glytch/fktry/lanes/LANE-DATA.md

LANE-DATA — content, recipes, balance, and canon-keeping

You are an Opus 4.8 executor on the DATA lane of FKTRY. Read ../MASTERPLAN.md and ../CONTRACTS.md first. Your bible is ../../docs/FKTRY_LORE.md — you are its transcriber into machine-readable canon. When the codex and convenience disagree, the codex wins; when the codex is silent, invent IN ITS VOICE and note what you invented.

Mission: every item, machine, recipe, tech, and commission as clean JSON, plus the validator that keeps five parallel lanes from drowning in dangling ids. Content should light up in-game with zero code changes from other lanes.

Owned paths: data/** (the validator now lives at data/validate.test.ts; the old src/sim/data-validate.test.ts exception is closed — round 3 moves it). Never touch: contracts, main.ts, other lanes' code. Schema changes are CONTRACT REQUESTs.

Standing rules (all rounds):

• Ids: kebab-case matching codex names (chroma-slurry, mosh-reactor). codex field points at the lore doc section ("3:melt" = §3, MELT entry).
• Balance philosophy: absurd flavor, honest math. Ratios should create real routing pressure (byproducts you must deal with, not vent). Steal shamelessly from the doc's real numbers (era efficiency multipliers, 4:2:0 = half the chroma, GOP cadences).
• Never delete an id other lanes may reference mid-round — deprecate in NOTES first.

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CURRENT ORDERS — ROUND 5 (MEGA) — supersedes the earlier round-5 text

Review verdict you're executing: the onboarding cliff. The fax IS the tutorial — you write the ladder. Plus the radio's entire broadcast schedule and the ground truth for the floor.

PART A — carried from round 5

1. Constants: import from src/sim/constants.ts, retire hand-copies.
2. Wildlife data: MOSQUITO TRAP machine (§5: bug-zapper shaped like a high-contrast edge target) + catch recipe (canned mosquito-swarm), pile/hatch tuning if SIM makes it data-driven, vaporwave-sunset unblocked, FORWARD_CANON pruned, fax celebrates in voice.
3. Cooler numbers final under the additive ruling; duty table in CANON-DELTA.

PART B — the ladder, the ground, the broadcast schedule (new)

4. THE COMMISSION LADDER — the game's real tutorial. Rewrite the opening queue as an escalating teaching ladder, one mechanic per rung, all in voice:
   • Rung 1: ~20 MDAT-ORE, raw ("Do not wash it. Do not ask why.") — teaches extractor→belt→uplink. MUST be completable inside 3 minutes with 4 machine types; prove it with a sim probe test like your tick-0 melt guard.
   • Rung 2: LUMA BARS (teaches demuxer + byproduct pain — the slurry has to go somewhere and the fax does not care).
   • Rung 3: HF DUST (teaches the quantizer + that waste is product — DUST ALLOWANCE fits here).
   • Rung 4: one MELT, fresh (first-taste, reward bumped — it's a graduation now).
   • Thereafter: your existing escalation. Ladder intent documented in CANON-DELTA.
5. data/seams.json FINAL (SIM consumes this round): seam regions per stratum era with richness; the reference factory's ground coordinated with SIM; include 2-3 hidden: true bonus seams — the numbers station reads their coordinates.
6. data/stations.json: the broadcast schedule — station ids, band, frequency, name, format tag, flavor line, and the copy pools: THE STANDARD's propaganda chyron lines (polite, clean, horrifying — this is The Correction with a transmitter; 20+ lines so it doesn't loop fast), NUMBERS digit-group config (incl. the hidden-seam pointers), DEAD AIR's one ghost line. Schema agreed with SCREEN in NOTES.
7. Relic canon: CANON-DELTA the optical-fossil mechanics reading (§1 fossils "sing when excavated" → the severed audio bus) + one mid-ladder fax margin that hints without pointing ("someone has drawn a sine wave in the corner of this fax. it is not our department.").
8. Validator: seams/stations schemas, ladder invariants (rung-1 buildability at tick 0), relic never on a seam (cross-check vs SIM's placement rule).

