PROCITY/docs/THE_FRONTIER.md

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 THIRD DIMENSION + TEXTURE LIFE (filed 2026-07-18 — John's Perlin question, answered from the code)

The ruling that frames this section: world structure stays on the semantic hash-stream system (prng.js — seedFor(citySeed, kind, id), independently-keyed streams per entity). That architecture is why 31 rounds of features never moved a golden: a draw added to one stream shifts no other. Perlin answers a different question — a continuous value over space/time — and it enters the toolbox only where the question really is continuous. When it does, it seeds from the same citySeed keying: deterministic, gate-able, no exceptions.

Candidates, ranked by honest cost:

1. TERRAIN / ELEVATION — the headline, epoch-scale, chartered as a v8+ candidate. Everything is flat, which is wrong for the real map: Katoomba is a mountain town rendered as a billiard table. Per the real-map DNA, the primary source is REAL elevation (SRTM / contour data for each town bbox, the same discipline as the roads fetch) — noise is only the infill between samples, never the shape of a real hill. The cost is named now so nobody charters it lightly: terrain touches everything — roads follow grades, buildings need foundations and steps, footpaths slope, the chunk streamer and the walkers and every budget meet a Y axis, and the classic covenant needs a flat-forever fence. This is an epoch with an alpha/beta/close arc of its own, not a round.
2. Sky / cloud domes — cheap, near-term (v6/v7 polish). Skies are baked textures today; a seeded FBM dome gives every day its own weather-shaped sky, composes with the existing weather states, and is one lane's item (B, lighting).
3. Wear & grime — cheap, high-charm (E/C canvas painters). Seeded value-noise for sleeve ring-wear, facade sun-fade, footpath staining — per-item, deterministic, and exactly the 90s patina the parody sleeves deserve. Pairs with the beta's price-guide work (a worn sleeve reading worn next to its condition grade).
4. Crowd ebb (LIVING STREET track, D). A slow 1D noise curve modulating street density across the day — mornings trickle, arvo swells — richer than uniform draws, one stream, identity-safe.

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.