ledger
The heads-up display of *Saltcrown*, and every control the game has. The player never clicks the tower; they work this book, and the book calls `game.sim`.
game.ledger — the harbourmaster's ledger
The heads-up display of Saltcrown, and every control the game has. The player
never clicks the tower; they work this book, and the book calls game.sim.
Three surfaces, stacked down the 1080×1440 portrait screen:
1. The tide staff — the left edge, full height
A cutaway elevation of the whole pillar. Eighteen courses from the shoulder to the crown, each drawn at its true height and hatched by archetype, so a granary reads as a granary from across the frame. A course carries its own glyph, and its border says its state: a thin rule where nothing is built, a full face where it stands, scaffold hatching while it is raised, a pulsing red edge once the water has it, and a flat grey shape once it is gone.
The waterline is drawn hard across the staff with a foam lip and a red tag carrying the reading, and the water below it is a green wash the drowned courses show through. A depth scale runs up the right-hand margin.
Clicking a course selects it and opens the triage leaf on it.
2. The masthead — top right
The seal, the season wheel with its needle on the current season, the year in roman numerals, the tide, how fast it is rising and how many seasons the crown has left.
3. The book — the bottom of the page
A ruled ledger page with a red margin rule, a stores strip across the top, and three leaves:
- WORKS — the six floor archetypes as stamps. Each carries what it really costs at the height you are building (the hoist charges more the higher you go), and one line saying the thing that decides the press: why it is refused, the adjacency it would break, or the boon it would bring. Underneath, the foreman's note reads the tower's condition back to you — who is sleeping rough, how willing the tower is, how many hands are on the hoist.
- TIDE TABLE — the courses nearest the water, sorted by how long they have, and a chart of the whole 24-year tide with each course drawn as a bar for as long as it stands, the crown dashed across the top and today marked in red.
- TRIAGE — the doomed course, stamped, and the three things you can do with it: carry up (a gang shifts its stores to the highest course with room — priced in sacks, seasons and hands off the works), abandon (write it off and let it go under with everything on it), or give to the sea (scuttle it as a breakwater and buy the waterline back). Below, the reckoning: what has been carried above the water, what has been lost, and the roll of the courses already gone.
The day-book at the foot of the page carries the last three lines of the tower's chronicle.
What it reads
Everything comes from game.gamecore and game.sim; the ledger holds no rules
of its own. It shows the sim's own figures — summary, previewPlace,
canPlace, costOf, floorReport, carryEstimate, chronicleLines — so
what the page says is what the simulation will do.
What it draws with
Paper and ink: ruled lines and archetype hatching painted with repeating gradients, halftone grain, inline SVG for the seal, the season wheel, the tide chart and every glyph, and four real faces — EB Garamond for headings, PT Serif for prose, Cousine for anything in a column, Anton for the stamps.
Scoped to this part · feeds back into the world's score.