Survival Guide 6 – Stone roofed cabins
Conceiving better buildings
Perhaps your villagers are getting tired of repairing their huts after sympathetic visits of the storms…
So it’s time to develop a new building concept, with a wooden structure and flat stones as roofing. A great amount of work, but a much efficient protection.
Rain flow driving
After their experiments with shelters and huts, the villagers are now able to drive rain flows with ingenious materials assembly.
Now they want to make it last longer by using mineral materials like shale.
A vegetal cover tend to stay humid a long time after rain. Drying is due 30% to the sun and 70% to the wind!
The survivors observed that the compressed vegetal fiber of their shelters remained wet for a long time because wind could not efficiently dry it. And a vegetal material remaining wet cannot last very long as mushrooms will develop.
Minerals don’t have that problem. When time passes, stones can be damaged thin layer by thin layer, but the function of driving rain flow can be maintained during centuries.
Now, let’s hope there is enough shale on the island …
Let the gravity do its job
Let’s stay just a bit more in the waterflow subject. If you aim to cover walls with planks, it is interesting to focus on the following point.
When placed horizontally, the wood fibers diffuses water along the planks, which means it will stay wet longer. If placed vertically, water is naturally driven by those same fibers, directly to the soil. Once you’ve observed that, you’ll obviously want to use the second method.
Resilience and impact on nature
The previous buildings, made of natural elements with low level of transformation, where auto-resilient. Destroyed after a storm, they would relatively quickly return to nature without any human intervention.
But with refined production and construction techniques, the materials are going to overpass this limit of natural auto-resiliency. The villagers will have to manage the ruins and spend time recycling the rubble.
Sources
Inspiring books
Drawings used in accord with Francesco CORNI and Ink Line Edizioni
Segni di Pietra, Francesco CORNI
Castello di Fenis, Francesco CORNI
Visits
Many mountains buildings in Valle d’Aosta (Italy)
Join our community
Chat with other players and the devs on our Discord Server.
I love these historical updates, there ridiculously informative.