One Hour One Life Forums

@ 16:50 in that video there is a good point that I'd like to tie into something I've observed.

The transcript of the video:

"This swinging substitute mother, a bleach bottle covered with furry cloth, was invented for an experiment by Doctors William Mason and Gershon Bergson at the Delta Primate Center in Louisiana. The isolated monkey has known no other mother than this moving surrogate which rises, falls and sways, in a random way.

This isolated monkey has an identical substitute mother, but the mother does not move.

At ten months of age, the monkey raised on a moving mother substitute is given a chance to make close physical contact with a human being. His behavior seems normal; he appears to be curious, bold, and friendly.

The monkey raised with a stationary mother behaves in quite a different way. He seems timid, cringing, and apparently unhappy. He appears emotionally disturbed, unsociable, and unresponsive to changes in the environment."

The rest goes on from 18:08.

This is not a point about baby suicides as much as it is about the types of mothers raising children, in the game.

As an Eve or any other mother, I find that if I take my children out working with me and not rush them home to dump them in a fire, they appear more likely to work harder later in life and to take a chance leaving the safety of the village.

Often times I'll be laying roads, gathering rabbits, collecting iron, with a basket, cart or horse, and wind up having children. If I continue to collect those resources while also caring for the child, rather than dropping everything and rushing them home, they often seem more eager to help. Certainly they are more thankful because they are with me when they come of age and will often thank me.

Mind you, as a child, I will thank you, no matter what. "TY / MA" Is what you will get from me, almost every time, whether you were juggling me while working, or just standing next to me at the fire or corner of the desert. But a mother or nurse who spend 90% of her time standing there, and only 10% of it eating food and stoking the fire, is not one that inspires me to go above and beyond what I would already normally do.

Mind you I have hundreds of hours of trial and error in this game. I, and people in similar situations, already know what needs to be done after we've looked around the camp and taken in the state of things. We get a lot more new players than we do people with hundreds of hours of play though. Just look at the reviews, a majority of them are coming from people with 5, 10 or 30 hours of play.

We want to set good examples for people who have 0 hours. They are the true infants of this game. The ones who, if we are good parents, will be curious, bold, and friendly.

Instead of a punishment, how about a reward?
Some kind of incentive, like a blessing, that you carry from life to life.

Before you run with that name, blessing, I'd just like to say I was against the curse system. It just doesn't make sense to me given the nature of the game. I was hoping that we could address the problems outside the game in some, amicable way, say, by reasoning with the streamers and video makers who were suiciding to look for the kind of town they thought would bring views from their audiences. But, stream to stream, video to video, I didn't find anyone speaking out against the behavior and, unfortunately, was not in the mood to 'be that guy' myself.

So, if we are going to have karma for deeds the community finds deplorable, why not have karma for the ones we appreciate.

A child stays in their mothers arms, that mother can then offer them a blessing as a reward.

This could even be extended to other good deeds.
Someone gives you a back pack when you really needed one to gather two soil instead of just one? Give them your blessing.
You leave home during a food shortage, and return to find a few people hard at work, restoring the farm. Give them your blessing.

Just as you cannot curse a person more than once, you can also only bless a person once, or it can have some other sort of limitation, maybe only once fr every ten or twenty years.

The payoffs could be something important, or something very subtle. Say, you receive five blessings, and in your next life, your food meter drops at only 95% the speed or, you move to and from warm 50% faster? Maybe as an eve you appear in a nicer area, or you are more likely to spawn in civilization. It could be an aura, a subtle glow you give off. Maybe people around you, within a certain radius, are also kept warmer in the cold and cooler when things are hot.

Maybe if you build up 100 blessings you get to live an extra 10 years.

Again, I don't know about calling it a blessing. I don't like the idea of karma or curses, or any of that sort of thing, but if curses are here to stay, I don't see why we shouldn't have some sort of alternative for good people.

The only bad scenario I imagine are people just standing around begging for blesses or dishing them out like a buffet. They should be something reserved for special occasions, something people recognize you've earned. Whether it comes from your mother, your children, or that cousin you spent 30 years making compost and farming with. I don't think it should be something we should expect though. People may become resentful if you do not bless them for giving you a gold crown when you really didn't have a use for one, or, say, for not committing suicide immediately after they were born.

This is all really a mess, if I'm to be quite honest. The killing, the cursing, the suicides. These are not things people are this inclined to do in real life, but games are a unique microcosm of real life, and in games, death and rebirth are just two bits away. What we're trying to do here, I guess, is to instill games with the sorts of values we have honed over the lifetime of our species. It's no small task.

