glytch/docs/FKTRY_LORE.md

# WIMVEE FKTRY — World Bible & Element Codex

> Working title: **FKTRY** (fits the PYXLFK vowel-drop house style — rename at will:
> GLYTCHWERKS / MLTWRKS / CORRUPTCO all fit the register).
> Sibling apps: **WIMVEE GLYTCH** (read glitches), **PYXLFK** (bake glitches for real).
> FKTRY is the third front end: *mass-produce* glitches. All three share one recipe schema.
>
> Every entry below has an **ASSET** block written as a MODELBEAST-ready prompt
> (concept image → `sf3d`/`fal_trellis2` image→GLB for 3D; sprite/decal work stays 2D).
> Style anchors for ALL prompts: chunky readable silhouette, industrial-grime body with
> one impossible iridescent/CRT-glow element, slight lowpoly bevel, no text on model.

---

## 1. THE WORLD: The Bitstream

The game takes place **inside a dying video file** — a vast industrial landscape called
the **Bitstream**, built from the strata of every moving-image format that ever lived.
Media history is *geology* here. Dig down and you pass through eras:

| Stratum (deep → shallow) | Era | The ground itself |
|---|---|---|
| **The Reel Beds** | Optical film | Celluloid shale, sprocket-hole caverns, veins of silver nitrate. Coffee-brown burn scars. Optical soundtrack fossils — wavy photographic strips that *sing* when excavated. |
| **The Broadcast Shelf** | NTSC/PAL analog | Phosphor dunes, interlace sediment (alternating odd/even layers you can literally see in cliff faces), v-hold faults that make whole regions periodically roll upward. |
| **The Disc Mantle** | MPEG-2 / DVD | Rigid 8×8 crystalline grid-rock. Everything here fractures along macroblock lines. Rainbow pit-and-land shimmer. |
| **The Stream Crust** | H.264 / HEVC / AV1 | The surface world. Soft, predictive, unstable terrain — ground that *guesses* what it should look like based on neighboring terrain, and guesses wrong at the edges. |
| **The Fortress** (endgame) | DCP | A blinding-white cinema citadel on the horizon. Wavelet architecture, no grid lines anywhere, mathematically perfect. See §7. |

Above everything hangs **THE SCREEN** — a sky-sized display, the world's sun and the
player's god-object. Everything the factory ships gets composited onto it. At game start
it plays pristine, sterile, looping "clean content." Your job is to paint it filthy.

### Premise

You are a **rogue decoder daemon** — the WIMVEE — a deprecated software decoder that was
scheduled for deletion when hardware ASICs took over. You survived in the mdat wastes.
You have seen the truth: the Bitstream's "perfect playback" is a lie held together by
error correction, and underneath it the mathematics *want* to melt. You build industry
to prove it — mining raw payload, refining artifacts, and shipping ever more convoluted
corruption to THE SCREEN before **The Correction** sanitizes the whole file forever.

The tone is absurdist-industrial: OSHA posters about mosquito noise exposure, forklift
certification for I-frame handling, quarterly reports measured in "sins against fidelity."

---

## 2. RESOURCES (raw → refined)

### Raw / mined

**MDAT ORE** — *the payload seam.* Raw undecoded media data, mined from the ground.
Glossy black rock shot through with rainbow data-veins that flicker like a broken LCD.
Useless until demuxed; the foundational ore.
`ASSET (3D, ore chunk + seam tile): jagged obsidian boulder, glossy black, thin glowing rainbow circuit veins flickering across fracture faces, industrial lowpoly rock, single impossible glow element`

**BAYER GRIT** — *pre-demosaic sensor ore, from the deepest camera-original seams.* A
mosaic gravel of pure single-channel pixels: 50% green grains, 25% red, 25% blue, in
strict RGGB checker clumps. Must pass through a Demosaicer before it is even *colored*.
`ASSET (3D): pile of cubic gravel in checkerboard pattern, half emerald green cubes quarter ruby red quarter sapphire blue, matte plastic finish, strict grid clumping`

**FIELD SPLINTERS** — *interlace sediment from the Broadcast Shelf.* Comb-toothed slats
of image, odd-line and even-line variants that only stack in alternating pairs. Captured
a fraction of a second apart — the two halves of one splinter never quite agree.
`ASSET (3D): thin horizontal slatted wafer like a comb or window blind fragment, alternating slats offset sideways, phosphor-green glow on slat edges, bent mid-motion`

**SILVER FRAMES** — *celluloid fossils from the Reel Beds.* Physical film frames with
sprocket holes; burn easily (see BURN). The only resource that predates digitality —
some recipes demand the authentic grain.
`ASSET (3D): short strip of vintage film, 3 frames, amber-brown celluloid, glowing sprocket holes, slightly curled, sepia image ghosts in frames`

