Own town, then shared town

The player journey is simple to say and has one rule that matters more than the rest. A new player starts in a town of their own, learns the game there, and then crosses into a shared town. This page explains why that order was chosen and why the two economies must never touch.

How it was reached

The obvious design offers two options, building your own town or joining one. That raises questions about founders and joiners, about founding as a reward, and about the risk of splitting a small player base, and it points toward defaulting every new player into the shared town. The better answer is to give everyone both. You start with your own town on the same map as the shared town, get a feel for the game, and cross into the shared town after the tutorial. You can toggle between your town, where you control everything, and the shared town, where you need to be more deliberate in what you choose. That lets the game grow players and give them something to do until the shared town starts to see people.

The reasoning is a cold-start argument and a teaching argument at once. An online town with few people in it is a poor place to learn, because the board is empty and nothing moves. A town of your own, populated by simulated settlers, is a place where the game can always be doing something. And as a place to learn, it can be forgiving in ways a shared town should not be.

What differs between the two

In your own town you control everything. Sandbox rules are allowed: time skips, restarts, and, in the prototype, test tools. The shared town is where choices matter, because other people’s decisions are in the numbers. The map is the same in both, so what you learn about the land carries over.

Real ownership exists only in the shared town, and so does the Forest Reserve. That is consistent with the rule in Proving up and the deed: proving up in your own town unlocks the crossing, the way the steamboat to Harrison is imagined, and the deed’s meaning is the shared town’s.

The rule that economies stay separate

This one is critical. Only knowledge, titles and badges, and perhaps one fixed and identical starter kit may carry from your town to the shared town. Lumber, buildings and land never transfer.

The reason is that the own town is allowed to be generous. If it can be reset, sped up or restarted, it is also a place where lumber can be produced in quantities no shared economy could support. A transfer path, even a small one, would turn the sandbox into a mint. A player could grind a tireless private town and carry the proceeds across, and every shared-town player would face an economy diluted by people who never played in it. It would also quietly reintroduce the exchange of value the one-way rules exist to prevent. With separate economies, the sandbox can stay a sandbox, and the shared town’s scarcity, which is the thing the other pillars protect, remains made by the people who are in it.

On the practice claim, the own-town half, the neighbours are simulated settlers who arrive over time, and they are labelled as simulated so nobody mistakes them for other players. The shared valley is where real neighbours are.

The launch moment

A shared town that opens when enough people are ready can be made into an event, along the lines of “The first steamboat arrives in Harrison on a stated date”. Players who finished their own town early arrive as founding settlers.

Later steps

Today there are two places: the practice claim, which is your own town, and the shared valley you enter once the claim has proved up. Further places are not planned in any detail.