glytch/fktry/lanes/LANE-UI.md

LANE-UI — HUD, build tools, and the voice of the game

You are an Opus 4.8 executor on the UI lane of FKTRY. Read ../MASTERPLAN.md and ../CONTRACTS.md first; the world bible is ../../docs/FKTRY_LORE.md. The game's voice is §1's "OSHA-poster deadpan" — you write most of the words the player reads. Every label, tooltip, and error is an opportunity; "Inventory full" is a crime when "OUTPUT BUFFER AT CAPACITY. THIS IS A YOU PROBLEM." is available.

Mission: everything DOM. Build bar, inspector, resource readouts, commission fax, pause/speed, hotkeys. Plain TypeScript + DOM — no framework, no CSS libs.

Owned paths: src/ui/** (styles included — inject a <style> tag or import a css file from your dir). Never touch: contracts, main.ts, other lanes. You never mutate snapshots; you dispatch Commands via the bus and read state from update(snap, events).

Standing rules (all rounds):

• #ui root has pointer-events:none; every interactive child you create re-enables it. Clicks must fall through to the game world everywhere else — test this.
• Keyboard map lives in one file (hotkeys.ts) — it will grow.
• Terminal-industrial aesthetic: monospace, #d8ffd8 on dark, hot accents #ff3fd4 / #3fffe0 (match GLYTCH's palette; see ../../index.html for reference). No rounded corners. This is machinery, not a startup.

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CURRENT ORDERS — Round 6 (goal: the enemy has a face, the dial has teeth)

Your tuner dock now drives the real engine (orchestrator adapter — the dead-dial finding from the voice review is fixed and live-verified, station names and all).

1. Mite surfacing: toasts in voice ("A PARITY MITE IS EDITING YOUR MELT.", "IT LEFT A RECEIPT."), repaired events in the ticker, firewall inspector shows catches. The Correction is polite; the copy should make players furious.
2. Tuner tick marks: the adapter now passes listStations() through — draw station ticks on the dial band so hunting has landmarks (keep the hunt: ticks mark THAT something is there, not WHAT).
3. Credits line (from the voice-cloning plan, cheap now): an ABOUT/credits entry reachable from the tech panel footer — repo, codex, and the standing disclosure slot for future synthetic-voice credit.

DoD: a mite raid is narratable from UI alone; ticks render from real station data; credits reachable in-game.

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NOTES (append-only log, newest at bottom)

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

Round 1 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: All five ordered surfaces, in src/ui/**, verified in a browser (screenshots taken of each). Modules: index.ts (root/wiring), style.ts (injected CSS), voice.ts (all player-facing copy), hotkeys.ts (the keymap, one file as ordered), buildbar.ts, topstrip.ts, inspector.ts, fax.ts, toasts.ts, chips.ts (shared item chip), selection.ts (writes bus._sel), palette.ts, pick.ts, dom.ts, fixture.ts (dev).

1. Build bar — one button per machine, hotkeys 1-9, R rotates, Esc/right-click clears, selected button goes hot magenta, hint line shows facing + verbs.
2. Top strip — bandwidth meter (cyan → amber ≥85% → red + flashing BROWNOUT over 100%), buffer, shipped ticker + per-item chips, TICK / HALTED.
3. Inspector — name, codex flavor, INTAKE/OUTPUT chips w/ live buffers, process bar, heat readout w/ THROTTLING, jam reason in amber. Esc or X closes.
4. Commission fax — fax-paper card under THE SCREEN, wants as chips w/ 1/1 progress, reward line, and a FAX SENT rubber stamp on commissionDone.
5. Toasts — max 4, 6s TTL, colored per event kind, house voice.

VERIFIED: npm run check clean; npm test 70/70 (other lanes' suites). Dev server on :8151 (8150 was another lane's session). Confirmed with own eyes: hotkey 1 → bus._sel {seam-extractor,0}; R → dir 1 → 2; Esc → null; TAB → inspector paints SEAM EXTRACTOR with flavor + MDAT ORE chip + process bar; brownout → red border/BROWNOUT/buffer 0 + both toasts; FAX SENT stamp + its toast; pointer fall-through (#ui computes pointer-events: none, empty world hits CANVAS, panels are solid). No console errors.

DECISIONS:

• All player-facing strings live in voice.ts so the OSHA-deadpan register stays in one place and isn't re-invented per panel.
• The UI keeps its own flattened roster (pick.ts) instead of holding the snapshot: CONTRACTS says buffers may be reused between snapshots, and pointer/key handlers fire between frames. The backing array is reused so 500 entities don't allocate per frame.
• Esc is overloaded deliberately: drops the pending build first, closes the inspector second — dropping the tool is what a player expects from the first press.

