The cart that never came

Edmund Lawrence is a miner in Brick Crossing, and until now his job made little sense. His mine could stand on any flat bit of grass, far from any mountain, and pull both iron ore and coal out of the same hole. Then, since workers go inside these days, he disappeared into it for the whole shift and the place looked dead.

The mountains come first. They now have spots on their outside, black lumps for coal and rusty ones for iron. There are not many, they last for ever, and the nearest of each kind is 40 to 80 steps from the camp on every map, however big it is. A mine has to stand with its back against one and it digs only what that spot holds. So Edmund digs iron, and Olive Barnes, seventeen tiles along the same wall, digs coal. A town now needs both of them before the smelter shows up in the build menu.

My first try at those spots looked good from above and awful from the side: flat orange bands up the cliff, like someone had laid bricks. Now the wall is the mountain’s own rock, with a few lumps on it.

Then I wanted to see someone come out of that mine. Every 30 seconds a miner should walk out along the rails with a cart, tip the load onto a small heap and roll back in. I wrote it, recorded the film and watched 25 seconds of a mine doing nothing. I recorded it again and it got worse, because the film now waited for a cart that was never coming, with the clock stopped, until it gave up after three minutes.

The answer was one line in the log that I should have read the first time: the heap’s model has no geometry. The heap comes in three sizes, ore and coal, all hidden until the game picks one. A model with only hidden parts counts as empty, so it did not load, and without its heap the game quietly decided there was no cart either. I added one small visible scuff on the floor, and out came Edmund.

The door is too low for him. A person here is taller than the mine’s mouth, so he ducks going through, with the cart hiding most of him. I could raise the door, but I left it, because the duck is fun.

The rattle of the cart is an ore cart on its tracks, recorded by Amusquiz99 on freesound, the next name on the thank-you card.