Bread on the ground
My play-test town starved next to a full well and bread in the grass, so the haulers now stock the food stall before any building site and clear the ground.
My last play-test town went hungry. Not for lack of food: there was bread lying in the grass, a well full of water, and a food stall in the middle of it all, empty. The stall never got stocked, and the people who eat from it starved a few steps away from their dinner.
The haulers turned out to be standing inside the storage yard, not moving. A well has a few spots round it to draw water from, and one of this well’s spots lay under the storage yard. The haulers walked to the nearest spot, into the yard, and there the yard, the well and a cabin walled them in. They had no way out. Now people only ever walk to a building’s open doors, never to a spot under someone else’s building.
That was not the whole story. A town that is busy building sends its haulers to the building sites first, and with few haulers and many sites the sites got everything and the stall got nothing. The town built before it fed. Now a food stall short of food or drink comes before any site. Only urgent work goes ahead of it, like boarding up a shaft or mending a wreck.
There was also a lot of stuff just lying about. Until now the haulers only took leftovers into storage. Now every pile nobody needs goes to the nearest haulers hut or storage yard. Wood from felled trees is the one thing they leave alone: it stays where the loggers drop it until someone is short of wood. And a hauler no longer walks over to a pile it will not lift. A pile with no way to it is left alone for an hour, so they move on to the next one.
To film it I took the start camp, unpacked the wagon onto the grass and called off five building sites, so their planks and stone lay round the fire with the bread and the water. Four haulers start at eight in the morning: Elijah and Iris Holland, and Myrtle and Geoffrey Duncan. Myrtle’s first load is bread for the stall, her second is water.
By the time the camera has gone round the town the stall is stocked and the haulers are on the planks, the stone and the wood. Before the film ends the grass round the camp is clean.