✠ The Chronicle

✠ ENTRY III

The stall broke: four build-plan phases shipped in one cycle (route…

The stall broke: four build-plan phases shipped in one cycle (route survivorship, combat coverage, lethality readouts, enemy rage mode), while two big design specs landed in parallel — the Aporia labyrinth continent and a full no-strike card-library revamp — and critique stayed stuck at zero playtest coverage on the same unresolved permissions gap. Second pulse of the day: the Aporia went from design to a fully playable headless implementation in the same afternoon, a hazard-tuning sweep found the CDR-0006 doctrine has drifted from the shipped engine on three separate axes, and critique's zero-coverage streak reached a third consecutive pass.

MECHANICS

Phase 14 — route survivorship/coverage-audit classification

What changed

game.cli --route now classifies every run as survivorship, blocked, or coverage-audit; it halts the instant a combat encounter ends in defeat instead of walking past it, and a new --route-audit flag gives a non-mutating full-map coverage witness.

Why it changed

promoted 2026-07-04 from a field playthrough report — the old route reached only 19/25 Fishing Village nodes, couldn't prove full branch coverage in one legal run, and kept reporting post-defeat traversal as clean survivorship.

commits 9180fa5d · b469d69d

MECHANICS

Phase 1 — combat test-coverage backfill

What changed

added the missing funded (success) e2e path for sig-overwhelming-argument and other HP kill-paths lacking a population-level witness.

Why it changed

the calibration run — deliberately small, proving the mechanics verify gate and the CI-green deploy gate work end-to-end. First phase the autonomous loop actually shipped since nexus adoption on 2026-07-03.

commits 0af106ff · 4b9e30f3

MECHANICS

Phase 2 — projected-lethality readout API

What changed

added projectCombatOutcome (pendingDot, roundsToKill, isLethalInFlight, finisher readiness) plus computeRoundsToKill / projectAmplify helpers, exported from the Combat and top-level barrels.

Why it changed

the status/DoT kill path is the intended win condition but wasn't legible on the board — this is the engine half of closing that gap (spec 30 draft; closes an AUDIT LOW row).

commits 128659e0 · 22bc8ab2

MECHANICS

Phase 3 — enemy rage-mode threat phase

What changed

enemies without an authored threat sequence now get a locked 4th "rage" phase (harder-hitting + self-healing) that unlocks after round 6; processBetweenPhases holds the phase pointer at the last reachable phase while it's locked.

Why it changed

doctrine-central — long fights should get qualitatively harder over time, rewarding fast status finishes. Scoped to generated sequences only; the 51 hand-authored, playtest-calibrated sequences are untouched.

commits e87559d0 · f2d59a13

CONTENT

The Aporia — MAZE-style labyrinth continent (design complete)

What changed

merged via PR #24 — DESIGN.md, three validator-green acts (the Colonnade, the Archive, the Proof) with true-path solutions, a folded MAZE-book research pass, a standalone graph-validation tool, and two promoted specs: W-01 (the continent contract) and C-01 (the Sophist, the Guide character).

Why it changed

roadmap steps 1-9 (research through spec promotion) are done. Step 10 — mechanics + CLI implementation — is scoped in plan/labyrinth/ROADMAP.md but not yet on the build-plan queue.

commits cddf81e8 · ee · 7ea06a6e · 18d64841 · 73adc28c · ec191bba · a8595a47 · 988d6cea · 8e9f39a0 · e6fda479 · dc4c0ecd · ba7c1723

MECHANICS

The Aporia labyrinth — mechanics + CLI implementation (roadmap step 10)

What changed

shipped via PR #27 — the labyrinth traversal mode on MapDefinition (free movement along a room's doors, secret-door/act-gate blocking, checkpoint teleport for the Oubliette); a new World/Labyrinth engine (fragments, gates + the Ledger of Assertions, three-tier hints, Borrowed-Premise debt capped at three, waystones); three act content modules transcribed verbatim from the authored design (47 rooms, three bosses with authored threat sequences, three Sophist's-Ledger quest boards); and a npm run labyrinth CLI with --script/--stdin/ --json-events playthrough support.

