SPRINT8 gate 1, carried since Sprint 6. week.js is a thin wrapper over the phase
machine, not a new system: it answers three questions between rounds — which
storm is tonight, how much money is there, and is it over. Zero THREE, pure data,
so the ladder and the money are testable at no cost.
The forecast card stops being a difficulty picker and becomes NIGHT n OF 5 with
the ladder as pips, tonight's storm, and the bank. Aftermath itemises the
settlement (fee / bonus / gear recovered / collateral / spent → bank), and E's
dawn tint comes up on their 2.2s ease BEFORE the scoreboard — their note is right
that you sell the survival first. E's diptych and copy are wired verbatim.
Two economy decisions, both made because measuring the week exposed them:
A lost night pays a FRACTION of the fee. Zero is unrecoverable and reads as
punishment; full pay means failure only costs the broken shackle and the bank
only ever climbs. Gear comes back at HALF — a full refund makes hardware free, so
the only sink is breakage and "broke = game over" becomes unreachable. Half is
also honest: a shackle that rode out a gale has been fatigued, which DESIGN.md
already says.
And the one that matters: REACHING night five is not SURVIVING it. My first draft
said it was, and playing the week found it — a $20-carabiner player loses four
gardens, never dips under the broke line because a cheap rig barely costs
anything, and got handed "THE WEEK HELD — everything's still where you put it"
over four dead gardens. The end card is the last thing this game says; it doesn't
get to lie the way the aftermath verdict used to. Words now scale with gardens
held: clean (5), scraped (3-4, E's own alternate copy), solvent (0-2, mine —
"STILL TRADING · The books balanced. The garden didn't." E never wrote words for
that ending because nobody knew the game could produce it).
Two economy questions I could NOT settle from a harness and have documented
rather than quietly tuned: a competent week runs the bank 80 → 350, so night five
stops being a decision; and a floor-scraping week may never actually go broke.
My bad-player model handed back a fixed $30 of gear whatever it spent, which
flattered the bottom of the curve — the same class of mistake this repo keeps
catching me in. Both want a human playing five nights.
Selftest 270 pass; the single red is gate 0's balance line, which is B+D's this
sprint and was already red on main.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
52bdcd0a5e