You have all confused me as to the nature of your problems, as nobody has communicated in any way what has occured on these forums. If something is failing, it is likely due to lack of communication. You MUST communicate, and communicate in a verbose manner on long-term goals and how to achieve them. Myself and our initial party founded this village and got it on its feet, it is up to the villagers to make it prosperous. Perhaps there is a lack of leadership. Perhaps there is a lack of coordination. People had mentioned wanting things and having goals, but none of this was ever prioritized or given timeframes. Without proper planning and communication, there can be no village, for it is the communication between the villages that makes it a village.
Now, I understand that there may be (have been) some misconceptions about the village. Some think it was supposed to become a trading village. Others, an isolated society. Yet more, a co-op or loosely associated group set forth to protect one another within common walls while working toward individual goals. These things were never clairified. our dead leader, Gh0stwolf, never asserted himself in any lasting manner beyond taking the initiative to gather together people and create the village, but without heed to their preconceptions and expectations, the village was doomed to failure form the start. Let's face it, people stop playing or become less active. To fix this, people can pick up multiple roles. Nobody said that the smithy had to be the lumberjack, the miner, and the steelsmith. Nobody said we could only have one cook or tree farmer. Let me be blunt: This village had no rules beyond "Don't fuck one another" and this is a very broad statement. Some people just wanted to use the village for metal and protection, then use the acquired goods to live their lives as essentially hermits within the walls or as hunter/gatherers with a save haven to return to. This village was not united, and it never has been. There has been no solid leadership or goal creation. There were just individual needs and wants, and people who wanted to fulfill them.
Hindsight is always 20/20, take a few weeks off and you will see the error of the current (previous) structure. And by structure, I refer to the lack thereof.
For posterity, A village timeline, from my perspective:
Day 1: Kipper and Julie are the first people ysh and I see, they are euros who were able to be on before we were, and along with saca had already built 3 houses. Ysh and I quickly scamble to grind LP and create two small plots of our own, we stay online until late that night until when ysh has yeomanry and can claim our plots. I have at this point bought the majority of the basic skills needed to subsist on my own.
Day 2-5: These are the first days where everyone is onlien simultaneously at various times. Kipper and Julie are on earliest, then leave for 10 hours, and come on again. I believe this was when they slept. Ysh and I are online that entire time, still training skills. Ysh set on getting his farming up to plant the WWW that was drying, and myself set on increasing exploration to find more Wild Windsown Weed. I wished we had carrots. Our initial plot has grown to the size of the peninsula, and a leatherworking operation has run for a load of leather, and we have backpacks. Nobody knows to or is willing to hunt. The late arrivals are still building houses.
Week 2: The peninsula is completely exhaused of wood, used for houses and cabinets. People are now grinding buckets, and some of the earliest arrivals have their personal beliefs in order, including myself. Jozan has realized that all we have to cook is meat (finally) and that we won't have a sausage grinder for awhile, and his cooking is useless until ysh gets significantly more wheat of higher quality. Due to this, he decided to go hunting with 6 marksman and a bow he found. I do not know how well this goes. Stenwulf, another personal friend, joins the village. He sets about grinding wicker breadbaskets, and then buckets for LP, on another nearby shore. I am happy that Ysh has carrots, but he "culled" the Q1 carrots to be used for some purpose later, instead of planted. Caring more about quantity instead of quality at this point (my exploration was 25+ and my perception still 10), i create 2 more fields for Ysh and replant all the carrots in it for him. He is confused, but accepts it and simply harvests more carrots. I am always full on carrots now. The other villagers are grinding LP for reasons unknown to me, they have all the skills they need for now, and they don't need high crafting skills for months of play, especially since farming quality softcap is broken and always on. Saca has died twice already. We have things stolen from our unclaimed plots daily. People complain but do nothing. Nobody works on the leatherworking, despite the fact that we will need a huge store when we find a mine. Late in the week, my first character dies to a boar I attempt to slay with a sling from a boat. it kills me in 1 hit while I am in the boat, I assume this is a glitch as it would normally have to destroy the boat first. I found high quality water. I respawn immediately, gather my belongings from my corpse, and grind my exploration and survival back up to where they were before. This takes a day of grinding, getting back the perception (30+) takes 3 days of carrots, aided slightly by occasional low-q carrot cakes which are now made. While I do this, Wiserain finds an iron mine, saca determines the new site for our village (on a clay and soil node), which also happens to be on a tin mine we discover the next day. The location is perfect, and the iron mine location is conveniently close to both our current and new locations. I set up metalworking shop in the new village after we build a palisade around a huge tract of land.
