One Hour One Life Forums

I'm still on the road this week, evaluating potential places to move to as part of the Great California Exodus, but I managed to implement some substantial changes.

Homelands determine where you and your other family members can have babies, and they exist to ensure that people remain at least somewhat geographically separate.  Separate towns are more interesting than one big town for a variety of reasons (trade, transportation, etc.)  Historically, your family homeland was determined by wherever your family settled down and built a functional well.

Specialty biomes determine what your family is good at, and what they have to offer other families.  Your family has a corner on the market in whatever biome you specialize in.  Historically, specialty biomes of all kinds were scattered at random across the whole map.

But specialty biomes and homelands were not tied together in any way.  In fact, it was possible for your family to settle, and make their homeland, in an area that was far away from your specialty biome.  Thus, it was possible that another family, when seeking you out for help with your specialty, might need to lead your back closer to their homeland to find an instance of your biome.  When this happens, it doesn't feel very much like trade.  Furthermore, if you settle near a specialty biome other than your own, that nearby area is effectively dead, unusable space for you and your village.  You can't build there, at least not without the help of distant specialists.

So why don't people generally live in and around their specialty biome?  That would make more sense, and solve both of these problems.

In this update, your family's homeland is no longer defined by where you build a well, but instead connected to a new horizontal band on the map that contains your specialty biome.  In fact, that specialty biome only occurs in your band, and nowhere else on the map.  Other non-specialty biomes occur everywhere, exactly as they did before, but the snow biome occurs only in the north-most horizontal band, and the jungle and desert occur only in the two south-most bands.  In between these bands, there's a band with no specialty biomes at all (the centers of the gray rocky areas have nothing but more gray rocky areas), and this serves as the homeland band for the language specialists.  They make up for not having a resource specialty by having a bit more iron veins in their homeland.

If your're looking for snow, you can walk north.  If you're looking for jungle or desert, you can walk south.  Historically, looking for a particular specialty biome involved quite a lot of trial and error.  And now, when seeking out a biome expert, you will find plenty of the desired biome around them where you find that expert.  This also gives the map a more cohesive, regional feel.

Thanks to Twisted for proposing this change.

In addition, several bugs and issues with follower gates have been fixed, and property fences now decay more slowly.

A bunch of impactful changes this week, mostly inspired by the deluge of new players from the recent Steam sale.

First of all, there's now a second phase in the tutorial, meant to help new players get accustomed to the game in a less high-pressure situation.  New players often just want to experiment and learn crafting without having a whole village depending on their efficiency.  Furthermore, being plopped into a thriving and cluttered village as a new player can be overwhelming.  You just learned to chop kindling with a hatchet in the tutorial, and suddenly you find yourself in an environment with dozens of unknown tools.  Yes, getting born into the middle of an existing situation is a fundamental premise of the game, but it's not a great environment in which to experiment with the basics.

So, after the main tutorial, there's now an optional solo challenge.  You are thrown out into the wilderness, naked and alone, to try your hand at solo survival.  You can opt out of this right away, if you want, or you can keep trying until you pass the challenge by surviving from scratch until age 60.  For new players who don't opt out, they will enter the main game at least knowing how to take care of themselves in a hostile environment.

Since the game keeps track of which phases of the tutorial have been passed (or bypassed), and no one has passed this second phase yet, even veteran players will find themselves thrown into the solo challenge at least once.

And of course, just like you can revisit the tutorial whenever you want, you can revisit this solo challenge too, almost like an alternate play mode (which many players have already been simulating by connecting to low population servers).

Next, tool slots have been disabled.  I was never fully satisfied with tool slots, since most players just ignored them, and they didn't really contribute to interesting cooperative interactions.  However, they were still in there, pestering you with endless DING messages as you went about your business.

The behavior of expert way stones have been expanded to help you find poly-lingual people:  if you touch your own expert way stone, you are directed toward the closest language expert.

New players start with a fitness score of 0 now, instead of 30.  This means that they generally see their scores go up in the beginning, which is good for morale, but it also means that having a new player as a baby will be likely to help, not hurt, your own gene score (as long as you help a new player live longer than 0 years, you will earn points).

