Colonists and the Haul Board

A colonist wakes, walks to work, gets thirsty, paths to wet ground, walks back. If that loop stutters, the colony feels broken even when the buildings look fine.

home_agent_interactor.gd is the hub: spawning from town hall, assigning workers to forester huts and quarries, registering beds only in housing footprints, and queuing haul jobs when stockpiles shift.

Needs tied to the water sim

agent_needs.gd does not magic water from a building radius. Colonists search for wet cells the CA sim actually maintains. wet_drink_path_cache.gd caches routes and invalidates on day boundaries so night/day transitions do not leave ghosts.

Tutorial steps can disable consumption while teaching placement — the flag is explicit, not a silent cheat.

Haul board vs job priority

When a workshop needs planks, someone has to move logs. haul_job_board.gd posts those tasks; job priority reshuffles when emergencies stack (food low, construction site waiting, forester low on plant stock).

Town hall is the early-game spine: spawn point, builder assignment, central stockpile. Specialized huts pull from the same material ledger colony_material_ledger.gd exposes to the UI.

material_chain_graph_view.gd draws production dependencies so you can see why the sawmill stalled without opening six panels.

Day, night, happiness

SimulationTime drives day/night. Colonists work by day; at night they march toward registered beds. agent_happiness.gd scales walk speed between 0.5× and 1.5× based on how well needs are met — not a separate mini-game, just a nudge you feel in haul latency.

Walk motion uses physics-stepped tweens tied to sim time so pausing or speeding up the clock does not desync feet from frames.

After quicksave reload

Loading a save clears stuck job flags and snaps workers to anchors (home_agent_interactor reload hook). Without that pass, colonists would stand in place claiming they were mid-haul while the board had already forgotten the job.

What we are not simulating yet

No individual meal cooking animations. No family units with separate inventories. Combat exists in a separate sandbox (combat_resolver.gd) and is not the colony loop’s focus.

The goal for this layer is narrower: make logistics readable. If you know why the forester is idle, the colony is playable. If you do not, no amount of Roman props will save it.