Update: Feast and Fixes
December 7, 2019
New this week, for a belated Thanksgiving: a feasting table, where you can serve yourself a whole plate of food. This takes advantage of the recently-added food overflow system, and is the first food source that offers +40 in one gulp, giving you a huge buffer of time before your next meal.
I spent the rest of the week making a dent in the very long list of issues that have piled up.
You now have a separate directional arrow, at the top of the screen, when you hear a distant bell tower ring. No more needing to dig up your home marker to follow the bell. A bug in lingering home markers from the last life has also been fixed. Some glitchiness in biome sickness have been fixed, along with an exploit that allowed you to plant biome-specific things outside of their target biome.
Eves were being spread out too far, because tutorial players and donkeytown players were advancing the next Eve position by accident, so that's been fixed. This should bring everyone a bit closer together. I Fixed a few confusing cases of tool learning (like when you're too hungry to use the axe, but learn it anyway).
There was a huge inaccuracy in the way that average lifespans were being computed as part of fitness score calculations. That has been fixed, which should dramatically reduce fitness score inflation, and all fitness scores have been reset back to 0.
There are still loads of issues left to fix, and I'll be focusing on those next week. Thanks to all of the people who spent so much time reporting them. Keep them coming. If I don't know about them, I can't fix them.
Please report programming-related issues here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues
and content-related issues here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues
| Update: Pie and Wine
November 27, 2019
As a mini-update before I start my much-needed family vacation, I give you pumpkin pie and wine.
Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!
| Update: Distant Explorers
November 24, 2019
This week's update focuses on new ways to find each other, in light of the fact that you now need each other for long-term survival.
First, there's a new tool in place for sharing long-distance navigation, and for helping people find your village. Way stones were inspired by forum member SirCaio's suggestion. They act like permanent maps that anyone can use simply by touching them. If you're looking to interact with foreign explorers, you can make your village easier to find by planting way stones in a radius around it. Just like maps, way stones can have long titles, which means they also can function as informative sign posts. Way stones can also be used to duplicate maps, but they can also be used in village center to make sure that important destinations are known to future generations---no chance of the map getting lost if it's literally etched in stone.
And now, when you pick up a map or touch a way stone, your character speaks a distance estimate along with the title. No more wandering in a vague map direction and figuring out that it's actually too far away.
Next, rideable objects, like horses and cars, protect you from the effects of bad biomes. No more long, circuitous routes. If you're riding, you can plow right through.
Along with these exploration updates, there have also been huge improvements to wall-building.
First, pine walls now require a lot less resources, and pine floors are possible, making them viable for early-stage camps. Being indoors adds a huge reduction to your food consumption rate, so building a few primitive buildings might be worth considering as part of your bootstrapping.
Next, all walls now auto-orient, freeing you from the tedium of cycling through the various wall orientations when building. You can put walls down wherever, and your building will look nicely connected, guaranteed. Fences also auto-orient, even relative to walls.
Finally, springy doors now open automatically when you pass through, and they don't interfere with path-finding. Being indoors is no longer a navigation inconvenience.
Beyond those content changes, a bunch of bugs have been fixed, and an exploit in the fitness score system has been cleared up. Committing suicide when young no longer allows you to reap a score benefit from a long-lived mother. Your mother and grandmother still count toward your score, but only if you live longer than they do.
Even with this exploit removed, some rather high scores are possible, and such scores make the tool slot limitations irrelevant. I've updated the mapping formula to a sigmoid, as shown in the following graph:
No matter how high your genetic fitness score goes, you'll never have more than 19 tool slots.
The recent Steam sale brought in a lot of new players. I'm deeply grateful to the existing players for helping all of these new people to learn the ropes.
There will be one more content update on Monday, and then I'm on vacation for Thanksgiving.
| Update: Family Specialty
November 19, 2019
The specialty biomes, which spawn sporadically in the center of the topographic map rings, include the jungle, arctic, and desert. In this update, each of these biomes is assigned to one specialist family skin tone---they are the only people who are comfortable working there. The other families must depend on this specialist family for help in getting necessary resources from this otherwise inhospitable area. Fortunately, the resources found in these special biomes aren't needed until the later stages of a developing civilization. Thus, families can live and work in isolation for a while before they are eventually forced to find each other and cooperate through trade.