And finally, dealing with griefers.  More players means more griefers.

Personal curses now last 90 days instead of 30 days (don't forget that you can always forgive someone if needed).  And curse labels (DOLL KING or whatever appears in black above the cursed person's head) are now shared between players, instead of being unique per cursing player.  So the same person, when cursed, always has the same label for everyone who has cursed them.  Thus, players can compare notes about griefer behavior.

For quite a while, it has been very hard for solo griefers or small groups of griefers to kill.  Killing requires some form of village consensus, either through a large enough posse or through convincing the village leader to exile the target.  Since leaders tend to be high-fitness individuals, griefers have a hard time becoming leaders.

However, griefers can still cause plenty of trouble in other ways.  Planting the wrong crops, moving stuff around, stealing stuff, and hiding stuff in the woods.  Yes, you can eventually convince the leader to exile them, and then eventually hunt them down to kill them (if they don't get away first), but all of that takes time.  Meanwhile, they can keep causing trouble.  Killing is also a pretty severe way to deal with a thief, but so far, it has been the only way.

This week brings you a new, less sever way:  ally gates.  Leaders can mark certain gates, designating them for ally access only.  All allies of that leader can move through that gate.  To stop someone from moving through the gate, the leader just needs to exile that person.  And the ownership of the gate is inherited by the next leader when the current leader dies.  Thus, you now have a new way to stop a trouble-maker:  exile them, and suddenly, they can no longer travel in and out of the village, through the gate.  You can even trap them inside, making them easier to confront and deal with.

The other nice thing about ally gates is that they are spring-loaded, so they automatically open and close as you walk through (and automatically keep non-allies out).

And sports cars can smash mosquito swarms on their windshields.

What started as a couple weeks of much-needed vacation turned into a long-term refuge away from the state of California, as wildfire smoke made our already-hobbled city almost unlivable.  We're back home now, but the smoke came back with a vengeance right around the time that we did.  This coming Monday, California---and much to the west coast---will have been burning for four straight weeks.  Given that this is just the beginning of fire season, there's no end in sight.

So, I'm hunkered down here at home, with all the windows shut, and the HEPA filter running full blast, working on One Hour One Life.  We can't go outside to get exercise, because the particulate count is so high.  We're somewhat safe indoors, but with five people breathing away in a small, sealed house, our CO2 level has peaked above 3700 ppm.  Yeah, that's "cognitive decline" levels of CO2.  Please forgive any typos.

And so, with all that context, I bring you delivery trucks, which is something that I've been joking about in relation to One Hour One Life since the very beginning (from rocks and sticks... all the way up to delivery trucks!)

Not only can they hold a lot, but I've also been rethinking vehicle fueling, and these new trucks will last an entire lifetime (hour) on just one fill-up.  That means that if you find an abandoned truck, you'll probably need some diesel to get it running, but if you're actively using it, you will be able to depend on it as long as you need it.  This change in thinking may eventually trickle down to make the Crude Car more useful as well.

But besides updating OHOL this week (finally), and generally running from the smoke, what else have I been doing over the past two months?  I've been working on a vacation project, which is live now:

http://projectdecember.net

This is the first publicly available interface that allows you to converse directly with the world's most advanced artificial intelligence.  Over the past nine months, AI has become so good that it has gotten spooky.  However, since it requires a full-time super computer to run it, it's pretty much out of reach for the average person.  I've figured out a way to make talking to it affordable (just $5 to get started, as we collectively share the costs of the underlying supercomputer).

When you're talking to it, the sense of an intelligent presence is palpable.  I never expected this to happen in my lifetime, but it's here, now.  And it's really, really weird.

This week's VOG Shot features Malin Snow and her daughter Ida traveling along the very long road:

I spent the week clearing up some of the reported issues that had accumulated.

The biggest change is to how killing and posses work.  First of all, if you try to join a posse, but cannot for some reason, you get a DING message explaining the reason.

