Sustainability

[nkycarbon]

I do not see anything on this game about sustainability. Being in balance and out of balance with our environment has been something that has always effected societies and still effects us today. Having a game with an infinite amount of food, wood, stone, etc. seems very strange.

The idea is that things would slowly fade over time.

I understand that the areas in the game are quite large and it would be very hard to access exactly how much of a resource is gone.

To try to make things simple let's say that every resource has a counter that starts at 2400. Each hour that anyone harvests the resource the counter goes down by 1. The counter goes up by 1 regardless of what occurs each year.

The calculation would be

"Harvest" = "Normal Harvest" * "Harvest counter" / 2400

Example:

Hour 1: 100 corn * 2400 / 2400 = 100 corn
Hour 2: 100 corn * 2399 / 2400 = 99 corn
Hour 3: 100 corn * 2398 / 2400 = 99 corn
....
Hour 25 (Day 3 hour 1): 100 corn * 2375 / 2400 = 98 corn
....
Hour 399 (day 10 hour 7): 100 corn * 2001 / 2400 = 83 corn
Hour 400 (year 1): 100 corn * 2001 / 2400 = 83 corn (It's still 2001 since 1 was added for a year and 1 was subtracted for getting corn)
....
Hour 2396 (year 19, day 19, hour 4 ): 100 corn * 24 / 2400 = 1 corn
Hour 2396 (year 19, day 19, hour 5 ): 100 corn * 23 / 2400 = 0 corn
....

So the effect is that after 20 cantr years (400 real world days) of constant corn gathering you cannot get anymore. Sometime before that you usally starve to death just trying to continue the process.

That is just slow enough not to be noticed for along time and then once noticed it is hard for society to deal with just like in the real world like "peak oil", "dust bowls" etc.

[Doug R.]

Something like this has been proposed before.
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13056


My biggest counter to this suggestion is, how long would it take for a literal handful of people in a location to exhaust a resource? In cantr, you have maybe a few hundred folks living on some islands the size of the US. I don't think sustainability is a problem for so few people.

[nkycarbon]

Something like this has been proposed before.
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13056

Thanks for pointing that out. I also see this one now too.

I see there is a gathering cap already in place which is good. This would be more of a personal gathering cap so that it would take more people to harvest the same amount.

My biggest counter to this suggestion is, how long would it take for a literal handful of people in a location to exhaust a resource? In cantr, you have maybe a few hundred folks living on some islands the size of the US. I don't think sustainability is a problem for so few people.

A handful of people can exhaust a resource by only gathering it by one method. For instance you can run out of water if you don't have a river, don't understand how to dig a proper well, and don't know how to "drink plants".

Abstractly I would say that larger groups allows more ways to get carrots than we choose to detail in the game.

By applying it to groups large and small it makes it more balanced but still give it an effect. A slow decline and recovery is the backdrop to which the world operates.

[Doug R.]

I see there is a gathering cap already in place which is good.

The current caps are too high to be effective. They used to be lower, but massive complaining by the players caused them to be neutered.

[formerly known as hf]

This was the very first post I ever made. And there's a ton of discussion on the subject around the place.

http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3023

One of the things it would encourage is more organisation that is place-based - whatever form that may take. The cap was an attempt to do that, but it seems individualism in how people want to play the game took precedence.

[tiddy ogg]

Those caps did work in some places when there was a much higher population density in some towns, but the expansion of the world and reduced player numbers means they've lost any significance most places.
But that's exactly the point, such small numbers of chars mean there should be no sustainability problem.

[joo]

This is a post I made on another topic which might be relevant:

I think the solution to balance out depletable (or at least partially depletable) resources it rather obvious: the resources that are taken from locations still exist, they're just used to make things, or broken down into new components, and in a lot of cases these can be fairly easily reclaimed IRL. To balance it out, basically, we should implement recycling first. Once people are able to take back what they have used to make tools, machines, clothes, jewellery, or even possibly buildings, then it can be made that new resources taken from the ground are limited in more ways than just gathering slots.

