Hearthvale

An original cozy farming sim built as a stylized 3D "living diorama" in Three.js. Design contract (art direction, scope, debug API): DESIGN.md — read it first.

Run

npm install
npm run dev          # http://127.0.0.1:5173  (try /?demo=farm-morning)
npm run typecheck    # tsc --noEmit (strict)
npm run lint         # architecture rule: no imports between sibling systems
npm test             # headless smoke test: boots the game, exercises every __game API + the farming loop,
                     #   fails on page/console errors or a blown render budget
npm run check        # typecheck + lint + test
npm run build        # typecheck + lint + production bundle in dist/ (three.js in its own vendor chunk)
npm run shot -- --url "?demo=farm-evening" --out shots/evening.png
sh scripts/critic-shots.sh  # re-capture the critic shot list into shots/r3/set (+ perf per shot)
sh scripts/perf-shot.sh "?demo=town-evening" shots/t.png   # shot + per-system perf table
npm run perf         # pillar 14: every demo at 2560x1440 high, 3 s warmup + 8 s → avg fps / p95 / p99 / draws / tris,
                     #   shots/perf/latest.json + history.jsonl, FAIL (<60 fps or p99>25 ms) / REGR flags
                     #   (--demos a,b · --filter re · --profile 15 · --eval "<js>" A/B · --strict · see scripts/perf.mjs)
node scripts/matbench.mjs --demos beach-sunset --eval "$(cat v.js)"   # shader A/B: renders only the named meshes
                     #   (default terrain chunks; --names "terrain-chunk|water", --names . --sys for per-system main-pass
                     #   cost), configs interleaved, 1-px readback per sample: resolves ±0.2 ms on a shared GPU
node scripts/abshot.mjs --url "?demo=snow-day" --eval "$(cat v.js)" --out shots/ab/snow   # same frozen frame per
                     #   config + pixel diff vs base (prove a perf change is invisible)
node scripts/framebench.mjs --demos mine-lava,lantern-festival-valley   # matbench's min-of-samples on the WHOLE frame
                     #   (shadows + main + GTAO + bloom + SMAA + tilt + grade): built-in noAO / noBloom / noSMAA / noTilt /
                     #   noShadow costs, --eval configs, --params for page-level switches

Controls: WASD / arrows move (Shift runs) · left click / C / Space use tool · right click / X / F interact · 1–0 toolbar · E inventory · Esc menu.

