[sim] round 5 NOTES

The relic works end to end (seed-derived, honours DATA's relicReserve,
digs up, persists). Wildlife's design point holds: sink your dust and
nothing hatches. Reference v5 researches a tech at tick 1235 with melt
and the zero-brownout regression untouched.

For the orchestrator:
- ONE contract change needed: GameData.seams + main.ts importing
  data/seams.json. DATA shipped the file mid-round with a good schema
  (and reserved a relic corner for me), but nothing reaches sim.init, so
  seams are inert in the running game. I mirrored their shape as
  SeamDef/SeamMap, exported, ready to lift
- still no trap machine in data, so swarms can't be cleared in the real
  game. Suggested machine + recipe in NOTES; the sim spots traps by recipe
  shape so it needs no code
- swarms slow crafting but NOT powerGen -- my call, flag it if wrong
- save format v3 -> v4 (wildlife, relics, lab timers)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>

fktry/lanes/LANE-SIM.md

@@ -492,3 +492,115 @@ NEXT (round 5 if asked)
 - A headless perf benchmark, so the numbers above stop being anecdotes.
 - Research *time* (a lab currently counts a pack the tick it lands) if you want the tech tree
   to feel like an investment rather than a purchase.
+
+### Round 5 — 2026-07-18 — Opus 4.8
+
+SHIPPED
+- **`grantResearch`** — idempotent, ignores unknown ids, completes the active target out from
+  under the labs, save/load safe. Verified through the live bus, so `__fktryDemo` can drop
+  `testkit` whenever you like.
+- **Research takes time** — `RESEARCH_TICKS_PER_PACK = 60` (exported). Stepped: a lab spends
+  the full 60 ticks on a pack, then consumes it and ticks progress by exactly 1, so
+  `research.progress` stays integer and determinism stays trivial. Labs really do parallelise
+  — measured 200 ticks with two vs 260 with one on the same supply. A lab mid-pack reports
+  `progress` 0..1, so RENDER/UI can show it working.
+- **Wildlife v1** — piles grow from dust a machine is sitting on, hatch swarms at 1.0, swarms
+  drift to production machinery and slow it while attached, traps can them. Deterministic,
+  save/load carries the lot, spawn/clear events on both. 12 tests including the design point.
+- **Seams** — extractors run only while their footprint overlaps an authored seam rect;
+  off-seam they idle with `'no seam'`, edge-triggered like every other jam. Consumes DATA's
+  real `seams.json` shape (and a bare rect list), defensively — see BLOCKED.
+- **THE RELIC** — one optical fossil per world, position a pure function of the seed, 18–28
+  tiles out, never on a seam, never under the demo. `excavate` within a tile uncovers it and
+  emits `relicFound`; it stays found through save/load and 20,000 further ticks. When DATA's
+  seam map supplies a `relicReserve` the roll folds into that corner — verified in-browser
+  landing at (21,15), inside the reserve, and digging up first try.
+- **Reference factory v5** — a second works on DATA's eastern seam: ore → demuxer → quantizer
+  → {crime → BRICKS, ringing → HALOS} + slurry → artifact bottler → SPATIAL PACK →
+  archaeology lab. **It researches `broadcast-phosphor-seams` at tick 1235.** Melt still first
+  at 1247, still shipping at 20k, **zero brownout ticks**, 179/179 placements legal, and with
+  seams wired **zero extractors off-seam** — both works sit on real ore.
+- Verified: 99 sim tests (446 across the repo), tsc clean in my lane, and the browser agrees
+  with Node tick-for-tick (melt 1247, scram 434, research 1235). Perf **63× realtime** at
+  3,500 entities / 6,820 belt items (0.529 ms/tick) — Round 4 was 64.7×, so all of this round
+  cost ~3%. (An earlier probe "timed out" and looked like a regression; it was the 30s tool
+  limit on a 16k-tick warmup, not the sim. Staged it and re-measured.)
+
+DECISIONS
+- **Dust breeds from BACKED-UP dust, not from dust existing.** First cut grew piles from
+  whatever a machine held, and the tidy factory — dust belted straight to an uplink — still
+  hatched 56 swarms, because buffers are never empty between pushes. Growth is now
+  proportional to what sits *beyond one craft's worth* (`DUST_SPILL_GRACE`). Plumbed lines
+  never cross the threshold; neglected ones hit the stall cap and hatch in ~400 ticks. The
+  asymmetry is the mechanic — without it the hazard is just weather.
+  - Related, and worth knowing: my first "tidy" fixture still bred, and the mechanic was
+    innocent. A crusher making 4 dust per craft out-produces a single belt lane (~0.15
+    items/tick) and backs up no matter how you plumb it. That's a true fact about belts.
+- **`SWARM_MAX = 8`.** A permanently jammed machine breeds forever — measured 29 swarms in one
+  20k demo run, which is a plague, not a hazard. At the cap, full piles just sit there.
+- **Swarms only settle on production machinery**, preferring machines actually mid-craft and
