Game specifications

Values on this page are the shipped defaults, generated from the same definitions the game uses. Game tuning shows your applied browser settings and lets you change them.

Gold & wood

A new settlement starts with 500 gold and 400 wood in a shared treasury. Traveler wallets are separate. Purchases require both currencies and spend them only when a complete placement succeeds. A rejected or cancelled placement spends nothing.

Resources come from NPC activity. Visitors enter the church free and may donate at the offering box beside the door when leaving. Gifts can be zero; higher piety increases the chance and size of a gift, limited by the visitor’s wallet. Buildings and resident counts generate no automatic gold or timber.

Woodcutter’s huts hire up to six jobless visitors each; workers fell nearby trees and deliver timber to storage. Tavern and market takings come from actual NPC purchases. Each delivery or receipt enters the shared treasury once. Construction uses available stacked timber first, then other treasury wood. There are no upkeep, refunds or demolition yet.

Wages are the treasury’s one standing cost. Every settler working one of your own places draws 2 gold at the turn of each game day — more than their own food and drink cost, so a paid household never falls into poverty. A treasury that cannot make payroll pays what it can and the day still passes. Independent town households are paid by their own town and never touch your books. Much of the coin comes back over your counter.

Construction

Choose a catalogue item, then click the map. Its origin is the hovered tile; the footprint extends along the map’s positive X and Z axes. Camera rotation changes your view, not the footprint orientation. Green previews can be placed; red previews explain a blocked site, insufficient supplies or an unmet unlock.

• Buildings can be placed anywhere on suitable ground, regardless of renown influence. Every footprint tile must fit on the map, and construction entrances must remain reachable from the shrine.
• Flat buildable terrain is allowed: grass, dirt, dry sand, the road and the shrine track. Any tile a path has already worn counts as open ground too, whatever lies beneath it. Hills, untrodden forest-floor clearings, woods, water and bridges are blocked, as are the dark-forest tracks, which the old growth leaves no way around.
• Existing structures, the hovel door and every building’s entrance tile must stay clear.
• A footprint may stand on a path. Travelers walk around it and wear their own way past, so a placement is refused only where it leaves no way around: where the road would be sealed, where the road is covered at the edge of the map (travelers arrive and leave there), or where the shrine door could no longer be reached from the road.
• While placing, green marks available ground and red marks blocked ground across the map. The cursor checks the complete footprint, access, supplies and unlocks. The faint influence boundary shown outside build mode does not limit placement.
• Lumber camps need reachable woods within eight tiles and a clear route from the shrine. Later construction must preserve access to their entrances.
• Each successful click places one copy and ends placement mode. Escape or Cancel spends nothing. Dragging pans the camera without building.

Shrine renown

Renown is a derived total for the entire establishment. It is not spendable and is not stored on the relic. Every placed copy contributes, with no diversity bonus or diminishing return. Passing travelers contribute as residents once recruited by a lumber camp; completed shrine visits also spread word of mouth.

Buildings

The founding hovel contributes 5; all purchased buildings contribute their catalogue renown.

Individuals

Sum over the residents: max(minimum, round(piety ÷ piety divisor) + skill count × renown per skill). With defaults: max(1, round(piety ÷ 40) + skill count × 1). Residents include the founding monks and recruited lumber workers.

Scenery

Sum of the gardens and carved crosses placed through the catalogue. Natural landscape and unbuilt forest do not add renown.

Relics

Sum over the relics: max(minimum, round((sanctity × sanctity weight + spectacle × spectacle weight − doubt × doubt weight) ÷ relic divisor)). Defaults: max(1, round((sanctity × 0.65 + spectacle × 0.35 − doubt × 0.25) ÷ 7)). The current game starts with one relic; the model accepts several.

Visits

Each completed visit adds 0.5 renown through word of mouth. This belongs to the whole shrine and has no relic-based cap.

