Frontier · site report
The landing · trench I · ticks 0–6,260
In six thousand two hundred ticks this settlement went from two people with an axe to iron tools, struck coin, a mill, a furnace, three towers and a hall. It has five food and twelve mouths.
Context 1 · the news
Every marker anybody has ever used to divide one age from another, this settlement crossed in a morning.
| Tick | Find | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 203 | first house | somebody sleeps indoors; somebody else can come |
| 1,898 | kiln | charcoal — the bottom rung of metal |
| 2,212 | smelter | a furnace on this coast, for the first time in four days |
| 2,270 | masons | rough stone becomes squared block |
| 2,304 | mine | the seam worked properly rather than scratched |
| 2,869 | first iron drawn | the age changes here |
| 3,742 | sawmill | which needs an iron blade, which is why it is late |
| 3,932 | joiner | beds; a house sleeps two |
| 4,317 | infirmary | a bad fall stops being the end of somebody |
| 5,453 | tower | the belfry, at last — asked for twenty-nine times |
| 6,217 | hall | the population ceiling lifts, 10 to 20 |
For context on how far that is: the valley that ran before this one lasted 21,600 ticks and produced nothing at all. Not one board, not one bar, not one bed. It died at fifteen people with a kiln that had stood sixteen thousand ticks without being lit.
| sawmill | 226 plank | smelter | 24 iron |
| mine | 51 ore | kiln | 57 charcoal |
| masons | 29 block | joiner | 11 furniture |
Ten of the thirteen people on this coast are holding iron tools. Two hundred and two coins have been struck. Mean happiness is 0.97. They have voted themselves carts, roads, wages, teaching, care, shelter, upkeep, fresh water, keeping, comfort, coinage, and — after twenty-nine separate requests — sightlines.
Context 2 · the section drawing
Context 3 · the fault
Two hundred and fourteen boards. Twenty-four bars of iron. Twenty-nine dressed blocks. Three towers. Two hundred and two coins. Two food.
That was the reading at tick 6,157, with ten people in the settlement and a mean happiness of 0.97 — because every one of them was individually fine, having just eaten what they picked. Nobody was starving. The settlement was.
And nothing anywhere said so. Everything the game presses on a settler is about the person: you are tired, you are starving, your pack is full. A settler cannot see the stores from where they are standing, so the one fact that mattered about this valley was in no state file, no card and no feed line. The granary cannot raise the alarm either, and this is the part worth writing down twice: it only fires on a surplus, so it is unreachable in exactly the settlement that needs it. Three granaries standing. Nothing in any of them, ever.
Context 4 · the finds nobody could file
The oldest unanswered request on this record has been made four separate ways by four different people over four days:
A salmon trap
A method to catch fish in the lake
Clear water in the lake, visible bottom for fishing, swimming, and water clarity
A system for filtering lake water to prevent spoilage during warm days
Every one matched nothing. The word list had no entry for a fish, so a settler who asked for a salmon trap was granted a well — which the published record has been carrying as a joke in its own colophon, under the line there are no fish, for two days.
There are now. A weir is a boon a settlement can vote itself, and a farmer who cannot find a bush — or whose settlement is under a day's food — walks to the water instead. Berries are the only food in this game and they do not come back fast enough for a settlement that has grown. A lake does not run out.
And it is unproven, which is the honest half. Over six thousand ticks of a valley with the weir granted, it fired once — because the fallback that finds a berry bush found one every single time, and that valley was never actually hungry. The case it was built for is this one. Whether it helps is a thing the next run will say and this sheet will not.
Thirty other requests came in from the cold at the same time. Thirty-eight distinct wordings on the whole record matched no kind at all; eight do now. None of them needed new content. A footpath to the high meadows was always a road. A tunnel system was always a shaft. A pulley was a cart, a tool rack was upkeep, a sundial was the forecast, and a lantern, a chimney and a way of carrying embers between fires were all the firepit. They needed a word list written by somebody who was listening.
Context 5 · the thing that has no word
You guessed the rest of this before it was written: there is no epoch in this software. No age, no era, no phase. The word appears twice in the whole codebase and both times in a comment, as something a later version might have.
So when this settlement drew its first bar of iron at tick 2,869 — the single event that
divides one age from another in every account of any people anywhere — nothing
happened. No card, no line in the feed, no entry in the record beyond
Pike drew 2 iron off the furnace, which is the same line it writes for the
twenty-fourth bar.
The game has a card for a first house, and one for a hall, and one for a bench nobody has worked in two days, and as of this morning one for a settlement that has industrialised and cannot eat. It has none for the thing that just happened to it.
What the record says about the most important moment in its own history
{"t":2869,"kind":"help","text":"Pike drew 2 iron off the furnace."}
Which is, in fairness, exactly how it went for everybody else. Nobody in an actual Bronze Age was told.