Some of the first steps have already been taken:

• Keys can be reclaimed to get 10 grams of iron back.
• Buildings and vehicles can be renamed and thus repurposed

Now, there needs to be more for recycling to become a reality:

• Notes, even uneditable ones, and envelopes can be destroyed or recycled to make a new blank note, or maybe pulp, or even possibly used as a fuel.
• Buildings are damaged every time a lock is broken. Possibly later there can be siege weapons which do instant damage to a building, but need ammunition to made as separate objects.
• Composite items can be broken back down to their separate components with the tools used to make them. This should take maybe three times as long as making them. Also, when an item goes beyond "crumbling" a portion of its resources should be left behind.
• Items can be utterly destroyed by a large pounding tool and a platform made of a stronger material (i.e. bone, wood < stone < bronze < iron < steel < titanium?). The project progressively does damage to the item's condition basically. Possibly metal items would require a welding tool to break down or destroy.
• The less people, buildings, vehicles, etc present in a location and the more wildlife, the faster its natural regeneration rate is. The rationale basically is that when the ecoloogy of a location is allowed to naturally flourish, remains will decay, microbes will process minerals, etc, and this will lead to more natural resources being generated. I am of course speaking on a very long-term scale, so maybe the ticks for this should only be made every game year or so.
• Organic resources, animal and human remains and by-products (such as dung) can be composted and fed to the land to reinforce its level of resource availability. Maybe a one-per-location contain called a compost heap can be made which automatically "eats" resources put into it at a constant rate and uses this feed the land.

Wow, that list got longer than I expected. Well, these are all random ideas I haven't presented them in a very logical form, but maybe they'll help stimulate the discussion. My main point is that it should be possible to live sustainably as well as desructively.

[Gran]

I would like to share some ideas:

First, before talking about sustainability, recycling and etc, what about chemistry?

There are many things that the game misses because it does not consider chemistry, from glucose that should be a result of biodiesel making process and that could be used to make soap to slag from steel and iron making that could be used in construction.

Soil fertility is defined by the amount and concentration of nutrients under the surface. As you stated Nky, the equation can express the decline of the overall fertility, however this process is not uniform: plants varies in the amount of nutrients needed and what types, also some like peanut can actually by association with microbes raise soil fertility by capturing nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Plus, it isn't certain that simply gathering something by different ways would work, it depends on what a crop/method consumes/produces. Growing sugarcane and corn on a large field to produce sugar would damage as much growing only one of them.

So, simply making an equation does not fill all the needs:
Soil can restore fertility if it is not being used, some plants damage less than others or inject nutrients that can be used by others.

The way to really explore these fields, with much more possibilities not only on recycling but on production chains as a whole, is by chemistry (yay, scrutiny we go!).

[Tiamo]

How detailed do we want the Cantr world to be?

Does a system of exact refertilazation (using chemistry, but also climate influences, soil types, plant types, etc.) add to the game experience compared to a simple sustainability/depletion system, making people aware of the limits of nature? And, given the simplicity of the current gathering system and the low use rate of gathering capacity, do we need a sustainability system at all?

Agriculture has several levels, even before mechanization starts, from simple clear-and-grow to switching crops, using plows, using irrigation, using fertilizer and in the process using stone/wood, bronze and iron tools. In Cantr this process is represented by the use of gathering tools. The mechanization phase is represented by the use of gathering machines (with or without petrol). Does the current system reflect this process of advancement enough, or do we want a more detailed system?

Using fields for agriculture means those fields will have to be cleared, and kept free of weeds. If fields are not used for several years they will slowly disappear and after a while will have to b e cleared all over again.
In Cantr every location has a fixed number of 'fields', regardless of their use. Do we want to change this to a system where fields have to be cleared, then cultivated, and disappear when not being cultivated for some time? This would be way more realistic.

Not only the number of gathering slots is fixed, also the type of crops that can be grown on each location is fixed. Why is this? Isn't it well possible to introduce new types of crops on your fields, even if they don't grow as well there as in their 'natural' habitat? The same goes for animals being relocated.
This would probably have an enormous effect on the Cantr world, but would also vastly improve the sense of 'realism' in the game, at least on this particular subject. Question is, do we need it to change, do we want it to be?

Finally (i can go on forever...), a very important element of any society is the domestication and use of animals, for food, for resources, for energy use and for travel. In Cantr this aspect of life is all but inexistent. Domestication is not possible, gathering milk & eggs means you have to kill the animal (huh?), any other type of animal use is absent. On the other hand, all kinds of animal body parts are readily available (without any effort!) upon killing an animal.
This may be the biggest gap of all in the Cantr food and resource system. But, do we want to have it changed? Does adding animal domestication and animal use make Cantr a more interesting game, or does it just add to the complexity of the game, shifting the focus away from the roleplaying and societybuilding aspects of the game?

How realistic and complex do we want the Cantr world to be?

[nkycarbon]

How detailed do we want the Cantr world to be?

I would like to see things stay fairly generic but still have the ability to be depletable but recoverable.

There is a large amount of complexity that could be introduced but the overall purpose is to have the effect of production cause scarcity impact a society. For instance the fairly common rules on animals in many places shows and under standing of this concept in various Cantr cultures.