One Hour One Life — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Update #156 | 2026-05-10 | Several big changes in the face of griefing and bot accounts. First, human-caused wounds (from knives and arrows) can no longer be healed. There are several vestigial systems in the game around killing, left over from previous solution attempts. The original idea was that killing would always be necessary in this game, because how else are you going to deal with people who are bothering you and just won't stop? The hope was that the good guys would outnumber the bad guys. But the insta-killing in very early versions of the game was still too abrupt, so healing was added, which further helped the good majority overcome the bad minority---there |
| Weekly Update #155 | 2025-11-12 | All logged bugs and issues have been fixed. I first started working on this game more than 10 years ago. My first commit, on May 28, 2015, bears the message, "Got basic client skeleton in place. It compiles, runs, pauses, and quits without crashing." No crashing! Sounds like I was off to a good start. 146,000 lines of code and over 3.5 million in-game player hours later, here we are. With something like 25 servers coordinating behind the scenes to keep things running, One Hour One Life is a massive, sprawling city of a solo engineering project. With so many moving parts, it's a miracle that this house of cards works at all, but somehow, it do |
| Last Hunt | 2025-10-31 | Last he rode four years ago One more haunt before the snow Spun in long lost tales of old Secret hidden ounce of gold Find it and it's yours to keep Sunrise he'll forever sleep |
| Weekly Update #154 | 2025-01-14 | People have been asking for some kind of censorship around bad words in speech for a long time. I don't want to censor things globally, and even if I did, it would be a never-ending arms race as people figured out cl evv er ways to bbbb y pass my f il ter s. Since everyone would be seeing the same filters, it would be easy for trolls to test them repeatedly to see what tricks can allow words to slip through. For those people who are tired of seeing bad words in-game, I'm instead putting the power into your hands. You each have your own personal word filter now, which you can populate as you please. And since no one can see the results of your |
| Weekly Update #153 | 2024-05-11 | Launch pads must now be built in populated areas, with coordinates discovered from the remote orbital alignment location. This brings rocket-building home, returning it to to community endeavor that it was in the beginning, while still limiting rocket launches to once every five hours. There have also been many fixes and improvements to the Editor, based on feedback from the Another Planet content team. |
| Weekly Update #152 | 2024-04-26 | All pieces are in place now for the One Hour One Life end game. You can build a rocket inside OHOL. And coming full circle, you can listen to Tom Bailey's amazing music when you do. You can ride that rocket to Another Planet, which gives you a Steam Key to let you into the beta test of this exclusive new, unreleased game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2787060/Another_Hour_Another_Planet/ After gaining access to Another Planet, you can specify your own Github account name, and you can also vote for a Content Leader using their Github name. The Content Leader has full Push access to the AnotherPlanetData Git repository, and the ability to |
| Weekly Update #151 | 2024-04-21 | All of the remaining infrastructure for Another Hour Another Planet is in place now. It is now possible to ride the rocket inside One Hour One Life, leave the planet, and gain access to Another Hour Another Planet via a Steam Key and an off-Steam download link. And once you're playing on Another Planet, it's also now possible for you to specify your GitHub account name, and to vote for the current Content Leader. The current Leader is automatically granted Push access to the anotherPlanet data repository on GitHub, and that access is removed whenever they leave office and are replaced by someone else. All of this stuff has been tested on my e |
| Weekly Update #150 | 2024-03-15 | I've been working on the infrastructure for the Another Hour Another Planet endgame, and the various pieces are coming together. There are now two AHAP servers running, which you can see here: http://onehouronelife.com/ahapReflector/server.php?action=report These are live and playable with bare-bones placeholder content, which is being managed here: https://github.com/jasonrohrer/AnotherPlanetData Eventually, the elected Content Leader will be able to edit and add to the content in this repository, and then make it live using this update trigger interface: http://onehouronelife.com/ahapUpdateGate The general idea is that the community will ma |
| Weekly Update #149 | 2024-02-16 | Content made with the Editor now tracks authorship using a hash of your account's email address or Steam ID. When you export content as OXZ files to share with others, your authorship hash goes with your content. Thus, over time, we can keep track of the portion of the content that each person contributes. This will be important in connection to the plan for Another Hour Another Planet, which I will explain here. Another Hour Another Planet will be a separate game, released for real on Steam. First of all, how will people gain access to Another Planet? For the time being, there will be a hard-to-build object inside One Hour One Life which req |
| Weekly Update #148 | 2024-02-03 | We recently received some sad news. Methman, a friendly pillar of our community and Discord moderator, died late last fall. The One Hour One Life community has been remembering him in various ways this week. His primary online handle was MaDc0w, and I just recently learned where the "Methman" nickname in the OHOL community came from. Mofobert designed an "OHOL Portrait" of MaDc0w using the Editor, and MaDc0w loved this hilarious image so much that he adopted it as his Discord icon. MaDc0w thought that this wacky OHOL character with the red cape looked like he was high on meth, so the name Methman was born. Here is a direct quote from the emai |
