Automated Processes

[Piscator]

Limiting the amount of gatherable resource wouldn't do much good. It would only take longer to clothe the island two times over. What we would need is a demand for new clothes or in other words, clothing deterioration.

[SumBum]

This is going to cause a slight derail. Clothing deterioration would be nice, but I think the bigger "problem" with clothing is that it is completely optional. If it required repairs, it's possible we'd have even more naked chars running around. I would think enough clothing gets buried with the dead to count as some deterioration. If you really want to increase demand, implement climate/weather that makes clothing more of a necessity. I could see more dead being stripped if clothing were actually needed so maybe a combination of weather and deterioration would be best.

Feel free to move this post to a more appropriate discussion thread of clothing changes.

[Tiamo]

Well, why do WE, in the real world, wear clothes? To protect us from the weather, from heat and cold, from getting scratched, from getting dirty, etc.
If this somehow would be necessary in the Cantr world too, there would be a reason to wear some clothing. If then clothes would deteriorate and must be replaced every now and then, there would be room for faster cotton harvesting machines etc.

In fact this mechanism should exist for everything that is made within Cantr, including vehicles and buildings. Make it useful or even necessary, make it rot, make it again.

[EchoMan]

Bad roleplay is a factor as well. I have a char that is crouched, ugly, smelly and sorrounded with flies. Still the first "oh so innocent and sweet" newspawn girl was hitting like crazy on him.

If being decently clothed actually was a status symbol as it is in most RL societies, and if it were roleplayed as such, the demand of clothes would be greater. But indeed weather, as well as weather effects on health, skill use and so on if not protected, I like.

[Cwalen]

Slightly derailed from the original thread, but some very important points in my opinion none the less.

I'll try regrouping the focus.

Primitive hunter/gather societies spent a little over half their waking time getting the necessities of life, 20-30 hours a week.
(new spawns, in isolated areas with no tools or machines)

As we shifted to a farming/herding lifestyle the amount of time we as a society could spend on doing other things increased dramatically.
(established groups with tools)

After the industrial revolution the amount we could produce increased massively.
(machinery, especially the sort of automation mentioned at the start of this thread)

Somehow despite all this we spend more time working than our ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago.

Spoilage, decay, the cost of keeping up with new technology, destruction through warfare and copious, opulent consumption of resources by a significant few, along with an ever increasing population and more recently throw away consumer culture means that in the real world at least the economy has not stagnated.

In Cantr at the moment, more or less eternal objects and buildings, stockpiles built up over time but not used, an inherited load of tools and machines, a relative (to the time frame) stagnation of technology and a decreasing population means there is very little that is not available easily.

(as an example one of my charters who is a wandering mendicant who doesn't even bother producing food for himself just got given an iron shield and a longbow having done very little real work in his entire life except for being a decent chap, another spawned in an almost empty location surrounded by houses full of meat, iron ore and hematite, and was given a tandem)

Perhaps my experiences are not typical, but they lead me to the conclusion that automating things even further, though the fuel use would be good, wont improve the economy, but cant really harm it much more.

Oh and I wear clothes because my parole officer said I really had to.

[Chris]

What is the point? You make some projects automated, but then you require more work to collect or make fuel for the automation. Cantr already has a work treadmill of great complexity. That's not what keeps people playing.

You want people to travel more? Time on the road is usually boring. The social life is in towns. So in effect, forcing people to travel more means reducing people's opportunities for social interaction. Some people enjoy traveling, but that's just the way they are.

[RedQueen.exe]

Hmm. Maybe a cotton harvester is needed?

I have a couple of comments for new harvesters.

At the basic premise it is a good idea, anything to help promote the use of fuels isn't necessarily a bad thing. But if we were to simply add in mass harvesters it would have the potential to hurt the economy.

As long as a sudden influx of a material is tempered to keep up with demand than it could be done. Remember something like clothing is a one-shot sale. It lasts forever, and through countless generations of characters.

As a hypothetical bit of what if. Suppose a town could automate cotton collecting and pull in large quantities of cotton a day. Then that they could also use propane to automate the ginning, making yarn and cloth. Propane usage does go up, and after a few years they now have enough cotton clothing to clothe the entire island they live on two times over. Then what? Sure, the value of propane may have gone up because of a new demand, but what about the demand for cotton? It is only good for clothes, and if everyone has a set that last forever, would the need for cotton and other clothing be, and stay, at a reasonable level?

If we want to go that route, in order to try and keep the market balanced, we'd have to implement an artificial limitation elsewhere, for examples caps on resources. Every year towns get between 'x' and 'y' grams of cotton. Once it's collected it is it for that year. Without something like this you'd be adding potentially hundreds of thousands of grams of cotton onto a market not necessarily prepared to handle it. And I'm not just picking on cotton, any harvester of any resource that lasts forever could possibly have this effect.

