OHOL throws things at you fast and hard, and you won't really have time to learn the basics of survival at that pace without a significant amount of frustration. So lets get those basics down before you jump back into game, but feel free to take a break at any point in reading and fire up a new life or two to practice what you've learned! Try your best to learn something every game, it will help you immensely as a player in the long term. Always try to learn from others!

Copying this guide to other locations or translating this guide has my full permission so long as credit is given and a link back to this guide is included. If there are any modifications you feel are required for the copy/translation, please credit yourself for the changes!

I'm more than happy to take feedback on the guide, be it spelling mistakes I've missed, graphical resources you'd like to see included, or discussion about game mechanics and how I've approached them. So long as it's civil discussion I'd love to hear it.

Note: This guide was written in Nov 2018, and as of Feb 2019 the game has developed enough that some parts of this guide are becoming outdated. I'm not currently playing so won't be updating it, but check the comments below as some community members are adding info that way.

Note2: Having played a bit recently, the meta around food has changed somewhat so I felt the need to add a section on yum.

If you're born to a camp, you will start as a baby. Most of your lives will be starting in other camps. Your mother will need to feed you for three minutes for you to grow to self sufficiency. She may choose to give you a first name, your last name is what the Eve of that camp chose for herself.

She may also walk away or ignore you. Don't take it personally, the mother is making a judgment that her camp can't afford to raise another child right now. Raising every baby a camp gets can starve a camp to death very easily. If for some reason you don't like that camp, you can also run off into the wild to starve so you can be reborn.

Being a baby is easy: Stay still unless your mother tells you otherwise. Babies can have literal seconds between feeding at early stages. Your mother doesn't have time to find you when you wander around.


If you hit 2 pips of food left, type "F" to let your mom know you need food and give her a bit of time to react. Saying it with only 1 pip left might not give her enough time to run back.


With the recent influx of new players, some experienced players are starting to adopt "testing" measures to pick who to feed. While you may be new, reading guides on how to be a better player and understanding mechanics definitely qualifies you as worth raising anyway.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4434

They are basically testing "Can you stay still so I can find you?" and "Do you understand temperature?". More will be covered later, but the basics of temperature is to try and keep a balanced temperature. Desert is hot, everywhere else is cold when you're naked. If you're in a cold biome, either move to a desert border or near a fire if available. If you're in a desert, move away from fire if you're placed near one.

The tutorial covers a bit about how temperature impacts amount of food eaten, but the impacts are actually incredibly powerful at reducing food consumption. Managing your temperature efficiently is the difference between eating 700 pips in a lifetime vs 200 by a skilled player.

After three minutes you'll be able to interact with things and feed yourself. Do note, fertile (15-40yo) females can still feed you for two more minutes but it's generally expected that you'll be feeding yourself.

There's two critical things you need to do at this stage. Number one is not overeat. Your hunger bar is small as a child, this limits how long you can go without food pretty heavily. However, it also means that many foods will overfill/waste themselves on your food bar. Here's a list of foods you'll find in or around a starting camp, try to eat the lowest food value item that you can get if you're going to overfill.

(Current public server settings adds a flat +2 to all food values, this is included in these numbers)

Raw:
Gooseberry: 5
Wild Onion: 6
Carrot: 7
Burdock Root: 9
Cactus fruit: 10

Cooked:
Carrot pie: 7 per slice (x4 slices)
Rabbit pie: 14 per slice (x4 slices)
Omelette: 19

The second crucial thing you can do is to be helpful. Children will almost always need a basket to be useful at this stage, since your food bar is small enough that not finding food within a minute of camp will kill you. However, sitting in camp doing nothing will contribute to killing the colony since you're producing nothing while being fed.

Ask what the adults need, they will usually give directions. Getting clay, soil, water, goose eggs, or just general foraging are all common activities you'll be asked to do. Clay, soil and eggs take empty baskets but you should bring a sharp rock in your basket when going foraging. Water collecting requires a bowl. In all cases, take the lowest pip food you can find in camp with you while you're figuring out the area. Starving to death when you find the clay pit out a bit farther than expected isn't a great feeling. If you're trying to collect water and can't put berries in your bowl, run out first with a bit of food to get the lay of the land.

• If you have a sharp rock and a basket, you will be able to survive indefinitely in the wild so long as you keep moving through untouched areas.
  
• Very few things actually decay on the ground. Berries/straw/reeds are the only ones that you can harvest. Digging up roots for others to find if they're starving and missing a rock could save their life. Picking cactus fruits or eggs lets them start a regrowth cycle and increases the pip/min your colony is getting from the area, even if you just drop them immediately in view.

