Documentation

Palim is short for palimpsest: a page scraped clean and written over, where the old writing still shows through. The full word was already taken as a name, so the project is Palim and the idea keeps its name.

Three kinds of page, kept apart on purpose. The design document is the vision, including what is not built yet. The rules as shipped are generated from the code the game runs, so they cannot drift. The features describe what is in the game today, each with the simulation itself running on the page.

The design document

1. Concept — One city, one site, six hundred years; every stage stays legible in the ground underneath the next one.
2. Core loop — Quarry, carry, place, inherit; the town does this on its own, and the player's loop is to watch, lean and read what happened.
3. Progression arc — A founding village, its daughter villages, a feudal region, a metropolis; gated by eras the city earns, and by a level per building that only the twenty-first century can take to a hundred.
4. Economy — Materials that run out, a treasury that pays wages, tribute that flows up the feudal ladder, and legitimacy that everything reads.
5. Peoples — The people are not interchangeable: one founding people, daughter peoples that name themselves, strangers with their own looks, converts, feuds, and a region whose make-up drifts over centuries.
6. Territory and water — A fixed site that is shaped by the town as much as under it; villages that keep their distance; streets worn and laid out; and the water, which is not a dice roll.
7. Catalogue — What the city can build and be made of: eight crafts, twenty-six kinds of building read off their shape, parametric templates, materials with a service life, and styles that never move a voxel.
8. Signature events — Things that happen to the city, all of which leave marks; and the century timelapse, which is the moment the whole design is for.
9. Tone and aesthetic — Earth, stone and weather, drawn at 1/32 of a metre; a chronicle in plain sentences; and what the game is not.
10. The player — A small set of levers, each with a cost and a lag, and one deliberately expensive direct edit.
11. Success criteria — Five tests the design has to pass, and what is out of scope so that it can.
12. Open questions — The undecided design issues, in public, so that the vision and the game can be told apart.

The rules as shipped

Every table and number, exported from the Rust definitions on each build: eras and their gates, the catalogue, materials, goods and recipes, events, water, needs, policy, templates, world recipes, climate scenarios, controls, and the tunable rule reference.

Features, live

• The valley and its recipes — A coast, a winding river, hills and woodland from one seed; then caves, cliffs, gorges and terraces carved by a recipe before anybody arrives.
• Rain, rivers and lakes — Rain soaks in, runs downhill along a drainage network read off the terrain, fills hollows into lakes that spill when full, runs as streams, and cuts into soft ground.
• Floods, and what the town does about them — A flood is what happens when the valley delivers more water than the channel holds. The town refuses to build below the flood line, ditches its wet streets, banks the river, and grows uphill.
• Seasons, snow and glaciers — A climate over centuries with cold and warm periods; snow that lies as voxels, firn, glacier ice that creeps into the valley and melts into rivers, permafrost, and the fertility all of it leaves.
• Fire, plague and earthquakes — Each hazard rolls once a year with the shapes in the rules reference. Fire scales with thatch and a dry year, plague with crowding, earthquakes only shake the sites that shake, and all of them leave something in the ground.
• Quarry, carry, place — Every voxel in every building was quarried out of the ground by a named person, carried to the site and set down in plan order. A wall goes up course by course over weeks.
• The crafts, or nobody is given a blueprint — A building's shape comes out of a small network that is bred, not written, and what the building is, hut, granary, palisade, bridge, is read back off the finished shape by measuring what it physically affords.
• Building templates — A template is a kind of building as slots with options; a variant is one option per slot plus a level; the chooser picks, the compiler draws, the city measures.
• Streets, worn and laid out — Paths are worn by footfall and resurfaced in place; the town also lays out a street plan to its gates and crossings, builds it out of quarried stone, and drives it through the occasional building.
• The wall — The wall's line is the outline of what is already built, smoothed, wobbled, then fitted to the ground; it stops at the river and picks up on the far bank, and it is still standing in 1890.
• Eras, and the palimpsest — Every placed voxel stores the year and era it was placed in. Colour the city by that and six centuries are legible at once; cut the ground open and the old town is under the new one.
• Levels, and why a building is never finished — Every building carries a level from 0 to 100, read off its fabric on a scale the calendar sets. The town spends most of its effort on what is already standing, and when a building has had everything its age can give it, it comes down and is built again on its own footings.
• Villages, fields and the feudal region — Crowded settlements send parties of adults to reachable land with room for a village and its fields. Local lords collect rents, village knights owe tribute to the town's lord, and the dues end in the industrial era.
• Peoples, descent and strangers — The founding village is one named people. Daughter villages name themselves; peoples who share ground and a hungry year fall out; strangers arrive from foreign cities with their own looks, and a region whose people start taking a foreign name pays for it.
• The outside world — Foreign cities are rows in a table with a population, a wealth, a specialism, a price list and an opinion. They grow, industrialise and change their minds about you, and are never rendered.
• Material, money and salvage — Sixteen goods with a stock, a price and an appetite; workshops run recipes; the mountain feeds the city early and the city feeds on itself late, and the two crossings are tuned to happen at about the same time.
• The governor, policy and legitimacy — You do not place buildings and you do not command citizens. You set policy, spend a treasury, and absorb the consequences; the city has its own momentum and will frequently do the opposite of what you wanted.
• Workings, mines and the water table — Coal and iron mines advance through timber-supported stairways; a working whose face is below the water table fills with water, and a town that has never lost one does not know to look.