Ruling — Catan — RuleSage

You asked

How much does a city cost to build?

Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this counted as refused

The rulebook doesn't appear to cover this cleanly — but here are the closest passages retrieved, in case they help you rule.

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.6 · Cities

You cannot build a city directly. You can only upgrade an existing settlement to a city. You pay the required resources, return the settlement to your supply, and replace the settlement with a city on the same intersection Y . Each city is worth 2 victory points. You receive double resource producti

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.6 · BuildinG Costs Cards

The building costs cards show what can be built and which resources are required. When you pay building costs, you must return the necessary resources to their supply stacks. You can build settlements Y and roads Y , upgrade settlements to cities Y , and buy development cards Y . C

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.4 · 3. Build Y

Now you can build. Through building, you can increase your victory points Y , expand your road network, improve your resource production, and/or buy useful development cards. To build, you must pay specific combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Card Y ). Take the appropriate number

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.5 · c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain

You may only establish a city by upgrading one of your settlements. When you upgrade a settlement to a city, put the settlement (house) piece back in your supply and replace it with a city piece (church). Cities produce twice as many resources as settlements. You acquire 2 resource cards for an adja

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.6 · Build (BuildinG)

You may build on your turn after you have rolled for resource production and finished trading. To build, you must turn in the specified combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Cards Y ). Return the resource cards to the supply stacks. You can build as many items and buy as many cards

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): qwen3:4b-instruct-2507-q4_K_M@0edcdef34593
timings: search 86 ms · ask 2136 ms · total 7791 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 5569 ms · generation 2222 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 6, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "You cannot build a city directly. You can only upgrade an existing settlement to a city. You pay the required resources, return the settlement to your supply, and replace the settlement with a city on the same intersection Y . Each city is worth 2 victory points. You receive double resource producti", "headingPath": "Cities", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "The building costs cards show what can be built and which resources are required. When you pay building costs, you must return the necessary resources to their supply stacks. You can build settlements Y and roads Y , upgrade settlements to cities Y , and buy development cards Y . C", "headingPath": "BuildinG Costs Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Now you can build. Through building, you can increase your victory points Y , expand your road network, improve your resource production, and/or buy useful development cards. To build, you must pay specific combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Card Y ). Take the appropriate number ", "headingPath": "3. Build Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "You may only establish a city by upgrading one of your settlements. When you upgrade a settlement to a city, put the settlement (house) piece back in your supply and replace it with a city piece (church). Cities produce twice as many resources as settlements. You acquire 2 resource cards for an adja", "headingPath": "c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "You may build on your turn after you have rolled for resource production and finished trading. To build, you must turn in the specified combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Cards Y ). Return the resource cards to the supply stacks. You can build as many items and buy as many cards ", "headingPath": "Build (BuildinG)", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Example: See Illustration M. Olivia, the blue player, wants to build a new settlement. She may only do so at one of the intersections marked 'B'. She cannot build on 'A' because of the Distance Rule, nor on 'C' because no blue road leads to this intersection. Note: If you have built all 5 of your se", "headingPath": "settlements", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "You may only build a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y and only if none of the 3 adjacent intersections contains a settlement or city. Example: See Illustration F. Coleman, the blue player, wants to build a settlement. The settlements marked 'A' are already in play. Coleman cannot build on ", "headingPath": "distanCe rule", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "The roads connect your settlements and cities. You build roads on paths Y . You cannot build new settlements without also building roads. Roads provide victory points only if you hold the Longest Road Y special card. Only 1 road may be built on each path. You can build roads along the coast. Example", "headingPath": "roads", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
citations (raw): []
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
answered-before recall: no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until: Oct 7, 2026 02:34

retrieval — what the search arm returned

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	Cities	p.6	0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	BuildinG Costs Cards	p.6	0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	282
#3	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	3. Build Y	p.4	0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#4	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	c) City Y Requires: 3 Ore & 2 Grain	p.5	0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#5	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	Build (BuildinG)	p.6	0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#6	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	settlements	p.12	0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#7	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	distanCe rule	p.7	0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#8	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	roads	p.11	0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 86 ms · first delta n/a · total 7791 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 5569 ms · retrieval 86 ms · ask 2136 ms · gateway work 2222 ms · total 7791 ms
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 35s ago)
stream path: not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
abstain rationale: the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.