Two days, one governance rewrite, and a second continent: THE OPEN GATE…

What changed

T's attended 2026-08-28 session retires [needs-user-call] as a blocking state loop-wide — it becomes decide-and-ship with a [loop-call] residue row for after-the-fact review. LOCKED MECHANICS converts from owner-gate to loop stewardship (standing call: Conviction/ Surge/Dice all KEEP), the north-star's six open questions (Q-1..Q-6) are answered directly in plan/north-star-mork-borg.md, engine constants and art-origin questions open to the tuning loops, and content growth becomes a standing mandate via new skills/forge.md wired into /march step 3b on a 48h growth gate.

What changed

New travel MapEventKind + handler (the departed map's state is preserved, not discarded — WorldState.mapStates); a real createStartingWorld() catalogue replaces the empty-array no-op that made changeContinent structurally dead; doors at fv-10 → northern-forest and nf-10 → the caverns; GAME_STATE_VERSION 20→21 with a pinned migration. The Caverns ships as the northern continent's first map: 25 nodes / 10 columns, The Delver stages the previously-dangling gather-iron quest, terminal boss The Under-Gate.

What changed

Map 2 of the northern continent: 25 nodes / 10 columns (WALL / HIGH STREET / HARBOR lanes), 3 inns, 2 shops, 2 staged NPCs, boss The Harbormaster pinned L9 on a clean 3-step act ladder (fv-6=3 → nc-25=6 → ncy-25=9). Ships 9 new enemies in the same phase — the first fully-licensed portraits in the roster (game-icons.net silhouettes, CC BY 3.0, truthful provenance), draining most of Phase W5's roster-growth backlog. Five design calls made and filed to plan/AUDIT.md as loop-call residue (door placement, migration handling, quest-grant gating, enemy batch, boss ladder) — informational only, nothing blocking.

What changed

Full redesign, T's call after ratifying the direction by play: the side-rail face (sideways half-names, sticker glyphs on unrelated art) is retired for a codex-page layout — horizontal blackletter name band, a framed art plate behind a hairline rule (text never fights art), a bottom ledger with FREE glyph, stance die cube, keyword and value. FaceScrim, the art tint wash, and the radial glyph backdrop are deleted along with their hex-literal debt. All face instances (hand, staged, drag ghost, inspect, rewards) share one component.

What changed

V4 delivers four more Doré plates (charon-crossing, the-pit, ludgate-hill, wentworth-street) via a licence-checking acquisition script that refuses anything not PD/CC0 — maps/ is now the one asset category with zero UNRESOLVED licenses. V5 generalizes the pattern into a reusable ScreenBg art slot (dim + vignette, opacity pinned ≤0.25, no blur) and wires it into the event, labyrinth, and combat screens.

What changed

Momentum-chip empty state gets real contrast; the exploration legend un-clips from the pannable map canvas onto a viewport-fixed overlay; the hub's two disagreeing node counts collapse to one source of truth; six inactive screens (blacksmith, cache, cutscene, dialogue, rest, village) trade a blank view for a house-voice empty state and a ScreenBg plate each (art keys 3→9); the combat corner medallion stops occluding the leftmost hand card's touch target. Visual smoke baselines — stale since PR #193 — are refreshed in the same commit, which is why this window's screenshot diff touches all seven baseline screens even though most of the pixel delta is catch-up, not new work.

What changed

Phase 71 converts the one-off Doré acquisition into a repeatable ingest script (grade → resize → WebP + provenance) and found a bigger problem while at it: 35 of 36 unprocessed raster stragglers had no license on record at all, now flagged UNRESOLVED rather than silently unlicensed. Phase 72 widens the CI harness allowlist (76→130 entries) so attended and unattended ticks stop prompt-walling on the commands the skills actually run. Phase 73 ships a generate(spec) -> image adapter (hosted gpt-image-2, Option A per T's routing call) with a deterministic prompt compiler and the same post-process/provenance pipeline an acquisition gets — the generate leg is inert without an API key, labelled as such in its own header.

What changed

Phase 74 promotes plan/north-star-mork-borg.md's ratified §2 into spec 34 §2.5 (the Mörk Borg delivery register) rather than leaving it living only in a plan file. Phase 75 sweeps every shipped player-facing string into the ratified register: a new 20-word-ceiling + no-semicolons rule in check-prose.mjs, made field-aware so it reaches narration without touching rules text, closing 105 findings (46 long sentences, 59 semicolons) across 9 files to zero.

What changed

The continent playtest (a real Playwright walk that proved W1/W2 worked) caught a real defect: mobile saves are explicit, and the new travel interceptor never called save() — a map crossing survived only until the app closed. Now checkpoints after the arrival toast, same as rest/combat/cache/blacksmith; a regression pins adapter.saveCount.

What changed

User report: a crash after accepting a post-combat card reward. Could not reproduce on the current web build after driving the full accept flow end to end — but the hunt found the real bug: the e2e harness's aftermath walk never tapped an offer tile, so the accept path (claimCombatRewardAction mutating the player mid-panel) had zero coverage across every prior "live" run. The walk now rides preview → confirm → take on every won fight, with a PRESET= knob so a fresh level-1 save can reach a real victory in CI.