Kids these days! Why, when I was working on those skills... I, um. Grumbled, too.

Here's a thing while we don't have those fancy new-fangled things:
As long as you don't exit Maiko's while cooking, you don't have to worry about Newdays. It's just like being in a dwelling until you leave said dwelling, look at someone's bio, or take a sleeping space.
So I don't think you'll have to keep enlisting your family members, as long as you keep your req with you.

That's all well and good, but that's probably little consolation. I remember wondering why I liked this game while I grinder cooking, carcass-cleaning, and the insults for a couple hours. I also spent more than an hour purchasing nicotine patches this one time... Please, we need input text boxes for numbers, or at least x10 buttons.

It does get a little repetitive, and time spent is time spent even if it's not on a NewDay.

But, if we're spending hours of realtime pressing buttons on the Island, I feel like it's a sign that we're taking it a tad too seriously. A Bottle of Water is right--perhaps we ought to step outside, take a break, and resume later knowing that we haven't wasted any stam by passing a NewDay. Yesno?

That said, I do like the text input box idea.

If I could change one small thing on The Island...
I would put a link direct from the jungles to the world map.
What with all the breached outposts kicking around, it's becoming a bit of a joke. Although I guess you can justify it as the fight to the train station...

I think being attacked while going from the Jungle to the World Map is the entire point, as much as I'd love a Travel button from the Jungles as well.

When an outpost is going down, can one of the last things that stays afloat, along with Sheila's and eBoy's, be the Comms Tent? It'd make sense that people (like me) would be rushing into the tent to frantically alert the other cities that a city needs assistance.

The one thing I would do is during a breach e-boys would be like half off so you could spend your req on grenades and other items you may need.

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Once you understand the nature of the human mind you leave nothing to chance.

But Cenobite. If everybody needed your stuff; you would never sell them half-off. Would you? In normal wartime. People get lucky if salesmen only sell necessary goods at DOUBLE price.

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There are two secrets to success. The second one is to never reveal all your secrets.

If I could change one thing on the Island, it would be to have some game-provided way of knowing which outposts are breached.

Word of mouth is all right when breaches are rare. Not very reliable, guaranteed to get out of date fast, but it sort-of works. And walking into a breach you don't know is there is tolerable, I guess, when it happens once in a long, long time. But when it gets to the point that some outposts are breached more often than they are available...! well, I'd really like it if, for instance, you could get a list of current breaches, together with the most recent estimate of monster count in each, in the comms tent.

And yes, some people would use that list to stay away. So? What happens now is they travel all the way to the outpost they want to be in, they walk in, are waylaid by more monsters than they're ready to handle, and of course retreat at the first opportunity, with perhaps a side trip to the failboat first. Then they have to reformulate their plans.

That's not going to reduce the monster count by more than a handful. Breaches have to be dealt with by willing fighters. A comms tent list would allow those who are in a position to fight in a breach, to find out where their talents can best be used.

As for, why the comms tent? Well, it doesn't have to be. It makes game-sense to put it there, but if it would be easier to put it in the council offices, or to make a whole new link, that would be perfectly fine, too.

(It would also be good to be able to see threat levels in unbreached outposts. That would be lagniappe.)

I heartily second this having just had my plans fuct up landing in the middle of two breaches at L1 and facing foes at L17. I love breaches but only when I'm ready for them...

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It's not an optical illusion. It just looks like one.

I do believe I saw something to this extent coded on Github. If memory serves me right it was Cousjava that made a module to this effect.

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http://maniak.cu.cc/

I have. Its up there, on GitHub, in my master branch, with a pull request on it for CMJ to pull it into the proper game. Its up to him. If he doesn't like that format, I can send in the code any way he wants. Gives you a approximate number of how many monsters there are around your outpost, and where's worst off. The module consists of a few alterations to counciloffices, so they they are actually useful, after you have done Mr Stern's quest. You can find it at https://github.com/Cousjava/Improbable-Island

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A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a trombone; what else does a man need to be happy?

Does that identify breaches? I skimmed the code, didn't see it, but maybe I missed something. (If we want to talk code, though, p'raps we ought to do it on the Labs forum.)

One thing I noticed recently is the increasing number of people buying more than one plot on a square.
While owning more than one dwelling isn't a bad thing, owning more than one in the immediate vicinity is not necessary. They could easily branch off the same room and everything else would be the same.

So I was thinking that there could be some tweaking of the system, only allowing one plot per person per map-square.
What do you think?

I think that some people do this so that they can own the entire square. There's still plenty of space for everyone, so it doesn't seem that much of a problem to me.

We have a problem when people buy up land and don't develop it. I'm pondering a land tax.

I think Sonny has a very valid point. Have a look at the Improbable Island Land Registry. A lot of the fully-owned squares by one person are either just Empty Plots or One Room Dwellings. Often without progress. This is basically dead real estate, sometimes in prime locations. Examples of this include 15:25, one click NE of Pleasantville and 12:12, one click NW of Improbable Central. Not to mention the beach-front far west of NewHome. A lot of this is a darned waste of space. In my opinion, it should be possible that if a plot of land is unbuilt or undeveloped for a long time it should go back onto the market. What's the point when one player has 16 plots, with only 1 with an actual dwelling on it.

If there's some valid reason I'm missing, I'd love to hear it. But, like Sonny says, there is no apparent necessity.

Yes, I have 2 plots on one square. Yes, I am aware of the irony. Yes, I have a valid reason.

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http://maniak.cu.cc/

There's still plenty of space for everyone for now.

Just like how 640k was pretty much all the memory anybody would need, or IPv4 was large enough when then made it.

How many potential plots exist? I can't find the thread where Buddleia made the spreadsheet anymore.

I think the most elegant solution to a future space-shortage would be to have an increasing price to put a plot down on an already-occupied square but to make the plots per square unlimited. That way, it discourages but does not stop people from stacking a huge amount of dwellings near cities, and still leaves it relatively cheap to fan out and make dwellings on different squares.

But you're right that it's not a problem right now and could be fixed WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down the road when this game is an AAA Title game with an explosion of players.

There are, methinks, many problems that are more in need of a solution than that one. And this doesn't strike me as something best handled by automated code. Too many variables, too many quite different reasons for situations that look quite similar.

You do have moderators...