Bridges

Wading only gets you so far. Past 0.6 m of water you need a boat, or a bridge. A bridge is a row of decks, each one a tile of planking with rails, sitting on log pilings driven into the bed. Once it's up, you can walk across, lead a horse across or pull a cart across and keep your feet dry, and so can everyone else.

Planning one#

A bridge is hard work, the same as it would be for real, so it's worth planning before you start. Every deck takes 9 logs, 1 iron fittings. A river ten tiles wide, with the climb up to it on each bank, is about twenty decks: 180 logs and 20 iron fittings, which is 10 iron bars at the forge. That means a lot of chopping, and a forge and some time at it for the iron. You also need Building 10 before you can lay a deck at all.

Then there's the building. Driving pilings is slow, heavy work, and the longer the piling the longer it takes, so the decks out in the deep middle of a river take the most time and wear you out the most. Bring food. Building pulls from piles and carts within a few metres of you, so stack the logs and iron on the bank or keep a cart behind you and you won't be walking back and forth for every deck.

You can build one on your own if you have the patience. With a friend it goes quicker: one of you can haul while the other builds, or you can each start from your own bank and meet in the middle.

How the decks go in#

Start on the bank. The first deck has to go beside ground you can stand on, and every deck after that goes beside the last one, so you work your way out over the water a tile at a time. You can turn a deck so the planks run the way you're headed. Hand rails go up on their own along any side you can't step off, and they come off again when you lay another deck beside it.

You don't pick the height. Each deck sits 1.8 m above the water, so a raft or a rowboat can pass under it, and it looks a few tiles ahead for the river, so the decks on the bank climb to meet it. They never go up or down more than a step from the one before, so the climb takes a few tiles of bank before you reach the water. Plan for those ramps on both sides when you're working out what it'll take. If a deck won't go where you want it, the reason is shown on the ghost before you place it.

Pilings can go in up to 6 m of water, which is enough for any river. Lakes and the sea are mostly deeper than that, so for those you still want a boat.

Good to know#

• Rafts and rowboats pass under a bridge, with you sitting down. A sailboat's mast won't clear one, so she can't get past.
• Nobody can dig or raise the ground under a deck. Take it up first.
• You can take up your own decks and get everything back, but not the one you're standing on.
• You can drink and fill your canteen from a deck. The water is right there below you.