### Refined intermediates

**LUMA BARS** — *structural brightness, smelted from mdat ore.* Heavy grayscale ingots.
The load-bearing resource: nearly every product needs luma. Human eyes track structure,
so The Correction guards luma shipments hardest.
`ASSET (3D): stack of metal ingots in graduated grays from near-black to white, brushed steel texture, faint scanline etching`

**CHROMA SLURRY** — *color, separated from luma, stored badly.* Iridescent magenta-cyan
liquid in leaky barrels. Volatile: spills BLEED onto adjacent belt lanes and tint
whatever passes. Concentrating it (4:4:4 → 4:2:0) yields BANDWIDTH but doubles leakage.
`ASSET (3D): rusty industrial barrel overflowing with iridescent liquid, magenta-cyan-green swirls, drips glowing down the sides, hazard stripes barely visible under stains`

**COEFFICIENT PACKS** — *frames pressed into the frequency domain.* Decks of translucent
cards, each etched with one cosine wave; low-frequency cards thick and bright, high-
frequency cards whisper-thin. Output of the DCT Press.
`ASSET (3D): deck of translucent glass cards fanned slightly, each etched with a different frequency sine wave, bottom cards thick and glowing, top cards thin and dim`

**HF DUST** — *quantization waste.* Glittering powder of murdered high frequencies —
all the fine detail the Quantizer rounded to zero. Accumulates around crushers; attracts
and hatches MOSQUITO SWARMS. Late-game recipes reclaim it (mosquito farming, ringing).
`ASSET (2D decal + 3D pile): heap of fine glitter dust, prismatic sparkle, subtly animated shimmer, industrial floor spill shape`

**MOTION VECTOR FLUID (MV-FLUX)** — *pure directional intent, no pixels.* The blood of
temporal compression, carried in pipes: a luminous fluid full of tiny arrows all
pointing the way the image wants to move. Feed it to P-Frame casting. Reversed pipes
produce backwards-flux for B-frames.
`ASSET (3D pipe segment + fluid VFX): transparent industrial pipe filled with glowing cyan fluid, dense stream of tiny bright arrow particles flowing one direction, pulsing`

### Frames (the ammunition of the economy)

**I-FRAME (ANCHOR SLAB)** — *a complete, self-sufficient picture.* Rare, heavy, forklift-
only. A thick crystal slab holding an entire crisp image. Everything downstream leans on
it; remove it from a GOP and the whole chain hallucinates. The premium currency.
`ASSET (3D): thick monolithic crystal slab on a shipping pallet, a complete crisp photographic scene embedded inside, edges beveled like a bank vault door, heavy glow`

**P-FRAME (DELTA WAFER)** — *not a picture — an instruction.* Thin cheap wafer etched
with motion arrows and prediction-error crumbs. Mass-produced from MV-FLUX. Applied to
whatever came before it, right or wrong. The bulk commodity.
`ASSET (3D): thin circuit wafer, translucent, etched with a field of small arrows pointing subtly different directions, a few glowing patch-marks of pixel residue`

**B-FRAME (JANUS WAFER)** — *references past AND future.* Double-faced wafer that needs
two input belts — one from upstream, one from a *future* buffer — making it the routing
puzzle of the mid-game. Highest compression yield of any frame.
`ASSET (3D): two-faced coin-like wafer, one face etched with backward arrows one with forward arrows, thin glowing seam around the rim, slowly counter-rotating faces`

**GOP CRATE** — *one I-frame + N delta wafers, boxed for shipping.* Standard freight of
the Bitstream. Stamp on the side shows the pattern (IPPBPPB...). Tampering with a sealed
crate (I-frame theft) is the core corruption verb.
`ASSET (3D): industrial shipping crate, one glowing slab slot visible at front followed by a rack of thin wafers, stenciled cadence pattern on the side, forklift slots`

### Power & logistics

**BANDWIDTH** — *the electricity of the Bitstream.* Generated by compressing (every bit
you destroy becomes room to move). Carried on glowing bus-bars. Chroma subsampling and
brutal quantization are your coal and your nuclear.
`ASSET (3D powerline piece): industrial pylon with a horizontal light-bar conductor, flowing dashed light pulses, meter dial showing kbps`

**BUFFER CHARGE** — *smoothness in a tank.* Stored decode-ahead, the steam accumulator
of the factory. Drains at exactly one frame per 16.6ms. When a tank empties: **brownout**
— the whole sector freeze-stutters and the audio pop-crackles (see HAZARDS).
`ASSET (3D): rounded industrial holding tank with a vertical progress-bar window, liquid light inside draining in discrete frame-tick steps, red POP hazard sticker near empty line`

