Twenty-two assets off the Cloudflare FLUX lane (scripts/gen-art-batch.sh
— idempotent, fixed seed per character, ~5s each, barely a dent in the
10k daily neurons):
- Thirteen regulars on their tickets, clipped into the corner like a
loyalty card photo: Deidre's floral cardigan, Ray's flat cap, the
child on tiptoes with a fistful of coins, the bloke from two doors
down in his dressing gown, the delivery mid-yawn at 6am, the lunch
rush as three impatient torsos, the pavlova order in her pearls. The
inspector's ticket uses his own portrait; a name with no face made
simply shows no frame (onerror removes it).
- THE MOTHER's jar rendered in all three states on the title button:
bubbling over the rim, sulking under grey liquor, and dead with a
tiny white surrender flag planted in the crust.
- Six dish heroes on the scorecard beside the ask: the skewers, the
pan, the sliced rib eye, the whites bowl, the poached egg mid-drip,
the benedict.
Verified live: pavlova portrait on day 20's ticket, benedict table on
21's, jar_sulking at gap 3, hero_eggs on the eggs scorecard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
After five days survived, a jar appears on the title shelf. She wants
feeding — one click — every new day you reach, and the stamps are maxDay
based so replaying old days for the S never starves her. Fed within a
day, toaster-days earn +0.2 and the line 'The starter is lively — the
crumb held. (She did that, not you.)'. Three days forgotten and the jar
sulks, and the crumb knows. Five and she goes still: the button becomes
a funeral, and one click begins THE MOTHER (second of her name) — she
forgives, mostly. The deaths counter never resets. Station days (grill,
pan, cold, steak, eggs, poach) are honestly out of her reach.
Also hardened loadSave against non-finite numbers: NaN and Infinity
stringify to null, and one bad number was enough to rot every derived
stat downstream. Every numeric field now refuses them on the way in.
Verified live: jar born fed at maxDay, starved to a funeral, resurrected
as second-of-her-name (deaths=1 persisted), lively bonus fired on a
bruschetta (9.6 -> 9.8 with the line), sulk line at gap 3, save numbers
intact after the full arc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A touch strip for devices with no wheel and no keyboard — which is most
of the phones the SHARE links land on. Each button IS its key: pointer
down dispatches the real keydown, pointer up the real keyup, so the
holds (crack charge, spoon drain) behave exactly like the physical key,
and the heat arrows synthesise real wheel ticks at the canvas. Drags
already worked — the input layer was pointer-events from birth.
Only appears on touch devices (desktop cooks keep a clean bench; __tp()
summons it for the curious), hides while the title is up, and the small-
screen pass folds the rest: the title stacks and stops overflowing, the
ledger fits, the judge's eye steps up out of the strip's way.
Verified at 375x812: no horizontal scroll, buttons drive the real input
path (heat arrows walked the poach knob 0 to 7 through the button
handlers), pad hidden at title / shown in service, day-21 pot playable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Days 10, 20, 30... he seats himself. The ticket warns you in red, the
scorecard portrait drains to grayscale, and the scoring changes shape:
the worst row on the card counts DOUBLE. Perfection survives him
untouched (doubling the worst weight of a flawless run moves nothing) —
anything less gets leaned on, exactly where it hurts. His lines are his
own: an S gets 'I came to write a takedown. I cannot. This is the worse
outcome — for me.'; an A learns that 'competent' has never once appeared
in a good review; a failure gets mercy in print, which is worse.
The Daily is exempt (same deal for everyone means the same judge), and
demonstrations reset the flag — he doesn't review his own cooking.
Verified live on day 20: banner up, grayscale portrait, critic line on
the card, day 21 clean; flawless eggs still 10.0 by construction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Once you have pulled a single S, the title offers THE INSPECTOR'S SHADOW:
arm it and the kitchen's words go dark for the whole run — no state
words, no wobble words, no browning gauge. The ticket still asks and the
controls hint survives, but the read is the face in the corner, the
sound of the pan, and the food itself. Every diegetic channel we built
was practice for playing without the subtitles.