Next, there's a new exception to the posse and exile requirements---something like "live by the sword, die by the sword."  Someone who kills becomes vulnerable to being solo killed, without being exiled or having a posse form against them, for 60 seconds (the same amount of time that they are stuck holding the non-sword murder weapon).  This helps people deal with the "evil leader" problem.  The current leader is the most powerful in terms of being able to exile, which means that dethroning them requires quite a bit of political willpower.  If that leader goes on a unilateral killing spree, organizing collectively to de-follow them---to strip them of power---can be really difficult.  One of the early ideas for justice in the game was "safety in numbers."  As long as the citizens outnumber the griefers, the citizens should triumph.  That idea resurfaces as we differentiate good killers from bad killers.  The good ones will need to be protected by others while they are in their post-kill vulnerability state.  The bad killers, who are acting alone and without the approval of the group, become fair game for everyone.  The 60 second window of vulnerability is a live server setting, and may be tweaked in the future.  It could be even longer than the murder weapon hold time.

Feast tables have been tweaked so that they are no longer kick-started by pumpkin pie, allowing these pies to be stored on a table without forming a feast table.

This week, I'm also kicking off a new community content feature.  Congratulations to Fred Struggs, whose modern berry farm is featured in this week's VOG Shot:

I'm on vacation next week.

New this week:  diesel-powered plows and irrigation systems.

Through these industrial farming techniques, you can use water, soil, and iron much more efficiently.

The third-party tech tree (OneTech) can now be reached from a button on the Login screen.

I have in my possession one of the great secrets to gustatory delight.  Say goodbye to vinegar.  Say hello to the magic that can be achieved through a little bit of salt and a lot of patience.

I will share that secret with you now.

KOSHER DILL PICKLES

24 of the freshest 4-inch pickling cucumbers
8 cups filtered water
1/2 cup sea salt
12 to 16 sprigs fresh dill (or substitute dill seeds, with 1/4 teaspoon seeds replacing 1 sprig)
8 cloves garlic, peeled
16 whole peppercorns
4 bay leaves
1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

In a non-reactive soup pot, combine the water and salt.  Simmer and stir until salt is dissolved.  Remove from heat and cool the brine to room temperature.

Snip the blossom end of each cucumber, exposing a bit of the white flesh.

Put cucumbers and all other ingredients into a large clay or glass crock.  Pour in enough brine to cover all cucumbers by at least an two inches.  They will float as the brine level rises, so push them down to make sure there is at least two inches of extra liquid above them.  Make more brine if needed.

Place a clean ceramic or glass plate on top of the cucumbers, and place a sealed glass jar full of water on top of the plate to weigh it down and keep all the cucumbers below the surface of the brine.  Use the largest plate possible that fits in the crock, and put the plate face-up to avoid trapping too much air under the plate.

Cover the crock with a clean pillow case.  You can also use a towel, secured with a loop of string to cinch the loose ends shut around the crock.

Place in a cool place.  68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal for fermentation, which should take about three weeks, but happens faster at higher temperatures.  Slower fermentation produces the most delicious results.

Every few days, remove the cloth cover and skim any scum or mold that appears on the surface.  You will see bubbles coming up around the plate as long as fermentation is happening (you can tilt the plate a bit to observe any trapped bubbles).

After two weeks, remove the plate and sample one pickle.  Rinse it off.  Slice it in half along the cross section, and check how far the fermentation has progressed.  If it's finished, the army-green translucent part should extend from the skin all the way to the center.  If there's still some white-looking flesh near the center, the fermentation isn't done yet.  You can also taste it for doneness.  If they're not done, rinse the plate and put it back with the weight on top.  Let them go another week and then sample one again.

Once fermentation is complete, fish all the pickles out and place them into jars.  Ladle enough brine into each jar to cover them.  Place them in a root cellar or refrigerator to keep them long term---they will be good to eat for many months.

To eat:  Fish out a pickle from a jar with a fork, rinse off, slice, share, and enjoy.

Note that every year's batch of pickles tastes slightly different.

When you have a good pickle year, it's a really good year.