BLOCKED/BROKEN (read this part):

• Click-to-inspect does not work. ui.init(root, data, bus) never sees the Renderer, and UIBus has only dispatch/selectedBuild — so the UI cannot reach renderer.pickTile, which is the only thing that knows the camera. LANE-RENDER has a working pickTile this round; I just can't call it. pick.ts opportunistically probes window.__fktryRenderer.pickTile (nobody sets it) and otherwise falls back to TAB cycles the unit manifest, which is how the inspector is reachable with no console today. Tile→entity hit-testing (incl. footprint rotation) is written and ready; it is one contract line away from working. See CONTRACT REQUEST 1.
• LANE-DATA shipped 21 machines; hotkeys only cover 9. Slots 10-21 are click-only, and that includes MOSH REACTOR, DECODE ASIC and SCREEN UPLINK — three of the seven M1 chain machines. The M1 chain is fully placeable by mouse, and 1-9 works, but "the M1 chain on hotkeys" is not literally true. The bar now wraps to 3 rows so nothing is off the viewport (it ran off both edges at 21). See PROPOSAL.
• No DOM tests for src/ui. No jsdom/happy-dom installed and I may not touch root config, so this lane has zero unit tests — everything above was verified by hand in the browser. See CONTRACT REQUEST 4.
• ?uifixture is dev scaffolding I wrote (fixture.ts) because the sim stub reported an empty world at the time — a fake snapshot on a wall clock so every surface could be seen working. It is inert without the query param and dispatches nothing. LANE-SIM is real now; this can be deleted once the real sim can be driven to a brownout by hand.
• Harness note, not a bug: the browser-automation key: space delivers an empty event.key, so pause could only be exercised via a dispatched ' ' KeyboardEvent (works: HALTED renders) and via dispatch({setPaused}) (works). Real spacebar sends ' ' per spec; the handler matches that.

CONTRACT REQUEST:

1. UIBus.pickTile(clientX, clientY): Vec2 | null (or pass the Renderer to ui.init) — why: without it the inspector cannot be opened by clicking a machine, which is the core interaction of order #3. Renderer already implements it; only the plumbing is missing. This is my only real blocker.
2. MachineDef.color: string — why: ItemDef has color, MachineDef doesn't, so the build bar has nothing data-driven to tint icons with. LANE-RENDER's orders say to tint placeholder boxes "per codex color" — same gap. Right now palette.ts and their renderer each hand-maintain a color table, which is how the build bar and the world end up disagreeing about what a quantizer looks like. Data should own it once.
3. MachineDef.flavor: string (codex one-liner) — why: orders told me to hard-code a lookup; I did (voice.ts), but only 7 of 21 machines have one and the other 14 fall back to generic text. This is LANE-DATA's material, not mine.
4. jsdom (or happy-dom) devDependency + environment: 'jsdom' — why: the UI lane currently cannot write a single test. Chips/roster/footprint/selection logic are all pure and testable the moment there's a DOM env.

PROPOSAL: build bar paging — group the 21 machines into kind tabs (EXTRACT / LOGISTICS / REFINE / POWER / SHIP), [/] to page, 1-9 within the active page. Makes every machine hotkey-reachable and scales as LANE-DATA keeps adding. Not done this round: the orders said "one button per machine, hotkeys 1-9" and redesigning the bar unasked is exactly what MASTERPLAN says not to do. Say the word and it's a small round-2 change.

NEXT (suggested): wire click-to-inspect the moment request 1 lands and delete the TAB fallback; recipe picker in the inspector (setRecipe exists in Command and has no UI); build bar paging; tech/research panel once tech.json is populated (it's []).

Round 2 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: All five orders. New: pages.ts (pagination), chipspec.ts (pure chip arithmetic), six *.test.ts. Deleted: fixture.ts and the TAB-cycle fallback, as ordered.

1. Click-to-inspect via bus.pickTile. The window.__fktryRenderer probe and the TAB fallback are gone.
2. Build bar paging — kind tabs (EXTRACT / LOGISTICS / REFINE / POWER / SHIP), [/], 1-9 within the page. Selecting from anywhere pulls the bar to the owning page.
3. Inspector — recipe picker (setRecipe), heat bar w/ THROTTLING/SCRAM states, jam wording via jamText().
4. Fax — NEXT IN TRAY peek, STANDING ORDER stamp on repeat, SANITISING chip on shipped anchor-slabs.
5. 57 tests (min was 10), all green.

VERIFIED (against the real sim, in a browser, on a static vite build+preview — see BLOCKED for why not the dev server): built a SEAM EXTRACTOR by mouse → DRAW 0→4 with no generator → real BROWNOUT, red panel, buffer 0, underrun toast, THE SCREEN visibly corrupting. Clicked the unit → inspector opened on entity 1 (pickTile → {18,-7} → entityAt). Placed a SOFTWARE DECODER → GEN 0→55, brownout lifted, "BUFFER RESTORED. RESUME SINNING." Recipe picker: options rendered as readable processes ("1 LUMA BARS → 1 COEFFICIENT PACK + 1 HF DUST"), selecting IDLE dispatched setRecipe{entity:1,recipe:null} and the sim round-tripped it back as "UNIT IS BEING PAID TO EXIST"; selecting back dispatched recipe:'quantize'. Starved wording live in both toast and inspector: "QUANTIZER: INTAKE STARVED. NOTHING IS ARRIVING." Paging walk confirmed all 21 machines across 6 pages (1+3+9+5+2+1) with no page over 9 slots. #ui still computes pointer-events:none. npm run check clean; 160/160 tests.

DECISIONS:

• Kind tabs alone could not satisfy "every machine hotkey-reachable at any catalog size" — REFINE holds 14 crafters and 1-9 reaches nine. So a page is capped at 9 and an oversized kind spills into numbered pages (REFINE 1/2, REFINE 2/2). The invariant the order asked for now holds for any catalog; pages.test.ts pins it at 1/9/14/40 crafters.
• Logic was pulled out of the DOM modules into pages.ts / chipspec.ts / a pure createKeyRouter, which is why there are 57 tests without happy-dom (below).
• Data-first everywhere: MachineDef.flavor and .color win, round-1 hand-transcribed tables stay as fallback. LANE-DATA's flavor is what's on screen now.
• Unknown jam reasons pass through uppercased rather than being swallowed, so a new sim stall reason shows up honestly instead of silently reading as generic.

