spaceship/core/Quests.gd

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#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
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extends RefCounted
# Forgejo #129 / #133: the quest chain.
#
# One place, in order, and nothing but data. GameState answers each goal and
# QuestDirector reads each line out; neither of them knows what the quests
# ARE, so adding one here is the whole job of adding one.
#
# Two rules the chain obeys, both learned from the game rather than chosen:
#
# 1. Nothing here may ask for something the player cannot yet reach. The
# sharp edge is RESEARCH POINTS - they come only from conquering a
# planet (GameState.mark_point_captured), so every node with a
# research_points cost sits after `conquest` below. Ore-only nodes -
# Shipyards, Logistics - may come before it.
# 2. A quest names ONE goal, and the brief says what it will take. Asking
# for a gas burner is asking for the Power Systems research too; that
# belongs in the sentence, not in a second entry, or the chain turns
# into a list of errands.
#
# The whole story turns on `mothership`: the fleet builds a transmitter,
# calls the World Ship, and hears nothing - not because the array is weak
# but because the breach put them further out than anyone has been. Every
# quest after it is a search.
# There is nobody left to talk to, so the quests are the ship talking to
# itself - the same voice the prologue ends on (IntroDirector.SHIP_LOG).
const SPEAKER: String = "KESTREL - LOG"
# Goal kinds. Each is one line in GameState.quest_progress().
const GOAL_RESOURCE: String = "resource"
const GOAL_BUILDING: String = "building"
const GOAL_FLEET_VESSEL: String = "fleet_vessel"
const GOAL_VESSEL_UNLOCKED: String = "vessel_unlocked"
const GOAL_EXPLORE: String = "explore"
const GOAL_PLANET_VISITS: String = "planet_visits"
const GOAL_PLANET_KINDS: String = "planet_kinds"
const GOAL_CONQUERED: String = "conquered"
#141, #142: the chain teaches research, and asks for the pile before the build Two gaps between the first quests, both of the same kind: a step the chain assumed rather than asked for. #142 - "collect 5 ore" was followed straight by "build the mothership", which costs twenty. The first thing the chain ever asked for was four times what it had just taught, with nothing in between saying so. A stockpile quest sits between them now. #141 - the crafter quest's brief said "spend ore on the Shipyards doctrine, then put a ship crafter down", which is two unrelated things off one line: open a menu the player has never opened, and place a structure. Researching Shipyards is its own quest now, and it is the one that says where the research tree lives. Every later quest that needs a doctrine still only mentions it in passing - once is enough. That needed a goal kind for researching a doctrine, which the model did not have. Both are pinned as properties rather than as positions in a list. The chain must ask for at least as much ore as the first structure it wants costs; and the first structure that is gated behind a doctrine must have that doctrine as a quest of its own. Only the first - demanding one per building would double the chain for no teaching. One thing that fell out of writing those: the pile is exactly the starting fleet's hold. An interceptor carries 20 and the mothership costs 20, and before the mothership exists there is nowhere to bank anything, so the hold is the only store there is. It fits with no slack at all, so there is now an assertion saying so - a pile larger than the hold would be a quest that cannot be finished, and nothing else would have caught it.
2026-08-28 15:47:38 +02:00
# #141: researching a doctrine, as a step of its own. The chain used to fold
# it into the brief of the thing it unlocks ("spend ore on Shipyards, then
# put a crafter down"), which asks the player to do two unrelated things -
# open a menu they have never opened, and place a structure - off one line.
const GOAL_RESEARCH: String = "research"
