Coming soon: mining changes

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-28 18:01:33

I didn't mention the other stuff, because bottles were an illustrative example.

I don't want you making anything just to make it. Let's extend this rail track off to nowhere, just for the sake of making a long rail track.

Whatever you make, it should be because you need it. Always. No pretending. No make-believe. All real. If rail tracks aren't worth it, that's a problem with the utility of rail tracks, not because of a lack of iron.

Does your house in real life have spring-loaded doors on every side? My house has only two doors, one on the front, and another on the back (which is mandated by law for fire escape, perhaps). Doors are expensive, so people think carefully and put them in optimal spots.

You still have infinite iron, you just need to pay for it (at first with food, and then with oil).

Oil is currently infinite (at the cost of iron pipes, for more drilling exploration). So these two resources are wedded at the hip, which is a good thing.

And you can also wander around looking for dead villages to scrape a little pre-diesel iron out of. Even that is far more interesting than just wandering around picking free iron off the ground.

Elsayal · 2020-03-28 18:07:08

People are afraid of new things and cry. What a community !
New things are coming, just try it out and enjoy

Twisted · 2020-03-28 18:15:33

jasonrohrer wrote:

Whatever you make, it should be because you need it. Always. No pretending. No make-believe. All real. If rail tracks aren't worth it, that's a problem with the utility of rail tracks, not because of a lack of iron.

Then why did you add rail tracks, painted walls, dogs, top hats, cars, planes, tables, feasts, dung boxes, roses, doors, bottles, slot boxes, bowler hats, dyed clothing, tattoos, snow walls, pumpkin pies, pumpkins, cows, bottles, wine, grapes, way stones, maps, paper, pencils, masks, ghost costumes, graves, tombstones, snowmen, property fences, cameras, radios, morse code, skirts, trousers, dresses, cloaks, french fries, tortilla chips, ketchup, onions, nets, shrimp, fishing, emotes, looms, pigs, cows, xmas trees, candles, santa hats, garlands, turkey broth, playing cards, dice, mango trees, bonsai, springy doors, tacos, aprons, toque blanches, and many other items?

We don't need any of those things to survive. Heck any created food item is not needed either, we don't even need wells because we can survive just by foraging wild foods. But just living isn't interesting. We need those things to keep us interested in playing the game, and you just removing a bunch of those things out of the blue suuuuuuucks.

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-28 18:28:57

Twisted wrote:

Then why did you add rail tracks, painted walls, dogs, top hats, cars, planes, tables, feasts, dung boxes, roses, doors, bottles, slot boxes, bowler hats, dyed clothing, tattoos, snow walls, pumpkin pies, pumpkins, cows, bottles, wine, grapes, way stones, maps, paper, pencils, masks, ghost costumes, graves, tombstones, snowmen, property fences, cameras, radios, morse code, skirts, trousers, dresses, cloaks, french fries, tortilla chips, ketchup, onions, nets, shrimp, fishing, emotes, looms, pigs, cows, xmas trees, candles, santa hats, garlands, turkey broth, playing cards, dice, mango trees, bonsai, springy doors, tacos, aprons, toque blanches, and many other items?

Yeah, and you can see how rarely some of those things get made and used, right?

I mean, even though players beg for a laundry list of aesthetic content constantly? I should add cats next.

The reality is that after the novelty wears off, it's over, and the content mostly gets forgotten.

When was the last time you saw an axe in the game? Or a cart? Or an oil well? Those things are used constantly, because they are needed.

YUM should be necessary, eventually, for survival. It isn't, currently. It will be.

Property fences, rail carts, bottles, etc. They should be necessary. Bottles should be necessary because transport should be necessary because things are so rare and valuable that they are worth transporting to other places for the sake of arbitrage.

There is a lot of "fluff" content in the game, like dyed clothing. I saw tons of it the first week after it was introduced. A very colorful week.

But there's other non-fluff content in the game that doesn't get used because it's simply not needed. You don't use radios because you don't need long-range comms. Why not? You should NEED to coordinate at that level. You don't currently, because the game isn't that good yet.