I want to do it right.

I don't think adding supernatural elements to the game, such as curses and blessing, heaven or hell, is the right way to go about it. But if the results are the same but it is not conveyed as such, I'm a little more reluctant to play along. The idea of being promoted or demoted up or down a tree-and-root structure would make a lot more sense to me but it is by no means the only type of cost-reward, or, promote-or-punish, system, I would find relevant to a game like this.

I'm not usually around inside of towns long enough to get involved in the drama that leads to murders and curses anyhow. If I maintained that sort of playstyle, I would probably use blessings as much as I uses curses, which is to say, not very often, but on the other hand, I have cried many times IRL for the loss of my mothers and children in this game, and their have been some very personal moments with you folks where I wished I could hug you in real life after you conveyed similar sentiments to me.

I would not be against a greater way of saying thank you, for spending your time with me and my family, in this world.

Thank you Pein. I'm glad you got to share the story of, what I will now refer to as, El Peinado.

As for the other points I wanted to make this morning before I was interrupted by sleep, I want to point out a few things about what having such a speedy, long range, supply network is going to mean for us and our surrounding areas.

There is bad to take with the good, but bad that we can mitigate with some consideration.

But first, the good.

When your new town is in it's early stages of development, let's say, generations 3-10, the horse and cart is invaluable.
Using it to bring in 4 carts and a back pack full of soil, when the compost is taking it's sweet time, allows your farms to grow ten times as fast as a naked boy running with a basket back and forth between the nearest soil deposit. More food, means more stability and your women can eat more and stay comfortable warm by the fire or on the edge of the desert where they are more likely to be chosen by the game's algorithm for pregnancy. More people means more talking, greater quality of life, and more workers. But it will decrease the amount of work done per capita as people settle in, make pies and chit chat. I consider this an overall net gain for our civilizations, as those who desire the satisfaction of providing for our families, and the work that they do, generally outpaces the alternative.

Using it to bring 4 flat rocks to the road network.

Rather than go ahead of where the road may eventually lead to collect flat rocks and bring them back, I will first set off go off 45 degrees from the road to search for rocks and then bring them in, and drop them in a line of four making it as easy as possible for myself, or the other person hammering the stakes with the rocks to easily swap between stake, rock and stone by dropping one on top of the other. Many people with good intentions make this process more difficult by setting the flat rocks in piles of four, setting their rocks or stakes off to the side while swapping between them, or laying multiple stakes before laying multiple flat rocks. One stake, one stone and a line of flat rocks and a lot of repetition are the quickest way to get these roads laid out, and from there, it's all smooth running.

Gathering branches.

This is often overlooked, except when it comes to straight branches for their shafts. People often set out with an ax and cut down trees for the fire wood and butt logs they provide, and when branches are far, and the stumps turned to kindling have run out, people will often turn firewood into kindling to make fires, charcoal and to heat ovens. This puts additional stress on the iron and milkweed production as the stone hatchets and axes break more often than necessary if only someone had gone out to the grassland and gathered curved and yew branches to bring home, keeping the firewood for the fire, the butt logs for the froes and saws. That way we don't need to cut down more trees than necessary and aren't leaving the landscape around our homes barren and lifeless canvases. Happy little trees. The more life people see, the more potential we see as life and the more adventurous they will feel when exploring their surroundings. Find the balance between revealing the area so people avoid dangers like snakes, boars and wolves; revealing resources like clay and reeds; and giving them a reminder of what makes oxygen metabolizing life possible; our rooted, planty, brethren who, willingly or not, provide us their arms for warmth.

Gathering iron and stones.

We keep our fires burning outside to spark the ones inside. With each new life, there is a greater demand for tools and food. The faster we maintain this replenishment of resources the more stable our growth becomes. The iron eases our labors and makes new technology possible, while the stones allow us to collect and store more, and more, water for the lives of our crops. The stones also serve as tools across the settlement and are often in short supply when new wells are going in. If you see that these things are in short supply; the steel is sped thin, the ponds are drying up, stones; sharpened or not, are not easy to find, then bringing in baskets of stones from the badlands, deserts and snow biomes, can save people around the colony many small headaches.

