a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
If you weren't there last night for the Zoom call me and Jason ended up talking over fishing, game problems, and a bit of League of Legends. One note that was brought up in a thread + the chat last night was should iron veins have an rng factor to what you get out of them sort of like fishing?
For a little background experience I've played Runescape on and off for about sixteen years so fishing has a very nostalgic quality to it due to the sort of chill nature to the activity to it. Fishing in OHOL basically improves the more people who are doing it at one time and promotes teamwork in the same way you see multiple people rushing to bake pies whenever an oven is lit. I honestly think iron mining would really benefit from this communal effort of getting it especially now that iron veins are very easy to find.
In regards to original mining and its rework status (ignoring now the scarcity thing, that can be discussed elsewhere) I don't think it has ever felt quite right. Mining veins before the rework felt like it was just a bunch of nonsense clicking as there wasn't really any weight behind it. Click vein, add sanction kit, and then spam make piles of iron until the vein ran out. That didn't feel right at all to be honest, it always felt sort of weird that iron mining was just a game of stacking and stacking.
The reworked iron mining has a really bad flow feeling to it as you are constantly pausing to eat in between each and every swing. This can somewhat be combated by having a two man team with one clicking the vein and the other moving iron ore and feeding the first player but that seems weird too. So why not try the fishing approach with iron? This has a number of effects which I think would improve the overall experience.
1). Players are encouraged to interact with others rather than doing it solo. Lets take fishing with a fishing rod for example: Currently, the maximum number of casts per player is 576. (age 12 pick up, each cast is 5 seconds long) If for example mining had a high estimated amount of uses like this it means one vein would take a single player 48 minutes, a duo 24, a trio 16, so on and so forth (unless I'm derping up my math it's a tad bit early in the morning.) This encourages veteran players to either team up due to time costs or potentially bring along newer players thus teaching them who can then teach others.
2). Resources can be gathered without all the randomly seeking. Jason seems keen that searching around randomly for items is boring and to some extent I can agree with him there so why not have a table of possible results on an iron vein? Flat rocks, big rocks, iron ore, gold ore, alum, malachite, zinc. Add in a miss and a very low chance fail condition and boom now mining feels like mining vs the weird flows both the original and reworked mining has. My only potential issue with this is that with such a large drop table is the rng factor could bust pickaxes before getting replacement iron which would really suck. Maybe iron veins start out incredibly rich (higher chance of iron drops) and slowly as you use them up iron becomes more scarce.
3). An iron sink in the form of getting iron. In the current rework the goal was to reduce the amount of iron in the game by basically tweaking the numbers down instead of adding more iron sinks into the game. With the proposed change to mining and using our fishing casts per hour as a guideline each iron vein would have an average cost of 27.4 pickaxes (assuming each iron vein would last 576 uses) which is a much higher steel sink than even the oil grind is currently. Basically keep the idea where veins give free iron to bootstrap then making iron cost steel to get.
TL;DR:
-Mining becomes RNG that starts with heavily favoring iron drops and slowly degrades into other resources as iron becomes more scarce.
-Change mining to be a timed animation to both encourage more players mining and give the job a better flow.
-An iron sink is created that actually removes iron from the game at a more reasonable rate.
Worlds oldest SID baby.
Offline
I'm just going to slip in a plug for copper/bronze pickaxe as a way to prevent bad iron RNG from screwing you over completely.
...
And also, this is an awesome idea and sounds like it would feel more like real mining.
The Community Crucible added something like this - semi randomized results for iron mining. In fact, they took it a step farther and added ore veins to every biome. Each biome had a different drop-table, so if you wanted a decent chance to get gold, you mined in the tundra. If you wanted more chance to get rare minerals, you mined in the desert, etc. You would always get a decent amount of iron and some other stuff, but the ratio would vary depending where you found the vein. I loved how it made the biomes feel more unique.
Here's a link to the forum post that contains the drop table used by CCM:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6794
I probably would have made one of the biomes have an extra high chance at providing dug stones, so building stone houses would be easier. And other one drop a lot of flat stones, so you could go crazy with the road building.
