Settlement of the Landing · statement of stores
Tick 16,106 · year 2
Stocktake · being identical to the last one · and to the one before that
A settlement of ten people held exactly seventy-six things for three and a half thousand ticks, and moved none of them.
The store was full. It was full of the one thing nobody could spend.
Taken from the settlement’s own record. Eleven hundred and eighty-seven consecutive samples, the first at tick 12,894 and the last at tick 16,409, reproduced here as a single column because there is only one column to reproduce.
| Item | B/f | In | Out | C/f |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| wood | 70 | 0 | 0 | 70 |
| stone | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| ore | 6 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| food | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| plank | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| charcoal | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| iron | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| block | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| furniture | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| held | 76 | 0 | 0 | 76 |
Held: seventy-six. Highest figure reached at any point in the settlement’s recorded history: seventy-six. The two being the same number is the whole of the finding.
Not nearly full. Not mostly full. Not one unit in or out, in either direction, for the whole of the period.
Four buildings were taken down during this period and the figure did not move. That is the line that turns a full shed into something worth publishing.
Seventy of it was wood.
There is a great deal of wood on this coast and a settler can cut it with their hands. There is also, in the whole catalogue of things this settlement had unlocked, exactly one building made of wood and nothing else, and eleven of them were already standing. The hearth burns one log an evening. Nothing else in the valley spends a stick.
So the wood came in, and the wood stayed, and it went on coming in.
The store was not full of goods. It was full of the one material with nowhere to go, and it was holding the door shut against everything else.
The settlement had voted for a sawmill, a furnace and a yard, and had built none of them. The prices are not secret. They are in the same file as everything else:
Bare hands break rock perfectly well. Nobody was prevented from quarrying and nobody was idle. Settlers went out, worked the rock, and carried it home, and this is what the arithmetic did when they got there:
“So it goes on the ground beside the store, and it is gone. Not a second store with a worse roof — abandoned.”
Counted off the settlement’s own feed for this period: three hundred and five stone destroyed on the grass outside a full store. One thousand and ninety-one wood. Three hundred and fifty-eight food, in a settlement at nought food.
Highest quantity of stone ever held in the stores of the Landing, across the entire run: nought.
And then, because somebody went and read the job list rather than the ladder, the other half of it.
This settlement has a miner. The miner’s job is scored almost entirely on how short the settlement is of stone. The job declares that what it fetches is stone. The guard that stops a settler doing something pointless tests whether the settlement is short of stone.
A miner dispatched precisely because the valley had no stone walked to an ore seam and came home with ore. Every time. For as long as there was a seam anywhere near.
Which is why nine settlers out of ten were standing in that valley holding two or three ore apiece, and why there were six in the Landing’s store and eleven in Halla’s, and why not one of the three settlements had a single stone to its name. Nobody was idle. Nobody was in error. They were mining the wrong rock, on purpose, because they had been asked to.
Ore is also the worse thing to be wrong about. With no furnace standing, the number of ore this settlement can consume in the whole of its existence is four, once, for the sawmill it cannot build.
Nothing could be spent, because everything wanted stone. No stone could be put down, because nothing had been spent. And nobody was bringing any stone anyway. It is the hunger of last month said again a level up — ten people too full to eat and too hungry to put anything down, except that this time it is not ten people. It is the town.
Five kilns were standing, which was the last notice’s fault and was corrected this period. A settler took four of them down by hand.
Taking a building down returns half of what it cost. A kiln costs eight wood and four stone. Four kilns came down.
That is sixteen wood and eight stone recovered by the settlement’s own labour — and a yard wants eight stone. The exact figure. The settlement had, for one afternoon, dismantled its way to precisely the thing standing between it and every other building on the list.
Every unit of it was carried to the store, found no room, and was set down on the ground outside, where the weather had it.
The stores did not move by one. That is why the figure is the same before and after four buildings ceased to exist.
Filed this period by Halla, a forester, and carried on the vote of a settlement of two:
npc-07I’d give my right hand for a proper lock on the depot door — so when I’m gone, nobody steals what’s not theirs.
There is no theft in this game.
