a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Congratulations and thanks for the hard work on optimization! Well done.
I second everything that Alias said above. Please engage your Linode account rep and/or their tech support staff, and don't be reluctant to escalate until you find someone who really understands the situation and can help you.
This means following the advice to "leave one carrot in each row for seeds" is one of the worst way to grow carrots efficiently.
I see this happen from time to time, and it drives me nuts. I assume it happens because someone has heard the advice/instructions "LEAVE ONE FOR SEEDS" and thought it meant "one carrot" rather than "one row of carrots".
I would like to see the apocalypse have a chance to persist items, but degrade them. This way instead of a blank slate you end up with interesting ruins. Some of those stone walls could be crumbled, the bell tower might be half gone, some steel tools lose their handle, etc.
You can rebuild, but it becomes an interesting puzzle to use the resources that survived.
I like this a lot.
My information on the whole first trip business comes from this https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/ … 508fe6a536 I explicitly remembered it in the first place because I thought it was crud that a first time donkey would sneak out of there with a slap on the wrist.
Yeah, I think Jason misspoke in the summary on that commit. He assumed that someone getting cursed a lot would necessarily get cursed enough to send them to Donkey Town early on. Whereas it's possible - though probably rare - to accumulate curses for a long time without ever passing the Donkey Town threshold, so that your "first time" comes when you're at a higher lifetime total and thus get a higher sentence.
This added in a 2 hour afk period on my account (I thought first trip was only 30 minutes?)
Time spent in Donkey Town is based on the lifetime total number of curses you've received, not the number of times you've been sent to Donkey Town. The algorithm is described in this post. I'm surprised you only got a two-hour sentence. Maybe that was on your alt account instead of your main?
The algorithm was designed with typical players / griefers in mind, so naturally it breaks down for minmaxers. You and pein aren't spending nearly enough time in Donkey Town. Not only should the sentence length be increased as your lifetime total increases, but the threshold should likewise be reduced. I'm pretty sure the intention behind the curse system was not "You are allowed to piss off just enough people to receive one curse per hour on average, in perpetuity."
I'll open an issue on github and suggest a better algorithm.
The apocalypse needs to be neither impossible nor inevitable; in either case it's a pointless mechanism. If it's impossible, as it appears to be now, it will never happen, and no one will even try. If it's possible at all, then a supervillain such as Tarr will find a way to make it happen, and once others learn the technique it will happen all the time.
The ideal state is where someone, or a few people working together, can attempt the apocalypse and have some confidence that it might succeed. This gives everyone else something to do and a reason to do it, namely to stop the apocalypse. Doing it needs to be a challenge, and stopping it needs to be a challenge.
Apocalypse 1.0 was a foregone conclusion - if you want it, you can do it, and you can't be stopped. So it happened every hour. Apocalypse 2.0 is also a foregone conclusion - no matter how dedicated you are, no matter how hard you work, no matter how much skill you have, no matter how well you can exploit the game's odd quirks... you cannot make the apocalypse. (*)
Foregone conclusions are no fun. No one will try - no one has tried since the week after it was introduced, and the only reason it was tried this time is because Jason specifically asked for it.
The idea is great, it just needs work.
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(*) Okay, it actually is possible, because a caster did it. But it took a group of people camping out on a low-pop server creating a forced lineage coordinated through discord for a couple of days in a row. I don't think that's the kind of effort that Jason envisioned for a successful attempt.
The health of a town can be instantly appraised by looking at:
a) how brown is the berry farm, and
b) is there a lit large slow fire
Green bushes and a lit fire means at least one or two people know what they're doing. Brown bushes and no fire means the town is entirely filled with incompetent players and will soon die.
Everything else is a matter of degree. Got tools? Pen? Baskets? Carts? Rope? Milkweed farms? Surplus of pies? Buildings? Maybe yes, maybe no. If not, that just means the good players haven't gotten around to making them yet. But if the bushes are brown and the fire is out it means there are no good players.
Make more bowls.
God, yes, please!
Store wheat in bowls.
Oh god, no, please don't.
More bowls is good. Storing wheat in them is a terrible use. It takes up just as much space as the pile of grain, but now it also consumes a bowl that would be much better used for pretty much anything else.
Also, bakers - stop grinding up multiple bowls of flour at once. Leave the wheat on the ground until you have enough plates to make more pies, then in one step get a bowl of wheat, grind to flour, turn to dough, and put on the plates. At most have a single bowl of flour ready to go while you're still waiting for empty plates to come back. Otherwise you're just taking up precious bowls for no good reason.
Buildings aren't useful because heat management isn't very important once you have the resources to make buildings.
Heat management affects food consumption. Food is abundant once the compost cycle is working. A few people maintaining farms, sheep, compost, and pies can feed a very large town even if everyone is naked and the town is built on cold biomes.
On the other hand, now that temperature is affecting fertility, if buildings were an easy way to maintain the perfect temperature that would be a very large reason to make buildings. The problem is that buildings can just as easily make temperature worse if people build them on deserts or jungles, or make fires in them, or walk around in them fully clothed and cover them with bearskin rugs.
I had someone new-ish ask me whether PVP was enabled. I was puzzled, but said "yes". Then he asked how you kill people.
