The workshop is a durable productive practice and the bearer of one civic seal. The player begins by scrying, preparing, crafting, repairing, carrying, and tending processes directly.
Manual work teaches the material rules that later automation expresses. It should be tactile, readable, and brief enough that learning a process is satisfying without requiring permanent repetition. The workshop grows through new practices, tools, assistants, relationships, automation patterns, and Hold-local sites connected to shared institutions.
No single site efficiently contains every production chain. A player chooses where to install capacity, what to automate, which intermediate goods to ship, what to commission or trade, and what to request through a contract. A frontier site may process fresh dungeon returns while another performs advanced manufacture in an established Hold. The resulting supply chain crosses named routes without placing workshops on a shared city map.
One workshop view makes every site, local inventory, active queue, order, and freight commitment legible. It may let the player schedule work or transport remotely, but it never presents remote goods or capacity as if they were already local.
The workshop identity has one civic home and may establish any number of workshop sites in different Holds. Its workshop-wide presence lease expires after 36 hours without an authenticated foreground session, stopping bounded automation and removing every site from live local circulation. Returning immediately restores the same practice, history, and eligible sites; changing civic home is a separate prospective choice. Absence does not decay tools, erase relationships, relocate material, or multiply political authority.
The cozy fantasy comes from accumulated familiarity: named stations, remembered materials, recurring customers and delvers, repaired tools, small rituals, and sites whose local histories remain visible. Efficiency is useful, but the workshop is not reduced to throughput.