Since I wrote this guide 4 years ago, some things have changed although much is still the same. Most importantly food has become easier through these two mechanics. Although they existed in some sense back in 2018, it was different and much harder for new players to take advantage of (if memory serves correctly). But enough about the past, how do they work today?

Yum is a reward for eating unique food types. Each time you eat a new food you haven't eaten in that life, you get a Yum Bonus. These are burned at the same rate as food pips, but before your actual food bar ticks down.


Yum (yellow square): Says yum instead of meh if the food item hasn't yet been eaten this life. Meh foods give no penalty, but also no bonus. Since there's more foods available than in the past, eating anything other than yum foods is frowned upon unless you're in a very early stage of town growth.

Yum Multiplier (red square): The number of Yum Bonus your last yum item gave you. A little weird, when you eat yum you get that number +1 as your bonus.

Yum Bonus (blue square): The amount of yum bonus you currently have. You can get multiple yum bonuses added together without any issues, but once your actual food pips are full you can't eat any more until you've burned through your yum bonus.

Easy strategy as a child is to try to eat one of every crop type if your family has a good farm going. This can easily stack up a +5 or more yum bonus. Then next time you wander into the wild and eat a gooseberry for the first time you get 7 pips of hunger instead of 2 for the first one.

What about cravings?

For our purposes: Cravings are basically a super yum that instead of adding +1 to the yum multiplier, they add whatever they show. The harder to get, the more bonus you get. However as a new player cravings basically don't matter since we're not in the position to go out of our way to make a complex food. There is also some complexity about cravings being passed on through the generations, but alas that's for another guide

As a beginner it's easy to misuse resources or interrupt time critical processes like cooking/forging.

• When it comes to soil or clay, either ask what to do with it or let the adults handle what you bring back.
  
• Around town, never touch things around a kiln/cooking area unless specifically directed to.
  
• Never touch crops that are a full row unless the farmer says it's ok, you are probably destroying seed crop.
  
• Try to only ever harvest wild milkweed when it is fruiting, the debris can be harvested for seeds and the products of thread are important to an established colony.
  
• Don't try to stack wet bowls, it's a crafting recipe. No wet clay items can be stacked anyway.

This doesn't fit well into a bullet point, but it's important. The simplest thing to know is that berries, reeds, and straw will decay when left on the ground after several minutes. Baskets, clothes and backpacks will decay over the course of hours, which isn't overly important to us but worth noting. As mentioned earlier though, this means *everything* else doesn't decay. Certainly items like eggs/cactus fruit should be picked and dropped for someone else to find even if your hands are full since they'll never go bad and the resource can replenish.

Growth wise it gets a bit easier to mess things up. Taking an item from anything that regenerates or grows to other stages (wild berry bushes, ponds/wells) resets *all* the refill timers. Taking the last berry from a wild bush resets the regrowth timer for the next berry. Taking an egg from the goose pond resets the water refilling clock.

Yes that's right, eggs can stop it from raining.

Being born as an adult female is called being an Eve. Adam isn't really required in this world apparently. First things first, name your dynasty like the tutorial taught you by saying “I am” followed by whatever you'd like to name yourself. All children born from you and your descendants will carry your last name. You can even check how your family did here:

http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/server.php?action=front_page

(for steam users at this time, the way you access your personal family tree info is to take the Steam ID that you see on the main page by pressing view and attaching it to @steamgames.com as your email address)

As an beginner Eve you have a couple primary goals, but it's important we talk about the reality. Most Eves fail, even experienced ones. You as an inexperienced player won't be able to set the footholds for an optimal colony, not even close. The advice I'm going to give here is meant to teach you to find a relatively good starting area, early game food production, and how to raise a child. Your best bet at this stage of the game is to try and survive long enough to raise a child who is an experienced player and can take the reins over from what you start. Hopefully the lives you live as an Eve will help teach you how to be useful in other beginning colonies, and set you on the right foot to start learning the game from other players.

Now, back to our primary goals: You need to find a good place to live and find/farm enough food to raise the first generation of children. It's always true but especially as a new Eve, remember that children are... optional. If you try to raise the first child or two you're very likely to starve yourself and get nowhere. Don't be afraid to keep running after a child is born, we'll come back to child raising after picking a spot to live.

