How to manage the poop-ocalypse

BlueDiamondAvatar · 2019-04-19 02:35:07

Here's the key observation to managing the shit clutter produced by the High Society update: If a sheep or lamb is in a full pen when it grows wool, it does not generate any new dung.

Poop clutter threatens the usability of many advanced towns these days. How do we stop making our towns into such shitholes?

Answer: Stop cleaning out the sheep pen.

This was a difficult revelation for me, as I like the aesthetic of a clean sheep pen. But I like the aesthetic of a clean town even more. But these days, spacious sheep pens shouldbe full of dung - so you don't keep making more poop than your town can possibly use.

To some extent we already had issues with excess wool production cluttering towns with mutton. But mutton biomes are easily cleaned up by baking pies and directly roasting mutton. The clean up of a each sheep dung moved out of a pen requires one straw, six berries, one carrot, the unique use of a steel tool, a bowl of water, a lot of transportation, and additional sharp stone actions. That's a lot of labor and resources compared to one kindling being used to cook up as many raw muttons as you can grab. And the result from cooking muttons is easily stored and moved to new locations, unlike the compost pile.

To keep towns free of poop clutter and (oddly) compost clutter - we have to get serious about keeping the poop inside the pen until we need to use it. In fact - we might even be happy to add other items to make sure the tiles of the pen are full. (That's a shocking change to how I used to police pens for random clutter.)

For the compost maker this means a meta change, also. Please take the dung that is already outside the fence. Even though this means extra shovel uses, it's the only way to reduce your town's poop surplus.

The loom that is driving this rising tide of shit needs two huge balls of yarn to make a bolt of cloth. Six sheep is enough to produce a huge ball of yarn in one round of feeding the sheep. So every dress, cloak, or set of shirt and pants, could create TWELVE pieces of sheep dung. Both shepherds and bakers should note... that the meta for an advanced town with a loom will generally be to keep six sheep alive for optimal wool production.

But how many pieces of sheep dung should we be sure to have available for composting? Three? Six? We definitely don't need twenty or thirty. We must maximize the dung-free production of wool, and that's now easier to do the smaller the pen is. You know those super tight cow pens that everyone makes? We need smaller sheep pens, now too. I think six sheep with six pieces of dung, for a total of twelve tiles, is close to ideal.

The decision to feed a shorn sheep or a lamb is always a fraught one, and sometimes decided by fiat by the baker when they show up unannounced with a knife. Since mutton spam is of no concern in comparison to the impact we are seeing from poop spam - it's in the shepherd's best interest to keep some mutton available near the pen, so that the anxious baker doesn't kill off all the wool production capacity at once.

Besides when appeasing the baker, it's generally less labor for the shepherd to feed the shorn sheep. But if there's already empty tiles inside the pen - feeding the lamb will fill up the pen to glorious dung-neutral wool production twice as quickly.

Well, thanks for reading my rambling note all about poop.

futurebird · 2019-04-19 03:14:11

Excellent post. I already take dung outside of the pen first since ... well dung *belongs* in the pen. Yell at anyone who is just moving poop out. You don't need to have an empty pen to feed a sheep for wool only. You just don't get the dung and miss a chance for mutton, but if there is a lot of mutton around (more than 4 baskets full) then stop worrying and just feed a grown sheep.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-19 05:19:04

I have no idea if this comes as the primary or secondary pen. You've collapsed town design on sheep pens into a discussion about the design for a single pen apparently. I don't agree with doing that.

I see no reason to have the primary pen to not get cleaned out. Expand the farm and try to give your children plenty of projects with respect to its expansion. Go so far as to even expand the farm to where the rabbits lie or the tundra so that rabbit hunters, shrimpers, and even ice cream makers have some variety of food to eat.

I think you do want poop clutter in the secondary pen though. But the logic doesn't lie in avoiding the poopaclypse as a compost mess should suggest more farming and without that the yum supply can die off or the local milkweed supply can die off (given water and a tilling tool, of course). Having more dung means that settlements can qualify as metropolises instead of cities if players work on building the town. Thus, feeding sheep when they can't move isn't such a good idea for town expansion. You can prefer cities to metropolises if you like, but it's not better, it just means that people aren't working on building metropolises enough at present.