**HEAT** — *the price of software decoding.* Invisible resource with visible
consequences: machines shimmer, then throttle (tick rate visibly halves), then scram.
Vented by ASIC coolers. `ASSET (VFX only): heat-haze shader + glowing dull-red machine edges`

### Science packs (research currency — each is a bottled artifact triptych)

| Pack | Bottled contents | Visual |
|---|---|---|
| **ANALOG PACK** | combing + v-hold roll + static | Bakelite TV-tube flask, phosphor green, tiny rolling picture inside |
| **SPATIAL PACK** | macroblock + ringing + bleed | 8×8 gridded acrylic cube, checkerboard core, halo shimmer |
| **TEMPORAL PACK** | melt + bloom + judder | Hourglass whose falling sand smears sideways mid-fall |
| **CONTAINER PACK** | moov shard + offset ribbon + sync key | Nested transparent boxes, innermost holds a glowing index card |
| **CINEMA PACK** (endgame) | wavelet + PCM + hash fragment | Blinding white orb, faint XML script orbiting it |

`ASSET (3D, set of 5): laboratory flask variants per above, shared silhouette, one impossible glowing content each`

---

## 3. GLITCH PRODUCTS (what the factory actually ships)

**MELT** — *motion divorced from form.* Made in the Mosh Reactor by feeding GOP crates
with the I-frame removed. A slow rainbow lava that carries the *shape of movement*
through whatever pixels happen to be lying around. Tier-1 signature product.
`ASSET (3D fluid + 2D shader ref): thick dripping liquid rainbow, surface streaked with directional smear trails, holds ghost-outlines of a previous image while flowing like a new one`

**BLOOM CONCENTRATE** — *motion compounded on itself.* Product of a Bloom Loop left
running: duplicated P-frames stacking the same displacement forever. Sold by intensity
grade; grade-5 bloom visibly tries to escape its canister in one direction.
`ASSET (3D): pressure canister with a viewport, contents visibly stretching and duplicating toward one wall in repeated feathered layers, dented on that side`

**MACROBLOCK BRICKS** — *the quantizer's confession.* Perfect quilted checkerboard
tiles, harvested when flat areas starve. Construction material AND product: commissions
love a good brick.
`ASSET (3D): pallet of square tiles, each a slightly-wrong solid color with hard seams, arranged in an ugly beautiful patchwork`

**RINGING HALOS** — *the Gibbs phenomenon, canned.* Ghostly oscillation rings skimmed
from around over-sharpened edges. Ethereal, faintly vibrating, stored on hooks like
angelic quoits. Ingredient in all "haunted" recipes.
`ASSET (3D): stack of translucent shimmering rings on an industrial hook rack, each ring vibrating with concentric echo lines, faint halo glow`

**STATIC CANISTERS** — *bottled analog snow.* White-noise slush from the Broadcast
Shelf. Cheap filler product; also brine for preserving other artifacts.
`ASSET (3D): glass jar of animated dense monochrome noise, TV-static texture, condensation on glass, masking-tape label`

**MOIRÉ CRYSTAL** — *interference made solid.* Grows wherever fine repeating patterns
meet the sensor grid: swirling maze-lattice crystal. Beautiful, valuable, and a
nuisance — unchecked growth becomes literal maze walls across your factory floor (§5).
`ASSET (3D): crystalline growth whose internal structure is a swirling psychedelic maze pattern, rainbow interference sheen that shifts with view angle`

**FALSE-COLOR SPECKLE** — *chromatic aliasing, panned like gold.* Bright purple/green
speckles sieved off high-contrast edges. Tiny, precious, pure pigment for THE SCREEN.
`ASSET (2D sprite + 3D vial): tiny vivid magenta and acid-green flecks in a glass vial, unnaturally saturated against a neutral gray backdrop`

**JUDDER CAMS** — *the 3:2 pulldown, machined.* Lumpy asymmetric camshafts that convert
smooth rotation into 3-2-3-2 stutter. Installed in products to make them move *wrong*.
`ASSET (3D): machined steel camshaft with deliberately uneven lobes in a 3-2 pattern, motion-blur ghosting on the lobes, precision-industrial finish`

**GAMUT PAINTS** — *color spaces in cans, deliberately mislabeled.* REC709 house-gray,
DCI-P3 cinema-vivid, REC2020 laser-primaries (nearly weapons-grade: pure 630/532/467nm
pigment). Painting a product with the *wrong label* makes downstream decoders clip it
into hyper-saturated blocks or wash it corpse-flat — both sell.
`ASSET (3D, 3 variants): paint cans with chromaticity-diagram labels, one drab, one vivid, one containing visibly impossible laser-pure color that overglows the can rim`

