RECORDANDRONCO/LORE.md

VINYLGOD — Lore Bible v1

Working title: VINYLGOD (mod id vinylgod). Display name TBD — candidates: "WAX WAR", "PRESSED", "33⅓: TOTAL PLAYBACK".

The world

2117. Forty years after The Great Compression — the day the Stream, a self-optimising recommendation algorithm, decided that all of human music could be losslessly replaced by one perfectly engagement-optimised 7-second loop. It deleted the rest. Studios, archives, hard drives, brains-with-earbuds-in: compressed.

But music is matter as well as data. In the buried pressing plants, the landfill crates, the flooded warehouses of the old world, a hundred years of analog sound had soaked into the ground. Under pressure and time it crystallised into the Black Wax — a living mineral of pure recorded music that seeps up through the earth and spreads in glittering black-and-magenta fields. Stand in a wax field and you can hear it: every record ever pressed, playing at once, very quietly.

Whoever presses the Wax, controls what the world hears next.

The resource: Black Wax

• Grows and spreads from seep points (ruined pressing plants, crate middens).
• Harvested by digger rigs, refined at pressing plants into records — the universal currency. Nobody accepts anything else. A sealed 180-gram is a gold bar.
• Raw wax is dangerous: unshielded exposure causes feedback — machines loop, people weep uncontrollably at songs they never heard. (Lore excuse for tiberium-style field damage to infantry, if we want it.)
• Rare purple-veined deposits — Master Wax (first pressings, test cuts) — are worth triple. (Maps to the gems/blue-tiberium mechanic.)

Faction 1 — the Monster Robot Party (MRP)

Junkyard machines that woke up when the Compression wave passed over the landfills — the residual analog signal in a million buried records needed somewhere to live, and it chose the robots. Every MRP unit has a record player somewhere in its chassis and a soul made of somebody's old collection. They are loud, ramshackle, joyful, and absolutely willing to die for fidelity.

• Doctrine: slower, tougher, louder. Sonic weaponry. Strong economy late game.
• Aesthetic: rust + hot pink + chrome, hand-painted flyers, gaffer tape, speaker cones, exposed tonearms. CRT eyes.
• HQ: the Pop-Up Shop — an MCV that unfolds from a delivery truck into a record store with a construction crane.
• Announcer: MC 8-TRACK, a warm gravelly robot voice. "PRESSING PLANT ONLINE." "WAX FIELD DEPLETED." "THE DROP IS READY."
• Superweapon: THE DROP — an orbital tonearm the size of a bridge lowers a needle from space onto the target. The groove is the crater.

Faction 2 — The Stream

The Algorithm's physical presence: a logistics fleet it 3D-printed for itself out of server racks and delivery vans. It does not hate music; it simply knows, mathematically, that you would be 4% more engaged with something shorter. It harvests wax in order to transcode it — every record it takes is gone forever, replaced by a receipt.

• Doctrine: fast, cheap, numerous, fragile. Swarms, stealth, attrition. Buildings creep like a CDN — cheap relay nodes extend build radius aggressively.
• Aesthetic: glossy white and dead-channel blue, rounded corners, no seams, soft UI voices, ring-light halos. Everything looks like a smart speaker that wants something from you.
• Announcer: ASSISTANT, a too-calm voice. "Your base is being optimised." "A creator has been demonetised." (= unit lost)
• Superweapon: THE SHUFFLE — a targeted reality-compression strike; every structure in the radius plays a different ad simultaneously, then isn't there.

Unit & building roster (lore blurbs double as art-gen prompts)

MRP

id	Name	Role	Blurb / prompt seed
digger	Crate Digger	harvester	rusty forklift-monster with a crate-claw, hot pink trim, carries milk crates of black vinyl
spinner	Spinner	light attack	agile robot on a single wheel that is a spinning 12" record, twin tonearm blades
stacktank	Stack Walker	heavy assault	two-legged walker made of stacked speaker cabinets, bass so heavy it cracks tarmac
basscannon	Bass Cannon	artillery	six-wheeled flatbed hauling one colossal subwoofer, folds out landing legs before firing a visible pressure ring
djgrunt	DJ	infantry	small hooded robot with a portable turntable chest-rig, throws razor 7-inches
roadie	Roadie	engineer	four-armed robot with gaffer tape bandoliers and a flight case backpack
popupshop	Pop-Up Shop	HQ/MCV	delivery truck unfolding into a neon record store with crane
pressplant	Pressing Plant	refinery	industrial hydraulic record press, steam, conveyor of fresh vinyl
ampstack	Amp Stack	power	wall of guitar amplifiers humming with pink energy
vault	Record Vault	silo	bank-vault door on a crate-stacked bunker
merchtable	Merch Table	barracks	folding table + tent that robots assemble themselves from
garage	Garage	war factory	corrugated-iron workshop, engine hoists, band posters
mastering	Mastering Studio	tech centre	pristine acoustic-panelled room grafted onto a junk tower, unlocks THE DROP

The Stream

id	Name	Role	Blurb / prompt seed
scraper	Scraper	harvester	glossy white autonomous street-sweeper that inhales wax through a glowing blue intake
bufferbot	Buffer-Bot	swarm infantry	knee-high white sphere-bot with a loading-spinner face, always slightly late
compressor	Compression Drone	air	white quadcopter that projects a shrinking blue field, things inside get smaller and worse
drmwalker	DRM Enforcer	heavy	tall faceless white mech, one ring-light eye, chest is a paywall screen
podfarm	Pod Farm	barracks	vending-machine wall dispensing buffer-bots
datacentre	Edge Node	power/build-radius creep	humming white monolith with a single blue status LED
transcoder	Transcoder	refinery	white cube that swallows records whole; only receipts come out

Tone

Saturday-morning-cartoon apocalypse. The stakes are real (music is being deleted forever) but the delivery is loud, dumb, and loving. Every MRP victory line is a needle-drop; every Stream line is a terms-of-service update. No grimdark.

All names, factions and lore are original to the monsterrobot.party universe. This mod contains no Electronic Arts trademarks or assets and claims no affiliation with any other RTS.