a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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My philosophy has always been "create monuments". This does not refer to actual buildings, but it can. If you make a huge project, the time it takes to destroy it is increased. Gotta think bigger.
Spend your whole life making clothes for 30 people. Make 20 boxes full of dirt baskets. Plant 40 milkweed. Tame 20 sheep. Make 5 of each tool. Fire 50 bowls in a kiln.
If each of the "superusers" commits to making monuments, civilization will survive the bumps in the road. Stockpiling carrots will not work. Stockpiling pies might. Stockpiling DIRT is the answer.
My guess is that a feral eve ran way off the map, and started spawning children in a new area with a new camp.
Successive eves likely spawned in this same vicinity and ran even further into the wild unwittingly.
This is part of the reason for the Diaspora. The soil situation near the villages was dire even before the update, and with the seeding penalty villages like Farmer's Peak and Midgard did not stand a chance. Nobody was managing soil correctly to begin with, it must have been the friggin apocalypse when seeds started happening.
We tried to provision against this by loading the granary at One Line Farm with many baskets of soil, hoping others would use it to rekindle after the patch. It appears that instead, many generations of nomads were born and they fled Old Eden in a subsistence-farming frenzy.
This moved the spawning radius off the explored map, and after two days of searching I believe we have moved so far that several lifetimes of travel in the right direction would be the only way to find Old Eden.
The question is, where did we go?
Not sure why you would bother. The spawn radius has been so dramatically altered by new people that the old cities are lost, and finding them within one lifetime is not really feasible.
Thanks for sharing these charts and the brief postmortems. I have followed for awhile now and enjoy seeing your various creations come to life. It has been inspiring as a solo indie dev myself to walk in the footsteps of the denizens of /r/gamedev.
My only suggestion right now would be to start identifying people in the community that can moderate for you. This game attracts...interesting... people and dealing with that should be delegated to volunteers who care about the future of the game and have community standards in mind
Having run a few different discord and TS servers over the years, this can become a full time job. I implore you not to waste your most precious finite resource, time, moderating children in a chat room.
Thanks again for being transparent with the details here. It helps other people more than you know to see the realities of gamedev in or out of Steam's greenlight.
Farmer's Peak has changed so much since the guide was published. You would scarcely be able to recognize it now if you saw it a week ago. It has a large wall to the north, on the swamp border. The resilience of people rebuilding there is really awesome. Every other time I spawn there it seems hopeless, but carrots keep returning. Sadly most of the neighboring settlements have been robbed of their soil.
We put away a good quantity of soil at One Line Farm in preparation for the update. Preventing continuous habitation of a site while you are not only to shepherd it seems a sane way to "save" progress in the form of banked soil. It will be the only metric of sustainability that matters going forward, since composting will be a necessary part of the farming life cycle.
It is, in my opinion, acceptable to slowly wind down a settlement like that. If you become the server's "hot spot" for spawning, the destruction of resources will soon be intense enough that permanent settlement is untenable. You will simply have to travel too far to get soil, only to see it used up again.
Saw him removing rValue from fence posts in a video 2/2 heat resistance property so I believe you are spot-on here good catch.
One-line farm continues to thrive, despite being a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Most of the other settlements are intermittently inhabited, there was a brief milkweed revolution at Farmer's Peak and a murder spree, whatever happened they started farming carrots again after that.
Places like Utopia and Midgard are essentially large garbage piles with substantial floor and wall space, but no purpose to the buildings. Their advanced forges have spread tools throughout the land. Box Eden is a pie factory. I did not respawn in the east at all, which leads me to believe there is extremely low level of habitation in the eastern sites. Perhaps once over two days have I seen the Cradle.
Traveling when you grow up is fun. You should see how many cities you can visit, and update our google doc with your screen shots.
Just cut it down with sharp stick and rebuild with round stone. Chances are the marker owner is dead.
As a rule, put your own home marker a ways off. Will reduce people cutting yours down.
In general, build in places where biomes are easy to get to so people don't actually need home markers.
As a suggestion, multiple owners of home marker would be ideal.
Raised several generations of children over the past 24 hours at a particular carrot farm, you can identify it by it's one adobe wall. It can support many people if you plan ahead and dedicate yourself to food production there. Using one or two plots for seed, you can help future generations flourish.
Please do not empty ponds to build berry orchards. Use them to grow carrots. There is another settlement to the south, which did not use food wisely. There is another settlement even further south, which has a fenced garden but has been thoroughly looted. You can navigate to the northernmost settlement, the carrot farm, using either of the other two abandoned settlements.
I left 8 baskets full of carrots for an enterprising Eve who finds this carrot farm, or her multitude of useless children. Please teach your kids to farm. It is senseless to build berry orchards, and does nothing but waste resources because they cannot support large families.