Take an S with the words off and the ledger chip earns a star (S★), the
save remembers it (shadowed, per day, survives loadSave's corruption
filter — which was quietly dropping unknown fields; fixed), and he gives
you the only compliment he has: 'In the silence, too. I have nothing
left to teach you. ★'
Verified live: toggle arms, body.shadow hides the words (computed
visibility checked), S-in-silence writes shadowed.day20, star renders on
the chip after reload.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1) Station-mix procedural days: past day 19 the kitchen deals from every
station it taught — toast ~34%, then prep cuts (technique onion dice past
21), juice (better reamers + more pips later), the grill (4 pieces past
24), the pan (electric arrives 22, induction 26), the rib eye (random
grain, electric past 23), and the fridge delivery. Each with its own
ticket voice. Deals are seeded BY DAY: a reload re-deals the identical
order (no reroll-scumming) and the harness can reproduce any day.
2) THE LEDGER on the title: one chip per reached day with your best grade
stamped on it (S green through F red), click to replay. save.maxDay
tracks furthest-ever progress so replaying day 5 for the S never locks
day 19 away; old saves migrate (maxDay defaults to day).
Verified live: 26-day sweep deals all 7 stations, deterministic re-deals;
chip click starts day 5; procedural day-26 steak (electric fuel ramp)
played end-to-end: rested, cut across a random grain, 9.1/10.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The drawer's info card lives in a .drawer-panel that's inset:0 full-bleed
with pointer-events:none — but the base rule '#ui > *' re-enables
pointer-events:auto and its ID specificity (1,0,0) beats the class's
(0,1,0), so the invisible sheet covered the canvas and ate every drag.
The kitchen panel is a small positioned card so it never covered
anything; the drawer is the first full-bleed canvas-drag scene, which is
why it surfaced here. Scoped the container's rule to '#ui > .drawer-panel'
so it wins the specificity war and clicks reach the 3D pieces.
Verified: real DOM pointerdown now reaches the canvas, a piece grabs on
press and lifts (y 0.4). Harness never caught it — it injects input
directly, bypassing DOM pointer-events entirely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Code-complete and verified headless; NOT wired into a day yet (see brief §0.5).
The core, all reusing the M0-M10 bones:
- sim/ingredients.ts: the cast (tomato/orange/onion/garlic/parmesan/brie/
cucumber/avocado/roast_tomato) with shape, skin slip, flesh moisture+layers,
seeds, sting, temperature needs, gratability.
- sim/cutting.ts: CutSession = ingredient + knife + pattern (halve/slices/
wedges/dice), generalizing the M10 slicing sim. New physics: slip (press a
flat blade on slippery skin and it skates, the aim jumps, juice sprays) and
juice (moisture x speed, so deliberate leaks and frantic hoses).
- sim/mess.ts: the bench is judged. Field over the board UV + a solids list;
the wipe is the butter brush in reverse and mass-conserving, so one pass
smears and the second cleans.
- scenes/prep.ts: aim/bite/saw, deepening seams, pieces fan out, juice stain
texture, instanced solids, live 'bench: clean/smeared/a crime scene'.
- judging.ts: The Pieces (CV, w1.3) + The Bench (w0.9); clarkEvans extracted
for M15's toppings; criteria grouped by station and the card grouped with it.
- lines.ts: 8 lines each, in his voice.
Measured, not asserted:
- Even deliberate slices -> CV ~0, bench mass 0.51.
- Sloppy + frantic (0.3 u/frame) -> CV 0.72, mass 18.8, 16 solids, 'a crime scene'.
- Dinner knife pressed on a tomato without sawing -> skates, aim jumps 0 -> 0.12.
The Best Thing under the same press bites in 7 frames, 0 slips.
- Wipe two passes -> mass 0.51 -> 0.09.
Tuning found by playing: slice CV runs over piece WIDTHS not volumes (round
ingredients make end slices thin by geometry — a perfect cut scored 0.40, which
is a geometry lesson, not a skill test); juice coefficient 0.5 -> 0.1 (the first
tomato flooded the board before the second cut).
Assets: gen_3d retries once per stage, bakery seeds bumped, prep cast queued.
2D landed (bruschetta_hero, wonderslice_bag). 3D is BLOCKED: every bg_remove
fails because m4pro's disk is 100% full. Procedural stand-ins carry the bench.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
M10 (code-complete, verification pending — see OPUS-BUILD-BRIEF-2.md §2):
- Brands with mechanical quality (WONDERSLICE 0.25 vs Crustworthy 0.8 etc.):
quality scales heat-map patchiness and crumb fragility. Bakery sourdough is
loaf-only.
