It Comes With The Territory : Housing In Once Human

It looks like I'll be playing Once Human quite seriously as soon as it reaches a non-wipe release of some kind so I'm following through on my plan to cut back on the time I'm spending in beta. I have to say I'm not finding it easy. There's no game I'd rather be playing right now.

Still, short term pain, long term gain, right? And I haven't withdrawn from the beta entirely. I'm just trying to limit myself to no more than one, shortish session a day. An hour or so. That's not too much, is it? 

I'm also going to pull back on the long, detailed posts about it, I think. Got to keep something in the locker for when the game goes Live. I don't imagine finding new things to say about it is likely to be a problem when that happens, anyway. It won't be exactly the same game by then.

I'm betting it won't be radically different, either, though. As I mentioned, it's a very traditional beta. The game feels feature-complete so I'm not seeing any of the weird lurches and yaws in direction that come with playing games in an alpha state. Everything that was in place when I started a few weeks ago a is still there now. It just works better.

What I 'm mostly seeing are lots of small, incremental changes, designed to fine-tune the experience to make it more satisfying, less frustrating and broadly more fun for players. The latest patch notes offer some good examples of the kind of thing I mean. 

This is the guy that gives Commissions. I'm guessing the new tutorial sends you to see him but I found him on my own because I talk to everyone, just in case.

For example, they added a tutorial mission that appears the first time you reach Deadsville, designed to introduce the Commission system, a fairly important mechanic that feeds you your Daily Tasks. I did manage to find that on my own but it certainly wasn't obvious, so that's a thoughtful addition. 

(Also, very observant readers with highly retentive memories may note that I've been getting the name of the starting town wrong all this time. I've been calling it Deadville, when it's actually Deadsville, with an "s" in the middle. It makes me want to pop my fingers and yell "Daddio! every time I read it now I've noticed.)

The latest update also makes the first two bosses easier, a change that makes me feel quite cheerful about the direction the devs want to take the game. I've been in plenty of betas where that patch note would have explained how we'd all have more fun if the bosses took longer to kill, something that, in my experience, would not prove to be true. I'd far rather they erred on the side of leniency than the other way around.

Perhaps the most welcome note is the one about changes to where you can build. The patch adds to the areas in which you can build your house or Hive (I'll explain later.) and also allows you to settle down closer to existing NPC Settlements. One of the more frustrating aspects of the game for me has been the frequent messaging telling me why I can't put my territory marker down where I wanted to build my house. Too near a Settlement; too near a Stronghold; too near a Road...

Wouldn't want to be living there when the rains come...

Any relaxation of the zoning restrictions has to be a good thing. I realise urban blight is one of the biggest problems any MMORPG that allows free-build, open-world housing has to address but there needs to be enough give in the system to allow people to live somewhere convenient, not just way out in the boonies. Then again, you can build in shallow water, which seems to suggest a somewhat too relaxed attitude to health and safety, not least with all those mutant alligators roaming about in there...

While we're on the topic, I was going to do a whole post on housing and building in the game. I consider it to be one of the better implementations I've seen. Since I'm probably never going to get around to that, maybe I'll just go over a few of the salient parts now. 

The mechanics are introduced early on and feel relatively simple, as these things go. You find a spot where building is permitted, set down your Terminal and start building. The controls are easy to understand and to use. They're well-documented and they work. I've done a good deal of building and not hit any glitches or bugs. The snap placement can be a bit fiddly, but then when isn't it?

Everything is prefabricated, something I hugely prefer to the more simulationist approach some games adopt. I really don't want to be making my own bricks. So long as you have the correct raw materials on hand, all you need to do is open the interface, find the structure or object you want, select it and place it where it needs to go. 

There are also wallpaper and flooring designs that can be added at a click, Available options for infrastructure, fixtures, fittings and furniture are tied to your progress through the storyline, in that you open each new stage by killing a storyline Boss. That gets you the basics. You then spend points to open specific lines like lighting or roofing in whatever order you prefer. It's very simple and works well as an incentive to progress, although I don't personally approve of linking combat and crafting progression. I'd prefer to see them kept separate.

One thing I do very much like is that recipes outside of the basic and advanced lines can be found as drops, both from containers in Strongholds and from mobs. I find it quite exciting to open a storage crate and find a blueprint for a sofa inside. Most of my better furniture has come to me that way.

The amount of space you get for your house is fairly generous. Enough for a good-sized building and a decent garden or yard. You can expand it considerably by way of the Hive system, something that is very poorly explained, possibly because using it that way isn't exactly what the developers had in mind.

