Empty it first

Taking a corner of town apart used to be one click per building. In this film the corner is by the campfire: a farmhouse, its field, a well and a food stall, all in one patch. Now you press with Remove and drag, the patch turns red tile by tile, up to 10 by 10, and when you let go everything in it is marked at once. A field is in this one, so the game asks first, the same question a single field always got: its fence and crops go too. One OK covers the whole area. A drag never takes a mark off, so going over something already marked does no harm.

Iris Holland comes over with Joseph and Millicent Featherstone and Lottie Davies, and they take the patch down.

Next to it stands a sawmill, with Myrtle Duncan at work inside and wood waiting in its input pile. Until now, taking a factory down lost whatever goods lay on its floor. That wood would simply have been gone.

Now a marked factory is emptied first. A builder walks in and takes the pieces out one by one: the piles, the inserters, the cutter. While that goes on, the town tells you: the sawmill’s card, and a line beside the mouse, say the builders empty it first and count the pieces left. In the film that builder is Abraham Davies. Only when the floor is bare does the building itself come down, and the wood still in it ends up in a heap outside the door, where the haulers will find it. If you change your mind halfway, Remove on it again keeps what still stands.

The first version could get stuck. A piece with no path to it was never reached, so the sawmill would never be empty and never come down. A builder now takes such a piece from the doorway.

The film needed a second go too. The pointer in it is moved by the film itself, pressing the same buttons a player would, and in the first cut of the short it pressed before it had reached the corner of the patch. Now it gets to each target and rests there a moment before it clicks.