I REALLY like the idea of a set amount of resource per year, as long as it were sufficiently high. It could even vary by area, and you could potentially increase the number of locations that had different resources, some would just have very small amounts and some would have significantly more. I would almost like to see gathering rates vary by location as well... the places that had more could be gathered faster while the places that have less would gather slower. This would allow poor places to easier make small bits of things like iron with a few short trips so that they could get by without having to trudge about for years on foot everywhere just to make their first lock, but still allow for trade and for places to specialize in certain things.

But I'm sure it would be an implementation nightmare, or at least a nightmare for traders and RD to figure out the relative value and rarity of resources in any kind of objective way. *sigh*

[DylPickle]

What is the point? You make some projects automated, but then you require more work to collect or make fuel for the automation. Cantr already has a work treadmill of great complexity. That's not what keeps people playing.

You want people to travel more? Time on the road is usually boring. The social life is in towns. So in effect, forcing people to travel more means reducing people's opportunities for social interaction. Some people enjoy traveling, but that's just the way they are.

Another argument is that traveling prompts refreshing potential for social interactions with new pool of personalities, especially since arrival is announced as an event to all present. Time spent travelling is an investment with greater social interactions as a potential payoff.


Edit: I forgot to comment on the topic of the thread. I think the overall point of the suggestion is to make some commodities more necessary, in the hopes of increasing trade and interdependence, which is something I'm most definitely in favour of.

[Cwalen]

Scarcity leads to trade, interaction, tension, conflict, larger cooperative communities, All sorts of RP opportunities. (this game is about RP not resources, even if it makes getting a big pile of stuff harder for any of our chars)

Automating processes, even past the current situation of having so many harvesters that food irrelevant, is a two edged sword. On one hand there is the increased need for resources to fuel and/or build the machines. On the other increased productivity. Over time we are just pushing the problem forward, unless the increased time efficiency of the mechanization has a time cost of resource gathering which limits it.

Harvesting raw materials, with the use of tools or especially machines makes them plentiful, To the extent that we limit that, we limit the desirability of tool use/mechanization. Personally I believe it should be moderately profitable to use tools/machines rather than the current model of absurdly profitable. At the moment, no matter how much it costs to build a harvester, it pays it's self off relatively quickly, then lasts forever.

If we make it decay, then we effectively are adding slightly to the cost of production, If it decays and costs resources to maintain, then we are adding a little more to the cost of production, and requiring trade in many circumstances. That to me seems like a step we should consider before we automatize the world further and make even finished goods able to be produced on mass.

[RedQueen.exe]

Honestly, in my not-so-humble opinion, we should be increasing production/gathering rates a little at the same time as we're introduce rot and maintenance, or otherwise the combined amount of effort to both maintain and acquire things could become tedious (maybe that's what people want, I don't know). We ought for newspawns to actually be able to acquire a little bit on their own before their thirties without having to be given everything, and the maintenance and rot should still take care of the problems of towns sitting on mountains of wealth that they just pass from generation to generation. I'm worried if we only focus on adding maintenance and rot, that we're going to make trying to get anywhere in cantr insanely tedious.

Perhaps more succinctly, I think we ought to have these automated processes, or at least the ability to ramp up efficiency, but at the same time maintenance is introduced, so as the previous poster mentioned, future generations aren't simply reaping the benefits without any additional thought or effort.

[Piscator]

It would be easier for a newspawn to aquire things if their work would actually be worth something. Currently there's no motivation for a wealthy character to give away his stuff, since there's nothing the newspawn could offer. If people had to put in a little effort to remain wealthy, it might actually become easier for a newspawn to earn what he desires.

[RedQueen.exe]

It would be easier for a newspawn to aquire things if their work would actually be worth something. Currently there's no motivation for a wealthy character to give away his stuff, since there's nothing the newspawn could offer. If people had to put in a little effort to remain wealthy, it might actually become easier for a newspawn to earn what he desires.

Unless something changes to make the new spawn suddenly have something to offer, I doubt it. I would likely bet money that the same kind of people that don't already help newspawns would just as soon let their stuff rot in storage as they would give it away for nothing, especially if they keep telling themselves that they'll remember to fix it up and simply never do.

[Doug R.]

It would be easier for a newspawn to aquire things if their work would actually be worth something. Currently there's no motivation for a wealthy character to give away his stuff, since there's nothing the newspawn could offer. If people had to put in a little effort to remain wealthy, it might actually become easier for a newspawn to earn what he desires.

This is why item rot was implemented in the first place. Unfortunately, the players found it easier to scream their lungs out at the change than have their characters actually hire others to maintain their wealth. The result, of course, was a complete neutering of the implementation.