One Hour One Life Forums

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.

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.

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!

All of the remaining infrastructure for Another Hour Another Planet is in place now.

It is now possible to ride the rocket inside One Hour One Life, leave the planet, and gain access to Another Hour Another Planet via a Steam Key and an off-Steam download link.  And once you're playing on Another Planet, it's also now possible for you to specify your GitHub account name, and to vote for the current Content Leader.  The current Leader is automatically granted Push access to the anotherPlanet data repository on GitHub, and that access is removed whenever they leave office and are replaced by someone else.

All of this stuff has been tested on my end, and seems to be working.  But I need you to help me test it more thoroughly.

Starting on Monday, I will be making surprise VOG appearances in the game, and placing test launch pads for people to use.  By triggering these launch pads, they will be able to ride the test rocket, gain access to Another Planet, and help me make sure that all of this infrastructure is actually working correctly.

The last thing to do, for me, is to actually draw the rocket, and flesh out the tech tree changes that will make constructing the rocket possible.  Currently, the rocket features place-holder art, and it's currently uncraftable, except by me in VOG mode for testing.

Content made with the Editor now tracks authorship using a hash of your account's email address or Steam ID.  When you export contents as OXZ files to share with others, your authorship hash goes with your content.  Thus, over time, we can keep track of the portion of the content that each person contributes.  This will be important in connection to the plan for Another Hour Another Planet, which I will explain here.

Another Hour Another Planet will be a separate game, released for real on Steam.

First of all, how will people gain access to Another Planet?  For the time being, there will be a hard-to-build object inside One Hour One Life which requires some kind of server-wide collaboration and consensus:  a rocket ship.  Once this rocket is built, there will be room inside it for one lone traveler.  Whoever is chosen by the collective action of the players on the server will ride the rocket and gain permanent access to Another Planet.  For each rocket launched, one additional person will gain access.

And the content on Another Planet?  It will be entirely conceived, designed, drawn, animated, and assembled by the player community.  Each person who has access to Another Planet will also get the right to vote for the current Content Leader---the person in charge of curating, assembling, and testing the content submitted by the player community.  And yes, the Content Leader might make bad choices, try to sabotage the game, or even just burn out.  A new Content Leader is always just a vote away, and the entire process will be organized through an immutable Github repository, meaning that a future Content Leader can roll back bad content changes if needed.

Over the years, lots of people have disagreed with various content design decisions that I have made.  This will be a chance for the community to make their own decisions, chart their own course, and make the game their own. 

Only the content will be modifiable by end-users.  Another Hour Another Planet will use exactly the same binary client and server code as One Hour One Life, and I'll still be maintaining that, and fixing bugs, into the future.  So we don't need to worry about player-submitted virus code.

Finally according to Steam's policies, games that appear in the Steam Store and in people's game libraries must eventually be sold.  They don't want prestige items, only accessible as prizes earned outside their usual sales channels, clogging up their store and confusing their customers.  So yes, while Another Hour Another Planet will only be accessible by rocket from inside One Hour One Life during it's beta development period, it will eventually be sold to the general public as a real game.  I've set a deadline for you folks, in fact:  roughly two years from now, on February 13, 2026.  Of course, you can all keep working on it and adding content to it after that release date, but you should shoot to have a solid, compelling Another Planet game experience by then.

But if it's sold, that means it might make some money, and then what?

Coming full-circle, that's where the Authorship Tracking comes in.  I promise to share 60% of the revenue from the first year of AHAP sales with each and every person who contributed content to the game world, based on the fraction of the total content that they contributed.  Details still need to be ironed out, but sprites, sounds, objects, animations, transitions, and music will all be factored in.  But even if you only contribute one thing, you will get some money during the first year.

During future years after that, I will make a good-faith effort to continue sharing 60% of revenue with content contributors who's portion of the revenue would total more than $500 for the year.  In other words, I'm not going to continue paying thousands of people a few dollars per year forever.  I will do that during the first year, however.  Regarding the "good faith effort" part:  obviously, I won't live forever, etc.

And the point of all this?

