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.*