a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Woot! Thanks!
I figured diesel engine is a little harder for people to put together than the distillery + pumpjack. Plus I've been having putting the engines together so I rushed one out when I got to revisit the camp.
A request for the handful of people who know how to build the very advanced tech: please spend more time manufacturing the pieces and leave assembly to later generations. Those of us(*) not inclined to learn recipes by studying onetech can benefit by seeing what the various parts are and how they combine (using the in-game hints), and can slowly backwards-engineer how to work up the chain from the parts we already know how to do.
(*) For all I know, I'm the only such person...
Players’ attention has been shifted from building a civilization to reach the top of technology tree.
I'm sympathetic to this concern, as are I think many of the other forum users. It's harder to have large developed long-lasting towns than it used to be, and there are several different reasons for that. I think having such civilizations is a central part of Jason's vision (he's talked about such matters frequently); I think he wants it to be challenging, but I don't think he appreciates the factors currently in play that are making it not merely challenging but in fact flat-out impossible.
Even players who are focused on the technology tree feel the same way, because it's harder to climb the tree if the towns keep dying.
In the past, 1 queen or emperor in charge of the town, with 1-2 horseback escorts, inspections and missions to villagers.
Having fewer advanced towns means that more towns are struggling to survive and thus have less capacity to support useless people pretending to be in charge.
A real kingdom that can existence more than one day, even can have Trade or fighting other cities.
Trade is a pipe dream given the current core mechanics of the game. There is neither any ability nor any reason to trade, and adding ability or reasons would require overhauling nearly everything about how the game works.
Fighting could be fun for a few people but will probably be broadly destructive of the enjoyment of a great many people.
• Religion wars
• Aurora style marriages (or marriages in general)
• Saying "in the bush"
• Dictators
• The slave market
• The drug trade
• Cults
• Sacrifices of babies
• Brother lovin'
I started playing with the Steam release and I have no idea what most of those things are. If they exist at all they must be quite rare, and I for one am glad of that. I don't begrudge anyone having fun their own way, but I have yet to be anything but annoyed by anyone's roleplaying beyond the simple pleasantries of staying in character ("I love you mom" etc), so by and large if people want to roleplay I prefer they do it in ways that don't affect me and in places where I am not.
In my experience, what I see of roleplaying inevitably leads to murder. And while I'm basically okay if a bunch of non-productive people want to kill each other, it's almost never consensual; someone uses "roleplaying" as a spur or excuse to go kill whoever is around them whether they wanted to be involved in their little drama or not.
For a variety of reasons, there are fewer highly-advanced towns now than there were in the early days of OHOL, and as a consequence, most settlements you will be born into are in precarious situations, where if there aren't at least a few players who know what they're doing born into each generation the town will crash and die. That means that there's a lot fewer situations where significant numbers of people can just roleplay and screw around rather than be productive.
There's always plenty of non-productive people around, of course, but my hope is that they'll be engaged by the gameplay and attempt to learn the game mechanics rather than sit around in a glorified chat room.
But a quicker way is to use two items of one type and a third of another; the dissimilar item is the arrow-head pointing the way.
Like this?
O O O O O
O X X Y O
O O O O O
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O O O Y O
O O X O O
O X O O O
O O O O O
That's pretty good. I'd be a little concerned about it being ambiguous to someone not already familiar with it. I think most people would guess correctly, but not everyone. Also, I suspect a lot of people wouldn't even recognize it as a directional marker at all.
But for anyone clued in, that's a pretty good marker. As you say, it's fast to make. Requires two different types of objects that are resistant to being moved, though.
There was another thread recently about leaving signposts and arrows, including my own recommendation.
This came up in Discord today, and I'm curious if you could generate something similar for the entirety of the game's run.
Everything besides berries and pies is a vanity project.
Everything.
I'll try to think of something to make this more clear.
An "i" circle icon linking to an explanation would be good enough. Same for stuff like "chance to use" and so forth.
Jason has said he would prefer to have everyone in one single world. Rearchitecting to use a shared database across multiple servers could be a significant time sink, but could also be a big step towards an important goal for him.
Grim: Good post! I think the real key is scouting to find the direction with the highest concentration of activity signs, and then heading that way.
I'm not sure it matters whether you go orthogonally or diagonally. The Eve spiral is, well, a spiral, and in most cases it'll be very close to a circle. You could have spawned anywhere on that circle, and so the other camps could be in any direction.
I keep meaning to test and see whether diagonal travel has a speed advantage. I suspect that it does - I suspect that your movement rate is a fixed X moves per second, where one move can be either orthogonal or diagonal, which means that moving diagonally will actually let you move a larger distance in a given amount of time. In which case you're absolutely right, moving diagonally would be the right thing to do when searching.
