The arena ran ten seconds at 116 atoms and formed exactly ZERO bonds.
Valence, the twelve elements, the open sockets and the bond wrestle —
the best idea in the codebase — were all decorative, because building
something had no effect on anything.
A radical now abstracts from an OPEN VALENCE SLOT, so an atom with every
slot spoken for is a wall the wound cannot cross. Bonded H2 is the
cheapest firebreak in the game; a lone carbon with four open sockets is
the best kindling. Three things had to follow:
- The wall must be breakable or one good build wins forever. A blast
snaps a bond and both halves come away radical; Q breaks every bond in
radius with 40% going homolytic, so it is finally the igniter the
design doc describes rather than a free crowbar.
- Walling a radical in kills it in 3.8s and credits you. That is the
payoff for building, and the only way to kill the LAST radical, since
clearing needs zero live and terminating needs a pair.
- Two starve timers, far apart. Starving anything with no prey deleted
the meltdown outright: at 34 atoms over 1280x720 the mean spacing is
~130px against a 70px reach, so nearly every radical is momentarily
alone. Boxed-in is 3.8s, merely adrift is 11s.
Legibility. Radicals wore element colour — the one enemy arrived in
twelve of them and at 30 on screen you could not tell threat from fuel.
They now draw as a dark hole with a white rim. Molly drew BEFORE the
radicals and was buried under thirty additive white glows; she draws
last, over the fire, with a hard dark ring that more white cannot wash
out. Bonded groups render as one silhouette, teal when sealed.
The field grid. The flat lattice is now displaced by the Coulomb field
the sim already computes. 0.41ms/frame at worst case.
The score is the player's. CHAIN counted radical hops, so the one big
number on screen went up only while you were losing. It counts
terminations now, with a streak that stacks and lapses.
Neon was defined but never spawned. Now that saturation stops fire, a
zero-slot atom is a free firebreak — drawn from the spice table the
densest arena rolled 3 to 9 of them, and at 9 it stopped melting down at
all. Fixed per-arena counts; all 8 seeds now melt in 17-32s.
Also: prod-safe module loading (the absolute /v<ts>/ prefix fell through
nginx to the lander's index.html and was served as text/html, a silent
dead title screen), an opt-in F frame-time readout, a deploy script, and
removal of a full O(n^2) scan that ran every frame to angle some 3px
rings.
29 new tests in test/firebreak.test.mjs; 68 passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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