a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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My Situation: My town needed Kerosene. We had water to last a while, but our bell tower wasn't quite done, so if we wanted to get kerosene, we'd have to find another town. I packed up a cart of rubber-making equipment and set out towards the Bell Tower town. My town doesn't have dye or blank paper, and we can't make a rubber ball right now either - I'll have to go without a map.
I get to the Bell Town as an elder. I know it's too late to get back to town before I die. Bell Town is full of gingers though - I communicate with a woman, let her know we're about 20 wells north, but I don't know more precise than that. They promise to look for town once they're 40, to bring kerosene with them for the trade.
How it would work in real life: I show up in town, and I sketch them a map to get back home. There are waypoints to locate yourself from, and even different biomes are different enough to be able to make a distinction. My map is good enough to get them to my home.
Why this doesn't work in-game: Communication barriers, both by language barriers and by text limitations, make this infeasible. Additionally, the biomes in the game are not as diverse and tend not to have defining features like real life biomes would.
Proposed change: Allow map-making from a distance, to your home marker. I'm not exactly sure how this would work. Maybe when you title a map, if you include "/home" at the end, it will direct to your home marker instead of where you put it down.
Possible problems:
1. This could be OP - maybe being able to direct someone to your home directly isn't reasonable (though I think that it is realistic enough to consider).
2. People could use this for non-home-marker long-distance mapmaking, by placing a home marker wherever they want to make a map. This would really only be usable near your home base, or by people in a bell tower town.
3. People could troll by placing a home marker somewhere arbitrary.
Possible solutions:
1 and 2. Make the map not-so-precise. Depending on how far away from the home marker you are, add a semi-random amount of error. This would make these maps slightly less valuable, but would still be useful for finding the general area you need to be in. Would likely require parameter tweaking. Would likely need an indication "somewhere around 600m away" instead of "600m away" or something like that.
3. Not really much you can do, and this is already an issue with regular maps.
Anyway, just a thought. It seems silly that there's no way to communicate this piece of information that we have available to us.
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