The extractor is the first thing the chain asks for that cannot be paid for
out of a single hold. Every hull carries twenty and the fleet is small; the
mothership is where anything larger than one trip has to accumulate, and
nothing in the game had ever said so.
A deposit quest sits before it now, asking for sixty ore BANKED - which is
a different question from the one GOAL_RESOURCE answers, since that counts
the hold too, and the hold being too small is the whole point. So it needed
a goal kind of its own.
Sixty is three full holds, so it cannot be satisfied by accident on the way
past, and it leaves enough behind to actually buy the extractor afterwards.
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.
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.