So what do we need nearby? Lets review what each biome looks like:


https://onehouronelife.gamepedia.com/Biomes


Cactus (Great permanently renewable wild food)
Camp should be founded on the border if at all possible

Maple or Poplar tree (making fire)
Juniper tree (making fire)
Milkweed plants (rope)
Fertile soil deposits (farming)

Flint deposit

Tule reeds (making baskets, adobe oven/kiln)
Clay deposits (bowls/plates, adobe oven/kiln)
Canada Goose Ponds (easy food for adults, water for farms)

Hand to mouth food supply is crucial at this stage of the game because your walking range will be limited with you raising children and your mobile youngsters having a limited foraging range. This situation will be made worse if your children are inexperienced and waste food pips. The biomes with the most foraged food are grasslands, prairies and deserts. Swamps/badlands/tundra all have no foraged food available and should be avoided if you're hunting a meal.

Note: Technically a desert and more than 1-2 goose ponds aren't "required", but they will be crucial in tipping the odds in your favour of actually surviving.

It's important we talk about hunger rates

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1544

This post, for our purposes, can be summed up as “You will burn roughly 1 pip of food per 5 seconds in all biomes except desert/tundra”. Tundra you burn 1 p/2.5s, in desert you burn 1p/10 seconds.

Borders of biomes average temperatures of tiles around, so living on the edge of the desert is extremely useful for reducing hunger rate of both babies and adults. Cactus are also a massive bonus due to optimally producing 10p/10 minutes compared to 5p/10 minutes of wild goose berry bushes. Goose berries can also have issues with regrowing due to the growth clock getting reset every pick, while cactuses start growing immediately after picking.

Worst case scenario that doesn't involve suicide is 1 pip/5s. You will need a minimum 120 pips of food for your first 10 minutes setting up a camp. A fresh wild gooseberry bush is 30 pips worth of food, so four of those would be a minimum. Hopefully while looking for your camp location you managed to make a basket from two reed bundles and brought a bit of food with you.

Note: You may have heard about the "Yum!" bonus. For each unique food item you eat, you get a bonus to your food meter displayed as a +# beside the food meter. For every unique food in the chain, it gets bigger. These are food pips, but they don't show on the normal bar and are used up first. Micromanaging this isn't a top priority but if you have some food options try to cycle through them rather than focusing on one for the couple extra pips worth of yum. The chain is broken as soon as you eat an item you've already eaten in that yum chain, and you'll need to start over.

Your first order of business is to get an Adobe Kiln running. Farming requires clay bowls for watering crops, a kiln is crucial for forging tools and Omelettes need to be served on plates because we're naked, not savages.

This will take a stone, three clay, and three reeds to make. Unfortunately reeds can't be carried in baskets, just keep that in mind when gathering them. Once your kiln is done, your next priority is to make a fire so you can light it.

https://onetech.info/238-Adobe-Kiln/tech-tree



You will need three tools for this, a stone hatchet to make kindling, a fire bow drill to start the fire crafting process and wooden tongs to fire things in the kiln. You will of course need a sharp stone around as a crafting tool.








The fire bow drill requires a straight branch, a curved branch, and 4 milkweed stalks to craft.

https://onetech.info/74-Fire-Bow-Drill/tech-tree

A stone hatchet requires a stone, a straight branch, and 4 milkweed stalks

https://onetech.info/71-Stone-Hatchet/tech-tree

All you'll need to gather for the tongs is a flint chip and a straight shaft

https://onetech.info/239-Wooden-Tongs/tech-tree


Now that we have the basics, planning your intended fire spot nearish to a leaf giving tree (poplar/maple) and a tinder giving tree (juniper) will make crafting a fire easier. They burn out fast though, so make sure you have your kiln loaded with kindling, and some wet bowls (rock+clay) and/or plates (rock+wet bowl) ready to be fired. Do not try to stack wet plates/bowls, but the fired product can be stacked.

The crafting tech tree gets clunky for this one. From start to finish you'll need these items on hand:

Long straight shaft, fire drill bow, leaf, juniper tinder, kindling.

Shaft + drill = ember shaft
Pick up embers with a leaf
Apply embers to juniper tinder to get burning tinder
Apply kindling to burning tinder to get a fire.

Now that we have a proper fire we can light our long straight shaft on the fire and get our kiln cooking. Firing wet clay items involves using the tongs on them first before putting them in the kiln (this process is instant, but you'll manage to fire about 3 items before the kiln goes out).

