toastsim/MASTERPLAN.md

TOASTSIM → THE RAD KITCHEN — Master Plan

2026-07-17. This sits above the build briefs. Each phase below gets cut into an OPUS-BUILD-BRIEF-N.md when its turn comes; parallel Opus agents build inside a phase in separate file lanes; Fable reviews every stage against the exit bar with harness numbers before merge. "It's been done"? Sure. Ours is better, and it will keep getting better.

0. The one-sentence pitch

A kitchen where every station is the same game — fields, points, doses, and nerve — and a judge who notices everything, played from toast to a full pass.

1. The design law (unchanged, non-negotiable)

One game, not minigames in a trench coat. Every new mechanic must ride the proven bones or improve them for everyone:

Bone	Proven by	Generalizes to
Field (2D scalar grid + stats)	browning, spread, damage, mess	pan sear, egg set, sauce coverage, plate composition heat
Point statistics (Clark–Evans)	crust rind, toppings	plating layout, garnish scatter, seed mess
Cutting sim (bite/saw/slip/wobble)	bread, tomato, mushrooms	steak (grain axis), potato lid (depth), everything
Dose/mass tracking	spreads, juice	salt, capers, wasabi, sauces, butter-in-pan
Temperature clock	butter softness, fridge/bench	rest clock, pan heat, egg water, sog
Swirl/gesture detection	jar remix, reamer twist	whisking, poach vortex, sauce swoosh
Dwell commits + judge bands + lines	everything	everything
Dev harness (real input, deterministic dt)	every milestone	every milestone — no unverified feel, ever
MODELBEAST pipeline	the current cast	unlimited free assets; trial-and-error is cheap, bad eggs allowed

2. The foundation doctrine: SALT & BUTTER

John's law: butter and salt are the foundation, really. So they are cross-cutting systems, not ingredients — every phase from P2 on hooks them.

Salt is two objects and a timing question.

• Fine table/cooking salt: dissolves, penetrates, seasons DURING cooking. Cheap, correct, invisible when right.
• Flaky finishing salt (the good stuff): texture + sparkle, plating ONLY. The cardinal sin — cooking off the good salt: flakes into a hot pan dissolve into ordinary salinity and the judge KNOWS: "You cooked with the finishing salt. I can hear it weeping." Inverse sin: table salt at the pass reads flat — "sad little grains."
• Mechanics: one shared dose curve (under = unnoticed, right = bonus, over = ruined) — the same curve class capers and wasabi use (Brief 2 §7.5), built once. Plus a timing check: salt-type × when-applied matrix.

Butter is a state machine, everywhere.

• Spread (done, M2+), softness clock (done).
• P2 adds butter as cooking medium: cold → foaming (the moment) → browned (beurre noisette, flavour bonus) → burnt (bitter, mess). Heat × time on the existing temperature clock. Basting = a gesture that paints the sear Field.
• P3 closes the loop beautifully: over-whip cream long enough and you MAKE butter. The game teaches where butter comes from by punishing you with it.

3. The map — six phases

P0 — TOAST (done: M0–M11 core)

Toaster, spreads, jars, bakery, prep bench core. The bones exist and are measured. Remaining: M11 finish line (route days through the bench) — first lane of Stage 1.

P1 — THE PREP BENCH (Brief 2: M12–M15, specced, next to build)

Oranges + ribbed pyramid juicer, grater, onions, bruschetta capstone. Plus the pantry backlog already in the cast: mushrooms ×3, bell pepper. Feel that must be right: the reamer twist, the onion stop-line.

P2 — FIRE (the pan) — the steak phase

The one new primitive: the pan = a heat source under a Field, like the toaster but continuous, visible, and yours to modulate.

• Rib eye, in full:
  1. Salt it — when? Properly early (penetrates) or at the pass (crust); mid-cook sprinkle = amateur hour. Salt type matters (§2).
  2. Cook it — sear Field per side; flip timing; butter + baste; doneness = interior ramp (new 1D depth profile per Field cell — reuses the browning math pointed inward). Mushrooms & peppers cook here too.
  3. REST it — the nerve test. Rest clock: cut at 0s and juice mass (moisture 0.95→0.6 decay) floods the board — the mess field's finest hour. The ticket tempts you; the judge times you.
  4. Cut it — new grain axis on Ingredient; score cut-angle vs grain; wobble TEARS. Across the grain or it's chewing gum.
  5. Pair it — right mustard from the family (Brief 2 §7.5).
• Judge groups: The Season / The Cook / The Rest / The Cut / The Pairing.
• Feel that must be right: the sizzle-to-rest silence, and juice flooding when you cut too early. Player must FEEL the urge to cut early and learn.

