A game-loop mechanics patch: the satchel becomes a real stacking inventory,
forging now demands ore won in combat (not just gold), and a vault lets a
hero protect coin from ambush.
- Stacking satchel: the bag re-encodes from a flat id list to "id:qty"
stacks, so potions stack (three Minor Potions fill one slot, not three)
and materials ride alongside. satchel_max now caps distinct KINDS (3);
per-kind quantity is unbounded. quaff/death-save still pull the strongest
potion and ignore materials. One pure codec (engine/satchel.py) owns the
encoding; the façade, the Watch, and the sim all decode through it — no
three-way drift (the v0.9 single-source lesson). The codec parses a bare
id as qty 1, so it can never silently drop a malformed stack.
- Ore-gated forge: ore is a material that drops from won dungeon-rung
fights (and, less often, forest fights), stacks in the satchel, and is
not buyable or sellable — you earn your edge by fighting for it. Forging
now costs gold AND ore ((plus+1) ore per tier), so a rich-but-idle hero
can no longer buy power at the dice table. The dungeon is now also the
mine.
- The vault: deposit/withdraw at the inn moves coin to a strongbox that
ambush cannot touch and that SURVIVES the Wyrm-win legacy reset — the
carry-vs-protect decision the PvP economy was missing.
- Surfaced on both the /watch lobby TV and the in-chat door_status sheet:
each hero's stacked satchel, carried gold, and vaulted gold.
- Tuning (the sim is the instrument): the ore gate added ~2 days to the
Vale and ~1.6 to the Cinder Wastes; the greedy bot still slays the Wyrm
3/3 on both, fully forged to +3/+3, so the loop is not stalled. Defaults
held — no numbers needed retuning.
Four new banded settings (forge_ore_item, forge_ore_per_plus,
ore_dungeon_drop, ore_forest_chance); both worlds gained an ore item.
Schema mutated in place (banked column, satchel re-encoding) — pre-1.0, no
migration by design; a real migration story is owed at 1.0. Tests 382 ->
419; the vault-survives-rebirth invariant and the codec are revert-verified.
Graphics polish: distinct terrain and structures now read by COLOUR on the
Watch, not only by glyph. One unified palette, shared by every world — the
fix is to grow the set of distinct object-type roles, not to fork per-world.
- Roads were the tell: road shared the "floor" green with grass, so a path
vanished into the meadow on the lobby TV. Likewise forest shared "tree",
the three town buildings all shared "town", and the Cinder Wastes' molten
slag borrowed "water" and rendered BLUE. Each is now its own role: road
(stone), forest (lush green) with scrub (its barren ember-brown
counterpart for volcanic/desert dense terrain that must NOT read as
woods), lava (molten orange), barren (wasteland taupe), and inn/shop/
healer split out of the generic town.
- Both worlds remap onto the shared vocabulary; in each, no two distinct
terrain/building types share a colour. A live render caught the Cinder
cinder-fields rendering green under the generic "forest" role — hence the
scrub role, so the volcanic waste reads warm. The text frame renderer
stays monochrome (it never read colour), so frames and goldens are
untouched — this is Watch-only.
- The bug class is now closed by construction: a test asserts the Watch
PALETTE carries a hex for EVERY Color role, so a role can never ship
unpaintable and silently fall back (which is exactly how road hid).
- Color.assignable() is the single source for the overlay-vs-assignable
split (runtime actor/item colours and the DEFAULT fallback are not
author-pickable); the authoring manual's colour vocabulary generates
from it, so it can't drift.
Tests 373 -> 382. floor/tree/forest are three greens kept deliberately
distinct (forest is olive-hued); verified on a real render along with the
scrub fix.
The slice that proves the pipeline: a second world authored entirely by an
LLM from AUTHORING.md and the validator alone, plus the tooling to discover,
theme, and balance-test any world.
- The dogfood: "The Cinder Wastes" — an ashen volcanic underworld (slag
rivers, a caldera mouth, a Magma Wyrm) — was written cold by an agent
given only the generated authoring manual and `understone validate`. It
passed validation on the FIRST run with zero failures. Its stumble log
found six places where the manual stated a rule the validator didn't
enforce; those became permanent hardening (below). It ships in
understone/world/packs/ and glows ember on the lobby TV.
- `understone worlds` lists every bundled world (the Vale + alternates)
with its load status, via one shared discovery path.
- Per-world Watch themes: settings.watch_theme (phosphor/amber/ice/ember,
loader-validated) repaints the spectator page; the Vale's green is
byte-for-byte unchanged.
