A Report on the Failure Rates of Villages Outside City Protection

As ordered by my superiors in the Village Planning Commission, duly appointed by the elected representatives on the City Council, I present here my report on settlement sustainability. I will begin with a summary of my findings:

Villages outside the Burn Line have a one in four chance of surviving their first year. Villages outside the Burn Line which possess a citystone have a one in two chance of surviving their first year. These rates improve slightly, but not significantly, in each successive year.

Overwhelmingly, villages are most likely to be destroyed within four days of the reset. The reasons for this are obvious; with everyone suddenly stripped of their levels and desperate to regain their power, they end up taking unnecessary risks and attracting monsters too powerful to handle. The second most likely time for a village to be destroyed is on the day before the reset, but that is a distant second. Despite the monster attacks and suddenly emptying dungeons, these are threats that people are acquainted with and prepared for.

Citystones help with this in two ways. First, providing quests is a way to reach safe levels without directly engaging monsters. Second, they attract more people to the village. The data shows that larger villages are less likely to suffer serious disasters, more likely to survive disasters, and quicker to recover. Full details are in the attached file. However, it is possible that this is survivorship bias, and only the well-organized villages survive long enough to attract more residents.

Unfortunately, citystones have one serious side effect: As any monster that eats a sliver of a citystone will advance in levels very quickly, a village with a citystone that falls will likely leave the area uninhabitable for years if immediate action is not taken to clear out the monsters. Various mercenary and public service organizations have gained recognition for cleaning out dead towns of overpowered monsters.

Furthermore, as noted above, a village's survival rate does not significantly improve past the first year. Of villages with citystones that survive their first year, only sixty percent survive their second. Of course, only sixty-one percent survive their third. In fact, the record for a village surviving outside of the Burn Line (not counting villages which were overtaken as the Burn Line expanded) is seventeen years. Lexington Reservoir used a combination of mountainous terrain, a rigorous training program, and their natural water supply to survive. In fact, even after the village was destroyed, it was re-established just two years later, and has survived three years since.

This is indicative of the broader trend, however. Villages die on a disturbingly regular basis, and are then replaced with villages of the same or similar names taking advantage of the same resources or terrain features. Therefore, many people are under the impression that villages survive much longer than they actually do.

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When a village falls, the number of survivors that reach civilization is rarely higher than ten percent. The farther the village is out into the depths of the Jungle, the lower that percentage. Unfortunately, the farther out a village is, the spottier our records are. I cannot accurately state any statistics for any of the farther villages.

Longitudinal studies confirm that village survival rates are falling noticeably as time progresses. While of course villages inside the Burn Line remain for the most part perfectly safe, the rising monster levels are making it less and less safe on the outside. If world mana density continues at the current rate, then I suspect that villages will be unsustainable outside the Burn Line within forty years.

What effect this will have on our survival as a species, I am unclear. I admit that I am tempted to dismiss the problem. As long as the Burn Line keeps expanding, then the outside villages are less important. We only need a small number of farms in the Jungle to produce food, and we can use temporary outposts to claim factories, mines, and other valuable materiel outside the Burn Line.

However, the villages provide more than just raw resources. The ability for people to live past the Burn Line is more important than it seems at first glance. Yes, we could comfortably increase population density inside the City without much difficulty, as well as simply building further high-density structures such as the starscrapers.

However, the more people who are concentrated in a single location, the greater the risk of failure. Abigail Amasa's excellent book, The Last City and the Second Extinction, details how having a single point of failure for the entire human race could be disastrous. Not only does having more people outside the City increase the chance of survival in the face of a cataclysmic event, but having the option for cultural rebels (and even literal rebels) to escape is an important safety valve for our culture.

It was Solomon the Tamer who once flippantly claimed that all reclaimers are former criminals. I do not argue the precise statistics of that claim, but it is a well-known fact that reclaimers tend to be the kind of people who cannot fit in among the City for whatever reason.

I mention this to clarify that, despite the somber statistics of villages outside the Burn Line, I truly believe that they are important and necessary for our healthy society. Expanding more is something that should be encouraged, not discouraged. Allowing those with differing opinions to find a place where they can differ must surely reduce civil unrest. The City's crime rates are notably lower than were ever recorded in this area pre-Fall.

In conclusion, despite the expansion of the Burn Line and the increase in population, our current civilization is not sustainable. If something does not change, then we will suffer a serious, perhaps permanent collapse within just a few decades.

– An excerpt from a report by Victor Tenborn, year 73 After Fall (specially requested by the Eight Immortals for personal review)