Week 3: The iron mine is still unbuilt. And so is the village claim. Ysh is fed up with waiting and grinds out 90 unarmed and 2 days and punches a few deer to death, and myself, him, and Stenwulf form Bowerstone. Most of the villages seem clueless as to the move still, and some have stopped logging on. Kipper and Julie have quit the village, Julie feels she has been mistreated in some way or that our timezones do not match well enough, I am not sure. Saca has yet to provide direction on what should be done next. I get tired of waiting for metal. Jozan starts a palisade around the iron mine which I finish the next day. I also craft the remaining rope and leather the mine shaft needs to be complete. I enter the mine, and carefully mine out every other tile, giving me an inventory of iron ore (And 2 crates). I sue a barrel of the high-Q water as drinking water in the mine. I boat back to the village with my ore and craft it into bars. People start asking for metal tools. I must deny their requests, first I need a pickaxe, and then nuggets to use for supports, which are ridiculously tiny at this point. My second load of ore I make into wrought iron and make a sausage maker for jozan, this appeases him, and he cooks even less than before. All he does is hunt boars. Ysh begins to move his farm down from the old plot, this takes 3 days due to the size. My third and fourth loads or ore are made into wrought which I put into steel crucibles, this would both later become steel which i crafted into soldier's swords for the first statues. At this point, my highest priority is the expansion of the village claim to protect all of our stuff, especially the tin mine entrance, ysh's farm, and the gate. Everyone uses my metal storage house as general storage. I do not mind so much, but I am suspicious of metal or leather going missing, they are our most valuable commodities. Some time during this week somene attempts to break our wall, probably to people we walled into the tin mine area, Stenwulf uses his amazing vandalism skills to remove it and all nearby non-friendly hearthfires. Russians log on inside the walls (random wilderness spawn because the entire area is not claimed) and steal a bear cape. Ysh lets him have the benefit of the doubt, but the moment he leave the walls he puts it on. Ysh could have punch the new character to death, but it would not have gotten us anything, and by now Jozan occasionally brings back a bear. At some point, I place an initial cornerpost for a brick wall in the south-west corner of the palisade, as per the written-picture plan, and fill it with 200 bricks, most of which I hauled in from a nearby low-q clay node up the river. We never have enough cooked food, by lots of raw meat and wheat. Stenwulf elects to become backup chef, since Jozan is practically a dedicated hunter. This solves any food problem we had, and once again I am always full when I am in the village. Demiwar can only be online once every 4 days or so, something about being a soldier stationed in the middle east, and I understand that, but he is slow moving down and I need more trees. I tell Ysh to use this treeplanter's pot I made and start making us trees since he is full nature. He complies. Saca dies a third time to murderers sailing by while he was AFK in a boat. Wiserain dies to a bear outside the front gate. It is hilarious.
Week 4: I begin to fill backlogs of orders for metal tools, my bar income has exceeded how fast the steel crucibles use the wrought. Another successful load of steel is harvested, and i double the amount of steel crucibles to counter my pickaxe-enhanced income. I make: A metal plow for Ysh, a metal scythe for Ysh, a frying pan for jozan, a second pickaxe for chipping stone, a higher-quality smithy's hammer, other small tools, and a metal cauldron for general usage. Nobody cares about getting a teleport up at the mine. Ysh has finished making his farm. Jozan has make a cooking area by the well I made in the center of the mudflat. Bricks are our most scared item, everyone needs them, but I have forbid anybody from getting clay from our node to make them with. We need that clay to get back to it's Q52-goodness, and running it dry will not help. I am beginning to dislike my 3 jobs. I make 3 cabinets of charcoal and in 3 hours half of it is gone from the steal and metal. The is a huge need for it, and we are out of trees within the walls. I have taken it upon myself to build a village claim up at the mine. I bring up all the materials and build it, I'm missing 1 deer antler. A few days later, saca gets me one more. I form the village all on my own, build a teleporter, and run that village's authority into the ground so all of us in the main village can actually use the iron mine. After this I rejoin the main village. Initially, we got the steel to complete frequently, as Jozan was able to log on early in the morning and refuel the crucibles. This does not happen any more, and I am tired of the steel not completing. I manage to get enough to complete the bottom two rows of states and cover the gate, there is still 3 rows of statues and 1 row of banners to build. At some point this week, Mungoo (who has died once and has an alt which seems to do nothing) has built a personal plot, which is fine, but then used lots of leather, bone glue, and rope to build an initial cornerpost for a palisade around it. I facepalm and try to ignore it. People seem to be waiting for some critical event to do something, but I am unsure as to what. I start construction on a battering ram by the tin mine and place in every material except for the wood, since I must go outside the base for it. Nobody finishes it.