Twisted · 2020-03-28 18:42:44

jasonrohrer wrote:

Twisted wrote:
Then why did you add rail tracks, painted walls, dogs, top hats, cars, planes, tables, feasts, dung boxes, roses, doors, bottles, slot boxes, bowler hats, dyed clothing, tattoos, snow walls, pumpkin pies, pumpkins, cows, bottles, wine, grapes, way stones, maps, paper, pencils, masks, ghost costumes, graves, tombstones, snowmen, property fences, cameras, radios, morse code, skirts, trousers, dresses, cloaks, french fries, tortilla chips, ketchup, onions, nets, shrimp, fishing, emotes, looms, pigs, cows, xmas trees, candles, santa hats, garlands, turkey broth, playing cards, dice, mango trees, bonsai, springy doors, tacos, aprons, toque blanches, and many other items?
Yeah, and you can see how rarely some of those things get made and used, right?
I mean, even though players beg for a laundry list of aesthetic content constantly? I should add cats next.
The reality is that after the novelty wears off, it's over, and the content mostly gets forgotten.

When was the last time you saw an axe in the game? Or a cart? Or an oil well? Those things are used constantly, because they are needed.

YUM should be necessary, eventually, for survival. It isn't, currently. It will be.
Property fences, rail carts, bottles, etc. They should be necessary. Bottles should be necessary because transport should be necessary because things are so rare and valuable that they are worth transporting to other places for the sake of arbitrage.
There is a lot of "fluff" content in the game, like dyed clothing. I saw tons of it the first week after it was introduced. A very colorful week.
But there's other non-fluff content in the game that doesn't get used because it's simply not needed. You don't use radios because you don't need long-range comms. Why not? You should NEED to coordinate at that level. You don't currently, because the game isn't that good yet.

From reading this it is very clear that you haven't actually played your game in months. Half of things on that list are more common than carts or axes.

You have a very special and unique game with a passionate playerbase. A phenomenal game unlike any other. I thought you knew that, I really really did, but after this I am not so sure. It makes me sad.

Elsayal · 2020-03-28 18:51:17

Twisted wrote:

From reading this it is very clear that you haven't actually played your game in months. Half of things on that list are more common than carts or axes.
You have a very special and unique game with a passionate playerbase. A phenomenal game unlike any other. I thought you knew that, I really really did, but after this I am not so sure. It makes me sad.

cart and axe are more common than anything in your list, wtf are you saying ?

Twisted · 2020-03-28 18:53:41

Elsayal wrote:

Twisted wrote:
From reading this it is very clear that you haven't actually played your game in months. Half of things on that list are more common than carts or axes.
You have a very special and unique game with a passionate playerbase. A phenomenal game unlike any other. I thought you knew that, I really really did, but after this I am not so sure. It makes me sad.
cart and axe are more common than anything in your list, wtf are you saying ?

Painted walls, top hats, tables, doors, slot boxes, bowler hats, dyed clothing, pumpkins, way stones, maps are ten items that are more commonly seen than axes or carts in an average village.

Elsayal · 2020-03-28 18:54:45

It's just not true, but whatever.

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-28 18:58:45

Twisted, it it was a better game, there would be way more people playing it.

There are fundamental things that make it less "good" than other games (like the one-hour time commitment per game played, the fundamental lack of player progress from hour to hour, etc). I can't fix those things without abandoning the fundamental premise of the game.

But there are other things that have nothing to do with the fundamental premise that are not good. They make the game more boring and less interesting than it would be otherwise.

Infinite resources, in all their various forms, are one of those things. There's nothing in the premise of the game that requires infinite resources. Instead, "Everything Runs Out" was the mantra from the beginning:

http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=63

It has been a two-year process, going all the way back to the removal of infinite carrots. But each time one of those things was fixed, after some massaging to get the balance right, the game became better.

You might currently say that water is finite for "most" towns, except for a few veteran players who can make a diesel engine and get oil.

And water is an even more fundamental resource than iron.

Yet somehow, it works.

Elsayal · 2020-03-28 19:04:06

Is it because Twisted is a Twitch player, that you only answer to him ?

I'm sad.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-03-28 19:09:10

jasonrohrer wrote:

Legs, as far as I'm aware, "banning" mods is impossible, from a tech standpoint.

It's only impossible as long as this game is open source game. If we couldn't see the source, or at least one file with a secret code that only official client has access to, users would be unable to join the game using modded client that can't see the secret code.

Tho it's not zooming the problem... Users without zoom are the problem. This game is hardly playable without zooming and I could bet tons of more people would stay with this game for longer if they had zooming build in the game.

Elsayal · 2020-03-28 19:10:00

Coconut Fruit wrote:

Users without zoom are the problem.

lol

Legs · 2020-03-28 19:14:35

I mean, not to mirror spoonwood but resource scarcity was never a central theme. The basic premise is to improve by building. You pursue more advanced tech because it makes life easier. That's how civilization building works. This becomes sustainable through content updates which were never delivered. To you, colorful loom-woven clothing is a bad thing. To the players, it's a good thing. What's the point of building an engine when the newcomen pump is so much easier to run? """Upgrading""" to a diesel well now means losing productivity. The same with these iron changes. The whole point of building infrastructure and advancing tech is to get rich and make an easier life. You're trying to defeat that by design. The solution is new content that makes use of more abundant resources, not kneecapping the current build. What you're working on is utterly limited, it's trash. This is not sustainable game design. It's life support for a doomed game, and the cure is C O N T E N T.

