Nothing is free any more

Until now a building in Groundwork appeared the moment you placed it. That made playing from the very start pointless: the stranded camp has a wagon with a little wood and some planks, and none of it mattered. So I went back to the beginning and did things in order for once.

First, costs. A logging camp now takes ten planks, a stockpile five wood, a well eight. Place one and you get a blueprint on the ground, see-through and blue. Haulers walk to the wagon, pick up what the site still needs and carry it over. At first only one hauler would serve a site at a time while the others stood around, so now each claims part of what is missing and they work it together.

Once everything is there, the builders come. My first version had five of them walk to the door and stand there, which looked like a queue at a shop. Now each takes their own spot round the site, swings a hammer, and the real building rises out of the blueprint from the ground up, with a little dust where the two meet.

Then I played it, and the game got stuck. Two haulers, three loggers, and nobody to build anything, because only people without a job built. So there is a rule now: the town always keeps at least one hauler and one builder. If everyone is busy, someone is taken off another job, and if the builder dies, someone else picks up the hammer.

While playing I also noticed the loggers only planted trees and never cut the grown ones. They do it in the right order again: pick up logs, fell marked trees, replant what they owe, fell what has grown, and only then plant more.

The rest of the day went to the factories. Every machine now has the same shape idea: a body with one small tile per item on its sides, the first input behind and the first output ahead, and the corners left truly empty so other things fit there. That turns a factory floor into a bit of a tetris puzzle, which I like. What goes in and out is shown with a little pixel-art sign of the item on a pole. And five buildings that only existed on paper got models: a honey house with its beehives, a chandler, a lampworks and a long ropewalk. The quarry and the clay pit are in too, though digging in the quarry wakes the glimmers.

One thing you cannot see: every session is now recorded, every command with the moment it was given. I can play a game again from the start without touching anything, and check that it comes out the same. When something goes wrong in a game, I can watch exactly what happened instead of guessing.