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.

Every standing building carries a level from 0 to 100, read off its own fabric: room per unit of ground, storeys, what the walls are made of, daylight on the floor, how much of it is dressed, whether it has a way in, a flue and a roof, and what condition it is in. Nothing assigns a level; it is a reading, like capacity.

The level is reported on a scale the calendar sets, from 8 in 1100 to 100 in 2000, and the era sets a second ceiling. A perfect building of 1200 is a level 18 building. A hundred is unreachable before the year 2000, and then only for a contemporary building that has had everything done to it.

What moves a building up is work. The city runs an improvement programme beside new construction: the lowest, plainest, busiest buildings nearest the middle are surveyed, the next step for each is designed (another storey, a taller room, a tower or stack, a wider footprint, a walled yard, and every step also better material, more glazing and a better-dressed face), and the difference becomes a building site on an occupied house. What is never touched is the footing, because a later building may be standing on this one’s bottom course. So a refit starts at the second course up, and the bottom course of a modern shop is medieval stone.

Fabric wears at the rate of what it is made of: thatch thirty years, daub sixty, timber ninety, brick two hundred, cut stone four hundred. Somebody living or working in a building replaces the slipped tile before the rain reaches the beams; nobody does that for an empty one. A building that has had everything its age can give it, or has simply worn out, comes down and is built again on its own footings to what the current age would make of the plot. There is always something in hand.

In the code: crates/sim/src/building.rs crates/sim/src/city/improve.rs

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