How to make mass burials possible

[SekoETC]

A burial project actually consists of three parts:

1) Digging the grave
2) Lowering the corpse in the grave
3) Filling the grave.

In Cantr, this has all been simplified by making it a single project. But the problem is that even though the project in best cases lasts only a single Cantr hour, if you have several corpses to bury, it will take a longer time due to the fact that the player cannot be online at all times of the day to swap to a new project.

There has been talk of corpses and mass burials in the past, but this suggestion is a bit different, at least it's not a duplicate of the queueing idea.

Here it goes, the project(s) would be split into the three parts mentioned above. The first part is digging a grave. It would take approximately half an hour by corpse from an efficient person. Half an hour? you say - but in that case you would end up wasting even MORE time, and starting even more projects with all those phases! But correction, my dear Watson, I have this thought through.

Instead of digging a separate grave for every corpse, you could define the size of the grave, measured in people. Techically, it would be like a building. When the grave is ready, you could drag corpses into it until it's full (person/weight capacity is reached). After that's done, you would fill it up. If you noticed that you made a grave too big and you wouldn't have enough corpses to fill it, that's alright since you could still fill it when it's not quite full, only that for every unoccupied body space you would spend half an hour more. If the grave was full then it would take less than half an hour per corpse to fill it (filling is easier than digging solid ground).

This might also allow burying items and living people, but maybe there could be some sort of checks to disallow the filling project from being initialized if there's a living person inside.

A single person could still be buried with this method, but it would take at least two hours to finish it (one hour for digging the grave, some minutes from the beginning of the second hour to pull the corpse into the grave and the next tick for closing the grave). This might lead people into using mass burials for less important people.

Also, you could make criminals and hostages dig their own graves before killing them and save an hour. Maybe you could even make them enter the grave before you kill them, thus saving you from the dragging.

Did you get me?

[in vitro...]

i would rather dig a hole which acts like a building and has ID or something allowing to differ them from each other, then drag some corpses there (or maybe not only corpses - flowers, jewelery or even pirate's trasure instead of corpse) and then fill the grave. the grave could be dug up later if you know its ID. this will make mass burials, and also hiding treasures possible.

(i hope you understand me - my english isn't very good)

[SekoETC]

It's pretty much the same as what I suggested, exept that I didn't think about the possibility of opening the grave. Maybe the things in the grave would merely deteriorate faster than on the surface, and could be recovered if it's opened within a reasonable length of time.

If mounds could be opened, they should initially be visible to everyone, perhaps appearing on the bottom of the objects page, and later the position could only be known if you were witnessing the burial, or if a marker has been set. But it should also be possible to dig at random spots and to plant/move markers to distract grave robbers. This might be hard to program.

[tiddy ogg]

Make it too complicated and it'll be easier to build a mausoleum from a shack.

[Racetyme]

I like it except for having to drag the body into the grave, that part seems like it could be a real pain, and it still requires you to get on every click to move a new body, so it doesn't really do anything other than change the step that is a pain.

[SekoETC]

Hmm, yeah, it might get difficult if you can't find help. But if the corpses are already outside then usually people are ready to assist on dragging projects, just as long as it doesn't involve too many steps. People are more ready to assist on dragging than actual burial projects, maybe it's because dragging can happen instantaneously while a burial lasts at least an hour.

I can see a plus side in a single person not being able to move a fresh corpse into a grave without help. People are so eager to start burials for corpses just to get them off the objects list that in case of a stranger, they rarely stop to ask if someone was having other plans for it, like moving it to a mausoleum. If you had to ask for help in pushing the corpses into the grave, that would cause some more attention, and they could possibly be retrieved from there before the grave is closed, in case someone was not meant to be buried that way. Also making mass burials easier than individual ones gives a special meaning for those who are buried alone.