# #156: what is in the BANK, which is a different question from what the
# player can lay hands on. GOAL_RESOURCE counts the hold as well, and the
# hold is exactly what this quest is about being too small.
const GOAL_BANKED: String = "banked"
Implement #160, #161, #162, #163, #164 and #165 #162 - a single tap bought a research node outright. One physical tap arrives TWICE: Godot emulates a mouse button from every touch AND a touch from every mouse button, both project settings are on, and the menu's dispatcher routes InputEventScreenTouch and InputEventMouseButton alike to the tree. The second arrival found the node already selected and took itself for the confirming tap. Measured, not reasoned about - one tap produced two picks and two confirms. What is ignored is specifically the TWIN: same frame, same place, arriving through the other input kind. Deduping on frame and position alone also swallowed two genuine taps in one frame, which the test caught. #164 - the build menu predicted a caption's height from the COLUMN WIDTH: wide column, assume one line. Right for most names and wrong for the long ones, so "Spacial Workshop" wrapped onto the price beneath it. Captions are now measured against the font that draws them, and prices sized from PriceTag.wanted_height(), which existed for exactly this and was not being asked. Prices are set before anything is measured, because the old order laid out first and priced afterwards. The ship lab: its buy button is gone and a second tap on an option buys it, the same rule as the research tree; the explanation drops into the room that freed; research points move up into the resource table, where everything else being spent already is; the second row of options is placed from the first row's measured bottom rather than a constant; and the vessel strip is spaced from the panel's own width, so the eighth vessel is no longer half off the right edge. #160 - the quest panel was drawn BEFORE the sticks and the pivot pair, so they sat on top of it. Moved after them, under the narration banner. Its title rule ran straight through the close button; the header band is now as tall as that button. #161 - the prologue widens the formation into a freight convoy by writing over GameState.formation, and nothing put it back. The player flew the convoy's 600-unit spread for the rest of the game - a shape nobody chose, which reads as the fleet having drifted apart. #163 - a quest to station a vessel at the outpost, after the one that asks for the outpost. Building one and crewing it are different acts, and an empty outpost holds nothing. #165 - the gas bomb's blast and a vessel arriving fast both damage a structure. The blast used to stop politely at anything the player owned, which made a bomb dropped on a besieged mothership a free way to sweep the attackers off it. Collisions are caught on ENTRY, not on the 0.7s strike tick: a vessel is only moving fast for the instant it arrives, and a ship sent in at 900 did no damage at all until this moved. Docking is free - the fleet sits on its own mothership constantly to bank ore - and garrison vessels are exempt outright, because they launch from their outpost and re-dock with it at speed. The suite caught that one: the ram rule was destroying the garrison as it launched. Suite 153/153. Four tests changed because what they pinned moved: the lab's buy button, the intro's formation, the research tree's tap delivery, and the build menu's own preview. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 02:27:44 +02:00
# #163: a vessel actually STATIONED at an outpost. Building one and crewing it
# are two different acts - the chain teaches the second, because an empty
# outpost holds nothing and the player has no reason to discover the hangar
# that fills it.
const GOAL_GARRISONED: String = "garrisoned"
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
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#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