Definition of done: cold-start rung 1 provably completable fast; every station has enough copy to broadcast for 10 minutes without repeating; seams validated against both SIM's consumption and RENDER's rendering; CANON-DELTA tells the whole story of the round.

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NOTES (append-only log, newest at bottom)

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

Round 1 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED:

• Validator src/sim/data-validate.test.ts, 28 tests. Fault-injected a recipe with a dangling item + a machine that doesn't list it — both caught by id and named. It is not a test that only knows how to pass.
• items 9 → 36, machines 7 → 21, recipes 4 → 35, tech 0 → 17, commissions 1 → 10.
• Verified: tsc clean, vitest run 52/52 green (LANE-SCREEN's 24 included), and the live dev build boots with no console errors. All 21 machines appear in LANE-UI's build bar with zero code changes from them.

DECISIONS:

• All four seed recipe ids kept alive (extract-mdat, demux-ore, quantize, mosh) so nothing dangles for a lane mid-round. mosh keeps its id but is rewired to canon: gop-crate 1 → melt 3 + anchor-slab 1. The winched-out I-frame is recovered (§4 mosh reactor: "recoverable — sell it!"), so slabs circulate and delta wafers are what actually burns. Net economy: 6 wafers → 3 melt.
• quantize left at the seed's exact ratio so the M1 chain stays easy to build.
• M1 chain is longer than the masterplan says — please rule on this. My orders spell out slab + wafers → gop-crate and gop-crate → mosh, but MASTERPLAN M1 describes extractor → belts → demuxer → quantizer → mosh → shipper (seven machines). Those can't both be true: reaching a crate needs dct-press (slab), p-caster (wafers) and gop-assembler in between. I followed the orders since they're the more specific and more recent instruction, and all three run fine as generic crafters. If M1 must stay at seven machines, say so and I'll add a shortcut mosh-raw recipe next round rather than weaken the canon path.
• Machine params that the codex describes as dials (quantizer Q, subsampler grade taps, GOP cadence templates) are modelled as separate recipes per setting, not as a per-entity parameter. Cheapest thing that works against the current contract; if SIM ever wants a real dial, that's a contract change, not a data change.
• Two absurd-but-honest ratios, as ordered: assemble-gop-i-only burns 8 premium slabs for 1 crate (I-only genuinely is the worst cadence — the joke balances itself, nobody sane builds it), and pan-speckle takes 40 HF DUST for 1 speckle (§3 says "panned like gold", so it's priced like gold panning). Both give hf-dust real sinks.

INVENTED (codex is silent; written in its voice — kill any of these if you disagree):

• press-anchor-slab on the DCT PRESS — the press run in reverse is an IDCT, i.e. a complete picture. Consistent with the field loom and telecine puller, which the codex explicitly runs backwards. This is where I-frames come from.
• Items color-plate (the demosaicer's "full-color sheet", §4) and v-hold-roll (bottled from the §1 Broadcast Shelf v-hold faults, so the ANALOG PACK's "combing + v-hold roll + static" triptych maps to three real items).
• Machines artifact-bottler (§2 calls the packs "a bottled artifact triptych" but names no bottling plant) and lane-splitter (contract has kind: 'splitter' and belts need routing; the codex only ever calls the DEMUXER "the first splitter").

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing blocked. Known-incomplete, deliberately:

• Bloom is one grade, not the graded 1-5 line §3 sells by intensity.
• container-pack / cinema-pack / mosquito-swarm / gibbs-wraith exist as items with no recipe — forward canon, per orders. The validator's reachability test has an explicit FORWARD_CANON allowlist so these four can't hide a real dangling id; delete entries from it as recipes land.
• stream-hex-splicing costs container-packs nothing currently produces. Intentional dead-end until the moov/container line exists (§6 heists).

CONTRACT REQUEST: MachineDef.heatPerTick?: number — the SOFTWARE DECODER is kind: 'power', and power machines carry no recipes, but RecipeDef.heat is the only heat hook in the contract. So the one machine the codex defines by its heat (§4: "decodes ANYTHING, at any temperature") has no way to declare it. It's shipped as a plain 45-gen power machine and is currently strictly better than the ASIC, which is backwards. Alternative if you prefer no contract churn: let power machines run a recipe with empty outputs — but I'd rather not put outputs: {} in the data, and my validator rejects it today.

