Some thoughts and ideas

Fungius · 2018-03-12 17:15:45

First of all, I would like to say that this is a great game. I've been playing since the moment I bought it for the past three days almost non-stop, and this game really devours your time. After I had a great amount of fun roaming the official servers, I decided to join an almost empty custom server, just to experience the game in a less hectic environment and experiment. I ended up building a village with the only other guy on the server, and later expanding it into a rich and prosperous settlement as some more people joined. During our journey from a small farm to a town, I have experienced the game to it's full extent without having to worry about the constraining aspects, and now I would like to share some thoughts I had and some suggestions the developer might consider adding.

Item storage & space management in general

I would say that this is one of the most acute problems I have encountered during my playthrough. Every single settlement I have been in is just littered with tons of things. Unorganised people in combination with a poor storage system is a perfect recipe for an extremely discouraging clusterf***, which is inevitable. Not only is it distracting (and even almost painful on a physical level to people like me, who have from OCD), it is also of utter importance to a settlement's prosperity. For example, if the place is too littered, people have to run long distances to find the items they need, food, or free space to drop down their stuff to feed their baby. Failure to quickly and effectively accomplish these tasks may bring unwanted consequences.
I think that it makes absolutely no sense that one item, regardless of its size or type, takes up one tile. This wouldn't be a problem if tiles wouldn't be as big or as important as they are. For example, one bone needle takes up one tile, and at the same time, a wall or a farming tile also take up one tile. I just dont see absolutely any point in this. Why should we have an item which visually takes up about one tenth of a tile take up it's entirety? I know about rock and fur stacking, baskets and carts, but what is the problem to make bones, bone needles, sharp rocks, stakes, clothes, and other small stuff stack?
Baskets and carts are also of little use, since most of the time to take an item from a cart you need to first take out the basket, put it on the ground, then take out some more items from the basket (sometimes you can't take out the item you need directly from a basket) and only then you will get your desired item. This whole process is not only time-consuming, but also requires you to have from 2 to 4 free tiles, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of storage items. What is more, not all items can be put into a basket, and the reasons for that leave me guessing. For example, you could place shoes and loinclothes, but you can't place any other clothes into a basket. Same goes for some other items.
And the last thing which I want to mention is trashing items. There are small trash pits, which seemingly are designed to solve the problem of littering, but at their current state there are two major problems with them. The first one is their capacity - they certainly cant hold the amount of trash required for a big settlement. You can obviously make more pits, but the leftovers still take up space, which is not good. Second problem is being able to trash only certain items. In my opinion, this feature is pointless and unnecessary, completely defeating the purpose of trash pits. What's the point of digging one if you can't throw most of your stuff there? I understand that almost all of the items in this game have some use and should not be considered trash, but this is not always the case. I'll give an example: while building a house at my settlement, we first had it planned out completely with stakes. Little did we know that stakes are returned to you after you place your building material. As a result, we had 3 carts filled with baskets, which were fully filled with stakes. Unfortunately, we couldn't trash them, so we had to leave them taking up space in our village.

Solution: make smaller items stackable; implement a system which will allow to take out items with precision (better hitboxes/dialogue window where you can choose what you want to take); add clothing stands/racks - some form of container which would allow storing clothes; make bigger trash pits, allow trashing more items.

Improved building system

While I understand that at the current stage the game is set to be in a primitive era, and there aren't much items or tools available, I think there should be an ability to remove buildings and furnaces. There is always place for mistakes, and some buildings may be unwanted. Maybe there should be some kind of penalty to removing buildings, for example receiving half the materials back, or a complicated recipe for the remove tool, but this feature is a must-have. I think this point is pretty self explanatory.

I was going to write a couple more suggestions on new items and mechanics, but seeing how big this post is I've decided to create a separate thread for that later. For now, I would like to hear your opinion on the ideas presented here, and Ill be glad to discuss better ways to improve the game or answer your questions.

Zeromus · 2018-03-12 18:14:00

How to share suggestions is here:

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=406

Cryptodream · 2018-03-12 20:00:02

Round stones are stackable.

shoukanjuu · 2018-03-12 21:15:02

Cryptodream wrote:

Round stones are stackable.

Fungius wrote:

I know about rock and fur stacking

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-03-12 17:15:45