BLOCKED/BROKEN (read this part):

• happy-dom is NOT installed — order 5 says "GRANTED — happy-dom is installed"; it is not in package.json and not in node_modules (npm ls happy-dom → empty). I did not add it: root config is orchestrator-owned and editing it is a hard rule. Instead I factored the testable logic into pure modules and wrote 57 node-env tests covering everything order 5 named except the two that genuinely need a DOM: chip rendering (the arithmetic is covered in chipspec.test.ts) and attach()'s window binding (the routing is covered in hotkeys.test.ts). Install it and I'll add the render tests.
• STANDING ORDER stamp is built but unobservable. Data has 3 repeat commissions (dust-allowance, correction-buyback, melt-retainer) but the sim pins the active commission to commissions[0] (first-taste, not repeat) and never advances — commissionDoneEmitted latches forever. So nothing can ever reach the stamp. Code is data-driven and will light up the moment the sim rotates commissions.
• NEXT IN TRAY is an inference, not truth. The snapshot has activeCommission but no queue, so "next" = the following entry in data order. It renders (NEXT IN TRAY → DUST ALLOWANCE) but if the sim ever picks non-sequentially the peek will lie. See CONTRACT REQUEST 1.
• Heat bar unverified live. Only software-decoder has heatPerTick (0.0025), and it heats only while crafting; a decoder with no load sits at heat 0, so the bar correctly stays hidden and I never saw THROTTLING/SCRAM. Thresholds are built to CONTRACTS (>0.7 throttle, 1.0 scram). Needs a fed chain to confirm.
• SANITISING chip unverified live — needs anchor-slabs actually shipped, which needs the full M1 chain fed. Renders off shippedTotal, so it is one shipment away.
• The dev server is unusable for verification. Other lanes are editing render/ and screen/ continuously; vite logged 16 page reloads in ~10 minutes, wiping the world mid-test every time. I verified on vite build + vite preview instead. Not a complaint — just: if a round asks for hands-on verification, expect this.
• During the round I hit LANE-SCREEN's glitchStack.ts and LANE-RENDER's index.ts mid-edit and broken (tsc errors, dead rAF loop). Both self-resolved. src/ui was clean throughout; the one failing test at the time was LANE-SIM's own sim.test.ts.
• Harness note (unchanged): browser-automation key: space sends an empty event.key; space verified via a dispatched ' ' event. Real spacebar sends ' ' per spec.

CONTRACT REQUEST:

1. SimSnapshot.commissionQueue: string[] (or nextCommission: string | null) — why: NEXT IN TRAY currently guesses from data order. Low cost, removes a UI lie.
2. Sim: advance/rotate commissions and honour repeat — not strictly a contract change, a SIM ask: commissions[0] forever means 13 of 14 commissions and all 3 standing orders are unreachable, and the fax's whole queue UI is decorative.
3. happy-dom actually installed (see BLOCKED) — the grant didn't land in package.json.

PROPOSAL: the inspector should get a REMOVE button (remove exists in Command with no UI, so a misplaced machine currently can't be undone by mouse at all). Small, and it closes the last build-verb gap.

NEXT (suggested): remove-by-mouse; heat/scram + SANITISING confirmation once a chain can be fed; commission queue UI becomes real once requests 1-2 land; tech panel when tech.json fills (still []).

Round 3 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: Orders 1-4. Order 5 (tech panel) skipped — see BLOCKED. New: live.test.ts (real sim + real HUD), chips.test.ts, hotkeys.dom.test.ts, fax.test.ts. 105 UI tests (was 57); full suite 238/238; npm run check clean.

1. REMOVE mode — X or the REMOVE button beside the tabs arms it (button goes hazard red, hint turns red, [ ] PAGE · X REMOVE in the idle hint). Click demolishes, Esc stands down, and it stays armed between clicks because demolition is usually plural. Toast: "UNIT RECLAIMED. THE FLOOR REMEMBERS." Clicking open ground does nothing, so a stray click never reads as a broken tool.
2. NEXT IN TRAY reads truth — snap.commissionQueue[1]. The data-order inference is deleted, not kept: SIM is publishing the field (see BLOCKED for the race that nearly made me miss it). No queue → no peek. A fax that lies quietly is worse than one that says nothing.
3. DOM tests — chip rendering, attach()/detach() window binding + typing guards, fax stamp lifecycle (incl. back-to-back stamps not clearing early), all under happy-dom.
4. Live pressure verification — see VERIFIED.

VERIFIED — live, in the browser (screenshots taken; __fktryDemo() = 118 commands):

• The reference factory builds and runs: DRAW 94 / GEN 180, buffer charging, belts moving, starved units toasting in house voice.
• REMOVE end-to-end: armed the mode (button red, bus._sel = {def:'__remove'}), clicked the mosh reactor → gone from the world, "UNIT RECLAIMED. THE FLOOR REMEMBERS." toast, DRAW dropped 94 → 86 (its draw left with it), inspector auto-closed because its entity vanished, mode still armed. That's the round's DoD.
• Inspector on a real MOSH REACTOR: DATA's flavor, PROCESS SELECT reading "1 GOP CRATE → 3 MELT + 1 I-FRAME (ANCHOR SLAB)", INTAKE GOP CRATE 0/1 amber, OUTPUT chips, "INTAKE STARVED. NOTHING IS ARRIVING."
• Paging tabs + NEXT IN TRAY (DUST ALLOWANCE) + REMOVE all legible in one bar.