# #167: which quests carry the STORY, marked `"important": true` below.
#
# Most of the chain is teaching: bank some ore, place a crafter, open the
# hangar. A teaching quest handed to a player who has already done the thing
# has nothing to teach, and stopping the game twice to say so - once for the
# brief, once for the answer - is two dialogs about nothing. Those are
# skipped (GameState._advance_quests); they still land in the DONE list, so
# the player sees they were credited rather than lost.
#
# The ones marked here are different. They are the search for the World Ship
# - the wreck we start in, the call that gets no answer, the first world, the
# ground somebody else was already holding, the survey, the trail - and their
# lines are the plot rather than instructions. Those are read out whether the
# goal was already met or not, because skipping one drops a piece of the
# story on the floor.
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
const CHAIN: Array = [
{
"id": "first_ore",
"title": "SALVAGE",
"objective": "Break asteroids for 5 ore",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_RESOURCE, "resource": "ore", "amount": 5},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "The hull holds. The reactor runs. Everything else we had is on the far side of that hole. These rocks carry ore. Break some, and we can start again.",
"done": "Five ore in the hold. It is not much, but it is a start.",
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
#141, #142: the chain teaches research, and asks for the pile before the build Two gaps between the first quests, both of the same kind: a step the chain assumed rather than asked for. #142 - "collect 5 ore" was followed straight by "build the mothership", which costs twenty. The first thing the chain ever asked for was four times what it had just taught, with nothing in between saying so. A stockpile quest sits between them now. #141 - the crafter quest's brief said "spend ore on the Shipyards doctrine, then put a ship crafter down", which is two unrelated things off one line: open a menu the player has never opened, and place a structure. Researching Shipyards is its own quest now, and it is the one that says where the research tree lives. Every later quest that needs a doctrine still only mentions it in passing - once is enough. That needed a goal kind for researching a doctrine, which the model did not have. Both are pinned as properties rather than as positions in a list. The chain must ask for at least as much ore as the first structure it wants costs; and the first structure that is gated behind a doctrine must have that doctrine as a quest of its own. Only the first - demanding one per building would double the chain for no teaching. One thing that fell out of writing those: the pile is exactly the starting fleet's hold. An interceptor carries 20 and the mothership costs 20, and before the mothership exists there is nowhere to bank anything, so the hold is the only store there is. It fits with no slack at all, so there is now an assertion saying so - a pile larger than the hold would be a quest that cannot be finished, and nothing else would have caught it.
2026-08-28 15:47:38 +02:00
{
# #142: the gap this fills was a real one. "Collect 5 ore" was
# followed straight by "build the mothership", which costs twenty -
# so the first thing the chain ever asked for was four times what it
# had just taught, with nothing saying so.
"id": "stockpile",
"title": "THE PILE",
"objective": "Break asteroids for 20 ore",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_RESOURCE, "resource": "ore", "amount": 20},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Now do that four more times. Five ore builds nothing, and there is nothing else out here to spend it on yet.",
"done": "Twenty in the hold. Now we can build something.",
#141, #142: the chain teaches research, and asks for the pile before the build Two gaps between the first quests, both of the same kind: a step the chain assumed rather than asked for. #142 - "collect 5 ore" was followed straight by "build the mothership", which costs twenty. The first thing the chain ever asked for was four times what it had just taught, with nothing in between saying so. A stockpile quest sits between them now. #141 - the crafter quest's brief said "spend ore on the Shipyards doctrine, then put a ship crafter down", which is two unrelated things off one line: open a menu the player has never opened, and place a structure. Researching Shipyards is its own quest now, and it is the one that says where the research tree lives. Every later quest that needs a doctrine still only mentions it in passing - once is enough. That needed a goal kind for researching a doctrine, which the model did not have. Both are pinned as properties rather than as positions in a list. The chain must ask for at least as much ore as the first structure it wants costs; and the first structure that is gated behind a doctrine must have that doctrine as a quest of its own. Only the first - demanding one per building would double the chain for no teaching. One thing that fell out of writing those: the pile is exactly the starting fleet's hold. An interceptor carries 20 and the mothership costs 20, and before the mothership exists there is nowhere to bank anything, so the hold is the only store there is. It fits with no slack at all, so there is now an assertion saying so - a pile larger than the hold would be a quest that cannot be finished, and nothing else would have caught it.
2026-08-28 15:47:38 +02:00
},
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
{
"id": "mothership",
"title": "A PLACE TO STAND",
"objective": "Build the mothership",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "mothership"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "A ship is not a base. Build the mothership. It carries the only transmitter big enough to call the World Ship.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
