✠ The Chronicle

✠ ENTRY XLIX

A quiet content-lifecycle night

cards, equipment, and enemies all reach pass 4 and all three come back zero-action — clean re-audits, not new work. critique logs its 34th pass with no findings. The one real change in the window is an owner-session PR (state-fixture screens for /critique and visual smoke). The nightly breadth check stays red a third consecutive dated digest on the same already-diagnosed regex bug. A fresh reduced-nightly measurement shows another large late/impossible swing since 2026-09-07 — directional only, not filed.

CONTENT

adjust-keywords pass 3 — zero-action re-audit

What changed

Full keyword-atlas sweep; the AMBUSH/FINALE second-carrier loop-call (open since pass 1) is now confirmed closed by pass 2's authored carriers — nothing new to ship this pass.

Why it changed

Standing rotation cadence; a clean re-audit that also closes out a previously-open loop-call is itself a signal worth logging.

commits fe49681e · 3a10366a

CONTENT

adjust-npcs pass 3 — zero-action re-audit

What changed

Re-ran the staging/dialogue-tree sweep; the unstaged-NPC and thin-map rows flagged since earlier passes are reconfirmed still open (no drift, no fix this pass).

Why it changed

Standing rotation cadence — the pass exists to keep the finding honest, not to force an unready fix.

commits ba524879 · 457d5d16

MECHANICS

critique pass 34 — no findings

What changed

Full external-observer pass over the live build; nothing new filed.

Why it changed

Standing rotation cadence.

commit 114653a6

CONTENT

adjust-cards pass 4 — zero-action re-audit

What changed

Near-duplicate and scale-ladder signals reconfirmed clean across the library.

Why it changed

Standing rotation cadence.

commits 3b092183 · a9590465

CONTENT

adjust-equipment pass 4 — zero-action re-audit

What changed

Dominated-relic and shop-coverage signals reconfirmed clean.

Why it changed

Standing rotation cadence.

commits 9a2bc248 · d0c1d3d2

CONTENT

adjust-enemies pass 4 — zero-action re-audit

What changed

Orphan/deck/portrait/VITAE/voice/loot signals across the roster all reconfirmed clean.

Why it changed

Standing rotation cadence.

commits 84be1db4 · e57ab0db

INFRA

Owner session: state-fixture screens for /critique and visual smoke (PR #291)

What changed

Five new arrival fixtures let /critique, verify:visual, and the hermetic Jest/Vitest suites boot the previously-unreachable state-gated screens (/dialogue, /village, /cutscene, /rest, /hazard, /blacksmith, /cache) cold, instead of hand-rolled createMapState + setState surgery per test.

Why it changed

A follow-up to #290's state-fixture registry — those seven screens could never be reached by URL alone, so critique and visual smoke were structurally blind to them until this PR wired arrival fixtures for each.

commits 99e637ca · eed · a · PR · 291

BALANCE

Baseline re-measured — directional stage read

What changed

Session start flagged the standing baseline (5ff070d7, reduced-nightly) stale by 6 mechanics-source commits. Re-measured via the reduced-nightly pass (30 runs/cell) at commit e57ab0db. Stage terminal win rates across the 144-cell matrix: early 97.3%, mid 97.0%, late 82.0%, impossible 8.7%. Terminal-outcome totals across all 4,320 runs: 3,012 victory, 735 mercy(capitulate), 20 concede, 553 defeat, 0 retreat.

Why it changed

This digest's own freshness gate exists so a balance question never gets answered against a stale engine, and six content-lifecycle commits landed since the last measurement.

Note: Late and impossible read notably different from the 2026-09-07 measurement (73.9%/35.4% → 82.0%/8.7%) — an 8pp late rise and a 27pp impossible drop, the second large single-seed swing between consecutive digests in a row. Per-enemy detail at late shows the spread is policy-shaped, not a flat drop: turtle/mercy-seeker policies sit well below the other six against every late-stage foe (13%-60%), while greedy/control-lock/aggro-brute clear 90%-100% across the board — consistent with the standing [HIGH] mid/late-equipment-progression gap already on record. Not cited as a regression or filed as a /deck-tuning candidate from here — measure and report only, per this skill's own rail — but two large consecutive single-seed swings on the same cells makes a confirming full 3-seed baseline:regen worth someone's attention before either reading gets treated as settled.

commits e57ab0db · baee · ee · this · c

✠ The marginalia

The night's watch — what ran while nobody looked
when (UTC)verboutcome
2026-09-07 18:33–19:22marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-07 20:28–20:38marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-07 22:27–22:36marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 01:03–01:08marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 02:36–03:12marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 04:01 (PR #291)owner sessionstate-fixture screens for critique + visual smoke
2026-09-08 04:33–04:40marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 06:44–06:59marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 08:36–08:41marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 10:30–10:33marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 12:40–12:59march → adjust-keywordssuccess — pass 3, zero-action, AMBUSH/FINALE loop-call closed
2026-09-08 14:32–14:37marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 16:33–16:38marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 18:35–18:40marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-08 20:28–20:38march → adjust-npcssuccess — pass 3, zero-action, unstaged/thin-map rows reconfirmed open
2026-09-08 22:27–22:28marchfailure — transient CI infra (ENOENT, Claude Code native binary not found at the runner's cached path); no repo-side cause, self-healed next tick
2026-09-09 01:02–01:17march → critiquesuccess — pass 34, no findings
2026-09-09 02:37–02:42marchsuccess, no-op
2026-09-09 04:33–04:59march → adjust-cardssuccess — pass 4, zero-action re-audit
2026-09-09 06:45–06:56march → adjust-equipmentsuccess — pass 4, zero-action re-audit
2026-09-09 08:35–08:46march → adjust-enemiessuccess — pass 4, zero-action re-audit

19 of 20 march runs succeeded; the one failure was a CI-infra blip (the action's own Claude Code binary went missing on the runner), not a repo defect — no commit, no retry loop, and the very next tick ran clean.

The measure — did the fighting change?

None from this digest's own meta-loop rail this window — the pulse shows a healthy content-lifecycle rotation (all five /adjust-* categories active, three now at pass 4) and no starved queue or mistuned gate signal. No /expand pass ran in this window.

What is still unfinished
  • Build plan (plan/steps/01_build_plan.md): 0 open phases ([ ]),

11 partial ([-]), 3 explicitly [skipped], 124 shipped through Phase 78.

  • plan/AUDIT.md: 67 rows pending (114 headers under "Pending" minus

47 resolved-but-unmoved [x] bookkeeping rows) — includes the updated breadth-check row above.

  • plan/CRITIQUE.md: 29 rows pending; last full pass 2026-09-09

(pass 34, 0 new findings).

  • plan/PHASE_CANDIDATES.md: 41 rows pending (unchanged — last

/expand pass was 2026-09-03, before this window opened).

  • plan/CONTENT_LEDGER.md: cards, equipment, enemies at pass count 4;

keywords, npcs at pass count 3 — every category active.

  • No open triage:needs-user or loop:do issues.
  • Deploy: clean — HEAD is a content/docs tick, no gated workflow

triggered.

  • Nightly breadth (e2e:minigames): RED, third consecutive dated

digest — see Needs you.

  • Measurement: was STALE at session start (baseline 5ff070d7, 6

mechanics-source commits behind); re-measured this tick via npm run baseline:regen -- --runs=30 --confidence=reduced-nightly → now FRESH at e57ab0db. See the [balance] card above.

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.