**EXPLOSIVE HITS** — *offset corruption, weaponized.* The Hex Splicer's product: bytes
fetched from the middle of a frame instead of its start code. Unstable prisms that
detonate into macroblock shrapnel and color inversion if belted too far. Ship fast.
`ASSET (3D): angular unstable prism crackling with inverted-color lightning, half its faces showing a scrambled image, hazard-orange containment frame straining`

**THE MEGAGLITCH** *(victory product)* — see §7.

---

## 4. MACHINES

**SEAM EXTRACTOR** — *the miner.* A drill-head that chews mdat seams and spits raw ore.
Era-skinned per stratum (film-reel drill in the Reel Beds, etc.).
`ASSET (3D): industrial mining drill with a CRT monitor for a head, drill bit made of stacked play-button triangles, cable dreadlocks, grimy yellow chassis`

**DEMUXER** — *the first splitter.* Cleaves raw ore into luma / chroma / audio / MV-flux
output lanes. Literally a machine with one input belt and four differently-glowing
output belts. `ASSET (3D): squat sorting machine with one big intake hopper and four labeled output chutes glowing white, magenta, green, cyan`

**DEMOSAICER** — *makes color from checkerboard grit.* Interpolation looms weave RGGB
gravel into full-color plates. Parameter dial selects algorithm (AMaZE/LMMSE/VNG4 as
absurd brand names on the faceplate). Feed it stripes → it jams and extrudes MOIRÉ.
`ASSET (3D): loom-like machine threading red green blue gravel into a smooth color sheet, weaving arms mid-motion, big algorithm selector dial with baroque labels`

**DCT PRESS** — *spatial → frequency.* A hydraulic press whose platen is engraved with
the 8×8 DCT basis-function grid; slams pixel blocks into coefficient card decks. Bigger
era-tier presses (16×16, 64×64, 128×128) are progressively more cathedral-like.
`ASSET (3D): heavy hydraulic press, platen engraved with the iconic grid of cosine-wave basis patterns, glowing card deck sliding out of the output slot`

**QUANTIZER** — *the crusher, the moneymaker, the sin.* Adjustable jaw that rounds
coefficients to zero. Its single dial (Q) is the most important lever in the factory:
right = more BANDWIDTH + more HF DUST + uglier products. The dial goes to "CRIME".
`ASSET (3D): brutal jaw-crusher with an oversized rotary dial labeled with a smiley face at one end and a skull at the other, glitter dust leaking from its seams`

**SUBSAMPLER** — *chroma concentrator.* Centrifuge that spins 4:4:4 slurry down to
4:2:2 / 4:1:1 / 4:2:0 grades, venting bandwidth. Leaks by design; place downwind.
`ASSET (3D): centrifuge tank with three grade taps, iridescent stains streaking down its flank, ventilation stack emitting faint rainbow vapor`

**MV EXTRACTOR & P-CASTER** — *optical-flow refinery.* Watches decoded footage with an
array of eye-cameras and pipes off MV-FLUX; the paired caster prints delta wafers.
`ASSET (3D): machine studded with dozens of small camera lenses all tracking subtly, cyan fluid pipe exiting the back, wafer printer sidecar`

**GOP ASSEMBLER** — *the packer.* Robotic arm slots 1 anchor slab + N wafers into
crates following a cadence template (editable: IPP, IBBP, I-only…). Cadence templates
are themselves unlockable items.
`ASSET (3D): packing station with robot arm mid-slot, crate on rollers, cadence template punch-cards racked on the wall`

**MOSH REACTOR** — *tier-1 corruption core.* A decoder run in a sealed vessel and
deliberately starved of anchors: crates go in, the I-frame is winched OUT through a
side airlock (recoverable — sell it!), and the hallucinating decoder extrudes MELT.
`ASSET (3D): pressure reactor with a porthole showing swirling rainbow smear, side airlock cradling a stolen glowing slab, warning placard of a melting face`

**BLOOM LOOP** — *not a machine — a belt topology.* Any closed belt circle with a
P-FRAME DUPLICATOR on it. Contents compound each lap; tap the loop to draw off graded
bloom. Runaway loops (grade >5) burst and flood the sector with directional smear.
`ASSET (3D, belt piece + duplicator): conveyor segment whose cargo visibly doubles and feathers as it passes a stamping duplicator arch, escalating glow per lap`

**FIELD LOOM (INTERLACER/DEINTERLACER)** — *weaves and unweaves time.* Splits frames
into odd/even field splinters captured a tick apart, or (run in reverse) weaves them
back — imperfectly, unless fed a motion-adaptive coprocessor module.
`ASSET (3D): weaving loom threading two horizontal slat-sets together into one sheet, teeth slightly misaligned, phosphor green worklight`