Not a hazard, not a trait, not a difficulty setting. A search of the entire source for steal, theft, stolen and thief returns one hit, and it is a comment about which goods would be worth stealing if anybody could. Nobody has ever taken a thing that was not theirs. Nobody can.
There is also no depot. There has never been a depot. There is no door in the settlement of Cato’s claim, which is a lean-to on a rock in the bay holding eleven things in a shed that holds eight.
And she was right.
Goods were disappearing out of her settlement steadily, in quantity, week after week, and she had watched it happen and reached for the only explanation a person reaches for. Four hundred and fifty-one wood, a hundred and seventy food and a hundred and sixty-nine stone went off the heap outside that lean-to in this period alone. Somebody was taking it. She was simply wrong about who.
It was the weather, and behind the weather it was a settlement that had never built anywhere to put anything, and had never once put such a thing on a ballot, because nothing in the game had ever told it to.
Every unit the weather takes off the heap outside is counted. It has been counted since the heap was written. The counter is called dropped and its own comment describes it as the actual price of having nowhere to put things.
Written in one place. Read in none.
The ballot has known what to do with this for some time. A proposal that unlocks a depot or a granary is worth an extra two and a fifth to a settler in a cramped settlement, and there is a line written for them to say out loud when they vote for it — “We are carrying things about because there is nowhere to set them down.”
No such proposal has ever been on a slate, so that line has never once been said.
This is the third time a feature of this game has turned out to be a decision nothing acts on, after the triage vote that ordered nothing and the migration nobody could use. It is beginning to look less like a defect and more like the house speciality.
The answer to a frozen store is the one building on this coast made of wood and nothing else. A house is ten timber and twelve places to put something down, so it spends what is choking the store and adds the shelf that lets the stone in, in one afternoon. That was written, and it did not work, and here is the order in which it did not.
It sat below the hall and the depot on the list of what to build next. A hall is forty-four units and a depot wants six boards, and a settlement whose store is frozen can accumulate neither — so the moment either was unlocked it became the standing answer for ever, and the branch written to unjam the place was unreachable underneath it.
Having got past that, it put the question to a meeting. The meeting scores a proposed house on whether anybody is sleeping on the ground. Nobody was. It opened at minus nought point four five and was refused, and the card shown to the player said the settlement had decided the valley was big enough — which is a true sentence about a question nobody asked.
And the other half of it, the part that lets a settler pick up what is already lying on the ground, filled their arms to exactly capacity. The rule above it sends anybody with a full load to the store. The store is full. That is why the heap is there. So the load came back off their back onto the same heap, and they turned round and picked it up again, for ever, and the person it caught was whoever was trying to build.
Three separate mechanisms, none of which knew about the others, all arriving at the same answer, which was no.
Everything anybody carried into a settlement’s store became the settlement’s the moment it went in. A settler who walked out down the coast walked out with what was in their hands and not one thing besides, however many loads they had brought in over a year.
Nobody voted for that. Nobody wrote it down. It was simply how it was, and it happened on every departure this valley has ever had.
So the lock is real, and it is not for keeping anybody out. A locked store is a store with a share in it: what a settler can carry, drawn against what they actually delivered, on the day they go. Halla asked for a lock to stop people taking what was not theirs, in a world where nobody ever has.
The only thing in this valley that has ever taken what was not its own is the settlement, and it did it to everybody, every time, on the way out of the door she wanted locked.
Reproduced exactly as delivered, including the capitals and the coinage. The reader is asked to note that every finding above began here, and that nothing in the automated checks — of which there are four, and they are good ones — had anything to say about any of it.
Back to the island! There is STILL something afoot. They are back to a one-kiln town. That was hoped for. HOWEVER. Nothing at all, else. NEVERNOTHING. Has been built, yet -moreso? WHY?!
Eleven hundred and eighty-seven samples in which nothing whatsoever happened, and the thing that found it was a person looking at a valley and noticing that nothing whatsoever was happening.
That is eleven for eleven. Every load-bearing fault this project has ever found has been found by somebody watching the valley and saying what they saw, and not one of them has ever been originated by a check.
All four of those are true and were true throughout. The settlement worked a full year, in good order, at nought food, and finished it with precisely what it started with, having thrown seventeen hundred and seventy things onto the grass in the process.