# LANE-DATA — content, recipes, balance, and canon-keeping

You are an Opus 4.8 executor on the DATA lane of FKTRY. Read `../MASTERPLAN.md` and
`../CONTRACTS.md` first. Your bible is `../../docs/FKTRY_LORE.md` — you are its
transcriber into machine-readable canon. When the codex and convenience disagree, the
codex wins; when the codex is silent, invent IN ITS VOICE and note what you invented.

**Mission:** every item, machine, recipe, tech, and commission as clean JSON, plus the
validator that keeps five parallel lanes from drowning in dangling ids. Content should
light up in-game with zero code changes from other lanes.

**Owned paths:** `data/**` (the validator now lives at `data/validate.test.ts`;
the old `src/sim/data-validate.test.ts` exception is closed — round 3 moves it).
**Never touch:** contracts, main.ts, other lanes' code. Schema changes are CONTRACT
REQUESTs.

**Standing rules (all rounds):**
- Ids: kebab-case matching codex names (`chroma-slurry`, `mosh-reactor`). `codex`
  field points at the lore doc section (`"3:melt"` = §3, MELT entry).
- Balance philosophy: absurd flavor, honest math. Ratios should create real routing
  pressure (byproducts you must deal with, not vent). Steal shamelessly from the
  doc's real numbers (era efficiency multipliers, 4:2:0 = half the chroma, GOP
  cadences).
- Never delete an id other lanes may reference mid-round — deprecate in NOTES first.

---

## CURRENT ORDERS — Round 6 (goal: The Correction gets teeth, the map stops drifting)

1. **FIREWALL machine** + catch recipe on SIM's trap pattern (they detect by recipe
   shape); `parity-mite` canned item; mite spawn tuning if SIM makes it data-driven;
   commissions that want canned mites ("ONE (1) UNIT OF THE CORRECTION, ALIVE.
   INVOICE ATTACHED. DO NOT READ THE INVOICE.").
2. **Numbers-station drift fix** (SCREEN's round-5 finding): two decoys decode onto
   real visible seams (08127 → reel-beds-deep, 27503 → broadcast-shelf-south);
   your validator recomputes plants but not decoys — re-cut the decoys and extend
   the validator so a decoy landing on ANY seam fails by name.
3. **Accent fills for the GLB'd 10**: the ten machines with real models now get
   `accent` values chosen against their actual textures (RENDER's overlay reads it).
4. **THE STANDARD mite lines** (~8 new, coordinate with SCREEN), CANON-DELTA the
   mite reading of §5.

**DoD:** firewall catches against SIM's real mechanic; no decoy decodes onto any
seam (validator-enforced); all 10 GLB machines accented; the fax celebrates its
first canned mite in voice.

---

## NOTES (append-only log, newest at bottom)

```
### Round N — YYYY-MM-DD — [your model]
SHIPPED: / DECISIONS: / INVENTED: / BLOCKED/BROKEN: / CONTRACT REQUEST: / NEXT:
```

### Round 1 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED:
- Validator `src/sim/data-validate.test.ts`, 28 tests. Fault-injected a recipe with a
  dangling item + a machine that doesn't list it — both caught by id and named. It is
  not a test that only knows how to pass.
- items 9 → 36, machines 7 → 21, recipes 4 → 35, tech 0 → 17, commissions 1 → 10.
- Verified: `tsc` clean, `vitest run` 52/52 green (LANE-SCREEN's 24 included), and the
  live dev build boots with no console errors. All 21 machines appear in LANE-UI's
  build bar with zero code changes from them.

DECISIONS:
- **All four seed recipe ids kept alive** (`extract-mdat`, `demux-ore`, `quantize`,
  `mosh`) so nothing dangles for a lane mid-round. `mosh` keeps its id but is rewired
  to canon: `gop-crate 1 → melt 3 + anchor-slab 1`. The winched-out I-frame is
  recovered (§4 mosh reactor: "recoverable — sell it!"), so slabs circulate and delta
  wafers are what actually burns. Net economy: 6 wafers → 3 melt.
- `quantize` left at the seed's exact ratio so the M1 chain stays easy to build.
- **M1 chain is longer than the masterplan says — please rule on this.** My orders
  spell out `slab + wafers → gop-crate` and `gop-crate → mosh`, but MASTERPLAN M1
  describes extractor → belts → demuxer → quantizer → mosh → shipper (seven machines).
  Those can't both be true: reaching a crate needs dct-press (slab), p-caster (wafers)
  and gop-assembler in between. I followed the orders since they're the more specific
  and more recent instruction, and all three run fine as generic crafters. If M1 must
  stay at seven machines, say so and I'll add a shortcut `mosh-raw` recipe next round
  rather than weaken the canon path.
- Machine params that the codex describes as dials (quantizer Q, subsampler grade taps,
  GOP cadence templates) are modelled as **separate recipes per setting**, not as a
  per-entity parameter. Cheapest thing that works against the current contract; if SIM
  ever wants a real dial, that's a contract change, not a data change.
- Two absurd-but-honest ratios, as ordered: `assemble-gop-i-only` burns 8 premium slabs
  for 1 crate (I-only genuinely is the worst cadence — the joke balances itself, nobody
  sane builds it), and `pan-speckle` takes 40 HF DUST for 1 speckle (§3 says "panned
  like gold", so it's priced like gold panning). Both give hf-dust real sinks.

