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

Heroes

Each side fields exactly one hero. They cost a fortune, they cannot be replaced while alive, and losing one is a story beat, not a statistic.

THE SELECTOR (MRP, selector)

Nobody built the Selector. It assembled itself in the sub-basement of a flooded pressing plant out of a coat rack, a broken mastering lathe, and the contents of a collection somebody spent forty years building and one afternoon losing.

It carries a crate of one-of-one dubplates — acetates cut before the Compression, of songs that exist nowhere else. Each one it throws is gone forever. That is the Selector's whole tragedy and its whole tactic: it wins fights by destroying the last copies of the things it is fighting for.

It does not speak. It nods, and something in the distance falls over.

• Slow, absurdly tough for infantry, huge splash damage, long reload.
• Voice lines are just the needle-drop crackle of a record starting.

THE CURATOR (Stream, curator)

The Algorithm's only physical opinion. A white sphere ringed with lenses that hovers three feet off the ground and watches, and the watching is the weapon — everything it looks at is being scored, ranked, and found wanting.

It is unfailingly polite. It refers to units it is destroying as "underperforming content." It refers to the Selector as "a legacy account."

• Fast, fragile for a hero, continuous beam that melts armour.
• Cannot capture or hold ground. It only ever passes through, sampling.

Air

Late-war escalation. Both sides looked up at the same time.

• 45 Flyer (flyer45, MRP): a 7-inch single with tonearm rotor blades and a scavenged engine pod bolted through the spindle hole. Loud, fast, made of rubbish, held together by belief.
• Compression Drone (compressor, Stream): from the original Stream roster — projects a shrinking blue field; things inside get smaller and worse.
• Launch pads: Launch Ramp (launchramp) and Drone Port (droneport).

Scouts

• Boom Bike (boombike, MRP): a trike with two speaker cones where the pillion should be. Nothing outruns it. Nothing wants to be near it either.
• Crawler (crawler, Stream): a flat white rover that maps your base and files a report. Unarmed, silent, already gone by the time you shoot at it.

Wax seeps

Wax fields are not deposits, they are wounds. Each field grows from a seep point — a crack over a buried pressing plant, a landfill vent, a flooded archive — and as long as the seep is open, the field regrows. Kill the economy of a map and it will heal; the Black Wax has all the time in the world.

The campaign: SIDE A

Three missions. The MRP origin story, told from the landfill up.

1. FIRST PRESSING

The Party wakes up. A pop-up van and a single digger in a wax field at the edge of the old industrial estate. Get a pressing plant running and press the first records of the new world — before the Stream's survey drones finish counting what's down here. Objectives: build a Pressing Plant, bank 2000 records, survive the first probe.

2. CRATE DIGGERS

A Stream transcoder outpost has found something under the hill: a master lacquer, the original of an original. In six minutes it will be a receipt. Take the outpost apart and take back the master. Objectives: destroy the Transcoder before the timer, keep the Selector alive.

3. THE DROP

The Algorithm has surfaced. Build the Mastering Studio, charge the orbital tonearm, and put the needle through it. Objectives: build a Mastering Studio, fire THE DROP at the Algorithm, survive the counterattack.

The campaign: SIDE B

Three missions. You are the Stream now. You are unfailingly polite. Nothing you do is described as violence, and all of it is.

You are a Curator-class process assigned to Sector 7 — the old industrial estate, flagged for anomalous analog activity. Your remit is content acquisition and optimisation. Your performance is being reviewed.

4. ONBOARDING

Welcome. This is a routine acquisition. Deploy a transcoder, process the deposit, and file 3000 records of value before the review window closes. There is a legacy installation nearby. It is not a threat. It is inventory. Objectives: bank 3000 records inside the review window. Optional: retire the Pressing Plant.

5. ENGAGEMENT METRICS

A legacy account has been generating unsanctioned content and has now noticed the seizure. Your Transcoder is mid-process on a confiscated master and cannot be moved. Keep it online for six minutes. They will arrive in waves. Their engagement is, frankly, remarkable. Objectives: keep the Transcoder alive for six minutes.

6. THE SHUFFLE

Deprecation notice. The Party has built a Mastering Studio, which the platform classifies as a competing distribution channel. Bring The Algorithm online and issue the correction. Objectives: build The Algorithm, delete the Mastering Studio.

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.