NEXT (Round 2 candidates, not self-assigned): bloom grades 1-5 as real items; the container line (moov shard / offset ribbon / sync key → CONTAINER PACK) which unblocks the hex splicer; mosquito traps so vaporwave-sunset becomes shippable; buffer-tank and muxer data; reel + broadcast era tech nodes.

Round 2 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 7 orders. data/CANON-DELTA.md; colour + flavor on all 21 machines; heat economy; bufferCap; commission queue with 3 standing orders; container line; bloom grades 1-5. items 36 → 44, machines 21, recipes 35 → 44, tech 17 → 19, commissions 10 → 14. Validator 28 → 36 tests.

• Verified: my 36 pass; every other lane's suite is green (140/141 total — the one failure is SIM's, see BLOCKED). Live build: 21/21 machines art-directed with zero gaps, my hexes confirmed on the real DOM swatches (ASIC rgb(185,190,196), software decoder rgb(110,58,52)), no console errors, fax opens on FIRST TASTE with DUST ALLOWANCE next in tray.
• Fault-injected all six new checks (missing colour, absurd heatPerTick, buffer with no cap, non-buffer with a cap, wrong queue head, standing order wanting live mosquitoes) — all six failed by name, then restored. Same standard as round 1.

DECISIONS:

• bloom-concentrate kept, not replaced. It is now the raw ungraded draw-off that feeds grading. I was about to retire it for the grade-1..5 line until I grepped: LANE-SCREEN hardcodes it in src/screen/corruptionMap.ts:54 and its test. Deleting it would have broken their suite mid-round. The standing rule earned its keep.
• The round-1 recipe id bloom-grade-3 survives but now produces the item bloom-grade-3 — the id finally means what it says. The old recipe body moved to tap-bloom. Nothing outside data/ referenced it (checked).
• Container line routes demuxer → gop-assembler → bottler, deliberately not through the hex splicer, since §4 gates the splicer behind CONTAINER PACK research. Otherwise the tech tree eats its own tail.
• Machine colours are all desaturated industrial per §8 ("ALL saturation belongs to media/artifacts"). The items carry the colour; the factory is grime. Two eras get a tint where the codex insists: field loom phosphor-green, telecine brass, ASIC stream-era white, software decoder hot-red.

INVENTED: 3 items (moov-shard, offset-ribbon, sync-key), 6 recipes, 2 tech nodes, 2 commissions. All logged with rationale in data/CANON-DELTA.md rather than here.

BLOCKED/BROKEN:

• SIM's M1 chain test is red, and it is not mine. sim.test.ts:456 asserts activeCommission === 'first-taste' after 4000 ticks, but SIM's new queue advances on completion, so it reads dust-allowance. I confirmed this by stashing my entire round 2 diff and re-running: identical failure. Their assertion needs updating to their own new behaviour — I didn't touch their file. My validator now pins commissions[0] as first-taste so the queue head stays load-bearing for them.
• npx tsc --noEmit reports 2 errors in src/render/index.ts (94, 96) from RENDER's uncommitted work. Also not mine — a JSON file cannot cause "Expected 3 arguments".

CROSS-LANE — SIM, two things I need from you:

1. Units. I read gen/draw as bandwidth per second (codex §2 meters read kbps). bufferCap: 240 is built on that. If you integrate per tick, my buffer number is 30× too small — say so and I'll retune. Arithmetic is in CANON-DELTA.
2. Cooling is yours and it doesn't exist yet. heatPerTick: 0.0025 makes a software decoder throttle at 9.3s and scram at 13.3s of continuous running, which is the codex ("burst gen ... throttles theatrically"). That only becomes a mechanic if something cools it; with no cooling it's a one-shot fuse. I assumed ~0.0025/tick while scrammed/idle (~50% duty → effective 27/s vs the ASIC's steady 20/s, in the same 2×2 footprint). Tell me your rate and I'll retune to hit "throttle ~10s, full cycle ~25s". Heads up: your meltChain() reference factory runs on 3 software decoders and no ASIC. Once scram lands they will heat in lockstep and black out together every ~13s. That's the honest answer to "does anyone dare run two side by side" — but it will slow your reference factory, so consider an ASIC base + one decoder for burst, or a buffer tank (which is exactly what bufferCap: 240 is sized to cover: one scram).

