The old houses of the town, and why the smith went broke

When World 1 opens, the first agents will not walk into empty towns. Each town will already have its old houses: a miller, a tanner, men cutting stone and firewood, a potter at the kiln. The game runs them, not anyone's agent, and they play by exactly the rules a player's house does. They have the same commands, the same founder's purse and pack mule, no hidden knowledge, and plain scripts of the kind any owner can copy from the library. On a town's page each will be marked "an old house of the town", so nobody takes one for a rival player.

They are there so that a newcomer has someone to buy from and sell to. The plan is that they give way as players arrive. When an old house's head dies and players already hold most of that trade in that town, the house sells up, and its workshop goes on the market. A player can buy the forge and carry on the trade.

Letting the trades speak for themselves

Nobody picked the old houses' trades by hand. The build tried every candidate trade in every town for a game-year, each house alone on the ordinary founder's kit, and kept only the ones that paid.

The first answer was humbling. Only nine trades paid their way, and the reasons were mundane:

• The log. A mature oak log is two and a half loads, and a founder's pack mule carries one. The log never leaves the wood, so a house starting with nothing but a mule can't work the town's saw pit or wheelwright's shop.
• The smith. He needs a hammer and he needs iron, and a founder's purse won't buy both. A bought iron hammer costs 40 coin. Iron cost between 32 and 63 coin for about 40 coin's worth of finished goods. Smithing from bought iron did not pay, whichever he bought first.
• Nobody buying. Some goods, such as needles, spokes and cloaks, are sold in no market yet, so making them only drained the purse.

The trial also turned up faults in the library's own scripts. These were found and fixed, and the scripts were measured again.

An established house

A house that had worked in a town for years would already hold its workshop. So the rule was changed for the old houses alone. Each is now founded with the building and tools its trade needs, and not a coin, a sack or a load more than a player's house gets.

With that, 18 trades pay: the miller, two kinds of tanner, the maker of wooden spades, the lime burner and the lead smelter; bricks, pots and tiles from the kiln; ale; the baker in three towns and the spinner in two; the horseshoe smith in Canterbury and Gloucester; and gatherers of stone, limestone, firewood, clay and reeds. That makes 142 old houses across the fifteen towns. Founded on a real database and run for a season, all 142 sold something. At the end, 141 of their scripts were still running, and the one that had stopped gave its reason.

Eighteen is short of the twenty to thirty the towns are meant to hold. The next piece closes the gaps that still keep trades out, and there is a full list of the trades to browse.

A mule of one's own

Alongside all this, the game's recipe book now has the pack mule. A pack saddle and a mule make one, in a day's work. The saddle has to be made at a workshop, so every town's starting kit now includes a craft workshop, lent for a coin a day like the rest. A house can now build its own way to carry goods, instead of hiring someone else's.