One Hour One Life News

Lots of new stacks. Thirty, in fact. You can also rope pigs and sheep.

You now get a notice above your head when a hungry work action fails due to hunger.

Navigation arrows now have a priority system. When you're actively following an EXPT or MAP arrow, it doesn't get replaced spuriously by BABY arrows pointing back home.

Still working through the remaining reported issues. Only 86 to go.

Specialty biomes, and the expert families that go along with them, can provide a kind of social puzzle. If you travel to find one of these families, are they going to help you with what you need? There's a language barrier to deal with, but even if you are able to communicate with them, do they know how to get what you need from their biome? And if they do, are they willing to get it? Are they going to ask for anything in return, and if so, how are you going to get what they need? What if they ask for too much? What if they outright refuse? What if they simply ignore you?

The idea is to build a more complex and varying challenge. It's not enough to understand how to make what you want to make. It's not enough to gather there required resources from the land. You must navigate the whims of intelligent entities (other players) in order to succeed. You can't just memorize one solution and apply it over and over. Depending on the social situation, it may not even be possible to succeed.

This isn't a puzzle that needs to be solved by every player in every life, but instead a transgenerational puzzle that needs to be solved by someone in your village several times over the life of your village.

Here's the problem: where are they? The people that you need to interact with---the experts for the biome you need help with---how can you find them?

Wandering around randomly isn't interesting problem-solving. Hearing a distant bell, and chasing it down to discover that it was rung by the wrong family isn't interesting problem solving (not to mention the 18 hours you need to wait before a bell tower can even be built).

Now the location of each expert family is common knowledge to all. Each specialty biome has new Expert Way Stones in it, placed along the same ley lines as springs and oil wells. Touching one of these will point you toward the closest expert for that biome.

So, now you can find other useful families right from the beginning.

But this introduces a new problem: if you all move into one central village from the very beginning, no interesting social geography will develop over time. You won't need to take the road to the north to find these folks, nor will you head south through the desert to find these other folks.

I want you close, but not too close. That other family should be just down the road, and you should know how to find them, but they shouldn't be right on top of you.

Each family now has a homeland around their well. The place where the water tastes sweet to them. A family only feels comfortable enough to have babies in their homeland. Elsewhere, they are too homesick to breed. Building more well outposts means a bigger homeland, of course.

Due to spring tap-out, wells can't be any closer than 200 tiles apart, which means the village next door will always be at least a 50-second walk away (much shorter by road, horse, or car).

Because you can find each other so easily, it won't be hard to build villages close to each other. Gone are the days when you have to travel 2000 tiles to find the expert family that you need. Short-range transportation networks can be useful in this new world, stitching together the fabric of the new social geography.

And of course, a bunch more issues have been fixed. The most noticeable thing is the new Lab Table, which you can use for non-food bowls, like various chemical solutions.

Only 94 issues to go.

Someone observed that you can't put plated omelettes on the table, which is weird. Of course, no plated food is containable, because you can't shove it in a backpack or storage box---it's a plate of food, after all. The table is also implemented as a container, which means that plated food couldn't go on the table. Up until this point, an object was either containable or not, and beyond that, the only granularity was the required container slot size. Tables and storage boxes can store larger items than backpacks and baskets, for example. But there was no way to say, "plated foods can only be stored on the table."

This week, I added a named tag system for containable items that can only go in certain types of containers. All the plated foods are containable, but earmarked to only be containable on the table. This new property was added to 39 objects, so there's now a huge variety of new table-top items.

This feature can also be used in the future for other special types of containable items.

Let there be green paint and green walls.

Behold, a much-needed Dung Box.

May you plant sapling cuttings directly from your shears.

May letter stock be three times more plentiful.

And several other fixes.

Still working my way through the list of reported issues. Only 108 left.

Still working my way through the remaining reported issues. Only 123 left!

Highlights from this week: an overhaul of the tool-slot system to make it less error-prone and consolidate some of the dead-end tool choices, less-griefable rails, removable roses on hats, and black painted walls.

The biggest change is the way that committing to learning a tool works. While you're in the process of learning, you now get one free use of every available tool. After using a tool once, you've almost learned it, but you haven't yet committed to spending a tool slot on it yet until you use it one more time. This dramatically reduces the feeling of wasting a valuable tool slot on something that you learned by accident.

