Primitive Tool Types

[The Sociologist]

3 grams of that volcanic stuff a day, where ever mountains AND gold are. The tools, average need 100-200 grams of the stuff. Hard enough?

That sort of figure, yes. Maybe up to 5 grams a day if one limits the weapon to some kind of obsidian spear, drops the building implements and maybe one or two of the others. One could still leave space for a "bronze" age.

You are on the right track with "mountains AND...", I think, but probably not gold, diamonds or silver. Perhaps better to make it mountains plus some other material that's not used much. Perhaps wherever chromium or some similar metal is, plus wherever stone is by itself, or some combination like that. So it wouldn't just crop up wherever stone is. I agree now that such a distribution would still be too much.

Mountains and gold seems like a somewhat irrational requirement. I'd go with mountains and sand, because you need "volcanic" but you also need glass. That narrows the choices down a bit, but it gives people a reason to go to the mountains. In most of Cantr you just have to go to an "Iron Forest" to get the hematite you need, and mountains don't have much else.

I looked through my maps for mountains and sand, but... Anyway, I don't think one needs to be hyperrealistic about the geology. Putting hematite and wood together is bad enough. I agree, though, with giving people a reason to go into the mountains!

Would there be a tool and/or machine to harvest obsidian? Obsidian couldn't have a shield. That would be tough on it, but makes sense. With obsidian weapons and bone shields, you could have a Cantr war where damage is actually inflicted! (Damage is pretty light at most technology levels of combat if shields don't fail.)

I prefer damage the way it is in the sim. You would need an obsidian tool to dig obsidian, I suppose--"obsidian digger". But no machine is possible. It's collected in smallish quantities even today--it's used for ultra-sharp scalpels for microsurgery and whatnot. If you touch them, you've cut yourself, since your skin cannot resist a cutting edge only a molecule wide.

And yes indeed, no shield at all.

the RD has in mind many primitive style tools and weapons t introduce to the game but at present if we added them everyone would just make them instead of the iron steel ones already in the game.as soon as we have weapon/tool degredation the number of available things will sky rocket to include more primitive ones because then they'll be more in balance cause they'll break faster then steel/iron ones will.

The RD has made a fun and beautiful game, which has attracted some really fine people and I'm enjoying getting to know them. However, the RD also needs to take more account of some basic ideas about how human societies operate.

Currently, you have Joe of Joe's Bakery happily gathering wheat outside, while his spawnlings slave over the wheat-grinding-machine and the bread-baking-machine. Why? Because he holds in his hands his precious and irreplaceable sickle. It has taken him a lifetime to own it. Now you want to break it? In the current circumstances of a moribund economy?

No, what you need to do is make consumption of Joe's bread absolutely necessary for Edwina Evilguts of Castle Steel... not so much for reasons of health as for reasons of status. Then she will pay Joe for his bread and he can buy sickles one after the other and you'll have trade, and then you can start breaking Joe's surplus sickles. If you start beaking things now, old Evilguts--who lives on raw potatos and has never been anywhere near a restaurant anyway--will have even less time to bother with poor Joe, and even less interest in dispensing with her hoarded steel. The problem, you see, is that Edwina has no reason to consume, not that thing's don't break. You have insufficient demand to power the economy.

But I'll return to that--and also how to solve it--in another thread. Meanwhile I still believe this place needs obsidian fast. If you look at the overwhelming votes for stone tools, plus the fact that the above is a much better suggestion, then what further reason is there not to do it asap? It should be mere parameter changes not so?

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

i agree changes need to be made to the way food is handed in the game so that a food industry must appear instead of the travelling individual type society that's prevailent in the game at present.until such time as food is harder to make/gather it'll still mean trade is low because food is where it would all start from.would give perpose to having a job and building a community rather then just cause ya want something to do in the game.but every time someone suggests reducing food yeilds or to increase the amount of time needed to get food people object because it wouldn't be fair on newbies.ya can't have it both ways

[SekoETC]

In a good society newspawns should be taken into the community, given food and a meaningful job from the first day. But now most people are vagabonds. For example of my characters only a few are citizens somewhere and even they travel a lot.

[Revanael]

We need more incentive to form communities and stay there.

Easier to make tools would probably do the opposite!

[Antichrist_Online]

Easier to make tools would reduce the need to travel to complete personal goals meaning people stay together longer. The iron/wood/light food dependance means people tend to cluster in places with these resources instead other palces creating large migratory groups of people.

How about adding obsidian to five random places on the exsitsing islands. Rather than one specific place. (It could be a rock plug from a volcano or a long gone mountain system).