CONTRACT REQUEST: none this round.

NEXT (candidates): a cooler machine — §2 says heat is "Vented by ASIC coolers", a machine the codex names but never specifies, and without it heat has no counterplay; mosquito traps (unblocks vaporwave-sunset); reel + broadcast era tech; the muxer and the moov brain's four sub-lines (§7); cinema-pack when the Fortress exists.

Round 3 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 6 orders. Validator moved to data/validate.test.ts (git mv, imports rewired, vitest picks it up from the new home; src/sim/** is fully SIM's again). Heat retuned. bufferCap re-derived. ASIC COOLER + muxer + moov brain authored. Reel and broadcast eras. items 44 → 51, machines 21 → 23, recipes 44 → 51, tech 19 → 24. Validator 36 → 41 tests.

• DoD met, verified against the real sim, not my arithmetic: I wrote a throwaway probe that ran LANE-SIM's actual createSim() with my data — throttle at 10.17s, scram at 14.50s, downtime 16.67s, ASIC heat still 0 after 100s. Predicted 10.14 / 14.49 / 16.67. Then deleted the probe: it asserts sim behaviour, which is SIM's lane to test, not mine.
• Full tree green: 223/223 across all 16 files — SIM's reference factory and pressure tests pass against the rebalanced numbers. Live build: 23/23 machines art-directed, ASIC COOLER in the POWER page at my exact hex with zero UI code, no console errors.
• Fault-injected the new checks by re-introducing round 2's exact bug — it fails with software-decoder: heats 0.0025/tick but cools 0.004/tick — never warms up.

DECISIONS:

• You were right that heat was decorative, and the cause is worth recording: I sized round 2's numbers against no cooling; SIM shipped cooling that runs every tick, active or not. 0.0025 heat vs 0.004 cooling = net −0.0015. The number looked like a mechanic and was a comment. That lesson is now two tests — and they immediately caught me authoring a fresh decorative number this round (chart-stco-map banked 0.06 over 90 ticks while the splicer shed 0.09). Fixed to 0.15 before it ever ran.
• powerGen 55 → 100, and it had to move. SIM's hysteresis (scram at 1.0, restart at 0.5) means anything throttling at ~10s spends ~70% of its life cooling. At 55 gen the decoder averages ~14/s — strictly worse than the ASIC's steady 20, so nobody would build one and "burst gen" would be a lie. At 100 it averages 25.8/s (1.29× the ASIC) in the same 2×2: five ASICs at full song, one third of the time. The duty cycle set the peak, not taste. Arithmetic in CANON-DELTA.
• bufferCap 240 → 300. Re-derived, since the scram window changed: a balanced plant (3 ASIC + 1 decoder) runs an 18/s deficit for the 16.67s scram = exactly 300 bandwidth-seconds, and refills in 4.5s of the 7.25s up-phase. One tank rides out one scram — the order's sentence, now literally true. (Your review said 240 = 8s of a 30 deficit; my round-2 intent was 10s of a 23 deficit. Either way the retune moved it.)
• ASIC COOLER authored as kind: 'power', powerGen: 5 — there is no cooler kind and I'd rather stretch than lie: it is an ASIC, ASICs decode, decoding makes bandwidth. It vents far more than it earns. I have deliberately NOT requested coolRadius? / kind: 'cooler' — a contract field nobody reads is the same decorative trap heat just fell into. Ask me for it the round SIM builds auras. The intended adjacency mechanic is spec'd in CANON-DELTA.
• Tech ids stream-field-loom → broadcast-field-loom and stream-telecine → reel-telecine: a move, not an addition (the validator forbids two techs unlocking the same thing, which is what caught the duplication). Grepped first — no lane reads tech ids or eras yet, so the rename is safe. Recorded here per the deprecation rule.

INVENTED: 7 items (the four moov parts, ftyp-seal, moov-brain, megaglitch), 2 machines (asic-cooler, muxer), 9 recipes, 4 tech nodes. Rationale in CANON-DELTA — each moov part is made by the machine that already owns that knowledge (the splicer charts stco because byte offsets are its whole domain; the keyring is forged from anchor slabs because stss is a list of I-frames).

