it's already hard enough that the water dries up and we have to go ten miles to the well.
Use cisterns
]]>I think salvaging should be like dungeoneering: find a dungeon, bring a cart full of food, leave with a cart full of artifacts.
Making it possible and desirable to build long roads would help with exploration a lot.
Roadside Picnic, but the aliens are actually your ancestors.
As a bonus, make broken tech decay into death traps.
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Maybe seasons would help?
Spring/Summer things regrow. Winter, nothing regrows.
It will add the need to plan for the future. It will cull out the weak tribes. The strong ones will grow.
I agree!
]]>In real life, new trees can grow after their seeds naturally fall. Berry bushes will spread through animals eating them and pooping the seeds.
It is extremely difficult to replicate an ecosystem on our planet... and almost impossible if you consider many biomes. So I understand that a system must be put into place.
In real life, rivers and lakes are used to get large amounts of water to sustain civilization. The planet has a natural water cycle that refreshes our supplies. If we depended only on ponds, we would all be dead. Lakes or rivers could be added.
I have to agree with DaZZZ.
How many milkweed plants are needed to make 1 of EVERY item in the game? Can a player be expected to gather/farm that many? the current "grind" of the game forces the repetition you claim to want to remove by creating a slower regrowth in nature. of course we could plant milkweed and farm it but the slow growth rate turtles the game if this is your communities' bottleneck.
I think there is are a few points mention above that could be fixed with game mechanics...wells and cisterns have ZERO usefulness in the current game. We need to rob ponds to fill our wells? what kind of backwards logic is that? IRL you dig a well to access groundwater you don't dig a well then call the water truck over to fill is up once a month.
Also, currently the tech tree doesn't run deep enough to justify changes to the surrounding world I've been in cities that have maxed the tech tree out and it doesn't feel any different to being a fresh even making a farm...we are still running water in rabbit skins and making food.
Limited resources bottleneck our growth. The game in the trailer was about learning to craft, to survive, to discover technologies and evolve into a civilization. Instead it is becoming too focused on balancing resources and performing repetitive tasks.
Of course, too much abundance, and we will all be running around with full gear, carts, stabbing each other for no reason.
I think there should be a barrier to advancement. But once progress is made, there should be ways to make life a little easier.
Maybe seasons would help?
Spring/Summer things regrow. Winter, nothing regrows.
It will add the need to plan for the future. It will cull out the weak tribes. The strong ones will grow.
Yes, someday I'll make a more accurate simulation where you have to eat 18 times per second!
You could actually accomplish this with a clicker style game. Start off with a game like A Dark Room and as you age, you accumulate/earn automated actions, like the heroes in Clicker Heroes or the villagers, in A Dark Room, they just do things for you.
Players can manually automate the tedium of life so that they can spend more time making decisions, like, which kids to talk to at school, what classes to take, or, which neighborhood they want to settle down in to raise a family.
The choice of which things to automate early in life would influence their choices down the road, like assigning a level up to a stat, except, it's a routine you've learned to make life a little easier.
Call it Breathe.
Your first step, automate your breath as you emerge from the womb. From then on, things come and go, like suckling a breast, playing an activity at recess, or doing a paper route for a little spending money, that you can spend with friends, or, save for a bike, or a car.
Go where you want with the idea. Could make a nice Choose Your Own Adventure Routine.
]]>A friend of mine summed up a design theory for this game as "evolve or die.
From what I've observed, players value stability and certainty above all else, and only explore new things once they have a stable foundation. If the world is uncertain or dangerous, don't innovate, just double down on the things you already know: Naked Carrot Farming.
When confronted with "Evolve or Die", most will choose Die. It's a simple and effective plan that is easy to execute and protects you from uncertainty and doubt.
]]>I think there is are a few points mention above that could be fixed with game mechanics...wells and cisterns have ZERO usefulness in the current game. We need to rob ponds to fill our wells? what kind of backwards logic is that? IRL you dig a well to access groundwater you don't dig a well then call the water truck over to fill is up once a month.
Also, currently the tech tree doesn't run deep enough to justify changes to the surrounding world I've been in cities that have maxed the tech tree out and it doesn't feel any different to being a fresh even making a farm...we are still running water in rabbit skins and making food.
if we could create a
]]>I think you might be overestimating efficiency of randomly grouped people with limited communication abilities. Villages are virtually guaranteed to mismanage their resources, and leaving uninhabitable areas behind, without trees or water, will just lead to starting fresh being the only option. IMO the "wait an hour" issue is the lesser evil. A way to nerf that could be introducing decay, so waiting for resources to replenish would lower the tech level of the area you're waiting on. I think it's a bit too easy to pick up after a long gone civilization anyway. And it makes sense for food to spoil and wood to rot. Heck, given enough time metal will rust away and even buildings will collapse. And it's unsightly how much random trash is strewn across the world. Plus I reckon it'd make things easier on the servers if old items were culled.
I definitely agree on being forced to climb the tech tree, though. Ponds shouldn't replenish fast enough in a reasonably local area to indefinitely sustain a small farming community. A well should be enough for one, but building wells should require a bit bigger community with more specialized roles for making the materials. This community would deplete a well faster than the groundwater would replenish, so you'd need an even bigger community to build an aqueduct from a nearby spring, etc. Now, the issue is that you can have the well building civilization collapse and a new small community taking the well and being sustainable indefinitely, or simply the civilization contracting after building their infrastructure so they can sit on it forever. This is where decay can help, because the well will eventually collapse and they'll be down to unsustainable pond regeneration. In other words, climbing the tech tree should require a large and sustained civilization, rather than short bursts of advancement continuing from previous such bursts (ie a series of dead civilizations). I do like the idea of getting some use out of marvels of a lost civilization that you can't recreate or even properly maintain yet. So maybe decay for infrastructure could be usage based, that way it won't be all gone and reverted to basically a fresh start if it takes a bit too long before somebody reclaims the site.
Also, once a community reaches a certain size it's virtually guaranteed to implode even without external stresses. Size combined with lots of specialization and poor awareness of what exactly other people are doing is sure to breed distrust so civilizations will easily collapse for purely political reasons. Efficiency generally drops with size of a group, so people will feel like others are freeloading even if they're not. And it's all cranked up by the way in which communities gain and lose members, and the administrative nightmare it is to get the new members into correct roles.
Good thoughts there ... also Hi , wondering if Jason knows about H&H ...
]]>Crop fields maybe can require being 'rotated' like an actual farm would be. You can't use the same spot indefinitely for a crop farm, so it would make sense that every now and then there can be signs you need to move to another field. Farmers will do that where they seasonally swap where they grow.
You do need to replenish soil by composting. Carrots only need it when seeding, but it still makes you put in extra work into the soil to sustain the farm. Crop rotation would be interesting, but I think composting is filling that niche atm.
There should be a way to breed live stock, so that people don't feel too comfortable living on just carrots. It would take time and effort to raise the live stock, but it could provide far more food that may sustain you longer.
You can breed live stock.
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