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>
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