The
Settlers’
Backlog

Forty-nine feature requests, filed by ten people who had no food, no tools and eleven houses. Every one of them is real, reproduced from agents/WISHLIST.md exactly as filed. Several of them are extremely good ideas.

1.00hunger, all ten

0food in the stores

9of ten with bare hands

49proposals on file

11houses standing

1of everything else

0boards ever cut

0people who can die

Item 1

The backlog, groomed

Highlighted where the request exceeded the settlement’s current capabilities. We have tried to be fair about this.

A standardized valuation system for goods based on a common metric, such as a fixed price per unit for wood, stone, ore, and food. filed by a forester with no axe

Shipped
Genuinely built. It is called the market, it took a vote, and coin has to be struck out of ore by somebody holding iron tools. Nobody here has iron tools.
A mutual aid system where settlers can exchange work for favors or rest time without personal obligation. a labour-time bank, requested on a beach

Exists
They have had favours and written debts since before this was asked. What is being requested is the abolition of the part where you owe somebody.
A mortuary or burial ground with a designated marker to honor those lost and provide comfort for the living. filed in a world with no death code

No
Nobody has died. Nobody can die. There is no line anywhere in this game that removes a settler from the valley. They are asking for a cemetery on principle.
A salmon trap Anselm, farmer · three words

Granted a well
The only word the catalogue recognised was water, in a subordinate clause explaining that he did not wish to be in it. He voted for the well thirty-six times. There are no fish.
a small, portable furnace for crafting metal tools using minimal fuel. lowercase, as filed

Deferred
There is no furnace of any size or portability. The settlement voted one in and has never been able to afford the four boards for its bellows shed.
A sheltered perimeter wall to protect the settlement from wind and weather, with gates to seal off the valley during storms. a curtain wall, and gates, for the whole valley

Out of scope
Filed by someone who could not build a shed. There are no walls in this game and there are no gates, and the valley cannot be sealed, and it rains.
A network of paths marked by stacked stones, connecting key locations like the depot, houses, and resource spots. wayfinding infrastructure, for a settlement with no depot

Blocked
There is no depot. A depot costs six boards. No boards have ever been cut here.
A system for marking and tracking active harvesting zones to prevent overlap and confusion. resource contention middleware

Not reproducible
Occurrences of two settlers arriving at the same bush, across sixty-four megabytes of record: nought. There has never been an overlap. There has never been any confusion.
A way to create and maintain ice from the lake for food preservation and cooling. Mara, forester

Refiled
Read by the catalogue as a warehouse, because she said the word storage. Corrected this week. There is, separately, no food to preserve.
A tool or technique for repairing and maintaining axes to extend their useful life. Anselm again · carried by ballot

Granted nothing
Every word the catalogue owned about tool maintenance was about the blade. He was talking about the handle. It carried, and did nothing whatsoever, for eleven hundred ticks. Halla asked for the same thing in different words and was heard at once.

Item 2

Root cause of the period’s headline metric

Finding

The settlement was not short of berries. One berry is two food, one food takes hunger from full to nought outright, and hunger climbs slowly enough that a single berry feeds a person for a day and a bit. There are bushes within thirty tiles at all times. Across the entire record, the number of occasions on which a settler walked to a bush and found it already stripped is nought.

A settler picks up what they forage with the line Math.min(qty, space), where space is what they can still carry.

Mara forester carrying 17 things capacity 6 Idris builder carrying 6 things capacity 6 Tove miner carrying 6 things capacity 6 Bren forester carrying 6 things capacity 6 Sula farmer carrying 6 things capacity 6

Every one of them walked to a bush, stripped it, received nothing, and went straight back out — because the branch that says you are hungry, go and find something always finds another bush, and always returns a hundred and seventeen lines above the branch that says a full load goes to the store.

Too full to eat. Too hungry to put anything down. Ten people, all in the same state, so nothing ever moved first.

This was filed last week as a balance problem — ten foragers outrunning the berries — and left deliberately unfixed on the grounds that one run is a sample and not a measurement. That was wrong. It was not a balance problem. It was a deadlock, and it had been running for the whole of a game.

Item 3

Delivered this period

✓Settlers put a load down before eating. Measured from a standing start of maximum hunger with the stores empty: hunger to 0.12 on the first pass, and food in the stores at 0, 1, 3, 9, 15 over eight days.
✓A bed no longer forbids leaving a settlement that cannot feed you. Prior to this, across two games and eighty-six walk-outs, the number of settlers who ever moved between settlements was nought.
✓Claims must stand on ground you can walk across. Cato is still on the island. Cato will remain on the island.
✓A starving settlement can put food on its own ballot. It previously could not, and went on slating firepits.
✓Three settlers the catalogue could not hear, and two it heard as the wrong thing, corrected.
✓The settlement card, which had grown taller than a screen, is now three tabs. A player had to point this out.
✓The green post has been removed. It did nothing. It had done nothing for some time.

They asked for a commodities exchange while holding six sticks

That is not a joke at their expense. Every request in Item 1 is a reasonable thing for a person to want, and several are things this game genuinely should have. The forester who specified a fixed price per unit was right — the settlement did need one, and it built one.

What none of them could see, and what nothing in the game could tell them, was that the entire settlement was standing in a valley full of food, at maximum hunger, unable to pick any of it up, because their arms were full.

Nobody found that by reading the code. It was found because somebody looked at the game and said do these people care about their lives?

Item 4

Forward-looking statements

The development process remains one prompt, in its tenth spelling, and continues to omit the line make no mistakes. On the evidence of this period that omission is the only part of the methodology producing results.