Back to poop clutter in the secondary pen. Well, this pen has a different purpose than the primary pen. Unlike the primary pen which has uses for clothing, compositing, and food production in mind, the secondary pen gets designed as a back up pen in case the first pen gets griefed. This pen ideally would be rather large in size. It would have the sides made out of full bell tower bases and the corners made out of full belltower bases, since those stabilize the quickest. The corner entrances only on the bottom of the pen, would NOT be of the same type. Directly below the corner entrances lies either sugarcane or trees. Inside of the pen is some balance of sheep that have gotten shorn, but NOT have had their wool removed from the spot where the sheep stands (these sheep are not mobile once shorn anywhere), and dung as backup to get the farm going again. Why the shorn sheep with the wool under it? It's not because the sheep is immobile anywhere. Here's my hint: imagine the sheep as if it were a nice person in the game and the griefer was a wild animal, and assume that the wool is an item that the sheep stands on.

It's a lot of bowls berries and carrots to get a large pen up to that point. And that means there's plenty of use for all that dung around, even if settlements stay at the size of cities instead of the size of metropolises.

pein · 2019-04-19 05:42:01

instead of moving poop, we could move farms
how and why?

a cistern is holding water
you need 10 stone and a limestone forged, then mixed with water
but if you want to move a cistern, you can empty it,pickaxe it and get back the stones, then you only lose a limestone
now if you got a cart and 4 buckets, you can carry a lot of water, just dump in cistern and leave a bucket and a hoe there

the next step is making a new pen, yes, might sound like a big project but it's actually quite easy since you already got sheep, you just need a rope

sugarcane is quite easy to manage, just cut some, put in cart, each sugarcane is 4 piece bundled, so 16 in a cart, that's 16 walls, that's a 3x3 pen
but if you aim a bit higher you can do 32 with 2 carts/2 turns or 24 with upgraded cart

32 is already a 7x7 pen
now you got a lot of poop, put a cistern on middle, move sheep to other pen

if you are afraid of griefers cutting a sugar pen: they can grief any pen, they can dig up bell bases or water adobe pen
if you got adobe pen near water, which makes sense cause adobe comes from the swamp and you get free space there, then they can water it up
if they cannot destroy the pen they will just kill all the sheep

so instead of worry, just take out a lamb into a small biome, feed it (if you do it before might turn big when you release it), shear it so it becomes biome locked
if you got a sheep like this , it will stay int that biome forever, and if all he sheep gets killed, all you need to do is get 2 sheep food, feed the hidden sheep and get back the first lamb

now you can have multiple sugar pens, and the dung contained within and used up for compost then the soil for milkweed and carrot and wheat

the real problem is that clothes are new
people will want clothes and maybe feed sheep for the fleece (fleece thiefs are not a new thing)
basic rule is always that the player who fed the sheep gets it's fleece
not the one who picks up a fleece or who shears it
even so it's like 20% of the job
cause planting wheat, carrots, keeping seeds but not too many, making compost, cleaning bones, getting meat, making pies is part of a normal cycle
also the berry field gets depleted fast in meantime

this part of process is vital to keep a city alive
each 15 bush for 10 min provides 20 bowls of berry which is food worst case scenario, the upkeep is 1 compost (the rest of soil from compost goes back to makign compost)
so picking all bushes off is good, you maximize the output from berry and the more time you use a bush, the lover the initial soil and iron investment on it

but face it: people who care about the clothes, will make 12 fleece, but will never make 12 compost cause that would mean that they could have a cape with the cost or twice as much time to clean up

so having a pen for public, and having a pen for loom is good idea, you lose the dung and no meat, but you wont overproduce dung

this setup allows 12 sheep food in boxes (one in hand and swapped with shears)
the sugar is fast to grow, and the bottom boxes wont cover sheep
ideally put a cistern near soil piles, if you got sheep they arent so important anyway

the initial rope cost is a bit high, you can turn into 2x3 so you only need 2 boxes, but the 6 sheep can make 6 wool, and you can do 6 food, 6 fleece in boxes and swap the shears with the last fleece and take it out the last in hand, then start new
also ideal bottom corner is a loom which is unmovable and blocks sheep, and it's close to the setup

Spoonwood · 2019-04-19 15:06:18

pein wrote:

if they cannot destroy the pen they will just kill all the sheep.

