Lonestar Baron

You inherit country and cattle in 1919, and whatever is underneath them. The clock does not stop. Lone Star Baron is a Texas ranching and oil simulation built out of numbers a rancher would recognise. There is no ending year and no win screen. The score is land. Cattle and crude are the two engines that service the debt on it. TWO WAYS TO RUIN A GOOD THING The grass and the minerals ask you the same question, and both punish the same answer. Stock a section at 1.8 times what it carries and the range degrades, and it recovers about six times slower than it fell. Let a driller pump your field at five times the efficient rate and the money comes in a third of the time, but a third of the oil is coned off and stranded underground for good. Neither loss appears in the cash book. Both arrive years later, as a calf crop that does not come and a royalty cheque that stops early. THE GRASS Rain grows it. Cattle eat it. Thin cows do not breed, so a bad year costs you the next three. Weight, age and bloodline are tracked on every head you own. THE OIL A parcel is 500 acres of fixed geology, and you cannot see it from the gate. Surveying costs fifty cents an acre and answers on the spot: a field with a runway of two years, or forty, or nothing at all. Dry holes are real, and ground that was worked before you got there arrives part-drained and priced like it. You do not run the rig. You own the dirt, so you sign the lease — a bonus in one lump, then one-eighth of the wellhead every month it produces, the customary Texas fraction. Richer ground does not pay bigger cheques. It pays more of them. Minerals and grass are separate estates. Let the oil to a driller and the grass to a grazier at the same time, because a pumpjack and a cow share a section — but a grazing lease takes exclusive possession, so your own herd comes off, and he can wear your range out while you collect the rent. HISTORY IS THE WEATHER The economy runs on the real record for as long as the real record exists. Crude runs on actual wellhead prices from 1900: the post-war spike of 1920, the East Texas collapse to pennies in 1931, the regulated flat of the fifties, the 1973 embargo, 1986, 2020. Cattle and land run on their own series — the 1920-21 agricultural collapse, a decade where the Roaring Twenties never reached the farm, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, wartime price ceilings, the post-war herd cycles, the droughts of 2011 and 2022. It happens to everyone equally. The game is what you did about it. Past the record the generator takes over, fitted to the statistics of the real thing, so droughts still come in runs and nobody gets a quiet century. ELEVEN REGIONS, AND THEY ARE NOT SKINS The High Plains take thirty acres to the animal unit. The Upper Coast takes ten. The Permian Basin is mediocre grass sitting on the best oil in North America, and the Edwards Plateau is hard country with almost nothing under it. Where you start decides which engine you lean on, and there is no setting that is correct everywhere. WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO - Buy and lease country, section by section, off a real county map - Stock it, feed it, and ship the surplus every fall - Survey your acres for oil and find out on the spot - Sign mineral leases: bonus, royalty, term, and how hard he pumps - Lease the grass to a grazier and take the rent instead of the risk - Borrow against a herd nobody has counted, and meet the note every month A ledger and a county map. That is the whole interface, and it is exactly what fits on a phone. No account. No sign-up. No servers. Your outfit is saved on your device.