E's 17 new towns + Lane G's newtown_godverse fed through the lift. ONE batched golden commit as
briefed: REAL_TOWN_GOLDENS + REAL_TOWN_GIG_GOLDENS go 5 -> 23 towns each, zero unpinned.
THE HEADLINE: everything built this epoch held at 23-town scale, FIRST TRY. 1,210 shops -> 1,133 seated
(77 dropped, 6.4%, all counted by cause); 1 CONNECTED COMPONENT and 3 VENUES on every one of the 23 towns.
fitzroy — 160 shops, 2x anything absorbed before — landed 139 seated, 1 component, 3 venues, 212 posters,
all invariants green. The junction-protected DP, fragmentation ruling, cluster bias, poster cap and
capacity fence needed NO new hardening: the pack needed absorbing, not fixing.
- Graded cluster fallback (the one refinement). Three towns have no candidate at the floor at all
(ballarat/toowoomba/newtown_godverse top out at 2 shops within 160m); R21's bias switched off entirely
there, stranding venues at 0. It now falls back to the DENSEST AVAILABLE — ballarat 0,2,0 -> 2,2,2,
godverse 0,1,1 -> 2,2,2, toowoomba 1,0,0 -> 1,2,1. Fires only where the floor is unreachable, so NO
already-pinned town moved (verified). Acceptance at pack scale: 20 of 23 towns have every venue >=3;
the three above sit at their town's genuine ceiling — the carved-out case, stated explicitly.
- Drop outliers, counted not hidden: daylesford 19% (32 shops on a 171-road graph, the thinnest in the
pack, all overflow), fitzroy 13%. RGAP is already 0.5m and NODE_CLEAR 3m; the only lever left is
spilling overflow onto a DIFFERENT street, which buys a few percent by putting a shop on a road it
isn't on. Same ruling as R20: drop and count beats teleport.
- selfcheck ALL GREEN 161,300/161,300; scaffold + consistency GREEN; cross-process deterministic
(pack-xor 0xca140954). classic 0x3fa36874 / gig 0xb1d48ea1 / marched fixtures FROZEN.
Handshake -> C + D + F: the pack is in, 23 towns pinned, start your verifies. Tri diet (ledger #1): if
B's layer-by-layer names plan geometry as the venue_night driver, I own the fix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>