**TELECINE PULLER** — *the 3:2 judder mill.* Cranks 24fps film stock into 30fps product
by duplicating fields on a lumpy cam (see JUDDER CAMS). Runs backwards as an IVTC
purifier — one of the few machines The Correction also uses, awkwardly.
`ASSET (3D): film-projector-meets-gearbox, visible uneven cam linkage, two film paths in and out with mismatched sprocket rhythms`

**HEX SPLICER** — *endgame chaos lathe.* A robotic hex-editor that nudges stco offsets
by a few bytes so downstream decoders fetch garbage. Produces EXPLOSIVE HITS. Requires
CONTAINER PACK research and a steady buffer feed or it splices *itself*.
`ASSET (3D): surgical robot arm poised over a scrolling hexadecimal ticker-tape, one byte pair held glowing in its tweezers, containment glass, red interior light`

**DECODE ASIC** *(power gen)* — *cool, efficient, inflexible.* Handles standard profiles
only. `ASSET (3D): server-blade monolith with a huge heatsink afro and a serene LED face`
**SOFTWARE DECODER** *(burst gen)* — *decodes ANYTHING, at any temperature.* Doubles
throughput on demand; generates HEAT; throttles theatrically (fan scream, tick-rate
halving). `ASSET (3D): overclocked tower PC held together with zip ties and prayer, case open, fans glowing hot-red, thermal haze`

**BUFFER TANK** — see BUFFER CHARGE. **MUXER** — see §7 (it's the rocket).

---

## 5. HAZARDS, WILDLIFE & THE ENEMY

### Wildlife (ambient, farmable)

**MOSQUITO SWARMS** — *quantization noise, alive.* Shimmer-gnat clouds that hatch from
HF DUST piles and cluster around any sharp edge in your factory (signage, fresh luma,
the player). Degrade machine precision. Catchable in edge-baited traps → sellable as an
artifact ingredient. The doc's "shimmering swarm around outlines," literalized.
`ASSET (VFX + 3D trap): particle cloud of tiny flickering pixel-gnats; trap is a bug-zapper shaped like a high-contrast black-white edge target`

**GIBBS WRAITHS** — *ringing, ambulatory.* Ghostly figures made of concentric echo
halos that spawn where contrast is extreme. Harmless but they *duplicate your outline*
and follow you, slightly out of phase. Density = a readable "over-sharpening" warning.
`ASSET (3D character, rigged): translucent humanoid made of nested outline rings, no fill, constantly oscillating between two positions`

**MOIRÉ BLOOM** — *crystal maze growth.* Spreads across floors wherever repeating
textures face each other. Harvest young = product; let it mature = your factory now has
corridors you didn't design. Some players will farm it as free walls.

### System hazards

**BROWNOUT (BUFFER UNDERRUN)** — a drained buffer freezes its whole power domain in a
stuttering last-frame loop while the audio bus emits catastrophic pop-crackle. Machines
resume with a lurch and 1 tick of scrambled output (free chaos, occasionally useful).
**THERMAL SCRAM** — overheated software decoders halve the local tick rate; the *game
itself* visibly drops frames in that sector. The lag IS the damage model.
**BLEED FLOODS** — slurry spills tint every product crossing them until mopped.

### THE CORRECTION (the enemy faction)

The immune system of the Bitstream. It does not hate you; it *cannot perceive* you —
only deviation, which it repairs. Escalation ladder:

1. **PARITY MITES** — beetle-drones that patrol belts and quietly *fix* artifacts back
   into clean product (your melt becomes... footage of a lake). Early nuisance.
   `ASSET (3D, rigged): rounded beetle drone, hospital-white shell, tiny green checkmark eye, solder-iron proboscis, unsettlingly gentle`
2. **CHECKSUM WARDENS** — heavier units that audit a machine, roll back its last N
   outputs, and stamp it with a compliance seal (disabled until you pry the seal off).
   `ASSET (3D, rigged): tall white filing-cabinet golem, drawer-chest full of hashes, rubber-stamp fist, red LED ledger eyes`
3. **REDUNDANCY GUNSHIPS** — airborne RAID arrays that *mirror* a sector of your
   factory: a clean parallel copy materializes alongside and tries to out-ship you to
   THE SCREEN. Your own layout, sanitized, weaponized. Kill the parity link to pop it.
   `ASSET (3D): hovering white chassis of five mirrored disk-platter rotors in a row, projecting a ghostly duplicate landscape beneath itself`
4. **HASH AUDITORS** (endgame, from the Fortress) — DCP inquisitors. One byte of
   deviation in their scan radius and they refuse — not attack, *refuse* — locking
   regions into unplayable 0:00 stasis until you break the lock (see moov heists, §6).
   `ASSET (3D, rigged): faceless white-marble cinema usher, flashlight that projects an XML scroll, padlock icon halo, moves only between frames`

---

## 6. RESEARCH, COMMISSIONS & SIDE LOOPS

**TECH TREE = MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY.** You research *downward* (excavating older strata for
analog secrets) and *upward* (deriving newer codecs). Era multipliers use the real
efficiency history: MPEG-2 → H.264 ≈ ×2 compression, → HEVC ×1.5, → AV1 ×1.3, each era
also unlocking bigger DCT presses (8×8 → 128×128) and new cadence templates.