Architecture

src/
  main.ts                bootstrap only (creates Game, installs debug API, applies URL params)
  core/
    game.ts              Game context: engine services + SYSTEMS registry + typed game.services + fixed-step loop
    system.ts            System interface (init / fixedUpdate / update / onMapChange / save / load)
    events.ts            typed EventBus + GameEvents map (extend via declaration merging)
    time.ts              Calendar: 10 game-min per 7 real s, 6:00→26:00, 28-day seasons, weather
    input.ts             keyboard/mouse → actions, move axis, toolbar hotkeys
    save.ts              SaveManager: register(key, {save, load}); localStorage slots
    rng.ts, noise.ts     seeded RNG (mulberry32), hashes, simplex + tileable value noise
    debug.ts, demos.ts   window.__game API, URL params, canned beauty scenes
  render/
    renderer.ts          WebGLRenderer (ACES, sRGB, PCF soft shadows) + CameraRig (35° FOV, pitched, smooth follow)
                         + per-system draw/triangle probe → __game.info().perf.bySystem
    post.ts              EffectComposer: GTAO → Bloom (threshold 0.92, emissive-only) → Output → SMAA → tilt-shift → grade
                         (film grain luminance-weighted, off at medium / low)
    lighting.ts          DayNight: sun/moon, hemi, bounce, fog, sky dome, PMREM IBL, exposure + grade keyed by hour/season/
                         weather; shadow frustum fitted to the view footprint; lamps dimmed over snow
    textures.ts          procedural texture library (index) → tex/{core,ground,stone,wood,foliage,fx}.ts
    materials.ts         shared material library (+ nightGlow emissives, roofTile, paperLantern)
    wind.ts, worldfx.ts, patch.ts, uniforms.ts, particles.ts (smoke, ambience, bees, bursts, fire + embers),
                         precipitation.ts (2-layer hairline rain, splashes, snow), foliage.ts
    shaders/noise.ts     GLSL hash/value noise/fbm/cloud-shadow + hvMeadowVar (8–12 m hue/value variation)
  world/
    tiles.ts, map.ts     TileGrid + GameMap (warps, title) + World (map registry / loader)
    terrain.ts           chunked heightfield + splat (path/tilled/wet/sand) + ground-cover texture (clover/moss/
                         trampled/contact AO) shader; half-res shadow-proxy chunks; optional cobble path texture
    water.ts             Fresnel sky + bank reflection, depth absorption, broken animated shore foam, ice
    grass.ts             chunked instanced grass: 12 m full (3-seg) / 22 m 40 % (1-seg) / fade-out LOD
    geom.ts              roundedBox, bevelCylinder, lumpySphere, AO baking, MeshBuilder (+ material aliases), mergeStatic
    farm/                index.ts (assembly) · paint.ts (shape, splat + cover masks, grass density) ·
                         layout.ts (structures, vignettes + contact AO, trees, pond/cliff dressing) ·
                         overgrowth.ts (seeded Poisson-disk debris: ~650 clearable weeds/stones/sticks/stumps/logs/bushes
                         in clumps + a ~r 0.7 m ground-cover layer: clover, daisies, buttercups, leaf litter, ferns)
    town/                index.ts (map assembly, river, batched props) · layout.ts (buildings, streets, props, SPOTS) ·
                         buildings.ts (forge, inn, clinic, schoolhouse, cottages, bridges, stalls…) · pathfind.ts (A*)
    props/               instanced.ts (BatchPool/InstancedSet) · trees.ts · nature.ts (registry only) ·
                         rocks.ts (faceted, mossy, 3 tints) · debris.ts (chunky sticks, branches, stumps, logs, leaves) ·
                         flora.ts (weeds, ferns, bushes, flowers, reeds, ground cover) · structures.ts · farmkit.ts ·
                         homestead.ts · townkit.ts (townhouses, hall with lit interior cards, fountain, stalls, café,
                         flower cart) · festival.ts (catenary bunting, lantern poles, maypole, feast table, braziers) ·
                         crops.ts · soil.ts (wet mask, winter snow-in-furrows + husks) · decals.ts
  entities/              player.ts (chibi farmer), villager.ts (NPC rig: walk / idle / talk), critters.ts
  ui/                    hud.ts + hud.css (clock dial, toolbar, energy/health, toasts, fade, banner, screen router, focus nav,
                         gamepad) · kit.ts (Screen base, frames, tooltip, focus) · ui.css (all screens; UI zoomed to the
                         window via --uiz) · title.ts · inventory.ts (drag & drop, detail card) · shop.ts (per-keeper stock) ·
                         shop.ts also hosts Odessa's forge "Tool upgrades" shelf (next tier of hoe / can / pick for gold + 5 ore) · toolinfo.ts (tool tiers: metal pips, what each tier does, forge ladder; shown on tooltips + the backpack card) ·
                         crafting.ts (iso placement preview, craft payoff → Backpack tab) · placement.ts (in-world ghost:
                         real colours + pulsing outline, dashed reach tiles, red ✕ where blocked) · dayend.ts + dayend-art.ts
                         (painted night valley, quiet-day vignette; `ui=dayend:quiet`) · mapscreen.ts + mapart.ts (watercolour
                         valley laid out like the warps — mine north of the farm, Cindergrove + falls past its south gate, road east to the square and on to the beach pier: paper grain, washes, fields, Poisson woods, villager heads, season palettes) ·
                         settings.ts (quality + live fps, fullscreen, frame limit 30/60/vsync, FPS chip, volumes, UI size, reduce
                         motion, 24h clock, key rebinding) · pause.ts (+ save slots with real world snapshots — a dark frame (overnight
                         fade) is skipped and re-grabbed once the morning is on screen — overwrite / delete confirms) · newgame.ts
                         (New Journal: in-world character creator — name, farm, look via the co-op profile, six Quick looks, pet,
                         journal slot) · profile.ts (journal: name / farm / pet / slot, saved per slot) · menutabs.ts (one
                         fixed 1140×690 game-menu frame; tab swaps cross-fade the page only) · `place:<item>` panel · icons.ts (procedural SVG item icons; `registerItemIcon` for other teams) · itemtip.ts ·
                         demo-kit.ts (stocks the backpack for ui-* demos) · dialogue.ts · portraits.ts · fishing.ts · journal*
  systems/               economy (gold), energy, season, weather, inventory, farming, shipping, critters, npcs, warps,
                         audio, sleep (end of day / pass out), relationships, fishing*, mining*, crafting, quests
                         (* typed stubs: state + events + service, ready for their teams) — see systems/README.md
  data/                  crops.ts, items.ts, npcs.ts (villagers + festival-goers), fish.ts, recipes.ts, bundles.ts,
                         farm-layout.ts, town-layout.ts (incl. FESTIVAL layout)
scripts/shot.mjs         headless screenshot harness

Rules of the road

• Siblings talk through game.events (typed) or game.services (typed via declaration merging) — never by importing each other (npm run lint enforces it).
• World generation uses game.rng.fork('<label>') so content is deterministic per seed.
• Outdoor materials: applyWorldFx(mat); anything that should sway: applyWind(mat, …) and set mesh.customDepthMaterial = windDepthMaterial(sameOpts) so its shadow sways too.
• Anything glowing at night: use materials.get('glass' | 'lampGlow') or push to nightGlow; practical lights via game.lighting.addNightLight(light, maxIntensity).