Gogo · 2020-03-28 19:25:20

jasonrohrer wrote:

You shouldn't ever be building something "just because you're bored" and "you might as well."

In game or also in real life? This game is not necessary for ppl and how much fun it gave us. Sometimes free time brings good results.

I see the point of update, mining should be mining, not gathering and we need to care for stuff we're making from finite resources. But if stuff are valuable, we need to keep it. So why someone can steal a car just by putting kero into it? I tried to make a car useful and I found out it doesn't have advantages over a horse (I mean there's more disadvantages than advantages).. so I tried to make 'airport' in two towns, I made airplane from a car. But then someone stole the airplane.

Also, I see that one bowl of plaster can cover one wall, so why we need a whole bucket of paint for same one wall?

Last edited by Gogo (2020-03-28 19:26:17)

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-28 19:31:01

Elsayal, I wasn't ignoring you. Your response was a good one, though: "Let's try it and see how it goes."

Twisted actually came up with this idea (that each family would have only a few mines to work with). He doesn't like the idea anymore, or the way that I ended up implementing it. But he and I have been discussing it for a while, which is why I was responding to him in detail.

Fug is particularly upset, I think, because he hasn't figured out a work-around that will let him get infinite free iron (yet).

Legs, resource scarcity has ALWAYS been a central theme.

Here's a post that was written in 2017, about 8 months before the game launched to the public off-Steam:

http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=63

Unfortunately, the game launched with infinite carrots...

There has always been plenty of angst when any previously-infinite resource gets tamped down, though.

And I hope it's clear to everyone why this is a perennial issue:

On an infinite map, "infinite" is the default quantity for every natural resource.

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-28 19:36:28

Gogo:

You can put a property fence around your car or plane to make a "private garage" area to prevent theft. Of course, at the end of your life, you need to pick someone who will keep the fence going and "inherit" your vehicle.

There used to be a problem with "cargo cult" landing strips that could be used to lure pilots and steal their planes. That has been fixed. You can read a map right before flying, and it will pick the landing strip closest to the destination of your map.

So you can fly to "trusted" landing strips only, and bring a map to return home (or make way stones near each runway pointing to the other runway). And you can build a property fence near each runway, or even around it, to protect this whole setup and prevent your plane from being stolen.

Instant long-distance travel for 2 kero round-trip.

Anyway, you have the building blocks in hand for private and secure air travel.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-03-28 19:44:31

Keep working Jason, can't wait for the update
After all, I'm glad you keep working on the game.

DestinyCall · 2020-03-28 19:46:34

Elsayal wrote:

Twisted wrote:
From reading this it is very clear that you haven't actually played your game in months. Half of things on that list are more common than carts or axes.
You have a very special and unique game with a passionate playerbase. A phenomenal game unlike any other. I thought you knew that, I really really did, but after this I am not so sure. It makes me sad.
cart and axe are more common than anything in your list, wtf are you saying ?

You think that axes/carts are more common than slot boxes, tables, doors, bottles, bowler hats, dyed clothing, snow walls, painted walls, pumpkins, cows, way stones, maps, paper, pencils, masks, ghost costumes, graves, tombstones, property fences, skirts, trousers, dresses, emotes, looms, turkey broth, aprons, and many other items?

I don't know. I think there are a lot of popular items on Twisted's list and many more that would be common if they were not race-locked. I used to see plenty of villages with mango trees and cabbage, for example, back in the good old days when we could make what we wanted.

More radios, airplanes and cars too. I do agree that it would be nice if some of the truly dead content got a little attention. Fishing is very poorly implemented and dogs have been broken forever. A lot of the novelty food items are a huge waste of time and other resources. It sucks that many cool new things like tattoos and bottles are race-locked. I've never even touched them.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2020-03-28 19:50:26)

antking:]# · 2020-03-28 19:57:06

It looks interesting! I like the idea of going to the them same place repeatedly to harvest minerals maybe other minerals will be harvested like this one day (copper, limestone, ext)

I had a thought way back about a mining system that you would enter a cave to mine, and in the cave you would find, large immovable stones, that could be mined with a pickaxe which would produce gravel, which would needed to to be moved around with baskets, and could be filtered in water to get minerals.

