Chronicles
Townstead keeps a Chronicle for every village: a record of what has happened there. Births, deaths, weddings, friendships, arguments, first harvests, first brews, feasts, freezing winters, and the night someone played the jukebox all go in. Townstead only records moments the game produced. It never invents an event.
What Villagers Know
Section titled “What Villagers Know”Townstead records what actually happened separately from what each villager believes happened.
- Witnesses know first hand. Anyone close enough to a wedding, a fight, or a lightning strike saw it.
- Gossip carries it further. A villager passes the most interesting story they know to a neighbour they are standing near, and each retelling can lose some accuracy. An argument can end up blamed on the wrong person by the time it reaches the far side of the village.
- Common knowledge settles slowly. After a while, big events become things everyone in the village simply knows.
- You can be a source. The Share News option in dialogue passes a story to a villager.
What a villager believes shapes their mood and their opinion of the people involved. A villager who hears that someone started a public argument thinks less of the instigator, whether or not that is what really happened.
A Village With A Past
Section titled “A Village With A Past”A new village does not start blank. When Townstead first sees it, it generates a plausible pre-history: a founding, a founder, ancestors, and memories for the elders. Each villager also gets a personal past, including a plausible work history, so a master cook who spawned yesterday has a record of meals behind the rank. The same village always gets the same past.
Reading The Chronicle
Section titled “Reading The Chronicle”Build an Archives: a chiseled bookshelf, two bookshelves, and an Order Sheet in one room.
Right-click any bookshelf inside the Archives with an empty hand to open the village Chronicle: a dated list of headlines from the public record. A new village shows Nothing recorded yet.
The Scribe
Section titled “The Scribe”The Archives is kept by the Scribe, a Townstead profession. An on-duty Scribe is who you talk to about your career: declaring a vocation, registering skills, and reading your record. The Order Sheet in the Archives does the same paperwork when the Scribe is off shift.
What Gets Recorded
Section titled “What Gets Recorded”- The village founded, villagers born and died, spouses lost, weddings.
- Friendships forming, public arguments.
- Someone taking up a trade, learning a craft, becoming a master.
- First meals, feasts, first and bountiful harvests, first brews, first slaughter, first butchery, first flocks, production milestones.
- Going hungry, freezing, sweltering.
- Music played, lightning and explosions witnessed.
- Someone brought back from the dead.
- Taboos broken, when cannibalism is enabled.
Conversations between villagers are recorded too, but privately. They shape the two participants and are not public news.
The Chronicle also feeds careers. A skill can require a recorded count of real work before it can be learned, such as a number of cooked meals.
Operator Commands
Section titled “Operator Commands”/townstead chronicle has subcommands for statistics, what a villager knows, their memories, the sentiment between two people, and emitting an event for testing. See the commands reference.