The One-Kiln Town

Settlement of the Landing · nailed over Amendment No. 1

Corrigendum · tick 4,997 · year 2


Amendment No. 1 is withdrawn in its entirety

FixedForever


Amendment No. 1 certified this valley complete and declared that no further faults existed. It was correct about the ladder. It did not look at the people on it. The settlement has since been observed at nought food, ten mouths, and one kiln.

Schedule A

Vital signs of the settlement of the Landing

Taken from the record at tick 4,997. Nothing here is dramatised; these are the numbers the game wrote down about itself while nobody was reading them. Hunger runs nought to one, and one is as hungry as a person gets.

SettlerTrade HungerHappiness In their hands
Idrisbuilder1.000.01stone tools
Toveminer1.000.05nothing
Sulafarmer1.000.12nothing
Brenforester1.000.18nothing
Orenfarmer1.000.32nothing
Hallaforester1.000.43nothing
Maraforester1.000.53nothing
Food in the stores0for all ten of them

Nine of the ten are working this coast with their bare hands.

Not because they cannot afford tools. The stores hold ninety-nine wood and twenty-six stone, and a set of stone tools costs one wood and two stone. They cannot afford the afternoon. Above a certain hunger a settler goes looking for something to eat and keeps going, because there is always a berry within thirty tiles — and every other thing a person in this game can do sits below that line in the code. Tools. Boards. Building. All of it, underneath, never reached, for four thousand ticks.

Schedule B

Exhibits

Exhibit 1 · the one-kiln town

The Landing has voted itself a sawmill, a furnace, a masons’ yard and a kiln. It has built eleven houses and the kiln. Houses cost wood and nothing else, and there is a great deal of wood.

11houses standing
1everything else
4workshops voted for and never built
0boards ever cut
Exhibit 2 · Cato

Cato walked out of the Landing and founded a claim. The game asked whether the ground was dry, level, and unclaimed. It never asked whether it was attached to anything.

This map has four walkable landmasses: the mainland at seven thousand six hundred and sixty-two tiles, and three islands of two hundred and thirty-two, twenty-two and ten. Cato is on one of the islands. Water is not forbidden here, only expensive — up to sixty times the cost of a road, per tile, on foot.

Cato’s claim, at tick 4,997: one building, two settlers, one of them sleeping on the ground, seven wood, and nothing else in the stores whatsoever. Trades with the rest of the coast, ever: nought. The two mainland settlements had run three each.

Exhibit 3 · the door that was never opened

Settlers can move between settlements. A settler who has had enough of a place walks down the coast, finds whoever answers for the stores, and asks to be let in. It was built, tested, written up, and put in an advertisement.

86people who walked out to found a claim
0people who ever walked down the coast to ask
64MBof record searched for one

Moving required that you had no bed. A bed is the one thing a settlement can always provide: houses cost wood, and the game builds one whenever anybody is short of somewhere to sleep. So a settlement that answers every problem by putting up another roof had made itself immune to losing anybody — eleven roofs, ten people, nought food, and not one of them permitted to consider leaving.

They were not staying. They were held.

Schedule C

The one prompt, in its nine spellings

Amendment No. 1 stated that the entire development process is one prompt, and refused all suggestions that it be improved. That remains our position. It is necessary to disclose that the one prompt has never once been typed the same way twice.

  1. iWork in the frontier repo. Review latest settler wishes and build the tech behind them.
  2. iiWork on the Frontier Repo. Make sure everything is committed and that all the wishes have the technical capabilities to function.
  3. iiiReview latest proposed and carried wishes and build the tech behind them.
  4. ivbuild the technicals for any extant wishes
  5. vFollow the handoff and also build tech behind the current wishes
  6. viImplement the tech behind the wishes currently proposed and carried. And follow-up any loose threads in the paste.
  7. viiReview and progress on work still to be touched up in the paste, and also build any tech behind current proposals/wishes
  8. viiiWork in the Frontier repo. First, determine why the landing has only built houses, it seems like their progression is locked.
  9. ixWork in the Frontier repo. Ensure that all settler wishes have the tech built to support them. Interrogate economy chains, and look for dead ends.

Number viii was typed some weeks ago. The landing has only built houses.

Schedule D

Instructions received, verbatim

Reproduced without correction, including where correction was available.

did they just land with coin in their pockets? where is the coin coming from lol? and tools? let them harvest quite slowly without tools, and then have a similar tool progression path as minecraftthe entire economic foundation of this game
Mara and Idris are making the other two settlers sleep on the ground. I think it is time to make secession available.a housing complaint, escalated
‘Space sends for another settler’ is a god command, remove itvoluntarily surrendering omnipotence
add seasons, no need to vote them in — it’s environmental — let it rainweather, commissioned
test the sheepcomplete instruction, unabridged
okay, ther used to be like 30 wishes, they wittled them all down? were all the things they had wished for over hte iterations technically possible?the founding question of this project, twice misspelt
I wasn’t attached to that world, but was all the tech built for the things they had wished for?on the loss of an entire civilisation
Also Cato has gone to live on a wee island and who knows how functionable that can be.received mid-investigation, unprompted
Do these people care about their lives? Do they want to live in a one-kiln town forever?put to the developer, in earnest
A bit shorter, yes. Focus on how irresponsible I am being with the building process.editorial direction
Schedule E

Fixed today, and left broken on purpose

The instruction was fix what you can fix, and leave broken what is left broken. Both halves were carried out. The right-hand column is not a backlog. It is a disclosure.

Fixed

  • A bed no longer forbids leaving. A settlement that cannot feed you is a settlement you may walk out of, roof or no roof.
  • Where to move is no longer judged on bedrooms. Food and work now count, so a two-person claim with a yard can out-argue a one-kiln town of ten.
  • People leave one at a time. Measured without that: eight of nine left inside thirty seconds. A settlement should bleed, not empty.
  • No more islands. A claim now has to stand on ground you can walk across.
  • A starving settlement can put food on its own ballot. It could not before, and went on slating firepits.

Left broken

  • The famine itself. Ten foragers strip the berries faster than berries come back. That is a balance number, and one run is a sample, not a measurement.
  • Hunger still outranks everything. A starving settler forages instead of making the axe that would end the foraging, and telling a starving person to go and do carpentry is not obviously the fix.
  • The Landing’s deadlock. It has already voted for the sawmill, the furnace and the yard, so there is nothing left to put on a ballot. It needs one rested person with an axe. There is no code change that produces one.
  • Cato is still on the island. This game does not go back and change what a settlement was given.

Every fix is a fault that was allowed to finish

None of the above was found by reading the code. All of it was found by letting a valley run until somebody looked at it and said the landing has a kiln now, but nothing else.

Eighty-six people walked out of that settlement over two games. Nought walked down the coast. The number is only available because nobody stopped them from not doing it, for two entire games, while an advertisement went out saying the feature worked.

The prompt still does not say make no mistakes. It is the only line in the whole process that has never needed amending.

Schedule F

Standing of the previous notice

“Certified complete. No further faults exist. Valid until the next one.”

It was the next one.

Void — withdrawn
Superseded by nothing
No replacement is offered