Proving up and the deed

A claim in this game is usable from the first minute and owned only after work. The gap between those two states is the deed, and the deed went through three designs before it settled. The history is worth keeping because each version failed in a way that still teaches something.

Where it started: free land, earned

The first version borrowed from the Homestead Act. The idea was to give some land away for free, and the design answer was the historical bargain: claim it free, prove up through play, earn the deed, and abandoned claims revert. Free claims sit in outlying areas, prime land is sold, and there are caps per era. The reason this suits a game is that it solves the problem every land game has, which is that the first buyers get the best ground and latecomers get nothing. Free outlying claims give latecomers somewhere to start, and proving up means the land goes to people who use it.

First fix: residence

The first working rule borrowed the real one, which required living on and improving the land for a span of years (a fact recorded from memory and not yet checked, see Setting and history). The prototype turned that into time on the claim. The first five-day simulation showed that proving up took under two hours of play, so a residence requirement was added. It worked as a patch: with the other balance fixes of that round, the three leading strategies came within about seven percent of each other, and nobody could prove up faster than the clock allowed.

Why residence was dropped

The project holds that players should be able to get going right away, and should have to hit a milestone before they own land in the shared valley. A residence clock is a come-back-tomorrow mechanic. It rewards logging in at the right times and punishes everything else, which cuts against that. What replaced it is a deed made of work. Build a cabin, clear four parcels (ten acres), build a barn, replant two parcels, and produce 10,000 board feet from your own timber, counting what your mill paid you and what your own sawmill made from your logs. All of these are things a player does while enjoying the game, and none of them depend on a clock. The deed’s list is in the deed reference.

Production is also the right measure of the pillar, “play now, own later”. A new player is not kept out of anything for a day. They are kept out of the shared valley until the claim shows evidence of use, which echoes what the original proving up asked for in a real homesteader. Replanting is on the list for a reason beyond realism: it makes every deed-holder take at least one step in the long game of regrowth, which is where the forest’s future comes from.

What the simulations say about it

The honest result is mixed. In the latest five-day run the logger and forester bots proved up in about 1.7 hours of game time, the entrepreneur in 8, the miller in 17 and the casual bot in 40. The fast case is the one that prompted the residence fix in the first place. It may be acceptable if the deed is meant as a gate on features and not as a long commitment, but it also means the deed alone does not prevent a flood of fast-proved claims once the shared valley fills. Whether the production target should rise, or whether other goals should join it, is a balancing question that has not been answered, and it ties into whether proving up is also the entry to the shared town (see Own town, then shared town).

No taxes, nothing to pay

The deed is earned by proving up: a cabin, a barn, two parcels replanted and 10,000 board feet produced from your own timber. Once earned it cannot be lost. There are no taxes and no forfeiture, and nothing to pay for it. An earlier design considered taxes to keep people playing, but a weekly tax is a come-back-regularly mechanic, which is what the deed was redesigned to avoid.

What the deed does after it is earned

Once issued, the deed shows an appraisal, which the prototype computes from standing timber, roads, buildings, the mill and fields. It also has a button that records a listing price on the claim. The button is a stub: nothing is bought or sold with it, and the game has nothing to buy.