[The Industriallist]

Appleide's take on the obsidian tools would encourage organization, because you would need a lot of workers to collect obsidian at a useful rate. What would really help is more danger outside of communities

I have to point out that resources are placed at some department's discretion, not according to some formula. Though I would expect Obsidian to only appear in mountains.

The idea is that: Joe's Bread isn't actually getting any value by churning out this bread. His employees are working for food, and he sells approximately nothing. That is economics, cantr-style.

If Joe was breaking down his precious steel sickle to produce that bread, maybe he would either be looking a lot harder for a way to get some value for his bread, or he might reallize that 50000g of bread isn't worth destroying his sickle.

But, if you had a viable organization, like one of the endless 'collect resources and smelt' companies, it would need to have enough people to keep it's infrastructure up. If they have 2 tandem bikes, it'll take them quite a bit of work to keep supplying rubber to repair them.

[Gunther_01]

As a side note. Can there be a random chance that a metroite hits somewhere. They were the first source of iron before people discovered it was under the ground as well right?

No.
Human beings must have known of the existance of iron long before they new how to work it, but not from meterorites.
1: Meterorites are made of dust/rock. Often they are as large as a grain of sand. They are bits of comets, which are balls of rock and ice.
2: If they do hit the ground, they leave a smallish crater, and anything that was in it is more-or-less vaporised.
3:Any iron that comes from space would be in the form of the core of an asteroid. Asteroids are much more solid in comparison, consisting mostly of iron.
4: and besides, Iron is everywhere! I've got a creek next to my place, and the banks, the land above the cliff next to the bank, and for about 100 feet back is completely iron stone! So don;t go saying that you have to dig for it, because i've got hundreds of dollars worth in my neiborhood, and you probably do too.

[The Industriallist]

'Iron stone'? What is that?

Meteorites are not necesarily rocky. They can also be metalic, and some not only reach the surface, but survive impact and can be recovered.

Meteors are larger meteorites.

Asteroids, by definition, never reach earth. Once they enter the atmosphere, they are meteors or meteorites.

I have heard of meteoric iron, which would be extremely rare metalic iron obtained from (mostly) iron meteors/meteorites. It is possible that some humans worked meteoric iron before proper iron smelting was invented, though I can't say how likely that is.
The 'iron was known long before it could be worked' comes from the fact that at one point iron could be smelted, but the result was essentially useless. Some advance (I don't know just what, maybe limestone flux?) was needed to make the iron strong enough to be useful.

EDIT: I don't mean to say meteoric iron should appear in Cantr. I don't think it should, really.

[Lumin]

Just dug this thread up on a search for stone weapons. Obsidian would definitely be nice and all, but honestly right now I'd even be happy with a stone knife or spearhead...

[kroner]

hey, good dig. this thread is ripe now that deterioration is in.

[Just A Bill]

If you want bakers to be useful, what is needed is foodstuff deteriation. Food should deteriate faster than items. Think how moldy a pile of potatoes would be after a year or two. When you can't just use a carrot harvester for a day or two then not worry about food for the next decade or two there will be no market for food.

Deteriating food might lead to two food markets. First a local food market in most towns, to enable travelers to restock their food supplies, and also perhaps a food preservation industry to make more lasting food. Perhaps areas with access to glass could start a canning industry, or even just sell jars which could be used to preserve food. I believe that I heard somewhere that canning was actually invented as a means of feeding Napoleans(sp) armies. Areas with salt could preserve meat and sell that. Bakeries could make a kind of hard tack which would be reasonably long lasting.

I like the idea of an meteor strike, that or other natural disasters could shake things up. Earthquakes that knock down buildings and damage those withen, Floods that make fields unworkable, tornadoes ect might stir things up some and might motivate people to work together.

[TatteredShoeLace]

If I spend 13 years building a galleon just to have a flood destroy it, I wouldnt consider it "shaken up" I'd prolly hit the X on the Char page and cash in my chips. Weather is fine, building and vehicle deterioration is fine, but to randomly destroy things from natural disasters is kinda bogus. especially when we can't tear down buildings ourselves. Just my opinion.

[Nick]

Asteroids, by definition, never reach earth. Once they enter the atmosphere, they are meteors or meteorites.

Not quite...

asteroid: Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers. Also called minor planet, planetoid.

meteor: A bright trail or streak that appears in the sky when a meteoroid is heated to incandescence by friction with the earth's atmosphere.

meteorite: A stony or metallic mass of matter that has fallen to the earth's surface from outer space