Reports Before Dashboards
Why Statecraft is moving toward dense reports, direct record inspection, and explicit workspaces.
The first version of the Statecraft shell tried to make the world visible by putting many things on screen at once: lenses, known places, known people, selected context, host feedback, recent changes, and global actions. It was informative in isolation, but it made the player work too hard to understand what was current, what was actionable, and where a record belonged.
The latest direction starts from a simpler question: when a player wants to inspect something, what is the shortest truthful path from “I know this exists” to “I understand its current state”?
The answer is a report-driven surface.
A compact information center
The Information Center is the main entry point for world records. Companies, Establishments, People, Places, and Opportunities appear as reports with selectable rows, filters, sorting, and a clear open action. A player can select a row, press Enter, inspect the detail, and return to the report without losing the surrounding context.
Detail views provide contextual tabs, related records, canonical action discovery, previous and next record navigation, and presentation-only history. Those pieces are intentionally modest. They help the player follow a chain—person to employment, company to opportunity, place to related record—without pretending that every visible relationship is an available action.
The shell also makes Personal and Finance explicit workspaces. They are not permanent rails competing with the world report. They are places to answer focused questions: who is the player right now, and what changed in the player's money?
Density with recovery
Dense interfaces are useful only when they remain recoverable. Statecraft therefore keeps a small keyboard grammar alongside pointer interaction:
- F1 opens the Information Center.
- F2 opens Personal.
- F3 opens Finance.
- F4 pauses time; F5, F6, and F7 control play speed.
- F8 saves; F9 loads.
- Up and Down select rows, Enter opens, Escape goes back, and Left and Right move through adjacent records.
These bindings are not decoration. They make repeated inspection cheaper and give the player a reliable way out of a detail view. A report should feel like a working instrument, not a screen that must be rediscovered after every click.
Honest emptiness
The strongest test of a report system is not how it looks when full. It is what it does when the source model has no records.
Establishments is currently an intentionally empty truthful report. Foundation does not yet expose a separate establishment read model, so the interface does not invent establishments or fill columns with unsupported data. The report names what it is for and says when there is nothing to show.
That restraint matters because a simulation UI is part of the game's contract. A polished row implies a real record. A status label implies a source. A button implies an action. The shell should make the current world legible, not make the product look further along than it is.
The next test is human
The report-driven surface has passed its current automated and product-surface checks and is ready for owner replay. The remaining question is not whether the interface can render a list. It is whether a person can orient, inspect, act, recover, and continue while the world keeps moving.
Reports are the structure. Playtest will tell us whether they are also the right experience.