Adding a system

// src/systems/farming.ts
import type { System } from '../core/system';
import type { Game } from '../core/game';

declare module '../core/events' {
  interface GameEvents { 'crop:harvested': { cropId: string; x: number; z: number } }
}

export class FarmingSystem implements System {
  readonly name = 'farming';
  init(game: Game) {
    game.events.on('player:use', ({ x, z }) => { /* hoe / water / plant on tile (x,z) */ });
    game.events.on('day:start', () => { /* grow crops */ });
  }
  save() { return {}; }
  load(_data: unknown) {}
}

Then add one line to SYSTEMS in src/core/game.ts: () => new FarmingSystem(),

Publishing an API for other systems (no imports needed on the consumer side):

declare module '../core/game' { interface GameServices { inventory: InventoryApi } }
game.provide('inventory', this);                 // producer
game.services.inventory?.add('parsnip', 3);      // consumer

Useful hooks for gameplay teams:

• Maps expose grid (TileGrid), terrain, plots (named farm rects), poi (ambient-life anchors), clearGroundCover(x, z); grid.removeObject(x, z) removes debris visuals via onRemove.
• Farming events: item:use → till / water / plant / scythe / pickaxe / axe; day:start grows watered crops; crops:grow (debug) advances all crops; demo:stage with showcase: ['field'] plants the beauty-shot field.
• Player: game.player.facingTile(), game.player.swing(), game.player.controllable.
• Camera: game.rc.rig (target, pitch, yaw, distance, addShake()).
• UI: game.hud.registerPanel('inventory', { open, close }); ui:open events route to it. __game.openUI(name) logs a console error when no panel is registered (the shot harness and smoke test surface it).

Debug API & URL params

window.__game: setTime(h), setDay(d), setSeason(s), setWeather(w), teleport(map,x,z), facing(dir), openUI(name), give(item,qty), setGold(n), setEnergy(n), setHealth(n), grow(days), demo(name), ready(), pause(bool), plus quality(q), camera({yaw,pitch,distance,offsetX,offsetZ}), step(frames), save/load(slot), info(), demos. info().perf reports draw calls / triangles for the last frame (all passes) against the budget (≤ 300 draw calls, ≤ 1.5 M triangles); scripts/shot.mjs prints a warning when a shot exceeds it. It also carries lights (point lights in the scene / handed to the renderer) and adaptive (governor state).

