Notes on a
Divergence

Frontier, descended from The Settlers, and no longer recognisable as such

Two things were taken from the ancestor and kept: iron wants charcoal as well as ore, so forestry is load-bearing for every piece of metal; and a deep mine eats, so nobody digs seriously until somebody is feeding them. Everything after that is divergence, and most of it was not designed. It was voted for.

§ 1

Comparative morphology

Trait	The ancestor	This specimen
construction	You place the building. Serfs obey.	You cannot place anything. They vote. If it carries, somebody still has to be able to build it, and usually nobody is.
the player	A hand from above.	Two verbs: watch, and hand one person to a language model. A summoning flag existed and was removed for being a god power.
population	Interchangeable carriers.	Named people with grudges, debts, a trade they get better at, three horizons of goals, and every vote they ever cast on the record.
transport	Carrier chains along roads.	Everyone carries their own, six at a time. Until this afternoon, anything over six ceased to exist.
politics	None.	Ranked ballots counted by single transferable vote, canvassing, bribery before a sitting, secession, and — as of last week — moving house.
mortality	Serfs die.	There is no death. Not a hazard, not a difficulty setting: no line anywhere removes a settler from the valley. One of them has asked for a burial ground.
win condition	Yes.	No.
release	Shipped finished, in a box.	Shipped an advertisement declaring itself fixed forever, and withdrew it.

§ 2

Observed pathologies of decision by committee

Not a metaphor. Every building past a house in this game exists because a majority of the people living there ranked it above the alternatives, and the following are what that has actually produced.

Observations, in the order they were noticed

The settlement voted for a furnace and was granted a charcoal kiln. The vote stands and will always stand.
A man asked for a salmon trap and was granted a well. He ranked it first thirty-six times. There are no fish.
A woman asked for a clearing by the lake away from the woods and the masons, and was very nearly granted a masons’ yard.
The settlement voted itself roads, fresh water, a grindstone and tree-planting while holding no food at all.
It also voted through a sawmill, a furnace, a masons’ yard and a kiln, and then built eleven houses, because houses cost wood and there was a great deal of wood.
A firepit carried twice and did nothing both times, being a thing the catalogue had no word for.
Six sheep were voted onto the slope. The one behaviour that turns a sheep into food asked for a permission that did not exist, so they were scenery for a whole game.
A tax was agreed and took nothing whatsoever for the entire duration of its existence.
And one this week that never reached the committee at all: a proposal was filed under a boon the settlement already held, which strikes it off every slate ever drawn. Not refused. Never offered.

§ 3

A note on cairns

That last one was the cairn, and it deserves its own entry for reasons that go slightly beyond the game.

A settler asked for “a network of paths marked by stacked stones, connecting key locations, to guide people and reduce the risk of getting lost”, and gave her reason: everyone hauls back alone and gets turned around in the woods, when they could be helping each other. It was filed as a request for a cart, because she said the word hauling. Correcting that to road would have been quietly worse — the settlement has had roads since year one, so the proposal would have vanished off every ballot without anybody voting it down.

It is not a road. A road is ground that stops taking the time; a cairn is knowing where you are. So it is its own thing now, and what it grants is the distance a call for help carries: 120 tiles becomes 210. A manned tower still beats it at 340 and still stacks on top, which is the difference between the two said as a number — stones cost an afternoon once, and somebody standing up a tower costs an afternoon every afternoon.

The settler who asked for it was a language model.

Which is worth sitting with. Cairns are the metaphor this class of software reaches for constantly and unprompted — markers left by whoever came through first, for whoever comes through next, on ground nobody has a map of. Given a valley and a person to be, it asked for the one piece of infrastructure it was always going to ask for.

And it was nearly deleted by a filing error. Twice.

Claim under test

All magic has been eliminated

The first rule of this valley is that nothing is given. The corollary went unwritten until a player pointed at goods being set down on the ground and disappearing: nothing here should evaporate either. The claim was made. The claim was then audited, which is the part advertisements usually leave out.

✓Goods that will not fit in a store are now a real stack on the real ground. Anybody hauling past sweeps them in on the day there is room, so voting a depot through recovers last week’s timber.
✓The stack weathers — berries first, then worked timber, then raw, and the stone and ore last, because a heap of rock does not much care. Never nothing, or the ground would be free storage.
✓Every workshop in the valley ran through one function that added made goods to the stores, then to the maker’s back, and then to nothing. Somebody drew three iron off a furnace and two of them were never anywhere. Fixed.
✓The mill did the same with boards. Fixed.
✓A settler with one hand free walked out to six sheep, worked the whole flock, and four days’ food stopped existing. Now you take what you can carry off an animal and the rest is still a sheep.
×A felled tree still yields more than a settler can carry, and the remainder is destroyed, because the tile is marked spent whatever anybody could hold. The honest fix is to leave what will not fit standing, and it changes every gathering hour in the valley.
×A settler who lands arrives holding one food that came from nowhere.

So: no. Five of seven. The claim is false and we can tell you exactly where.

It was true for about an hour, which is longer than the last claim managed.

§ 4

Predictions