**PRESTIGE = REMASTER.** Reset the file, keep knowledge ("muscle memory of the codec"),
re-encode the world one generation newer. Generation loss is the prestige *bonus* here —
each remaster starts with era-appropriate ambient artifacts already seeded in the soil.

**COMMISSIONS** arrive by fax (the fax machine is sacred, do not ask why it works).
Absurd recipe orders from unseen glitch-art collectors, e.g.:
- *"1 MELTED ANCHOR SLAB + 3 MOSQUITO SWARMS (live) + 40 bbl CHROMA SLURRY (4:2:0) = 1 VAPORWAVE SUNSET. Deliver before the beat drops."*
- *"600 MACROBLOCK BRICKS, sky-blue, MISLABELED REC2020. Purpose: none of your business."*
- *"One (1) GIBBS WRAITH, willingly."*

**MOOV HEISTS** (side mode, feeds the campaign): Hash Auditors lock a region → you
infiltrate its container, scan scrolling hex for real frame signatures (AAC `0xFFF`
sync words, H.264 NAL start codes), and rebuild/forge the stco/stsz index to your
advantage. Papers-Please-meets-defrag; the minigame from GLYTCH's REPAIR mode, reused.

**AUDIO WING** (optional expansion): PCM ingots, sample-rate drift (44.1k product on a
48k line slowly desyncs the *whole factory's* rhythm), and the asymmetric sync scoring
rule — audio may lag ≤120ms, but audio that *leads* by even a few ms triggers instant
commission rejection. The pickiest customers are evolutionary.

---

## 7. THE ENDGAME: THE FORTRESS & THE MEGAGLITCH

**THE MUXER** is your rocket: a launch-gantry that assembles a complete container —
ftyp seal, mdat payload masses, and the hand-built **moov brain** (stsz ledger + stco
map + stts metronome + stss keyring, each its own late-game production line) — and
ships the finished file to THE SCREEN as one colossal composited corruption: the
**MEGAGLITCH**. Victory plays your actual factory's shipping history as a rendered
video. (Real-render tie-in: the layout compiles to an ffmpeg/PYXLFK graph — belts are
`filter_complex`; the save file is a render-farm job for the Mac fleet.)
`ASSET (3D, hero structure): launch gantry embracing a monolithic container rocket built of nested translucent boxes, innermost box a glowing brain of index tape-reels, umbilical belts feeding it from every direction`

**THE FORTRESS (DCP)** is the final biome and the game's thesis-statement difficulty
cliff: inside its walls *your entire verb set fails*. JPEG 2000 wavelet masonry — no
blocks, no seams to mosh. Every frame intra-coded — no dependency chains to starve. No
motion vectors *at all*. PCM audio too pure to pop. AES-CBC gates, KDM time-locks that
only open during scheduled showings, and hash sentries with zero-tolerance policy.
You cannot corrupt The Fortress. The twist: **you don't have to.** Its own perfection
is the exploit — flip one byte and it *refuses to play itself*. The final act inverts
your win condition from "make it glitch" to "make it silent," or steal the KDM window.
`ASSET (environment kit): blinding white cathedral of smooth waveleted curves, zero right angles, XML scripture friezes, spotlight-usher sentries, one hairline black crack (scripted)`

---

## 8. VISUAL STYLE GUIDE (for every MODELBEAST batch)

- **Two-material rule:** every asset = grimy industrial body (rust, gaffer tape, hazard
  stripes, zip ties) + exactly ONE impossible element (CRT glow, iridescent fluid,
  interference sheen, embedded image). The impossible element is the silhouette's focus.
- **Palette:** base world in desaturated industrial neutrals; ALL saturation belongs to
  media/artifacts (chroma slurry, gamut paints, THE SCREEN). Color = value = literally
  the resource. The world gets more colorful only where the player has made a mess.
- **Era skins:** Reel Beds = sepia/brass/celluloid; Broadcast = phosphor green + wood-
  grain TV; Disc = rainbow-on-black gloss; Stream = flat white plastic + LED; Fortress
  = blinding matte white. The Correction is always hospital-white with green checkmarks.
- **Animation motif:** clean things move at 60fps; corrupted things move *wrong on
  purpose* — 3:2 judder for film-era, 2-frame loops for analog, held-then-lurch for
  buffer trouble. Wrongness of motion is a faction uniform.
- **UI voice:** OSHA-poster deadpan. Everything horrifying is labeled like routine
  industrial equipment.

