The rules pile up

Back to Willow Landing’s first day. Six buildings by the evening came down to one thing: Richard Power, Minnie Holden and Archibald and Agnes Horton, four loggers at one camp, cutting wood faster than the town could think of uses for it. So I measured it. With trees always ready and the wood carried off at once, one logger fells about five trees in an eight-hour shift. Four of them was simply too many for a start.

A logging camp now has room for two loggers. Its rack holds four axes, two in use and two spare, and the wagon brings four old ones. An old axe fells a tree in four seconds and carries two logs a trip. After thirty trees it starts to go dull, and by forty it works at a quarter of its speed. It never breaks, so a town can never run out of wood, but it gets slow. A steel axe from the tool bench fells in three seconds, carries three logs and stays sharp for sixty trees. Each morning a logger takes the sharpest axe on the rack, and an axe down to three quarters of its speed is swapped for a new one as soon as there is one. The camp’s card shows every axe and how worn it is.

The food in that same town had a problem of its own. In the crop picker, onions looked just as good as carrots. They are not: only carrots, bread and the new berries fill a stomach, and a raw carrot or a berry only half. Now everything you can eat carries a little plate with its portion, in the crop picker, the stock list and on every card. A crop you cannot eat says so.

That is a lot of rules for someone who has never played, and the first testers are close. So every card in the town now has the same gold look with a picture: buildings, the inserters inside a factory and the people. Building and inserter cards got an Info tab that explains in plain words how they work, with the real numbers. And there is a help screen now, behind the question mark in the corner or F1, with twenty topics, pictures and icons, links from page to page and a Back button.