Berries in the wild

I started a new town, Willow Landing, and played its first day. By half past seven in the evening it had a logging camp, a food stall, a farmhouse with a field of carrots, a well and a sawmill. That was far too much for one day, and I will come back to that tomorrow. What caught my eye was the food. Twelve people eat about twelve loaves a day, the wagon brought a hundred, and Clement Dyer’s carrots need four days in the ground before there is anything to pull up. Meanwhile Amelia and Roland Rowe and Elsie Holden had nothing to do at all.

So now there is food in the wild. Blueberry bushes and strawberry patches grow along the edges of the fertile ground, about twelve of them on a small map. Nobody picks them by themselves. You mark a ripe bush with the new Gather tool, a little basket, and someone without a job walks over, picks its four berries and carries them to the food stall. Each berry is half a meal. Without a food stall nobody bothers. A picked bush grows back in four days, and you mark it again when you want it picked again. Clicking a bush opens its own card, which says how many berries are left and when it will be ripe.

The bushes have one more use. The glimmers come out of the old shafts hungry, and a bush out in the grass is something to go to that is not your field. In the video a settler picks a blueberry bush for the stall, and that night two glimmers find a strawberry patch and eat it bare, nibble by nibble.

Willow Landing also started without the big stockpile in the middle of town. It made life too easy: everything went in, everything came out, and nobody had to think about where the planks actually were. Now every producer keeps what it makes. The logging camp stacks its own logs, the farmhouse its own bales, and when a camp is full the loggers stop. Anthony Webb and Margaret Power carry wood straight from where it lies to whoever needs it, and in a bigger town the haulers work from a haulers hut.

Placing things changed with it. With no big pile to draw from, you rarely have all the wood in one place, so the game no longer asks. Everything goes down as a blueprint and waits, and when two of them want the same wood, the one you placed first gets it first.

The watchmen got something to worry about too. A club now breaks after ten glimmers, and new ones are carved at a carving bench inside the sawmill, out of the same wood the planks come from.