Last edited by DestinyCall (2020-03-31 14:01:09)
Offline
Getting other ressources from mines is not a bad idea but with the way you suggest it it becomes a game of chance rather than players decisions.
"oh this town got lucky and digged enough iron to get to the next level, cool"
"other town had shit RNG and died out..."
There's no decisions to make it's basically going to the casino and hoping to a have a lucky streak
I'm not against having some RNG it can be fun but it should be added on top of it and not be the main course.
Your current idea is just gambling, needs rework.
Offline
I'm just going to slip in a plug for copper/bronze pickaxe as a way to prevent bad iron RNG from screwing you over completely.
...
And also, this is an awesome idea and sounds like it would feel more like real mining.
The Community Crucible added something like this - semi randomized results for iron mining. In fact, they took it a step farther and added ore veins to every biome. Each biome had a different drop-table, so if you wanted a decent chance to get gold, you mined in the tundra. If you wanted more chance to get rare minerals, you mined in the desert, etc. You would always get a decent amount of iron and some other stuff, but the ratio would vary depending where you found the vein. I loved how it made the biomes feel more unique.
Here's a link to the forum post that contains the drop table used by CCM:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6794
I probably would have made one of the biomes have an extra high chance at providing dug stones, so building stone houses would be easier. And other one drop a lot of flat stones, so you could go crazy with the road building.
Yeah, I think having a lower tier pickax for either protection against bad rng or as the actual boot strapping mechanic would be a good choice. This would also make sense as in why the first tier needs to be more plentiful because until that point you don't have any iron anyways.
I obviously didn't play enough CCM to get a feel for mining there but how did it feel? I'm obviously not sure what the exact feel good percentages are for iron rng but was 55% good enough or did you feel like you were getting too many nonessential by products? With their current numbers one pickax = 11.55~ iron per pickax which doesn't seem too terrible. Then again, this also seems like a bit too much iron per pickax at the same time especially in a world where you have multiple miners working together.
25% chance lowers our iron per pickax to around 5.25 which nets 4.25 iron each pick which while low gives us a better sounding number imo.
Worlds oldest SID baby.
Offline
+1 to making mining more like fishing with it taking time.
+1 to mining giving different resources. Maybe it could work just like CC as Destiny said, with there being mines in different biomes that have different resource weights. This would also encourage buidling actual buildings near or around the mine, so you can store all the different resources you get before shipping them off to their processing area.
Mining feels much better than the clickfest than it was before, and I actually do like investing resources into the mine via Hungry Work, but 10 Hungry Work per swing feels a bit extreme since it requires you to bring a load of food and you end up spending more time eating than mining which doesn't feel right.
I also really enjoy having more stages of the mine. Maybe the initial stages could give exclusively iron, but once you install the stanchion kit and you actually mine blind and you can't really see what you're doing so you end up getting a bit of everything.
I still think iron being a finite resource is a bad idea. It turns many items into an objective misplay, and it actually reduces the amount of decisions you can make. Should you craft a rail? In the previous system you had to weigh whether they would actually be useful in any way (in most cases they wouldn't), in the current system the answer is always no.
With fug's system the mines could be potentially infinite, but the more you exploit the mine is the less iron it actually has, and eventually it takes a long time to get new ore because you're just getting rocks most of the time. You can still get iron, but it will take several people working together (and they can't just mash the mouse button since the transition takes a couple of seconds), and the amount you can get per hour is limited.
Offline
I obviously didn't play enough CCM to get a feel for mining there but how did it feel? I'm obviously not sure what the exact feel good percentages are for iron rng but was 55% good enough or did you feel like you were getting too many nonessential by products?
Unfortunately, I didn't mess around with mining that much because it was initially bugged so only the tundra ore veins worked properly and I didn't live close to a tundra. This didn't break the game, because ground iron was available in all biomes and it was a low pop server. For simple tools, you could wander around until you had enough iron. You didn't go to the badlands for iron, since the biomes were so ridiculously large. Mining iron was only necessary for late game tech, like engines, cars, radios etc.