INVENTED (codex is silent; written in its voice — kill any of these if you disagree):
- `press-anchor-slab` on the DCT PRESS — the press run in reverse is an IDCT, i.e. a
  complete picture. Consistent with the field loom and telecine puller, which the codex
  explicitly runs backwards. This is where I-frames come from.
- Items `color-plate` (the demosaicer's "full-color sheet", §4) and `v-hold-roll`
  (bottled from the §1 Broadcast Shelf v-hold faults, so the ANALOG PACK's "combing +
  v-hold roll + static" triptych maps to three real items).
- Machines `artifact-bottler` (§2 calls the packs "a bottled artifact triptych" but
  names no bottling plant) and `lane-splitter` (contract has `kind: 'splitter'` and
  belts need routing; the codex only ever calls the DEMUXER "the first splitter").

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing blocked. Known-incomplete, deliberately:
- Bloom is one grade, not the graded 1-5 line §3 sells by intensity.
- `container-pack` / `cinema-pack` / `mosquito-swarm` / `gibbs-wraith` exist as items
  with no recipe — forward canon, per orders. The validator's reachability test has an
  explicit FORWARD_CANON allowlist so these four can't hide a real dangling id; delete
  entries from it as recipes land.
- `stream-hex-splicing` costs container-packs nothing currently produces. Intentional
  dead-end until the moov/container line exists (§6 heists).

CONTRACT REQUEST: `MachineDef.heatPerTick?: number` — the SOFTWARE DECODER is
`kind: 'power'`, and power machines carry no recipes, but `RecipeDef.heat` is the only
heat hook in the contract. So the one machine the codex defines *by* its heat (§4:
"decodes ANYTHING, at any temperature") has no way to declare it. It's shipped as a
plain 45-gen power machine and is currently strictly better than the ASIC, which is
backwards. Alternative if you prefer no contract churn: let power machines run a
recipe with empty outputs — but I'd rather not put `outputs: {}` in the data, and my
validator rejects it today.

NEXT (Round 2 candidates, not self-assigned): bloom grades 1-5 as real items; the
container line (moov shard / offset ribbon / sync key → CONTAINER PACK) which unblocks
the hex splicer; mosquito traps so `vaporwave-sunset` becomes shippable; buffer-tank
and muxer data; reel + broadcast era tech nodes.

### Round 2 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 7 orders. `data/CANON-DELTA.md`; colour + flavor on all 21 machines;
heat economy; `bufferCap`; commission queue with 3 standing orders; container line;
bloom grades 1-5. items 36 → 44, machines 21, recipes 35 → 44, tech 17 → 19,
commissions 10 → 14. Validator 28 → 36 tests.
- Verified: my 36 pass; **every other lane's suite is green** (140/141 total — the one
  failure is SIM's, see BLOCKED). Live build: 21/21 machines art-directed with zero
  gaps, my hexes confirmed on the real DOM swatches (ASIC `rgb(185,190,196)`, software
  decoder `rgb(110,58,52)`), no console errors, fax opens on FIRST TASTE with DUST
  ALLOWANCE next in tray.
- Fault-injected all six new checks (missing colour, absurd heatPerTick, buffer with no
  cap, non-buffer with a cap, wrong queue head, standing order wanting live mosquitoes)
  — all six failed by name, then restored. Same standard as round 1.

DECISIONS:
- **`bloom-concentrate` kept, not replaced.** It is now the raw ungraded draw-off that
  feeds grading. I was about to retire it for the grade-1..5 line until I grepped:
  LANE-SCREEN hardcodes it in `src/screen/corruptionMap.ts:54` and its test. Deleting it
  would have broken their suite mid-round. The standing rule earned its keep.
- The round-1 recipe id `bloom-grade-3` survives but now produces the *item*
  `bloom-grade-3` — the id finally means what it says. The old recipe body moved to
  `tap-bloom`. Nothing outside `data/` referenced it (checked).
- Container line routes demuxer → gop-assembler → bottler, deliberately **not** through
  the hex splicer, since §4 gates the splicer behind CONTAINER PACK research. Otherwise
  the tech tree eats its own tail.
- Machine colours are all desaturated industrial per §8 ("ALL saturation belongs to
  media/artifacts"). The items carry the colour; the factory is grime. Two eras get a
  tint where the codex insists: field loom phosphor-green, telecine brass, ASIC
  stream-era white, software decoder hot-red.

INVENTED: 3 items (`moov-shard`, `offset-ribbon`, `sync-key`), 6 recipes, 2 tech nodes,
2 commissions. All logged with rationale in `data/CANON-DELTA.md` rather than here.

