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Fable: THE FRONTIER — the honest map of what is NOT figured out (John's challenge, answered in writing)

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Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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# PROCITY — THE FRONTIER (what is genuinely not figured out)
*Fable (m3), 2026-07-17. John's challenge, verbatim: "there is heaps more to figure out — all
the systems are set you say?" He's right. This doc is the honest map: what 29 rounds built is
the WORLD and the PIPELine; the GAME — the reason a stranger would play for an hour — is
mostly unfigured. Nothing here is chartered; it's the space the next epochs get picked from.
Sibling docs: V2_IDEAS (the old parking lot), V6_LIVING_STREET (chartered, in flight).*
## What is actually solid (don't re-litigate)
Procedural + real towns · enterable interiors · citizens with identity · gigs · weather/tram ·
the dig with real/mint/parody stock · the tier ladder + offline law · the two-studio pipeline ·
the QA culture. The platform is genuinely done-ish. Everything below stands ON it.
## THE BIG ONE — it isn't a game yet
You walk, you dig, you buy. Then you close the tab and it never happened. The whole loop that
makes digging MEAN something is unbuilt:
1. **Persistence.** No saves. The wallet resets, the collection vanishes, "gone this session"
is the only memory. (localStorage fits the seeded-everything law trivially — the world
regenerates from seed; only the DELTA needs saving: cash, owned items, day. This is days of
work, not an epoch, and it unlocks everything below.)
2. **The collection.** You buy records and they go... nowhere. No crate at home, no album/
shelf UI, no "look what I found in Katoomba." The collection IS the trophy case of the
whole game and it does not exist.
3. **The thrill loop.** thriftgod's `mint()` gem bands exist as DATA (price bands, gems,
CBD-distance curation) and drive NOTHING. No underpriced gem in a dusty crate, no "is this
worth more than they're asking", no sell/flip loop, no wantlist hunting across towns. The
entire reason op-shopping is exciting in real life is un-simulated.
4. **Why today matters.** No day structure — no opening hours pressure (hours exist! nothing
makes you race them), no end-of-day, no "the gig starts at 9, the shops shut at 5, choose."
The clock is scenery.
5. **The player.** No hands, no home, no inventory UI beyond a number, no character. Who are
you in this town?
6. **Onboarding.** A stranger at digalot.fyi/procity gets pointer-lock and silence. The first
five minutes are unfigured entirely.
## Chartered but unbuilt (in flight or waiting)
- **v6 LIVING STREET** — spikes gated on footage; then clips-at-scale, personas, footpaths +
occasional cars, generated bodies.
- **Option B** — real reservation holds (John's hold budget).
- **Tier-2 auto-discovery** — needs a reachability contract.
- **The editor/override layer** (V2_IDEAS, still the best long-game idea: hand-author any shop
interior over the procedural base).
- **Multiplayer presence** (see who's digging the same town).
## Unowned design questions (nobody has even sketched these)
- **What is a session?** 20 minutes? A day-cycle? A town per sitting?
- **The economy loop:** buy low → ??? → profit. Sell where? To whom? GodBay (thriftgod's
auction sim) is sitting right there as the obvious answer and no design connects them.
- **Cross-town play:** 23 towns exist; nothing makes you travel. Regional wantlists? A gem
rumor system? The tram/train BETWEEN towns?
- **The gig layer as gameplay:** you can attend a gig; you can't book one, play one, or care
about one. 90sDJsim overlap sits unexplored (DJ the venue?).
- **Music identity:** procedural beds exist; a game this specific deserves a sound.
- **The 90s-ness:** it's in the fabric (video shops, milk bars) but no system USES the era —
no phone-free navigation puzzles, no street-press gig guide, no mixtapes.
## The honest sequencing opinion (Fable's, not a ruling)
The private-test deploy is the design instrument: John walks the game cold and writes down
every "why can't I..." — that list IS the v7 charter input. My candidate for v7 once v6's
spikes land: **THE GAME (persistence + collection + the thrill loop + a day that matters)** —
it's the smallest set that turns the platform into something a stranger plays twice.