When the fire you lit for the kiln turns to embers, you can apply a flat rock to it. This allows you to cook goose eggs with your new fancy plate(s). Used when you're at the very bottom of your food bar, you should (assuming there's goose around) be able to stretch your food significantly further. The hot flat rock will last two minutes from the last time it was either cooked on or created, so you can keep it running quite a while by spacing out your egg cooking.

Make sure when you're cooking to get the egg onto a plate asap, it can burn which takes a skewer to scrape off.



Tell children not to eat the omelettes and instead suggest foraged food. Direct some children to bring eggs (or get them yourself) while others provide foraged food for everyone below adult age. Bowls for collecting berries efficiently are somewhat hard to come by, otherwise gooseberry bushes are probably best left as food sources for the child foragers running around. As much as possible try to get them to eat food outside camp before the bring home a basket full.

The community is split on omelettes in general. They are good targets for children to collect ingredients for and a well maintained flat rock can run indefinitely. If cared for properly ~10pips/10 minutes after reasonable wastage is a great wild food spawner. They are not a permanent food option though, the geese eventually fly off to ponds where tiny thieves don't steal their eggs. Omelettes are also prone to pip wasting, especially if a new player eats one on as a child.

With each omelette being worth 19 pips food (and assuming at this point your character has been alive long enough to get good use of that), we can definitely afford to raise children at this point if you haven't decided to start already. Each time you breast feed a child, you'll lose 1 pip worth of food, while the child regains its entire bar. Although you could just wait for the child to ask for food, frequently players will say “F” to indicate they are about to starve, it's usually better just to get a feel for when they need food. The first minute of their life you'll need to feed them once per 15 seconds, second year/minute once per 20 seconds, third once per 25 seconds in non-desert biomes.

What this means is that optimally at 1pip/5s hunger rate, you will burn 10 pips of hunger feeding a child and 36 pips of hunger yourself. That's a solid 3-4 omelettes depending how efficiently you feed yourself and your child. Don't forget you can give them a first name by saying “You are ____” when they are first born.

You can't realistically do much work outside the base while feeding children. Make sure to watch your food supplies, if a second child pops and you can't feed it, don't name it and keep track of your older one. Overdoing the children is an easy way that beginning Eve's starve. If your food supplies are limited, remember you do need girls to keep the camp running after you hit menopause/die. If you have few children or no girls, prioritize keeping a girl over a boy if required. Understanding your camp's population limits is a critical skill to learn long term.

Note: As soon as you hit menopause you lose the ability to breast feed children. Babies can be fed by anyone by using food on them if it's required. Alternatively, other fertile females can also breastfeed children if they're available.

As your children are approaching independence, make sure to tell them where important resources are and give them directions. Do you need soil or seeds for farming? Eggs for cooking or general foraging for food? Where is the closest swamp for reeds? Since you're locked to the base while raising any children you can afford, it's better to keep busy with resources they bring you rather than going out yourself. Guiding your children, especially if they're new, to start returning with resources at this stage is crucial to keeping things running. Make sure any girls born are told to avoid wildlife and try to be careful to stay safe since the next generation depends on them.

At this point it might seem like boys are worthless, but this isn't true. If you have no female children, and are being forced to pick between male and female due to food shortage you will definitely want to prefer a female or two to secure the genetic line.

However, once that is secure, having boys is perfectly fine because they are quite useful! Their primary benefit is being able to range far from base at all stages of life to bring in resources for the fertile women in camp to work with while they raise children. While they are not directly involved in raising children, the resources they bring in are very important in keeping the camp running and making sure there's actually food to produce more children.

Also, it's worth noting that men, where possible, should leave camp side work to willing women who might have nothing else to do otherwise. It's frustrating to have a man waste time in camp cooking while a mother stands by unable to be helpful other than feed her child as a result. That said, forging is often left to a man because the process is very time sensitive and the smith won't have as much free time to nurse as other home based activities.

The last thing we'll cover is farming. There is a vast amount of other content that is outside the scope of this guide, but as an Eve getting egg cooking and farms running is a great start to your personal learning and at least a mediocre start for your dynasty. There's also no point in doing any of this without a bowl, which is a mistake many beginners make and why we built a kiln first.

Step one: Soil

Fertile soil is, from a beginner's perspective, a finite resource. You can't get more soil from a spot without steel tools which is well outside the scope of this guide. We will need one of two tools to work the earth, and a basket to bring the soil to our camp.

https://onetech.info/139-Skewer/tech-tree

A skewer comes from a sapling if you have any around or

https://onetech.info/850-Stone-Hoe

A more durable, but harder to make stone hoe can be used. It needs 1 long shaft, a sharp rock, and 4 milkweed stalks to craft.

