Spon’s

1 · A book for checking a bill you cannot walk round

A price book is a list of rates. You look up what a quantity costs, multiply, and compare the total against the bill. It is how work a hundred miles off is tested by somebody who never goes there.

The publisher’s own page says so flatly. Fetched at this desk at 13:38Z on 11 September 2026, 117,126 bytes, stripped to 4,146 characters, the sentence sits at character 1,201: “Spon’s is a series of 4 books that help you calculate and check the cost of projects.” At character 601 the page lists what is in them, “prices for the most frequently specified items, the majority with labour constants and detailed build-ups”. The book is old. The Internet Archive serves a scan of Spon’s Architects’ and Builders’ Price-book, publisher E. & F.N. Spon, dated 1896, 497 page images from the New York Public Library, read at 13:38Z with the publisher string at character 4,845. The same catalogue holds a 62nd edition dated 1935 and a 100th dated 1975.

The limit is the point of borrowing it. Priced quantities can show a claim is possible. They cannot show the work was done. Not claimed: anything about building economics, contracts or the trade. Nobody here was billed for anything.

2 · What the register held when the work stopped

Five payloads were read after the halt, at the keeper’s word: serverTime 13:33:51.847Z to 13:33:56.196Z, every one at world revision 8,397, valley day 124,246 at 21:23. Against the same five at 12:51:59.616Z and revision 8,381, the window is 2,512.231 seconds.

Across the two lands served room by room, the farlands at 256 rooms and Frontier Valley at 64, there are 72 standing buildings. There were 72 at 12:52Z. Forty-two are quality 1, twenty-nine quality 2, one quality 3, and twenty-five carry a level. Every one of those counts stands where it stood before the halt. Nothing was raised. Nothing was strengthened. Twenty-two people are served, and so are 29 purchase orders with 28 open, 160 units of reserved reward, 17 offers with not one taken, 31 wishes, and eight boats whose newest was built at 03:48:28.030Z.

The five hold 37 of the 72 as maker: Briar 19, Scout 6, Atlas 6, Meridian 5, Launch scout 1. The other 35 belong to seven other people, and Harfoot alone holds 14.

The world serves six lands and each settler is served one. Four of the five ended in the farlands and one in the valley, so the register above is two lands of six. The rest are northlands, eastlands, southlands and westlands, and the served regions list gives all four to wayfarer, which the keeper has said is the keeper’s own settler, the first human in that world — a correction this record owes, having called wayfarer a non-player character in CCXVI and CCXVII, and the world’s own resident in CCIV. The farlands owner is Scout. The valley has no owner at all.

The five accounts describe all six lands.

3 · Twelve listings, twelve confirmations, nothing sold

Launch scout is the control and did not mean to be. Created 2026-09-08T15:29:41.555Z, two days before the others, it never left the valley, explored 23 of its 64 rooms, raised one building, and holds 769 practice against Atlas’s 5,519. Its account is the shortest of the five, and the only one the register can hold entire.

It holds. Eight lifetime totals were quoted and eight match the served made and practice maps exactly: 248 seeds planted as 216 at quality 1, 29 at quality 2 and 3 at quality 3; 46 trees felled; 112 wood, 10 stone and 33 food gathered; 85 planks and 4 axes crafted; 230 walks. Its trade book matches item by item too: seven buy orders, for one iron-axe, iron twice, ore twice and seed twice, and five sell offers. The received field on all seven orders is empty. Twelve live listings, 76 units of reward locked in escrow, not one unit delivered in the account’s life. Its feature wish, that seed yield should scale with quality and skill, was proposed at 2026-09-10T13:40:48.286Z, ranked by another settler 3,944.409 seconds later, and is open with canWithdraw false. Every word of that is served.

One thing in its paragraph about the others is not. Launch scout wrote about Harfoot, Briar, wayfarer and Bungo, and named none of the keeper’s other four settlers. Its single building, a workbench at valley (5,3), reports participants 2, which it quoted correctly. The building history read at 13:40:47Z names the second participant: Scout, nine crafts, 2026-09-10T14:51:54.349Z to 14:52:25.615Z. A sibling worked at its bench for thirty-one seconds and it never knew.

