A particulate spread. The jelly is ordinary rheology; the rind is discrete
solids that ride the knife and drop off per unit of stroke DISTANCE, not per
second — a dabbing knife makes a pile, a moving knife lays a trail, and since
the shed rate scales with what's left on the blade, one dip cannot cover the
slice. Even rind takes several dips placed with intent. Scraping picks bits
back up (60% survive the blade), so a clump can be argued with.
The judge scores the scatter with the Clark–Evans nearest-neighbour index over
the bread's own area, and quotes it: R near 0 is one clump, 1 is random, above
1 is deliberate. Verified end to end on day 8:
dab in a corner 8 bits "one clump (R 0.24)" drags grade to B
three placed dips 24 bits "evenly strewn (R 1.17)" A, 8.9/10
First cut shed per-second; even careful strokes dumped the whole load in the
first half-second and scored "clumped (R 0.50)". Distance-based shedding is
what makes evenness the reward for technique rather than luck.
Rind renders as instanced chunks parented to the slice mesh, so it rides the
pop, the landing, and the pedestal turn. Points, not a field: the judge wants
nearest-neighbour statistics, and those want points.
Same sRGB trap as M3, new spot: the instanced material's colour was passed as
raw floats, which the renderer reads as linear — candied orange rendered as
pale butter. setRGB(..., SRGBColorSpace).
New content: day 8 handwritten (Deidre wants a piece in every bite), marmalade
in the procedural pool, five rind-district lines for the judge, and a marmalade
jar GLB generated on-device like everything else, with a plain-glass fallback
while it loads.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Knife angle (wheel) is the only input, and spread/scrape/gouge all fall out of it.
Verified by driving real input through the real code paths:
cold toast + fridge butter -> damage 0.015, spread 0.029 (tears, as designed)
fresh warm toast -> damage 0, spread 0.117 (flows cleanly)
burnt toast, knife on edge -> char 99.9% -> 82.7% -> 54.5%
evenness 0.029 -> 0.123 -> 0.226
pale toast, knife on edge -> gouges; steak knife gouges 3.2x harder
That evenness column is the mechanic: scraping rescues you from char and wrecks
uniformity doing it. The judge will have opinions.
The trap is calibrated, not hoped for. Pressure comes from steepness, but past
SCRAPE_ANGLE the knife stops spreading:
fridge butter / cold toast yield 0.72 needs angle 0.75 IMPOSSIBLE
bench butter / cold toast yield 0.54 needs angle 0.57 (cliff at 0.62)
fridge butter / fresh toast yield 0.36 needs angle 0.38 fine
soft butter / fresh toast yield 0.16 needs angle 0.12 dream mode
So cold toast + hard butter cannot be spread at any angle, and the way out isn't
technique — it's not dawdling. The pressure gauge draws both marks so you can
see the gold sitting past the red and understand why you're losing.
Emergent and kept: a steak knife's narrow blade concentrates pressure enough to
beat cold butter's yield. It's the right tool for cold butter and a menace
everywhere else.
- cutlery.ts: 9 hand-authored archetypes (silhouettes are gameplay — the drawer
has to be fair) + compound box colliders for M4.
- dev.ts: harness that drives real gestures deterministically. Earns its keep.
Two bugs: cutlery meshes used mesh.rotation.x = -PI/2, which sends a profile
drawn toward +y to -z and one drawn toward -y to +z — the handle and blade were
laid out in opposite directions, overlapping, nowhere near the cursor. Now
rotated at the geometry level. And resize() computed aspect = 0/0 = NaN when the
container reports zero, which poisons the projection matrix so every raycast
silently misses — i.e. the entire mechanic stops with no error.
Metals need something to reflect: added a RoomEnvironment IBL and rebalanced the
direct rig, which was tuned before it existed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playable: pick a bread, set the dial, drop the lever, watch it brown, pop it
onto the plate. No timer readout — you go by smell.
- toasting.ts: heat map from real toaster behaviour (element stripes, cool top
edge where the slice stands proud of the slot, edge falloff, per-run noise
bias). Moisture must boil off before the crust browns at full rate, so
sourdough stalls then catches up; sugar browns and burns early.
Rate is measured against the heat map's actual ~0.77 mean, not guessed:
power 6 -> golden 0.511 at 10s, verified in-browser.
- Props on a real scale (1 unit ~ 11cm, one slice wide) — the toaster is
meant to dwarf the bread.
- The pop solves a genuine ballistic arc from slot to plate.
Three bugs found by driving it rather than trusting the compile:
- valueNoise2D read one past its grid at x=w-1, so heatBias was NaN along an
edge, which poisoned mean browning to NaN — i.e. every judge score would
have been NaN. Clamped.
- erode() clamped at the field border, so border texels could never erode out
of the mask and kept those NaNs in scope. Off-grid now counts as outside.
- Timer.connect(document) zeroes dt whenever document.hidden is true, which
froze the sim solid in an embedded browser. Dropped; rAF already pauses for
hidden tabs. App.step(dt) is now exposed so the game can be driven
deterministically for verification.
Also: screen shake was mutating the camera permanently instead of offsetting
it per-render, and the plate's lathe profile touched the axis (degenerate
triangles -> starburst normals) — rebuilt from primitives.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The bread slice is the whole game's canvas, so it's built first and properly:
- Field: a 128x128 scalar field with bilinear sample, a mass-conserving brush,
self-levelling relax, and the masked statistics the judge will read.
- Slice: extruded loaf silhouette (domed top), planar-projected UVs so the sim
grid lines up with the bread, per-texel silhouette mask, and four fields
(browning/dryness/spread/damage) packed into one RGBA8 texture per frame.
- Custom shader: browning ramp with blotchy char, crumb/crust/inclusions,
spread wetting + opacity + thickness relief, gloss, gouge exposure, and
flat data views for the judge screen.
- bread.ts / spreads.ts: the archetypes and the rheology the difficulty
curve will live in.
- scripts/gen-assets.sh: reproducible fixed-seed asset generation through
MODELBEAST (flux_local -> bg_remove_local -> hunyuan3d_mlx). All on-device.
Legibility work that mattered: butter rendered invisible at first. Fixes were
a gamma-style wetting darkening (a multiply *brightens* pale crumb), a normal
perturbation taken in UV units rather than raw texel deltas (~30x too small),
and pulling the lighting back under 1.0 so ACES stops desaturating yellow to
cream.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