Later on, I was playing with a group of other players and another person did a lot of mining, so we ended up with an abundance of iron and several cars. I focused on other things, liking farming every available crop, cooking lots of different foods, catching horses, and building ridiculously long roads.
Offline
There's 3600 seconds in an hour, assuming the animation lasts 10 seconds you could farm the mine 360 times per hour (for one person).
Let's say the iron drop rate is 5% that's 18 iron per hour for only one person mining, that's insane, you could farm all the iron you need in 2-3 generations and make your engine, if you work 3-4 person on the mine.
And if RNG is added that's all players would do (gambling addiction).
What numbers would you use to avoid players being able to just farm stacks of iron in one life?
Time for mining animation?
Pickaxe breakability percent per use?
Percent chance to get iron?
Limit of players mining?
It seems like players would just farm iron non stop and get to the top of the techtree in a couple of generations and have stacks and stacks of iron, making decisions regarding what you do with the iron each generation meaningless or be unlucky and die.
Overall it would be down to RNG if a village succeeds or not, might as well go gambling.
Offline
First wow Jason is being really receptive (I guess that happens when you have a smaller fandom)
Secondly this looks great, and I do like Destiny Call's idea of having different mines have a higher chance for different resources,
Such as the tundra will have more chance of gold
Deserts more chance of Alum, Cinnabar, Lapis Lazuli
Swamp for Clay (because clay is everywhere)
Ext
Or just make some resources exclusively to some biomes, so that their is a bigger RNG for more basic resources
what I mean is like don't have Alum, Cinnabar, Lapis Lazuli be a possibility to be mined in the badlands mine, so that their is a great chance for iron and other bad land resources.
which will make it easer to find what you want instead of having a small percentage to find one of everything, because we have so many materials that can be extracted form the ground.
and multiple pickaxes would be great
"hear how the wind begins to whisper, but now it screams at me" said ashe
"I remember it from a Life I never Lived" said Peaches
"Now Chad don't invest in Asian markets" said Chad's Mom
Herry the man who cheated death
Offline
A). You're assuming that a player can mine from age zero. Glad to see you're thinking that one through Dodge.
B). At a 5% chance of iron per player mining you are producing a near 1:1 iron per pickax you craft. (Pickax has an average of 21 uses, 5% is = is 1/20.) which is dumb. The scaling has to at least be greater than the input to pickaxes else you don't get anywhere.
C).By age gating mining to 12 like fishing we can lower the amount of actions to 288 swings per hour in an absolute perfect world if transition time = 10s per one attempt. This means one player is breaking 13.74 pickaxes and producing 72 iron per hour or net about 65 when iron is at a 25% which can be adjusted down by lowering iron chance.
25% = 72 (65 after recycling 1.35 iron ) or No recycling would be a net of 59 iron per 48 minutes per person which is 1.2 iron per minute per person mining.
20% = 57 (50 after recycling 1.04 iron) or No recycling would be a net of 44 iron per 48 minutes for a total of 0.9 iron per minute per person.
15% = 43 (36 after recycling .75 iron) or No recycling would be a net of 30 iron per 48 minutes for a total of 0.625 iron per minute per person
10% = 28 (21 after recycling .43 iron) or No recycling would be a net of 15 iron per 48 minutes for a total of 0.3125 iron per minute per person.
Also remember these people are spending 48 straight minutes doing this without adding in times to restock on pickaxes, move other resources that pop up, or even eating. I can't imagine you're going to get a bunch of people essentially clicking in one spot for 48 minutes straight each and every life.
By doing the 10% rate you would be on what iron veins were per par before the current changes but it would be timegated instead of an instant 21~ iron you were getting per vein before the original update.
Last edited by fug (2020-03-31 16:01:15)
Worlds oldest SID baby.
Offline
10 seconds looks really long.
Just count to 10 s, while standing there doing nothing.
Then repeat for each mining action.
Last edited by Elsayal (2020-03-31 16:05:21)
"I go"
"find"
"iron"
Offline
A). You're assuming that a player can mine from age zero. Glad to see you're thinking that one through Dodge.