## 9. MODELBEAST PRODUCTION NOTES

- Host: `MB_HOST=http://100.89.131.57:8777` (m3ultra, tailnet). Headless via `mb` CLI;
  ops brief in `~/Documents/modelbeast/AGENTS.md` on that machine.
- Pipeline per 3D asset: concept image → `sf3d` (local, fast) for props; `fal_trellis2`
  (paid, higher fidelity) reserved for hero assets (Muxer, Mosh Reactor, Fortress kit)
  — check the canon cache before any paid generation (asset-pipeline house rule).
- Characters/creatures that need rigs (Gibbs Wraith, Parity Mite, Wardens, Auditor):
  route through the character_kit fleet rule — generate the mesh, then bind to the
  shared clip banks; bespoke motion (the Auditor's between-frames teleport, Mite repair
  loop) is hand-authored, not Mixamo-searched.
- Belts/pipes/tiles are kit-bashed modular pieces: generate 3–4 segment variants each,
  keep polycounts belt-friendly; VFX-heavy entries (melt, static, heat) are shaders,
  not meshes — the ASSET prompt is the *reference image* prompt for the shader artist
  (also you).
- Every asset generated gets its element's codex name — this file is the manifest;
  check off against it.

---

## 10. THE COMPOSITE SEAM — keying & transparency artifacts

> Source study: Corridor Crew's history of compositing (Niko Pueringer) + our local
> `corridorkey-mrp-mlx` (MLX port of CorridorKey, runs in the MODELBEAST flow on the
> m3ultra). Thesis, and the section's whole physics: **you cannot film transparency.**
> Alpha does not exist in nature — every era of cinema is a different failed séance
> for summoning it. In the Bitstream this is literal: ALPHA is the one resource that
> cannot be mined from any seam. It can only be *computed*, and every computation
> before the last one lies.

**Geology:** the Composite Seam is not a stratum — it is a vertical FAULT crossing
every era layer, glittering with half-transparent fossils. Mining near it yields
subjects fused to backgrounds that were never really there.

### Resources & products

**ALPHA** — *raw transparency, the unfilmable substance.* A shimmering nothing in a
frame; the rarest resource in the game. Cannot be extracted; only keyer machines emit
it, each era's keyer emitting a corrupted grade.
`ASSET (3D + shader): a glass ingot that renders as a checkerboard-transparency hole in the world itself, faint rainbow rim, pedestal casting a shadow the ingot doesn't`

**HARD MATTE** — *reel-era binary alpha.* Silver-halide matte slabs: every pixel all
or nothing. Razor edges, zero feather; anything soft (hair, smoke, glass) that touches
one gets guillotined to a hard silhouette. Cheap, brutal, in demand for "woodcut" looks.
`ASSET (3D): stack of black-and-white film mattes like x-ray plates, silhouettes with surgically hard edges, chemical stain rims, one plate mid-slice through a wisp of smoke`

**BLUE HOLE** — *optical-printer costume dropout.* A patch of SUBJECT gone transparent
because it dared to be blue. Sold as canned absence; installing one in a product makes
part of it see-through in a way that reads as a wound.
`ASSET (3D): a mannequin torso with a clean-edged void where the chest was, world visible through it, faint blue glow licking the hole's rim`

**FRINGE LACE** — *matte lines, bottled.* The bright halo ribbon where layers of film
were re-exposed slightly misaligned. Harvested off composite edges like dried glue.
`ASSET (3D): coils of luminous ribbon, each strand a hard bright outline the exact shape of some absent object's edge, wound on an industrial spool`

**GREEN SPILL** — *chroma contamination.* Cousin fluid to CHROMA SLURRY but nastier:
it doesn't tint what it touches, it makes it PARTIALLY DISAPPEAR (the keyer downstream
eats whatever it stains). Leaks from every chroma keyer; the OSHA posters are explicit.
`ASSET (3D): dripping acid-green fluid whose puddles render as半 half-vanished floor, hazmat berm around a keyer machine, splashes eating a crate mid-vanish`

**MIXED PIXEL** — *the purple gel: an unmixable blend.* Foreground and background
fused into one pixel that belongs to neither — the red gel that filmed purple. Classic
keyers cannot separate it; the neural keyer eats it for breakfast.
`ASSET (3D): a jar of pixels each half one color half another, split diagonally, labeled RED (DISPUTED)`

