Scarcity and the Forest Reserve

Two commitments sit uneasily next to each other, and this page is about how the design lets them coexist. The first is that the studio does not steer scarcity. The second is that the studio owns a block of timberland and sells from it. Understanding why both survive explains most of the Reserve’s rules.

The studio does not control scarcity

The idea starts as an observation about player behaviour: if everyone develops land, timber becomes scarcer and more valuable. The design view is that this is self-balancing. Some players will build, some will hold timber, replanting is a long game, and rising prices push people toward the next region.

The pillar is that the studio does not control scarcity: that is up to the players. It comes with a caveat that shaped the design. The studio does control the rules, so fairness means locking them. Publish how fast each species grows and how fast cut ground regrows, then leave the numbers alone. Changes go through a vote or a published schedule, and balancing happens before the lock, not after. Never adjust supply to move a price, because a studio that nudges supply when prices fall is a studio that sets prices.

Where the loop is not yet closed

The design expects scarcity to arise from development: players build, building uses timber, the timber they leave standing becomes dearer. In the prototype that loop is partly open. Buildings are bought with lumber, not logs, and the plan to make buildings need particular species (a cabin wanting cedar shakes, a barn wanting Douglas-fir beams) has not been built. Until it is, the main thing that changes how much timber is standing is how much players cut and replant. That makes the replant decisions the real source of scarcity today, which is also why the forester bot does so well in the simulations.

A design note adds a point about the future. Once homesteads fill, new building room from the next era is the biggest single lever on demand. That is a studio lever, which the pillar seems to forbid. The workable reading is the one the pillar allows: eras arrive on a published schedule or by player milestone, not on the studio’s discretion. Which of those it is, remains undecided.

The Reserve as a seller that cannot haggle

The Forest Reserve is a large tract the studio holds, grows trees on and sells timber from, with the price set by supply and demand rather than by selling unlimited trees to players. It is modelled on how a national forest sells timber: a finite number of stands, regrowth after cutting, a price that moves with scarcity, and a floor that protects players. In the prototype there are forty stands in the northeast of the valley, each a particular species with its own haul-loss band, ringed on the map when ready.

The price of a stand is the logs it holds, times the species’ value, times a scarcity index. The index is a rule, not a decision: it falls toward one half when many stands are ready and rises toward one when few are. A few readings of this are worth stating plainly, labelled as readings of the code.

The index never rises above one, so the Reserve never charges more than the logs would fetch at base value. Scarcity here acts as a discount when the forest is full, not a premium when it is picked over. That fits the player-protecting floor in the design, and it means the Reserve is a source of fresh timber at a fair price, not a squeeze. Players still lose some of each stand to haul loss and saw yield, so a purchase is a bet on their own logistics. A bought stand regrows from nothing, which makes the Reserve a renewable seller, and simulated settlers buy stands at a rate that grows with the town, so a busy town drains it and the price rises on its own.

The studio is a seller to its own players, which is where the tension lives. The reason this is acceptable inside the pillar is that every number is published and the studio has no discretion over any of them: it cannot hold a price up, cut supply or run a sale. The reason it might still deserve scrutiny is that a seller that also writes the rules is still a seller, and a future designer who loosens “the rules are fixed” for the Reserve alone would remove the very thing that makes it defensible. That is the decision most worth protecting here.

What must not be said about it

Copy about the Reserve describes what it sells and at what rule-based price. It does not call the timber a good store of value or tell players its price will go up. The project does not describe land or timber as rising in value, and a scarcity-priced seller is exactly where marketing would be tempted.

The rule numbers are in the Forest Reserve reference, and the species growth rates that drive regrowth are in timber and growth.