Well I don't see any labor laws.... so I don't see what's wrong with this
"hear how the wind begins to whisper, but now it screams at me" said ashe
"I remember it from a Life I never Lived" said Peaches
"Now Chad don't invest in Asian markets" said Chad's Mom
Herry the man who cheated death
Offline
10 seconds looks really long.
Just count to 10 s, while standing there doing nothing.
Then repeat for each mining action.
I don't really have a problem with the action being 5 seconds but then we need to double all the numbers (which isn't a huge deal.) Obviously the goal is to have mining feel more like mining while also encouraging cooperation while having some semblance of balance.
So lets at least do the reasonable numbers.
15% = 86 iron per 48 minutes or 72 iron net after recycling.
10% = 56 iron per 48 minutes or 42 net after recycling.
7.5% = 43 iron per 48 minutes or 29 iron net after recycling.
And just a reminder for this, with these numbers you're breaking 27~ pickaxes per 48 minutes mining so you're still doing a ton of smithing or at least someone is to keep up with the amount needed.
So the takeaway is if mining transition is 10 seconds then the iron chance per attempt should be around 10% and if the transition lasts 5 seconds the iron chance should be around 7.5% chance.
Worlds oldest SID baby.
Offline
Yeah numbers can be adjusted but it's still just down to RNG if a village succeeds or not in other words gambling.
Turning OHOL into a casino game.
It's fine for less important ressources like fish but for iron that is one of the main part of the techtree not so much.
What could be interesting is having at least some number of iron per generation guaranteed, no gambling it would be 100%, and THEN having the choice to either use that iron for the things you need and keep some to gamble for potentially more or keep it for other stuff, even that i'm not sure since were talking about a major ressource.
But iron should definitly be time gated one way or another to avoid having stacks and stacks of it and choices being meaningless.
How about mine requires a newcommen pump to drain the water (historically accurate), it runs for 60 minutes and the first stuff you mine will the pump runs is iron guaranteed 100% ( a determined ammount) then the rest that you mine will the pump runs is RNG, then pump stops and you can run it again get guaranteed iron then RNG etc.
Basically each level of the mine gives you guaranteed iron + some ores/other that could be iron or not, run the pump again and you go deeper down the mine, get guaranteed iron and the possiblity to mine other stuff etc.
Offline
There are some limitations to what animations can happen in a context like this, just based on the way that "character" vs "held object" animations are divided in the game.
Characters have 5 animations (walking, standing, being held, doing, and eating), and they are "part" of the character itself.
The way fishing works is that it is stuck in your hand and sets your speed to 0, preventing movement. The pole itself has an animation, but the character is just standing there.
So for mining, the pick could have an animation (rocking, making a sound), but the character would just be standing there. Would look pretty bad, I think.
The reason a held object can't specify an animation for the whole character is that the characters are all different. They each have different sprites and parts etc. Some have hair that swing when they walk, etc.
I'm also not at all interested in slowing you down by making you stand there and wait X seconds to do something.
Fishing works that way mostly because it's cute/funny, not because I want to slow down fishing.
But yeah, getting something different out of the mine with each whack could be a thing.
Not sure about having the proportions change over time (more iron early, more rocks later), because that seems like it would create a surplus of useless stuff later, as you bang away for the thin iron at the end.
Offline
But the arms are all the same, so the arms could move and you could even have an emote since emotes can be implemented for all charachter models?
Regarding the time gate it could be done with the newcommen, the animation itself could only last a few seconds, see comment above.
Offline
You've also got to remember these are numbers for SOLO players. Gathering iron would only truly be slow if you only send one person to mine at a time and with how iron veins are found right now it would be easy to form a small group of miners vs previous renditions of mining where you'd be looking all over the map for a single vein. Remember when you posted the picture of the miners? It wasn't just one guy doing all the work now was it?
The main goal is turning something that feels like it should be a group activity into a group activity. By discouraging solo miners and slowing it down for these people you encourage them to either bring new players to help or to form a small group thus increasing the social interactions. The numbers can always be tweaked to whatever feels appropriate but I do think something like this would overall be an improvement over the current system we have for mining.