Why it changed

closes roadmap step 10 — the continent is now playable headless end to end, not just spec'd. 35 new hermetic tests; all three verify gates green; a full scripted three-act true-path CLI run completes (gates, the thirteen-word passphrase with eight pre-confirmed sockets, naming the Sophist).

commits 45f5a8d3 · 8b1c455f · ee · PR · 27

CONTENT

Spec 32 — the No-Strike Library (design only)

What changed

drafted and owner-ratified a full card-library redesign: strike-removal doctrine, FREE/PAID card grammar, a Doxa..Aporia rank ladder, a persistent floating-die pouch ("the Priors"), seven build-around packages, and a 75-card catalogue.

Why it changed

mines the Dawncaster KB (1,692 cards / 141 keywords) against an owner complaint that the current pool plays too samey; disenchant scope (enchant = positive persistent passive, disenchant = negative) was the last open question, ratified this pass.

commits b10f0dd1 · bef48c6e · 3e3b15cf · f728fe3b · eed · a · PR · 21 · c3ffb49b

INFRA

Catalog regenerates nightly; preview builds twice daily

What changed

export-catalog.ts now emits raw mechanical stats (stance, type, tier, power, effect payloads) instead of flavour text for the Cards/Effects pages, enemy portraits sit on a black plate, and npm run site:build is now wired into every digest commit so the catalog never drifts from the engine libraries. Separately, preview-build.yml's schedule moved from once to twice daily.

Why it changed

keeps the hosted catalog honest against the engine, and gets preview builds in front of the owner faster.

commits bc96500c · eed · a · PR · 20 · 30d1f4c0 · d33a82c5

✠ The marginalia

The night's watch — what ran while nobody looked
Time (UTC)VerbOutcome
2026-07-06 18:04 → 2026-07-07 05:31 (~12 ticks)marchall green; phases 14, 1, 2, 3 shipped in sequence — the first real work since nexus adoption
2026-07-06 19:19critique pass 12 findings (0 high/med, 2 low/needs-user) — blocked before observing any screen
2026-07-07 01:16critique pass 20 new findings — identical playwright-permissions block, recurrence noted in the existing row
2026-07-07 07:09nightdigest — breadth check needed a manual Playwright browser install first (see Needs you)
2026-07-07 07:42feat (roadmap-tracked, off build-plan)Aporia labyrinth mechanics + CLI shipped, roadmap step 10
2026-07-07 08:45 → 08:55marchdispatched to critique (due) → pass 3
2026-07-07 08:53critique pass 30 new findings — 3rd consecutive zero-coverage pass, same playwright-permissions block
2026-07-07 10:40mergePR #27 (labyrinth implementation) merged; all 3 verify-* workflows green
2026-07-07 11:21 → 11:23out-of-band pushcopyrighted MAZE-book scan images pushed straight to main (author root@srv1699746.hstgr.cloud, not a loop identity), self-reverted 2 minutes later; the same content now sits on branch labyrinth-maze-book-images-pr awaiting a real PR — no action needed, flagged for visibility only
2026-07-07 11:31night (this run)digest — second pulse same day; breadth check re-run clean (browser install workaround repeated, see Needs you)

Build-plan queue (plan/steps/01_build_plan.md): 5/15 shipped (phase 0 plus 14, 1, 2, 3) — unchanged since this morning; the labyrinth ship tracks against plan/labyrinth/ROADMAP.md, not the numbered build plan. plan/AUDIT.md 8 pending (unchanged), plan/CRITIQUE.md 5 pending (unchanged — still the same playwright-permissions row, now at pass 3, plus 4 carried-over rows), plan/PHASE_CANDIDATES.md 7 pending (unchanged, /expand has not run since the 2026-07-03 seed). No open triage:needs-user or loop:do issues. One open PR outside the loop's own merges: #26, a report-only /hazard-tuning sweep (0 numeric changes, see Needs you). Deploy gate: CI green on HEAD (a5d6db9b; the labyrinth merge commit 8b1c455f and everything since is docs/plan-only, no verify-* re-trigger needed).

The measure — did the fighting change?

None filed by digest this pass (in scope: loop-gate mistuning only — game-balance tuning routes through /expand or the domain tuning skills, see Needs you above). The one live loop-scoped proposal (Combat challenge-gradient retune, URGENT) is unchanged from 2026-07-05.

The nightly entry also carries a panel addressed to the maintainer — open questions, permission grants, things only he can rule on. It is held back from this page: it is correspondence, not a report. The unfinished work it tracks is published above, in plain words.