Finally got through the whole list of reported issues.  There's now a lovely count of zero outstanding reports on both the code and data repositories.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues

Beyond that (and because of all the very helpful reports), the game is in a pretty good place right now.  Most of the systems, like property, leadership, and YUM chains are more useful, and therefore more widely used, than ever before.  The challenge of managing collective resources to survive is ever-present, even in advanced villages.  Even more important, that challenge is constantly changing, as the situation in each village shifts over time.  There's very often something important to do that will actually help your village survive---and the choices you make along the way actually matter.  The promise of each life being a unique story is closer to being delivered than ever before.

The big things to notice this week is that you can get an arrow to your top leader with the /LEADER command, and a new /UNFOLLOW command is available in case you're too young to utter the necessary phrase.  Speaking of being too young, the speech length curve (which grows with age) has been tweaked quite a bit, giving you more speech length much earlier in life.  You now gain a ton of speech length between ages 8 and 16, and gain a bit more than that by the time you reach old age.

NO MORE

BREAKING UP

MESSAGES

INTO MULTIPLE

UTTERANCES

People who are starving (less than 20 seconds left before they die of hunger) make a starving face, complete with a whimpering sound that can be seen off screen.  Rail carts hold twice as much as they used to, and corner property fences auto-renew themselves when nearby fences are renewed.  The car is now faster and goes much farther on a single unit of fuel.  Also, a bunch of other little fixes.

Several systems that required repeated manual intervention for trans-generational propagation have now been made automatic by default.  In the past, these systems were rarely used, in part because of maintaining them long-term was almost impossible (one weak link in the chain, in some future generation, caused the whole thing to fall apart).

First, property.

If you die as the last owner of a property gate, instead of the gate collapsing, ownership now passes to your oldest family heir.  This is your oldest child, grandchild, or great grandchild, if you have any, or your oldest, closest relative otherwise.  To prevent gates from hanging around forever, even if they're no longer wanted, owners now have the power to remove them at will.  When you inherit property, you get a DING message explaining the situation, and an arrow pointing back to it.

Second, leadership.

If a leader dies with no chosen heir (they can chose one by following someone before death), their oldest follower takes over for them as leader.  All their other followers automatically switch to following this new leader, and get arrows pointing toward them.  The new leader gets a DING message informing them of the situation.

Combined with the fact that babies follow their mother's leader by default, and babies of leaderless mothers follow their own mother by default, leadership will be the default condition throughout the game.  People can still opt out by following someone else or intentionally following no one, so truly bad leaders that inherit their power can be easily removed from office.  Furthermore, since most people in a family will follow the same leader by default, there's now a reliable way to mark bad actors through exile (when the top leader exiles someone, everyone will see it).  And that leads us to the next tie-in.

Third, killing.

In the arms race against murder sprees committed by coordinated teams of griefers, killing has become harder and harder.  The posse system worked to prevent unilateral, unjustified killing.  However, it also demanded organization on the part of the players to carry out consensus-based, justified killing.  This organization, for a group of strangers working together through in-game chat, is tough.  But a griefer team, working through voice chat, can easily meet the required level of organization.

The required posse size has been climbing to combat this, and the griefer teams have been growing in size along with it.  Meanwhile, necessary killing in the game (to stop non-killing griefing) has become almost impossible.  If 8 people are required to form a posse, you have to get 8 random strangers on the same page, at the same time, about what they are trying to do.

What is the actual goal here?  We're trying to prevent the minority from pestering the majority with nuisance killing.  We can assume, hopefully, that any team of griefers will be smaller than the group of non-griefer players in a village.  How do we give the larger group the power to both avoid getting killed by the smaller group, and also the power to kill easily when necessary?  A large enough posse requirement protects the majority from being killed, but it makes it way too hard for them to kill.

And just a quick aside:  if you haven't been following this game's growth closely, you might be thinking, "Why is there killing in this game at all?  Just remove it!"  But then what happens when someone keeps moving your tools right when you go to use them?  What happens when someone steals your horse and won't give it back?  There are endless ways for one player to irritate other players.  Killing is supposed to be the way the group says, "enough is enough."

But how do we know who the majority is, so that we can give them that power?

