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Devlog #062 - The Street of the Blacksmiths

Soldier’s Road is globally hidden. Street of the Blacksmiths is not. It is real, playable content whose first condition is buried in the current city’s raw data.

That difference was easy to miss. Testing in Pressburg showed no blacksmith street, which initially made it look like another dormant row. Testing the owner against the complete city database revealed a much more interesting system.

The First Gate Is the City

The route begins during the day, because the business-district state presents $BUSIN00 by day and the Main Street night screen after hours.

daytime business district
  “Shops dealing in arms and armor”
        ↓
$MILCR00 card 0 — Military Crafts
        ↓
“Street of the Blacksmiths” only if city byte +62h is nonzero

The Military Crafts owner reads byte +62h from the current DARKLAND.CTY record. At this call site, only zero versus nonzero matters.

Pressburg has zero, so the row is suppressed. Steyr has a nonzero value, so it is published. Across the 92 shipped city records, exactly 32 enable the street and 60 hide it.

This is why a route can be difficult to find without being removed. A player can visit the correct broad district, choose the correct trade category, and still never see the option because the current city was not assigned that craft selector.

The reconstructed engine obviously preserves that distribution. It does not make the row globally available for convenience, and a regression test fixes the 32-of-92 result against the shipped city data.

One Selection, Three Destinations

But seeing the row is only the first condition. Selecting it does not always open the same screen and that’s what is interesting.

The original action has three destination classes:

  1. Ordinary daytime visit. If an internal flag is zero and a computed unsigned threshold is below 100 (both not quite identified yet), the game opens the selector-zero Blacksmith merchant directly. Leaving advances one hour and returns to Military Crafts.
  2. Daytime fallback. If that flag is nonzero or the threshold reaches at least 100, the game enters raw state 004Bh, the richer $BLACK00 blacksmith-street controller with PICS\\BKSMITH.PIC.
  3. Nighttime fallback. Outside the original daytime interval, the threshold is not evaluated. The game enters raw state 004Ch, $BLACK01, with PICS\\XMS043.PIC.

Entering Military Crafts normally requires the daytime business screen, but other interactions can advance the clock while the party remains inside this part of the city graph. The original action therefore still owns a genuine night destination.

The Threshold Is About the Party and the Place

The daytime direct-merchant decision is deterministic. It does not roll the random generator and does not ask the player to select a character.

Its threshold combines:

a city-and-season term reduced modulo 21
+ party fame divided by 20
+ local reputation divided by 2
+ average current Charisma of the active party

A guided original run in Groningen at 10:00 produced a threshold of 41. The internal flag was zero, so the result was below 100 and the party entered the direct Blacksmith merchant. That observation matched the static arithmetic and confirmed that $BLACK00 is a fallback, not the unconditional daytime result.

This is a good example of why endpoint reconstruction is dangerous. A capture in one city with one party can make “Street of the Blacksmiths opens a shop” look like the whole rule. Another city, another reputation value, or another hour can select a different owner entirely.

The Street Controllers Are Larger Than the Shop

The daytime $BLACK00 owner publishes seven possible rows. The nighttime $BLACK01 owner publishes ten. Their availability depends partly on persistent event records and, on one daytime row, on whether the party carries one of a small set of items or formulas.

The clean engine now reproduces both presentations, their exact day and night pictures, their ordinary Leave actions back to Military Crafts, and the first $BLACK00 merchant action. That merchant consumes one hour and returns to the appropriate day-or-night street screen after the clock advances.

The remaining actions stay fail-closed until their callbacks and effects are certified. The visible menu is therefore no longer mistaken for a simple list of shops, but neither is its unfinished reconstruction padded with plausible blacksmith services.

Rare Content Is Still Canonical Content

Street of the Blacksmiths belongs in the faithful reconstruction. Its scarcity is part of the original world model. The correct restoration is not to expose it everywhere, but to preserve the city field, time classification, party calculation, fallback owners, persistent-event predicates, and return loops that make it rare.

Alongside Soldier’s Road and the callerless night-gate cards, it gives us three different restoration categories:

conditional content: original route exists and should remain conditional
hidden content:      complete route survives but ordinary publication is off
orphaned content:    original cards survive but no executable caller is known

That classification will matter later. It lets the project finish the faithful 483.07 game without silently “fixing” it, while also building enough evidence to support an optional restored-content edition. Removed branches could be re-enabled, unfinished branches could be completed cautiously, and every editorial step could remain separate from the historical reconstruction.