One Hour One Life Forums

You were a particularly malicious little devil today, stealing my newcomen parts while I was working on that diesel engine. It took me a while to convince the town of your subtle acts of theft, but eventually you managed to stir the hive. We had lots of players on the hunt for you, bows with arrows, and old women with knives. It's a shame that, despite that, you only suffered the fate of yellow fever rather than us having the satisfaction of spilling your blood.

After you died though, it was an eight-minute game of hide and seek. But after some effort, we managed to recover everything you hid from us. Newcomen parts, pump valve, camera box, etc.
Plus I got to finish my diesel engine for the town!

But next time I'll keep an eye out for you, and next time I'll have my revenge...
>:D

With the new war update and the push for town defenses, some people on discord and I were discussing a way to alert the locals if there was a raider/griefer within the city. This means no matter where you were in town, as long as you were within a certain radius, you'd hear the bell ring for a bit, and know there was danger and to engage a fight or flight response, possibly to the town's panic room.

The issue I ran into was that there would be players just crying wolf whenever they used it. People could spam that bell and no one would take it seriously anymore. Then when there actually is danger, some people would have already died by the time people knew what was going on. My solution was that the bell could only be activated by an injured player, someone who's been stabbed or shot (Or wounded by animals such as bears, town medics can recognise that the sound means someone must be injured), with a 5 second cooldown between rings. It's no longer a false alarm, someone actually has been attacked.

A few drawbacks with this idea though; firstly, for the bell to be activated, someone has to die, unless there are meds nearby. Secondly, a griefer/raider who is only stealing without taking lives will not cause an alert. It is up to the people to spread the word in this instance.

Another problem I ran into as well was that this bell takes two gold to make. That's hard to come by, so younger towns will be at a disadvantage. Also, that gold could be put to use in a belltower (If the town even wants one as of now), and some toddler could ruin the bell tower project by placing the bell on some random fence/wall, depending on how the panic bell would be crafted. For the latter issue, there would be a timer before the bell would become permanent, so some other player could easily reclaim the bell.

Anyway, thanks to Humboldt and Mofobert for the idea