

However, playing as a male character may be easier due to a lower chance of causing another player's death. The importance of women in the survival of a tribe often leads to male children being disfavored if there is a lack of food. Players have an equal chance of spawning either as a man or as a woman, which the only difference being that women alone can birth new players when they are between the ages of 14 and 39. Crafting is necessary as the food sources available without it are limited. The process of crafting involves clicking an object to pick it up, then clicking on another object in an effort to combine them. One Hour One Life has over 3000 human-makeable objects, which may be produced through crafting. One Hour One Life is a permadeath game, meaning that a player restarts from nothing after dying. Players die of old age upon becoming 60 years old, but can also be killed by animals, other players, or their food bar being emptied. Each player has a food bar, whose size varies with age, that fills until full adulthood (17/18) and depletes over time when a player hits 40 years old. For their first three years, players are unable to interact with objects and rely entirely on other players to feed them, while initially only being able to speak one letter at a time. Each minute played represents one year in the life of the player's character. Players spawn randomly into the world either as a child, with another player as mother, or as a young adult, an Eve, if the number of babies is already too high. To the right are two babies, who must be cared for by others. Rohrer has stressed the continued development of the game until at least 2020.

The game has had a positive reception, with critics comparing the game favorably to Don't Starve and praising its social aspects. The main ideas influencing the game's design are player cooperation, sustainability and the prospect of developing a civilization. It is almost exactly the same as the PC version, other than slightly different graphics and a different creator. Separate from the servers hosted by Rohrer, an independently developed, unofficial fork of the game created by Dual Decade exists for iOS and Android devices, titled You Are Hope.

Originally available only on the website, it was later released on Steam in November 2018. The game's source code and assets are placed into the public domain, and are freely available on GitHub, with accounts being sold for access to the primary servers hosting the game. They must gather and grow food, craft tools and build societies in order to survive. Each player lives for, at most, 60 minutes in a large, persistent world, with each minute representing a year of life. One Hour One Life is a 2018 survival massively multiplayer online game developed and published by Jason Rohrer.