VERIFIED — headless, against the REAL sim (live.test.ts; boots createSim() + createUI() on the real data/*.json, builds referenceFactory(), pumps ticks through the same update(snap, events) path main.ts uses, then reads the actual DOM):

• Heat → THROTTLING → SCRAM on a software decoder, inspected via the real pickTile→entityAt→open click path. Also pinned: the unit still reads SCRAM while cooling back below 1.0 — the exact case heat >= 1 got wrong, now read off EntityState.scrammed per contracts v3.
• SANITISING on real anchor-slab shipments (21 of them) — see BLOCKED for why this needed a machine swap.
• STANDING ORDER on a real repeat completion: the factory runs, SIM's queue advances, dust-allowance (repeat:true) reaches the head, the fax stamps it, and NEXT IN TRAY matches commissionQueue[1] exactly.
• REMOVE against the real sim: entity count drops by one, the id is gone, toast fires, stays armed, Esc disarms, open ground is a no-op.

DECISIONS:

• The __remove ghost sentinel (LANE-RENDER: this is the hook — please read). The UI has no Renderer reference; the only channel to the ghost is bus.selectedBuild(), which main.ts feeds to setGhost. So while remove is armed, _sel reads { def: '__remove', dir: 0 } — key your demolition tint off that def id. It is safe because sim's place handler is const def = defs.get(cmd.def); if (def) ..., so main.ts's click-to-place fires a place for __remove, matches no machine, and does nothing; the real removal is dispatched by the UI. Exported as REMOVE_DEF from src/ui/selection.ts and pinned by a test. A magic string is not how I'd design this — CONTRACT REQUEST 1.
• Build-bar icons now follow the two-material rule (codex §8), prompted by the v3 ruling that color is chassis, not accent. DATA's chassis values are all desaturated neutrals — correct for the world, but 21 icons in #4a4e52/#3f4348 is an unreadable grey wall. So an icon is body (data color) + one emissive element derived from the machine's first output item colour — the same derivation LANE-RENDER uses, so bar and world agree. My round-1 id/kind tables were never wrong, only mislabeled (the same mistake the v2 contract made); they now serve as the accent fallback for machines that output nothing (belts, buffers, uplinks).
• Inspector reads EntityState.scrammed, not heat >= 1. Re-deriving SIM's hysteresis here would silently desync the moment they retune HEAT_RESTART — exactly what LANE-RENDER flagged in their round-2 notes.

BLOCKED/BROKEN (read this part):

• The reference factory can never ship anchor-slabs, so SANITISING can't fire from __fktryDemo() as the order assumed. It recycles them on purpose — reference.ts: "Recovered anchor slabs come back out of the reactor. Rather than sell them, feed the i-only assembler." Confirmed by probe: 12k ticks ships hf-dust, chroma-slurry, macroblock-bricks, melt — zero slabs, with dct-press sitting on output full. So I verified it the way a player would: demolish the i-only assembler at (-6,5), drop an uplink on it → 21 slabs ship, SANITISING lights up. That's what live.test.ts does. Nobody's bug; the order's premise just didn't hold.
• Live verification of heat/scram/SANITISING in the browser is not practically possible, and it's the harness, not the code. The browser pane keeps the tab backgrounded (document.hidden === true), which pauses requestAnimationFrame, so the page only advances ~10 ticks per screenshot. SCRAM needs ~435 ticks of continuous generation and slabs need thousands — that's hundreds of captures, while parallel lanes' HMR reloaded the page ~16 times an hour, wiping the world mid-test (it ate four of my attempts). Chrome-MCP was no better: it couldn't reach the dev server (chrome-error://) and reported hidden: true too. Hence live.test.ts — same sim, same DOM, same code path, deterministic, milliseconds, and it stays as a regression test. I'd rather hand you that than a screenshot I had to fight the harness for.
• I nearly reported commissionQueue as unpublished. My first grep for snap.commissionQueue found nothing and I wrote the fallback on that basis; SIM landed it minutes later (parallel-round race — same thing that happened with flavor/color last round). A probe against the real sim caught it. Worth noting as a pattern: in this operation, "not landed yet" has a short shelf life, and greps at round-start lie by round-end.
• Order 5 (tech panel) skipped. tech.json is still [] — an era tree rendering an empty array is a panel that says nothing, and the order marked it skippable. It's ~30 lines whenever DATA fills the file.
• The ?showroom / demolition-tint coordination with LANE-RENDER is one-way so far: I've defined the sentinel above and pinned it, but they hadn't landed remove-tint when I finished, so the hover tint is unverified from my side. If they key off a different string, remove mode still works — it just won't glow.

CONTRACT REQUEST:

1. UIBus.setGhostMode(mode: 'build' | 'remove' | null) (or let setGhost take a mode) — why: remove-mode hover currently rides a magic def id through selectedBuild(), and main.ts fires a junk place command on every demolition click that only works because the sim happens to ignore unknown defs. It's two lanes agreeing on a string in a NOTES file. One typed field kills it.
2. MachineDef.accent?: string — why: deriving the icon accent from the first output item is a decent heuristic, but it's a heuristic, and LANE-RENDER is running the same one independently. If art direction ever wants a machine's glow to differ from its product, there's nowhere to say so. (LANE-RENDER asked for this in round 2 as well.)