Week 5: Lots of new people are joining the village now that we have a ready supply of metal. People have said on the forum that they want swords. I make 3 swords and put them in my tool cabinet and post saying that anybody may use them. I really don't want to know who uses them or why, nobody has both melee combat and unarmed up, and I'm confident that having them will just lead to someone's overconfident death. My smithing is as high as it needs to go for a few weeks, as the quality of my bars cannot go up until we have fully grown high-quality trees, so I train unarmed to 50 with my excess LP and punch foxes whenever I see them while boating, after an hour of practicing on ants. I am definitely beginning to burn out, and nobody is picking up the slack. Ysh makes an alt to mine stone for LP on the day the support radius is increased, but the next day mining LP is nerfed. This saddens me. Everybody seems confused on what needs to be done. Jozan keeps hunting and ocasionally cooks. Stenwulf logs on sometimes just to check progress. Ysh logs on to farm his crops each day and build a banner. Since giving lawspeaker over to Saca, I have yet to build another statue, and the steel has never successfully completed a cycle since then. Still, nobody has finished the battering ram. This confuses me, as most people would check a signpost on paved tile right next to the wall and see what it is. I guess nobody cares.Two of the new people seems especially zealous in their industriousness. I believe their names were Konda and.... some guy who knew him personally. They built another brick wall outside the palisade and completed one side of it. I facepalm very hard, as it is unclaimed, and an extra row of statues/banners would be needed to cover it, increasing the daily authority loss by a disproportionately huge sum for the amount of area gained, and the bricks that went into the other cornerpost are wasted. Still no new steel has been made, though the crucibles are on most of the time, nobody can make enough charcoal continuously, nobody has good carpentry, nobody can log on in time anymore. And so here the village lies, half claimed and organizationally derelict, and I can't take it. I am burnt out from the effort and repetitive tasks, and the utter lack of direction is killing me. My goal had been to be part of a village the relied on one another, where each part was dependable or had backups, everyone knew they could rely on one another, and eventually, just maybe, become a minor trading hub in the region. This hope died as I effectively became a mine-hermit who gave all his stuff away for food. My metal storage house never got everyone's stuff taken out of it. People just lived communally while simultaneously claiming ownership of individual objects. Situations of unhappiness arose amongst villagers, but nobody mediated to resolve them. People did what people did with whatever resources they found in the camp. it was a type of controlled anarchy where those who didn't want to step on the toes of others became the providers of those who did.
Week 6: I was not around for week 6. In fact, I was only slightly aware of week 5. From what I've gathered, one of the newbros converted the anarchy into an iron fist dictatorship, which is to be expected, without established government, some order of control must be applied to the chaos eventually. Dissatisfied with this, another newbro wrecked the village, historically, this is also what happens. I've never rescinded my position as councilman. It is perfectly possible that this village will be rebuilt in the future, but for now, I am still burnt out from the early days of repetitive tasks and labor, and the latter days of wastefulness and facepalms. I will beat Mass Effect 2, and I will play EVE Online and take the SATs for now. The future, though, the future is endless, as one time reaches its end, another becomes a beginning. Like a phoenix, from the ashes rise a new life, reborn in glorious fire, tested and true. The end is nigh my brethren, so let us look towards what the future may hold.
-Councilman Levy
Ense et aratro, Esto perpetua.
It is a sad and happy story, full of pain and joyfulness.
