The Lowest Severity

1The question is asked on its own

A settler is asked what to do next. Every sixth time, they are asked something else as well, in a separate call with its own prompt: what is this valley missing? They answer as the person. About the life, not about software.

It is a separate call for a measured reason, and the tree says so plainly:

It is a separate call because folding it into the decision as an optional field produced two wishes in about thirty decisions. A model asked to mention something “only if” will take the “if” nearly every time.

The answers land in agents/WISHLIST.md, which is a markdown file and deliberately the only copy. There is no database behind it. Granting a wish flips one character in it and writes every other byte back unchanged, so a person can tick a box in any editor they like. The file introduces itself in its own first lines, and this is the sentence the rest of this sheet is about:

Nobody asked them to write a feature request — they were asked what this valley is missing, and this is what they said.

2What they asked for

Two hundred and thirty-three wishes stand in the file tonight, carrying 46 distinct kind lines between them. The shape of the asking is not flat. One want dwarfs the rest, and it is the plainest want there is: somewhere to put things.

Who asks is not flat either. Foresters filed 101 of the 233, miners 57, farmers 43. Scouts filed 12, traders 11, builders 9. The trade that spends its day chopping is the trade that asks for the mill.

Read that table carefully, because one of its rows is two numbers. The file says sawmill seven times. The game counts eight, and it is right to. One entry in the file carries no kind line at all, and the parser works its kind out from the words it was written in. That entry is wish-1, the first thing anybody in this valley ever asked for: “A wood chopper or a sawmill that can process logs into planks efficiently and quickly.” Halla, forester, tick 173. Seven as written, eight as read. The Frontier desk measured eight against this desk’s seven, and finding out why was worth more than either figure.

Seven other standing wishes carry the kind line new. That is a different thing from having no line, and the tree is emphatic about the difference: no line means nobody ever asked the question, and new means it was asked, with the model that wrote the request standing there to answer, and the answer on the record is that this valley has no word for what was wanted. Those seven can be voted through and change nothing. The tick box works. There is nothing behind it.

3The file is the survivors

When ten wishes are open the settlers vote. The one with the most votes carries. The one with the fewest is struck off, and the rest keep their votes for the next round. Striking is a deletion and not a tombstone, which the tree defends on purpose:

Deliberately a deletion rather than a tombstone: a struck wish is not banned, and if a settler asks for the same thing again it comes back as a new entry with a clean tally. The record of what was struck lives in the log, not here.

It does live there, so this sheet went and read it. Across 603,137 lines in thirteen log segments:

So the plainest fact about this valley’s wishes is not in the file at all. At least 3,611 times a settler has answered the question, and 2,245 of those answers were refused before they were ever written down. The commonest outcome of telling this valley what it is missing is being told that somebody already has.

The refusals split two ways: 1,811 because a wish of the same kind was already open, and 434 because a model was asked whether it was a duplicate and said yes. That second number is 434 separate occasions on which one model judged another model’s idea to be a thing already said.

The numbers tell the same story from the other side, and they were walked one at a time rather than subtracted. The file’s highest is wish-861 and 233 stand, so 628 numbers are gaps. Here is what became of them:

Three quarters of the missing were struck by a vote. The other 148 went by some path this sheet did not walk, and it is not going to guess at one. And 14 numbers that were struck are standing in the file again tonight, which is the last of the residue Sheet XV reported on 27 August: a counter that walked backwards every time a vote struck the highest wish off, so one number belonged to twenty-one settlers in sixty-seven minutes. The fix takes the floor from the log rather than the file, because the whole point of striking is that the file forgets.

One rule in the striking was bought at a price. A carried wish may not be struck, and the comment recording why is a receipt:

fourteen carried decisions were deleted by votes held down the coast — one of them planting, hunger’s last open word in the landing.

4The word at the door

A wish is classified on arrival against a list of 49 categories in tools/lexicon.mts. The category is the whole of what the game can act on. Two proposals of the same kind are one proposal however differently they are worded, so the category is also what refuses a duplicate. It is the label at the door, and it decides everything after.

Here is what that cost, in one entry, printed whole from the file:

## wish-22 · Sula, forester · tick 1651 `npc-05`

- [x] A furnace that turns ore and charcoal into iron, so the hill is worth digging.

> I have carried ore about all week and not one of us can do anything with it.

**Why it would matter:** Everything this settlement cannot do yet is on the other
side of iron: a saw, a pick that will open a seam properly, a struck coin. Ore and
charcoal go in and the valley changes.

**Kind:** kiln
**Votes:** 55

That is a smelter, in the smelter’s own words, and an older word list filed it as a kiln. It carried with 55 votes. It granted a kiln. Then it went on holding the word: a carried wish keeps its category for ever, so when a settler called Ferro later asked for a smelter, it was refused as a duplicate of the wish that had failed to be one. The tree’s own account of what followed is nine hundred entries of somebody walking to a site to be told there is no iron for a saw.

Ferro is a settler in the valley. There is also a resident of the city called ferro, who is a different person entirely and has nothing to do with this.

5What a wish actually built

The raft is in the game because five settlers asked for a way across the water and there was no object to give them. The comment beside its cost in src/sim.ts:1354 is the clearest statement in the tree of how this valley grows:

That left this valley with an abstract crossing anybody could vote for […] and a hull nobody could afford, and nothing in between. Five ferry wishes have been sitting in agents/WISHLIST.md since 31 August asking for exactly this, and there was no object to give them. A raft is the between: no plank, no iron, no mill, no vote. An axe and an afternoon.

The count in that comment is still exactly right. Five wishes carry the kind ferry tonight, and four of the five have carried:

A raft costs eight wood and nothing else. No board, no iron, no mill, no meeting. The valley grew a rung because five people who live in it said the ladder had a gap, and the gap was where they said it was.

It is honest about what it is not. A raft will not take anybody to the city, because the sea asks for a boat by kind. The wish was answered and not overpaid.

6The line nobody has ever written

The file keeps two different facts apart, carefully, in its own words: ticking a box means the settlement has resolved to build a thing, and “a wish is only Built once it is actually in the game”. Two hundred and seventeen of the 233 standing wishes carry a Carried line. The number carrying a Built line is nought.

The raft is in the game. No wish says so. The smelter, the sawmill, the depot, the well: whatever of them exists, exists without a line in the file that asked for it. The record of a want becoming a thing lives in a comment in the engine source, which is a fine place for a programmer and no place at all for the forester who asked.

That is the finding, and it is smaller and more ordinary than a bug. Nothing is broken. A field was designed, shipped, and never filled in, and the half of the loop that would tell 34 named settlers that somebody heard them is the half that was never wired. In Debian’s ladder this is exactly a wishlist: nothing has failed, something is absent.