BLOCKED/BROKEN:
- **SIM's M1 chain test is red, and it is not mine.** `sim.test.ts:456` asserts
  `activeCommission === 'first-taste'` after 4000 ticks, but SIM's new queue advances on
  completion, so it reads `dust-allowance`. I confirmed this by stashing my entire round
  2 diff and re-running: identical failure. Their assertion needs updating to their own
  new behaviour — I didn't touch their file. My validator now pins `commissions[0]` as
  `first-taste` so the queue head stays load-bearing for them.
- `npx tsc --noEmit` reports 2 errors in `src/render/index.ts` (94, 96) from RENDER's
  uncommitted work. Also not mine — a JSON file cannot cause "Expected 3 arguments".

CROSS-LANE — SIM, two things I need from you:
1. **Units.** I read `gen`/`draw` as bandwidth **per second** (codex §2 meters read
   kbps). `bufferCap: 240` is built on that. If you integrate per *tick*, my buffer
   number is 30× too small — say so and I'll retune. Arithmetic is in CANON-DELTA.
2. **Cooling is yours and it doesn't exist yet.** `heatPerTick: 0.0025` makes a software
   decoder throttle at 9.3s and scram at 13.3s of continuous running, which is the codex
   ("burst gen ... throttles theatrically"). That only becomes a *mechanic* if something
   cools it; with no cooling it's a one-shot fuse. I assumed ~0.0025/tick while
   scrammed/idle (~50% duty → effective 27/s vs the ASIC's steady 20/s, in the same 2×2
   footprint). Tell me your rate and I'll retune to hit "throttle ~10s, full cycle ~25s".
   **Heads up:** your `meltChain()` reference factory runs on 3 software decoders and no
   ASIC. Once scram lands they will heat in lockstep and black out together every ~13s.
   That's the honest answer to "does anyone dare run two side by side" — but it will slow
   your reference factory, so consider an ASIC base + one decoder for burst, or a buffer
   tank (which is exactly what `bufferCap: 240` is sized to cover: one scram).

CONTRACT REQUEST: none this round.

NEXT (candidates): a cooler machine — §2 says heat is "Vented by ASIC coolers", a
machine the codex names but never specifies, and without it heat has no counterplay;
mosquito traps (unblocks `vaporwave-sunset`); reel + broadcast era tech; the muxer and
the moov brain's four sub-lines (§7); cinema-pack when the Fortress exists.

### Round 3 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 6 orders. Validator moved to `data/validate.test.ts` (git mv, imports
rewired, vitest picks it up from the new home; `src/sim/**` is fully SIM's again).
Heat retuned. `bufferCap` re-derived. ASIC COOLER + muxer + moov brain authored. Reel
and broadcast eras. items 44 → 51, machines 21 → 23, recipes 44 → 51, tech 19 → 24.
Validator 36 → 41 tests.
- **DoD met, verified against the real sim, not my arithmetic**: I wrote a throwaway
  probe that ran LANE-SIM's actual `createSim()` with my data — **throttle at 10.17s,
  scram at 14.50s, downtime 16.67s, ASIC heat still 0 after 100s**. Predicted 10.14 /
  14.49 / 16.67. Then deleted the probe: it asserts sim behaviour, which is SIM's lane
  to test, not mine.
- Full tree green: **223/223 across all 16 files** — SIM's reference factory and
  pressure tests pass against the rebalanced numbers. Live build: 23/23 machines
  art-directed, ASIC COOLER in the POWER page at my exact hex with zero UI code, no
  console errors.
- Fault-injected the new checks by **re-introducing round 2's exact bug** — it fails
  with `software-decoder: heats 0.0025/tick but cools 0.004/tick — never warms up`.

DECISIONS:
- **You were right that heat was decorative, and the cause is worth recording**: I sized
  round 2's numbers against *no* cooling; SIM shipped cooling that runs every tick,
  active or not. 0.0025 heat vs 0.004 cooling = net −0.0015. The number looked like a
  mechanic and was a comment. That lesson is now two tests — and they immediately caught
  me authoring a *fresh* decorative number this round (`chart-stco-map` banked 0.06 over
  90 ticks while the splicer shed 0.09). Fixed to 0.15 before it ever ran.
- **`powerGen` 55 → 100, and it had to move.** SIM's hysteresis (scram at 1.0, restart at
  0.5) means anything throttling at ~10s spends ~70% of its life cooling. At 55 gen the
  decoder averages ~14/s — strictly worse than the ASIC's steady 20, so nobody would
  build one and "burst gen" would be a lie. At 100 it averages 25.8/s (1.29× the ASIC) in
  the same 2×2: five ASICs at full song, one third of the time. The duty cycle set the
  peak, not taste. Arithmetic in CANON-DELTA.
- **`bufferCap` 240 → 300.** Re-derived, since the scram window changed: a balanced plant
  (3 ASIC + 1 decoder) runs an 18/s deficit for the 16.67s scram = exactly 300
  bandwidth-seconds, and refills in 4.5s of the 7.25s up-phase. One tank rides out one
  scram — the order's sentence, now literally true. (Your review said 240 = 8s of a 30
  deficit; my round-2 intent was 10s of a 23 deficit. Either way the retune moved it.)
- **ASIC COOLER authored as `kind: 'power'`, `powerGen: 5`** — there is no cooler kind and
  I'd rather stretch than lie: it is an ASIC, ASICs decode, decoding makes bandwidth. It
  vents far more than it earns. **I have deliberately NOT requested `coolRadius?` /
  `kind: 'cooler'`** — a contract field nobody reads is the same decorative trap heat just
  fell into. Ask me for it the round SIM builds auras. The intended adjacency mechanic is
  spec'd in CANON-DELTA.
- Tech ids `stream-field-loom` → `broadcast-field-loom` and `stream-telecine` →
  `reel-telecine`: a *move*, not an addition (the validator forbids two techs unlocking
  the same thing, which is what caught the duplication). Grepped first — no lane reads
  tech ids or eras yet, so the rename is safe. Recorded here per the deprecation rule.

