Overview

Harrison Homestead is a frontier economy set around Harrison, Idaho. Every player starts with a 160-acre claim. Timber grows in real time by species, on the ground that suits it. Players cut it, skid it to a landing, and haul it to rival mills that bid by species and by how full their yards are. They build, farm, and choose a trade by spotting what the town’s wanted board says is underserved. Using the land costs nothing from the first minute. Owning it comes later, once a player has proved up by doing the work.

What exists today

The prototype is one HTML file of about 1,900 lines. It runs entirely in the browser and keeps its save in the browser or in a claude.ai artifact database. It has the claim map, nine timber species, three town mills and an optional mill of your own, farming and a town-run store, a wanted board with simulated competitors, a Forest Reserve of studio-owned stands, a deed, six leaderboards, and a small fair with axe and saw contests.

The prototype has no server, accounts, shared town, marketplace, subdivision, taxes or seasons. Every player’s neighbors, competitors and mill yards are simulated privately, and scores and saves are written by the browser. The hosted game is different: you play it in the browser with a free account on a hosted server, so your claim is waiting when you come back and the valley is shared with other players. The rules on these pages are the ones it starts from.

Where to start

If you want to feel the game, begin with the first tutorial. It runs with the sandbox test tools on, so nothing waits on a timer.

If you are going to change a rule, read the matching reference page first, then the balance findings, since the bot simulation is the only check on whether a change breaks the economy.

How this site stays true to the game

The reference tables are not retyped. A script loads the prototype in a headless browser and writes its rule constants to a JSON file, and the reference pages render their tables from that file. Run npm run rules in docs-site after changing the prototype and the tables follow. Formulas are taken from the code and each page names the functions it came from, so a reader can check any claim.

The design rules behind the choices are collected in the explanation section.