Open questions
Unwired levers · The site’s size · Save and load · Century-scale balance · Bridges and the far bank · Interiors and the metropolis · The full viewer in the browser · Player levers versus determinism ·
The rules as shipped are what the code does; this chapter is what the design has not yet settled or the code has not yet caught up with.
Unwired levers
The policy struct, edicts and friction exist and every rule reads them, and the browser Council exposes policy controls; the native Council now issues schooling, fire-code, flood-works, conservation and street orders. The native report panels remain read-only. Compulsory purchase exists as an edict; nothing issues it. Which levers deserve a place in the frame, and whether the launcher’s balance preset is the right home for the rest, is open.
The site’s size
The original design said 256 × 256 × 96. The code’s default site is 384 × 160 × 384 and the viewer opens at 448, because the fine detail made a small valley look like a model. The lightweight browser painter runs at 96 to 256; the full WebGPU viewer keeps fine detail and caps sites at 192. Whether one canonical size should exist at all is open.
Save and load
There is no save. Every world is its seed plus its settings plus the years it has run; a share link carries exactly that. A saved world would have to carry the crafts’ learned weights, every person, every voxel’s stamp and the water model’s state, and the current thinking is a versioned snapshot rather than a replay, guarded by a determinism hash. Not started.
Century-scale balance
Long runs still stall in ways the fast tests cannot see: a town that never leaves the medieval era because literacy never rises, a valley whose stone runs out before the salvage curve catches it. The recovery-rate crossing is tuned by hand; whether it should be a tunable, and whether the era gates should scale with the site, is open.
Bridges and the far bank
A bridge is built when the crossing craft has learned a deck on piers and the city has a reason to cross. Planning a bridge as a piece of the street plan, rather than waiting for one to be commissioned, is not done.
Interiors and the metropolis
Citizens walk the outdoor network and supported mine stairs; interiors are measured but not walked. Above a few thousand people the outer districts are aggregated, and the metropolis-scale frame budget of the native viewer is not yet proven.
The full viewer in the browser
The Bevy viewer now has a WebGPU build sharing its geometry, shaders, controls and engine panel with desktop; the lightweight CPU painter remains available. Browser GPU coverage, memory use in mature cities, touch ergonomics and performance on lower-end devices remain open. See WEB.md for build and acceptance commands.
Player levers versus determinism
If the player can lean on the town at any moment, a share link no longer reproduces a world. The design leans toward recording the edicts with their day in the share string, which keeps determinism and makes a policy a thing that can be shared.
This chapter is docs/design/12-open-questions.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.