One Hour One Life News

A bunch of impactful changes this week, mostly inspired by the deluge of new players from the recent Steam sale. Welcome, everyone!

First of all, there's now a second phase in the tutorial, meant to help new players get accustomed to the game in a less high-pressure situation. New players often just want to experiment and learn crafting without having a whole village depending on their efficiency. Furthermore, being plopped into a thriving and cluttered village as a new player can be overwhelming. You just learned to chop kindling with a hatchet in the tutorial, and suddenly you find yourself in an environment with dozens of unknown tools. Yes, getting born into the middle of an existing situation is a fundamental premise of the game, but it's not a great environment in which to experiment with the basics.

So, after the main tutorial, there's now an optional solo challenge. You are thrown out into the wilderness, naked and alone, to try your hand at solo survival. You can opt out of this right away, if you want, or you can keep trying until you pass the challenge by surviving from scratch until age 60. For new players who don't opt out, they will enter the main game at least knowing how to take care of themselves in a hostile environment.

Since the game keeps track of which phases of the tutorial have been passed (or bypassed), and no one has passed this second phase yet, even veteran players will find themselves thrown into the solo challenge at least once.

And of course, just like you can revisit the tutorial whenever you want, you can revisit this solo challenge too, almost like an alternate play mode (which many players have already been simulating by connecting to low population servers).

Next, tool slots have been disabled. I was never fully satisfied with tool slots, since most players just ignored them, and they didn't really contribute to interesting cooperative interactions. However, they were still in there, pestering you with endless DING messages as you went about your business.

The behavior of expert way stones have been expanded to help you find poly-lingual people: if you touch your own expert way stone, you are directed toward the closest language expert.

New players start with a fitness score of 0 now, instead of 30. This means that they generally see their scores go up in the beginning, which is good for morale, but it also means that having a new player as a baby will be likely to help, not hurt, your own gene score (as long as you help a new player live longer than 0 years, you will earn points).

And finally, dealing with griefers. More players means more griefers.

Personal curses now last 90 days instead of 30 days (don't forget that you can always forgive someone if needed). And curse labels (DOLL KING or whatever appears in black above the cursed person's head) are now shared between players, instead of being unique per cursing player. So the same person, when cursed, always has the same label for everyone who has cursed them. Thus, players can compare notes about griefer behavior.

For quite a while, it has been very hard for solo griefers or small groups of griefers to kill. Killing requires some form of village consensus, either through a large enough posse or through convincing the village leader to exile the target. Since leaders tend to be high-fitness individuals, griefers have a hard time becoming leaders.

However, griefers can still cause plenty of trouble in other ways. Planting the wrong crops, moving stuff around, stealing stuff, and hiding stuff in the woods. Yes, you can eventually convince the leader to exile them, and then eventually hunt them down to kill them (if they don't get away first), but all of that takes time. Meanwhile, they can keep causing trouble. Killing is also a pretty severe way to deal with a thief, but so far, it has been the only way.

This week brings you a new, less sever way: ally gates. Leaders can mark certain gates, designating them for ally access only. All allies of that leader can move through that gate. To stop someone from moving through the gate, the leader just needs to exile that person. And the ownership of the gate is inherited by the next leader when the current leader dies. Thus, you now have a new way to stop a trouble-maker: exile them, and suddenly, they can no longer travel in and out of the village, through the gate. You can even trap them inside, making them easier to confront and deal with.

The other nice thing about ally gates is that they are spring-loaded, so they automatically open and close as you walk through (and automatically keep non-allies out).

And sports cars can smash mosquito swarms on their windshields.

Each sports car built has a serial number on the side, starting with 01, and going up to 30. Early adopters get the lower numbers.

You can also run over snakes will all powered land vehicles now, not just the crude car.

This week's VOG Shot features Pepe Ginger:

What started as a couple weeks of much-needed vacation turned into a long-term refuge away from the state of California, as wildfire smoke made our already-hobbled city almost unlivable. We're back home now, but the smoke came back with a vengeance right around the time that we did. This coming Monday, California---and much to the west coast---will have been burning for four straight weeks. Given that this is just the beginning of fire season, there's no end in sight.

So, I'm hunkered down here at home, with all the windows shut, and the HEPA filter running full blast, working on One Hour One Life. We can't go outside to get exercise, because the particulate count is so high. We're somewhat safe indoors, but with five people breathing away in a small, sealed house, our CO2 level has peaked above 3700 ppm. Yeah, that's "cognitive decline" levels of CO2. Please forgive any typos.

And so, with all that context, I bring you delivery trucks, which is something that I've been joking about in relation to One Hour One Life since the very beginning (from rocks and sticks... all the way up to delivery trucks!)

Not only can they hold a lot, but I've also been rethinking vehicle fueling, and these new trucks will last an entire lifetime (hour) on just one fill-up. That means that if you find an abandoned truck, you'll probably need some diesel to get it running, but if you're actively using it, you will be able to depend on it as long as you need it. This change in thinking may eventually trickle down to make the Crude Car more useful as well.

But besides updating OHOL this week (finally), and generally running from the smoke, what else have I been doing over the past two months? I've been working on a vacation project, which is live now:

http://projectdecember.net

This is the first publicly available interface that allows you to converse directly with the world's most advanced artificial intelligence. Over the past nine months, AI has become so good that it has gotten spooky. However, since it requires a full-time super computer to run it, it's pretty much out of reach for the average person. I've figured out a way to make talking to it affordable (just $5 to get started, as we collectively share the costs of the underlying supercomputer).

When you're talking to it, the sense of an intelligent presence is palpable. I never expected this to happen in my lifetime, but it's here, now. And it's really, really weird.


This week's VOG Shot features Malin Snow and her daughter Ida traveling along the very long road:

I spent the week clearing up some of the reported issues that had accumulated.

The biggest change is to how killing and posses work. First of all, if you try to join a posse, but cannot for some reason, you get a DING message explaining the reason.

Next, there's a new exception to the posse and exile requirements---something like "live by the sword, die by the sword." Someone who kills becomes vulnerable to being solo killed, without being exiled or having a posse form against them, for 60 seconds (the same amount of time that they are stuck holding the non-sword murder weapon). This helps people deal with the "evil leader" problem. The current leader is the most powerful in terms of being able to exile, which means that dethroning them requires quite a bit of political willpower. If that leader goes on a unilateral killing spree, organizing collectively to de-follow them---to strip them of power---can be really difficult. One of the early ideas for justice in the game was "safety in numbers." As long as the citizens outnumber the griefers, the citizens should triumph. That idea resurfaces as we differentiate good killers from bad killers. The good ones will need to be protected by others while they are in their post-kill vulnerability state. The bad killers, who are acting alone and without the approval of the group, become fair game for everyone. The 60 second window of vulnerability is a live server setting, and may be tweaked in the future. It could be even longer than the murder weapon hold time.

Feast tables have been tweaked so that they are no longer kick-started by pumpkin pie, allowing these pies to be stored on a table without forming a feast table.

This week, I'm also kicking off a new community content feature. Congratulations to Fred Struggs, whose modern berry farm is featured in this week's VOG Shot:



I'm on vacation next week.

Long-distance pipelines can drain the new diesel oil well from afar, and also give you more oil per well than the Newcomen pump.

And pipes, for both sprinklers and oil, can pass through property fences now.

This might seem like a simple change, but with all those different pipe orientations and and flow directions, it's actually pretty complicated, requiring 125 new objects this week to stitch the whole thing together and make it work. Long distance flow requests and responses, with no code changes needed to make it happen.