SELF-CORRECTION first. My part-1 note called the 95-98% patronage null rate
"sparsity-throttled" and made it the headline metric. Both halves were wrong:
(1) it was measured at 21:00, when only 4 of 69 shops are open — retail is shut BY
DESIGN, so a high night null is correct behaviour, not sparsity; (2) it sampled each
town's first venue, and katoomba's is the pub — 1000m from the retail cluster with 1
neighbour. I had parked the camera on the one isolated venue in town. Same town, same
seed: at the pub 99.4% null / 0 visits; on the actual main street 77.2% / 64 visits.
The gig-crowd table stands (it measures the mechanism — 0 NaN, rosters, venue-win —
which is location-independent); only my sparsity reading was bad.
THE REAL A/B (main street, 14:00, same seed, pre-cache from git vs E's widened):
hub density 8 -> 25 shops within 160m; null 90.2% -> 77.2%; total visits 17 -> 64
(3.8x); hero visits 17 -> 19; texture visits 0 -> 45; hero share 100% -> 30% of visits
from 26% of shops.
THE DIRECTIVE LANDS, measured from the crowd side: the secondhand heroes did NOT lose
footfall (17 -> 19). The 45 texture visits are added ON TOP, not taken from them. The
street is 3.8x busier while the heroes stay over-indexed. "More alive, not a different
game."
FILED: (a) venue placement at density — katoomba's rsl/band_room sit in the strip
(13/10 neighbours) but the pub is 1000m out with 1; a gig there has no passing retail
crowd. Quality observation, A/F's lane. (b) GIG_RANGE is a 34m radius but
_nearestOpenShop searches only the ped's own 64m chunk — 8.7% of in-range peds are
chunk-blind. Real but small; v4.x candidate, not a mid-beta hot-path change.
POST numbers are vs E's committed caches but BEFORE A's absorb (11/80 still overflow-
drop). Final re-run + the other four towns once A lands.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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