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.

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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."

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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

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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.

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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).

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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

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.