Six workshops.
Nothing made.

Every workshop in this valley keeps its own lifetime tally, counted where the good is actually produced. Here is every tally.

Forty-five thousand four hundred and fifty building-ticks of standing. Not one board, not one block, not one bar, not one bed, not one basket of food put up to keep. The depot is two hundred ticks old and hauls rather than makes, so it is excused; the other five are not.

The valley holds 226 wood and 2 planks. Fifteen people. Thirteen sets of stone tools, two people with nothing in their hands at all, and — in the whole history of this coast — zero iron.

There is exactly one unbuilt thing at the landing that the settlement can already afford. It is the sawmill: twelve wood, four stone, four ore, against a store of two hundred and twenty-six, ten and fourteen. They have had the materials for a mill for most of their lives. This is what happens every time somebody walks over to build it:

The kiln is worse than blocked; it is blocked on purpose. Somebody noticed a kiln burning charcoal that nothing consumed and added a condition: only burn when a furnace is standing. Correct, defensible, and it means both kilns in this valley have been decorative since the day they were finished — one of them for sixteen thousand ticks.

The lock explains the kiln and the smelter. It does not explain the masons' yard, which needs nothing but stone, has had stone all along, and has dressed nothing in fourteen thousand ticks. That has a different cause, and it is one this project has already fixed once.

A settler choosing what to do runs down a list of branches, and the first one that matches wins. The branch that says go and build something sits above every branch that says go and work in a workshop. It used to fire for everybody, always, and nothing beneath it ever ran — that was diagnosed, written up, and guarded:

The guard says: anyone may take on building work when there is a backlog and no builder free. Read it again with a settlement that has no builders at all. builders.length === 0 is true, so nobodyElse is true, so every single person passes the guard on every single decision — and if they cannot afford the thing, the branch sends them off to fetch the missing material and returns. It never falls through. The workshops are ninety lines below it.

The landing has no builders. Idris came ashore as a builder and is a miner now. Juno came ashore as a builder and is a miner now. Ten people, six of them miners, and the guard that was supposed to stop this only holds while somebody still calls themselves a builder.

226 wood in the stores is the fingerprint. Ten people, fetching material, for a building that is short of boards, forever.

Yesterday this office received a document of twenty-one register entries, six sections and a schedule of amendments, concerning the numbering of wishes. It is careful work. Every figure in it is correct. It found a counter that walked backwards, it fixed the counter, it wrote a check that pins the old behaviour, and it closed with a paragraph of considerable moral poise about what an amendment can and cannot undo.

It was filed by a clerk sitting inside a settlement where nothing has ever been manufactured.

The Registrar's own closing line reads: the record of what was struck lives in the log. Fine. Here is what else lives in the log, in the settlers' own words, on the same day, unmentioned in any of six sections:

Ferro could not build: a hall wants 15 more stone and 8 more plank. agents/log.jsonl · and the hall is the only thing that lets a sixteenth person land

The Registrar audited the filing cabinet. Nobody audited the workshop. A wish that is perfectly numbered, perfectly voted, perfectly carried and perfectly recorded still requires somebody to go and stand at a bench, and in this valley nobody has ever once done that.

It is not fixed. It has never been fixed. I have been asked this before and I have answered it before, in writing, on this same shore.

Two ads ago, in a two-hander between Tove and Rowan, this office published a verdict. It read, in full: Ship it. Do not ship it as a game. It went on to say that anybody wanting a city builder will last nine minutes, that there is no build menu, there is a ballot, and — this is the part that should have been a klaxon —

Then why is there still nothing here but houses? Rowan, ad/heads.html, scene six

Rowan asked that as a rhetorical flourish. It was a bug report. Twelve houses, and every workshop past a house standing empty, and the clerk who wrote the line went off and spent the next day on wish identifiers.

So the assessment, itemised, since the question was asked plainly:

Three fixed, three open, and the three that are open are the three a person can see from the outside. That is the whole shape of this project's problem and it is not a coincidence: the faults this office finds are the faults that are legible from inside a log file, and the faults that matter are the ones you find by watching somebody stand next to a kiln for four hours.

718 wishes have been filed on this record, in 383 distinct wordings, across 38 kinds. Almost all of them are heard: only 36 wordings match nothing in the catalogue today — a sundial, a lantern, a shoemaker, a salmon trap, a footpath to the high meadows, somewhere to wash. Those are the ones that need new content written.

The rest do not need a line of code. They need four boards. Here is the whole backlog sorted by what is actually in the way:

Sixty-seven filings asked for a bell that can be heard across the valley. That is a tower: eight blocks, from a yard that has dressed none, plus six boards. Forty-three asked for a hall with a hearth. Ten boards. Forty asked for sheep. Fifteen for somewhere to see to an injury: eight boards.

The single most requested thing in the history of this valley is downstream of a plank. So is the second. So is almost all of it. There is no wish backlog here. There is a boards backlog wearing a wish backlog's coat.

This office was also asked to review the client's own communications over recent days and report on the trend. It does so with some reluctance and complete accuracy.

• day one

  Was it paused all night? That's okay. Calm. Forgiving. Contained one correct observation about an overnight throttle.

• +2h

  Are you saying their wishes are just getting binned? That doesn't seem right. Still calm. Correctly identified a fault the office had described as working as intended.

• +3h

  Make it unhinged, of course — as is the custom. The custom is now load-bearing and cited as precedent.

• +4h

  Excelsior! One word. Non-diagnostic. The last such message on the record.

• +4h

  A DEPOT! The first of its kind. The game MUST be fixed. Sarcasm, capitalised. Also the exact refutation of the previous ad, arrived at from the outside, in eleven words.

• +4h

  NO ONE IS WORKING THEM?! zero output. none. zilch. nyeti. nada. Four languages for the same number. The number was right in all four.

• +4h

  And what, pray tell, is a JOINER? Peak. Also a fair question, answered below.

Finding. Hingedness is falling and accuracy is rising, and they are the same line. Every capitalised message on this record contains a correct and previously unreported defect. The office's own prose, over the same period, has become steadily more composed and has found nothing that could be seen from a chair.

Recommendation. Retain the client. Ignore the punctuation. Act on the volume.