The project to build a dam at the river pass is going well. This was entirely my idea in the first place but I think the game must already have known how dams work - maybe there are beaver-people somewhere I haven't explored yet - because the bears got the idea very quickly. Once I have a dam I'm going to try generating electricity with it and then electric lights. The day/night cycle follows station time so I never see night, but sometimes if I play in the morning I find that something probably related to it being dark happened. There are burnt out candle stubs and stuff around even though they get stung when they get wax from the beehives. (The bears less than everybody so I have them getting the wax and giving it to the other three kinds for other stuff.) So it would be nice if they could have lights without getting stung.

The game didn't come up with anything that new for me this week but since this is the first report I should go farther back than a week. Last week I found an abandoned mine. All the nearby villagers acted surprised when I showed it to them. But it'd been mined before and there were supports and old pickaxes of a different design than the ones the bird blacksmith or the antelope blacksmith make. I think the game wants me to think about the place as having a history even though it's generating it as I go. (Right? I think it's actually generating it as I go.)

Everybody else's fantasy game has characters that talk but for some reason mine doesn't - I mean there's sort of an incomprehensible background chat going on when the villagers talk to each other, they transmit information amongst themselves, but they almost never talk to me, they just mime like I have to and when they talk to each other it's offscreen and quiet. Maybe it's doing this because it'd feel less like I was directing things if they were much better at communicating than I was. As soon as I showed up the first time they've been happy to do what I show them to do; I didn't show up like a refugee or a traveler, I was pretty much right away the bird empress and it didn't take much to get the antelopes and the butterflies and the bears on board too. They don't seem to be able to read what I write, though.

It's about due to give me a new species if the patterns from before hold. I wonder what it'll be. I don't know why it's giving me a bunch of different stuff - no, wait, I do. It's easier to figure out what the problems they have with each other are if they're based on visible stuff instead of invisible cultures a bunch of different groups of just birds could have. It gives me a fair chance at figuring out stuff like how they might not like how each other smell. If they were having religious arguments or something instead I couldn't tell unless they talked a lot more. I think that's why. If my avatar could talk I bet the animal-people would talk too and they'd get more complicated cultures instead of just being all different species.