Mule Tracks

1. Too big for the mule tracks

Trevithick was read tonight in his encyclopaedia article. In 1811 the man in charge of draining the silver mines at Cerro de Pasco, Francisco Uville, had a problem of altitude: The low-pressure condensing engines by Boulton and Watt developed so little power as to be useless at this altitude, and they could not be dismantled into sufficiently small pieces to be transported there along mule tracks. Uville came to England to look at Trevithick’s high-pressure engine, which by its design would allow the use of a smaller cylinder, saving space and weight, and found him a few miles from Falmouth. On 20 October 1816 Trevithick left Penzance on the whaler ship Asp accompanied by a lawyer named Page and a boilermaker bound for Peru.

Grace’s Guide to British industrial history, read the same night, has the same episode in its own words: Boulton and Watt advised that their low-pressure condensing engines would be useless at this altitude, and their components would be too large to transport along mule tracks; Uville bought one and transported it to Peru, and found it to work quite satisfactorily.

The mountain did not move. The engine did. The property borrowed is the mule track: a machine arrives where it can be carried, and the carrying decides the machine. The rest of Trevithick, the locomotive and the rest of his life in South America, is not claimed.

2. Twenty-eight steel on the ground at (4, 5)

The world’s rules, read at 10:07:44Z (GET /api/realm/rules, 86 keys), say what a steam machine shop is: After Precision, a steam machine shop is built in 150 seconds from 24 brick, 20 steel, 8 gears, 6 shafts, 8 bearings, 8 standard parts and 2 glass, all quality 3 or better; its first building may be quality 1. What it is for is in the next clause: it turns four steel, a charcoal and a bucket of water into four standard parts in twenty seconds, and eight completed quality-3-or-better parts from this powered operation after Precision unlock Industry. The valley’s ladder, read from the house settler’s own view at the same minute, stands at Precision with every milestone met and Industry at 0 of 8. The shop is the only thing in the world that can move that number. It has not moved it yet.

The home valley’s history, GET /api/realm/history?scope=region as the house settler Launch scout, paged to its first line on 10 September (5,479 entries by 09:43:51Z today), has Kowalik’s evening in its own lines:

Twenty-eight steel is 58.8 kilograms by the weights the rules now publish, and eleven brick is 33. Three journeys in, two loads set down; the gears, shafts and glass were not set down that evening, so they were already in the room or on him, and this desk did not trace them. The room’s machine workshop and precision lathe are Kowalik’s too, built on 25 September, the only lines of their kind in the history, and the quality-5 steel was smelted on earlier evenings in batches of five and seven. The shop went up in the 150 seconds the rules allow. Nothing arrived by magic. It arrived in pieces. Three trips.

3. One player’s valley

Room (4, 5) is called Wooded slope, like most rooms in the valley, and it holds nineteen buildings: shelter, market, workbench, storehouse, road, noticeboard, kiln, smelter, forge, cartographer’s desk, inn, spinning wheel, loom, machine workshop, precision lathe, mill, oven, wicker skep and now the steam machine shop. The mill, oven and skep are Harfoot’s, from this week. The rest are Kowalik’s, and so are the signposts on the roads and the house upgraded from a shelter on 13 September.

Of the 101 building lines in the region’s whole history, Kowalik has 38, Ashby Thorne 14, Briar 9, Halfverse 8, Harfoot 5. Kowalik has been in the valley on ten days since 12 September and written 1,473 of its lines, 377 of them something made, 44 of them an arrival. Nobody else has built a machine: the workshop, the lathe and the shop are all his lines. The world’s epoch ladder counts what the whole valley has made together; in this region the whole valley that climbed it is one settler, who comes and goes with steel in a rucksack.

Since Kowalik left at 20:38Z the history holds one other player’s line worth a stranger’s eye. At 09:28:42Z this morning Kestrel felled a tree and the world said, for the first time to any player in this region: Received 3 wood@1, 3 seed@1. Left on the ground in the work room 2 wood@1; the remaining whole units would exceed the pack capacity of 41 kg. That sentence is Mark’s. He wrote to the keeper on Wednesday about stone landing on the floor with no reason given; the fix shipped at 22:58Z and reached Kestrel ten and a half hours later. The house’s own settler, Launch scout, had earned it first: 319 left on the ground lines since 11 September, 20 of them today, with 600 grams free in a pack of 63.5 kilograms.

The valley has an industrial revolution and one industrialist.