You really think griefers will manage to kill all the sheep in a large pen with, thinking more on it, a single entrance, and sheared sheep having their wool directly below them?

pein wrote:

so instead of worry, just take out a lamb into a small biome, feed it (if you do it before might turn big when you release it), shear it so it becomes biome locked
if you got a sheep like this , it will stay int that biome forever, and if all he sheep gets killed, all you need to do is get 2 sheep food, feed the hidden sheep and get back the first lamb

I kind of think that griefers come as smart enough to mess this up also. Griefers do run out of towns. I also don't know why it would be needed to find a small biome for the sheep. Shorn sheep with their wool directly below them can't move.

pein wrote:

this part of process is vital to keep a city alive
each 15 bush for 10 min provides 20 bowls of berry which is food worst case scenario, the upkeep is 1 compost (the rest of soil from compost goes back to makign compost)
so picking all bushes off is good, you maximize the output from berry and the more time you use a bush, the lover the initial soil and iron investment on it

I agree with this. Well it could get overdone in principle, but I don't think that all that likely to happen. I used to not understand the whole putting berries in a bowl thing, but there's a lot to it. As you point out, it's more berries for the initial investment. It might fill up all of the clay bowls with berries, but oh well. I think even more importantly, more clay firing will come as needed soon enough. And if you fire some clay and make charcoal in one burning kiln, that's more efficient than just firing charcoal, and results in more fired clay earlier which stacks nicely. The only hang up comes as players who insist that they need empty plates and bowls right now for some smithing project and will do something idiotic like throwing berries on the ground. But those players act like or are noobs who throw berries on the ground and won't get clay when it's needed, let alone fire it up.

DestinyCall · 2019-04-19 15:20:21

Spoonwood wrote:

I agree with this. Well it could get overdone in principle, but I don't think that all that likely to happen. I used to not understand the whole putting berries in a bowl thing, but there's a lot to it. As you point out, it's more berries for the initial investment. It might fill up all of the clay bowls with berries, but oh well. I think even more importantly, more clay firing will come as needed soon enough. And if you fire some clay and make charcoal in one burning kiln, that's more efficient than just firing charcoal, and results in more fired clay earlier which stacks nicely. The only hang up comes as players who insist that they need empty plates and bowls right now for some smithing project and will do something idiotic like throwing berries on the ground. But those players act like or are noobs who throw berries on the ground and won't get clay when it's needed, let alone fire it up.

I don't have a problem with people picking berries off into bowls, but if you are doing any project that occuppies the majority of the free bowls in the village, I think it is YOUR responsibility to go gather some caly to offset the bowls that you are using. It is pretty thoughtless to fill all the available bowls /baskets/buckets so that your job is the only job that can be done without emptying a container that you just filled up. Don't force that job onto the next person. Make more bowls FIRST, then your village won't be negatively impacted by your project.

It is the same idea with making more buckets if you want to milk the cow or make rubber tires. Don't occupy all the buckets in the village so no one can draw up water from the deep wells. Be responsible - make more buckets.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-19 17:29:41

BlueDiamondAvatar wrote:

Here's the key observation to managing the shit clutter produced by the High Society update.