I've dedicated eight years of my life to One Hour One Life.  I'm now 46 years old, and I may not have that many big software projects left in me.  It's time for me to move on to other things, before it's too late.  I could just turn One Hour One Life over to a dev team, or even sell it to a company, in order to keep it going.  But given that I drew every pen line, played every piano note, and recorded every sound myself, it's a very personal work.  It is exactly how I want it to be, and I want to leave it that way, going into the future.  People who play One Hour One Life should be playing my One Hour One Life.  But how can the game really live on, and the community keep thriving, if I stop working on it?  Another Hour Another Planet is an outlet for that future vitality.

One Hour One Life also maintains a certain degree of visual consistency, in part because everything in it was drawn by the same hand, using exactly the same tools (heck, even on exactly the same paper stock).  Any collaborative effort would obviously deviate from that consistency.  In fact, I imagine that Another Hour Another Planet will be a bit of stylistic mish-mash.  But that's perfectly fine, given the theming:  it's supposed to be an alien world, after all.  Alien worlds can be strange.

There are obviously lots of details to iron out, but that's a broad overview of the plan.

A small mid-week update this week.  You can now pile baskets of soil, just like you can with baskets of charcoal.  There's also been a gotcha fixed with worm farming:  taking the last worm from the wormy soil pile no longer permanently ends the worm farm, since you can put the worm right back in if you've removed it by mistake.

I also spent a good chunk of time this week ironing out the details of AHAP and starting to implement it.  You'll hear more about this soon.

Tomorrow, I'm heading out to Utah for the premier of the documentary Eternal You at Sundance, which is in part about Project December, my AI side-project.  More details here:

https://festival.sundance.org/program/f … 6f45c03c81

I'll be back early next week to resume work on One Hour One Life.

Steam Workshop support is live.  You can find it here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/595690/workshop/

Instructions for posting mods to Steam Workshop can be found here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ … 3121137673

And I'm holding a contest for the best mods, as voted by the community, between now and New Year's Day.  Post your mods to Workshop between now and then.  The mods with the most subscribers at or around Noon EST (New York City Time) on New Year's Day win.

There will be ten winners.  Each person can only win one prize, even if they have more than one highly-subscribed mod.

Prizes are as follows:

1st place: $500
2nd place:  $400
3rd place:  $300
4th place:  $200
5th through 10th place:  $100

Prize winners can choose from the following payment methods:

--PayPal

--Cashier's Check by Mail.

--Gold coins/chunks by Mail.

--Silver Coins by Mail.

This is obviously a contest of skill, not a lottery.  If it is illegal in your area, I feel sorry for you.

The four different groups of people in the game have had different specialties for a while.  Three of the groups have biome specialties, making them the experts who can obtain resources from the jungle, the desert, or the arctic.  The forth group had no specialty biome to call their own, so they became the language experts---the one group that could talk to all the other groups with no language barrier.  The idea was that they could serve as a kind of trading group, traveling from area to area in the world and exchanging specialty resources.

But in the harsh survival reality of the game, this fourth group, the language experts, were always seen as dead wood.  While the other groups were necessary for collective survival, because they provided access to necessary resources for technological advancement, the players could really care less about the fourth group.  If they died out, the rest could still survive and progress just fine.

This week, the language experts get an additional buff:  they can travel and settle anywhere, even outside of their homeland.  This means that they can join other villages and help out long-term, across generations, which will give them more opportunity to put their language translation abilities to good use.

There's also a fix to the way /DIE cycling works on the low-population servers, making parallel solo play on low-population servers viable again.

And finally, there's a new, more detailed food consumption log, which will allow third-party statistics services to compute some interesting things.  The log gets populated on a 24-hour delay, but data will eventually start posting here:

http://publicdata.onehouronelife.com/foodLogDetails/

This was partly inspired by DopiePanda's amazing work on this new leaderboard and stats site:

https://oholcurse.com

More fixes this week, based on some newly reported issues.

A possible exploit that would allow a daisy-chain of carts to be used as an impenetrable wall has been fixed.  Trash pit behavior has been improved to avoid nuisance trashing of some items, and accept some other waste items.  Large animal bones now decay faster.  Defaced graves are no longer permanent (and defaced baby graves decay after two minutes, just like regular baby graves).  Stone walls with shelves can become ancient.  And you can FINALLY place a drumstick down on a plate.