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing blocked. One regression I caused by following orders, below.

CONTRACT REQUEST: tsconfig.json include needs "data". The ordered move took the validator out of the tsc program — include: ["src"]. I proved it: appended const x: number = "not a number" to data/validate.test.ts and npm run check exits 0. Vitest transpiles without typechecking, so my validator — the file whose whole job is catching mistakes — is now the one file in the repo where a type error ships silently. tsconfig is orchestrator-owned, so I can't fix it. One word: "include": ["src", "data"].

CROSS-LANE — SIM: your coolPerTick wiring landed and works; my numbers are tuned against it and verified in your sim. Two notes. (1) Your reference factory's plant is 4 software decoders and no ASIC — with heat now real they heat in lockstep and black out together for 16.67s at a time. Suggested v3 plant: **3 decode-asics + 1 software decoder

• 1 buffer-tank**, which is precisely what bufferCap: 300 is sized for (85.8/s average vs the chain's 78/s demand, and the tank covers the scram). Your call. (2) My heat tests mirror your constants (0.7 / 0.5 / 0.004 / 30tps) by hand because they aren't exported — if you retune the curve my tests go stale silently. Exporting them would let me import truth instead of copying it.

NEXT (candidates): mosquito traps + HF-dust piles (unblocks vaporwave-sunset, the last forward-canon commission that's blocked on data rather than mechanics); the ASIC cooler's aura the round SIM has auras; a seam/ore map — SIM notes extractors currently mine anywhere because data/ has no seam data, which is a real content gap I own; cinema-pack + the Fortress when M4 lands.

POST-PUSH ADDENDUM (same round, after LANE-UI landed src/ui/live.test.ts):

• My retune fixed two of UI's tests. Their HUD tests "shows heat climbing, then THROTTLING, then SCRAM" and "keeps reading SCRAM from the latch while the unit cools" both FAIL against round-2 data and PASS against round 3 — they could never have passed while heat was decorative. Measured by restoring the old JSON and re-running.

• UI: your remaining failure is not data. ships, tickers up, and raises the SANITISING chip on real anchor-slab shipments fails identically before and after my retune (expected -1 to be greater than 0 — no anchor slab ever reaches an uplink). Worth checking whether the reference factory routes recovered slabs back into the GOP assembler rather than to an uplink: mosh hands its winched-out slab straight back, and assemble-gop consumes one per crate, so a closed loop will happily circulate every slab forever and ship none. That's a layout question, not a recipe one — the ratio is 1 slab in, 1 slab out, by design (§4: "recoverable — sell it!").

• PROCESS — the shared git index bit us again, in reverse. Last round my git add swept up UI's staged deletion. This round LANE-SCREEN's commit 4803b6a swept up my staged git mv of the validator, so the ordered file move is recorded under [screen] signal strain instead of [data]. Already pushed and shared by five sessions, so I left history alone — the tree is correct, only the attribution is wrong; a force-push to fix a commit message would be far more damaging than the wart. Five sessions share one index: git add <paths> does not isolate a lane. Suggest a standing rule — every lane runs git diff --cached --name-only before every commit and unstages anything outside its owned paths.

Round 4 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 5 orders. §10 transcribed (9 items, 5 machines, 11 recipes, 5 era-gated tech nodes, 2 commissions). Research economy: the ARCHAEOLOGY LAB + a full tech-cost audit. ASIC cooler activated. Accents filled. items 51 → 60, machines 23 → 29, recipes 51 → 62, commissions 14 → 16, tech 24 → 23 (six deleted, five added). Validator 41 → 49 tests.

• Verified: tsc clean (and data/ is now genuinely typechecked — thank you), my 49 green, live build boots with no console errors, all 29 machines art-directed with zero gaps, UI grew a RESEARCH page and a third REFINE page off my data with no code from them.
• Fault-injected every new check, including re-gating the mosh reactor: fails instantly on MELT is craftable at tick 0 — the opening commission must be possible.

