Territory and water
The site · Villages and fields · Streets · Water · The climate over centuries ·
The site
A fixed-size region chosen at the start: a river, a ford, hills, a stone outcrop, woodland, arable flats, the sea. The default is 384 paces across and 160 high (the design once said 256 by 96; the code moved, see open questions). The site never grows. When the city runs out of flat ground it goes up, or it drains the marsh, or it terraces the hill, all of which are visible, expensive, permanent changes to the terrain.
It shapes the ground between the buildings as well as under them. Every year a little of the public-works purse goes on making up the hollows, grassing over the scars nobody walks on, bringing the market place to one level and putting trees in on the greens. All of it fills and none of it cuts: the town rises over its own past rather than erasing it.
Villages and fields
Villages spread when local crowding or food pressure sends settlers to reachable land. Their spacing leaves room for homes and farms without scaling up with the map, and there is no fixed village-count ceiling. Barns occupy open land beyond the village with long cultivated strips; fields stop at woodland, water and terrain obstacles.
Streets
Paths are worn by footfall: above a threshold the ground becomes packed dirt, then gravel, then cobble, then setts, then asphalt, replacing the surface in place. The town also lays out a street plan to its gates, crossings and civic doors, builds it by hand out of quarried stone, refuses plots that would stand in it, and drives it through the occasional building that already does. The street plan of the metropolis is the footpath network of the hamlet, straightened only where someone paid to straighten it.
Water
Rain does not evaporate into a statistic. It soaks into the ground, runs downhill along a drainage network worked out from the terrain itself, fills the hollows into lakes that spill when they are full and dry back to mud in a drought, runs as streams where there is enough of it, and cuts into soft ground and drops the spoil downstream where it slows. Six hundred years of it leave a valley that is not the valley generation made.
A flood is what happens when the valley delivers more water than the channel holds. After one the town will not build below the flood line, which is how a flooded town grows uphill; it ditches and culverts its wet streets to win that ground back, banks the river when it can afford to, loses a working to the water table and stops driving the next one that deep, pumps the drowned ones out once it has engines, and buys its winters in firewood and then coal.
The climate over centuries
Above the year’s weather is a clock of cold and warm periods. Snow lies as voxels, firn turns to glacier ice that creeps into the valley and melts into rivers, ground freezes to permafrost, and the fertility all of it leaves decides the harvest. A cold century is something the town lives through and the land remembers.
This chapter is docs/design/06-territory-and-water.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.