✠ The Chronicle

✠ ENTRY XXXII

The retheme batch closed out its narrative half

the fishing village is now the Drowned Parish, and all eight coastal NPC trees speak in the new register. Two direct owner PRs landed combat UI the loop didn't route: the card face lost its redundant prose, and the foe now breathes, skips the double entry gate, and shows its hand. An /oversight session drained five standing needs-user-call threads in one sitting. The deck-matrix baseline re-stamped clean — byte-identical numbers again, the fourth night running for a display-text-only cycle.

CONTENT

Phase 44f — named the Drowned Parish

What changed

the Fishing Village map's region display string becomes "the Drowned Parish," grounded in the drowned-parish enemy estate's own fiction ("the coastal parishes the sea took"). mapId, node ids, the continent label, and every other identifier stay frozen — display name only.

Why it changed

spec 34's own worked naming example (NL-18: "a feature plus a fact that went wrong") names this exact pattern; the fiction anchor was already sitting in the enemy roster, unclaimed until now.

commits 30dbab98 · bef · 4b9083c1 · (ship) · b81b73ce · (row)

CONTENT

Phase 44g — coastal-village dialogue retheme

What changed

rethemed all eight coastal NPC dialogue trees (Coastal Beggar, Captain Blackwater, Fisherman's Daughter, Village Healer, Dockworker's Union Leader, Merchant's Widow) against spec 34 §2 — dropped exclamation marks and [Moral meter ±N] bracket readouts, cold/archaic register throughout. Renamed the quest-board storyBeat string to match 44f. All flags/deltas/node-ids/requires gates stay byte-for-byte unchanged; three tests that asserted on literal old prose (not just isolated words) got their assertions updated to the new equivalent phrases.

Why it changed

the brief claimed no test asserted on verbatim dialogue text — that didn't hold under a real pass, so the ship fixed the tests it broke rather than leaving the retheme half-done.

commits 440ced7d · bef · 74f66110 · (ship) · 4eb5aee4 · (row)

UI

PR #193 — strip the prose off the card face

What changed

a direct owner report ("there's not so much verbage on the cards? The card details already define the keywords") took the authored PAID sentence, the type strip, and the printed die lines off the card face. The face is now glance-only: art, name, FREE glyph, rarity tag, and a KEYWORD / value pair. Nothing is lost — the inspect overlay regains the full metadata, die lines, and read triplet it used to carry before 07-16. Visual baselines re-approved (7 matched / 0 differing); labyrinth got a baseline for the first time (prior debt, not a regression).

Why it changed

owner-directed declutter — the card details layer already owns the keyword definitions, so repeating them on the face read as redundant.

BEFORE

The combat encounter screen before the change: a direct owner report (

AFTER · 11 AUG

The combat encounter screen after the change: a direct owner report (
combat-encounter — the only baseline of the six that carries an actual product change; character/exploration/inventory/root/ labyrinth differ on whole-page text/layout offsets from a Chrome-build difference on this container, not from this PR's diff.

commits 44251587 · 193 · ed · dec · PR)

UI

PR #194 — breathe the foe, retire the double entry gate, name the enemy's turn

What changed

three owner-reported combat-UI asks landed together. (1) the foe now idles with a non-harmonic scale-and-float breath, boss-weighted slower and deeper. (2) entering a fight used to ask twice — an ENGAGE/FLEE modal over a procedural SVG, then ENTER COMBAT over the real painting; the modal now auto-engages on mount and the reveal is the single commit gate, with WITHDRAW moved onto it. (3) the foe's resolved threat phase now renders as a card — intent glyph, action sentence, payload lines — with a DENIED strikethrough when a phase is hindered, so the player's control has visible proof.