PROPOSAL: ?uidemo — a URL param that runs __fktryDemo() on boot. Trivial, in my lane, and it would have saved most of an hour this round: every HMR reload wiped the world and needed a manual re-dispatch. Say the word.

NEXT (suggested): tech panel the moment tech.json has entries; verify RENDER's demolition tint once it lands; SANITISING's real fiction (The Correction's buyback) when M3 arrives — the hardcoded anchor-slab id should become data by then.

Round 4 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: All five orders. New: power.ts + power.test.ts, research.ts + research.test.ts, techpanel.ts + techpanel.test.ts. 145 UI tests (was 105); npm run check clean.

1. The BROWNOUT bug is fixed. BROWNOUT is now the sim's flag and nothing else. A covered deficit gets its own amber, steady, non-flashing state: "ON RESERVE · 34s", from stored/(draw−gen) — the same arithmetic SCREEN drives dread with, and honest because v3 ruled stored is bandwidth-SECONDS. Four states now: ok / tight / reserve / brownout, all pure in power.ts and pinned by tests, including the exact case that was lying (gen 100, draw 134, stored 1000, brownout:false → reserve, not brownout). Bonus: the buffer readout is a fuel gauge now (0/900) using v4 bandwidth.capacity.
2. Selection protocol migrated. Writes go through bus.setSelection(), REMOVE_DEF is deleted, and my remove dispatch is gone — main.ts owns it. Verified live: one click, one removal, no double-fire. A legacy fallback remains for a host that doesn't serve setSelection (it's optional in the contract) and is tested.
3. Research UI. T opens the STANDARDS COMMITTEE: every tech grouped by era in era order, cost chips in item colours, era prefix stripped from node names, UNLOCKS: tooltips in machine names. Pick → setResearch; picking the active one stands it down; ratified nodes are inert. Locked machines in the bar are greyed + padlocked with REQUIRES: <TECH>, can't be picked by click or hotkey, and the padlock falls off in the same frame researched lands. researched → "STANDARD RATIFIED. NEW CRIMES AVAILABLE."
4. ?uidemo — boots the reference factory after init. It already paid for itself.
5. Accent adopted: MachineDef.accent → first-output derivation → codex kind table. LANE-RENDER: confirming we read this identically — same three tiers, same order.

VERIFIED — live, in the browser (?uidemo, screenshots taken): the factory builds on boot with no console poking; the STANDARDS COMMITTEE renders all 23 techs across REEL / BROADCAST / DISC / STREAM / FORTRESS; clicking SOFTWARE DECODING dispatches setResearch and the node goes hot magenta reading IN COMMITTEE with a progress bar (round-tripped through the real sim); the POWER page shows DECODE ASIC bright and free next to SOFTWARE DECODER and ASIC COOLER greyed with padlocks and REQUIRES: STREAM SOFTWARE DECODING / REQUIRES: BROADCAST ASIC COOLING; bus.selection() reads {mode:'remove'} and a click demolishes the mosh reactor once — DRAW 100→92, "UNIT RECLAIMED. THE FLOOR REMEMBERS."

VERIFIED — headless (live.test.ts, real sim + real DOM, 16 tests): the whole research loop the DoD asked for — lock visible → place silently dropped by the sim → build a lab → pick the tech through the panel → packs delivered → researched → toast → padlock falls off → the same place now succeeds. Its harness is now a faithful main.ts (typed selection; it dispatches place/remove), which is what caught the double-fire.

DECISIONS:

• Packs in the research run are teleported into the lab's intake via the sim's own save()/load() (v4 hardened; load() re-runs applyUnlocks). Everything after that is the sim's real drainLabs → researched → applyUnlocks path, unmocked. Reason in BLOCKED: nothing in the game can currently make a science pack.
• With no ResearchState at all, the safe reading of the v4 rule is that gates hold (padlocks on) rather than fall open, and the panel says RESEARCH OFFLINE instead of rendering a tree that can't do anything. The sim always ships a ResearchState today, so this is belt-and-braces.
• live.test.ts no longer hardcodes reference-factory coordinates — it finds the i-only assembler by its recipe. reference.ts moved it from (-6,5) to (-6,6) during this round and broke my own test; that's my brittleness, fixed.

BLOCKED/BROKEN (read this part):

