You wake holding a camp, a day’s food, six poles and your tools. Put the camp down first, because until you do there is nowhere that is yours, and the tile you choose is where you live. Then unload — the poles are a workbench, so you can put one up before you have felled anything.
Felling a tree is easy. A tree comes down and lies there, and you cut the trunk into logs a couple at a time. Carrying them home is the game. Raw material rides on your shoulder, one kind at a time, twenty logs or a dozen stone and never both, and a full load slows you down. So a trip out is a decision about what the trip is for, made before you leave. The near wood runs out, too. Day five’s walk is three times day one’s.
A bench draws on the stores within a few tiles of itself, not of you. Stand at a sawhorse with the logs heaped out of its reach and there are no planks, however close you are to both. That is the whole game in miniature: where things go is the decision. Chests near each other can see each other, so a line of them is a supply line, and you build it because you felt the need for it.
You build by choosing a material and a form — plank as a wall, thatch as a roof, stone as a floor. Walls sit on the lines between tiles, so a five-by-five house is five by five inside. Close a room in and you can walk through the door into it, and a night in a room you built yourself is the best rest in the game. That is where the stars come from: eating well and living well, not working hard.