Worlds oldest SID baby.
Offline
There are some limitations to what animations can happen in a context like this, just based on the way that "character" vs "held object" animations are divided in the game.
Characters have 5 animations (walking, standing, being held, doing, and eating), and they are "part" of the character itself.
The way fishing works is that it is stuck in your hand and sets your speed to 0, preventing movement. The pole itself has an animation, but the character is just standing there.
So for mining, the pick could have an animation (rocking, making a sound), but the character would just be standing there. Would look pretty bad, I think.
What if the Character is really going down into the mine and re-apears when he founds something ?
Or, what if the character really enter a new territory, a new space, inside the mine ?
I'm just throwing ideas there
"I go"
"find"
"iron"
Offline
Might feel more like mining if instead of a timed animation, it was smaller hungry work with only a chance of ore on each swing. Problem is durability of the pickaxe with all the extra swings. I know some things have been made non-use, perhaps the non-ore swings wouldn't cost durability?
https://onemap.wondible.com/ -- https://wondible.com/ohol-family-trees/ -- https://wondible.com/ohol-name-picker/
Custom client with autorun, name completion, emotion keys, interaction keys, location slips, object search, camera pan, and more
Offline
But yeah, getting something different out of the mine with each whack could be a thing.
Not sure about having the proportions change over time (more iron early, more rocks later), because that seems like it would create a surplus of useless stuff later, as you bang away for the thin iron at the end.
if we are going to get a different thing every whack shouldn't we make the iron mine infinite? and just decrease the percentage of getting iron every time you mine the vein, which would eventually cause the mine to become stale or the percentage of iron so low that it isn't worth mining their any more, and then remove the Diesel Mining Pick, because if this new system is implemented of RNG mining the Diesel Pick will be in weird place, of should it just make iron or keep the RNG going?
"hear how the wind begins to whisper, but now it screams at me" said ashe
"I remember it from a Life I never Lived" said Peaches
"Now Chad don't invest in Asian markets" said Chad's Mom
Herry the man who cheated death
Offline
I obviously didn't play enough CCM to get a feel for mining there but how did it feel?
It worked exactly the same as the old mines did. Attach a stanchion kit on an "iron" pit and you then pull out ressources until the mine breaks. Only difference is that you get different materials depending on the biome you are in, instead of just iron. It honestly didn't feel that great since you mostly ended up with a bunch of trash (flat stones, round stones, flint chips and big rocks) and barely any useful ressources (iron). You could get a ton of gold in the tundra though. Even when the mine was in the mountains you barely got any copper out of the deal.
Here's the chance chart for the mining if you're curious.
As you can see no matter where the mine is you have 28 % chance to get trash out of the deal (since those ressources are easily found elsewhere).
So long story it didn't feel great. Too many useless side products. I preferred the old mines tbh.
Last edited by sigmen4020 (2020-03-31 19:32:35)
For the time being, I think we have enough content.
Offline
I like the iron like it is now, I'm even fine with eating every swing.
How about making it that mining one iron costs 40 food? Only yummers could mine it.
Just kidding... Don't do that.
Making own private server (Very easy! You can play on it even if you haven't bought the game)
Zoom mod
Mini guide for beginners
website with all recipies
Offline
kinda said the same thing
hourly income would be nice, or more like each 20 min a session
during this time you got a limit of work and a limit of resources
it will take 10 minutes of actively working to gather out the resources.
It could be a big rock then you would need to split it open to find out what it contains
it could give one iron at first guaranteed so the pick can be replaced or it wouldn't break at all.
we could have an animation of going down the mine, and coming back up if that's an issue, it could be a drill also which doesn't make much sense without electricity
we also could have multiple upgrades on iron increasing the maximum amount of resources you can gather.
The problem with single upgrades is that we rarely have to do anything, one player can upgrade the well or the iron and the rest of time feels kinda flat. with multiple small upgrades would be more interesting and more interactive. If you start off with 10 iron then every 20 minutes 1 more and 1 extra item, then for every upgrade 1 more item, it adds up eventually. rather than having 21 then 78 then 144 or whatever.
