Upadate: Only Friends
May 10, 2026
Several big changes in the face of griefing and bot accounts.
First, human-caused wounds (from knives and arrows) can no longer be healed. There are several vestigial systems in the game around killing, left over from previous solution attempts. The original idea was that killing would always be necessary in this game, because how else are you going to deal with people who are bothering you and just won't stop? The hope was that the good guys would outnumber the bad guys. But the insta-killing in very early versions of the game was still too abrupt, so healing was added, which further helped the good majority overcome the bad minority---there was safety in numbers, and the good guys could heal each other, while lone griefers would go unhealed. Eventually a posse system was added, and then a leadership and exile system, to make sure any killing that took place involved group consensus. These days, it's mostly griefers getting killed, which is good, but that means healing only helps griefers, who often work together in teams, healing each other as the larger group of good guys tries to get rid of them. So, that kind of healing has been removed.
The leadership system---which allows a bad actor to be exiled so that they can be killed---generally works, because it's hard for bad actors to become leaders, since who would pick them? However, when a bad actor is using a bunch of extra dummy accounts, they've been able to essentially stuff the ballot box and force themselves into power, after which they engage in indiscriminate exiling and killing. Griefers buy new accounts constantly to serve this purpose, which means that these dummy accounts can be thwarted by restriction leader picking to older, more established accounts. Legitimate new players aren't engaging with the leadership system at first anyway.
And the same problem occurs when griefers use a bunch of dummy accounts for cursing, so cursing has been limited to older, more established accounts.
And finally, for as long as this game has existed, people have tried to play alone or with small groups of friends. Historically, the higher-numbered servers---the so-called low-pop servers---have been used for this purpose. More recently, people have figured out that they can use the (very rare and precious) ghost ability, left over from several Halloweens back, for this purpose. Ghosts, being immortal, can walk very far away from mainline civilization and set up hidden private villages. Of course, all these methods of playing privately aren't really private, which means they can be targeted by griefers. Most recently, griefers have been acting like self-styled ghost hunters. Some people just want to be left alone.
Over the years, I've thought about various possible affordances to help these people play privately. I have considered paid private servers, and even spin-off games like One Hour One Hermit and One Hour One Tribe, but in polling players, there was never enough interest to make setting these things up worthwhile.
Meanwhile, the higher-numbered servers aren't free to operate, and I've burned thousands of dollars of the past 10 years on servers that are almost always empty.
Enter the new Friends-Only server, which allows you to play privately, either by yourself or with a group of friends. This sever leverages twin codes, which are used on the other servers to get born together as twins, triplets, or quadruplets, but the Friends-Only server now uses those same twin codes as Friend Codes to do two special things:
1. If you are the first person currently connecting to the server with a given code, it maps your code to one of a trillion unique locations in the server world map, and spawns you as Even in that specific, special-to-you location.
2. If other players are already alive on the server with that code, you get born into their family.
So there you have it, private villages, as long as you keep your friend code a secret. In fact, you can have as many private villages as you want, just by changing your friend code. There are a trillion locations available, so we're never going to run out. Each player can have a million private villages if they want.
But wait, you might ask, won't griefers find these private villages anyway, if they're all on the same server? Yes, that's possible, but it's also extremely unlikely. Remember, the server map is huge---more than 50,000 times bigger than earth. It is 4 billion tiles wide by 4 billion tiles tall. The chances of two private villages being within a million tiles of each other is 1 in 5 million, and we expect to be able to place 2500 private villages before any pair of villages is within a million tiles of each other. It takes something like 20 hours to travel a million tiles at the fastest travel speeds, and also remember that we're not just talking about straight-line distance. If a village is within a million tiles of you, you are searching a circle with a radius of one million, which actually has 3 trillion tiles in it.
And yes, ghosts tried to do this on the main server by walking far away from civilization, but they could only walk so far themselves, and the main server also has public map logs available, so their hidden activities could be observed over time. The friends server has no public logs.
