Core loop

The town’s loop · The player’s loop · What a year costs ·

The town’s loop

1. A need. The city measures itself every month: people without a roof, grain without a store, work without a workshop, a threat without a wall. The largest shortage becomes a commission for a craft.
2. A lot. A household with money and need claims a lot from what is free: the leftovers between existing walls and lanes, fronting a street if it can. Medieval districts come out crooked and nineteenth-century ones rectangular because of this and nothing else.
3. A design. The craft’s best builder turns the situation into twenty dials, the dials into a form, and the form is measured for what it affords before it is named.
4. Quarry. Somebody walks to a tree, a rock face or a clay pit and wins material out of the ground. The ground loses that voxel.
5. Carry and place. Material is carried to the site and set down one voxel at a time in plan order. A wall goes up course by course over weeks; a town of twenty does not start what twenty cannot carry.
6. Inherit. The next building on that plot is founded on whatever this one left, and the level of what is standing is read again so the improvement programme knows what to do next.

Nothing is placed by the game; every voxel is carried there by someone who wanted it there, and the next century builds on top of it.

The player’s loop

1. Watch. The town at the speed you choose, under the lens you choose: material, era, water, cultures, traffic.
2. Read. The chronicle says what happened and why; the panels say how close the next era is, what the works are waiting on, who is hungry.
3. Lean. Tax, tariff, public works, relief, a fire code, schooling, the garrison, the wall, tribute: each with a cost and a lag.
4. Absorb. The town answers in its own time, often not the way you wanted, and the answer stays in the ground.

What a year costs

A year is 360 daily ticks. People act every day; construction batches every ten; the month reviews needs, prices, streets and the wall; the year end brings the harvest accounts, demographics, taxes, wear, the outside world, the hazards and the era check. The water model steps monthly and again when a storm breaks. Everything above is deterministic from the seed and the settings.

← Concept Progression arc →

This chapter is docs/design/02-core-loop.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.