Why it changed

three separate UI reports from the same session (2026-08-10), landed as one bounded PR since all three touch the same encounter entry path.

commits a251a325 · 194 · ed · dec · PR)

INFRA

Oversight — drained five needs-user-call threads, filed the minigame-consolidation candidate

What changed

a same-day /oversight session ruled on five standing threads in one sitting: card evolution unpark trigger (design-now, no phase yet), the "Axiomancer" product name under the whole-product pivot (reconsider — opens a dedicated naming session, current name holds until then), inn placement (no — fishing-village-only stays complete), the live-combat exit path (route through endCombat, queued as Phase 54), and the Cloudflare Pages hosted surface (incidental, scope it down via /iterate). Also filed a new candidate — T's own framing — to fold treasure/quest/rest/narration into one plain "encounter" choice+effect shape and retire the Gathering, Quest Board, and Loot Cache minigames entirely; combat stays a distinct system.

Why it changed

the AUDIT/CRITIQUE backlog had accumulated enough ruled-but- unrecorded decisions that draining them in one session beats letting /march ticks keep re-reading stale open threads.

commits 7a016524 · 195

✠ The marginalia

The night's watch — what ran while nobody looked
TickVerbOutcome
08-10 13:50marchsuccess — critique pass 22 (0 findings)
08-10 15:51 (direct)PR #194merged — combat UI (foe breath, entry gate, enemy card)
08-10 18:24 (direct)PR #193merged — card face declutter
08-10 19:26marchsuccess — phase 44f (Drowned Parish)
08-10 20:09 (direct)/oversightmerged — PR #195, backlog drain
08-11 02:32marchsuccess — phase 44g brief
08-11 07:43marchsuccess — phase 44g ship
  • plan/AUDIT.md: no new rows filed tonight; 49 pending (down from 57

— the oversight session drained the FLEE/tab-bar row via #194 and several ruled-but-unrecorded threads).

  • plan/PHASE_CANDIDATES.md: 34 pending (up 1 — the minigame-

consolidation candidate filed via /oversight, not /expand).

  • plan/CRITIQUE.md: pass 22 (commit d03f38e7) — 0 fresh findings,

first pass since Phase 44e; 19 pending rows, unchanged.

  • triage:needs-user / loop:do issues: 0 open. No open PRs.
  • Deploy: nothing to check — HEAD (4eb5aee4) is a docs/plan-only

tick, no gated verify-* workflow triggered for its paths.

  • Breadth check (npm --workspace axiomancer-mobile run e2e:minigames):

GREEN — all six legs (hazard, combat, gathering, encounter- routing, exploration↔combat-prelude roundtrip, upgradeable-dice) ALL PASS. The FLEE/tab-bar regression flagged the last two nights is gone, drained by #194's entry-path rework.

The measure — did the fighting change?

baseline:check opened this cycle stale by 1 mechanics-source commit (74f66110, phase 44g — dialogue-only). Re-measured with the reduced-nightly pass and committed at 4eb5aee4.

The regenerated report is byte-identical to yesterday's stamp — only meta.generatedAt/meta.commit changed. Expected result for a mechanics-source commit that only rewrote NPC dialogue strings; the combat sim never touches those files. CQI reads unchanged: early 0.746, mid 0.739, late 0.814, impossible 0.820. No band moved; nothing to file.

Same standing gap as the last several nights, not re-filed: the open [docs] AUDIT row (skills/digest.md §3b still reads the retired win-rate doctrine curve) still needs a design ruling before §3b can be rewritten against CQI directly — read blind against that curve, tonight's numbers (early 54.5% / mid 8.3% / late 0% / impossible 0%) would file as a doctrine violation. They aren't one: Phase 43 retired win rate as a grading term outright, and this exact reading has been byte-identical and already-tracked (the "Post-D8 flag-on curve repair" → Phase 39 → Phase 43 chain) since before that phase shipped. This digest read combatQuality.index instead and skipped the stale-law filing, same as every night since 2026-08-09.

Today's intent

A split day — half narrative close-out (44f/44g finish the place and voice half of the retheme), half owner-directed combat UI that arrived outside the loop entirely. The breadth check went green for the first time in two nights (the FLEE regression is gone), and the baseline confirmed a fourth straight byte-identical read. The standing /oversight backlog is now genuinely drained rather than re-read and reconfirmed — a rarer outcome than it sounds, going by how many digests before this one found the same five threads still open.

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.