One Hour One Life Forums

I strongly disagree.  The problem isn't the race against other families - its that we are retreading the same area.  I did a lot of iron exploring with a horsecart and came up with absolutely zero iron ore, wrought iron, or steel ingots.  Instead I found two large dead towns, with nothing but a few steel tools, and one functioning town that didn't have enough of an iron ore stash to start a race war over. (Not  that such an amount actually exists, IMHO)

Our family was doomed to never build a newcommen engine - just because of iron shortage.  So no way to update our pump to kerosene, much less drill for oil, or build a diesel engine.  Iron exploring is about to get really interesting on this map....

And unlike with the spiral... I don't even know which way to move my family to get out to pristine territory.

If I really wanted THAT family to survive, I'd be going for an apocalypse right now.

Kudos for being one of those rare people who likes constructive criticism.

Yeah, there are pros and cons to the apocalypse.  If I'd been aware of the group working on the last one, I probably would have come out pro-apocalypse, even though I like finding old towns.

It turns out the swords are a great sign that I don't want to live in that town.  I was gifted a backpack with one as a baby, and suicided in my twenties becuase the town was becoming an "adolfo" cult.  That's the only town I've seen more than one sword in.

In other news, I find it ridiculous that Jason is calling his genocide update the "come together" update, and am a fan of your post on the difference between stress and excitement.

You mean dreams "deferred".  As in, dreams that have been set aside.

I originally thought you actually meant different dreams... a lot of us have different dreams for this game than Jason does.  This race war update really takes the cake for that, IMHO.

And that's ok, we have different dreams.  We play the way we want to anyway.

I just had a conversation with my siblings where we talked about how the area ban plus four families in the same area, means that we really sorta ought to kill them off- if we want our families to grow and work together without language barriers.  But we also all three agreed that we didn't want to play that way.  At ALL.  So we didn't.

So now, instead of pro and anti-apocalypse factions, we'll have pro and anti-race war factions.  I've already seen that come to a head once.

I've been thinking about this problem too.  I like carting!  And it sucks to not be able to put some bowls/buckets of stuff in your cart when other things go in without a problem.

Let's make a thorough list and put it on github as an issue report.  Jason has been way more responsive to those than anything else.

It's also weird that you can carry a stack of bowls or plates, but not a stack of baskets.  But I can't decide if that's actually a bug or not.

Karrots, you have every right to be angry.  That sucks.

JK, you had every right to kill your mum, and that village did not deserve you.

futurebird, I also will bury someone if they ask me to, but only one person, and only if they are special to me in some way.  I tell people obsessively burying everyone to stop, and I will take flat rocks from any graveyard I find. Love that you had a great funeral for yourself. 

This one time, a lady was determined to bury her mom next to the nursery fire, while a team of us were in the middle of putting boards down around it.  She had the shovel, the flat rock, some flowers, and everything.  It took a couple of us repeatedly grabbing the bones and putting them back in the basket and on the cart to get it through her skull that there was no way we were letting her take up this incredibly useful central tile for her random grave.

Please don't make this change!!!!!

This is a very common problem, because half the time when I want to curse a griefer I am a kid!

I've killed someone for griefing, and still had to wait ten minutes to be able to curse them, because i couldn't say their whole name!!!  This was YESTERDAY!

Seriously, if you are going to only give us 60 seconds to curse a griefer, then you MUST add a curse command so that kids can curse people with names longer than their regular character limit.

This makes perfect sense to me.  Have a pen full of sheep for the loom - with absolutely mutton and dung neutral wool production, and a second pen that is for mutton and dung production - and maybe some balls of thread for meds and things like that.

While there's a ton of upfront cost to building the second pen, it'll make shepherding easier to manage for generations to come. 

As a bonus - makes it harder for a greifer to destroy all you sheep pens without someone noticing.

Love the sugarcane pen design, too.

Again, love your description of the fragile town, futurebird.

Jason has mentioned before that the average player time on this game is about sixteen hours.  Maybe the pump stage is the crafting skill level most people get up to in that sixteen hours?  After that, there just aren't enough people around to teach the advanced skills while also meeting the town's needs.  So you get this crises-interrupting-teaching cycle.

Enough players are baffled by what to do next, and bored by the same old tasks, that they become either disruptive (greifing) or go into a complete sponge mode (RPing) or they just quit the game, and go "learn" something else entirely.

One of the benefits of a good content update is that it gets some of the people who just like learning new crafts to come back for a few days.  Even if they don't teach others, having someone with advanced skills to make that emergency hoe while you continue teaching your daughter, will hopefully build up the overall player skill base.   Of course, this opportunity only helps if there are already plenty of forges and materials available.

It's also kind of a problem that the key tasks don't need to be done continuously.  If someone has had a good run of baking, we can afford a break for twenty minutes, but not for forty minutes.  In the meantime, the people who knew how the system was working have died off, the wheat farm has changed locations, the shepherd has focused on making wool and isn't prepared to kill off more sheep, etc. 

It seems like obvious massive surpluses are bad for "institutional knowledge" of how to produce that key material.

I'm all for a domesticated milkweed that gives us a thread, and regenerating wild milkweed.

futurebird, I like the idea of increasing the chance to get thread over multiple generations, but that would take a lot of additional coding. I think Jason's more likely to go for the steady percentage chance.

Or maybe you had good luck with towns before the last update???

Honestly, I think this has been a problem for as long as I've been playing. You did a great job explaining the issue.  We feel too safe, and then we take things for granted and stuff falls apart.

In my last life, I took over the bakery as a four year old, and got us to the point that we had three baskets of pies in a box by the time I was ten.  But then... there was a little girl that obviously wanted to take over the bakery.  Since I was playing a boy, and baking is one of those things that can be done while raising babies in town, I let her take over.

I went and farmed milkweed and made buckets and carts, did some exploring, etc.  I'd run by the bakery to pick up pie time to time, and my cousin managed to add to the surplus as she raised her kids. By the time I'm late forties I've got the rope to go tame that horse i spotted, BUT!  No one is making compost.  AND the guy who is now in the bakery seems pretty lost.  <sigh>

After many years of composting, I run back by the bakery to deliver some mutton, and realize the pie surplus is completely gone.  The bakery looks like people have been delivering supplies to it, but no one is making it into food.

How do we keep track of who is the baker?  Who is the composter? 

We really need some quick visual messages.  A sign outside the bakery that says, "Maria is baking" that can be updated on the fly would be so useful.

Between the lack of visibility across all the critical workstations in your town, and the lack of easy communication between players, I think towns are just destined to keep falling apart.

Tip number 1)  Don't use AWBZ.  Or if you do, keep it very tightly zoomed in.  I get a lot more lag when I'm using the mod.

There are some commands Jason added to help you figure out what is causing your particular problems

/ping will tell you the status of your connection to the server
/fps will tell you your framerate - AFAIK this is diagnostic of how well your computer is handling the graphics