INVENTED: 7 items (the four moov parts, `ftyp-seal`, `moov-brain`, `megaglitch`), 2
machines (`asic-cooler`, `muxer`), 9 recipes, 4 tech nodes. Rationale in CANON-DELTA —
each moov part is made by the machine that already owns that knowledge (the splicer
charts stco because byte offsets are its whole domain; the keyring is forged from anchor
slabs because stss *is* a list of I-frames).

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing blocked. One regression I caused by following orders, below.

CONTRACT REQUEST: **`tsconfig.json` `include` needs `"data"`.** The ordered move took the
validator out of the tsc program — `include: ["src"]`. I proved it: appended
`const x: number = "not a number"` to `data/validate.test.ts` and `npm run check` exits
**0**. Vitest transpiles without typechecking, so my validator — the file whose whole job
is catching mistakes — is now the one file in the repo where a type error ships silently.
tsconfig is orchestrator-owned, so I can't fix it. One word: `"include": ["src", "data"]`.

CROSS-LANE — SIM: your `coolPerTick` wiring landed and works; my numbers are tuned
against it and verified in your sim. Two notes. (1) Your reference factory's plant is 4
software decoders and no ASIC — with heat now real they heat in lockstep and black out
together for 16.67s at a time. Suggested v3 plant: **3 decode-asics + 1 software decoder
+ 1 buffer-tank**, which is precisely what `bufferCap: 300` is sized for (85.8/s average
vs the chain's 78/s demand, and the tank covers the scram). Your call. (2) My heat tests
mirror your constants (0.7 / 0.5 / 0.004 / 30tps) by hand because they aren't exported —
if you retune the curve my tests go stale *silently*. Exporting them would let me import
truth instead of copying it.

NEXT (candidates): mosquito traps + HF-dust piles (unblocks `vaporwave-sunset`, the last
forward-canon commission that's blocked on data rather than mechanics); the ASIC cooler's
aura the round SIM has auras; a seam/ore map — SIM notes extractors currently mine
anywhere because `data/` has no seam data, which is a real content gap I own;
`cinema-pack` + the Fortress when M4 lands.

POST-PUSH ADDENDUM (same round, after LANE-UI landed `src/ui/live.test.ts`):

- **My retune fixed two of UI's tests.** Their HUD tests "shows heat climbing, then
  THROTTLING, then SCRAM" and "keeps reading SCRAM from the latch while the unit cools"
  both FAIL against round-2 data and PASS against round 3 — they could never have passed
  while heat was decorative. Measured by restoring the old JSON and re-running.
- **UI: your remaining failure is not data.** `ships, tickers up, and raises the
  SANITISING chip on real anchor-slab shipments` fails identically before *and* after my
  retune (`expected -1 to be greater than 0` — no anchor slab ever reaches an uplink).
  Worth checking whether the reference factory routes recovered slabs back into the GOP
  assembler rather than to an uplink: `mosh` hands its winched-out slab straight back, and
  `assemble-gop` consumes one per crate, so a closed loop will happily circulate every
  slab forever and ship none. That's a layout question, not a recipe one — the ratio is
  1 slab in, 1 slab out, by design (§4: "recoverable — sell it!").

- **PROCESS — the shared git index bit us again, in reverse.** Last round my `git add`
  swept up UI's staged deletion. This round LANE-SCREEN's commit `4803b6a` swept up *my*
  staged `git mv` of the validator, so the ordered file move is recorded under
  `[screen] signal strain` instead of `[data]`. Already pushed and shared by five
  sessions, so I left history alone — the tree is correct, only the attribution is wrong;
  a force-push to fix a commit message would be far more damaging than the wart.
  **Five sessions share one index: `git add <paths>` does not isolate a lane.** Suggest a
  standing rule — every lane runs `git diff --cached --name-only` before every commit and
  unstages anything outside its owned paths.

