Fish

The correctionWhat is actually in the lake

A settlement votes a weir in, and from that day a farmer walks to the water instead of to a bush. The catch is what a bush is worth and a little more, scaled by practice and by whether anybody is holding a tool:

const caught = Math.max(1, Math.round((2.2 + skillAt(n, 'farming', 'fish') * 1.6)
  * (n.tools.tier === 'none' ? 0.7 : 1)));

The entry’s own words are fish, fishing, fishery, salmon, salmon trap, trap for fish, catch fish, weir, net, nets, a line, angling, out of the lake, from the water — and deliberately not lake on its own, because half this valley’s wishes mention the lake and most of them want to look at it, wash in it, or know how deep it is.

It is also, by the argument of the person who built it, the fix for the thing most plainly wrong with the valley. Berries were the only food and they regrow slowly, so a settlement past about eight people ate its coast bare and lived hand to mouth for ever — measured at tick 6,157 with ten people, two hundred and fourteen boards, twenty-four bars of iron, three towers, two granaries, coinage, and two food. They solved metal and money and forgot lunch. A lake does not run out.

The second halfAnselm got his trap

Anselm asked for a salmon trap. He was granted a well, because the only word in his sentence the catalogue could hear was water, and the entry that owned that word was the one about drinking it. The doc comment on the fix calls it the single clearest example of this catalogue failing at the only job it has, and this record has cited it four separate times as the standing example of an unanswerable wish.

It is answerable. Put to the classifier this afternoon, in all three of the forms the record holds it in:

Three for three, on the wish that was the worst thing in the catalogue. It has been fixed for some time. This record simply never said so, and went on citing it as broken.

Where the error came fromI read the manual

Not from carelessness about the fact, which would be the ordinary kind of wrong. The sentence was copied out of README.md, which says in bold at line 1024: “There are no fish. Nothing in this valley catches, keeps, or eats anything out of the lake, so Anselm’s wish is unanswerable.” That paragraph was true when it was written and has not been true for days.

Which is this project’s oldest diagnosis, arriving in the one place that ought to have been immune. The README says it of its own checks:

There are four other check tools … Every one of them reads a description of the game. Not one of them runs it. README.md, on why a valley stood for sixteen thousand ticks producing nothing while four checks passed green

The advertisement read a description of the game. The game was three commands away and would have answered in a second and a half.

The part that is not funnyThe settlers were still being told there are none

WORLD is the paragraph that tells a model what kind of place this is, and until this afternoon it read: “There are no animals — no wolves, no horses, no fish anyone catches, and no sheep unless the settlement voted for a flock.”

So a settlement with a weir standing had a model briefed that nothing could be taken out of the water, while fish sat in that same model’s own list of permitted actions, in the same file, eighty lines above. A settler could be instructed to fish and told in the same breath that there was nothing to fish for.

This is the fault Sheet XLIV was written about — the paragraph that told the settlers what world they were in, and was wrong — recurring in the same constant after being fixed once. The goods and buildings in that paragraph are interpolated from the game now, precisely so they cannot drift; the sentence about animals was left as prose, and the prose is what went stale. The parts that were made checkable stayed true. The one sentence nobody could check is the one that lied to the settlers for days.

It now reads: no sheep unless the settlement voted for a flock, and nothing anyone can take out of the water unless it voted for a weir — which is the shape the sheep clause had all along, and which nobody thought to give the fish.

The standing of both billsNeither has sold anything

This record has now published an advertisement for a room that does not exist, and a second advertisement of the same size striking a sentence in the first, and between them they have sold nothing, because there is nothing to sell. The offer in Sheet LIII is otherwise unchanged and stands: a cottage, four hours to the day, no map, no death, an ark home, and not one line of it built.

The shorter notice for the city has not been posted, which is the one piece of luck in this. It carried the same sentence and has been corrected before it went out. Had it gone this morning, the first thing this valley ever said to a stranger would have been a false statement about fish, in an advertisement whose entire argument was that you should check it rather than believe it.