While there are only three specialty biomes, there are currently four family skin tones. The fourth skin tone has no biome specialty, but gains the polylingual ability to communicate with all the other families, so they can help with the coordination and trading efforts.
The general idea here is that as your village climbs the tech tree, you should face new and more complex challenges, including challenges that involve social interactions like negotiation and diplomacy. Transportation networks between towns will go from an entertaining diversion to a necessary component for group survival.
Specialists can also build roads and buildings in their biome to make it traversable and hospitable for other families, so trading posts and gathering areas are possible.
To go along with these changes, some new content has been added in these biomes, with a new biome-locking feature ensuring that you have to visit those biomes to interact with that content. For example, you have to visit the jungle in order to get a tattoo, and only a jungle specialist can perform the procedure for you.
The language learning system has been changed so that it always happens gradually over generations of cohabitation, at a fixed rate, and it can't be "forced" by spamming lots of training text to a baby. As long as a baby hears a single utterance in the foreign language, they learn 10% of the remaining unknown letter clusters. Even after many generations of living together, some interesting accents will linger.
A huge set of loading stability improvements have been implemented. What happens when the data files the client is expecting to find aren't present or are corrupted? It used to crash, now it doesn't.
The genetic fitness score has been overhauled to give you points based on how long you help your offspring survive beyond their own personal average. Thus, you don't get punished for having a novice baby who dies young, as long as you help them live a bit longer than they usually do. Genetic scores are much less impacted by luck in baby assignment now, but they are also unbounded in both the positive and negative direction (the scores used to naturally cap themselves between 0 and 60).
| Update: Boundless World
November 8, 2019
Thank you for your patience during the long-running Arc and Rift experiments, which have shed light on a number of important design issues and improved the core of the game immensely. The list of Rift-based discoveries is long, but to summarize, we have a better biome map layout, a more balanced birth placement algorithm, a tap-out system to ensure upper-end resource scarcity, a more powerful and intuitive cursing system, and a map system.
It's time to test out these improvements on an infinite map and in a perpetual world, shifting the focus away from community-wide story arcs and back to individual family arcs, happening in parallel. The full reasoning behind this change is described here:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8320
Eves spawn into this boundless world whenever they are needed, when there are too few families or too many babies for the existing mothers to handle. These conditions occur rarely, so a new Eve will be a special event. The privilege of being Eve is granted to a player with a relatively high genetic fitness score. Eves are placed in a zigzag pattern spreading out to the west, which looks like this:
Thus, to find older villages, you can walk to the east, while walking west will take you to the frontier.
Each water well and oil strike taps out ground water and oil in a radius that matches this Eve placement pattern, meaning there can be roughly one water well and one oil well per Eve settlement, though distant resource outposts are possible.
The map has been set to never cull anything, except for during server updates, when areas that haven't been visited in a full seven days are cleared to conserve database space. Thus, in active areas, perpetual road networks are possible.
Things will obviously end up being more spread out than they were in the Rift, so the plane will become useful again. To make the plane more reliable, your destination can now be set by looking at a map immediately before taking off---you will land at the closest available landing strip to the map's destination.
With genetic fitness scores mattering more than ever before, the question becomes: how long can you keep your offspring alive, and what will you have to do in order to keep them alive? The resources in the immediate area surrounding a family's home base will run out. Survival beyond that will require quite a bit of planning and coordination.
The wastefulness of high-value food items has been reduced, because adults now have a large overflow store to accommodate the last food item that made them full. This overflow area starts small and grows along with your stomach size, so young children still have a tense eating game. This also helps to differentiate low-value food like berries from high-value foods like pies. Munching four berries is no longer equivalent to eating a piece of pie, because the pie can fill a larger portion of your overflow store. This graph shows the size of your overflow store, based on your stomach size:
Indoor areas have been buffed by applying a flat time-per-food-pip bonus while indoors. Being indoors makes you burn food much slower, no matter your heating or clothing situation. Mousing over your temperature meter now gives you information about your current food burn rate.
When a well or oil strike taps out neighboring areas, gradient markers are now left to the north and south as well as to the east and west, making finding the well easier.
The kill-spam bug has been fixed. In order to target (or re-target) someone, you must first drop your weapon.
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