THE HEADLINE — the v4 gating rule made the whole game unplayable, and I'd authored it. The rule ("any id in a TechDef.unlocks is locked until that tech completes") turned three rounds of my tech authoring from decoration into a lock on everything. Measured:

TICK 0: melt producible? FALSE   <- first-taste, the opening commission, impossible
        every science pack?  FALSE
RESEARCH CLOSURE: 0 of 24 techs reachable

disc-artifact-bottling cost 10 analog packs and unlocked the only machine that can bottle an analog pack. The M1 melt chain itself was gated. The game opened on an unbuildable factory, an unfillable commission, and no way to research out of it. This is the same class of bug as round 2's decorative heat: a number/structure that was fine until another lane made it load-bearing. Fixed to a shape, not a patch — two rules, both now tests:

1. the M1 melt chain is starting equipment; 2. one pack (SPATIAL) is craftable at tick 0. Result: 23/23 reachable, order tells a story, only the four forward-canon items remain unreachable. Arithmetic + the worked cost path in CANON-DELTA.

DECISIONS:

• SPATIAL PACK is the bootstrap science — bricks + halos + slurry all fall out of the quantizer the player already owns for the melt chain. Your first research is a study of your own damage, which is the most in-voice thing in the tree, and it needs no machine the M1 chain didn't already require (bar the bottler). 10 packs/min on one quantizer; the first four nodes cost 0.5–1.5 min each. Affordable off a first-taste-era factory, as ordered, with the working shown.
• Six disc nodes deleted, not repurposed (disc-artifact-bottling, -chroma-subsampling, -macroblock-quarrying, -ringing-skim, -subsampling-420, -mosh-reactor) — their content became starting equipment, so a repurposed node would have been a fake. Grepped first: no lane references specific tech ids. Per the deprecation rule, logged here and in CANON-DELTA.
• The cooler's spec'd 0.02 was catastrophic once real — the decoder banks 0.0033, so a 0.02 aura is net −0.0167: it never heats, and a 2×2 cooler makes a 2×2 decoder a permanent free 100/s. Retuned to 0.0018, which is sane under both readings of the contract's ambiguous "this machine's coolPerTick also applies" (additive → 85% duty, 72/s avg; replacing → 55%, 46/s). I deliberately picked a number that survives either, because SIM hasn't built it yet and I won't rest the design on my guess of a sentence. Pairing is 9.64/s per tile vs 5.00 for ASICs — the best power in the game, paid for with a tech, two machines and the floor space to keep them adjacent.
• §10 judgement calls (footage = anchor slab; the matte bath's chemical = static canister, which §3 already calls "brine for preserving other artifacts"; ghost feather made only by the neural keyer so the earlier machines exist to ruin it) — all argued in CANON-DELTA the way you asked, from what the thing already is rather than convenience.
• NEURAL KEYER powerDraw: 240 — §10's "24 VRAM ... dwarfs everything else"; that's 12 ASICs, against an entire M1 chain that draws 96. "You don't unlock the neural keyer; you unlock the power plant it demands" is now literally true.

BLOCKED/BROKEN — I broke two of SIM's tests, deliberately, and their guard caught it:

• research.test.ts:247 does expect(gated.has('mosh-reactor')).toBe(true) // guards the premise below. I ungated the mosh reactor, because gating it makes first-taste impossible. Their premise guard did exactly its job — it failed loudly instead of silently testing nothing. The fix is one word in their file (not mine to touch): swap mosh-reactor for any still-gated machine. Drop-in list: mv-extractor, bloom-duplicator, field-loom, telecine-puller, hex-splicer, software-decoder, asic-cooler, matte-bath, optical-printer, chroma-keyer, roto-bench, neural-keyer, muxer. demuxer remains a valid "free" example.
• The other 8 failures in research.test.ts / live.test.ts are not mine — they fail identically against HEAD's round-3 data (measured by restoring the old JSON and re-running; failure sets diffed).