Twisted · 2020-03-28 19:59:42

jasonrohrer wrote:

Elsayal, I wasn't ignoring you. Your response was a good one, though: "Let's try it and see how it goes."
Twisted actually came up with this idea (that each family would have only a few mines to work with). He doesn't like the idea anymore, or the way that I ended up implementing it. But he and I have been discussing it for a while, which is why I was responding to him in detail.

Oh, no no no, don't you dare put this on me.

I remember very clearly what my suggestion was in response to the commit that added hungry work to extracting iron from mines: If your goal is to make iron more valuable, instead of making iron annoying to extract from the ground, why not give each family the ability to upgrade a mine and make it so only they can extract iron from it. To get iron out of it they'd have to invest some resource (similar to Newcomen wells) and/or you could only get a capped amount of iron per hour. I never even considered the fact that you would make iron finite and break the tech tree.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Fug is particularly upset, I think, because he hasn't figured out a work-around that will let him get infinite free iron (yet).

Fug is trying to show you how and why this change breaks the game but instead of actually taking his posts into account you're trying to make it look like he's just a memey exploiter. That's not OK.

Elsayal · 2020-03-28 20:16:31

Twisted wrote:

Painted walls, top hats, tables, doors, slot boxes, bowler hats, dyed clothing, pumpkins, way stones, maps are ten items that are more commonly seen than axes or carts in an average village.

Axes and cart are always made prior any of these items. Why ? Because they are necessary.
I think it was the point.
Not about how much of these are present in a big town, but how often you saw them in ANY town.

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-28 20:18:49

Well, Twisted, you at least inspired the idea.

Fug punched a hole in the initial version that I came up with (where you unlock more mines by founding more homelands), which led me to the version where there are a non-growing number of mines for family.

pein · 2020-03-28 20:34:30

Jason, there are several things you are wrong about:

-the only tech that increases speed is Horses. That's locked by your melatonin level. So saying that distance is not a problem, with the tech is not true. Anything that you cannot make yourself can't be taken as a promise. Carts help on transport a bit, towns are still limited by distance, more and more over time and exploring is dangerous and costs food, it's stressful and generally boring.
I don't even talk about cars cause they run even if you don't use it so taking resources on a car is wasting more resources than it produces.

-higher tech mining method? it's not higher-tech if the effectiveness is lower. 1 kerosene is equal to 40 water of 5 iron (6-1 for chisel) so 1 iron is 8 water. 1 iron makes a hoe, that's 51 uses on average, which is 25 tiles of farm tiles, which also needs 25 water. 8 water makes 32 pies which is quite a lot of survival time. Dunno what you think about the numbers, for me it seems way too low. By nerfing iron, you think the water will be less valuable? with your constant nerfs you managed to make water very high cost, to a point where double tilling soil is better than single tilling 1 soil, since it uses less water, getting wild soil is less time than making a profit out of composting (maybe if it would not cost so much water).
So it can't be called higher-tech, its a convenience. Composting is a convenience to make soil, iron mining engine is a convenience to get iron. Both are less effective than gathering from the wild cause they don't cost water. Since you can get water for kerosene, it's a better deal than using it for iron or transportation. If you increase mining to 9 iron per kerosene, then 1 iron=1 water, but I doubt that it would worth it even so.

-"just by walking" it's not free it will cost food and time, by restricting everything to resources, you make player time and work less valuable. nobody likes to feel useless. when you see a stack of iron you nerf iron cause you see "too much iron" when players spend a life on gathering iron, it's a sacrifice, it's an act of kindness, spending time with grinding instead of eating and talking to others. Walking is not free, takes food, time, and it's dangerous.

-limiting iron for each family is unrealistic, nobody liked the rift, these invisible limits are the same as the rift.

-you limit pseudo eves and outposts by this. splitting from your family is a personal choice, sometimes it's necessary cause their habits are wasteful and you can predict the low survival chances.
Oil and iron mining is locked behind melatonin levels which we aren't able to change so planning on that is dumb. You restricted cities to Newcomen levels. How it makes sense to give outposts the minimum requirement of having an engine and oil?
And more importantly, making an outpost is a selfish choice, but the outcome is affecting others. How do you know where is your original homeland and how you get back there? How do you know that your family wasted 120 out of their 144 iron and there is no chance of making an engine now? Having problems that you can solve is part of the game, having harder problems can be challenging for some. Having problems that are unsolvable it's not fun, especially if you don't even know that you already lost.

