A pit has no door

Yesterday I told how workers now go inside their buildings instead of blocking the door. That is fine for a clerk in an office. It is not fine for Flora Green. She works at the quarry in Hollowridge, and a quarry is an open pit. There is nothing to go into, so for a few hours she simply vanished the moment she got to work, and stone came out of nowhere.

I had also never given her anything to dig in. Since early October my design notes have said a quarry should sit on a rock deposit, followed by the honest words that the game has no rock. The ground knew grass and water, and that was it. A quarry went wherever you dropped it, in the middle of a meadow if you liked.

So first there is rock now. Grey patches lie scattered over the map, not many, and they last for ever. One is always a short walk from the camp, so a new town is never stuck without stone. A quarry only stands on rock. I first kept every other building off those patches as well, then changed my mind: they are not in the main part of the map anyway, so build there if you want to.

Then Flora got her pickaxe. She stands on the terrace facing the rock, swings it from overhead, slower and heavier than an axe, and at every blow grey chips fly off the rock face. Now and then she walks to another spot. Eleanor Vickers waits at the door to haul the stone away. The sound is a garden pickaxe on rock, recorded by Sadiquecat on freesound, who now has a line on the thank-you card.

The first film had a problem up on the crane. The block on its rope bobs up and down as if it is being hoisted, and the rope bobbed with it, so every time the block sank a gap opened and the rope hung in the air under the arm. I made the rope longer, so it ran on inside the arm. That was worse: now the two flickered where they overlapped, and it showed that the rope had been half a block off centre all along. Now the rope belongs to the arm and ends right under it, in the middle, and only the block moves, sliding up and down it.

That took three films to get right, for a thing nobody asked for and everybody would have seen.