Buildings and roads

Players spend lumber to put structures on cleared parcels. Each parcel holds at most one building. A road is separate: it can share a parcel with timber or a building.

Costs

Structures and roads. The note is the in-game description.

Structure	Key	Cost (bd ft)	In-game note
Cabin	cabin	1,500	Your home on the claim
Woodshed	woodshed	500	Keeps the crew rested longer
Barn	barn	2,500	Required to prove up
Sawmill	mill	4,000	Mill your own logs and buy from neighbors
Road	road	200	Shares the parcel; cuts skidding losses

Placement

build(parcel, kind), kind other than road:
    refuse if the parcel has standing timber, a building, or a field
    refuse if kind already exists, except the woodshed
    require lumber >= cost
    lumber -= cost;  parcel.building = kind;  built[kind] += 1

build(parcel, "road"):
    refuse if the parcel already has a road
    require lumber >= 200
    lumber -= 200;  parcel.road = true

A parcel that is allowed a building is therefore any cleared parcel without a field or another building. That includes meadow parcels. The interface additionally disables the building buttons on the landing. The build function does not check this itself. A road may be built on any parcel without one: timbered, cleared, farmed or built on.

Only the woodshed is repeatable. Each extra woodshed costs 500 bd ft and adds 500 bd ft to the appraisal, but crews rest only 25 percent faster no matter how many exist.

Businesses (see town and markets) are stored as a building of kind biz: plus the market id, and are placed with their own rules.

Effects

Structure	Effect
Cabin	A deed goal. Required before a boarding house. Adds 1,500 to the appraisal.
Barn	A deed goal. Required before a teamster stable. Adds 2,500 to the appraisal.
Woodshed	Crew rest is multiplied by 0.75. Adds 500 each to the appraisal.
Sawmill	Creates the sawmill record (see your sawmill). Adds 4,000 and later upgrade costs to the appraisal.
Road	See below. Adds 200 each to the appraisal.

The barn and cabin do nothing else in the code. The barn does not store produce: harvested crops go straight into a counter whether or not a barn exists.

Roads

A road on a parcel changes three things:

skidding:   stepCost(parcel) = 1 (2 on steep ground), instead of 2 or 3 (+3 on steep ground)
yield:      logs cut from the parcel are multiplied by ROAD_SHARE = 0.9
appraisal:  +200 per road parcel

The landing starts as a road, so a new claim already holds 200 bd ft of appraised road. Roads are never removed.

Inputs, outputs and state

Inputs are a parcel, a kind and the lumber on hand. Outputs are a changed parcel, a counter and a ledger entry. State: each parcel’s b (building kind or null) and road flag, and the built map from kind to count. Business buildings are recorded as built["biz:id"] = 1. The legacy field cabinAt is set when a cabin is built and is not read.

For the shared game

Buildings change the economy in three places: the appraisal, the deed and the rest of the crew. A server should own the parcel grid so that a building cannot be claimed without payment. Placement rules live partly in the interface in the prototype, so the server should hold a single rule set: no building on the landing, no building on a field, and a decision on meadow parcels. The woodshed that can be bought repeatedly is a lumber sink with an appraisal benefit.

Source: prototype/index.html · constants BUILD, ROAD_SHARE in rules.json · logic build, claimValue, stepCost