My biggest question is... how do you estimate the number of tiles travelled? Especially once you start going around the inevitable jungle?
There's a piece of software you can run in the background which tracks your current coordinates relative to your spawn point. I think Tarr has a link to it; it's been mentioned on the forum recently but I couldn't find the post.
Otherwise - Just estimate distance based on time spent moving. It doesn't have to be exact, or even close. When I've gone chasing the bell, I've traveled roughly 100 tiles every minute; that was on foot, naked, carrying a basket and sharp stone, and stopping as needed to forage off the land while avoiding jungles and dense trees in swamps. You can see how far you travel (and how quickly) if you are heading towards (or away from) a bell, or if you get more than 1000 tiles from your home marker.
Big O is a real bitch.
Once the town is mature(*) food is not an issue, and "pip efficiency" is not worth worrying about. Yeah, don't get stupid with it, don't eat a pie or a mutton or a berry when you're only down two pips... but otherwise as long as you're fairly low when you eat and the town is fairly flush with food, it really doesn't matter. Do what is efficient with your time and labor with respect to your goals, not what is efficient with the resources that are locally abundant.
(*) Maturity is basically defined as "the compost cycle is working and someone is baking"
i see a lot of people tellign kids not to eat pie but they forget to tell them to eat pie when they are 14
bread stew and cooked mutton should be eaten between 8-13 and 40-54
In some towns there would be a lot of value from spending your whole life just standing in the berry farm telling adults to go eat stew.
carry to the berries so people eat that instead of berries
This is an underappreciated point. Put the alternate foods (bread, stew, burritos, tacos, turkey, broth, milk, mangos, popcorn, mutton) near the berries. People will run to the berries when they are in a hunger emergency, so make sure there's something there besides berries that they can grab. Also, it helps teach the berry-dependent people that alternate food exists; they can see the food and see other people eating it.
Don't put pies there; everyone knows about pies and everyone expects to get them from the bakery.
Don't prepare any of that food near the berries. Keep things uncrowded. Do your cooking in a separate space with plenty of room, but bring the final product over to the berries. Stew and broth of course will have to be put on a fire there, but do all the prep work for the crock someplace else.
this is heavily limited by the number of plates, the eve makes some then maybe someone else, once clay is out of the 50 tile distance, no one really gathers
There is never enough:
rope
bowls
plates
baskets
carts
Okay, maybe not never. By the time the town has a diesel pump they probably have enough bowls and baskets. But 90% of camps and settlements I've been in are drastically undersupplied on these basic containers.
There's usually enough buckets, barely.
Before /die there were lots of running babies. After /die there were fewer running babies, but still plenty of them, because /die wasn't always available. Now that there is insta-die, there are almost no running babies, because they just insta-die. If you get rid of insta-die you won't get more people staying, they'll just go back to being runners. And runners put you on cool-down the same way that insta-die does.
Wishing that people would stay and play in a situation that they don't want to play in is a fool's dream. What you should be asking for is for insta-die and running babies to not put you on cooldown. Or, equivalently, for /die to be available under wider circumstances.
As soon as you are lineage banned from a town on these lop pop servers you're going to be in a constant state of Gen 1 or Gen 2 and the only fix for this is to leave the server thus lowering the population further until the other servers start having die outs to refill your own.
Servers having die-outs do not refill the other servers, because of sticky sessions. When players die and are reborn, they always reconnect to the same server they were just on. To refill the other servers you need to have an influx of players who are just starting to play for the day, or have some advanced players choose to manually switch to the other servers.
Disabling sticky sessions would dramatically improve the situation that Tarr is complaining about. It would effectively turn all the active servers into a single big server, at least in terms of births and rebirths.
With sticky sessions (the current situation), all servers have the same population regardless of their survival rates, and every player is a captive of the one server they're assigned to. Players stuck on a server with low-lifespan high-deathrate rapid-turnover towns will be stuck being frequently reborn to those towns, or pushed into an Eve run if they manage to get lineage banned (either by living long enough, or /die-ing).
By contrast, without sticky sessions, servers whose current towns are poorly run and thus have shorter-than-average lifespans will see a net loss in population; they'll have a larger-than-average share of deaths but receive only an even share of births. The other servers, where the current towns are well-run, will have their populations grow. When players get lineage banned from one town, they'll have the possibility of being reborn onto any of the servers and so have a wider range of other towns that they could spawn in, which will dramatically reduce the number of forced Eve runs.
Anyone who wants an Eve run will always be able to get one just by /die-ing until they're lineage banned from enough towns. It might take more /die-s to get there, but they'll always get there eventually.
