How last night went
After a night of Cinderkin, Ashwell now wakes up to a summary of what it cost, and eaten wheat stays bitten until a farmer sows it again.
When I played Ashwell for a day, the raids went by without a word. A pack would nibble at a field, empty a pantry, chew on a fence, and in the morning the town looked the same as the evening before. If I had not been watching at 02:00, I would never have known. A loss you never hear about is not a loss, so the nights felt like nothing.
Now the morning tells you. From 06:00 until noon one alert, “How last night went”, sums up what the night cost. Each loss is a sentence of its own: people killed or hurt, buildings wrecked or damaged, food taken from pantries or from other buildings, crops eaten, pieces of fence broken. Only the lines with something in them show. Click the alert and it opens the place that was hit hardest.
The fields show it too. A spot where a Cinderkin ate the crop used to turn bare, the same as one never sown. Now it is ravaged: three bitten stubs, a torn strip, crumbs of the crop and scratched soil, in the colours of whatever grew there. Fields do not grow back by themselves, so it stays like that until a farmer sows it again.
The film is 06:05 in Ashwell. The Oakleys, the Dyers and the Penningtons are waking up in their tents by the fire, and in front of the camp lie two fields of wheat. The bites are thickest on the mountain side, where the Cinderkin come from, and thin out toward the camp. On the first field one piece of fence is broken, the one on that same side. Up in the corner the summary says it plainly: Cinderkin ate 56 crops on 2 fields, and broke 1 piece of fence.
I have to own up to one thing about this film. The real pack in that save got through only 8 plants before dawn, which is too few to see on camera. So for the film I laid the bites by hand, in the same way the Cinderkin lay them, and counted them the same way too. From 06:05 on, it is the game running.
One kind of night gets no summary at all: a night where the watch killed Cinderkin and the town lost nothing. At first those kills got an alert of their own, but a night with nothing lost gives you nothing to do. So the kills only show up next to a loss. If Ashwell wakes up to “How last night went”, something is waiting to be fixed: a fence to mend, a field to sow again, a pantry to fill.