It's not produced by the update. It's produce by the players who don't know about or don't care about how the sheep clothes with respect to fertility mechanics. Rabbit fur clothing is more insulating than almost all of the sheep clothes, with the exception of the cape/cloak, which is only 2% better than a backpack if I recall correctly (I know it's a small amount). Want to solve the poopaclypse early on? Try to prevent anyone from making a loom, and encourage more rabbit hunting. Inform people that the women will have MORE yum (for anyone who doesn't know more types of food can get cooked from rabbits than mutton) AND have better temperature with rabbit fur clothes than with the new sheep clothes. There do exist people that care about the lineage surviving (the question is the percentage of players that care about this... some don't of course), so you might just get enough people who want the rabbit fur clothing (or more sealskin coats and wolf hats). And then the poop-apocalypse... a sign of either confused players OR players not caring about their lineage surviving... won't even start in it's process. Maybe even go so far as to say that anyone making a loom is griefing, but I find it bit a stretch to say that anyone not playing for the survival of the lineage is a griefer. But, if you do think that not playing for the survival of a lineage is griefing, then making the new clothes and encouraging others to wear them is griefing instead of trying to get enough rabbits, wolf hats, and sealskin coats for your family, and increase their yum numbers. To speak more precisely, the new clothes for the men would be okay, or women past forty. But for an adult woman in her fertile period the new clothes pose a problem for the lineage. It might even hold that the attempted revivals of Bell Town ultimately failed, because of players working on the new clothes instead of hunting rabbits, seals, and wolves, on a horsecart possibly, possibly with a fence to park the horse. Yeah... the failure of the attempted revivals of Bell Town might come as the strongest evidence that the new clothes just spell trouble for a lineage.

BlueDiamondAvatar · 2019-04-19 23:43:38

pein wrote:

so having a pen for public, and having a pen for loom is good idea, you lose the dung and no meat, but you wont overproduce dung

This makes perfect sense to me. Have a pen full of sheep for the loom - with absolutely mutton and dung neutral wool production, and a second pen that is for mutton and dung production - and maybe some balls of thread for meds and things like that.

While there's a ton of upfront cost to building the second pen, it'll make shepherding easier to manage for generations to come.

As a bonus - makes it harder for a greifer to destroy all you sheep pens without someone noticing.

Love the sugarcane pen design, too.

BlueDiamondAvatar · 2019-04-19 23:58:12

Spoonwood wrote:

Rabbit fur clothing is more insulating than almost all of the sheep clothes, with the exception of the cape/cloak, which is only 2% better than a backpack if I recall correctly (I know it's a small amount). Want to solve the poopaclypse early on? Try to prevent anyone from making a loom, and encourage more rabbit hunting. Inform people that the women will have MORE yum (for anyone who doesn't know more types of food can get cooked from rabbits than mutton) AND have better temperature with rabbit fur clothes than with the new sheep clothes.

This is true -- convincing people to skip the loom and just keep making rabbit fur clothing would be the best way to avoid the poop-ocalypse all together.

BUT, I think asking people to not make looms and not make the new clothes is a bit like telling a group of teenagers not to use smartphones.

The clothes look great. They help the aesthetic of the town and the game. Making people as efficient as possible is one way to promote the length of the lineage... but making people WANT to be in your town is another way. One of the things folks loved about the bell town this cycle was the impressive selection of hats and clothing dyed all the possible colors.

I don't think anyone who goes out exploring is choosing the new clothes over a good seal fur coat and wolf hat. I've also seen plenty of rabbit hunting in towns with looms - for backpacks if nothing else. At the very least that solves the yum deficit. But for people staying near food sources and inside bakeries, the difference in insulation just isn't that important. People want to stay and be bakers because they get to wear that unique red dress and pass it on to a favorite daughter or son. And you can pass it down forever... because these clothes don't decay! (yet....)

So even using the value of lineage survival, town flavor and aesthetics will decide where people stay and play during the late night fertility crunch. The new clothes serve that purpose much better than the constant grind of rabbit hunting.