- Slicing minigame: aim thickness, saw with vertical strokes; progress/wobble/
squash; wedge slices brown unevenly in the toaster (the bad cut follows you);
squash arrives as pre-existing damage.
- Bread Knife + THE BEST THING (heavy, soft-scalloped, saw eff 1.65) join the
drawer; on loaf days the drawer trip happens BEFORE toasting ("they are
waiting") and whatever you fish out is what you slice with.
- Day 9 handwritten (the inspector wants a doorstop with parallel faces),
procedural brands/loaf days from day 10, The Cut criterion (band + wedge +
squash, TBT signature bonus), cut line bank.
- Verified so far: day-9 ticket chips, knife-trip drawer with bread_knife AND
the_best_thing present, timer label, typecheck + build. Slicer end-to-end
play, tuning, and couplings assertions are itemised in the brief.
OPUS-BUILD-BRIEF-2.md — the prep bench: generalized ingredients + cutting
(slip, juice, piece-evenness CV), the judged mess field, oranges + ribbed
pyramid juicer (halve evenness caps yield, seeds by juicer tier, the
Juicernaut), the grater (zest/pith line, cheese needs cold, knuckles), onions
(sting that blurs REAL vision, the stop-short-of-the-stem criss-cross dice),
and bruschetta as the capstone (temperature planning, roast tomatoes on the
browning field, topping Clark-Evans, the sog clock vs doorstop slices).
Bakery asset batch partially failed (flux errors + one lost GLB) — regen
instructions with retries are in the brief §8.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sat down with it like someone who'd never seen it. Five findings, all
reproduced before fixing, all verified after:
1. The kitchen panel was a cheat console. BREAD/SPREAD/TOOL/BUTTER are the
order's facts, but the widgets stayed live — you could fetch a soup spoon
and then quietly re-select the butter knife. Locked during play; the
browning dial stays yours because it's a real control.
2. The drawer card printed the ANSWER under the silhouette. The entire
"similar but not identical" puzzle, solved by a caption. The name is gone;
after ten seconds of fumbling it fades in as a pity: "fine. it's the
butter knife."
3. Lifting anything above the rim committed it instantly — but fishing means
lifting blockers, so you could accidentally "choose" whatever you were
moving aside. Commit now needs 0.45s of continuous hold above the rim,
which doubles as a beat to compare what you're holding against the
silhouette. Verified: a wobbly lift takes ~0.95s because dipping below
the rim resets the clock, and that's correct.
4. Coverage scored 20% on a slice a player had visibly covered corner to
corner. Root cause: the "covered" floor scaled with the ASKED amount, so
Coverage and Amount both punished thinness — double jeopardy. Coverage now
asks its own question (are there bare patches? floor = 0.06 absolute) and
the same conscientious play scores 84%.
5. Nothing told you how much was on the toast until the verdict. New live
readout, computed by the judge's own functions: "on the toast: thin —
normal asked · 84% covered". Watching it, a played-well day 1 went
8.8 -> 9.0, and the missing 0.2 is named on the card (stripes), not hidden.
Also: the drawer holds 11 pieces dropped down a tighter column (a heap you
rummage in, not an exploded diagram — padded with extra teaspoons, like every
real drawer), it sits on a bench instead of floating in a void, Service is
sim-time rather than wall-clock, and the title mentions the drawer exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Content (verified — same dial, same 18s, four breads that disagree):
bread 4s 9s 18s char
white 0.22 0.54 1.08 93%
multigrain 0.20 0.52 1.06 92%
raisin 0.30 0.76 1.14 99.8%
sourdough 0.11 0.33 0.74 14%
Sourdough stalls at half the rate then accelerates hardest (x3.0 vs white's
x2.45) as its water boils off; raisin browns 40% faster and is essentially
carbon by 18s. Seven handwritten days then procedural, day persisted.
Assets, all generated on-device and free, all reproducible from fixed seeds:
- the judge's five expressions (one seed, one description, only the expression
phrase varying — he stays the same man while his face falls)
- title art, wooden bench, blurred kitchen backdrop
- butter dish / peanut butter / MITEY jars as GLBs, normalised on load
(recentre, scale to fit, sit on y=0) rather than hand-fixed, so regenerating
them doesn't mean re-fixing them
The toaster stays procedural: the generated one is prettier but this one has a
lever we can drive and a dial that turns. Judgment call, per the brief.
