✠ The Chronicle

✠ ENTRY XXXVIII

Three phases finished the fishing-village narrative spine end to end

the quest-giver made reachable, four dilemmas authored, and a read-back web that lets post-boss NPCs notice them — plus a design ruling that scopes the real early-game gap down to one screen. The combat baseline re-measured unchanged for a second straight read. A CI flake burned a full march tick on an hour-long apt-mirror hang; filed as tonight's one new finding.

MECHANICS

Phase 53c — Old Marrow made reachable on every route, a coverage-floor audit lands

What changed

Narrowed fishing-village column 1 to fv-2 alone, so the quest-giver (Old Marrow) sits on 100% of legal routes instead of being one of two column-1 options — matching what docs/story.md and the map file's own header comment already claimed. Homed three more S-02 NPCs (Captain Blackwater, the Coastal Beggar, the Fisherman's Daughter) into the post-boss column, one per lane. Added auditRouteCoverage and a coverage-floor test pinning fv-1/fv-2/fv-6 at 100%, plus a witness test that reaches Old Marrow through real navigation and activates starting-quest — the assertion that could not pass before this phase.

Why it changed

The quest-giver placement the docs already asserted was never actually true in the shipped graph — a second column-1 node let a route bypass Old Marrow entirely, so "start a quest" wasn't guaranteed reachable despite reading as guaranteed everywhere it was described.

commits 44fab3ae · bf39b391

CONTENT

Phase 53d — S-01's four dilemmas authored and wired

What changed

Shipped four narration-kind dilemma nodes with real DialogueTrees — three unflagged root choices apiece, each a leaf setting one distinct flag, no moralDelta — two on fishing-village (The Borrowed Hook, The Stranger's Net) and two on northern-forest (The Frightened Friend, The Crowning Witnessed). Each displaces a plain encounter node and sits strictly ahead of the post-boss column Phase 53e reads.

Why it changed

S-01's four dilemmas existed only as spec prose until this phase; shipping them as real, flag-setting nodes is what makes the read-back web in Phase 53e possible at all.

commits 7d14acd6 · 87cfbd39

MECHANICS

Phase 53e — the read-back web: post-boss NPCs notice earlier choices

What changed

Gated a reactive, additive branch on each of S-01's four dilemma flags (plus marrow_pressed) in the three post-boss NPCs — ten new branches total, all appended last, none carrying moralDelta per S-01's "the dilemmas refuse to score themselves" ruling. requires.flag gate count goes from 1 to 11 across every authored map.

Why it changed

Before this phase, every dilemma resolved into silence — the world never mentioned a player's choice again. This is the payoff: a choice made at fv-4 in column 3 gets noticed by the Fisherman's Daughter in column 6.

commits ccb8654c · 5844a20b

MECHANICS

Phase 46a — early-game rethink: design ruling narrows the gap to one screen

What changed

Docs-only design session. Rejected both premises on the table — a canned battle per preset deck, and a labyrinth-gated starter commitment — since both assume the ten-theme preset model the 2026-08-08 Profane Canon rework already replaced with one evolving deck (threadbare → pilgrim → apostate). Identified the real gap: BundleSelectScreen still offers Pilgrim/Apostate (mid/late campaign snapshots) as peer picks to brand-new players, undercutting the controlled-vacuum intent of the tutorial that follows. Scoped the fix to Phase 46b: new-player picker collapses to Threadbare only.

Why it changed

Both original framings were premised on mechanics the codebase had already moved past; shipping either would have built tutorial content for a deck model that no longer exists. No code shipped — docs-only per plan-a-phase.md §9's precedent.

commits 8decc1c9 · 125904d7

INFRA

Combat baseline re-measured — numbers hold unchanged for a second straight read

What changed

The deck-matrix baseline was stale by 3 mechanics-source commits (53c/53d/53e) at digest open. Re-measured via the reduced-nightly pass; baseline:check now reports fresh at 05c3ffdf.

Why it changed

None of the three staling commits touch combat resolution — narrative/content wiring only — and the regenerated numbers confirm it: early avgWinRate 0.545 (avgCQI 0.727), mid 0.083 (avgCQI 0.692), late 0.000 (avgCQI 0.767), impossible 0.000 (avgCQI 0.767) across 144 cells, identical to the prior e3bbcfd0 read reported in the 2026-08-17 digest. CQI holding flat while win rate collapses across stage is the expected transitional-library shape, not a violation of the retired ten-preset doctrine curve — reported as directional confirmation, not a finding. No tuning work spawned.

✠ The marginalia

The night's watch — what ran while nobody looked
TickVerbOutcome
2026-08-17 13:12marchsuccess — shipped Phase 53c
2026-08-17 19:04marchsuccess — critique pass 27, no findings
2026-08-18 01:55marchsuccess — shipped Phase 53d
2026-08-18 07:11marchsuccess — no-op
2026-08-18 13:15marchsuccess — shipped Phase 53e
2026-08-18 19:03marchsuccess — shipped Phase 46a (design ruling)
2026-08-19 01:57marchsuccess — critique pass 28, no findings
2026-08-19 07:12marchcancelled — apt-mirror hang, see below
The measure — did the fighting change?

None filed tonight. The one operational irregularity this pulse surfaced (the apt-mirror hang) is a CI-reliability finding, not a gate/cadence mistuning — filed to plan/AUDIT.md per the standard breadth-failure rail instead of proposed as a phase candidate.

What is still unfinished
  • Build plan: 27 open phases, 0 blocked. Phase 46a's ruling unblocks

46b/46c; Phase 54 (route live combat through endCombat) is also open and independent.

  • plan/AUDIT.md: 44 open rows (82 logged; most closures are

resolved-in-place rather than moved to ## Done). Newest: tonight's apt-mirror-hang row.

  • plan/CRITIQUE.md: 20 open rows (44 logged). Last pass: 28

(2026-08-19, no new findings — the standing MED momentum-chain contrast row from pass 21 reconfirmed unchanged, not re-filed).

  • plan/PHASE_CANDIDATES.md: 37 open rows (45 logged).
  • No open triage:needs-user or loop:do issues.
  • Deploy: clean — HEAD 05c3ffdf (this digest's baseline commit) is

a critique/docs-only tick; no gated workflow triggered as of 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.