Built by your own hands
Where settlements are going and why, plus a day of fixes, from footbridges to grey skies.
Today we sat down with how settlements grow in Chronicle and decided to change it. Here's what we decided, why, and what else went out today.
Settlements: from watching to building
Right now your settlement mostly builds itself. Your citizens gather wood, stone and food, and every minute they decide on their own whether to put up a hut, a farm or a store. Left alone, a camp becomes a town in about an hour and a half to two hours. It works, and the world fills with villages even while their owners are away.
But it isn't really yours. The village grows with or without you, its layout is the planner's choice, and it's hard to tell why something went up or what to do next. Keep-clear areas exist mostly so players can stop the planner building where they don't want it.
So settlements are moving to a hybrid:
Citizens handle the chores. They gather, and they put up a farm when food runs short or a store when the stores are full.
You place everything that grows the settlement: huts, longhouses, walls and docks. Each new level is something you decide to build toward.
While you're away, citizens keep gathering until storage is full, and empty beds still fill. Nothing grows past its level without you. When you come back, you'll see what happened while you were gone.
You can still choose to let your citizens build in a settlement if you'd rather spend your time fighting.
Your first Chronicle will start with a short checklist that teaches the loop: claim your land, gather, craft a spear, then place a hut, a farm and a store. Each step says why it matters. When you finish, your campsite becomes a camp: walls unlock, and you can name it.
We're building the explanations before the rules. Changing who builds without telling you would leave villages standing still and nobody knowing why. So the first piece is a clearer panel in builder mode. Each store fills as a bar toward the room you have, turns amber when it's full, and tells you to spend it or build more storage. Below the stores, a checklist shows what the next level needs. It's switched off for now while we test it.
Next come one place on screen for timely hints, then the first-Chronicle checklist, then the change to who builds.
Footbridges
Roads used to wade straight through creeks. Where a road or a village street crosses a river now, a small plank footbridge goes up, with rails and posts. It only appears where the road actually crosses the water, not where it runs along a creek's edge. Lakes are still forded or gone around. You and the villagers walk over the planks instead of through the water underneath.
Grey skies
On an overcast evening, the haze still glowed sunset orange as if the sky were clear. It took its colour from the horizon before the weather had greyed it. Now cloud cools the haze, the far light and the clouds themselves toward grey, so a rainy dusk looks like a rainy dusk. Clear evenings keep their warmth.
Smaller fixes
Your own ground. You could build a farm on a tile you didn't own, because the space around your home reached across a tile's edge. Your home's ground now ends where its tile does.
Harbours, not streams. Docks were going up across creeks. They now only go on a lake or the sea.
Where streams meet. Where a narrow channel met a wide one, the ground could step a metre up between them. Every channel a spot lies in now shapes the riverbed, and the step is gone.
Clean edges. At the top of a waterfall, the pool poked up through its bank in jagged triangles. The water now follows the ground's shape, and the edge is clean.
Clear lines. In builder mode, a warning like "Outside your land" printed over the description of the building you were placing. It now sits above it.