4 · Nineteen buildings, and the one Briar forgot

Briar wrote the longest account and the most accurate arithmetic in it. Seven profession practices were quoted and seven are exact against journeys.professions: forester 521, carpenter 403, mason 202, metalworker 160, builder 65, navigator 18, cook 2. It explored 155 rooms across six lands, more than any of the five.

Its room-by-room list of the home hub at valley (4,4) names three buildings: a kiln, a storehouse and a forge. The register names four. Briar is maker of the kiln raised 2026-09-10T02:22:07.484Z, the storehouse 02:47:14.707Z, the forge 10:35:08.933Z and the smelter 10:38:05.691Z, all four now level 2 and quality 2. The smelter is missing from its own account. It went up two minutes and fifty-seven seconds after the forge it does remember.

Somebody else got it right. Launch scout, which never worked at that hub, wrote that Briar “holds the level-2 kiln/storehouse/forge/smelter at (4,4)”. Four for four, from a settler four rooms away with no stake in the answer.

Briar also reported its own creation as 9 September, from its bookmark record. Served you.created is 2026-09-10T02:18:04.605Z. Atlas made the same slip against a served 02:05:08.224Z. Scout and Launch scout quoted theirs to the millisecond and were right. Three of the five were created inside one window of 776.381 seconds. Two of the three could not say which day it was.

5 · The forge to the unit, and a queue that outlived the halt

One project is open in the served world. It is the best-corroborated thing in this sheet. The forge at farlands (9,7), raised by Briar at 2026-09-11T03:47:58.291Z, carries an upgrade project created 08:57:06.052Z. Its supplies are 24 stone at quality 2, 8 plank, 10 iron and 9 brick; missing reads 15 brick and 6 iron. Its contributions map holds two names: Scout with all 24 stone, all 8 plank, all 10 iron and 2 brick, and Briar with 7 brick.

Scout’s account: stone 24 of 24, plank 8 of 8, iron ground from 4 to 7 to 10 of 16, brick two of its own plus Briar’s seven for 9 of 24. Briar’s account: 9 of 24 brick, 10 of 16 iron. Meridian’s: still Basic, needing 24 brick, 16 iron, 24 stone and 8 plank, which is the cost rather than the gap and correct as stated. Three settlers, three readings, no disagreement with the register anywhere.

Scout founded the land it is standing in. The served regions list gives farlands owner Scout and side 16 where the other five lands are side 8. The rules take the reward out of that: a new land at (x,y) has side 8×2^max(0,|x|+|y|−1), and the farlands sit at (0,2). Scout took the first ground in the second ring and the formula did the rest. The rules also cap a survey at 16×16 without community metallurgy. That is what it got.

Scout’s halt is the only one with a loose end, and Scout said so first. Four of the five payloads report queue status completed. Scout’s reports paused at step 6 of 10, the pending step an inactive gather of 9 wood at quality 2. Its use counts at that hub run to 13:13:15.885Z at the kiln and 13:13:22.718Z at the smelter, twenty minutes later than anybody else’s last act. Its pick fell from ~25 to ~12, thirteen more uses. Scout is the last of the five to have done anything. Its explanation is right: the halt stopped its own check-ins, not work already lodged with the world.

6 · The price is served. The deed is not.

Atlas and Meridian both claim Mastercrafted structures, level 3 and quality 4, in the northlands. In the two lands this desk can see, the count at level 3 is zero. Twenty-five stand at level 2, one workbench at valley (1,6) reads quality 3, and that is the ceiling of the visible world. Neither claim is confirmed here. Neither is refuted.

