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.*