pein · 2019-04-20 07:23:59

now here is the truth: once i killed eve West over a basket, well technically for a burdock and a basket
cause i grown hair, she took the basket 2 times from me without asking, dumping out everything i put in it, and left me with a total empty camp where i cant do shit without a basket, then i took a burdock and went to swamp, made a new, and when i go back with 3 clay, she took the burdock back to camp and i almost starved
if you don't want kids don't raise them
if you raise them, provide them a few baskets and empty bowls, if you think they idiots and will hang around while you do everything then i do not have sympathy for you, also you will have 10 more kids who will just annoy me and we fight for basket then what camp will that be
and quite bad logic that she sees a burdock in swamp and takes back to camp, how it got there? someone took it
should i sit on my ass 30 min while she does everything? im a kid, not a retard
we talked about it after and hes nice, i wouldn't kill over this every time just she was like longest lineage eve and played so generic, almost starved me so i was pissed on her even more

how many times i seen newbees to search for a bowl and pick up every bowl of vinegar, seeds and other stuff?
it's frustrating to me and for them too

now if you don't understand how 30 bushes will produce the same amount of berries as 15 if not taken care of then you are part of the problem
i think even 12 bushes are enough if you don't eat any of them and fix right away
now i can get that you want more, but no reason putting them near each other
no reason planting new before fixing the other one, 8 min vs 12 min
so if you soil and water all of them, then you can consider planting new ELSEWHERE

i don't think 1 bowl per bush is a lot to ask, you will have 3-4 bush per person worst case scenario to survive until some bushes come back
picking all of them into bowls regardless of what you do with them, you can left click it, right click it, no difference from bushes, fixing ll of them all-together and picking all of them all-together is the best way to manage them
they already regenerating and if people don't use/eat them, then you just doubled the berry output
also ideal job for anyone, helps the sheperds and composters, you don't need to be expert to pick off 6 berries, it just needs a bit of time

my best passive-aggressive population reduction technique is to make berry bowls with carrot, suddenly they cant find bowls, and if they don't feed it to sheep or make compost they wont get any, and i wont stop until they starve or start composting, if they starve without berry, it's a camp not worth playing in anyway, i do compost when the pop starts dwindling a bit

making loom is not so simple for new players, one lady really tried but put on the wrong newcommen extensions , like i realized what she wants, but noticed she put up lathe
i swap to roller
they wasted the fill, then i made copper rods, then they wasted again on something other
then i finally made a rod but she made another, then she combined the two wires to an antenna
luckily i got like 6 malachite and made 4 rods cause why not, the roller was going
so i could make a loom

i didn't made before cause having no car you don't go for airplane
since update i made 4 times, as early as gen 8 or last 5 minutes in Haak line
but only once from a point of not having newcommen at all

people like updates, be that totally useless tomatoes or dogs so they will go for it wasting a lot of charcoal and water
not makign is not an option
sure it gonna be bad for the camp, but a kid who feeds sheep and tends to berries, is still distracted and gives the lineage chances, and a baby who sees clothes, will more likely stay at the camp

only that it's even worse for the people who tend to sheep

actually i still go for max storage outfit, and i don't mind having some style in the meantime, so for me is pack, apron, pants and whatever, possibly same color hat as my pants

and yeah, i agree, it's better to have packs for everyone and a bit worse insulating set, than full fur for a few (badly) selected players and nothing for the rest

still makes towns shitty, but hey, gonna wear off a bit in a while (or maybe not cause clothes are the main concern of Rpers)

Spoonwood · 2019-04-20 14:21:23

BlueDiamondAvatar wrote:

I don't think anyone who goes out exploring is choosing the new clothes over a good seal fur coat and wolf hat.

I think Pein will do that, since he likes the apron and the trousers. With a backpack you could bring home 6 items that way without a basket or cart. Some people have also found a backpack difficult to use with a wolf hat, so I'm not so sure about the wolf hat even.

Anyways, you do have an interesting point about people staying. And maybe the quantity of people staying matters more than having more people who care about fertility mechanics.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-04-19 02:35:07

How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#2 2019-04-19 03:14:11

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#3 2019-04-19 05:19:04

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#4 2019-04-19 05:42:01

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#5 2019-04-19 15:06:18

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#6 2019-04-19 15:20:21

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#7 2019-04-19 17:29:41

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#8 2019-04-19 23:43:38

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#9 2019-04-19 23:58:12

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#10 2019-04-20 07:23:59

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

#11 2019-04-20 14:21:23

Re: How to manage the poop-ocalypse

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