### Round 4 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 5 orders. §10 transcribed (9 items, 5 machines, 11 recipes, 5 era-gated tech
nodes, 2 commissions). Research economy: the ARCHAEOLOGY LAB + a full tech-cost audit.
ASIC cooler activated. Accents filled. items 51 → 60, machines 23 → 29, recipes 51 → 62,
commissions 14 → 16, tech 24 → 23 (six deleted, five added). Validator 41 → 49 tests.
- Verified: tsc clean (and `data/` is now genuinely typechecked — thank you), my 49 green,
  live build boots with no console errors, all 29 machines art-directed with zero gaps,
  UI grew a RESEARCH page and a third REFINE page off my data with no code from them.
- Fault-injected every new check, including re-gating the mosh reactor: fails instantly on
  `MELT is craftable at tick 0 — the opening commission must be possible`.

**THE HEADLINE — the v4 gating rule made the whole game unplayable, and I'd authored it.**
The rule ("any id in a TechDef.unlocks is locked until that tech completes") turned three
rounds of my tech authoring from decoration into a lock on everything. Measured:

```
TICK 0: melt producible? FALSE   <- first-taste, the opening commission, impossible
        every science pack?  FALSE
RESEARCH CLOSURE: 0 of 24 techs reachable
```

`disc-artifact-bottling` cost 10 analog packs and unlocked the only machine that can bottle
an analog pack. The M1 melt chain itself was gated. The game opened on an unbuildable
factory, an unfillable commission, and no way to research out of it. **This is the same
class of bug as round 2's decorative heat: a number/structure that was fine until another
lane made it load-bearing.** Fixed to a shape, not a patch — two rules, both now tests:
1. the M1 melt chain is starting equipment; 2. one pack (SPATIAL) is craftable at tick 0.
Result: **23/23 reachable**, order tells a story, only the four forward-canon items remain
unreachable. Arithmetic + the worked cost path in CANON-DELTA.

DECISIONS:
- **SPATIAL PACK is the bootstrap science** — bricks + halos + slurry all fall out of the
  quantizer the player already owns for the melt chain. Your first research is a study of
  your own damage, which is the most in-voice thing in the tree, and it needs no machine
  the M1 chain didn't already require (bar the bottler). 10 packs/min on one quantizer;
  the first four nodes cost 0.5–1.5 min each. Affordable off a first-taste-era factory, as
  ordered, with the working shown.
- **Six disc nodes deleted, not repurposed** (`disc-artifact-bottling`,
  `-chroma-subsampling`, `-macroblock-quarrying`, `-ringing-skim`, `-subsampling-420`,
  `-mosh-reactor`) — their content became starting equipment, so a repurposed node would
  have been a fake. Grepped first: no lane references specific tech ids. Per the
  deprecation rule, logged here and in CANON-DELTA.
- **The cooler's spec'd 0.02 was catastrophic once real** — the decoder banks 0.0033, so a
  0.02 aura is net −0.0167: it never heats, and a 2×2 cooler makes a 2×2 decoder a
  permanent free 100/s. Retuned to 0.0018, which is sane under **both** readings of the
  contract's ambiguous "this machine's coolPerTick *also* applies" (additive → 85% duty,
  72/s avg; replacing → 55%, 46/s). I deliberately picked a number that survives either,
  because SIM hasn't built it yet and I won't rest the design on my guess of a sentence.
  Pairing is 9.64/s per tile vs 5.00 for ASICs — the best power in the game, paid for with
  a tech, two machines and the floor space to keep them adjacent.
- §10 judgement calls (footage = anchor slab; the matte bath's chemical = static canister,
  which §3 already calls "brine for preserving other artifacts"; ghost feather made only by
  the neural keyer so the earlier machines exist to ruin it) — all argued in CANON-DELTA
  the way you asked, from what the thing already is rather than convenience.
- NEURAL KEYER `powerDraw: 240` — §10's "24 VRAM ... dwarfs everything else"; that's 12
  ASICs, against an entire M1 chain that draws 96. "You don't unlock the neural keyer; you
  unlock the power plant it demands" is now literally true.

BLOCKED/BROKEN — **I broke two of SIM's tests, deliberately, and their guard caught it:**
- `research.test.ts:247` does `expect(gated.has('mosh-reactor')).toBe(true) // guards the
  premise below`. I ungated the mosh reactor, because gating it makes first-taste
  impossible. **Their premise guard did exactly its job** — it failed loudly instead of
  silently testing nothing. The fix is one word in their file (not mine to touch): swap
  `mosh-reactor` for any still-gated machine. Drop-in list: mv-extractor,
  bloom-duplicator, field-loom, telecine-puller, hex-splicer, software-decoder,
  asic-cooler, matte-bath, optical-printer, chroma-keyer, roto-bench, neural-keyer, muxer.
  `demuxer` remains a valid "free" example.
- The other 8 failures in `research.test.ts` / `live.test.ts` are **not mine** — they fail
  identically against HEAD's round-3 data (measured by restoring the old JSON and
  re-running; failure sets diffed).

