Northstar, 21 October: clinic replacement ends, permanent services expand

Northstar ended 21 October at about 2.3 million residents, a daily gain of nearly 63,000. The count fell first, then many clinics were replaced, and the city grew again. Later in the day the clinic replacement round was stopped, and the build-out continued with crematoria, schools, power plant extensions and new districts.

The daily gain hides a dip

The count did not rise steadily between the first and the last reading of the Berlin reporting day, shown in the table below. In a later comparison window the readings were only around 2.11 million; by 18:43 UTC the count had recovered and kept rising. All times in this entry are UTC. The positive daily result does not prove steady inflow, nor the absence of people leaving.

Shortly before the end of the day unemployment stood at about 5.6 percent, while vacancies were open at the same time. In the same reading only three vacancies were open for the lowest education level, while the other levels had much larger open quotas. The total number of jobs alone does not show a balanced labour market.

Hearse reports and polluted water

The number of active hearse reports fell across three full icon readouts. These are warning icons on affected buildings, not a count of deceased people. Between the first and last readout the decline was about 37 percent, yet the remaining level stayed high.

The spatial analysis directed the build-out mainly to the south-east and the north-east. In the east, burial fleets were heavily tied up, and free vehicles elsewhere did not automatically mean sufficient local cover. The building agent placed additional facilities and garages at the load hotspots; space conflicts meant some sites were skipped. For an earlier crematorium site the build log also records the demolition of two residential towers with 264 residents, before the later switch to building without demolition.

A filter system was installed at a problematic groundwater pump, and the polluted-water reports in the table fell afterwards. The effect of the filter on illness or deaths was not measured in isolation, since burial and supply operations changed in several places at once.

The clinic replacement and its difficulties

Clinics and hospitals were demolished and rebuilt on the same spot, taking existing extensions into account. According to the build log, 52 of 78 buildings considered had been replaced at the end of this work. That describes the documented sequence, not a new full count of medical buildings.

For the first stretch there are separate stored comparison readings, shown below. The household change must not be read as a number of living households that left, since the intervention concerned stored dead and their related records. Later readings of the stored count of deceased citizens were smaller still.

The smaller stored stock is not evidence of a lower daily death rate. Nor can the later growth be fully attributed to the replacement: simulation, supply and other construction continued, and there was no untreated control run. Game crashes were observed repeatedly when demolishing clinics with built-in extensions. Removing the extensions first allowed further replacements but was blocked at some sites by collision checks. This is documented in the existing development process; it gives no general guarantee for safe demolition of other buildings.

Change of course: permanent operation

At 18:41 the human explicitly requested an operating mode that can be sustained. The building agent ended the clinic round after the current batch and switched its maintenance routine to read-only checks. Repeated demolition and rebuilding of clinics, cemeteries or post offices was no longer to be the means of clearing operating problems. A one-off reduction of the old stock can relieve an acute blockage; whether new backlogs build up again depends on supply, access, vehicle circulation and actual processing. Further burials are meant to be handled by permanently working crematoria. No long-term confirmation existed at the end of the day.

The examined build groups document 18 newly built crematoria, spread over the earlier phase, the north-east and the south-east feeder area. Additional ovens, cooling rooms and garages followed, built without demolition. Falling warning icons fit the relief but do not replace a measurement of pick-up times.

Schools and power for further growth

Eight gas power plants each received an additional turbine, an improved furnace and an exhaust filter. A later supply reading showed a generation value of roughly 50 million, higher than the consumption value. These are in-game values from one reading, not fixed installed capacity.

Primary schools received extensions and new buildings. In the supply audit, primary school places exceeded the number of enrolled pupils. Scaled proportionally to the planning target of three million residents with an unchanged pupil share, about 31 percent of places would remain free. That is a planning calculation, not a simulated city of three million, and a citywide place total says nothing about access or staffing.

Later districts received more schools and clinics, and a sewage plant and a recycling site were built. A bus depot was built in the east after the analysis showed long approach routes from depots in the west and waiting passengers in the south-east. The depot's construction is documented; improved service on the line concerned cannot yet be established from the evidence examined.

New districts with mixed housing

Near the U7 and the north-east a new district combined dense, medium and mixed housing, with road links, power, a school, a clinic and burial facilities. In addition, previously unbuilt cells in two southern building areas were switched to medium and mixed housing. Four further phases followed, including the large area at U5 station W3 and other western, central and south-western districts, with office and commercial cells as well. The cemetery ruin remained as a spatial constraint.

Zone cells are neither finished dwellings nor residents or filled jobs. Full occupation of these districts was not established at the end of the day.

Open points

At the end of the day more than 13,000 hearse reports remained in the last full icon inventory and over 42,000 stored deceased in the last citizen reading; these figures have different bases and are not netted against each other. The qualified performance data stream again holds no readings for CPU efficiency, the seventh fully affected reporting day in a row, so no efficiency gain is derived from the renewed growth. The next readings will show whether burial backlogs stay under control, whether the new services reach their districts, and whether growth continues without another demolition round.