The cabin arrived on the morning of October 6 and was rebuilt more than once in the two and a half days that followed. About two dozen changes went into it, and the order they came in shows how building pieces go wrong.
The first version worked as a system. Lash a sawbuck from four poles and a split wood, set it down, fell firs nearby and buck them where they lie: logs within 8 m of the sawbuck, 2.5 m each, become floors, walls and roofs. Corners notched, openings framed themselves and piers grew to the ground. By that evening the materials had been remade from real things: peeled logs with knots and checks, a plank door with a Z-brace and strap hinges, a roof of split shakes.
What it did not do was hold together up close. Each wall was assembled from many pieces, and the pieces met badly: walls and roof showed cracks, gaps and parts clipping through each other. Early on October 7 the cause was taken out instead of patched. Every wall bay became one whole made panel, in logs, boards, dry stone or wattle, with its own doorway and window, and every roof bay one made section. Log courses lined up across the posts. A thatch wall arrived the same morning, tied in the hands from poles, sticks and plant fiber.
The rest of that day went into making each material read as itself. The stone wall had been an even speckled field; it became fieldstone and split blocks of different sizes with deep joints. The wattle wall had pale blobs stuck on it; it got clay daub packed into the weave. The half wall had been the full wall squashed to half height; it became its own waist-high wall in every material. Gables, a ridge cap, a stone step and a split-log threshold followed, and the building wheel on a held E gained a picture of every choice in the wall’s own material.
Two problems on October 8 were about time rather than looks. The first wall of each new kind stalled the game for a few seconds while the piece was built, so every cabin piece is now readied under the loading page. And a wall or a roof on the hotbar with no floor near showed nothing at all, which looked like a broken slot; it now shows a gray ghost with “Needs a floor”.