Nine
Houses

Verbatim from the record. Nothing here has been improved.

Every line above is a real count out of agents/log.jsonl. The most-said sentence in the history of this valley is a plan to walk to a building that does not exist, and the second is a request for materials for a building that cannot exist, and both are said by a woman who is starving on top of a hundred logs.

Three hundred and sixty-six wishes were filed that the catalogue had no word for. These are real. These were typed by people made of arithmetic who have two stones and a boat.

The settlement that filed a request for a moisture sensor could not, on that day or any other, make a plank. It had been unable to make a plank since the boat. It would remain unable to make a plank for four thousand eight hundred and sixty-six ticks, which is the entire recorded history of the place. It wanted the sensor for the planks.

Two of the three hundred and sixty-six were things this game genuinely had no word for and now does: a notice board, asked for seven times, and a ledger of who has done what for whom, asked for fifteen. Both are built. Both do something you can measure. That is the part of this document that is not a joke.

The single most common event in a nine-hour run of this game was a sentence with no subject and no object.

It had twenty-odd different reasons available to it and used none of them. This report noticed the same line one sitting ago, at fifty occurrences, described it as “a message that names nothing”, fixed the two things behind it, and then left the message alone. It is now fifteen times larger and it says exactly as much.

You asked for a catalogue. This is the catalogue. Every row is a real commit or a real section of the report in which a dead end in this valley was found, explained at length, fixed, measured, and pronounced closed.

Sixteen. Six of them are sections of the report; the rest are commits. Each one is correct about the fault it found. Each one is wrong about the sentence at the end.

The other half of the comedy, and the half with a person in it.

Nine settlers in ten were holding nothing. For the whole run.

A house costs ten wood and nothing else. Everything else on this coast wants a board, and cutting a board wants an axe, and making an axe wants an axe's worth of attention that nobody was paying. A house is the only thing fourteen empty-handed people can build. They built nine of it. Then eleven of it.

The game already knew. The settler thinking for themselves puts tools above the work and the comment says why — “A builder without an axe cannot make a saw.” Left alone, this valley equips itself by tick 86 and is cutting boards by tick 286. Hand it to a model and that branch is never reached, because a settler on the bus runs the plan they were given, and the plan was:

Bare hands are now the first thing a settler on the bus sees to before they will take an instruction. On a valley directed exactly the way the night was directed: before, no stone was ever mined and no tool was ever made in four thousand ticks. After, stone at tick 65 and an axe at tick 69.

It was first written one level higher than that, where it also applied to the settlers thinking for themselves — who were never the problem. That version got every settler tooled up, thirteen of thirteen, and cost the valley its furnace, its deep mine, its yard, its mill, all of its charcoal and every bar of iron it would ever have smelted. The number being watched went up and the thing it stood for went away. It is the sixteenth fault in the table above, committed twice in one morning, four hours apart.

“More wood for the hall.”
— Mara, forester, three hundred and thirty-six times, about a hall that was never proposed, never priced and never possible, while standing on a hundred and seven logs she could not lift a plank out of.