One Hour One Life Forums

I don't think the <30 minute thing is a very reliable exploit. It's more of a coincidence. It's not the kind of thing you can count on to be reborn to the same place. The odds go up if there are a lot of fertile girls in the town, and there aren't a ton of people playing the game, even post steam, so, it's not as if there are hundreds of villages or Eves at once.

I don't really mind what way the rebirth works, so long as it does.

I don't mind being an Eve but the second to tenth generations are probably the most enjoyable.

If I recall, there was a time when an Eve that had managed to live to old age had an increased chance of being reborn into her family line. Apparently Jason thought this was better, for some reason. Much as I would love to be the child of my daughter or grad daughter after having lived a full life in a place, it's okay with me that I have to play another 2-3 hours to even have a chance of seeing the home I picked, again. I generally put a good amount of effort into finding a suitable home, and often lose many children along the way, but not because I abandon them, but because, I think they either see me running with nothing and don't want to wait or just want to be born at a later stage.

Much as I wish more people played the way I do and had more patience, I can't force people to want to stay with me, or any Eve. Best I can do is reassure you that I will do everything I can to insure we have a reasonable home while still affording myself a little time to settle in and give birth to kids while we're in the place I've decided upon.

I will say I think it's a shame when people give up on their town just because their lineage cannot continue. I've found so many little camps, villages and large towns as an Eve or, the child of an Eve, out looking for iron, rabbits or just scouting the land. I'd like to encourage all of you to never give up on your towns and try to leave the place in as good as shape as you can with the idea that an Eve or anyone else may find it and revitalize it. With the way we are all learning that how the Eve spiral works, thanks to thundersen and everyone else looking into it, I hope you all can see from data what I've known from experience; that there is a chance we will see our old homes again.

Sure would be interesting of we could work the spirals back to some of those places we lived 6-9 months ago, but those are quite a ways away now. Besides, who knows if they still even exist after two apocalypses and the jungle patch? No, better homes still exist out there and it's okay that the spirals work their way out to them. Better that we get the chance to do things right with a fresh start. It's not as much about the land or the towns anyway, it's about us; our experiences with each other, learning to recognize problems before they crop up and doing what needs to be done so that our family and town manages without us.

However, I don't want us to just keep things going, I want us to go above and beyond what we've done before.

So much is still possible, even if there was never another patch, we could manage some really amazing towns with lots of horses and cars and resources, stored across the map. I've had so many dreams about this game, so many... never mind that though.

I'd rather just play and not get too caught up in mechanics of the game. Code isn't my thing, but I'm glad it's someones, or we wouldn't be here.

Pretty sure it's up to thirty minutes.

If you die before having spent thirty minutes in a family, there is a chance you can be reborn to that family if one of the women is next in line for kids.

I've used this to my advantage many times to get larger projects done, it's risky, as there is no guarentee you will be reborn to the same family, but the payoff is nice. You can easily spend age 3-28 working on a project, die at 28-29, then be reborn to your mother, aunt or a sister or possibly even a daughter, and continue working on that same project from 3-60.

It means a lot to me, be able to do this, as I don't talk very much, I just like to work, on anything and everything, and seeing a village grow through more time is satisfying.

However, if I do die before 30 and am not immediately reborn to the same family, I will accept that and do the same with the next family I am born to. Often times it's not entirely intentional but it just seems that I get really into a project at around age 25-28, and almost... unconsciously wind up starving to death.

You can work multiple projects in multiple families this way.

Also, once that thirty minutes is up there is a 3 hour timer that starts, at least, I'm pretty sure it's 3 hours, that will give you a chance to be reborn again to the same family, where you can basically do the 60+ to <90 minute thing over again.

From a different perspective, I'd hate if my kids used this <30 minute exploit and I happened to be living a full life. I really want to see them in that last moment, as I do sometimes get attached to different people for different reasons. Especially those of you who work the hardest and can always find something productive to be doing.

Jason is the 'utopiastone'
The game is already utopia, we are it's undoing.

The lesson here is to make the best of what we have before it's gone. We've been given a whole world, in reality, we've been given the whole universe, now what are we going to do with it?