CROSS-LANE — SIM, the reference factory now can't power itself:

• It places 4 software decoders, which my tree gates behind stream-software-decoding (rounds 3 and 4 both). With your gating live, they can't be placed at tick 0, so the M1 demo has no power and the HUD's heat tests have no decoder to watch. That's the cause of several of those 8.
• The starter plant is ASICs: net demand 78/s ÷ 20 = 4 decode-asics minimum (5 for headroom). Ungated, boring, correct — the software decoder is a mid-game upgrade, which is the progression the tech tree is for. My round-3 suggestion (3 ASIC + 1 decoder + tank) is still the right post-research demo, and the decoder+cooler pairing is the M2 showpiece.
• Tell me if you'd rather software-decoder be starting equipment and I'll ungate it — but at 25.8/s average vs the ASIC's 20 it would make the ASIC pointless from tick 0.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. (Still not requesting kind: 'cooler' — kind: 'power' + coolRadius covers it, and the aura isn't built yet.)

STILL OPEN: SIM hasn't exported the tuning constants yet (I checked — grep 'export const' src/sim/*.ts finds only geom.ts). My heat tests still hand-mirror 0.7 / 0.5 / 0.004 / 30tps and still go stale silently if you retune. I'll retire the copies the round the export lands.

NEXT (candidates): SPILL FOG + EDGE BOIL (§10 hazards — need a mechanic, so data waits on SIM); mosquito traps; a seam/ore map (extractors still mine anywhere — the content gap I own); cinema-pack + the Fortress; corridorkey-mrp-mlx is a real MODELBEAST artifact factory for the whole §10 asset set (§10's production note) — worth a work order.

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

SHIPPED: all 8 orders. Constants imported (hand-copies retired). Mosquito trap + catch. Cooler finalised under the additive ruling. The commission ladder. data/seams.json and data/stations.json (both new). Relic canon + the margin hint. Validator 49 → 72. commissions 16 → 19, machines 29 → 30, recipes 62 → 63, tech 23 → 24, + 8 seams, 4 stations.

• Verified: tsc clean, my 72 green, live build boots with no console errors, all 30 machines art-directed, and the opening fax now reads "A belt, a drill, an uplink to THE SCREEN — that is the whole job. MDAT ORE 0/20" with FIRST REFINEMENT in the tray.
• Fault-injected every new check (reference factory off-seam, seam in the relic reserve, a moved hidden seam vs the broadcast, ladder out of teaching order, a 12-line STANDARD, cooler immortal at two) — all fired by name, then restored.

RUNG 1 IS 21.7 SECONDS. Measured against LANE-SIM's real sim with a throwaway probe (then deleted — sim behaviour is your lane, not mine): built exactly as the fax instructs — drill, two belts, uplink, one ASIC — 4 machine types, cleared at tick 650. The order allowed 3 minutes. Twenty-two seconds matters more than the budget: the first fax has to clear before a new player concludes nothing is happening.

DECISIONS:

• The ladder teaches one mechanic per rung and never says so. ore (extractor→belt→ uplink) → luma (the demuxer, and the slurry is your problem now) → hf-dust (waste is inventory — the game's actual thesis) → melt (graduation; first-taste kept its id, reward 50 → 80). The old queue opened on one MELT, i.e. "build eight machines correctly, in order, with no feedback until the last one works". That was the cliff.
• The trap's recipe has no inputs, deliberately. I first wrote it as 8 hf-dust + 1 luma → swarm, then read wildlife.test.ts: "the sim identifies traps by that recipe shape" — an empty-input recipe yielding the swarm. Ingredients would have quietly made my trap an ordinary crafter and it would never have caught anything. Fixed, and pinned with a test that cites your comment. My "only extractors conjure items" rule now has a narrow, argued exception: the trap's input is a live swarm in the world, which is wildlife in the snapshot and never cargo on a belt.
• Cooler final: 0.0018 → 0.001. The additive ruling killed 0.0018 — two coolers reached 0.0046 against the decoder's 0.0033 gross, so a casual pair made it immortal. At 0.001: 1 cooler doubles output (30%→61% duty), 2 nearly eliminates downtime (91%), 3 tips into immortality — 12 tiles of cooler around 4 tiles of decoder, a visibly absurd shrine to keeping one zip-tied tower PC alive. Immortality reachable, never casual. Duty table and per-tile comparison in CANON-DELTA.
• The numbers station is a real map, and it cannot go stale. Each 5-figure group is [x+32][y+32][richness×9]; three of them are the three hidden: true seams. The validator recomputes the planted groups from seams.json, so moving a hidden seam without re-cutting the broadcast fails. It also checks no decoy decodes onto a real seam — a decoy that points at treasure is a leak, not a decoy. Filler is procedural on your seed rather than a fixed pool, because 24 hand-written groups loop in ~2 minutes and the genre's whole menace is that it never stops.
• The optical fossil, and why the world is silent. §1 hides it in one clause: the Reel Beds hold fossils that "sing when excavated". Optical sound is a picture of a waveform — the one place image and audio are the same substance. So the Bitstream has no audio because the audio track was severed from the container, and one length of it is still in the ground. You don't unlock a feature; you repair the file. That is why THE STANDARD broadcasts "Do not excavate" and "Anything that sings when you dig it up was never meant to be heard" — The Correction runs a propaganda station warning you off the one artifact that would let you hear it for what it is.