- The sim harness: a pure, seeded, greedy bot plays the real game façade
over an injected day-stepping clock and emits a balance report —
`understone simulate PATH [--days N] [--seeds K]`. It SLAYS THE WYRM on
both worlds (Vale ~day 13, Cinder ~day 25), so the whole v0.1->v0.7 loop
is proven winnable end-to-end by an unclever bot through the real stack.
- Loader hardening from the dogfood: a rare monster may not occupy a
dungeon-rung guardian slot (it would silently become a fixed foe and
leave the rare pool); exactly one monster may be the boss; and the
boss-tier error now says "no non-boss monster," matching the manual.
AUTHORING gained a generated "what validate checks vs. what it cannot"
section so the rule/guidance boundary is honest.
Review hardened the bot for arbitrary authored packs (a MENU-mode fight
spin and four related robustness gaps that were latent on the shipped
worlds), and documented that final_level reads post-legacy-reset. Tests
359 -> 373; both worlds still win byte-identically after the fixes.
The look of the next age — the modern equivalent of the ASCII->CP437 leap.
Full Unicode is available now, but the whole stack (text frames, golden
tests, the Watch's 1ch grid) assumes one glyph = one column, so the
enabling piece is a WIDTH RULE, not the glyphs themselves.
- textwidth.is_grid_safe: one code point, printable, East-Asian width not
Wide/Fullwidth, no combining/format/control category. This is the
one-glyph-one-column contract. Ambiguous-width glyphs are ACCEPTED on
purpose — they ARE CP437 (the wall, the club-tree, the up-arrow forest)
and render single-column on the Western-monospace metrics every surface
uses; only genuinely double-width runes are barred. The loader enforces
it on every map glyph; the player-name/free-text sanitizer enforces the
same rule (the narrow ledger), so a wide name can't shear a frame.
- Re-skin: water ~ -> ≋, inn -> ⌂, healer -> ✚, dungeon mouth -> ∩, and
the other adventurer -> ☻ (CP437's own player glyph). The colour field
the renderer has carried unused since v0.1 now has a second consumer.
- Texture variants: grass and water vary by a deterministic per-coordinate
hash, rendered identically in the Python frame builder and the Watch's
JS. The two are kept in lockstep by shared hash constants + an agreement
test that replays the JS arithmetic and asserts it equals the Python
output for every variant over a grid — not a comment-coupled copy.
- Watch glow-up: a Noto Sans Mono font stack and a UTC-hour day/night tint
(the Vale darkens at dusk on the lobby TV).
- The curated SAFE_PALETTE is enforced author-usable: a test asserts no
palette glyph collides with the reserved player markers, so AUTHORING's
generated appendix can't advertise a glyph the loader would reject.
- Resume is identity-preserving: an existing character resumes by exact
stored name without re-validating the width rule (which governs creation
only) — resume must never lock anyone out.
Tests 231 -> 283; width edges (CJK/emoji/combining/fullwidth), the
Python<->JS lockstep, the palette/reserved guard, and resume-vs-create all
pinned and revert-verified.
The IGM seam realized: world packs are now a first-class authoring target
for models and humans, with a validate loop and a loader hardened for
routinely-untrusted generated content.
- understone newpack DIR scaffolds a pack (the six content JSONs templated
from the shipped Vale) plus AUTHORING.md — a manual written for a model
to follow cold. Its bands table is RENDERED FROM the loader's own band
constants at scaffold time, so documented limits and enforced limits
cannot drift.
- understone validate DIR loads a pack and prints either a pack report
("This pack is sound. The door stands open.") or the loader's
file/index/field-naming error — the authoring feedback loop.
- Loader hardening: glyphs must be one printable column-safe character and
never the frame box-drawing set or the @/& player markers (map content
cannot impersonate players or forge frame chrome); map dims 8..256;
per-file count caps; display-name length caps. All errors instructive.
- The packaged-world path is single-sourced (understone.world.
PACKAGED_WORLD_DIR) for the server default and the scaffold template.
- README "Authoring worlds" section frames the loop: newpack -> write or
generate -> validate -> serve with UNDERSTONE_WORLD=dir.
Review round: bug finder returned zero findings; quality round fixed the
world.json doc example (it showed a zone fragment where an authoring model
would copy a whole-file shape — now a labeled skeleton), the stale Usage
docstring, and the duplicated packaged-path constant.
Tests 166 -> 184. Scaffold round-trips through load_world by test.
Patrick Buckley