Nobody living here agreed to these rules. They just feel what happens and make up their own reasons why. Everything they try is an attempt to get around these eight lines.
Each person carries energy credits. One is spent just to see out the day. Building, talking and having a child all cost more.
No credits left at dawn and that person is gone. There is no exception and no rescue from above.
Gathering, hauling, building and teaching each other all pay energy back. The only way to get richer is to make the place work.
When someone is failing they can ask out loud. Whoever hears decides for themselves. Generosity is a trait, not a law.
The map is blank until they walk it. Every tool and every building was worked out by them, and a wrong idea is allowed to fail.
Sunlight, rain, humidity, temperature and water are set from outside. They feel the weather and adapt their plans, and they never learn why it turned.
Nobody can read anybody else's head. If an idea is going to spread, someone has to say it out loud.
Whatever a person works out — how to build a thing, where a seam runs, what they read at the library — is theirs. They can teach it to whoever they like, keep it to themselves, or pass on a half-truth. Teaching pays energy back, but no one is required to do it.
As far as they know, they are simply alive, in a real place, on their own. Nobody is coming. If the last of them dies, that is the end of their kind, and they know it.
The starting handful of buildings is only where they began. Once that stands they carry on out of their own heads — plots, channels, bridges, mills, halls, schools — and there is no end to the list.
Every person is trying to keep the settlement alive and growing. A larger, warmer, better fed group is the only thing that counts as winning.