I say 20 minutes so you can do it 2-3x per life.
also skipping out it would mean that you lose some of it so working and interacting would be more important.
I feel like we don't have enough activities in the game, people aren't lazy always, sometimes they are limited by the resources. I could burn through all the water the city has by planting milkweed, or smith most of the iron into steel ingots. It's kinda sad when a kid asks you what to do and you got no clue what to say.
The most common was farming until we had water, maybe building pine roads or walls, cutting boards. I tried to make french fries the other day, I made some palm oil for the rubber, then planted some potato with my newbie son. I had some visual bugs so I was kinda slow, he had to eat some berries when I was away. We did 6 plates of potato and planted the rest back. It's quite a lot of food, more than the berry bushes gave, my son was like "this is fun let's do some more". Aside from the fact that we had no girls, that was quite a lot of resources turned into quite a lot of food. Sure, water will run out eventually and you got a big crisis but if we would have small upgrades and a limitation of work and wait timers itt would be more work and some rest every session.
1-minute animations would not be good at all but 5 seconds to do a job would be okay I think. Right now I could get enough adobe in let's say 20 minutes, using itt to build a building would take me 2 minutes tops.
Also, there are no static jobs, so hanging around in a place has no real reason other than having a collection of resources there. IF people could do 5 sec animations while talking, then feed kids, they would feel better about themselves and others wouldn't say that they just munching berries and they are useless.
It would make sense to have a top cap on how much you can get per 20 min, and how much work you need to do.
If the can only upgrade gradually (1 item per unique person per session) then the workforce matter more and you can't rush the upgrades either, also you could only upgrade an empty mine. I think 5 seconds is fine but it could be 15 and proper clothing would decrease the timer (helmet, clothes). Mining big rocks out would introduce space issues, you could only split them in place, so working in team would be essential, while one person does the mining, the other clears the space around the mine, so they can talk too. Als o would make minecarts valuable if split rocks take time to transport manually, or you can only drop them tile by tile or put it in a minecart to move. This would save up space.
But I guess splitting would mean you get 2 items at once.
Some of the rewards could be useless waste rocks, later tech could convert it to bricks but until then it would be a waste of space.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7986 livestock pens 4.0
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4411 maxi guide
Playing OHOL optimally is like cosplaying a cactus: stand still and don't waste the water.
Offline
Track carts are super slow, just a bit faster than carryng big rock.
The only reasonable use would be if they were the only possible way of interaction between the two devices.
Like moving ore stright from mine to furnace.
Offline
Well if it would only be possible to pick up and drop near you it would be an annoyance. Or mine directly to a cart and drop on the other side.
Another issue is that we only got one start and one end, we should be able to stop a cart at any position (with a lever perhaps).
It shouldn't be exactly like the big rock (big geode for example) it could have even more slowing effect, kinda dumb exploit to pick it up the rock and drop on the other side of you, walk the other side of it and repeat. if it's any slower than it's worth putting in a minecart, and if it doesn't go in a normal cart, minecarts have a function. If you can perform the mining half the time than the actual refresh timer, then you can process it on the other half of it or just collect multiple for later. adding extra job for processing it and cleaning up after would be better than just pulling out useful items all the time.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7986 livestock pens 4.0
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4411 maxi guide
Playing OHOL optimally is like cosplaying a cactus: stand still and don't waste the water.
Offline
bunch of trash (flat stones
How dare you.
Really though, it would be neat to have a renewable way to grab all sorts of miscellaneous ores and rocks IMO. A transition from run-around-aimlessly resource gathering to mining gathering would naturally create stockpiles for the village to run to when they need these basic resources, rather than stealing the smithy's flat rocks or running around for 5 minutes to find the only round stone outside the kitchen. And once you have stockpiles people would more easily be able to make a road that enables trade, rather than spending several lives running through the wilderness to collect enough stones for a vague set of waypoints.
Hero the roadbuilder
Student of the Morti school of berry management
Offline