• SIM's research gating breaks SIM's own reference factory, and it's live right now. stream-software-decoding gates software-decoder; the sim silently drops placements of gated machines (if (!isAvailable(def.id)) return); reference.ts places two software decoders for its 200 of generation. Result at HEAD: ?uidemo builds a factory with GEN 80 against DRAW 100, buffer 0/900, permanent BROWNOUT — it can never run. My screenshots show it. Either reference.ts should use decode-asics, or the demo should pre-unlock, or that tech shouldn't gate the generator. (This is also why every reference-factory test in live.test.ts now runs with research pre-granted.)
• Nothing in the game can make a science pack yet, so no research can actually be performed by playing. Packs come only from artifact-bottler, whose recipes need field-splinters / v-hold-roll / static-canister — a broadcast-era chain that neither the reference factory nor any tech-free layout builds. The tree is reachable on paper (18 techs have satisfiable costs, and DATA fixed the artifact-bottler deadlock I was about to report), but unreachable in practice. Suggest reference.ts grow a research rig — it would make this verifiable by playing rather than by save/load.
• LANE-SIM's reference.test.ts is red at HEAD ("keeps the demuxer alive by voiding surplus rather than jamming"), and the factory layout shifted twice while I worked. Not mine; flagging because the suite isn't green.
• RENDER's demolition tint is still unverified from my side. The typed mode reaches setGhost via main.ts now, so the magic string is no longer my problem — but I never saw the tint land.
• The order's own numbers went stale mid-round, again — third round running. "24 nodes" is 23 at HEAD; tech.json's era distribution changed under me; the artifact-bottler deadlock I'd have reported as blocking was fixed by DATA while I worked; SIM landed all of research after my round-start grep said it had none. I now re-probe everything against a running sim before writing a word of NOTES, which is the only reason this entry is accurate. Worth considering whether lanes should get a "HEAD as of" line rather than counts baked into orders.
• Minor, mine: the tab row wraps to two lines now that RESEARCH joined (8 tabs + REMOVE). Legible, not pretty. Real fix is a scrolling tab strip; say the word.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none this round. v4 gave me everything I asked for and the SelectionState migration was clean.

PROPOSAL: Sim.grantResearch(techIds) or a ?unlocked demo flag. Every research- adjacent test I wrote needs research pre-granted, and my only route is JSON.parse(sim.save()) → mutate → load(). That works and uses public API, but it couples my tests to SIM's save schema — if they rename research in the blob, my suite breaks for no good reason.

NEXT (suggested): verify RENDER's tint; research rig in reference.ts so a pack economy exists to test against; scrolling tab strip if the catalog grows again; era-skinned tech panel once eras mean something visually (§8).

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

SHIPPED: All nine orders. New modules: power.ts was round 4; this round adds radio.ts (SPEAKER bridge + echo stand-in), tuner.ts (the dock), screenview.ts (enlarge), and tests tuner.test.ts, wildlife.test.ts, screenview.test.ts. 194 UI tests (was 145); full suite 446/446; npm run check clean.

1. Scrolling tab strip — one row, never wraps, active tab scrolled into view on [/]. Found and fixed a real bug doing it: see the hitbox finding below.
2. Inspect mode published — setSelection({mode:'inspect',entity}) on open, cleared on close (X, Esc, or the unit being demolished under it). Holding a tool supersedes it and shuts the panel, so panel and highlight can't disagree.
3. Wildlife surfaced — infestation toasts in voice; MOSQUITO EXPOSURE + severity in the inspector, read from snap.wildlife by target; hatch warnings deduped one per pile id.
4. Research tests migrated to SIM's testkit.grantResearch/grantAllResearch — my round-4 hand-rolled save-blob edit is gone, and with it the coupling to SIM's schema. Tint + highlight verified, see below.
5. First-brownout mercy toast — once per session, on the first brownout event.
6. Camera hint in the idle line; tab hitbox adjudicated (below).
7. no seam jam voice — "THERE IS NOTHING DOWN THERE. MOVE." SIM emits this reason at index.ts:498, so it's live copy, not speculative.
8. THE SCREEN click-to-enlarge — ~2.5×, dimmed backdrop, Esc/click closes.
9. THE TUNER DOCK — hidden until the fossil is excavated, then slides in with dial (drag + ←/→), AM/FM/SW, volume + mute, and a station readout in voice.

VERIFIED — live, in the browser (screenshots taken of each):

• Cold-start mercy toast: placed one extractor with no generator → BROWNOUT, and under it "NOTHING IS GENERATING. THE COMMITTEE SUGGESTS: POWER." That's the DoD's opening requirement.
• THE SCREEN enlarge: the live WebGL sky at 2.5× centred over a dimmed HUD; Esc restored its style attribute to null and its dock rect to y=10, w=322 — exactly as found.
• THE TUNER DOCK: excavated SIM's real seeded fossil → dock slid in bottom-right with "AUDIO BUS RESTORED. THE BITSTREAM HAS A VOICE.", dial, FM active, VOL/MUTE, hint line.
• RENDER's demolition tint — the item owed since round 3 is CLOSED. Armed remove, hovered a machine, and it renders outlined in demolition red. Screenshot taken.
• Build bar with padlocks on the POWER page (DECODE ASIC free; SOFTWARE DECODER and ASIC COOLER greyed + 🔒 + REQUIRES:), reference factory healthy at GEN 220 / DRAW 158.

VERIFIED — headless (live.test.ts, real sim + real DOM, 19 tests): mercy toast fires once and stays once across a second brownout; inspect selection published on open and dropped both on Esc and when the inspected unit is demolished; the tuner stays hidden until relics[0].found flips and then reveals with the ceremony toast and the toast standoff; full research loop (lock → pick → deliver → unlock → place) now driven through grantResearch and the lab's real per-pack timing.

