A place to rest

With the people in, a few things started to look wrong. A grown-up without a job just stood still all day, as if someone had paused them. Now they do what the old folks do: they wander a little around town and come back. It sounds like nothing, but a town where everyone without work stands frozen looks broken, and now it looks lived in.

The other thing was people walking straight through each other. They are smaller than a tile, so two of them meet on the same path all the time. I first tried to fix it in the simulation itself, and it broke a sawmill: a hauler nudged a hair off his pickup spot kept walking back to it forever. So the fix lives only in what you see. When two people meet, each steps a little to their right and they pass, while the game underneath still counts them where they really are.

Last week a day became a year, so people grow old and die. That meant they needed somewhere to go. The graveyard is in: a small walled yard with twelve plots, a headstone for each grave and a memorial wall at the back. It shows up in the build menu after the first death. Mourners visit the grave, and if the town has nowhere to bury someone, it tells you so, and the family grieves a day longer. After twenty years a grave is cleared for someone new and the name moves onto the memorial wall, so the yard never fills the valley. People also live a little longer now, to somewhere between 75 and 90, so the grandma you start with no longer dies on day three.

The names got a lot bigger too: 150 for men, 150 for women and 300 surnames. And about one family in twelve is a pun family. You might meet Robin and Sandy Banks, Rocky Shore, Herb and Rose Garden, or Walker Plank. I could not resist.

Most of the day went into talking, not building. Factories are going to work like the part of Factorio I enjoy most: an item goes onto a belt, meets others, and after three to five machines it comes out as one product. A bakery mills the grain, kneads it with water and bakes the dough over coal, all on its own floor. Belts will cross on little bridges you can watch the goods ride over. Stone comes from a quarry, but digging there wakes the glimmers, just like the mine, so the first defence is a wooden guard post with watchmen and clubs, and a fenced yard people can run to when something glows at them in the dark.

There will be a market, without money. Buying just means fetching from the right stall: someone from each family walks from stall to stall with a bag and brings it home, as long as the town has actually made the goods. And everything will cost something to build, wood at the very start and wood and stone after that, carried to the site before the builder can start. None of that is built yet, but now I know what I am building.