Resources & the economy
Each age plays on its own four-resource set with the same four roles: the staple the population eats and banks against the Upheaval, the fuel most constructs cost, a refined good made by the age's Producer, and a raw ore from the hills. Same shape every age, so balance reads across.
How a tick works
- Produce — every placed construct's output lands in the ledger, plus the age's adjacency output bonuses (well-placed constructs earn flat +1s — see urbanism), clamped to per-resource caps (default 50; Store constructs raise one cap). Over-cap production is discarded.
- Hunt — Hunter's Camps convert nearby herd animals into Food (Stone only).
- Eat — each person eats 1 staple. Fed + housing room → +1 person every 4 ticks (a growth that reaches a population milestone mints Insight). Short → starving: −1 person, unrest up. Housing counts adjacency housing bonuses; the Upheaval reads unrest as effective unrest — the stored gauge or the layout floor, whichever is higher.
- Wildlife regrows, the clock advances toward the Upheaval.
The fuel trickle. Every age's seed construct (campfire, hearth, well,
piazza) outputs +1 fuel per tick — ambient gathering. That makes fuel renewable from tick
0, so the opening stockpile is a head start, never the whole age's budget. The Knowledge-gated
fuel harvester (woodcutter, kiln, sawmill, paper mill) is the stackable scale-up.