"Hives" are what Once Human has instead of Guilds. The concept is introduced via a tutorial mission (Well, a Journey section, much the same thing.) that invites you to join a Hive. Since I'm not much of a one for guilds these days, my first instinct when something like this crops up - as it almost always does in any new MMORPG I try - is to check if it's possible to meet the mission requirements by making a one-person guild of my own.

In Once Human I'm happy to say that is something you can do. Making a Hive costs nothing and you only need one player to do it. It's a very simple process. The confusing part is what you do with your Hive once you have it. 

Hives, like individual players, are entitled to claim land and build on it. The Journey/Mission asks you to place the Hive marker to establish a Territory for your Hive but it doesn't really explain how to go about it. I spent a while trying to figure it out until eventually I ran across something online that suggested you could use your Hive Territory Terminal to extend the boundaries of your personal Territory, just by putting it down inside the limits. That was how I came to move house.

Great view of the sunrise. Shame the boundary line cuts right into the corner bedroom, though. It's going to be fresh in there come winter, with no wall.

Taking a step back to what I said about the zoning restrictions, when I first came to look for somewhere to live, I had quite some difficulty finding a suitable spot. I was a few days late getting into beta and all the obvious locations had already been taken. I spent quite a while searching for anywhere that would let me put my Terminal down and when I found a place, I didn't consider the potential for future development very carefully.

I was pretty lucky. It was a good spot with enough room for my new home and a fine view over the valley. What wasn't so good was the way the boundary lapped up against a road on one side, a cliff on another and a sheer drop on a third. When it came time to extend the limits with the Hive Terminal, there just wasn't enough room. The Terminal just couldn't be placed anywhere on my Territory.

(At this juncture I probably ought to mention you don't have to put the two Territories together. Even with a one-person Hive, you can have both a personal Territory and a Hive Territory, in different parts of the map. That would give you two personal teleport spots and presumably the option to build two complete properties. I haven't yet tested how that works and I probably won't get around to it in this beta but it's something to keep in mind.)

That's how I came to test one of Once Human's most impressive building features: relocation. I've seen this offered in other games. Vanguard had a very limited version of it, I seem to recall, and Landmark, typically, had an extremely awkward, over-complicated system for it that didn't work very well but this is the first I've seen that just works, first time, right out of the box.  

My new place, as seen from the road.

I was very nervous about trying it out. I expected it would either be frustratingly fiddly or it just wouldn't work at all. I thought there was a small chance I'd lose all my stuff but a much bigger chance I'd keep the mats but have to rebuild from scratch. Still, what else are betas for? So I gave it a go.

Literally the only problem I had was the same one as before - finding a good spot no-one else had already claimed. I ran around for a good while, carrying my Terminal with the Relocation screen open. That showed me all the boundaries of everyone else's Territories. Of course, every time I tried to put mine down in a space someone hadn't taken, the game came up with some reason why I couldn't do it. It was annoying.

After about twenty minutes running around, I finally got an OK from the planning department for a nice-looking spot down by the coast. This time I took the trouble to check the area before staking my claim. It seemed like it ought to be big enough so I put my Terminal down and Relocated, expecting the worst. 

But it just worked! Perfectly. The ghost of my house appeared on my cursor. I rotated and adjusted it until it was where I wanted it, then I put it down and it took on solid form, intact and complete. Nothing was glitched, nothing got lost, nothing was messed up in any way. All my furniture was even still inside, set up exactly as it had been.

I managed to relocate to a spot where the boundary also cuts into the same corner! Still can't put a wall there. But just look at that view!

Okay, there was one room with some rocks poking through a wall but they looked pretty good so I'm calling it a feature. It was by far the best implementation of this kind of operation I've ever used. It makes moving house from one area to another as you level up seem like a bona fide option for once. No packing up your stuff, finding a new home, then putting it all into place again. Just pick up the whole house and everything inside it in one go then put it back down!

With that done, I was easily able to add the Hive Terminal to push the boundaries of my new Territory out further. Now I have a good-sized chunk of land, sufficient for a big patio, an area for my heavy machinery, a separate space for my garage (I have a motorbike now!) and enough land for a small market garden, should I wish to take up farming.

The Hive Terminal supercedes the Personal one so all I need to do is keep that supplied with wood, gravel and ore. There is a maintenance requirement on both kinds of Territory but it's entirely automated and extremely cheap. You could easily gather enough mats in a few minutes to keep your home at full maintenance for weeks. 

Oh look. It seems as though I have written that post about housing after all. Go me!

I was going to say something about fishing and a few other things but I guess I'l save those for another time. Beta still has a couple of weeks to run and, while I'm playing less, I'm not going to stop altogether. There'll be time for another post or two before we're done, I'm sure.