If Jason disabled sticky sessions you wouldn't have to manually switch servers, the reflector would do that for you.
Sticky sessions means that if you are connecting to a "random" server you will keep being sent back to the same server each time you connect. This is actually a very good thing for reconnecting when you accidentally disconnect, but otherwise I don't think there's any benefit to it. I'd like to see Jason implement within-lifetime connection recovery without using sticky sessions across different lifetimes.
My biggest gripe right now (besides the getting all boys thing) is why are we playing with pre-steam numbers over multiple servers on our off peak hours?
Because the alternative is that whoever ends up getting randomized onto server4 or server3 will be doomed with zero chance at keeping their lineage alive when the reflector stops sending new connections there. I (and others) suggested the change; Jason was unsure, but decided to do it anyway. Maybe he'll change his mind and switch it back, or come up with a different idea.
Here's the thread where thundersen, betame, Gederian, and I were theorycrafting about population fluxes. Here's the post in that thread where Jason wandered in and started theorycrafting with us.
Start a new topic and give him feedback.
If you pick your Eve spot because there's some free firewood you're not going to live to go exploring much further.
Smart people looking for things will travel more N-S than they do E-W, so make your trail E-W to maximize the chance of being seen.
I LIKE IT
Let's handwave estimate and say that for every ten tiles you go in a single direction, you'll pass by three trees within a few tiles on either side of your path. So for a thousand-tile journey you'll cut 300 trees which needs three axe heads.
It takes about ten minutes to travel a thousand tiles on foot if you're living off the land as you go (and it needs to be a foot journey; going on a horse won't help, because you'll have to keep dismounting to cut trees). So if your town is just utterly flush with iron, take a hand cart, four baskets, twelve axe heads, a backpack, and an axe. Fill the backpack with bananas when you pass through jungles to sustain you as you go. Cut a trail four thousand tiles long; leave when you're old enough to haul a cart, and spend your last few years making an interesting stone sculpture at the end of the trail.
Four thousand tiles is enough to cross the paths of a LOT of Eve camps. You'll probably run across a few actual camps (probably dead), but more importantly, almost everyone else will run across your trail once they start foraging away from their starting spot.
You'll need to start making axe heads as soon as you can pick things up, and you'll have to hope that nobody is paying attention to the forge or you'll get stabbed really fast.
Don't forget to leave arrows showing which way to go! You want them to find your town, not your bones!
That's a good idea, thundersen.
MultiLife:
The reason it exists is because the game can't recognize when it happens or stop it from happening. Don't ask me how it works, others know what it truly does (forced starvation or some other forced total disconnection). In a nutshell the game can't recognize this as a forced action from a player so it can't prevent it from happening.
Here's how it works: if the server receives a malformed message from the client, the server decides the client is broken and kills the player. So Awbz' client sends a malformed message on purpose to get the server to kill the player. Jason may at some point decide the right thing for the server to do is to drop the connection rather than kill the player, and if (when) he does that the insta-die 'feature' will stop working.
You're overreacting.
All I want is a proper cup of coffee
Made in a proper copper coffee pot.
And lionon, Are we sure the one week cell reset is working?
The plot thickens.
I've dug around in the forum and github a bit. The cell reset is known as "map culling" and I believe the purpose for it is not to make all of our beloved stuff go away, but rather to keep the server object database from growing without bounds.
Here's how it works: when a server is restarted (which happens at least once a week during the weekly updates), everything that hasn't been seen in the previous 24 hours is culled, i.e. the tile is restored to its original state. This only happens when the server is restarted, so stuff won't disappear in the middle of the week.
BUT.
The implementation of this had some bugs, and in May as a workaround for at least one of those bugs, Jason changed the value of mapCellForgottenSeconds.ini from 24 hours (86400 seconds) to 7 days (604800). And it's been that value ever since. See the github history. That's why San-Cal is still with us, and will be as long as someone visits it at least once during each week. And that is still happening, we presume, because the Eve spiral keeps getting recentered on or near it, although I'd love to see some better data about that.
Note that map culling is still happening, but there's a week lag. So all the Eve camps that died two weeks ago and were never seen again are now gone. And for that matter, it's possible for parts of a huge town like San-Cal to get reset if nobody happened to see them during the week. For example, if a car got lost in the wilderness it's probably gone for good no matter how hard you search. Outposts that got created and then abandoned may be gone for good if nobody went to check on them.
But what's really interesting is that all the depleted natural resources will have been restored! BUT ONLY IF nobody tried to find them in the past week! So the ground iron and the iron veins are all there again waiting to be harvested, unless you went looking for them too soon, in which case they're still all used up.