Okay, so how do you join this friends-only server? First, you need to look in your SETTINGS screen and set a custom server address for friends.onehouronelife.com like this:
After that, go to the FRIENDS screen (the same one you'd use for twinning), type or generate a unique code (there's no limit on length, type whatever you want as a code), and then use the brand new SAME FAMILY option, like this:
LOGIN from the FRIENDS screen, and you're off to the races.
| Update: Jason's Rocket Ride
November 11, 2025
All logged bugs and issues have been fixed.
I first started working on this game more than 10 years ago. My first commit, on May 28, 2015, bears the message, "Got basic client skeleton in place. It compiles, runs, pauses, and quits without crashing." No crashing! Sounds like I was off to a good start.
146,000 lines of code and over 3.5 million in-game player hours later, here we are. With something like 25 servers coordinating behind the scenes to keep things running, One Hour One Life is a massive, sprawling city of a solo engineering project. With so many moving parts, it's a miracle that this house of cards works at all, but somehow, it does. According to my records, the main game server hasn't crashed since July 2024, and it's been running steadily since the last update in January of 2025. That's 10 months of continuous uptime, during which players made something like 200 million changes to the persistent map.
Along the way, I processed and fixed over 2000 reported bugs and issues. There were something like 100 issues in this most recent batch, which was itself quite a mountain to climb.
But I'm turning 48 on Friday, and I'm not going to spend the next 10 years of my life working on One Hour One Life. It's time to make a new game, before my time of making games runs out. I fancy making something a bit smaller and simpler for the next one.
Of course, I will continue to keep the servers running and fix showstopping bugs as they're discovered, for as long as I'm alive and able. For the most part, the servers run themselves, but every once in a while, there's a fire that needs putting out.
One last little token before I go: over 300 people have ridden the rocket to Another Planet, which was always meant to be a "You Won the Game" moment. Now they will each be immortalized, hopefully forever, as long as the servers keep running. Maybe if you can get 146,000 lines of C code to compile in 2125, there's a chance at forever.
And lastly, over the next few days, I'll be getting born in the game as a baby and trying to build and ride the rocket myself, as one final salute. No cheating with VOG or other funny business---I'm going to build the rocket for real.
I may even spawn as your baby at some point, and it will be up to you to take care of me.
| Update: Last Hunt Event
October 31, 2025
Last he rode four years ago
One more haunt before the snow
Spun in long lost tales of old
Secret hidden ounce of gold
Find it and it's yours to keep
Sunrise he'll forever sleep
| Update: Personal Blacklist
January 13, 2025
People have been asking for some kind of censorship around bad words in speech for a long time. I don't want to censor things globally, and even if I did, it would be a never-ending arms race as people figured out cl evv er ways to bbbb y pass my f il ter s. Since everyone would be seeing the same filters, it would be easy for trolls to test them repeatedly to see what tricks can allow words to slip through.
For those people who are tired of seeing bad words in-game, I'm instead putting the power into your hands. You each have your own personal word filter now, which you can populate as you please. And since no one can see the results of your word filter but you, trolls won't be able to figure out tricks to bypass your personal list.
You can add the word DOG to your list by typing /BLACKLIST DOG into the speech box.
If you do this, SHAGGY DOG will become SHAGGY XXX.
However, HOTDOG will still look like HOTDOG, and DDOGG will still look like DDOGG.
If you want to censor DOG in all its forms, use /BLACKLIST !DOG, with an exclamation mark in front of DOG. Then HOTDOG becomes HOTXXX and DDOGG becomes XXXXX. Also, D O G will become X X X.
If you ever need to clear things out of your list, you'll have to roll up your sleeves and dig into the settings folder. wordBlacklist.ini is the file you will need to edit.
Have a good XXXXXXX evening, folks!
| Update: Town Launch
May 11, 2024
Launch pads must now be built in populated areas, with coordinates discovered from the remote orbital alignment location. This brings rocket-building home, returning it to to community endeavor that it was in the beginning, while still limiting rocket launches to once every five hours.
There have also been many fixes and improvements to the Editor, based on feedback from the Another Planet content team.
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