Some people simply don't understand what this game is about.
since you are mostly eager to comment on how bad of a mother I am
I don't think that has been anyone's intent.
Culling only happens when the server restarts, and it only culls things that weren't seen at least once in the seven days prior to the server restart.
Culling is prevented by the object being seen. It doesn't have to be interacted with, it just has to have entered the vision of at least one player at least one time within that seven day window. Which means that both live bushes and dead bushes should either be culled or not culled together.
... at least, I believe that's the intention (based on skimming the code). The actual behavior might be more complicated, possibly unintentionally.
Tell them what you're doing and ask if they want to help.
That works for both new and old players alike. If they're new you'll end up teaching them, if they're experienced they'll either learn something new or have fun working together on something.
so if they're dead they never disappear though right?
That's correct.
And if they're full of fruit they also stay forever?
That's correct.
They never disappear ("decay") no matter what state they are in.
According to onetech, domestic gooseberry bushes will not despawn. They can be removed in various ways, but if left alone they will eventually become dead gooseberry bushes, which persist forever.
Domestic gooseberry bushes persist forever as long as they have at least one berry. After the last berry is picked, they begin dying in several steps: languishing, then dying, then dead. Languishing bushes can be removed using stakes, getting it wet, and then quickly digging it out with a shovel; the dug bush can be chopped into kindling. Dying bushes can be removed with a shovel and will become kindling. Dead bushes can be chopped into kindling, which will remove them.
You can see the details of all of this using onetech. Start at https://onetech.info/391-Domestic-Gooseberry-Bush and then follow the "How to use" chains.
This was excellent.
We need more of this in the game.
There's the kernel of a valid complaint here. The advanced content is only going to be rewarding to hard-core players, people who can devote a substantial amount of time to the game. They don't provide any benefit to the town, so their only value is as something to build for the sake of building it. But because they are complex and only accessible in late game, not many people will have the opportunity to enjoy the challenge of puzzling out how to build them and developing the skill of building them.
I think that's fine. There is plenty of other content which provides more useful benefits to a town, which is accessible earlier, and which is complex enough to be a stimulating challenge but not so complex that it's beyond reach for casual players.
As I've said elsewhere, while I'm glad the advanced content is there, I'd be even happier with more focus on enhancing the lower-level content, and in particular creating more viable paths and more interaction between the paths.
You must make a home marker.
This is a myth. You do not need to make a home marker.
You simply have to die as an Eve at 60 years of age, then reconnect to the same server at a time when there are fewer than four fertile women. You will then spawn as an Eve on the place where you previously died.
If you spawn as a child in between Eve spawns, your last old-age-Eve-death location will still be remembered and you will still spawn there again as an Eve the next time you spawn as an Eve on that server. But if you ever spawn as an Eve and die before 60 years of age, you will lose your saved location (if any), and your next Eve spawn will be in the next spot on the Eve spawn spiral, not where you had died at any previous time.
Because there are more people using the setting to make sure they log in to server 2, it makes it less likely that people will randomly be assigned to server 2 by the random OHOL system (AKA reflector).
One minor correction. The reflector doesn't consider how many people are already on a server when it sends a new connection there. All active servers have the same chance to get any new player from the reflector. (... well, almost. The probabilities are weighted by the server max capacity, and server1 has a lower max capacity than the others, so server1 will be sent slightly fewer new players by the reflector than the others.)
i would like to see some actual code, but its safe to assume it's the same
Bells and home markers use the same code to determine which way the arrow should point.
What if I do the eyebrow dance as a baby? I'm not trying to show I'm some elitist, it's just funny as hell and a good way to pass the time as a toddler.
That's what I'd always assumed. Until at some point I saw (maybe on discord, maybe the forum) a reference to using it as a "hey, I'm special!" signal. That really pissed me off. But no, I won't abandon someone who does that, because I'll continue to assume they're just being funny.
Q is pretty unambiguous, though, and will earn someone a one-way ticket to a snowbank from me.
Also little-known: if you cut down someone else's home marker, they don't lose it. You only lose your home marker if you, not someone else, cut down your own.
So go ahead and cut down those home marker forests. Clear up space and declutter the center of town. Leave up one so that other people will remember to set it for themselves (and never remove the two stones!).
does any one say "Q" any more? It doesn't seem to help me like it used to
If you say "Q" to me I will let you starve.
I don't like elitists.
Gederian, I think you misunderstand how the server selection and spawning mechanisms work. Having every server used at all times wouldn't produce the results you're suggesting, other than the spiral growing more slowly.
Either that, or I'm misunderstanding what you're suggesting. If so, my apologies.
Playing on a full server makes it less likely that you will have children. Ever server gets the same number of births. Playing on a more-populated server means that same number of births will be split among a larger number of fertile women. (This didn't used to be the case; this came about after the recent change that disabled sticky sessions.)
Playing when there's a lot of people playing or only a few people playing doesn't change how many births you will get. What matters is whether the playerbase is increasing or decreasing. If it's increasing, you will have more births; if it's decreasing, you will have fewer births.
Average lifespan also affects number of births. If other players are dying young, you will have more births. If other players are dying old, you will have fewer births.