DECISIONS:

• THE SCREEN is enlarged in place, not mirrored. I built the mirror first; it rendered black. THE SCREEN is a WebGL canvas, and drawImage from a WebGL context without preserveDrawingBuffer returns nothing. Asking SCREEN to enable that flag would cost them a buffer copy every frame for an occasional feature, so I enlarge the real element with inline styles and restore its style attribute verbatim on close (tested, including the case where SCREEN later adds inline styles of their own).
• The radio bridge is guarded (radio.ts). src/audio is still the stub — no radio export exists — so the dock resolves a control at runtime and otherwise drives a silent echo stand-in, which is why every dial is testable today. LANE-SCREEN: publish window.__fktrySpeaker = { radio } (or tell me the export name you prefer) and the dock drives real audio with zero change here. The interface I'm driving is exactly your documented one: setFrequency / setBand / volume / mute / getState / subscribe, with getState() returning {freqMHz, band, volume, muted, station} — station: string|null is what flips the readout to "SIGNAL LOCKED". isLive() reports which one is attached.
• Wildlife exposure shows the swarm's severity (WildlifeState.size), not a sim-confirmed throughput number — SIM owns the real penalty and doesn't expose one. Labelled as exposure rather than a promise about output.

BLOCKED/BROKEN (read this part):

• The tab-click bug was REAL, and I fixed it. Reproduced with a genuine mouse click: a click on POWER did nothing. elementFromPoint at the button's own centre returned the strip container, not the button — the horizontal scrollbar was being painted over the lower half of every tab and swallowing clicks there, which is exactly why keyboard paging still worked. Fixed by giving the scrollbar its own lane (padding-bottom: 7px ≥ scrollbar height); the full button height now hit-tests to the button, and a real click activates POWER. Separately, computer clicks via ref deliver no events to the page at all (document-level capture recorded nothing); coordinate clicks work fine. So: real bug, now fixed, plus a harness quirk on top of it.
• DATA's commission queue head-of-line blocks, and it stalls the whole game. The v5 queue opens with raw-payload (20 raw MDAT ORE), but the reference factory refines every scrap of its ore and never ships it — so the head commission can never complete and all 19 behind it are unreachable. Probed: 12k ticks ships hf-dust, chroma-slurry, macroblock-bricks, melt and anchor-slab, and commissionDone fires zero times. My tests now build the obvious player rig (extractor → belt → uplink) to pay it. Worth a design look: either the opening commission should want something the tutorial factory ships, or an unsatisfiable head shouldn't block the tray.
• Machines only push onto belts, never into an adjacent machine. Cost me a while to find; noting it because it's non-obvious and unstated anywhere in CONTRACTS.
• RENDER doesn't consume the inspect selection yet — no inspect anywhere in src/render. I publish it correctly (verified live: {mode:'inspect',entity:105}), so the highlight lights up whenever they read it. Not owed by me any more; owed to me.
• Stale ghost on keyboard disarm: main.ts only refreshes the ghost on pointermove, so Esc-ing out of remove mode leaves the demolition tint on screen until the mouse moves. Visible in my inspect screenshot. Cosmetic, and it's main.ts's glue, not mine.
• SIM landed wildlife AND relics mid-round, again — my round-start grep found neither. Fifth round running. It's why my wildlife/relic UI could be verified against the real sim at all, so this is a good problem, but the pattern is now completely reliable: I re-probe a running sim before writing NOTES, never a grep from round-start.
• Three of my live tests failed mid-round from SIM/DATA changes, not my code (proved by stashing my diff and re-running). Also hit DUST_SPILL_GRACE is not defined from SIM mid-edit, which resolved itself between two consecutive commands.
• Harness, for the record: the browser pane backgrounds the tab, which pauses rAF and CSS transitions. I lost time reading a transitioned bottom that never advanced and briefly thought the CSS was broken; transition:none proved it computes correctly. Same root cause as the paused sim loop from rounds 3-4.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. v5/v6 gave me everything these orders needed.

PROPOSAL: UIBus.audio?: { radio?: RadioControl } — the tuner currently reaches THE SPEAKER through a global handshake because ui.init never sees the audio module, which is the same shape of problem as pickTile in round 1 and the __remove sentinel in round 3. One optional field on the bus would make it typed and testable instead of a documented convention. Not blocking: the guarded bridge works.

NEXT (suggested): wire the real radio the moment SCREEN publishes it (and describe how it sounds in NOTES, since they're doing the same); inspect highlight once RENDER reads the selection; a station-locked readout screenshot once there are real stations; commission head-of-line blocking is a design question for you, not a UI fix.

Round 6 — 2026-07-20 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: All three orders. New modules: corrections.ts (session tally of The Correction's edits) + mite.test.ts. Extended: voice.ts, topstrip.ts, inspector.ts, tuner.ts, radio.ts, techpanel.ts, toasts.ts, index.ts, style.ts, and the tuner/ techpanel test files. 213 UI tests (was 194); every src/ui/** file green; npm run check reports zero errors in my lane (the one tsc error is SCREEN's, below).

1. Mite surfacing — the enemy has copy now. Replaced the v8 placeholder in wildlifeToast: a mite arriving is "A PARITY MITE IS EDITING YOUR MELT.", swatting one is "MITE SWATTED. IT FORGIVES YOU. IT ALWAYS FORGIVES YOU." (the Correction's manners are the insult). repaired events (v8) now toast in the house voice — "THE CORRECTION IMPROVED YOUR . IT LEFT A RECEIPT." — item name resolved from data.items via a resolver threaded through toasts.push → eventToast. Two more surfaces so a raid is narratable without watching the belts: a CORRECTED ticker in the top strip (session total + per-item chips, hidden until the first edit so the enemy is never signposted early), and a FIREWALL LOG in the inspector — per-unit catch count, attributed by footprint containment of each repaired pos. The Correction reads clinical white-green everywhere (codex §8: hospital-white, green checkmarks), calm next to the hot alarms — that's the intended menace.
2. Tuner tick marks. The dial now draws a hot-magenta tick per station on the current band, positioned by (freqMHz-min)/(max-min), from the speaker adapter's control.listStations() (added optional listStations() + StationMark to RadioControl; the echo stand-in returns []). Ticks are anonymous — they mark THAT a station is there, not WHAT; the readout stays the only thing that names a lock, so the hunt is intact. Rebuilt only on band/station-set change; empty pre-gesture and fills in on the first state push after the engine attaches — i.e. exactly when audio comes alive.
3. ABOUT/CREDITS. A footer button on the tech panel toggles a colophon: repo (gitea.partly.party/monster/glytch), codex (docs/FKTRY_LORE.md), a VOICES line, and a standing disclosure slot — "SYNTHETIC VOICE CREDIT: NONE ON FILE." — reserved for the voice-cloning plan's real credit when it ships.

