A story was written and cleared the same day

What changed

An attended /world-spec session (T present, 2026-09-17 20:55) wrote THE TALLY: T's own instruction was "delete the story overview and write the most emotionally damaging story for this game using the voice of Cormac McCarthy instead of my story." The session found that no shipped line needed rewriting — the Herald's mercy-line, the Gate-Clerk's dead office, the river-court reading a boy as a ledger line were already telling this story; the new story-bible.md just named what was already on the board, and proposed W-02 (the Capital's payoff, Phase 84) on top of it. The commit flagged one open question: did T's "all mentions and extrapolations" mean a narrow deletion (just the overview) or a wide one (every dialogue node and retired spec)? Less than four hours later, an attended session answered it directly: THE BLANK PAGE (2026-09-18 00:31) — "remove ALL law about what the story is... an unidentifiable X as the first/main character" — deleted story-bible.md and W-02 too, the same day they were written. content/story/README.md now states the clearing outright: no arc, no premise, no canon, no name or figure for the player. Shipped narrative (~186 dialogue nodes) stays live as legacy text, explicitly not canon. plan/2026-09-17-story-outline.prompt.md is the lift condition: a new story-overview.md, built event by event, when someone runs that session.

What changed

Both the playtest matrix and the CLI's --auto mode unconditionally accepted any capitulation (RELENT) offer — no automated run could ever fight through one, even with the enemy at single-digit HP. This silently converted near-certain kills into mercy endings, inflating the matrix's mercy share for every policy except mercy-seeker/chaos, and let The Incompleteness's impossible-stage ceiling probe leak through a mercy exit 5 times out of 6 instead of holding. Fixed by giving every sim policy its own capitulationChoice: 'accept' | 'continue' stance — only mercy-seeker (mercy is its identity) and chaos (the noise floor) accept; every other witness now plays through the offer toward its own win condition, per the "alt-wins compete on merit, none protected" doctrine. Landed alongside FLURRY (Phase 90), a new multi-hit enemy keyword ("clause by clause"), first carrier Guild Knife.

What changed

PR #324 refilled the phase queue and closed a stale ruling (axio-query now re-checks corpus freshness on every call instead of once). PR #325 — THE GROWTH FLOOR — gave the growth mandate its own tick budget and shipped small gaps directly: Phase 89 (die faces + HUD chrome get the art-direction-coherence pass), Phase 91 (amber-CI tick recovery — a deploy-URL comment floor), Phase 92 (a march job-ceiling decision: one phase per invocation, never chain), Phase 93 (card-base reconciliation — GameState.flags wired through initializeCombatEncounter, with a same-window follow-up fix stopping the dev combat sandbox from leaking real flags), Phase 94 (critique:drive's artifact wipe scoped to its own subpaths, not the whole tree), and Phase 95 (the combat primer now teaches the signature rune rail — one of the UI fresh-eyes six).

What changed

adjust-keywords pass 13 backfilled UNMOVED, a turn-shape face word that had printed on six vigil/apocrypha cards with zero atlas row and zero mobile glossary entry since it shipped — structurally invisible to the card-face-honesty guard because that guard can only flag words it already recognizes. adjust-npcs pass 12 staged the Village Healer and did hygiene on the Coastal-Village unstaged-NPC backlog. adjust-cards pass 13 fixed a stale library-header comment (said 128 cards, the tree has 130 — EVENTIDE's two carriers were never counted in). adjust-equipment pass 13 found zero-CREATE/UPDATE/REMOVE on the data itself but filed a real gap: consumables have no cantrip-style secondary effect or HP-conditional scaling, unlike the corpus's usual anti-hoarding levers — needs a new Consumable field plus engine wiring, so it's a PHASE_CANDIDATES.md row, not a solo ship. adjust-enemies pass 13 re-derived every structural signal fresh and found Phase 90's FLURRY already fully wired end-to-end — nothing left for the steward to do.

What changed

Session start flagged the standing baseline (3ed75185, reduced-nightly, 2026-09-17) stale by 5 mechanics-source commits. Re-measured this tick at f79207c9 (30 runs/cell, reduced-nightly). Stage win rates: early 97.2% (was 97.3%), mid 95.4% (was 96.8%), late 74.2% (was 80.6%), impossible 12.5% (was 35.0%). The late/impossible drop traces cleanly to the capitulation-stance fix above, not a content regression: at impossible stage, greedy/blind went from 26-of-30-capitulate + 4 defeat to 0 capitulate + 30 defeat against The Incompleteness — exactly the "ceiling probe now holds instead of leaking through a mercy exit" the fix's own commit message predicted. chaos and control-lock (the two policies whose capitulation stance didn't change) hold steady at 67% and 23% respectively. CQI stayed flat to slightly up at every stage (early 0.65, mid 0.69, late 0.72, impossible 0.74) — the fights read the same, they just resolve through combat more often now instead of through mercy.