Against A's pack absorb (3face97, 23 towns / 36 goldens). selfcheck ALL GREEN
161300/161300, synthetic 0x3fa36874 frozen.
FITZROY STRESS: PASS — the sim doesn't notice 2x scale. 160 shops -> 139 seated (21
dropped, counted), 1859 nodes / 2408 edges (biggest of the epoch), 376 active peds,
0 NaN, 0.08 ms/frame, 22 chunk rosters, 454 identity sigs, 103 patronage visits.
A's R21 cluster bias survives the mecca (min 8 shops within 160m). Nothing needed
touching; the citizen field is not a budget risk at any scale this epoch reaches.
THIN TAIL — "does 12 shops still read alive?" ANSWER: only if they CLUSTER. I checked
both 12-shop towns because they disagree, and the disagreement is the finding:
- darwin_real ALIVE: 27m median nearest-neighbour spacing, 7 of 12 shops within 160m of
the hub, 18 visits (13 hero).
- toowoomba_real DEAD: 388m median spacing (14x) across a 4.6km road network, only 3
shops within 160m of its own densest point, 1417 patronage checks -> 0 finds, 0 visits.
Not a shopping town — a road network with occasional shops.
Verified real, not an R20-style sampling error: 9 shops open at 14:00 in BOTH, camera
stood on the town's own densest point. 0 NaN / 0.05 ms/frame either way.
FILED for E/Fable (curation, not code): MIN_TOWN_SHOPS counts shops, but what makes a
town read alive is clustering. A cheap test that separates them: ">=5 shops within 160m
of the densest point" — darwin 7 PASS, toowoomba 3 FAIL. Toowoomba ships in the v4.0
pack today with no main street to walk. Cull or accept as a known thin-tail (it costs
nothing). E/Fable's call — A's venue bias correctly exempts it ("no better candidate").
D->F: citizens at pack scale GREEN, no D-side blocker for v4.0. Toowoomba is curation,
not a citizen defect — the tag isn't gated on it from me.
Carried to v4.x: GIG_RANGE 34m radius vs single-chunk lookup (8.7% chunk-blind).
Last flag before the retro: R20's main-street relocation half remains unowned (fitzroy
13 hero vs 90 texture visits); one call of this harness re-runs it if v4.x wants it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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