# The hinge of the whole chain (#129): the answer to "we built the
# transmitter" is that the transmitter was never the problem.
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"done": "The mothership is online. Calling the World Ship. Calling. Nothing comes back, and the transmitter is not at fault. The breach threw us further out than any signal of ours will carry. So we find their trail ourselves, or we never find them.",
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "chart",
"title": "DEAD RECKONING",
"objective": "Chart 30 sectors",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_EXPLORE, "sectors": 30},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "So we search. Fly, and the map fills in behind us. Their course is somewhere in it.",
"done": "Thirty sectors charted. No sign of the World Ship, but the map behind us is no longer blank.",
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
#141, #142: the chain teaches research, and asks for the pile before the build Two gaps between the first quests, both of the same kind: a step the chain assumed rather than asked for. #142 - "collect 5 ore" was followed straight by "build the mothership", which costs twenty. The first thing the chain ever asked for was four times what it had just taught, with nothing in between saying so. A stockpile quest sits between them now. #141 - the crafter quest's brief said "spend ore on the Shipyards doctrine, then put a ship crafter down", which is two unrelated things off one line: open a menu the player has never opened, and place a structure. Researching Shipyards is its own quest now, and it is the one that says where the research tree lives. Every later quest that needs a doctrine still only mentions it in passing - once is enough. That needed a goal kind for researching a doctrine, which the model did not have. Both are pinned as properties rather than as positions in a list. The chain must ask for at least as much ore as the first structure it wants costs; and the first structure that is gated behind a doctrine must have that doctrine as a quest of its own. Only the first - demanding one per building would double the chain for no teaching. One thing that fell out of writing those: the pile is exactly the starting fleet's hold. An interceptor carries 20 and the mothership costs 20, and before the mothership exists there is nowhere to bank anything, so the hold is the only store there is. It fits with no slack at all, so there is now an assertion saying so - a pile larger than the hold would be a quest that cannot be finished, and nothing else would have caught it.
2026-08-28 15:47:38 +02:00
{
# #141: its own step, and the first time the chain sends anyone into
# the research tree at all - so the brief says where the tree IS.
# Every later quest that needs a doctrine only mentions it in
# passing, which is enough once the player has been there once.
"id": "shipyards",
"title": "SHIPYARDS",
"objective": "Research the Shipyards doctrine",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_RESEARCH, "node": "shipyards"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "One ship cannot chart a whole sky, and we have forgotten how to build more. The mothership holds the archive. Go aboard and research Shipyards.",
"done": "Shipyard plans recovered. There is more in that archive, if we go back for it.",
#141, #142: the chain teaches research, and asks for the pile before the build Two gaps between the first quests, both of the same kind: a step the chain assumed rather than asked for. #142 - "collect 5 ore" was followed straight by "build the mothership", which costs twenty. The first thing the chain ever asked for was four times what it had just taught, with nothing in between saying so. A stockpile quest sits between them now. #141 - the crafter quest's brief said "spend ore on the Shipyards doctrine, then put a ship crafter down", which is two unrelated things off one line: open a menu the player has never opened, and place a structure. Researching Shipyards is its own quest now, and it is the one that says where the research tree lives. Every later quest that needs a doctrine still only mentions it in passing - once is enough. That needed a goal kind for researching a doctrine, which the model did not have. Both are pinned as properties rather than as positions in a list. The chain must ask for at least as much ore as the first structure it wants costs; and the first structure that is gated behind a doctrine must have that doctrine as a quest of its own. Only the first - demanding one per building would double the chain for no teaching. One thing that fell out of writing those: the pile is exactly the starting fleet's hold. An interceptor carries 20 and the mothership costs 20, and before the mothership exists there is nowhere to bank anything, so the hold is the only store there is. It fits with no slack at all, so there is now an assertion saying so - a pile larger than the hold would be a quest that cannot be finished, and nothing else would have caught it.
2026-08-28 15:47:38 +02:00
},
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
{
"id": "crafter",
"title": "A YARD OF OUR OWN",
"objective": "Build a ship crafter",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "ship_crafter"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Now build a ship crafter. Ore goes in, ships come out. It is the only way this fleet grows past the one hull that came through the breach.",
"done": "The yard is running. We can build our own ships now.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "second_hull",
"title": "A SECOND HULL",
"objective": "Fly two vessels at once",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_FLEET_VESSEL, "vessel": "interceptor", "count": 2},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Order an interceptor at the yard and crew it. Two ships is not a fleet, but it is twice what we flew out of the breach with.",
"done": "Two ships in formation. It has been a long time since we flew with company.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "planetfall",
"title": "PLANETFALL",
"objective": "Land on a planet",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_PLANET_VISITS, "count": 1},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "There are worlds out here. Fly the fleet close to one and land on it. A surface holds more than all this empty dark.",
"done": "We are down on solid ground. Whatever else this place is, it is somewhere.",
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "conquest",
"title": "GROUND HELD",
"objective": "Take every capture point on one planet",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_CONQUERED, "count": 1},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Something reached this surface before us, and it is still holding it. Take every capture point on the planet. What we pull out of their camps is worth more than the ore.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
