Completes the set. These two matter most of the five because they are the most COMMON enemies in
the game — the seeker is pepsin, eosinophil and neutrophil across four levels, and the turret is
every candida bloom and Peyer's patch.
seeker -> amoeboid immune cell, rounded body with blunt pseudopod lobes. 3194 tris, replaces a
6-sided cone.
turret -> candida plaque colony, a lumpy dome of fused budding yeast. 3894 tris, replaces a
7-sided cylinder.
Both took two MODELBEAST runs: the farm 401'd then 429'd the guest token twice under load, which
is a rate limit rather than a content failure, and the script being resumable meant the retry
only paid for what was missing.
A judgement call worth recording: the seeker's bbox aspect is 1.16, near-round, which for the
phage was the signature of a FAILED reconstruction. Here it is correct — an amoeboid cell is
round, and the detail is in the lobes rather than the silhouette. The cost is that a charging
seeker no longer has the cone's "pointy end = coming at you" read. The fiction wins: pepsin and
eosinophils are cells, not missiles, and the thing is 1 unit across at 19 u/s, so its threat is
read from motion and colour long before shape.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtest ask: "more detailed looking enemies... we have local trellis-2 and hunyuan, we can make
actual shaped pathogens". Two landed, keyed by ARCHETYPE so one mesh skins every instance of
that behaviour with no code change:
latcher -> Giardia trophozoite: teardrop body, broad front, ventral suction disc. 2232 tris.
Replaces a tetrahedron, and it is the one that matters most — a latcher ATTACHES
to your hull, so it is the only enemy the player ever sees close up.
driller -> H. pylori: thick corkscrew rod. 3231 tris. Replaces a cone.
Both prompts deliberately ask for BODIES and no flagella: the phage taught us image->3D webs
thin appendages into a lump, and at flat-emissive gameplay scale only the silhouette ships.
It worked — bbox aspect 3.80 (teardrop) and 2.12 (rod) against the phage's near-cubic 1.27:1.41:
0.94 failure, so these are genuinely shaped rather than blobs.
THE PIPELINE FIX that made them usable, worth recording: collapse-decimate FLOORS OUT on Trellis
output. Asking for 2500 tris gave 15871 and iterating moved it not at all; welding first made it
worse (12042 -> 78663); triangulating changed nothing. The answer is VOXEL REMESH first — it
rebuilds the surface as clean manifold topology, which is the right tool for a blobby organic and
finally gives decimate something it can collapse. 15439 -> 2232 and 78663 -> 3231, shapes intact,
4.4MB -> 91KB. Any future pathogen goes through the same path.
Not landed: seeker and turret. MODELBEAST returned 401 then 429 on both across two runs — the
guest token's active-job cap, not a content failure. The script is resumable; they need a quieter
window on the farm.
Honest limit, so nobody expects more than this delivers: at gameplay distance under flat emissive
these read mostly as silhouette, so the gain over the old primitives is real but modest. The place
it should actually show is a Giardia clamped to the hull. If we want enemies to read as DETAILED
rather than merely better-shaped, the lever is the rendering (a matcap or rim treatment on
entities), not more geometry — that is an ART_BIBLE decision, not a pipeline one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
spore_pod (the Candida foe) now renders a real 3D mesh instead of an icosahedron:
flux_local "budding yeast colony clump, fused knobbly spheres" -> bg_remove -> trellis_mac
-> Blender decimate 197k->3019 tris + strip materials (entities are flat emissive, only the
silhouette matters) -> web/assets/models/spore_pod.glb (213KB, texture-free).
First real GLB through the loader wired in 0ac11ae: verified in-engine — loaded, merged,
normalized to a unit bounding sphere (r=1.0000), 6056 verts, scaled to the archetype radius,
rendering emissive amber. assets.get('models','spore_pod').geometry lights up the hook.
flora stays a procedural CapsuleGeometry on purpose: its concept IS a smooth rod, so a
5.7k-tri capsule GLB would be pure download for zero visual gain. The pipeline is for shapes
a primitive can't fake — which is exactly the yeast cluster.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