| Weekly Update #147 | 2024-01-17 | A small mid-week update this week. You can now pile baskets of soil, just like you can with baskets of charcoal. There's also been a gotcha fixed with worm farming: taking the last worm from the wormy soil pile no longer permanently ends the worm farm, since you can put the worm right back in if you've removed it by mistake. I also spent a good chunk of time this week ironing out the details of AHAP and starting to implement it. You'll hear more about this soon. Tomorrow, I'm heading out to Utah for the premier of the documentary Eternal You at Sundance, which is in part about Project December, my AI side-project. More details here: https://f |
| Weekly Update #146 | 2024-01-17 | NOTE: this update announcement was posted last week as a time limited contest by accident, which limited its visibility. This is a repost. The original announcement date was Saturday, January 13, 2024. A bunch of improvements to the Editor this week. First of all, along with loading mods, which are temporary, the Editor can now import content permanently. You can either replace objects content (similar to how mods are loaded, but permanently) or add entirely new objects. To import, drop an OXZ file into the new import_add or import_replace folder. The idea here is that people who are working together on new content can easily share their work |
| Weekly Update #145 | 2023-12-24 | Steam Workshop support is live. You can find it here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/595690/workshop/ Instructions for posting mods to Steam Workshop can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3121137673 And I'm holding a contest for the best mods, as voted by the community, between now and New Year's Day. Post your mods to Workshop between now and then. The mods with the most subscribers at or around Noon EST (New York City Time) on New Year's Day win. There will be ten winners. Each person can only win one prize, even if they have more than one highly-subscribed mod. Prizes are as follows: 1st place: $500 2nd |
| Weekly Update #144 | 2023-12-16 | The game client has mod support. Mods can completely overhaul the look, animation, or sounds of any object in the game. To install a mod, simply drop an .oxz file into your mods folder. Multiple mods can be installed together by putting multiple files in there (but if they overlap in terms of which objects they change, one of the mods will override the other according to some kind of mysterious filesystem ordering). When you launch the game client again, your mods will be loaded. Note that they don't change the game content permanently. Simply remove a mod file from the mods folder and re-launch the game client---the game will go back to norm |
| Weekly Update #143 | 2023-12-01 | The four different groups of people in the game have had different specialties for a while. Three of the groups have biome specialties, making them the experts who can obtain resources from the jungle, the desert, or the arctic. The forth group had no specialty biome to call their own, so they became the language experts---the one group that could talk to all the other groups with no language barrier. The idea was that they could serve as a kind of trading group, traveling from area to area in the world and exchanging specialty resources. But in the harsh survival reality of the game, this fourth group, the language experts, were always seen |
| Weekly Update #142 | 2023-11-23 | A small update, just in time for Thanksgiving. Eating a drumstick from a plate no longer causes the leg bone to vanish. This might seem trivial, except that a full set of turkey bones are needed to make turkey broth. People ended up with a bunch of useless partial sets of bones that piled up. You can now reclaim rope from the long shaft, along with being able to reclaim it from other wooden shafts. This was a small oversight that has been lurking in the game content for years now. And the biggest change this week: what happens when you type /DIE as a baby (succumbing to SIDS). Before, the server would remember only your previous SIDS mother, |
| Weekly Update #141 | 2023-11-03 | More fixes this week, based on some newly reported issues. A possible exploit that would allow a daisy-chain of carts to be used as an impenetrable wall has been fixed. Trash pit behavior has been improved to avoid nuisance trashing of some items, and accept some other waste items. Large animal bones now decay faster. Defaced graves are no longer permanent (and defaced baby graves decay after two minutes, just like regular baby graves). Stone walls with shelves can become ancient. And you can FINALLY place a drumstick down on a plate. |
| Weekly Update #140 | 2023-10-28 | It might be more than just your imagination. |
| Weekly Update #139 | 2023-10-20 | Thanks to everyone who helped by posting One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety bugs and issues over the life of this game. I'm sure there will be more things discovered in the future, but for now, I've finally made it to the end of a very long list. While that seems like a lot of bugs and issues, it helps to keep the complexity of this game in perspective. There are 2400 hand-drawn sprites, which are assembled into 4339 unique objects. And those objects interact with each other through 5106 transitions. To put it a different way, this is a game with 4000+ pieces and 5000+ rules. Obviously, there are lots of opportunities for little things to |
| Weekly Update #138 | 2023-10-13 | Lots of fixes this week, still pushing through the list of user-reported issues. You can now carry out most fermentation steps on top of the food preparation tables, and the full fermentation crocks are (slowly) moveable. There's a way to farm worms without generating loads of excess soil, and worms themselves speed up the composting process. A bunch of different sub-mechanisms from the machine shop can now be disassembled. Hand carts no longer decay. You can detach carts from a hitched riding horse, so the carts are no longer stuck attached to a horse. |