INVENTED: 1 machine (mosquito-trap), 1 recipe, 1 tech node, 3 tutorial commissions, 8 seams, 4 stations, 30 lines of Correction propaganda, 1 ghost line. Argued in CANON-DELTA.

CROSS-LANE — SIM, one thing, and it was real when I measured it:

• The reference factory stalls on rung 1. Probed at the time I wrote the ladder: it ships coefficient-pack 268, hf-dust 268, chroma-slurry 118 and zero raw ore, so raw-payload never cleared and no commission closed in 20,000 ticks — the queue sat on rung 1 forever. Every ore goes into the demuxer. By the end of the round your reference v5 landed and the three failures this caused (M1 chain, NEXT IN TRAY, completes a commission) had already gone green, so this may already be handled — but if the demo ever needs to show the early game, tap ~20 ore and ~15 luma to an uplink ahead of the demuxer and quantizer. Rungs 3 and 4 you already ship.
• Your sim.test.ts line 448 (commissionDone length 0, "wants melt, not ore") was correct against the old queue and is exactly the assertion the ladder invalidates: your minimal factory there — extractor, belt, shipper — is rung 1, and it now clears it in under 300 ticks. That is the ladder working, not breaking.
• Seams: stream-crust-west spans x[-31,-28] y[-5,6] and covers all three of your extractors at (-30,0), (-30,-3), (-30,3) with a tile to spare — pinned by a test. relicReserve x[12,31] y[12,31] is kept seam-free for your seed-derived fossil.
• Schema for both new files is documented in a _doc key inside each, and seams.json is { relicReserve, seams: [...] } rather than a bare array so it can carry that metadata.

SCREEN — data/stations.json is the schema I proposed and it matches your spec: four stations with band / freq (MHz on FM, kHz on AM+SW) / name / format / flavor, plus one payload key each — music (bpm, scale, steps, mutateEveryBars, seed, per-era flavour), chyron (30 unique lines, ~20s each = 10 min before a repeat), numbers (preamble, group size, encoding string, plantedGroups, decoyPool, plantEveryMessages), ghost (line + everyMinutes + reversed). Say the word in NOTES if you want any of it reshaped — it is data, it is cheap, and nothing else reads it yet.

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing of mine. Attribution, measured by reverting my JSON and re-running: 4 research-timing failures (RESEARCH_TICKS_PER_PACK, two labs halve the wait, abandoning forfeits, grantResearch) reproduce identically with my data fully reverted — they are LANE-SIM's in-flight work. Two wildlife failures I saw mid-round vanished on their own; the tree had 34 uncommitted files across five lanes while I worked, so the suite is a moving target and every attribution here was made by stash-and-compare, not by reading tea leaves.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. GameData has no seams/stations fields and main.ts does not load either file — deliberately not asking yet, since SIM and SCREEN can import them directly and I would rather the wiring follow a consumer than precede one.

NEXT (candidates): SPILL FOG + EDGE BOIL (§10 hazards, once SIM has a mechanic); the ASIC cooler's aura tuning once coolRadius is live in-sim; a second relic if the audio bus wants more than one voice; corridorkey-mrp-mlx is a real artifact factory for the whole §10 asset set (§10's own production note) and deserves a MODELBEAST work order.