Why the game works this way

The reference section of this site says what the rules are. The pages here say why. Each one takes a part of the game that looks arbitrary from the outside (money that only flows one way, a forest the studio owns, a deed you earn by cutting lumber, a fair where nothing you win can be spent) and walks through the reasoning that put it there. The point is to keep a later designer from tidying away a rule that was holding something up.

The material comes from the prototype’s source, the design notes and the simulations. Where a rule exists in the code but nobody wrote down why, the page says so and offers a reading marked as a reading.

Start with Design pillars, since the other pages are mostly those seven ideas applied to one system at a time. The economy pages come next: Economy, sinks and one-way money, Pick a lane and Scarcity and the Forest Reserve. Proving up and the deed, Skill contests, not gambling and Own town, then shared town cover how a player moves from trying the game to owning something in it. Balance findings reports what the bot simulations showed, and Setting and history separates checked facts from remembered ones.

One page covers a system that is still being designed: Eras and technology explains why the rules change as the century does, what each lever stands for, how the era clock and fading old trades work, and what could go wrong.

Two commitments hold across every page: in-game value never converts back to real money through the studio, and nobody describes land or timber as rising in value.

When a page links to a number, it links to the reference section rather than repeating it, so there is one place to correct a constant. The reference slugs are map-and-terrain, timber-and-growth, crew-cutting-and-saws, town-mills, your-sawmill, buildings-and-roads, farming-and-mercantile, town-and-markets, forest-reserve, deed-and-proving-up, leaderboards, valley-map and game-state, all under /reference/.