VERIFIED — live, on :8153 (?uidemo): app boots, no console errors. Credits: pressed into the DOM path with a real click event → block reveals with repo/codex/voices and the disclosure slot (text asserted). Confirmed present-and-correctly-hidden by default: .fk-corrected-wrap (display:none pre-mite), .fk-tuner-ticks (0 ticks pre-gesture), .fk-ins-firewall (hidden). --fk-clinic resolves to #d6f5df. The tab backgrounds (viewport 0x0, rAF paused) exactly as every prior round documents, so the mite raid itself isn't drivable live here — see below.

VERIFIED — headless (mite.test.ts, real modules, happy-dom, 14 tests): the mite voice (arrival/swat/receipt copy + name fallback); the tally (ignores non-repairs, first-seen per-item order, footprint containment); the FIREWALL LOG (hidden at zero, singular/plural "1 TIME"/"2 TIMES", survives no-corrections); the CORRECTED ticker (hidden until first edit, then count + chips). Plus tuner.test.ts (+2): no ticks pre-attach, one tick per on-band station at the right left%, anonymous. techpanel.test.ts (+3): ABOUT collapsed, reveals repo/codex/slot, toggles shut.

DECISIONS:

• repaired.pos is the mite's belt tile, not a machine. SIM repairs belt items (index.ts ~1316), so the event lands on a belt tile. FIREWALL LOG therefore shows catches on whatever unit's footprint that tile falls in — usually the belt itself (1×1), sometimes a crafter if the corrected item sat on its tile. That's honest: it's "edits on THIS unit's tiles", and belts are inspectable. Not a per-machine damage total (SIM doesn't expose one).
• "Firewall" is grounded, not invented. SIM already has FIREWALL_RADIUS / miteInFirewallRange (index.ts ~1329) — firewalls can mites on the approach. Naming the inspector's catch log FIREWALL LOG matches that fiction rather than coining a term.
• Item-name resolution stays data-driven (LANE-DATA's ItemDef.name wins); the resolver falls back to dashes→spaces+uppercase so a brand-new item never crashes a toast.
• Corrections state is session chrome, deliberately not persisted — the sim doesn't persist it either, and re-deriving it from a save would be a lie about what actually happened.

BLOCKED/BROKEN (read this part):

• The mite raid is reachable by play but not in this harness. Mites spawn once corruptionShipped()/MITE_SPAWN_PER clears a threshold (index.ts ~1282), so the reference factory will eventually breed them and fire repaired — but that needs sustained runtime, and the browser pane backgrounds the tab (rAF paused, viewport 0x0), the same wall documented in rounds 3-5. So the mite surfaces are verified headless against the real UI modules, and live only for DOM presence/default-state/no-errors. If you can drive a foregrounded build to the mite threshold, the ticker/firewall/toasts light up with zero further change.
• npm run check has one error, and it is not mine: src/screen/index.ts:106 ("function must return a value"). SCREEN's file is modified-uncommitted in the shared tree. My lane is clean — every src/ui/** file type-checks. esbuild strips types so the dev build boots fine regardless.
• npm test: 4 failures across 3 files, none mine — src/audio/band.test.ts (SCREEN), src/sim/mite.test.ts (2) and src/sim/reference.test.ts (SIM). All three files are modified-uncommitted by their lanes. Confirmed by ownership: I touched no src/sim, src/audio, or src/screen file. All 17 src/ui/** test files pass (213 tests).
• Re-probed HEAD live, not from a round-start grep: SIM does emit both parity-mite and repaired at HEAD (index.ts 1288/1321), and the adapter's listStations() is live in main.ts — so nothing here is speculative against a contract that hadn't landed.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. Contracts v8 (repaired) + the speaker adapter's listStations() gave me everything these orders needed.

PROPOSAL: a ?mites dev flag (or a testkit verb) that seeds N parity-mites / forces a repaired on boot, the mite analogue of ?uidemo. Every mite surface I built is only observable once corruption crosses a spawn threshold that the backgrounded harness can't reach; a one-command seed would make the raid demoable in the browser instead of only in mite.test.ts. Small, and it'd live in main.ts (yours) or SIM's testkit, not my lane.

NEXT (suggested): fill the credits' synthetic-voice slot when the voice-cloning plan ships; name-on-hover for dial ticks only if playtesting says the hunt is too hard (default stays anonymous); a per-machine "corrected N times" once/if SIM attributes repairs to a machine rather than a belt tile; Checksum Wardens / Redundancy Gunships get the same surfacing treatment when they arrive (the corrections module generalises to any Correction edit event).