Closes my own R19 finding + F's one open budget edge. A sparse REAL town has few shops but a big edge
graph, so the 'two posters per main edge' pole run reads busy (katoomba 438) and drove venue_night to
200,965 tris (+0.5% over the 200k soft ceiling).
- gigs.js buildPosters caps the spine pole run at POSTER_PER_SHOP × shops (1.5/shop, floor 12) — a seeded
subsample. SCALED BY SHOP COUNT, not edge count (the whole point). katoomba 438→31 posters (~2x the
synthetic feel), fremantle 32, castlemaine 14. NO-OP on the shop-dense synthetic town (493 shops ⇒ cap
~740 ≫ its ~15 posters), so the synthetic gig golden 0xb1d48ea1 stays FROZEN.
- Posters are gig-layer (withGigs), so the real-town BASE goldens are unchanged (correctly green). Added
REAL_TOWN_GIG_GOLDENS (the full district+capped-poster plan per town: katoomba 0xbd332e83, …) to
regression-guard the capped output byte-exact, not just via districtInvariants. classic/gig/marched
fixtures frozen; selfcheck ALL GREEN 51675/51675; scaffold + consistency GREEN; cross-process deterministic.
→ F: re-measure venue_night, the +965 edge should close. Density absorb (ledger #2) pends E's widened
caches — the poster cap already reads the live shop count, so it auto-scales to the widened towns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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