Lone Star Baron

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.