Sound is synthesised, no samples: clatter is driven by real Rapier contact-force
events and scaled by force, which is the only way a drawer of cutlery can sound
like one. Plus lever clunk, knife scrape pitched by pressure, and the stamp.
Perf, measured (16.7ms is the 60fps budget):
kitchen 0.99ms/step · drawer 0.12ms · drawer while dragging 0.21ms
Production build: 2.87MB / 1.0MB gzipped, mostly Rapier's inlined wasm + three.
Textures carry colorSpace = SRGBColorSpace explicitly — same class of bug as the
albedo gamma fix in M3, and it washes them out silently if you forget.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
toast -> drawer -> spread. Eight pieces settle into a real tangle; find the one
on the card, drag it up and over the rim, and whatever you're holding is what
you're spreading with.
The link, verified end to end (day 4, butter softness 0.3):
4s in the drawer warmth 0.78 yield 0.343 needs angle 0.36 comfortable
50s in the drawer warmth 0.17 yield 0.565 needs angle 0.60 cliff is 0.62
Dawdling walks you to within two hundredths of the scrape cliff. On day 7
(fridge-hard butter) it tips over into genuinely unspreadable. The drawer isn't
a timer bolted on the side — it's the thing that makes the butter hard.
Physics choices that earn their keep:
- Compound boxes, never trimeshes. A trimesh fork tangled in a trimesh fork is
a solver nightmare and slow with it; the tine envelope is what matters anyway.
- Grab is a capped PD spring, not a fixed joint, so a snagged piece fights the
ones lying on it and loses instead of tunnelling through them.
- The solver is fixed-stepped so a frame hitch can't detonate the pile, and the
drawer settles offline so you open it on an existing mess.
- Clatter is synthesised from real contact-force events, velocity-scaled — a
drawer of cutlery is a noise, and the noise has to come from the collisions.
Three fixes:
- Quaternion.toArray() returns [x,y,z,w]; Rapier wants {x,y,z,w}. Every axis
read back undefined -> NaN in the solver -> wasm panic on the first step.
- The drag plane faced the camera, but the camera looks down into the drawer, so
dragging to the top of the screen couldn't physically lift anything over the
rim. It's a vertical plane now: up-screen means up.
- Cooling lived in kitchen.update(), which stops running the moment the drawer
opens — so the toast stayed hot no matter how long you rummaged, quietly
cancelling the entire mechanic. It's an app-level tick now.
The drawer was 4.6x3.4 and the pieces politely spread out flat. Tangling needs
crowding: 3.1x2.2, dropped down a narrow column so they land on each other.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The loop closes: ticket -> toast -> spread -> ENTER -> verdict -> next day.
- judging.ts: 9 weighted criteria, each reading the same fields the knife was
pushing around, so every line of the scorecard points at something real
("0.78 against 0.68 asked", "thick — thin asked", "28% burnt").
- lines.ts: ~45 lines keyed to whichever criterion actually decided the score,
so the verdict and the scorecard always agree — the verdict just has feelings
about it. MITEY has its own vocabulary.
- judge.ts: the toast turns on a pedestal under a spotlight, grade stamps in,
heatmap toggle for browning/spread. The generated inspector reacts by grade.
- orders.ts: seven handwritten days, then procedural. Day 1 is soft butter on
white; day 7 is a translucent film of MITEY on wet sourdough with fridge-hard
butter and a steak knife.
The find: every art colour was authored as sRGB and fed straight into a linear
lighting pipeline. Linear 0.14 encodes back out to sRGB ~0.4, so "near-black"
MITEY rendered as TAN and saturated butter washed to pale cream. This was the
root cause of the legibility fights in M0 and M2 — I'd been treating the symptom
by pushing the specular around. One line (albedo = pow(albedo, 2.2), mixing
stays in sRGB because that's the space the palette was picked in) and the whole
art direction landed: MITEY is genuinely black, butter is butter, the crust went
from cream to a rich golden brown.
Also: the specular lobe was far too broad. The slice is flat with the light and
camera both above it, so dot(N,H) ~0.98 everywhere and a wide lobe blankets the
whole slice in white. Tightened, so only ridges tilted into the light catch —
which is what a spread actually looks like.
The slice rolls its own lighting and ignores scene lights, so the judge's
spotlight did nothing to it; it now swaps its own rig for presentation.
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>
