Catalogue

The crafts · Kinds of building · Templates · Materials · Styles and scale ·

The crafts

The thing that decides what a building looks like is a craft: a lineage of builders, one per kind of need. Shelter, keeping, making, defence, husbandry, winning material, assembly, crossing. A craft is two learned things and nothing else.

A population of small networks. Sixteen numbers in, describing the situation: how badly the city wants this, how rich it is, what age it is, how easily it can get timber, stone, clay and metal, how big the plot is, how steep, how near the water, how far from the middle, inside the wall or out, how much woodland and arable is around, and how frightened everyone is. Twenty numbers out, the decisions that make a building: how much of the plot to cover, how high, how far round to take the walls, whether to put a lid on it, whether to leave a way in, how many holes, whether to lift the floor onto piers, how much of the inside to fill in, how thick, what to stick on the top, how much yard to fence, what to do with the yard, and how good the materials should be. Nothing in there says “house”. A house is one setting of those dials, and the craft has to find it.

A reward model. What the lineage currently believes each thing a building affords is worth. Affordances are physical and measured off the finished shape. A building’s capacity is never assigned: a granary holds what its dry volume holds.

The population learns by rehearsal, spread across simulation days, and by the year’s accounts. Builders are given a physical vocabulary, not coordinates for houses: support, headroom, doors, connected rooms and stairs are measured from the resulting voxels, so a large sealed or unsupported shell cannot claim the capacity of usable rooms.

Kinds of building

Heap, hut, house, tenement, farmstead, pen, plantation, granary, warehouse, workshop, sawmill, quarry, mill, forge, factory, market, town hall, church, school, hospital, tower, palisade, wall, gate, garrison, bridge. None is a template the craft is given; each is a name the measured shape earns. Once a shape has been named the trade moves in with its furniture: an oven and a flue for the forge, a wheel for the mill, a hoist beam over the warehouse door, a bell on the school, a fire in any house with a stack to take the smoke.

Templates

For when you want to say what a house should look like: a template is a kind of building as slots with options, a variant is one option per slot plus a level, and a chooser (a heuristic, or a model) picks from the menu and never draws. The city measures the result exactly like anything else and may refuse it.

Materials

Every material has a colour, a flammability, whether it bears load, what it burns to and collapses to, what it is made from and what it salvages back to, and a service life: thatch a generation, daub and timber a lifetime, brick two hundred years, cut stone four hundred. That last number is what decides that a town’s houses are rebuilt every century or two and its church is not.

Styles and scale

A style is everything the viewer may decide on top of the simulation: the render unit, the palette, the people, what grows on the ground, the surface treatment, pixel art. It may change what is drawn and how big; it may not move a voxel or a person. The simulation’s metre cells stay authoritative for collision, walking, capacity and accounting; the 1/32 m material voxels under them are presentation the rules never see.

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This chapter is docs/design/07-catalogue.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.