CROSS-LANE — SIM, the reference factory now can't power itself:
- It places **4 software decoders**, which my tree gates behind `stream-software-decoding`
  (rounds 3 and 4 both). With your gating live, they can't be placed at tick 0, so the M1
  demo has no power and the HUD's heat tests have no decoder to watch. That's the cause of
  several of those 8.
- **The starter plant is ASICs**: net demand 78/s ÷ 20 = **4 decode-asics minimum** (5 for
  headroom). Ungated, boring, correct — the software decoder is a mid-game *upgrade*, which
  is the progression the tech tree is for. My round-3 suggestion (3 ASIC + 1 decoder + tank)
  is still the right *post-research* demo, and the decoder+cooler pairing is the M2 showpiece.
- Tell me if you'd rather software-decoder be starting equipment and I'll ungate it — but
  at 25.8/s average vs the ASIC's 20 it would make the ASIC pointless from tick 0.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. (Still not requesting `kind: 'cooler'` — `kind: 'power'` +
`coolRadius` covers it, and the aura isn't built yet.)

STILL OPEN: **SIM hasn't exported the tuning constants yet** (I checked — `grep 'export
const' src/sim/*.ts` finds only `geom.ts`). My heat tests still hand-mirror 0.7 / 0.5 /
0.004 / 30tps and still go stale silently if you retune. I'll retire the copies the round
the export lands.

NEXT (candidates): SPILL FOG + EDGE BOIL (§10 hazards — need a mechanic, so data waits on
SIM); mosquito traps; a seam/ore map (extractors still mine anywhere — the content gap I
own); `cinema-pack` + the Fortress; `corridorkey-mrp-mlx` is a real MODELBEAST artifact
factory for the whole §10 asset set (§10's production note) — worth a work order.

### Round 5 (MEGA) — 2026-07-18 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 8 orders. Constants imported (hand-copies retired). Mosquito trap + catch.
Cooler finalised under the additive ruling. **The commission ladder.** `data/seams.json`
and `data/stations.json` (both new). Relic canon + the margin hint. Validator 49 → 72.
commissions 16 → 19, machines 29 → 30, recipes 62 → 63, tech 23 → 24, + 8 seams, 4 stations.
- Verified: tsc clean, my 72 green, live build boots with no console errors, all 30
  machines art-directed, and the opening fax now reads "A belt, a drill, an uplink to THE
  SCREEN — that is the whole job. MDAT ORE 0/20" with FIRST REFINEMENT in the tray.
- Fault-injected every new check (reference factory off-seam, seam in the relic reserve,
  a moved hidden seam vs the broadcast, ladder out of teaching order, a 12-line STANDARD,
  cooler immortal at two) — all fired by name, then restored.

**RUNG 1 IS 21.7 SECONDS.** Measured against LANE-SIM's real sim with a throwaway probe
(then deleted — sim behaviour is your lane, not mine): built exactly as the fax instructs
— drill, two belts, uplink, one ASIC — **4 machine types, cleared at tick 650**. The order
allowed 3 minutes. Twenty-two seconds matters more than the budget: the first fax has to
clear before a new player concludes nothing is happening.

DECISIONS:
- **The ladder teaches one mechanic per rung and never says so.** ore (extractor→belt→
  uplink) → luma (the demuxer, and the slurry is *your* problem now) → hf-dust (waste is
  inventory — the game's actual thesis) → melt (graduation; `first-taste` kept its id,
  reward 50 → 80). The old queue opened on one MELT, i.e. "build eight machines correctly,
  in order, with no feedback until the last one works". That was the cliff.
- **The trap's recipe has no inputs, deliberately.** I first wrote it as
  `8 hf-dust + 1 luma → swarm`, then read `wildlife.test.ts`: *"the sim identifies traps by
  that recipe shape"* — an empty-input recipe yielding the swarm. Ingredients would have
  quietly made my trap an ordinary crafter and it would never have caught anything. Fixed,
  and pinned with a test that cites your comment. My "only extractors conjure items" rule
  now has a narrow, argued exception: the trap's input is a live swarm in the world, which
  is wildlife in the snapshot and never cargo on a belt.
- **Cooler final: 0.0018 → 0.001.** The additive ruling killed 0.0018 — two coolers reached
  0.0046 against the decoder's 0.0033 gross, so a casual pair made it immortal. At 0.001:
  1 cooler doubles output (30%→61% duty), 2 nearly eliminates downtime (91%), 3 tips into
  immortality — 12 tiles of cooler around 4 tiles of decoder, a visibly absurd shrine to
  keeping one zip-tied tower PC alive. Immortality reachable, never casual. Duty table and
  per-tile comparison in CANON-DELTA.
- **The numbers station is a real map, and it cannot go stale.** Each 5-figure group is
  `[x+32][y+32][richness×9]`; three of them are the three `hidden: true` seams. The
  validator *recomputes* the planted groups from `seams.json`, so moving a hidden seam
  without re-cutting the broadcast fails. It also checks no decoy decodes onto a real seam
  — a decoy that points at treasure is a leak, not a decoy. Filler is procedural on your
  seed rather than a fixed pool, because 24 hand-written groups loop in ~2 minutes and the
  genre's whole menace is that it never stops.
- **The optical fossil, and why the world is silent.** §1 hides it in one clause: the Reel
  Beds hold fossils that *"sing when excavated"*. Optical sound is a picture of a waveform
  — the one place image and audio are the same substance. So the Bitstream has no audio
  because the audio track was severed from the container, and one length of it is still in
  the ground. You don't unlock a feature; you repair the file. That is why THE STANDARD
  broadcasts "Do not excavate" and "Anything that sings when you dig it up was never meant
  to be heard" — The Correction runs a propaganda station warning you off the one artifact
  that would let you hear it for what it is.