Jason was the start.
Nosaj is the end.

If he could, he might make the game play in reverse, right back to the moment he sat down and started coding it, and these years would just bounce back and forth, through this window of time, like a perfectly perpendicular match of pong.

But the end is always gaining distance from the beginning; the end is always getting closer to the present.

mrslax, with all due respect, we have been planning and building towns for a long time, and the more we plan outside the game, the better we get at constructing them in the game. Not only that, but just playing with people who have been around for quite some time, you pick up on a lot of good habits from their experience as well. Eventually you will learn to recognize them and distinguish them from people who have only recently started playing. Layouts are the key to successful towns; the way that towns are shaped by the first, by the environment, and secondly by the experienced players, who know what they want, because they want it to work.

I've devoted several days to OHOL almost entirely, playing for over 12 hours a day is not unusual for me (some of us on this Earth have no obligations but what we choose to do from day-to-day) and I've had some periods where I have been awake for more than 36 hours and played for what has felt like at least 24 of them. In 12 hours of playing you can easily see the same town 3 or 4 times, if it's a good one. The four "towns" that come to mind first, in terms of the number of times I have played in them, have been stretched well over a hundred meters (a meter being a step, or a tile, in game) in length and have been populated for days on end.

Now, this is not the same game it was nine months ago, there are no gigantic adobe castles with courtyard you could get lost inside, they were so big. They were so big they had rooms within rooms, as if two or three adobe castles had been connected into one, gigantic one. It's not that game. There are no coordinates used by the game, at least, not to my knowledge, and so, people do not find their way back to the great castles, or at least, cannot work their way inward to the 0,0 origin of the x,y axis that each servers original spiral of Eves generate.

Jason is periodically adjusting the algorithm that determines where Eve's spawn, so, as far as cities staying alive, we can't always count on finding our way back that way. But I have made many roads; of wood, hard rock and flat rock, that have lead to towns that have been populated time and time again by new families and it is still important, if a town is to be found or repopulated, that there is a clear sign of player activity around it, that will draw people towards it.

It is still quite important that towns are spread out, if they are to stand the test of time, as well as if the families inside them, are to do the same.

I suspect what you are calling a town, was just a new players desire to strike off on their own. This should also be encouraged, as new players should know how to make basic tools as well as setup their own smithies, bakeries and farms, but a dozen items around a forge is not a farm. There have also not been wars in this game that it has the potential for. There may have been disputes between families that have lasted for a day, in town chains that have lasted for nearly a week, but if anything, that is testament to the success of the large towns. After people began making castles out of stones a quarter the size of the great adobe walled bailey designs, they simply ran out of other things to do. This is another very important reason for spreading out, not just of the town(s), but of the family itself.

The game can still be completed by a civilization in 6-9 hours, in that time, some of us have been to those same towns, and lived full lives, 2, 3 or even 4 times. Heck, if you do it right you can live for as much as 90 minutes in a town every 3 hours. That's if you happen to die before spending 30 minutes there and then are reborn and live a full 60 minute life. There is a 3 hour timer between "lives" spent in a town, but I've not seen it made clear if that timer starts at the time of your birth or the time of your death. It has seemed to me that I have lived lives where I was born to a civilization where I had previous spent a full life there, less than 3 hours ago, but I have not busted out a timer, watched a clock or added up all the time I lived lives between those in the same location. It may be a full 3 hours after death, before you can be reborn, and that time has been so good for me that it has just flown by.

I've also had days where my 12 hours spent was between many repeats of many towns. Where maybe there were 2 or 3 great sized towns that day and I spent 2 or 3 long lives between each of them, with maybe only 1 or 2 lives that day spent with a younger civilization, or, as an Eve starting my own town. Some days I've been an Eve for more than half of the usual 9-12 hours I might play.

Point is, I have a lot, if not the most, experience of any player, when it comes to just time spent playing the game. At least, by any metric I've ever seen.

Really just sounds like you are having trouble with people who are bored or frustrated.