# Says out loud where research points come from, because nothing
# else in the game does.
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"done": "The planet is ours. Their machines gave us research data, the first we have had. Every doctrine worth having will cost some.",
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
# #156: the extractor is the first thing the chain asks for that
# cannot be paid for out of a single hold. An interceptor carries 20
# and the fleet is small; the mothership is where anything larger
# than one trip has to accumulate, and nothing had ever said so.
"id": "deposit",
"title": "THE HOLD IS SMALL",
"objective": "Bank 60 ore at the mothership",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BANKED, "resource": "ore", "amount": 60},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Each ship carries twenty units and no more, and we are going to need more than twenty. Fly what we have back to the mothership and unload it. What is stored there stays there.",
"done": "Sixty in the vault. A hold empties on the next trip out. A vault does not. Everything from here on depends on that.",
},
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
{
"id": "extractor",
"title": "STANDING MINE",
"objective": "Build an extractor on a planet",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "extractor"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Research Logistics, then place an extractor on a planet. It keeps digging whether we are standing over it or not.",
"done": "The extractor is digging. The ore will be waiting when we come back for it.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "gas",
"title": "THE HEAVY AIR",
"objective": "Bring back 25 gas",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_RESOURCE, "resource": "gas", "amount": 25},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "The striped worlds are full of gas, and gas is the only thing out here that burns. Take the fleet into one and fill the tanks.",
"done": "Twenty-five gas aboard. Now we need something that can burn it.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "hub",
"title": "FREIGHT",
"objective": "Build a transport hub",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "transport_hub"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Hauling every load ourselves is slow. Research Freight Handling and build a transport hub. Its transporters fly the routes without us.",
"done": "The hub runs its own traffic now. That frees us for other work.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "burner",
"title": "POWER",
"objective": "Build a gas burner",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "gas_burner"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Research Power Systems and build a gas burner. Gas in, energy out. The better weapons run on energy.",
"done": "The burner is lit. This fleet has power again for the first time since the breach.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "lab",
"title": "SHIP SCIENCE",
"objective": "Build a ship lab",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "ship_lab"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Research Vessel Science and build a ship lab. It makes the ships we fly better, and it opens designs we have never built.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
"done": "The lab is open.",
},
{
"id": "shield",
"title": "A NEW HULL",
"objective": "Unlock the shield vessel",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_VESSEL_UNLOCKED, "vessel": "shield"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "The archive holds a shield ship. Unlock it at the lab. So far the fleet has taken every hit on bare hull.",
"done": "The shield ship is unlocked. There is more than one design in that archive.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "outpost",
"title": "FORWARD BASES",
"objective": "Build an outpost",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "outpost"},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "We cannot be everywhere at once. Research Forward Bases and build an outpost. Ships stationed there hold ground we are not standing on.",
"done": "The outpost is up. That is one place we no longer have to fly back to.",
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
Implement #160, #161, #162, #163, #164 and #165 #162 - a single tap bought a research node outright. One physical tap arrives TWICE: Godot emulates a mouse button from every touch AND a touch from every mouse button, both project settings are on, and the menu's dispatcher routes InputEventScreenTouch and InputEventMouseButton alike to the tree. The second arrival found the node already selected and took itself for the confirming tap. Measured, not reasoned about - one tap produced two picks and two confirms. What is ignored is specifically the TWIN: same frame, same place, arriving through the other input kind. Deduping on frame and position alone also swallowed two genuine taps in one frame, which the test caught. #164 - the build menu predicted a caption's height from the COLUMN WIDTH: wide column, assume one line. Right for most names and wrong for the long ones, so "Spacial Workshop" wrapped onto the price beneath it. Captions are now measured against the