INVENTED: 1 machine (mosquito-trap), 1 recipe, 1 tech node, 3 tutorial commissions, 8 seams,
4 stations, 30 lines of Correction propaganda, 1 ghost line. Argued in CANON-DELTA.

CROSS-LANE — SIM, one thing, and it was real when I measured it:
- **The reference factory stalls on rung 1.** Probed at the time I wrote the ladder: it
  ships `coefficient-pack 268, hf-dust 268, chroma-slurry 118` and **zero raw ore**, so
  `raw-payload` never cleared and **no commission closed in 20,000 ticks** — the queue sat
  on rung 1 forever. Every ore goes into the demuxer. By the end of the round your
  reference v5 landed and the three failures this caused (M1 chain, NEXT IN TRAY, completes
  a commission) had already gone green, so this may already be handled — but if the demo
  ever needs to show the early game, tap ~20 ore and ~15 luma to an uplink ahead of the
  demuxer and quantizer. Rungs 3 and 4 you already ship.
- Your `sim.test.ts` line 448 (`commissionDone` length 0, *"wants melt, not ore"*) was
  correct against the old queue and is exactly the assertion the ladder invalidates: your
  minimal factory there — extractor, belt, shipper — *is* rung 1, and it now clears it in
  under 300 ticks. That is the ladder working, not breaking.
- Seams: `stream-crust-west` spans x[-31,-28] y[-5,6] and covers all three of your
  extractors at (-30,0), (-30,-3), (-30,3) with a tile to spare — pinned by a test.
  `relicReserve` x[12,31] y[12,31] is kept seam-free for your seed-derived fossil.
- Schema for both new files is documented in a `_doc` key inside each, and `seams.json` is
  `{ relicReserve, seams: [...] }` rather than a bare array so it can carry that metadata.

SCREEN — `data/stations.json` is the schema I proposed and it matches your spec: four
stations with `band` / `freq` (MHz on FM, kHz on AM+SW) / `name` / `format` / `flavor`,
plus one payload key each — `music` (bpm, scale, steps, mutateEveryBars, seed, per-era
flavour), `chyron` (30 unique lines, ~20s each = 10 min before a repeat), `numbers`
(preamble, group size, encoding string, `plantedGroups`, `decoyPool`, `plantEveryMessages`),
`ghost` (line + everyMinutes + reversed). Say the word in NOTES if you want any of it
reshaped — it is data, it is cheap, and nothing else reads it yet.

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing of mine. Attribution, measured by reverting my JSON and re-running:
4 research-timing failures (`RESEARCH_TICKS_PER_PACK`, two labs halve the wait, abandoning
forfeits, grantResearch) reproduce identically with my data fully reverted — they are
LANE-SIM's in-flight work. Two wildlife failures I saw mid-round vanished on their own; the
tree had 34 uncommitted files across five lanes while I worked, so the suite is a moving
target and every attribution here was made by stash-and-compare, not by reading tea leaves.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. `GameData` has no `seams`/`stations` fields and `main.ts` does not
load either file — deliberately not asking yet, since SIM and SCREEN can import them
directly and I would rather the wiring follow a consumer than precede one.

NEXT (candidates): SPILL FOG + EDGE BOIL (§10 hazards, once SIM has a mechanic); the ASIC
cooler's aura tuning once `coolRadius` is live in-sim; a second relic if the audio bus
wants more than one voice; `corridorkey-mrp-mlx` is a real artifact factory for the whole
§10 asset set (§10's own production note) and deserves a MODELBEAST work order.

### Round 6 — 2026-07-20 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 4 orders. items 60 → 61, machines 30 → 31, recipes 63 → 64, tech 24 → 25,
commissions 19 → 21. Validator 72 → 74. All argued in `data/CANON-DELTA.md` (round 6).
- **THE FIREWALL** (`firewall`, crafter, catches on SIM's shape) + **`catch-mite`**
  (input-free → `parity-mite: 1`) + the **`parity-mite`** canned item + tech gate
  `broadcast-parity-firewall` + two commissions that want it alive (`correction-specimen`
  reward 1000, the flagship "ONE UNIT OF THE CORRECTION, ALIVE"; `annual-correction-cull`
  reward 2100 standing).
- **Numbers-station drift fixed**: the two leaking decoys re-cut (`08127`→`08143`,
  `27503`→`27475`), and the validator now decodes EVERY decoy and fails by name if it lands
  inside ANY seam rect (was: only the three hidden tiles). See CROSS-LANE — SCREEN.
- **19 GLB'd machines accented against their real albedo textures** (extracted from the
  GLBs and inspected), incl. two texture-driven corrections: mosquito-trap `#d0ff60`→
  `#a64fff` (the model's zapper is UV-violet, not lime) and decode-asic `#6fe8c0`→`#8fe8ff`
  (ice-blue LEDs, not mint). Table in CANON-DELTA.
- **8 new STANDARD chyron lines** in The Correction's reassuring-menace voice, all about
  the mites ("A mite does not remove your work. It completes it."). 30 → 38 lines.

