崇祯直聘 keeps no morality score. The silver still has a source.

崇祯直聘：明末官场沉浮模拟器 is still in early access. The listing says the current build contains two complete lines, a county and a border command, and that further origins and storylines are still to be added before 1.0. The short description names four backgrounds: a poor civil official, a gentry son, a military descendant, or a palace eunuch. The feature list then says two lives are the ones in hand, and that more origins will open later. This piece follows those two. It also says there is no good-and-evil value and no correct person to become. The game shows consequences.

The county life, in the longer text, starts as a poor scholar from Xiangfu in Kaifeng. Ten years of study, a passed exam, a posting to a broken county, and on the first day the treasury is empty. The silver is never enough for farms, trade, crafts, schooling and the wall at once. Grain pay has to be collected. Disaster victims need relief. The page calls that tearing down the east wall to patch the west. Court is the same shortage in a verdict. Tenants refuse rent. A poisoning destroys a household. Canal grain is robbed. Judge by the statute, or take the money and let it pass. Once the words are down, the page says, spilled water cannot be gathered up.

Imperial envoys arrive one after another to demand the taxes. A single denunciation can bring the Embroidered Uniform Guard. The page lists three responses. Stay clean and get through the performance review that comes every three years on the strength of the record. Stuff embezzled silver to the envoy and take a higher post. If the denunciation has already put you in jail, stage a refugee assault, put three thousand local militia on the wall, and send the Guard back to the capital. The feature list puts more than thirty governance decisions and a run of court cases on this line. That count is the page’s. Each case, it says, tangles interest with personal obligation.

The border life starts with a waist token at the Xuanfu garrison. An elder brother has died in Liaodong. A father has retired. What remains is an old house and rusted armor. The route the page prints runs from there to the emperor’s aid, out to hold Ningyuan, south to put down the Dengzhou mutiny, then through Jiangbei, Jingxiang, Songjin and Kaifeng, and finally back to hold Guanzhong. Thirteen volumes. Each volume is a sand table of a defense zone, and the dates follow the historical record. On the table you split troops, send scouts to harass, open military farms and requisition local grain. Official pay often arrives at only sixty percent. The fastest close is to cut a sum from the treasury into your own purse. The risk named beside that cut is the person who comes to audit the books.

When the fighting starts, the page says you command it in real time. Among eight troop types it names dao-and-shield, long spears, bows and crossbows, cavalry, matchlocks and cannon. It does not name the other two. Victory or defeat rewrites the plot that follows. Five pressures sit on the same officer: imperial favor, court debate, the army supervisor, morale and public reputation. Please one, the listing says, and another pulls the other way. Each volume promotes by merit, from hundred-household commander toward command of the relief armies, and a promotion often means a new map and a new mess.

The page names 卢象升 Lu Xiangsheng, 孙传庭 Sun Chuanting, 曹文诏 Cao Wenzhao, 左良玉 Zuo Liangyu and 吴三桂 Wu Sangui as officers who share the camp. Some pull you up. Some trip you. At home the Gu family register holds a gambling uncle with wide connections, a younger brother obsessed with firearms, and an elder sister who will marry onto the grassland. Letters travel with merchant caravans. They report that people are safe, and they report when that stops.

After the sixteenth year of Chongzhen, the page calls the country an endgame. Defend the capital, escort the heir south, hold Guanzhong, join Dashun, surrender to the new dynasty, go north to the grassland, or found a title of your own. Which of those is open depends on the road already walked. The feature list’s dozens of endings — martyrdom, flight south, surrender to the Qing, holding out, hegemony, dying abroad, the pinnacle above everyone — sit beside the promise that more storylines are still coming. Those dozens are not a count of what this version already contains. The sky over both lives, in the listing’s account, is drought, then flood, then locusts, heavy taxes for the Liaodong war, more refugees, and Jurchen forces watching from beyond the passes.

A coin can feed the wall or the private purse. The title screen shows a new posting and V0.2.28.2. It does not show the empty county treasury, the sixty-percent pay, or the auditor. Which of those spends this build can already examine belongs to the two lines the page says are in it.