font that draws them, and prices sized from PriceTag.wanted_height(), which existed for exactly this and was not being asked. Prices are set before anything is measured, because the old order laid out first and priced afterwards. The ship lab: its buy button is gone and a second tap on an option buys it, the same rule as the research tree; the explanation drops into the room that freed; research points move up into the resource table, where everything else being spent already is; the second row of options is placed from the first row's measured bottom rather than a constant; and the vessel strip is spaced from the panel's own width, so the eighth vessel is no longer half off the right edge. #160 - the quest panel was drawn BEFORE the sticks and the pivot pair, so they sat on top of it. Moved after them, under the narration banner. Its title rule ran straight through the close button; the header band is now as tall as that button. #161 - the prologue widens the formation into a freight convoy by writing over GameState.formation, and nothing put it back. The player flew the convoy's 600-unit spread for the rest of the game - a shape nobody chose, which reads as the fleet having drifted apart. #163 - a quest to station a vessel at the outpost, after the one that asks for the outpost. Building one and crewing it are different acts, and an empty outpost holds nothing. #165 - the gas bomb's blast and a vessel arriving fast both damage a structure. The blast used to stop politely at anything the player owned, which made a bomb dropped on a besieged mothership a free way to sweep the attackers off it. Collisions are caught on ENTRY, not on the 0.7s strike tick: a vessel is only moving fast for the instant it arrives, and a ship sent in at 900 did no damage at all until this moved. Docking is free - the fleet sits on its own mothership constantly to bank ore - and garrison vessels are exempt outright, because they launch from their outpost and re-dock with it at speed. The suite caught that one: the ram rule was destroying the garrison as it launched. Suite 153/153. Four tests changed because what they pinned moved: the lab's buy button, the intro's formation, the research tree's tap delivery, and the build menu's own preview. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 02:27:44 +02:00
{
"id": "garrison",
"title": "STANDING WATCH",
"objective": "Station a vessel at the outpost",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_GARRISONED, "count": 1},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "An empty outpost is only a building. Open its hangar and station a ship there. It will hold that ground whether we are there or not.",
"done": "The outpost has a crew. It watches that approach now, so we do not have to.",
Implement #160, #161, #162, #163, #164 and #165 #162 - a single tap bought a research node outright. One physical tap arrives TWICE: Godot emulates a mouse button from every touch AND a touch from every mouse button, both project settings are on, and the menu's dispatcher routes InputEventScreenTouch and InputEventMouseButton alike to the tree. The second arrival found the node already selected and took itself for the confirming tap. Measured, not reasoned about - one tap produced two picks and two confirms. What is ignored is specifically the TWIN: same frame, same place, arriving through the other input kind. Deduping on frame and position alone also swallowed two genuine taps in one frame, which the test caught. #164 - the build menu predicted a caption's height from the COLUMN WIDTH: wide column, assume one line. Right for most names and wrong for the long ones, so "Spacial Workshop" wrapped onto the price beneath it. Captions are now measured against the font that draws them, and prices sized from PriceTag.wanted_height(), which existed for exactly this and was not being asked. Prices are set before anything is measured, because the old order laid out first and priced afterwards. The ship lab: its buy button is gone and a second tap on an option buys it, the same rule as the research tree; the explanation drops into the room that freed; research points move up into the resource table, where everything else being spent already is; the second row of options is placed from the first row's measured bottom rather than a constant; and the vessel strip is spaced from the panel's own width, so the eighth vessel is no longer half off the right edge. #160 - the quest panel was drawn BEFORE the sticks and the pivot pair, so they sat on top of it. Moved after them, under the narration banner. Its title rule ran straight through the close button; the header band is now as tall as that button. #161 - the prologue widens the formation into a freight convoy by writing over GameState.formation, and nothing put it back. The player flew the convoy's 600-unit spread for the rest of the game - a shape nobody chose, which reads as the fleet having drifted apart. #163 - a quest to station a vessel at the outpost, after the one that asks for the outpost. Building one and crewing it are different acts, and an empty outpost holds nothing. #165 - the gas bomb's blast and a vessel arriving fast both damage a structure. The blast used to stop politely at anything the player owned, which made a bomb dropped on a besieged mothership a free way to sweep the attackers off it. Collisions are caught on ENTRY, not on the 0.7s strike tick: a vessel is only moving fast for the instant it arrives, and a ship sent in at 900 did no damage at all until this moved. Docking is free - the fleet sits on its own mothership constantly to bank ore - and garrison vessels are exempt outright, because they launch from their outpost and re-dock with it at speed. The suite caught that one: the ram rule was destroying the garrison as it launched. Suite 153/153. Four tests changed because what they pinned moved: the lab's buy button, the intro's formation, the research tree's tap delivery, and the build menu's own preview. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 02:27:44 +02:00
