One Hour One Life Forums

I actually did this experiment in high school and found cattle dung to be the best for breeding worms.

I hear you Morti. I wish I could keep all my babies alive but it's a choice. Do we have enough food to feed another mouth or are we on the brink of destruction and even a pro player will kill us all while we wait for her to grow?
The game is brutal. Reading the first two lines on the website will tell you that. An average lifespan of 8 minutes with only 5% of players making it to old age. Even the worst times in our history had average lifespans in the twenties.
The birthrate is just too high and we just don't have the ability to expand our food output 10x every generation. If there were some way to limit our birthrate it'd be great but as things are leaving an unwanted baby to die is this game's equivalent to birth control and/or abortion.

This is so much better than I originally thought. I was going to rage about deep wells being dry for 5 hours if you could only use buckets on 10 water. 10 water every 30 minutes is so much better.
I still don't like that they have to be built on ponds. Another thing I thought of is Canada Geese. At what point do they despawn. It would suck if we built all our shallow wells and then realise we can't upgrade to deep wells because we can't make a file.

I have mixed feeling about this.
I agree that the refill rate of this week's iteration of deep wells is OP.
A 30 minute refill time isn't too bad if you can build as many as you want wherever you want but requiring them to be built only on ponds seems too restrictive.
Wells are meant to free us from being tied to naturally occurring water sources. This change will tie us even tighter. Also, the availability of ponds varies widely from place to place which will put an even greater burden on Eve's to find an ideal starting place.
I get that ponds and shallow wells are only meant to be temporary steps on the tech ladder but the top tier, which is currently deep wells, should be more generous until the next tier is implemented. I see a lot of successful settlements hitting the 200 water limit and then dying out.
Even thinking of pegging the regeneration rate to the maximum efficiency setup seems dangerous. Forcing players into a complex calculation (see YAHG's post) of exactly how many plots need to be devoted to which crop just to survive is a terrible idea. There should be more flexibility. Planting one too many rows of carrots, or one too many rows of berries shouldn't doom a civilization.
I need more information to decide whether I like buckets or not. Do buckets require 10 water to fill or can you collect partial buckets of water? Do they work on other water sources? What happens if you try to fill a container without enough capacity to hold the whole contents of a bucket?

I don't see this as a problem, many paths to victory, keep the players on their toes etc.

Don't Starve is one of my favourite games of all time. Living as a nomadic or even a relatively sedentary Eve, if you find the right biome, is quite fun. Once kids come along, however, it's a choice between ruining someone else's day by leaving them to die or having to settle down and hope you can get a farm going before your hungry babies deplete the local food supply. It would be nice if a small family (4-5 people) could live off the land, occasionally migrating from place to place with nothing more complicated than a sharp rock and a basket. We survived that way for 100,000 years in the past (with families of 50-100 people). I don't see why this would be impossible now.

Unfortunately, we have way too many babies and we can't grow our cities fast enough to feed them all without risking a famine which could kill the whole tribe. This leads to a lot more baby abandonments (and unhappy players) and even straight up male genocide. If you upped the natural food supply and packed the players closer together, you could add in Adams and require the presence of males for females to have babies.

You did say somewhere that you were worried about consent but I'm not sure I'd pick murder and genocide over rape. Heck, it might even make players think about their behaviour in the real world.

Pies are way better than carrots. You can fill half your hunger bar 4 times and only take up one slot while you go out hunting.

I have, that or a crown. Usually worn by the person with a knife killing off half the village because they've reached the end of the tech tree and the game is becoming stale.

It is already a good game. It's the lack of content that's preventing it from being a great game.

One of the main problems with deep wells is that there isn't enough to differentiate hem from shallow wells. Shallow wells bring the water close to where it is needed, which is great, but deep wells do what? Give you a few extra seconds to grab a weapon and kill the noob (or griefer) who's busy emptying it? Even just stopping wells from drying up and becoming useless eyesores for centuries would be an improvement. Deep wells with their greater capacity will help smooth out the water flow. When a crop of carrots needs to be watered a single deep well will water twice as many crops as a shallow well. Cisterns help with this too but then it becomes choice whether to use the plaster to make a cistern or use the wood to make a deep well.

You could also nerf shallow wells a bit. Make it so they can only be built on a swamp tile where the water table may be higher. Or make it so they only produce stagnant water. Good enough for watering crops but not for making dough for delicious pies or any other uses you may implement later.

In general, I would say you need to increase the demand for water as you progress up the tech tree.

Say you introduce cattle.
Each cow could have several stages of growth, eg. calf, wiener, heifer, cow. In addition to the food needed for each stage, you would also need to give it water. Once the cow is fully grown you could either milk it, which would require more water, or kill it to get leather. You would then need to tan the leather to make it useful which would use more water. Leather would be essential for other techs further up the tree.

You could also add steam power. each machine would automate a process but would need copious amounts of water to continue operating.

As cities grow the need for sanitation also grows and so people would need more water to wash themselves and their clothes and to dispose of waste to prevent disease. Speaking of disease people could also produce medicine and other chemicals which would also consume water.

As civilization advances beyond the steam age the need for water may diminish but then people would have to replace their water wells with oil wells.