There are, of course other things to gather with the carts, but I want to make a point about just one more that has a potentially drastic downside for the future of any village and the expanse of it's network;

Milkweed

At the moment milkweed serves three important roles, thread, rope and lassos, and with this Horse Corral idea and having an abundance of fast transportation for people, I fear that this is going to add additional stress  to the ease at which our families branch out to populate the surrounding areas. It is already common, even necessary given the time and resource limits, for people to travel out on foot to additional grassland biomes to harvest the milkweed necessary for their tools, backpacks and other uses for rope and thread. Farming is not everyone's cup of tea; it's not always something we want to do every life, but it is something someone has to do with every family to keep food and growable resources localized. While it can be a great asset to your immediate family to set out with a horse and cart, cut reeds for baskets and fill them with the thread and rope you've collects across multiple grasslands, doing so has a tremendous drawback for the expansionists among your descendants who may have opted to settle near one of those grasslands, only to find there isn't even enough milkweed to make the tools necessary for fire. Let alone thread for clothes to stay warm.

A solution to this problem, which has been ongoing, but now has the potential to be an even bigger threat, is to dramatically step up our milkweed production for rope and lassos, while also keeping needles and balls of thread, readily available so that milkweed is used less often for the purposes of thread.

Not every grassland harbors a haven for a settlement; bordering an edge with a swamp at least, or is an intersection between grassland, swamp, desert and prairie at best. But the ones that do harbor these potential havens for mothers who may want a fresh start with their own personal families, or for our brothers, who may just want to strike out on their own to test their wits against the elements, the milkweed supplies of these locations should be harvested reservedly. Additionally, by having an abundance of milkweed and rope ready at home, anyone who wants to set out on their own, or as a group, can make their basic tools in advance and travel with them to their future destination without denying the home of their origin those tools they were counting on to start a new fire.

To make this possible, an abundance of horse carts laden with baskets , moving out to collect soil from areas otherwise undesirable as homes, would greatly easy the stress on the farmers and shepherds back at home, keep the carrots, berries and wheat replenished, as well as relieve stress from the smiths and iron collectors who maintain their tool supplies. Yes, their is a limited supply of soil within reasonable traveling distances for anyone, but the soil of surrounding grasslands is one of the last resources that are tapped in those areas.

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There are always more points to make; more things to consider, about every aspect of the game. That includes you, the code, our thoughts and desires for the world we want to share together. I welcome you to share yours on anything related to these matters.

If someone could get mushrooms in the game, we could get pogo sticks; if we really wanted them.

What play?

The Atomic Powered Update was/will be the best update.

Just got done watching Arrival for the first time and it reminded me of a quote by Isaac Asimov used in the movie The Light Years, better known as Gandahar around the world:

We speak of Time and Mind, which do not easily yield to categories.
We separate past and future and find that Time is an amalgam of both.
We separate good and evil and find that Mind is an amalgam of both.
To understand, we must grasp the whole.

P.S. The future is set. We just don't know it.

But if it is the last update from Jason, I won't be happy with it. I've quite enjoyed this work of yours, good sir.
I have to wonder what you will be working on, 2 years from now.

Just have to wonder.

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The best so far though have been the ones with the most productive content; raw resources, recipes, products. If all you did for the next year was release 100 drawings, sounds, recipes a week, I could see myself playing this for a thousand more hours. I'd like a more resistant environment though. More obstacles that our towns have to work with at various stages of their development. Trees, big hard rocks, ponds, caves, mountains? Lakes? Radioactive tiles? Oil fields? Things that get in the way at first and are useless to very primitive civilizations, but in the end determine the longevity of well established ones, like the ponds and iron ore veins.

Once the landscape is scorched by our activity the barren canvas of biome tiles just, becomes, so disheartening. More obstacles that serve purposes through the stages until they are ultimately removed, would be nice.

Give the land more defenses from us. Give us, more challenges.

Thank you Jason,
for everything.

ILY

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Uh, yeah.

Keeping the Fruit Boot thing in the game was one thing, leaving this glitch in would be another.

This is supposed to be a simulation about rebuilding civilization and raising a family in the process, not a bug collection.

I'm ok being naked. Just give me a backpack and a desert corner or a nice roaring fire to start my long journeys from and it's 22 second food meter pips all day.

Besides, it's too hard to balance temp when clothed. Harder to find spots either on; very small patches of desert, very thin peninsulas of desert, or inside a C shape of desert tiles, where the sum of heat from all tiles + the warmth provided by clothes, hit a perfect balance.

Earlier today I was gathering rabbits fully clothed and it was nice to not have to run so much to cut down o the food I was consuming, but wherever I work I'm always scouting out renewable food like wild berry bushes and cacti. That way I'm not taking any food or plates from the people who never leave town.

Oh, also, I stabbed the person and they shed their wound as well.
So... yeah. Maybe you don't have to even be holding something for the wound to be cast off, and then, good as new.

It's a pretty lame bug. Almost as bad as the buttered knife.