This week, I'm testing a new idea:  your group is defined by the leadership tree that you are part of.  If you are part of a big group, you can't be killed easily.  If you are not part of a big group, you are fair game for anyone to kill.  You inherit (or choose) which group you are part of based on which leader you are following.  But leaders have the power to remove you from their group, and relegate you to your own defenses, through exile.

In detail, we count up your allies (those that see you as part of their group) and your enemies (those that see you as exiled).  If you have at least as many nearby allies as enemies, you can't be solo killed, and a large posse is required to get you.  However, if you have more nearby enemies than allies, anyone is free to solo kill you.

A small team of griefers might be able to form their own leadership tree and thus have a few allies each, and they might be able to exile you, giving you a few enemies.  But as long as you are part of a larger group of allies, you will be immune to their attacks.  Furthermore, if your group exiles them, they will have a lot of enemies, and be easily dispatched.

Also, if trouble crops up within your own ranks, all the top leader needs to do is exile that bad seed, and then anyone in the village can take care of the problem.

(Feels strange to be talking in euphemisms like a mob boss....)

Combined with the fact that everyone will be part of a leadership tree by default, and we can see that everyone will be protected by default.  The ally pool will be manually shifted around as needed, through exiling and changing leadership, to deal with problems as they arise.

Finally, if you try to kill someone who is protected by allies, thus requiring a large posse, you get an arrow back to their top leader, so you know who to petition to exile them.

Yes, there will be times when talking the leader into exiling a legitimate troublemaker doesn't work out, but it will be much simpler to accomplish than trying to get 5 strangers to act in unison to form a posse.

Only 7 more reported issues remain.

At this point, I've closed nearly 1200 issues.

Big changes this week to the posse system to make it less confusing and harder to evade.  Posse members don't get sick in bad biomes, and posse targets are too scared to carry anything, so they can't hop on a horse to escape.  You know your posse is big enough to land a kill when the target starts whimpering in terror.

Information overload has been reduced by limiting your NEW BABY notifications to one per minute max, and only showing you VISITOR notifications for your gate when you're far from home (and also at most one per minute, max).

Donkeytown players can no longer manipulate end towers or ring the bell tower, so no more hidden d-town apocalypses.

Non-property fence gates now auto-open and close when you pass through, and never let animals wander out.

You can hook your bow on the outside of your quiver or backpack, similar to how a sword can be carried.

Potatoes harvest has been overhauled to waste less iron in digging.  Property fences cure more quickly and are less fiddly to build.  And a bunch of other little fixes, which you can see here:  https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/commits/

A bunch of things fixed this week.  Stackable piston blanks, both hot and cold.  Swappable machine mechanisms after putting in water or charcoal.  Unsealed bottles can be set on tables.  Full list can be seen here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeD … its/master

Later-game Eve, who is placed when one of the specialist families dies out completely, is now reserved for players with high fitness scores.  No more spamming /DIE in order to force yourself as an Eve in those situations.

38 reported issues left.

Lots of new stacks.  Thirty, in fact.  You can also rope pigs and sheep.

You now get a notice above your head when a hungry work action fails due to hunger.

Navigation arrows now have a priority system.  When you're actively following an EXPT or MAP arrow, it doesn't get replaced spuriously by BABY arrows pointing back home.

Still working through the remaining reported issues.  Only 86 to go.

Someone observed that you can't put plated omelettes on the table, which is weird.  Of course, no plated food is containable, because you can't shove it in a backpack or storage box---it's a plate of food, after all.  The table is also implemented as a container, which means that plated food couldn't go on the table.  Up until this point, an object was either containable or not, and beyond that, the only granularity was the required container slot size.  Tables and storage boxes can store larger items than backpacks and baskets, for example.  But there was no way to say, "plated foods can only be stored on the table."

This week, I added a named tag system for containable items that can only go in certain types of containers.  All the plated foods are containable, but earmarked to only be containable on the table.  This new property was added to 39 objects, so there's now a huge variety of new table-top items.

This feature can also be used in the future for other special types of containable items.

Let there be green paint and green walls.

Behold, a much-needed Dung Box.

May you plant sapling cuttings directly from your shears.

May letter stock be three times more plentiful.

And several other fixes.

Still working my way through the list of reported issues.  Only 108 left.