P3 — EGGS & AIR

Two new gestures on old bones, then the near-game:

• Whisking/whipping: sustained swirl detection + shear accumulation → cream: liquid → soft peaks → stiff peaks → grainy → butter (see §2). Field stores air fraction; judge pokes the peak on camera.
• The poached egg — almost a whole game, treated with respect: water temp band (clock), the vortex (reamer-twist gesture at pot scale), the drop (timing + height), white-set vs yolk-liquid as a two-layer Field (set outer, liquid inner — the toast browning math with a phase boundary), the lift, the drain, the wobble test — judge presses it: "It should tremble. Like you, right now."
• Feel that must be right: the vortex drop, and the wobble.

P4 — THE PASS (plating)

Composition becomes the scored surface. The plate is a Field + point set:

• Placement = Clark–Evans + mass balance bands (M15 topping math, plate- sized). Height/stacking as a bonus axis.
• Sauce gestures: dots (dose curve), the smear/swoosh (a spread stroke scored on confidence — ONE motion, hesitation reads in the Field), drizzle (path statistics).
• Garnish = the dosing danger class: capers, flake salt, herbs. Tiny masses, brutal curves (§2). Wrong-salt-at-the-pass judged here.
• Feel that must be right: the swoosh. One confident stroke.

P5 — SERVICE (the restaurant)

The kitchen becomes one organism: multi-course orders, the planning clock generalized (M15's fridge/bench timing at menu scale), stations in parallel, the pass as the bottleneck. Baked stuffed potato lands here as the multi-station capstone (bake → lid cut → scoop → mix → restuff → rebake — Brief 2 §7.5). Career arc: the menu grows day by day; the judge brings FRIENDS. S-rank a full service = the diploma.

4. The build model (stages, agents, review)

• Stage = one phase slice with 2–3 parallel Opus agents, each in its own git worktree, each owning a disjoint file lane (one owns src/sim/X.ts + its harness helpers; another owns scene/UI; a third fires asset batches and does judge lines). Lanes declared in the stage brief; game.ts merge conflicts resolved at review, not shared live.
• Agents verify with typecheck + build; Fable holds the browser — harness numbers and screenshots are the REVIEW gate, run by the reviewer, so no two agents fight over the preview pane. No milestone merges without numbers.
• Exit bar per stage (same as ever): played-through with numbers in the commit message, screenshots, feel-check on the phase's named feel. Feel wrong = fix feel before advancing, always.
• Bad eggs policy: assets are free and code is cheap — trial fearlessly, kill quickly. A mechanic that isn't fun after its harness works gets ONE retune pass, then it's cut and logged in the brief. No sunk-cost stations.
• Commit discipline unchanged: one commit per milestone, message = what you measured, push to Gitea.

5. Asset batches (MODELBEAST, seeds reserved per phase)

• P1: in flight (prep cast rendering now) + mushrooms ×3, bell pepper.
• P2: cast-iron pan, raw rib eye (marbling!), cooked steak rested + cut showing pink interior, salt cellar (fine) + salt dish (flakes), butter block in pan, tongs. Seeds 170–199.
• P3: whisk, copper bowl, egg carton, single egg, poach pot, slotted spoon, cream carton. Seeds 200–229 (2D: soft/stiff peak reference cards).
• P4: big white plates ×3 shapes, squeeze bottle, microgreens, sauce spoon. Seeds 240–269.
• P5: the pass window, docket rail, second toaster (!). Seeds 270+.
• Anything the player identifies by shape or that carries physics stays procedural — silhouettes are gameplay (unchanged law).

6. Order of battle

1. Stage 1 (now): M11 finish line + M12 juicer, parallel lanes.
2. Stage 2: M13 grater + M14 onions.
3. Stage 3: M15 bruschetta (single lane — it's integrative by nature).
4. Stage 4: cut Brief 3 from P2 (salt system + pan + steak). The big one.
5. Stage 5+: P3 eggs, P4 plating, P5 service — brief per phase, re-planned against what the previous phase taught us.

The bet, restated for the whole kitchen: the bones are good, so every station is the bones wearing a new apron — and the game stays ONE game, from a slice of toast to a full Saturday service.