One Hour One Life Forums

IMO I think all trees being hungry work is fine. The real problem is the small amount of firewood and logs we get per chop. One tiny log and two firewood per tree is an incredibly small number when you consider the fact that you're chopping down a whole tree!

Getting a high Yum is fairly easy if you know what you're doing unless you're in an Eve town. I usually have one consecutive yum chain from age 3 to age 60, and I only have to eat ~16 foods per lifetime, depending on the warmth of the clothing I'm wearing.

Berry, Berry Bowl, Carrot, Popcorn, Corn, Mutton, Mutton Pie, Rabbit, Rabbit Pie, Stew, Bread are eleven foods that are readily available in almost every town you'll ever spawn into as long as you're not an Eve or her kid. You only need to get ~5 other foods to have a life-long yum chain, and that's fairly easy to get since you don't have to worry about it until age 40 or so.

Warmth is mostly provided by clothing (buildings are completely irrelevant for warmth IMO), and if you don't have clothing readily available in town the first thing you'll do is head out with a snare and a needle+thread and get geared up. You'll probably have a full set of clothing before the first baby pops out no matter how lucky or unlucky you get with the rabbits.

TL;DR, most towns have the same warmth and yum potential, the only exception are early Eve villages.

Full disclosure, I initially liked the idea of a limited playspace and the possiblities it could create, but after playing inside the rift for a few weeks I think it was a bad idea, and no matter how much work you put into it it's still going to be less enjoyable that an unlimited map.

A problem that I see with the rift is that the game stops being as enjoyable long before any of the previous end conditions trigger.

If it goes on until there's no more resources on the map, it's going to stop being fun long before the last hidden oil spot is depleted.

If it goes on until people are dying en masse, players are going to stop playing once they realize it's impossible to survive.

Griefing is only part of the reason while the long rift was bad, it was also not enjoyable because of the lack of progression for most of its duration. We reached technological peak within a few hours, and there's not much to do after that point. Towns also quickly became a massive mess with various hard to use bowl items scattered everywhere. And if you spawned in as an Eve, the person who is supposed to start a new civilization, the only thing you could do is go to an existing town and live there. And going to an existing town is easy - since the map is so small, you only need to walk in a random direction for a minute or two and you'll find a settlement.

These things led to each life after the 24 hour mark feeling incredibly samey, at least for me. Every time I'd spawn into a big town with a big fence around it, we'd have plenty of food despite griefers attacking us from the inside and wild Eves wielding swords on the outside. The town would have all the technology it needs, and the only thing left to do is to either deal with griefers which is very dull work, try to clean the place up which is almost impossible, or make pies and other foods which is kind of unnecessary since everyone else is already doing it.

When the rift comes back, along with a new end condition, we need a bigger map (not infinitely big, but something that takes more than two minutes to run across on horseback), and ideally some kind of progression system for civilizations so that we don't reach endgame within hours. I still find it very weird that you can go from nothing to a town with Newcomen Engines during the Eve's lifespan.

As for the end condition, I think it should be something that can be influenced by players so that the world ends while it's still enjoyable and leaves you wanting for more. The world should fail because the players failed to keep it going, not because it's so bad that it can't support life any more.

I saw the suggestion of photographs taken extending the life of the rift - a world that is worth taking pictures of is worth saving, after all. I kind of like this idea, but I do think it's a bit unintuitive.

I also had the idea of counting the bones laying on the ground. If there's ever X bones in the world, the apocalypse triggers. This would encourage people to bury their family, something that I always thought was super weird that we don't do. If the world turns to war and too many people die and there's no one to bury them, that world might not be worth saving. Bones decay on their own (and they decay more quickly when buried), so it's kind of a dynamic timer. If people start dying too young there's a higher chance of the fail condition happening.

Great video! I've never made an engine before as I just couldn't wrap my head around it, but after seeing it actually done step by step it just clicked, and I made one in my very next life!

Amazing news, thank you so much from taking the time from your vacation to adjust the game.

I see what you're going for with the rift and a limited playspace - permanence can create more interesting stories than when there's no permanence - but at this stage it just makes the game not very enjoyable to play. One day though!

Yes, but there has to be some kind of middle ground, right? We went from an infinite map with numerous towns and cities that all had their own personality, to a tiny map with only a few settlements that are all exactly the same. Civilization grows and changes even less than before, and I think that's a bad thing. There can still be a map that allows for people to interact with different villages if they want to without putting everyone a minute away from everyone else. Let small villages grow over time and let them evolve at their own pace, and let them eventually connect to other civilizations on the map.

If someone asked me this I would tell them that players are still in the stone age, but they have the ability to make diesel engines. The tech tree is weird and too short for an arc that lasts several days. During the previous arc players reached the end of the tech tree in about five hours and then spent the next 200+ hours stagnating. That can't be a good ratio of development & stagnation.

Why would you have killed yourself? Pre-rift, even if you were the last person in a village, you could walk in a random direction and you'd find another village almost every time without fail. I did that exact thing a bunch of times. Heck, one time I kidnapped their girl and went back to my village to repopulate it. I think you overestimate the distance between towns pre-rift.

This is cool the first time you see it, sure. But it's one thing, and once you see it once the luster goes away. Pre-rift there were a bunch of places like that, big towns with bell towers that lasted several days. Finding those was always a great feeling, and I'm sad that it's gone.

Thank you for the reset, Jason. That arc went on for far too long. I think one of the reasons we haven't hit the family limit is because there's just not enough players to get up to 35 different families. Even if there was 0 food whatsoever there would never be enough people to spawn 35 Eves.

I'd wager that the reason for the declining player average is not solely due to mass griefing (although that's definitely a factor), it's because lives in the rift are all very samey. I played a lot less this week specifically because of that.

Pre-rift you'd never know what kind of life you'd have, but post-rift (with the exception of the first ~10 or so hours) there's only one type of life - you spawn in a big fenced-off town with plenty of resources and all the tech, and said town is being attacked both from the inside by sheep griefers and from the outside by wandering Eves. It's not really a unique situation generator anymore when you know exactly what's going to happen before you even spawn in.

I feel like the world is much less enjoyable to play in in its current state compared to pre-rift and the early rift days. It's just a mess of murders and griefers and discarded items everywhere.

The reset condition of ~34 families is almost impossible to trigger any time soon with the current playerbase. I think it should either be reduced or reverted to one of the previous reset conditions until Jason gets back from his vacation and has time to brainstorm and implement a new end trigger.

But then again, if the world is reset, it's going to end up in the same state after ~30 hours and a lot of people will be asking for a reset yet again. If the world is reset I think the rift size should be increased drastically and then we can compare the two play experiences.

The largest rift radius was 1000, but we only had that for a few hours. I think if it was increased from the current 354 tiles to 1500 (a drastic increase), just for one arc, we'd get a significantly different gameplay experience, but one that would be more enjoyable to most players. We'd still need to wall off our cities and establish rules, but it would no longer be a non-stop murderfest.

Shift-clicking with a weapon locks onto the nearest person to where your mouse pointer is. It works like that so it's easier to target people jumping from tile to tile.

I figured it was just lag or me running inefficiently, but the person in this video ran away from me really easily. Maybe it's related to this issue? I was also unable to shift click on them for some reason (even if you don't click directly on them it's supposed to assign the closest person to your click, right?). Timestamp 40:51 - https://youtu.be/bW3iz3QVKEQ?t=2451

My bad, I completely missed that part. I do agree that with moving it's more efficient iron-wise, but it's a very awkward thing to do and I can't see most people moving the well around every time it exhausts. Seems like a clever thing to do once you get the chance, but unlikely to ever become the meta.