Titles progress from Humble shrine at 0, to Sanctuary at 40, Pilgrimage site at 80, and Renowned establishment at 150. These are display milestones. Each building’s unlock is configured independently; the hall requires 40 renown by default. Raising a threshold never removes an existing building.

Traveler attraction

For a traveler with piety fraction p = piety ÷ 100, the relic’s appeal is sanctity × p² + spectacle × (1 − p) × 0.8 − status × (doubt ÷ 100) × 0.4. Multiply that appeal by base draw + (clamp(shrine renown, 0, draw cap) ÷ draw cap) × draw bonus.

Defaults range from ×0.5 at zero renown to ×1.25 at 100 renown. Relic interest rises linearly from 0 to 100% across draw scores 15–65. Faith attraction is p × (0.5 + 0.5 × relic interest), contributing to a visit chance of 0.1 + 0.9 × faith attraction. Piety scales attraction smoothly across its full range, with no cutoff. Let q = (clamp(renown, 0, draw cap) ÷ draw cap)².

Thirst attracts travelers to the church even without an open counter. Hunger contributes only when a tavern or market stall has someone serving. Fullness or hydration must be below 20 + (60 − 20) × q. Its chance grows from zero at that threshold to a maximum of 1 + 0.5 × q at an empty meter, capped at 100%. The church itself does not refill hunger. Available food service can feed visitors before they see the relic. Tiredness and job vacancies alone do not attract visitors. Travelers roll the higher of faith and hospitality chances when crossing the junction; they do not turn back to seek the shrine. If that roll fails, a completed carved cross grants one independent 5% Evangelism roll. Additional crosses do not stack this chance. For an ordinary visit chance p, the combined chance is p + (1 − p) × 0.05. The HUD forecasts the combined chance, while actual visits require a clear route and an available queue or prayer place. The keeper reveals the veiled relic beneath the altar to one visitor at a time; other visitors may pray on the open floor. Higher renown does not increase the road’s traveler count or spawn new archetypes.

Passing travelers start with 80–100 fullness and hydration. These lose 0.375 and 0.75 points per game hour respectively; camping halves both rates.

Food and drink are bought, never given. A counter charges 2 gold for a meal and 1 for a cup, and only serves what the customer can pay for; the takings go to the treasury. Tavern customers pay at the counter and then take a table. Kneeling at the relic restores stamina alone.

Work is offered at the end of a relic viewing, and only to a visitor who can be given both an open place and a free house bed. A visitor out of work takes it 90% of the time; one who already holds a trade elsewhere gives it up 5% of the time. Monks may ask for a shelter bed instead, while nuns and vendors keep their own callings. Someone who is housed but out of work asks again every game hour.

Settlers who take work move into a house, six to a house. They come home to sleep, and an hour by the household hearth is worth 12 hours of bread and small beer for nothing. Nights are short, so the larder stretches what a resident buys rather than replacing it: a working settler comes to the counter for supper every week or so, and one who cannot pay stays abed until the house has fed them back to work. A settler with no house camps beside their work once their legs give out.

Tuning while playing

1. Use Tune ↗ in the Shrine panel to open a second tab and keep your settlement running.
2. Edit values, then choose Apply tuning. The whole preset is validated before any rule changes.
3. Costs, unlocks, build radius and renown update in existing game tabs. Current supplies and placed structures are retained; price changes do not refund previous purchases. Starting gold and wood apply to the next new settlement.
4. Applied settings persist in browser storage and synchronize across tabs at the same origin (including the same port). They survive reloads; the settlement itself is still session-only.
5. Export a JSON preset to keep or share your edits. Import loads a draft; Apply activates it. Restore defaults immediately saves and applies the shipped balance.

Invalid numbers, missing preset fields, unsupported preset versions and non-increasing progression thresholds are rejected. A corrupt saved preset falls back to defaults on a fresh page; invalid external updates retain the current settings. The tuning page reports storage failures.

Tunable rule reference