Clay by the water

Flora Green has changed jobs. In this film she works the clay pit outside Hollowridge, and it has the same problem her quarry had: it is an open pit, so why would she vanish into it? She gets a shovel. It is a lower, scooping swing than the pickaxe, down into the wet clay, with clods flying off it and the shovel sound the farmers already use.

A clay pit in a dry meadow never made sense either, so now it has to stand within 3 tiles of water. That rule showed me a real problem right away. I checked how far a town would have to walk for that water, and on a big map, on 4 of the 11 seeds I tried, it was over 115 tiles from the camp. Nobody is going to walk that far for clay. That would be a town stuck for no reason at all.

A bigger map does not mean a bigger place to build, it just means more of it, further out. So the land near the camp now follows the same rule at every size: there is always water 20 to 29 tiles from the fire, a pond if no river happens to come by, and coal and iron within 40 to 80 steps.

The film took a second try. In the first one the camera sat behind her and you mostly saw her back, her hair and a big wooden tub. It is a film about someone working, so I turned it around to where she faces, and now you can see her do it.

The maps got a cleaning at the same time. The 64 by 64 map is gone, it was just too small for a decent game, and with it went the little test maps nobody needs anymore. A new game now starts at 256, and 512 is open to players instead of a debug option. Even bigger maps are something I want for exploring and for trains later on, but those need the ground drawn differently first: at 2048, by my own sum, the ground’s textures alone would take about 16 GB.

And the houses grew, ready for ideas I have for later. A cabin is now a plot two tiles wide and three deep, with the door on the short side and a fenced backyard behind the house, the same fence as the fields but without a gate. Nobody walks in those yards yet.