun over anything related to information.
A basic twist on LittleBigPlanet's emotions is what I'm thinking - four keys, like the arrow keys or number keys, each for a short animation or even an expression.
If a shot bear starts chasing me, I'd take the time to hit the "holy shit I'm terrified" expression, for the simple reason that it would be hilarious for other players to see me run through camp with sweat beads flying off and a horrified look on my face.
Or, if your hands are free, tiny animations for a tribal dance or a fall-to-your-knees-in-grief performance. My favorite part of the game by far are those hilarious moments between players in the world when an "event" happens that's communally shared.
Agreed on the single carrot debacle... Tried it for a while, became horrified looking around at a mostly-empty carrot farm with measly single untouchable carrots and mostly unused plots.
I'm also trying to ABH - always be harvesting. As long as there are plantable seeds and available water, I should be adding carrots to the stores - but then I run out of baskets. A good farm needs some serious storage. Can wooden boxes accomplish this?
I'm very curious to try a x8 carrot plot this way. 3 separated plots for flowers (where's a big red NO TRESPASSING sign when you need one?).
I've seen quite a few farms with absolutely tons of carrot plots and they become unwieldy and require so much water, and are really too big for a single farmer to manage.
I came across a beautiful fenced-in carrot farm once... It was empty, abandoned, ghostly. But quite lovely. I hope to come across it again and attempt an efficient farm.
Gestures... A choice of emotional animation you can trigger at will. 1, 2 seconds of dance or grief or rage or love or fear.
The player would have to choose to do this, sacrificing precious seconds in order to express something aesthetically, but I am dreaming about this possibility. Dancing around a fire, falling to knees in sorrow when the chosen child dies, a farmer raging at a young buck plucking his last carrots. Being able to trigger and see these would make the experience endlessly touching and hilarious. Dark Souls has its gesture system, LittleBigPlanet has puppeteerable sackpeople emotions, and I have found both to result in absolute hilarity when utilized cleverly online.
Imagining the possibilities - I know it's purely aesthetic and wouldn't affect the core gameplay at all, but to think of these little naked people with their stick-legs dancing and raging and expressing has given me a giggle fit. Something to ponder!
I think some kind of carrot seed caution is needed for a 5th law... Similar to the milkweed problem, this is about keeping seeds always available. Last night I found myself in a land of dead hamlets where the carrots were depleted. All prairies for miles were devoid of wild carrots - all had been dug up. no farms were left with seed or flower. For miles in all directions this was the case - dead settlements with empty rows of unseeded soil, and not a seed in sight. Hilariously, there was an overabundance of milkweed. I saw the inverse in another region, where I came across a frantic man pulling a depleted handcart across the wilds with a single milkweed seed, and it seemed that he had seen some real shit out there.
How to word it in a simple universal rule though, I don't know. Different farmers treat their crops differently.
"Never pluck the last carrot in a row without a seed to replace it" would be close.
Regarding wheat: Don't you lose fertility after harvesting? Unless I'm mistaken, even if you remember to gather all the wheat seeds before harvesting, one reap = one basket of fertile soil gone forever. I hope I'm missing something, but this seems to make wheat farming frighteningly expensive on the land.
I would put a snare immediately on stage 2 if there isn't one available already. After the bow drill and hatchet, a snare is necessary to bring the furs to make absolutely everything else.
As for pouches vs clothing, that's tricky. a basket of pouches makes for very efficient farming. But clothed babies make happy mamas!
I'm still not sure what a good milkweed farm looks like, Fertile soil is precious, and those milkweeds take so so long to grow from stumps...
Villages are crucial at this stage to craft the advanced tools - Once a village has steel tools to make barrows, fences, walls, and slow fires, it becomes a central hub from which new settlers may spread out - an eternal outpost that will always have the tools available to new generations, even if carrot drought ends the line. When new tech arrives, the organized village is well set up to discover and utilize the next tier.
Okay, milkweed people. So, when you have children beyond the hamlet limit that have just learned the laws - do you keep them in the hamlet to learn the way, and send an older son east with provisions to spread root and wisdom? Children on their own may not fare long in the eastern wilds.