Woods past the wall
Inside a factory the floor used to float in nothing. Now the sawmill stands in a clearing, with grass out to the horizon and trees round its walls.
Going into a factory used to feel like leaving the game. You double click the sawmill, the camera goes in, and there is the floor with its belts and saws, floating in an empty nothing. The trees, the fields, the people walking past, all gone. It was boring.
The real fix would be to show the town around it, but a factory is far bigger inside than out. A floor can be 17 by 7 tiles in a building that takes 3 by 2 on the map, so there is no way to fit it in its own spot and keep the neighbours where they are. So the world round the floor is made up, and made up cheaply.
The grass is one big flat sheet, painted from a small patch of the town’s own grass, every other copy turned over so you cannot see where they meet. It runs out to the horizon. Round the walls there is a clearing of three tiles, and past that the woods start: thin at the edge, thicker toward the back, about 150 trees round a floor that size, with the same tree models the map uses. Each factory grows its own woods from its own number, so the sawmill always has the same trees around it. The sky, the sun and the moon are the real ones, so when it is morning in the town it is morning inside too. None of it is part of the game itself. You cannot click the grass or fell those trees; they are only there to look at.
The film starts high over the town. The sawmill stands 18 tiles from the fire, with a farmhouse, two fields and three cabins round it and the woods behind it. The camera goes down the lane to its door and in.
Inside, wood rides the belts and the cutters saw it into planks. Over the wall the trees stand where trees should be, where before there was nothing. Halfway through, Bessie Stevens, one of the town’s haulers, walks in across the floor. At the end the camera rises and you see the whole room as it is now: a sawmill floor in a clearing in the woods.