What it takes

Flora Green has been digging clay for a while now, and the clay is piling up. It is meant for bricks, and bricks come from a kiln. So I opened the help to see when I could build one, and I had no idea what was missing. In my own game.

The help had a new tab for exactly this, What it takes. You pick a building and it tells you what comes before it. It was just a list. It read like a checklist somebody had printed out, and I could not see why one line came after the other. So before anyone rebuilt it in the game, I had it drawn up as a web page, because changing a page is a lot quicker than changing the game.

The first idea scrolled sideways, like the big build order chart I keep for myself. That chart shows these things very well, but I did not want to scroll sideways through a help window. So now it runs from the top down. The kiln sits on top, and under it, joined by lines, stands everything it needs: Flora’s clay pit, the quarry, and a coal mine with a dashed line, because the kiln opens without coal but will not run without it.

What your town already has is green with a tick. What you can start on right now has a red rim and says Next step, and the line under the title says it in words: one thing still to do, you can start on the coal mine. That is the answer I wanted in the first place. Click a card and you get that one’s tree, with a Back button for the way back. And since you often want to know the other way around too, every building also says what it makes, and what uses it.

The page taught me something on the way. I looked up the ammo shop and it had almost nothing above it. It costs planks though, so really you need the cutter in the sawmill before you can pay for it. I had left the costs out on purpose, as I do not want this tab to read like a shopping list. So the costs now count as lines, and the amounts stay out of it. That does make a loop: a logging camp costs planks and a sawmill costs wood, and each would need the other. The wagon’s stock pays for the first of them, so those two lines are left out.

The first real version in the game had lines all over the place. Long ones stepped sideways at every row, crossing each other for no reason. Some crossing can’t be avoided, but less is better, so lines that leave one card now share a trunk, and long ones run straight where they can. Over all the trees that took the crossings from about 10,800 down to about 1,700. The steel mill is still a big plate of spaghetti, as you can see at the end of the film, but it takes over 20 cards to get to one, so maybe that is fair.

Looking at all this also made me look at the factories themselves. The building tiers are gone, a building now grows with addons you unlock with better materials, so a sawmill can get more floors. Which made its first floor look silly: 20 by 20 tiles of empty boards for one worker. A sawmill now starts at 9 by 5, room for a pile, an inserter, the saw, an inserter and a pile, with a line around it for growth. Factories that need more machines in a row to make anything at all, like the bakery, start at 17 by 7. A test now lays out each first chain and runs real goods through it, to prove it fits.