Frontier · sheet XXIV
Tick 9,886 · the landing
A settlement built the same monument three times, could only ever climb one of them, and paid for the other two with more than half of every block it had ever made.
I
Ferro finished a tower at tick 5,453. He finished another at 5,691. Nim finished a third at 5,890.
Four hundred and thirty-seven ticks, three towers, and a settlement that at the time of writing holds two food. A tower is the most expensive thing this valley can raise. Eight wood, eighteen stone, six boards and eight dressed blocks — and the masons' yard has produced twenty-nine blocks in its entire life.
| Into the two that cannot be climbed | Cost | Of the settlement's whole production |
|---|---|---|
| dressed blocks | 16 | of 29 ever made — 55% |
| stone | 36 | the stores hold 6 today |
| boards | 12 | the stores hold 3 today |
| wood | 16 | the one thing there is plenty of |
II
Every workshop in this game was found the same way, and the way was
placesOf(town).find(...). find returns the first. So the settlement
was permitted three towers, two mills and two granaries by a table called
MOST_OF — and could reach the first of each and no other. Nothing
anywhere could send anybody to the second mill. watcherOf asked whether somebody
was standing near tower number one, and a settler on tower number two was invisible, so a
third was despatched to relieve a watch already being kept.
The comment above that table says, in the file, in the author's own hand:
They were not things it could have. The sentence is a value, written down, believed, never once tested against the code underneath it — and for four days it silently authorised a settlement to spend everything it made on a second copy of a thing it could not use.
III
One does not refute a tower.
One asks what it was for.
The temptation here is to call this a bug and patch the number: tower: 3 becomes
tower: 1, the settlement stops building monuments it cannot climb, and the
sheet writes itself. That is the cheap version and it is the one this office would have
shipped a week ago.
But a second granary is not waste. It is sixty more places of storage and a second bench, and the settlement has two, and they are both earning. A second mill is a second pair of hands at a saw. The ceiling was not wrong about those. It was wrong about the tower, and it was wrong about all three in the same way — not because the number was too high but because nothing had ever asked what a second one would be for.
So the lookups can see past the first now. A settler goes to whichever bench has a place free, a watcher on any tower counts as a watcher, and the second granary and the second mill have become the things the comment always claimed they were. And the tower is capped at one, because when the question is finally put to it — what would the second be for? — the honest answer is nothing: the watch scans every soul in the settlement from whichever tower somebody happens to be standing on. One covers the coast. The next one covers it again.
Two of those three were revalued upward. One was destroyed. That is the difference between taking a hammer to a thing and taking a hammer to the reason for a thing, and it is most of what this week has been about.
IV
The first tower is not a folly. It has been climbed, and the bell has gone twenty-four times: a settler up on the watch sees somebody a long way out, hungry, carrying nothing, and calls it in.
Which is why the sheet is not called the tower problem. The tower works. What went wrong is what always goes wrong here: a good thing was built, and then it was built again, because the settlement had a rule permitting three and no way of noticing that the second one did nothing. A monument does not report that it is redundant. It stands there being a tower, exactly as much a tower as the first, and every block in it is a block that is not a hall.
V
The other half of the day, and it is the more cheerful half. Four hundred and seven distinct things have been asked for on this coast, in the settlers' own words, and as of this afternoon every single one classifies as something the game can grant. Yesterday nine matched nothing at all. Four days ago the number was thirty-eight, and a man who asked for a salmon trap was handed a well.
| Distinct things asked for | 407 |
| Heard as nothing at all | 0 |
| Open proposals filed under the wrong kind | 0 |
Three of those were corrected this afternoon and one of them was the trap this codebase had already written down and walked into anyway. A settler asked for a communal hour log for tracking work hours and contributions, because sometimes it feels like the people who help the most get overlooked. It was filed as a road. The file says why, in a comment written days ago: `track` is the road's word. Carrying it would have paved the valley.
A rain catchment with stone channels and a basin was filed as a hearth. A quiet cove sheltered by the hills, calm enough for a sail, was filed as a market — because the settler had said they would trade a whole stack of wood for a little bit of peace on the water, and the word list heard the trade and not the peace.