+  falling back to jammed ones. Power plants read as permanently "running" and hoovered up
+  every swarm in the world to no effect — it looked exactly as silly as it sounds. The
+  fallback matters because the dust that bred them came from a machine that seized: without
+  it, a swarm evaporates at the moment it should bite.
+- **Swarms slow crafting, not generation.** `swarmThrottle` is not applied to `powerGen`, so
+  an infestation never causes a brownout. That's my call, not the contract's — flag it if you
+  want mosquitoes on the grid; it would make them far nastier and would end the zero-brownout
+  regression.
+- Traps are identified by **recipe shape** — empty inputs, outputs the canned swarm — not by a
+  machine id, so DATA's real trap lights up with zero code changes. A trap only progresses
+  while a swarm is in `TRAP_RADIUS`, and holds at full progress rather than canning air if its
+  prey drifts off or a neighbour beats it to the catch.
+- Switching research target **forfeits the part-processed pack** in every lab, matching the
+  existing rule that switching abandons delivered packs. Lab intake now counts what *all*
+  labs are holding, so a bank of them can't collectively hoard more than the tech costs.
+- **The annex is a separate works, not a tap off the melt line.** Every column between the
+  quantizers and the press is spoken for; threading bricks, halos and slurry through that
+  floorplan would have made the melt regression hostage to the science. DATA's second mdat
+  seam is empty ground, so the annex mines its own ore and shares only the bandwidth bus.
+- Save format **v3 → v4** (wildlife, relics, lab timers). `testkit` follows it.
+
+BLOCKED/BROKEN
+- **`GameData.seams` is not wired, so seams are inert in the actual game.** DATA shipped
+  `data/seams.json` mid-round (good schema, and they reserved a relic corner for me), but
+  `GameData` has no `seams` field and `main.ts` doesn't import the file, so nothing reaches
+  `sim.init`. I consume it defensively and my tests inject it. **This is the one contract
+  change the round needs** — see CONTRACT REQUEST. I verified in-browser what happens once
+  it's wired: 0 extractors off-seam, relic in DATA's reserve. Until then extractors mine
+  anywhere, exactly as before.
+- **There is still no trap machine in the data,** so swarms cannot be cleared in the real
+  game. The mechanic is complete and tested against a fixture trap; DATA needs a machine
+  whose recipe has no inputs and outputs `mosquito-swarm`. The demo currently hatches its 8
+  and keeps them. (Suggested shape in PROPOSAL.)
+- The demo researches **one** tech and then idles: completing clears `active` and nothing
+  auto-picks a successor. That's a player/UI decision rather than a sim one, but it means
+  the annex jams shortly after 1235 — the bottler starves of halos (skim-ringing wants 3
+  coefficient packs per craft against crime's 1, and the splitter is a blind 1:1), packs back
+  up, and the line seizes. Harmless and honest, but it's why the demo grows piles.
+- My round-1 lesson bit me again from the other side: DATA reworked the commission ladder
+  mid-round (`first-taste` → `raw-payload`, 20 ore), which broke a sim test that assumed
+  shipping melt closes the first commission. Rewritten to assert the *rule* — shipping what
+  the active order wants credits it, capped at the cost — rather than which order is first
+  this week.
+
+CONTRACT REQUEST
+- **`GameData.seams?: SeamMap`**, and `main.ts` importing `../data/seams.json` into the data
+  object. The shape is DATA's file verbatim; I've mirrored it as `SeamDef`/`SeamMap`, exported
+  from `src/sim/index.ts`, so the contract can lift it as-is. Nothing else in my lane is
+  blocked.
+
+PROPOSAL
+- **A trap for DATA**, matching what the sim already recognises:
+  `{ id: 'mosquito-trap', kind: 'crafter', footprint: {x:2,y:2}, recipes: ['catch-swarm'], powerDraw: 3 }`
+  plus `{ id: 'catch-swarm', machine: 'mosquito-trap', inputs: {}, outputs: {'mosquito-swarm': 1}, ticks: 30, bandwidth: 2 }`.
+  The canned swarm is already an item and commissions already ask for live ones, so it ships.
+- Should swarms bite `powerGen` as well as craft speed? Currently no, deliberately.
+- `snapshot.wildlife` and `snapshot.relics` are always present (found or not) as the v6 note
+  requires. They alias live arrays like `commissionQueue` — same read-only rule.
+
+NEXT (round 6 if asked)
+- The Correction / parity mites — the enemy proper.
+- A headless perf benchmark, so these numbers stop being browser anecdotes (proposed round 3;
+  the 30s-timeout scare this round is the third time it would have paid for itself).
+- Per-seam `richness` driving extraction rate, once DATA wants it — the field is already there.
+- Swarm behaviour beyond "sit and bite": drifting between targets, or fleeing a trap.