-there is an exploit already which is quite weird: the eve could stack stones to dry up iron, and then walk 160 tiles out and establish homeland elsewhere, which is weird, considering that this is a must-do in order to have more iron in future, but reversely doing it is impossible, that someone would make a city then get iron by walking that far

-not caring is not boring, if a veteran spends a life getting iron or 10 newbies get the same iron over time, isn't that the same? since you don't have time-based output, recharge rates, how you determine how much people cared? your solution to "boring" is nerfing it? like making harder and more tedious to do it? the principle is still the same, people will try to stack as much iron as possible, you don't make it more fun by nerfing it.

-having exactly the same amount of iron per city makes cities even more generic, makes specialization, adapting to surroundings even less important, at least we had cities with lot of iron or just some, it made difference in gameplay
now we can assume how much iron we have left and how bad it is to the current tech level

-by making iron amount fixed, you limited the family time as well. with 144 or so iron, the family will live X hours.
With a higher population, X will be less than with a low population, since they require more food. So the upkeep is different but the end result is the same. This is technically a nerf to the population as well, I don't think it would make a difference to have 10 people or five more if those people don't go out of the camp to explore, even if they do, the upkeep is higher and the chaos is higher, they might just look in the same place and not get anything. Since birth is not a choice, we can't control it, and you make the population a bad thing, it's again a problem what we cannot solve. The more population, the more chaos and more tool and food needs, the less time to do the tech upgrades.

-The population should be something positive, that people are genuinely happy to see a new baby, cause it means more workers. More workers should mean more resources to gather, easier life. You seem to disregard the human element. Players want to be useful, their time should be useful, their work should be useful. Too much focus on resources makes players time useless. We are not playing the game to avoid death, we try to have fun. It's okay to make the game harder, but don't just punish people for not doing things, reward them for doing things. Instead of nerfing iron why don't you add more things to do with iron? What activities should people do that benefit the community if they can't gather resources?
We would need an easy way to convert player time into profit, I don't like to be useless, most of the people don't like to be useless, some don't care and they might or might not get punished for it. What is the difference between a community who cares, who makes good choices, and one that doesn't care when you take away the choices? what are the rewards for good leadership and organization?

fug · 2020-03-28 20:47:28

jasonrohrer wrote:

Fug is particularly upset, I think, because he hasn't figured out a work-around that will let him get infinite free iron (yet).

Sacrificial Eves on server reset that keep no kids and dig up as much of their iron as they can. Best quick solution to the problem.

I'm not upset because there's not unlimited iron. I'm upset because of how much you DIDN'T think any of this through. If this update was pushed Thursday or Friday the game would have been completely unplayable all weekend. You explicitly had to be told how much iron is needed to even get through the tech tree because you couldn't be bothered to check yourself and just picked a random number essentially. It's frustrating to see you so far disconnected from what your game is and what you want it to be I mean Jason you were measuring coverable distance in cars. CARS.

It's frustrating to spend three days arguing about this kind of update when you're essentially sticking your fingers in your ears blocking out what people say. Diesel mines stopped getting used because oil got nerfed. People would much rather have 40 water vs 6 iron. These things can be buffed, these things can be changed, but not when you're telling someone who actually plays your game your PERCEIVED idea on the issue. People do not use content if its bad. Diesel mining picks are bad, cars are bad, planes are bad and this is because you wanted oil to be limited. That's OK but trying to say "oh no, people will use my crappy pick given the option to walk further or stay close to home" is just plain you not understanding.

Should I be out here telling you exploits or letting people break whatever update you're trying to put out? Should I be running over to the discord telling people "Hey, you can dump items into bad biomes by dying in them or by riding a horse to a bad area biome, swapping the horse cart for the item on the good biome then moving in the bad biome to displace the item." How many times have I outed bugs that I've liked in order to keep the game from being abused in different ways? We're on the same team here Jason. I don't spit venom because I dislike you, it's difficult trying to bridge a gap you cannot see from your viewpoint.

It feels like you keep sucking the soul out of this game and replacing it with "interesting things." Do you ever look at moelifes onetech? twohours onetech? Even YaH has been improving on things and then you look at the changes we keep getting. It's like watching a bright student slowly fall into mediocrity because the passion is gone in his learning. Those games get love. We get nerfs.

http://moetech.onehouronelife.cn/
https://twotech.twohoursonelife.com/

Roosty knife · 2020-03-28 21:02:02

The fixing bugs updates are so much better, those updates at least are making things better.
Now new iron change is bunch of dumb restrictions with no game development at all.

Last edited by Roosty knife (2020-03-28 21:02:24)

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