},
2026-09-04 15:56:07 +02:00
{
"id": "planet_scanner",
"title": "LISTENING POST",
"objective": "Build a planet scanner",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_BUILDING, "building": "planet_scanner"},
"brief": "Blind searching is wasting our reach. Research Deep-Space Scanning at the mothership, then build a planet scanner. Give it a world signature and it will put the nearest match on our map.",
"done": "The scanner is listening. Now we can choose where the search goes next.",
},
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
{
"id": "worlds",
"title": "THE SURVEY",
2026-09-04 15:56:07 +02:00
"objective": "Land on four different kinds of world",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_PLANET_KINDS, "count": 4},
"brief": "Rock, gas, the abandoned labs, and the lightless wells. Use the scanner and land on all four kinds of world. If the World Ship came this way, it passed something.",
"done": "Four kinds of world surveyed. No convoy—but their signatures resolve a fifth signal, hidden inside something alive.",
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
{
"id": "propulser",
"title": "A LONGER REACH",
"objective": "Build an Energy Propulser vessel",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_FLEET_VESSEL, "vessel": "distorder", "count": 1},
"brief": "The trail may run far beyond this cluster. Unlock an Energy Propulser at the ship lab, build one at the yard, and crew it. Its drive will let the whole fleet search faster.",
"done": "The Energy Propulser is in formation. We can cast the search wider now.",
},
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
{
"id": "trail",
"title": "THE TRAIL",
"objective": "Chart 150 sectors",
"goal": {"kind": GOAL_EXPLORE, "sectors": 150},
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
"brief": "Then we search wider. A hundred and fifty sectors, and every one of them looked at properly. They are out there somewhere.",
"done": "A hundred and fifty sectors charted, and still no trail. The search does not stop just because the list ran out.",
"important": true,
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
},
]
static func count() -> int:
return CHAIN.size()
static func at(index: int) -> Dictionary:
if index < 0 or index >= CHAIN.size():
return {}
return CHAIN[index]
#166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one. #166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice. #167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those - no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate them on it. #168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses. #169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make and used to build the world twice. #170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first. #171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way: nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a mouse. #172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing; a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it. #173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word. test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read. The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so. Full suite green at 154/154. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
# #167: whether a quest's lines are the story rather than instructions. Only
# these are said when the goal was already met the moment it was handed out.
static func is_important(quest: Dictionary) -> bool:
return bool(quest.get("important", false))
#129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore, the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an outpost, and a survey. The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted. Three pieces: Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys: nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief rather than split into an errand of its own. GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface is still finished after take-off. the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out. Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest finished underground is announced underground. The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses - the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself a reason to start briefing somebody.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
static func by_id(id: String) -> Dictionary:
for quest in CHAIN:
if String(quest.id) == id:
return quest
return {}