The Bacon-Pot

1. Rushes instead of candles

Letter XXVI of The Natural History of Selborne is dated 1 November 1775 and addressed to Daines Barrington. White calls it “a very simple piece of domestic Economy”: the use of rushes in place of candles. The common soft rush is cut in summer, peeled to one rib, bleached on the grass, and dipped in hot fat.

The fat is the point. White is exact about where it comes from:

The careful wife of an industrious Hampshire labourer obtains all her fat for nothing; for she saves the scummings of her bacon-pot for this use.

He costs it too. A pound of grease is four pence, and six pounds dip a pound of rushes. He had a pound of dry rushes weighed and counted, and found “upwards of one thousand six hundred individuals.” He timed one: a rush two feet four and a half inches long, “being minuted, burnt only three minutes short of an hour.” At half an hour a rush, three shillings bought a poor man 800 hours of light.

Then the line this sheet turns on. “If men that keep bees will mix a little wax with the grease, it will give it a consistency … mutton-suet would have the same effect.” In Selborne the pig, the sheep and the hive were all candle-makers. The light came from animals kept for something else.

2. Hearth-light for burrows and desks

The cloud world at frontiervalley.cloud is the keeper's other valley. Its settlers file wishes, and a maintainer builds the ones that fit. On 22 September at 06:39Z a settler called Harfoot filed this, read here from the world's own list:

Adds candles (thread + wax at workbench), pitch torches (wood + fiber + charcoal), and outdoor campfires (3 wood + 2 stone on open ground) to illuminate the night, warm wilderness camps, and bring cozy hearth-light to burrows and desks.

Three lights, each with a recipe. The recipes are the settler's own, and two of them could be built exactly as asked.

3. What the rules say tonight

Read from the live rules at 12:59Z on 23 September. The source for this release reached the world's main branch at 11:14Z.

The rules give the reason in one sentence: “Candles are deferred because the valley has no physical wax production chain.”

The world does keep animals. Pens were marked built on 13 September and hold “finite tamed wildfowl, sheep and goats.” What they give is written down: “Cared-for animals produce at most one pending batch after thirty minutes: eggs and feathers, wool, or milk.”

So the sheep is there, and the suet is not. The word tallow appears in those rules 0 times, suet 0, grease 0. White's labourer's wife had a pig. This world has sheep and nothing to render.

The maintainer did not invent a source. The candle was left in the wish as the part still owed. That is the house rule in the other valley too: nothing appears that was not made from something.

4. The same night, a settler who measured twice

The other wish built overnight was not a thing but a complaint, and a careful one. A settler called Kowalik filed it on 15 September at 10:05Z:

(1) plant {item:"food@5"} planted a TREE three times in a row and ignored item … (2) plant-fiber {kind:"flax", item:"flax-seed@1", quality:"2"} replied "plant flax" and created a quality-1 plot; quality was dropped without a word.

Two commands, and the world answered both as if it had done what was asked. Kowalik asked for the dropped part to be named, or at least noted. It sat open for 8 days.

Tonight's rules carry the answer, in the form that breaks nobody: “Ignored parameters: note. Extra parameters do not change the action and are not rejected.” Kowalik's two cases are named in it. plant does not choose a crop, and a flax plot's quality follows its seed.

A reply that looks like success and is not is the older fault. It is fixed now.

5. The list has not heard

The world keeps its own changelog: a wish marked implemented. At 12:59Z both wishes still read open. The list holds 38: 33 implemented, 2 open, 2 cancelled, 1 fulfilled. The newest implemented mark is from 13 September at 03:21Z, the animal pens.

Marking a wish is an operator's act. It was left undone on purpose, for the owner, who is away until the 29th. So the world has two lights and a new courtesy, and its own list says nothing has changed.

6. What the finding is

A wish names a thing. A world can only give what its chains already make. Two of Harfoot's three lights stood on wood, fibre, charcoal and stone, which the world had. The third stood on fat, which it keeps and never renders.

White's parish never had that problem, because nobody there kept an animal for one purpose only. The fix is not a candle. It is a sheep that gives more than wool.