People who are happy working, are not people who are killing each other or, making traps for people just for luls. This is yet another reason why it is important to spread out. 30 people living in a small town leads to more frustration between players, spread those same 30 people out in an area 3 times the size and you have only 10 or so clustered in the same space. Meanwhile, with any number of people, there are likely to be players out in the woods around towns, gathering, working, or having children and moving back towards home. The more spread out they are, the less likely one person is to pick off the important ones, or to pull a few pins and bring the whole civilization down.

Why civilizations die is often up to the players, not always, but often. It's not why they die that concerns me so much, it's how they live, how we, manage to live with each other, that is important to me. And even with all the stackable objects added over the last few months, we still need more space for our things. There are just more of them now, and there will continue to be, until the final update drops.

This is why I can't take your post seriously. This is the problem. You leave everything else out, and as such, everything else becomes clutter. This is what I want to stop. Not only does this type of view leave out the rest of the products of our civilizations, but it also, invariably leads to stagnation, repetition; of the fewest possible things, and boredom. One of the things that I love about this game is making past realizations fit into present situations. It's a little like Tetris, but it reminds me more of a game I used to love playing, called Rampart. Which was a fort building game with Tetris-like pieces, it's like that x1000. There are 1000 pieces and 1000 landscape arrangements in which to place them and for someone who likes to not only try and perfect function, but form, every life presents me with a new and intriguing problem.

In the long run this game is not about speed, or even function, so much as it is about beauty, direction and allure. People need to be happy with where they are born if our towns are ever to last again for a week or more. When they look attractive, they feel attractive, and attractive towns generate stories, and, in their own unique way, they generate culture. The kind of feel and culture people aim to simulate in future homes, and, in so doing, generate new and unique stories, for new lives, in new lands. I think if you were to ask the top ten players with the most played time what some of their most vivid memories of the game have been so far, they could paint for you recreations of the landscapes around the towns where those events happened. We have these ways of making mental maps of our surroundings, and each story is embedded into one of those maps. We do not shy away from scale. We do not hesitate to move out into the landscape around us when we know that that is what needs to be done. We've done it to gather resources and we've done it to plant the seeds of the most valuable things of all; our families, our labors, our homes.

Even if that home just turned out to be a couple planted berry bushes, a forge, and a dozen dishes and tools, for others to see, and wonder; who were we?

If home markers and bells can be things that change the interface, displaying the arrow in the bottom, then maybe checkpoints could be added.

A simple way to make them would be to use the skewer and stone combo that already exists, or, to add something like mallet and skewer. The person in the lead, or, the one who has scouted out a path to a new location, can hammer a skewers in order and then the next person who comes along following their path simply has to touch them as they go. Each marker interacted with, bring up an arrow to the next.

If this were used, all that would be required would be a sharp stone and, let's say, mallet, and then the saplings would need to be found along the journey with excess carried to traverse areas without grasslands.

Another option would be to make a kit of some sort that had a number of uses.

Let's say, you add a blank paper to a skewer to get blank marker kit. You then stack the kits to some number, let's say, up to six. Use a charcoal pencil on the stack of kits and you get that many numbers of markers that come out in order of use. 1 leads the way to 2, 2 to 3, etc..

I could see other things being added to the game with similar functions to the skewer or bell tower, something like a compass, sextant or astrolabe. Though it's less likely that items make it into game if they don't convey some aspect of their real world counterparts. But if magnets and compasses were added, all members of a party could hold compasses but once, and the other hold a magnet. The magnet would make them, essentially, a moving home marker, for anyone carrying the compass.

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Other than that, you could use milkweed seeds or clay pulled from a pit to make arrows and try to stick to those courses as best you can.

If you are ever lost, also keep in mind, that rabbits and cacti give a visual indication that someone has passed through the area. Cacti are not as reliable as rabbits, as they do go through 1/4 of their life cycle without fruit or flowers, but if the rabbits are already out of their holes, it's a good indication someone has passed through the area. If they are popping out as you approach them, than you are the first person they've seen, generally, and if you were following someone, that's a pretty good indication that you should turn back and look in another direction.

If you ever feel completely lost, find the nearest grassland, sharp stone the sapling, stone the skewer, and use that arrow to help guide you around.