I'm also in the process of phasing out the "eating bonus" that was put in place during the first big Steam sale. This means that the food supply will get a little bight tighter over the next few days, and the game will be a bit more challenging. Keep in mind that this is balanced by a reduced rate of food consumption. So even as the value of each bite of food is reduced some, the frantic feeling of "needing to eat constantly" won't resurface.

I've got murder on my mind. I was taking a look at the life logs recently, and saw a somewhat normal murder rate of around 6%. Then I ran the analysis a different way, and computed the murder victimization rate. This is the percentage of active players on a given day that are the victims of at least one murder. I ran this analysis on Thursday, February 5, and I was shocked by what I found: a whopping 25% of active players were murdered at least once on that day. Turns out that this was an anomalous peak, but other recent days weren't that much lower, as seen in this graph:



This analysis motivated some of the changes last week to kill waiting times and curse visibility, and you can see the minor effect of those changes toward the end of this graph. But still, I wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

Mid-week, I added a new kill log to the server, letting me see who was landing the kill hits, whether they were solo or part of a posse, and who was being saved via healing. This log did not paint a pretty picture. Since the log was set up on Wednesday, there have been 174 kills, 153 of which were solo killers, acting alone. There were only 21 group kills, and 34 instances of players being saved by healing. Yes, that's 87% solo kills.

And what's the problem with solo kills? Well, a more detailed analysis of one day's log showed that 62% of the solo kills were done in cold blood, unprovoked by previous murder, while only 20% of the group kills were done in cold blood.

That brings us back to why killing is in the game in the first place. Why not just remove it entirely? Because you need to have a way to "vote someone off the island" who is violating village rules. Otherwise, laws become impossible. Killing isn't the only kind of possible griefing, and removing killing entirely makes everyone powerless to stop those other kinds of griefing.

But if you really are voting someone out of your village by killing, and that's the point of killing, solo killing really has no role to play. If everyone agrees that this person should go, you don't need to kill them solo. You can form a posse and kill as a group.

Solo kills are unilateral actions where there is no group consensus. Most of the time, I'm guessing, solo kills are simply griefing, full stop.

Over the past two years, I've added loads of adjustments and limitations to solo killing in the game. Now we have a panoply of warning mechanisms and advantages for the victim. You GASP, the killer looks and sounds angry, you can track the killer off-screen, the killer must wait 12 seconds, and the killer runs more slowly than you. In practice, given all these advantages for the victim, solo kills should be all but impossible. But I've seen it myself: the victim just standing there for 12 seconds, like a sitting duck.

This means that most victims of solo kills are new players who don't know how these warning systems work. This means that most victims of killing are brand new players. That is really bad. Being killed is one of their first experiences in the game.

And like I said, the presence of solo killing does not help with the philosophical point of killing in the game---it doesn't help us vote someone off the island as a group.

So why not remove it entirely?

There are still two cases of solo killing that are dear to my heart.

First, we have the wilderness situation, which I've come to call the Two Hermit Problem. If you're one-on-one in the wilderness, and someone is bugging you, I want you to be able to protect yourself. I want you to be able to say, "scram," and mean it. Even if the person isn't bugging you, the fact that you CAN kill each other is part of the magic of the game. You can kill each other, but choose not to, and that's beautiful.

Second, we have the guarding scenario. With 1-v-1 killing, a guard with a bow can get a bead on a would-be intruder outside the gate, and then open the gate to let people pass through, while preventing the intruder from passing through the guarded area.

The way killing works now in the game, I've been able to preserve the first case, the Two Hermit Problem, but I've had to sacrifice solo guarding, at least for now.

Here are the changes:

In order to kill, you need to form a posse of the minimum size, given the population in your area. In higher population areas, that size is 3 people. But in places with less than six people, the posse size is half of the area population, rounded up. The area is a 30-tile radius around the killer. So if there are only two of you out there, 1v1 killing is still possible. But in a mini-camp of three people, two of you need to conspire against the other in order to kill.

This min posse size is capped at 3, which is what you need in higher population areas.

When you try to kill someone, you still go into murder mouth mode, but you also get a DING message explaining the minimum posse size in your area.

With this change in place, we'll see what happens to the murder rate over the next few days.