Round 5 (MEGA), all eight orders.
THE COMMISSION LADDER — the fax is the tutorial. The queue used to open on
one MELT, i.e. "build eight machines correctly, in order, with no feedback
until the last one works". Now four rungs teach one mechanic each and never
say so: 20 raw ore (extractor->belt->uplink) -> 15 luma (the demuxer, and the
slurry is your problem) -> 18 hf-dust (waste is inventory) -> 1 melt
(graduation; first-taste keeps its id, reward 50->80). Measured against SIM's
real sim: rung 1 clears at tick 650 = 21.7s with 4 machine types, against a
3-minute budget.
data/seams.json — seam regions per stratum, richness, and a seam-free
relicReserve in the SE so SIM's seed-derived optical fossil always has
somewhere legal to land. stream-crust-west covers all three reference-factory
extractors, pinned by a test.
data/stations.json — the whole dial: FKTRY FM, THE STANDARD (30 lines of
Correction propaganda, 10 minutes before a repeat), NUMBERS, DEAD AIR. The
numbers station is a real treasure map: each 5-figure group is
[x+32][y+32][richness*9] and three of them are the hidden seams. The validator
recomputes them from seams.json, so the map cannot drift, and no decoy is
allowed to decode onto real treasure.
Also:
- mosquito trap: input-free recipe, the shape LANE-SIM detects traps by (my
first pass took ingredients, which would have silently made it an ordinary
crafter). Unblocks vaporwave-sunset after four rounds; FORWARD_CANON pruned.
- cooler final 0.0018 -> 0.001: the additive ruling made two coolers immortal.
Now 1 doubles output, 2 nearly eliminates downtime, 3 is an absurd shrine.
- SIM's tuning constants imported; the hand-copies are retired.
- the optical fossil canon: §1's fossils "sing when excavated", so the world is
silent until you dig up the severed audio bus. One margin hint, mid-ladder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 4 orders, all five.
The headline is a bug I authored: the v4 gating rule (any id in a
TechDef.unlocks is locked until that tech completes) turned three rounds of
tech authoring into a total bootstrap deadlock. Measured: melt not producible
at tick 0 (first-taste impossible), 0 of 24 techs reachable — every pack chain
gated behind packs you cannot make. disc-artifact-bottling cost 10 analog packs
and unlocked the only machine that bottles analog packs.
Fixed as a shape, not a patch, and both rules are now tests:
- the M1 melt chain is starting equipment (so first-taste is possible, and
RENDER's era derivation correctly reads it as starting equipment)
- one pack is craftable at tick 0 — SPATIAL, made from the quantizer's own
sins, so your first research is a study of your own damage
23/23 nodes now reachable; six emptied disc nodes deleted (no lane references
tech ids).
Also:
- §10 THE COMPOSITE SEAM transcribed: alpha/hard-matte/blue-hole/fringe-lace/
green-spill/mixed-pixel/roto-chatter/ghost-feather/sodium-light (forward
canon), matte bath, optical printer, chroma keyer, roto bench, neural keyer
(powerDraw 240 — the codex's "appetite that dwarfs everything").
- ARCHAEOLOGY LAB canonized (kind: lab), ungated — a lab behind research is a
lab you can never build.
- ASIC cooler live: the round-3 spec of 0.02 would have meant "never heats,
free 100/s". Retuned to 0.0018, sane under both readings of the contract.
- accents where output-derivation can't work; CODEX_REF regex widened for §10.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 3 orders, all six. The validator move landed in 4803b6a (swept into
LANE-SCREEN's commit by the shared index); this is the rest.
- heat retune: round 2's numbers were below the sim's always-on cooling, so
nothing could ever warm up. Decoder now 100 gen at 0.0033 heat / 0.001 cool
-> throttles 10.2s, scrams 14.5s, 23.9s cycle, 25.8/s average (1.29x the
ASIC). Verified against LANE-SIM's real sim, not just arithmetic.
- powerGen had to move: the scram/restart hysteresis forces ~30% duty, so at
55 gen the decoder averaged worse than a steady ASIC and nobody would build
one.
- two new tests refuse decorative heat (per-tick and per-craft). They caught a
fresh instance of the same bug in chart-stco-map before it shipped.
- bufferCap 240 -> 300: one tank now covers exactly one decoder scram.
- ASIC COOLER spec'd (aura deferred to M4, no contract field requested yet);
THE MUXER + moov brain sub-lines; reel + broadcast era tech.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 2 orders, all seven.
- data/CANON-DELTA.md: ledger of every invention beyond the codex, with the
rationale and the arithmetic behind the numbers.
- colour + flavor on all 21 machines (kills UI's hardcoded lookup and RENDER's
black-on-black); desaturated industrial per style guide §8.
- heat: software decoder 45->55 gen at 0.0025/tick (throttles 9.3s, scrams
13.3s) so it's a burst generator, not a better ASIC; a pinch on the splicer.
- bufferCap 240 = 10s of the reference chain's one-decoder-down deficit.
- commission queue reordered into a ramp + 3 standing orders, incl. THE
CORRECTION BUYBACK (the sellout loop: anchors clean THE SCREEN).
- container line (moov-shard/offset-ribbon/sync-key) unblocks the hex splicer;
bloom grades 1-5. bloom-concentrate kept — LANE-SCREEN hardcodes it.
- validator 28 -> 36 tests, covering every v2 field; FORWARD_CANON pruned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Transcribe the §2-§6 codex into machine-readable canon and add the validator
that keeps five parallel lanes from drowning in dangling ids.
- validator (28 tests): recipes point back at their machine, every item/tech/
commission reference resolves, ids unique + kebab-case, colors hex, footprints
>=1x1, plus a reachability pass proving MELT is craftable from raw ore.
- items 9->36, machines 7->21, recipes 4->35, tech 0->17, commissions 1->10.
- mosh rewired to canon (gop-crate -> melt + reclaimed anchor slab); all seed
recipe ids preserved so nothing dangles mid-round.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