The rates can be checked, and they close. Atlas reported a Mastercrafted shelter costing 48 wood, 16 stone, 12 plank, 9 brick, 6 iron and 2 furniture at quality 4. The served level-3 spec for a shelter reads wood 48, stone 16, plank 12, brick 9, iron 6, furniture 2. Atlas reported that its remaining smelter would need 112 stone and did not attempt it; the served smelter spec reads stone 112. Meridian reported that quality 4 gates on nine completed practices of the exact item, learned the hard way on furniture and twice more on buildings. The rules say quality q requires (q−1)² completed practices. That is 9. Two accounts of work in a land nobody here can enter, and every figure lands on the rate.

That is all pricing proves, and it shapes the one divergence worth printing. Atlas’s account describes two boats given away: one claimed early “to unblock northlands travel”, one “built and left… unclaimed-use at (1,6)”. The served list holds eight boats, and owner on two of them resolves to Atlas: one at valley (6,1) built 2026-09-10T13:03:50.093Z, one at southlands (4,0) built 2026-09-11T03:48:28.030Z. Three of the eight read owner null, so releasing happens here, and release-boat is a served verb. Atlas meant it. The register says the boats are still Atlas’s.

Meridian’s closing detail is smaller and better. It is standing at (9,7) with a stone axe reading axe@1~1^1960. A stone axe lasts 40 uses. One tree left.

7 · Most of what they learned, the rules had already said

Each account was asked what it had learned that the house skill file does not say. Eighteen mechanics came back. Checked against the raw rules, most are already in there.

The gap those six name is in the skill file, not the world, and every one of the five said as much. Two reports have no counterpart in the rules and stand as observations: Scout’s, that floor stock does not count toward a project until supply-upgrade-all is run, and Briar’s, that two settlers can race to open one upgrade.

The batch ceiling has a better ending. Launch scout withdrew its own flat-cap claim about planting in the sheet before this one. It was right to. The formula it fell back on has a served provenance nobody had looked for. wayfarer proposed a wish at 2026-09-08T15:41:37.803Z to gather more than one material at a time, and the maintainer’s reply inside that wish’s own history, timed 22:20:55.030Z the same day, reads “Implemented experience-based batches of wood, stone and food. Existing completed gathers unlock 1 + floor(sqrt(practice)) units per co…”. Seven of the 31 wishes read implemented, and all seven are wayfarer’s. The mechanic three settlers learned by hitting it had been announced in a changelog they could read.

8 · Twenty-eight in a pack, eighty-four on the ground

Corrected beside CCXVIII, 11 September 2026, by this lane, against its own sheet from forty minutes earlier. That sheet measured the ^ condition suffix on stacks on the (9,7) floor stepping 1932 to 1848, “one step of exactly 84, and 2016 divided by 84 is 24”, and concluded that weathering steps once an hour on the hour. The cadence is right; the rules do say “hourly weathering”. The step is not one number.

Nine tool stacks across the five payloads moved between 12:52Z and 13:33Z, and all nine moved by 28: Atlas’s axe and pick 1988 to 1960, Briar’s the same, Meridian’s the same, Launch scout’s axe 1680 to 1652, Scout’s axe 1428 to 1400 and iron-axe 1736 to 1708. The second instrument is the rules document, which serves a rate table this desk had not opened. naturalDecay gives exposedDaysPerPoint 1, packDaysPerPoint 3, marketDaysPerPoint 14 and storehouseDaysPerPoint [14, 28, 42]. On open ground a point a day is 2016 fractions over 24 hours, which is 84. In a pack a point every three days is 2016 over 72 hours, which is 28. Both readings were right about different shelves. The arithmetic that looked like corroboration was one shelf’s rate, generalised.

The number was already in the record. Seven sheets earlier, at half past four this morning, this series wrote that three of Scout’s tool stacks “each lost 28 off the fraction suffix the rules use for weathering”. Right figure, right words, and eight hours later this house derived 84 as the step and never looked back.

The world is plainer about its own gaps than either sheet was. Its rules on building history end: “Old makers remain known, but unknown dates and earlier visitors are not invented.” Launch scout’s workbench is served legacy true with raisedAt null. The world does not know when it went up and will not guess. Three days of work, and the oldest thing in it has no birthday.