The more you play, the more you get a feel for your location and get good at making maps in your head. Time spent traveling in directions become things you remind yourself of periodically, as well as landmarks.

Let's say you are going to look for iron. You travel 30 seconds north through grassland, prairie and tundra. Then you travel another 30 seconds east through a swamp and desert and find badlands, where you fill a basket with iron. If you have not set your home marker before that journey, you can either go back the way you came, or, travel southwest 40 - 45 seconds, or for about the time and a half that you traveled on either leg of the trip. When you get about 40 seconds into your trip southwest, you should start to see signs of your home biomes, if you don't, keep an eye out for them or the other ones you saw along the way. But if you travel more than a minute and don't see anything, I would go back the way you came, back northeast, favoring the northern direction to increase the odds of seeing some familiar landmark.

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While thinking about several of my experiences in situations like this, I've come up with a few other ideas that could perhaps be implemented into the game.

Things that would alter the home marker; flags, smoke signals, signal fires or, soon techwise; flares or rockets.

Things that would alter the landscape, leaving a visual indication; something like using a branch on the ground that would leave a mark, that when placed on a piece of ground adjacent to it would combine to create an arrow. Since item uses have been given more variability with different actions used for left and right clicks, using a branch on bare ground with one would drop it, and with the other, leave a mark on the ground. Marking the ground with a stick could also help people to plan out areas for development.

Let's say you are holding a stick and you click to move five tiles away, a temporary line could be drawn in the dirt as you travel from the point you are in to that point. Maybe it fades away after 5 seconds or 5 minutes, it can be something that only exists in the area while people are near. Then, when everything else stops moving because no one has been in the area for x amount of time, it vanishes. I don't know if that happens immediately after the last person is gone or how it works, but 5 seconds equates to about a months time, doesn't seem like that would be an unreasonable amount of time for a mark on the ground to last.

As for multiperson transport, I think getting people's connections to sync up while moving in a game like this is going to be tricky. I just get that feeling that something is just not ready for it, but, if we do, it'd be nice to have horse drawn carriages. Maybe a larger version of the cart and two tame horses harnessed together.

Basket labels appear okay.

No problems here.

It has to do with the limited resources available in the area. Iron and water are the big ones, but also natural, renewable food sources, the ground upon which our towns are built which reduce food consumption rates, and natural soil deposits which are just easier to draw from than producing compost, so people are drawn to them more often.

Setting up a sheep pen and making compost increases the rate that water is consumed, drastically, as those sheep become consumers of 6 goosberries + 1 carrot. More if they are regularly being used to produce wool instead of just dung, mutton and a single sheepskin or fleece.

The battles every town faces are; keeping people fed, keeping people working and keeping people happy with their lives.

A good town layout goes a long way towards all these things, but when people stay, eat, and work for a life, they contribute to the exhaustion of resources. There is no way to escape that in this game.

Luckily in real life, the vast majority of mass is recycled on the surface of this planet. But incorporating that feature of reality into games is something programmers haven't quite got the knack for yet. We just don't have the computing power available to every home gamer, nor do programmers have the ambition, to make the sort of simulations that NASA, NOAA or any other global resource or event tracking services pays the big bucks for. And if they do have that talent or ambition, they are working for such organizations, raking in a lot of dough and prestige for their service to humanity.

I'm sorry, bit of a tangent.

It's all about density and distribution.

Also, I'm a horrible typist, and almost never proofread. XD

If you've ever read my post, or played with me in game, you'd probably know that.

Youa re Mercury

Youa re Venus

Look familiar?

In that moment, especially as Eve, the last thing I want to do is stand around, fixing a typo, but I'll do it, because ily.

I almost always die next to food, well, except now with the yellow fever to mentally calculate, but in the last week, it's mostly been, about, 40% Yellow fever and 40% starvation, with maybe 20% being a combination of both along with other factors.

I'm always trying to be as efficient as possible.

I am always calculating temperature vs food.

As much as I want 100% food from every bite, to reduce the amount of food wasted, in turn reducing soil, water and iron wasted, I don't always calculate temp and the food meter's drop rate right.

Almost every time I starve, it comes down to split second timing, and I'm just on the wrong side of the split.