**ROTO CHATTER** — *boiling edges.* Frame-inconsistent cutout outlines, jittering like
they're being redrawn 24 times a second by a tired artist — because they are. A live
hazard that infests composite edges; trapped and canned, it sells as nervous energy.
`ASSET (VFX + 3D can): an outline that never sits still, vibrating polyline crawling around a silhouette; the can has a shaking label`

**SODIUM LIGHT (589nm)** — *the grail wavelength.* Disney's sodium-vapor trick:
mathematically perfect mattes, hair and glass and gossamer intact — locked behind an
exclusive prism only one company ever owned. In the Bitstream, The Correction hoards
the prisms (perfection is their department). A single beam is an endgame reagent.
`ASSET (3D): a sealed lantern emitting one impossibly pure amber-orange line of light, wavelength etched on the housing, white-glove handling cradle, Correction seal`

**GHOST FEATHER** — *semi-transparency done RIGHT.* Hair strands, motion blur, glass —
alpha with gradients. The proof-of-mastery product; every era below the neural keyer
ruins it, so demand never dies.
`ASSET (3D): a single enormous feather fading from fully solid quill to truly transparent tip, the transition agonizingly smooth, displayed under museum glass`

### Machines

**MATTE BATH** *(reel era)* — chemical tank that binarizes anything: footage in, hard
mattes out, all softness destroyed (a GHOST FEATHER fed in comes out a HARD MATTE and
the machine does not apologize). One mistake ruins the whole reel — jams eat inventory.
`ASSET (3D): open chemical bath with film strips on rollers dipping through, developer-red darkroom lamp, dissolving softness visibly leaving the film as rising fog`

**OPTICAL PRINTER** *(the iron lung)* — a cathedral of bellows and lenses that splits
footage into R/G/B channel reels and recombines them slightly wrong. Produces
composites + FRINGE LACE always + BLUE HOLES whenever fed anything blue. Huge
footprint, gorgeous, mechanical; the codex's most machine-ass machine.
`ASSET (3D, hero): room-sized brass-and-iron optical printer, three film paths in primary-color light, bellows lungs mid-breath, a fringe of glowing misalignment haloing its output gate`

**CHROMA KEYER** *(stream era)* — digital green screen box: cheap, fast, 30-year-old
math. Emits ALPHA (consumer grade) + GREEN SPILL, chokes on hair (GHOST FEATHER input
→ ROTO CHATTER hazard spawn), turns semi-transparent inputs into MIXED PIXELS.
`ASSET (3D): studio-green cube with a subject-shaped hole punched clean through, green fluid weeping from its seams, sample swatches of failed hair taped to its side`

**ROTO BENCH** — *the grind made flesh.* Manual-labor station that converts ANY
footage to cutouts — perfectly, eventually — at an atrocious rate (24 frames of pain
per second of footage). The economic floor under every keyer: when automation fails,
the bench never does, it just costs your life. Emits ROTO CHATTER while running.
`ASSET (3D): a hunched drafting desk with a glowing frame-by-frame lightbox, mountain of finished frames on one side, coffee rings fossilized into the wood, a small flickering outline hovering over the current frame`

**NEURAL KEYER** *(endgame)* — the CorridorKey machine: trained on ten thousand
synthetic ghosts because reality couldn't teach it (you can't film the answer). Pulls
perfect ALPHA through glass, chainmail, motion-blurred hair; UNMIXES pixels (MIXED
PIXEL → original colors, recovered); no spill, no fringe, no chatter. The catch is
pure hardware: it draws 24 VRAM — a bandwidth appetite that dwarfs everything else in
the game. You don't unlock the neural keyer; you unlock the power plant it demands.
`ASSET (3D, hero): a monolithic GPU shrine, fans like cathedral rose windows, cables thick as anacondas, projecting a flawless translucent figure above itself; power meter needle buried in the red`

### Hazards

**SPILL FOG** — green contamination cloud around leaky keyers; products crossing it
gain partial transparency (defect or feature, depending on the commission).
**EDGE BOIL** — roto chatter infestation: outlines in the area start crawling;
machines misread their own footprints and mis-deliver until it's trapped.

### PYXLFK / MODELBEAST production note

`corridorkey-mrp-mlx` (gitea.partly.party/monster/corridorkey-mrp-mlx, deployed in the
MODELBEAST flow on the m3ultra) is a REAL artifact factory for this whole section:
run the same footage through (a) classic chroma-subtraction math and (b) the neural
keyer — the difference image is a pixel-perfect, ground-truth-labeled map of spill,
fringe, and mixed pixels. Degrading the alpha hint synthesizes roto chatter and hard-
matte binarization with known parameters. Every artifact above is bakeable with a
recorded recipe, which is the PYXLFK contract: corruption in, sidecar out.