One Hour One Life Forums

Oh yeah, good point. Such markers would be very useful for explorers. However banannas in pastures might be a little overpowered, since it is a food source, and penguins in the badlands seems a little out of place even in a colder climate. Perhaps the pine trees in colder regions could have snow on them even outside of the tundra instead, for example? As a society develops, it would need to expand outwards in different directions before its water supply runs out. Polylingual families might be able to assist in any resulting negotiations, but long-range supply routes would become more likely. However, unlike with the current specialisation system, you would not necessarily need to find somebody of the right race to access the right biome. Instead, you'd have to find a way to access a distant biome that may be controlled by a different race more suited to the terrain than you. That way peeps of different races aren't constantly trying to repopulate other towns. Even if one race is missing in the world, it dosn't mean it is impossible to advance up the tech tree, just harder.

Oh yeah, that's true. Thanks for replying by the way to me humble suggestion XD. I didn't expect it to be so looked-upon.

So we've come to the conclusion that the specialisation update is a good idea, but could use some tweaking for more versatility. We've also identified the desire for more varied cultures between settlements, but ruled out the idea of making extreme biomes liveable.

Hmm...

How about some sort of general culture update? A bunch of random stuff, largely without mechanical effect, which can give villages regional distinction? This, combined with a tweaking of the ability of the races to live in certain biomes, could lead to more cultures forming without any major changes perhaps?

Like let's take the fruit boot item. This is just adding a desert fruit to a shoe, but the nature of the item means that it will be more common in desert-based societies, and those societies will be more common amongst those with the race which gives them an edge in those biomes compared to other races. Working on the same principle, there could be other items of clothing that can be modified or created based on natural materials to give a bit of cultural identity. Like being able to kill penguins and adorn your clothes with their feathers. Other items could help people to build up their individual cultures beyond region. For example, a priest's cloak could be a craftable item by using some dye and rope on a cape. This means that you can instantly identify a member of the clergy. With such an item, any town with a loom would be able to sustain their religions/cults/"clubs" for generations longer and give it more authenticity. Such faiths tend to make peoples' lives more interesting when they are implemented in settlements, although they rarely last longer than a generation or two. Another major tenant of a city's culture could come from the written word. At the moment, pages are very expensive to make and hard to store. Small features like being able to make a book out of a stack of written pages by using a needle and thread would make a lot of difference. Perhaps pages written with ink instead of charcoal could have twice the word count as well? With such tools a society could begin to develop law systems over time. As the local king, you could look inside the Great Library and learn what the great elders of old wrote about their constitutional monarchy rather than simply relying on what mum said. I tried to make such a system once, but I only had three pages to work with and about that many sentences, so the system was rather limited. Items like these could do more for culture than allowing cities to develop in different biomes. Imagine spawning into a town that isn't just populated by different people, but a town with a different governmental system? A classical republic might even form somewhere XD.

As for the continents idea that was just a way of combining the advantages of having a Rift with the benefits of an infinite world. More of a side-idea really. But that too would make city's more diverse and unique. When the Rift was around, players could get a sense of the world around them. Continents could be even smaller and so be more cohesive to live in, with its citizens aware of roughly how their continent is made up. Visitors from foreign lands would be recognisable due to having a different race, creating lots of fun "distant traveller from a distant land" role-play. Who knows? Perhaps continents would even build a road across the harsh jungles and deserts to live together in harmony/perpetual war.

If we say the main objective of such a suggestion would be to create a sense of town culture, continents could potentially solve the problem. While most towns would still exist in pastures green, you'd more easily have a sense of where your town was in relation to your continent. Each continent would be smaller than the Rift area, after all, so finding your feet wouldn't be too hard. The central tundra would encourage conflict/cooperation to use the valuable resources more effectively than race-induced limitations. However, different races would do better at certain things, leading to multicultural societies being more versatile. It would also mean that some cities would probably come to exploit some resources better than others. For example, a city of brown-skinned players might settle next to a jungle so it could have easy access to mangos and bananas.

It seems that capitalism and One Hour One Life don't go together. Even with resource scarcity, organising yourself that effectively over multiple generations would be a logistical nightmare, a nightmare most would not bother with when they're simply gathering wealth for themselves. Therefore, perhaps focussing on more achievably goals like creating cultures and governments would be easier? If your average town simply lasted longer, there were more hats like crowns to designate status, you could more easily write stuff down (e.g. more words per page, pages are cheaper to make at high-tech, pages can be combined into books?) and there was more variety between towns then you could likely end up with old towns with deeply entrenched cultures.

Replying to Coconut-Fruit, the existence of ponds is a good point. Some sort of jungle-pool could work, or a desert-lagoon. The idea is that not every family that has brown skin would build their town in a jungle, but enough would that they would exist. It could be that there's a perfectly good spot in a nearby temperate pasture they'd choose to settle instead. But as long as it's possible then a few cities will develop in these speciality biomes, and that's enough to make things more interesting. As for tundra it would be harder than desert or jungle to make it liveable. Perhaps snow could be taken from snow drifts in bowls and put over hot coals to get water? It dosen't matter if its much harder to survive in the tundra than in other areas, the point is it's possible. That way we might get small groups of tundra-dwellers hoping to hold on to that one tarry spot area for their family down south. Having only a few people in tundra areas would also be more realistic anyway. Such an update as this would need to be carefully balanced so you don't start getting lots more people living in jungles and deserts than in temperate biomes. Perhaps starting resources could be slightly more scarce in such biomes?

As for the economy side, I know that OHOL can't really support capitalism due to its small communities and short lives. Still dosn't stop us from trying though XD. The few lives I've had on a private ranch have been fun at least.

Part of this idea for an update is that it would offer a wider scope of an incentive for cultures to work together. Rather than making it an economic necessity to trade with other civilisations, which isn't really a mechanic that's consistently possible, this would also encourage civilisations to mingle for the sake of cultural exchange. If you heard of a foreign city in a western jungle as a kid, wouldn't that make you want to go there? Even if it was just out of curiosity. By creating cities in different biomes there'd be more cultural difference between those cities, especially if specialist items were added too. That would give the players in those cities an easier job at creating interesting societies based around region-specific stuff. "Praise the gold-laden ice-queen" and that sort of thing. At the heart of this suggestion is the idea that perhaps the best way to make each life more interesting and diverse would be to focus on creating cultural distinction rather than economic systems. Such an update as this would simply make it easier for players to achieve this goal.