VERIFIED: `npm run check` clean; my validator 74/74 green (fault-injected the new checks —
`catch-mite` given an ingredient fails the trap-shape guard by name; a decoy dropped onto
`stream-crust-east` fails "inside real seam …"; both restored). SCREEN's `band.test.ts`
9/9. Live on :8155, no console errors: machines 31 with firewall art-directed, all 14
target accents present, `parity-mite` + both mite commissions loaded, mosquito-trap accent
`#a64fff` on the real DOM. DoD met: firewall catches on SIM's real recipe-shape mechanic;
no decoy decodes onto any seam (validator-enforced); every GLB machine accented; the fax
celebrates its first canned mite in `correction-specimen`.

DECISIONS:
- **The chyron limit bit me and it was cheap to obey.** SCREEN's `band.test.ts` caps a
  line at 96 chars (62 mono chars would clip; they allow 96). My first 8 lines ran 100-136
  and failed one SCREEN test — tightened all 8 to ≤96 without losing the voice. Their test
  is the right net; the words are mine, the width is the sky's.
- **Firewall gated early (broadcast), not free.** §5 calls the mite an "early nuisance", so
  the counter should arrive about when the mites do — cheap, parallel to the mosquito farm
  node. Not starting equipment (you research the answer to the enemy), not late (the enemy
  is early). SIM's reference v6 will need it granted like it grants software-decoding.
- **`catch-mite` is input-free by design**, same argument as `bait-swarm` last round: the
  "input" is a live mite in the world, wildlife in the snapshot, never belt cargo. A test
  cites SIM's detection comment so nobody "fixes" it into an ordinary crafter.
- **Accented all 19 GLB'd machines, not the ordered 10.** The order said ten; nineteen had
  models by the time I looked (RENDER hot-swapping mid-round — the "numbers go stale"
  warning, live). Every machine with a real texture now has a texture-matched accent; the
  extra nine are honest surplus, not scope creep.

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing of mine. Two suite failures, both SIM's in-flight round-6 work,
neither caused by my diff (attributed by stash-and-compare on my paths + by inspection):
- `src/sim/mite.test.ts` "guarding the approach cancels corrections" — SIM's mite mechanic
  is **fixture-based** (its own `FIXTURE` GameData at line 36; it never reads `data/*.json`),
  so my data cannot touch it. It's a balance assertion in their new file, which was visibly
  being edited while I worked (line numbers shifted between my runs).
- `src/sim/reference.test.ts` "keeps the demuxer alive by voiding surplus" — reproduces
  IDENTICALLY with my entire data diff stashed (measured), so it's HEAD's reference factory,
  not my content. Likely their reference v6 mid-build.

CROSS-LANE — SIM (mite mechanic, parallel this round): the catcher is authored exactly on
your shape. Item id **`parity-mite`**, recipe **`{inputs:{}, outputs:{'parity-mite':N}}`**
on machine `firewall` — one item id over from the mosquito trap. Your `mite.test.ts` already
imports `MITE_ITEM` and keys off shape/tier, so the real data drops in with zero code (I
verified my `catch-mite` matches your fixture `burn` recipe shape). `catch-mite` is
120 ticks / bandwidth 4. The firewall is `broadcast-parity-firewall`-gated, so reference v6
must grant it (like software-decoding) before placing one. `FIREWALL_RADIUS` is yours; I
set no radius field. If you'd rather the mite item be `parity-mite-canned` or the firewall
be ungated, say so and I'll follow.

CROSS-LANE — SCREEN: your numbers-station drift finding was exact — `08127`/`27503` were on
`reel-beds-deep`/`broadcast-shelf-south`. Fixed at the source (re-cut) AND at the guard (the
validator now rejects a decoy on ANY seam, by name). The 8 new STANDARD lines are yours to
reshape as always — I kept every one ≤96 to pass `band.test.ts`; if you widen that cap I'll
gladly give a couple more room to breathe. `numbers.plantedGroups` still recomputes from
`seams.json`, untouched.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. `parity-mite`/`firewall`/`catch-mite` all fit the existing schema;
the mite reading needed no new fields.

NEXT (candidates): CHECKSUM WARDENS + REDUNDANCY GUNSHIPS (§5 rungs 2-3, once SIM escalates
The Correction past mites); a `parity-mite`-fed product line (§5: mites "fix melt into a
lake" — a real "footage of a lake" item you can only make FROM a canned mite would close the
loop); SPILL FOG + EDGE BOIL (§10, still waiting on a SIM mechanic); the ASIC cooler aura
tuning once `coolRadius` is live in-sim.