You can till a basket of soil dumped onto the ground directly, or if soil is scarce you can scoop out a bowl of fertile soil and till it twice instead (three bowls per pile). Obviously this trade off of tool durability vs soil efficiency depends on your particular starting spot. Each generation of plants will need a bowl of fertile soil to start producing again while tools can usually be remade a bit more easily.

Step two: Seeds

It's worth asking: What should our budding colony be growing at this point? The two basic crops are gooseberry bushes (gooseberry + flint to get the seeds) and carrots. Gooseberry bushes produce 30 pips over 10 minutes per tile, while carrots produce 28 pips over 4 minutes. Carrots may be faster at producing, but they come with a catch. They must be replanted, with every 5th tile needing to go to seed which takes after planting 9 minutes and requires that no one start eating it. Assuming you can keep the hungry newbies off the carrot fields, you can get a cycle going of one generation per 4.5 minutes or so. The other difference is that gooseberries don't need additional tool durability, while carrot rows need to be re-tilled. Optimal farming also means people are harvesting the fields immediately and re-soiling/watering immediately as well, so it's not realistic but every crop has that kind of inefficiency so the ratios are correct.

The general suggestion frequently seen is to plant a 4x4 of gooseberry bushes while planting a 5 tile row of carrots off to the side. Carrots are useful for early game food, and are also a very good pie filling once your colony moves into the next stage of development.

Step three: Crop generations

Preparing for the next generation of crops is as simple as applying a bowl of soil, and a bowl of water. Seed based crops will need some tool durability spent on prepping the ground and seeds added of course. There isn't really anything else to say on the topic.

As mentioned, this isn't an ideal start that experienced players would aim to make. Farms are limited by nearby soil and water supplies, neither of which last more than a couple generations if badly managed. How to make steel tools to extend resource lifespan hasn't been touched at all, and honestly it's far too complex to try for when you're still new.

But lets say you have time to spare, things are going well, what next?




Collecting as much wild spawning iron, clay, and kindling as is possible will form the foundation of future tool smithing.

A snared rabbit is required as well to make the bellows needed to run the forge, not to mention hunger reducing clothing and backpacks when you can start bringing in multiple.

https://onetech.info/160-Snare/tech-tree

Tools serve as a foundation for extending resource life of soil/water, but compost is the next step beyond that and makes soil entirely renewable. Compost requires tamed sheep, gooseberries and carrots. To start domestication, you'll need a rope and bow-and-arrow.

https://onetech.info/152-Bow-and-Arrow/tech-tree

That however is as far you should really expect to complete as a beginner, certainly all a 60yo Eve will manage.

It's weird but appropriate we're heading back to the tutorial at this stage of the guide. Now that you've gotten a handle on the base mechanics of the game, experienced sorrow and joy, the tutorial has a good area to hone your skills at the end. Just in case you haven't noticed, when you're being reborn (not your first life on login) there's an option to re-run the tutorial in the top right of the rebirth screen.

Now, after the torch area of the tutorial, you can head south instead of killing yourself on snakes. It leads to a very useful area that lets you practice making fires, cooking, and gives the necessary resources to craft steel tools. If you craft a steel axe and shovel, you can free yourself to go experiment in a real world environment, so it's a great place to learn higher skills!

It's also time we revist the "/" crafting help system. At first it's far too confusing to use, you may even have forgotten about it. Whenever you hold an item, it will tell you the recipes that item can be used in on and lets you tab to cycle between items. For basic things like a sharp rock, this won't help much for sure. However, if you remember at least some of the starting ingredients for a recipe typing something like "/stone hatchet" will help remind you what steps you need between your sharp stone and a hatchet. It's a neat tool at this stage of development, since you need your feet wet with the game to make full use.

Make full use of the "/" system and the crafting website and hone those skills!

All images were taken as screenshots and uploaded to steam from either the wiki, the family tree page, or the wonderful ontech crafting guide. By all means, credit goes entirely to them, and you should check into all three resources!

http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/server.php?action=front_page

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/index.php

https://onehouronelife.gamepedia.com/One_Hour_One_Life_Wiki

https://onetech.info/

https://onehouronelife.gamepedia.com/Smithing

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2858


Some players use zoom mods to get a better view of the landscape. This is allowed, but the dev has openly come out saying he doesn't like it from an artistic/design standpoint. It's unlikely to ever see official integration as a result.

2022: The most common/popular client mod is the hetuw client. Link below.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5923