Render-engine perf rules (pillar 14, src/render/): BatchedMesh keeps a draw list per camera and only re-uploads it when it changes (batching.ts); at most preset.pointLights point lights (high: 8) shade each frame, the most important in view, cross-faded, constant count so no recompiles (lightbudget.ts); objects whose shaders aren't compiled yet are held back a frame or two and compiled off-thread (shadergate.ts), compiled programs are never evicted, map warps compile behind the fade; GTAO runs at half res; pausing menus refresh the world at 20 Hz; the adaptive governor (governor.ts) sheds GTAO → bloom → shadow res → render scale when the 1 s average runs over 16.7 ms and restores them with back-off (off under automation; ?adaptive=1|0 to force); a step that bought < 4 % (AO / shadow res on a fill-bound frame) is followed by the next one after a single short window, so a fill-bound scene reaches render scale 0.85 in ~12 s instead of ~17 s. Shader rule: pay for a layer only where its weight is > 0 (if (w > 0.0) around noise / taps; taps inside such a branch use textureGrad with derivatives taken outside it). Terrain chunks draw after the other default-order opaques (renderOrder 0.5): rocks, buildings, grass and props that cover the ground hide its shader instead of overdrawing it; an opaque decal on the ground must write depth (polygonOffset) or take renderOrder >= 1. The static sun-shadow cache (shadowcache.ts) rebuilds over 3 frames into a back buffer when the cache can wait (the 2 s safety timer, a caster that settled; it keeps drawing with the moving casters until baked), one triangle-balanced slice of the still casters per frame; a shadow-camera step, map realloc or a baked caster that moved / vanished still refreshes at once (?shadowsplit=1 = old one-frame refresh). MeshBuilder parts under 7.5 cm (moss, petals, beads, rivets) merge after the larger parts of their material and depth-only passes (sun shadow, GTAO G-buffer) draw only the larger prefix (geom.ts DETAIL_R, userData.shadowCount; ?detailr=0 = off). Water (perf r17): solid winter ice skips the open-water colour it fully replaces and runs its crack Voronoi only on the cracks' runs; open water takes a forward 2e wave difference (world/water.ts, ?waterfast=0 = old shader). The beach ocean's swash / breaker phase noise and kelp-bed warp are per vertex on the 0.5 m near sheet (?oceanvn=0). Its deep occluder (perf r23, ?oceandeep=0) is kept: hiding it in-page costs beach-sunset +1.2 ms of main pass (matbench p20, the sea bed's sand shading comes back under the opaque deep water) and is neutral (-0.1) at the coop-fishing lens (perf g20; page-to-page ?oceandeep=0 runs differ by more than that on this machine). The open sea has no dominant term left: the wave-normal gradient taps are 0.3-0.8 ms, whitecaps / kelp / swash-front beads / glints <= 0.13 ms each. Rain / snow quads that are inactive or faded out at the lens are clipped in the vertex shader. Mine (perf r20): the lava band's scorch / ash fbms (three coarse octaves) and crazing mask are per vertex on the cave shell's 0.2 m grid; fields that place thin crack / joint lines stay per pixel (world/mine/cave.ts HV_CAVE_VN, ?cavevn=0 = old shader). The lava plane itself measures ~0 ms in matbench (mine-lava); the shell is the mine's main-pass cost. Ground light pools (props/decals.ts) are one merged mesh per map (town at night 8 draws -> 1). Ambient critters (perf g22, systems/critters.ts): every butterfly / songbird / cat / chicken part draws from two BatchedMeshes (shadow casters and the rest) fed each frame from the hidden rigs' world matrices, instead of one draw per part per pass (farm-morning 236 -> 211 draws, farm-fall 229 -> 204, coop-farm peak 280 -> 256; abprof p20 frame -0.5 ms farm-morning, -0.4 farm-fall; abshot farm-morning mean diff 0.000/255; ?critterbatch=0 = one mesh per part). Measure shader changes with scripts/matbench.mjs --names <tag> (isolated, min / p20 of interleaved samples) and prove them with scripts/abshot.mjs: wall-clock npm run perf on this shared machine (load 100-400 on 18 cores) cannot resolve a 10 % change. Shadow proxies (perf r22): an InstancedPart with shadowOnly: true draws only in the sun's shadow pass (its colour twin sets castShadow: false; render/batching.ts zeroes it in camera passes). The forest giants and shrubs cast from a twin built off a clone of the same RNG state with every other trunk ring / root side and icosphere detail 0 under the canopy puffs, so every proxy vertex lies on the colour mesh. noAO: true keeps a part out of the GTAO G-buffer (winter berries, stalks); the giants' finest winter whips are detail; snow collars are one batched geometry per tree (?forestlod=0 = all off).

URL: ?demo=farm-morning, ?map=farm&x=30&z=20&time=18.5&season=fall&weather=rain&day=3&gold=900&facing=up&pause=1, &ui=inventory, &quality=low|medium|high|ultra, &hud=0 (hide HUD), &cam=yaw,pitch,dist[,offX,offZ], &seed=abc, &notitle=1 (accepted; the title screen is a UI-team deliverable).

Demos: farm-morning, farm-noon, farm-evening, farm-night, farm-fall, farm-winter, farm-rain, farm-pond, farm-field, winter-night (+ DESIGN names town-evening, beach-sunset, forest-rain, mine, festival, which stage on the farm until those maps exist). UI screens: ui-title, ui-title-continue (a returning player: Continue is the green hero), ui-hud (toasts), ui-inventory, ui-shop, ui-shop-smith, ui-forge (Odessa's tool upgrades with a purse that can pay), ui-shop-carpenter, ui-crafting, ui-placement (in-world ghost), ui-dayend (dusk farm behind the ledger, lines tick + hop into the crate, season-so-far strip; ui=dayend:big = a 20-kind bin in two columns), ui-dayend-quiet (nothing shipped), ui-sleep (the real night: stocked bin → bed → payout → ledger over the dusk grab of the farm; shoot with --wait 5500), ui-map, ui-settings, ui-pause, ui-saves, ui-icons (item almanac), ui-newgame (New Journal creator; ui=newgame:demo pre-filled; a villager's / the shop's name is refused), ui-hud-low (both tubes low: % chips, red/amber rim pulse, red edge vignette, selected-item banner held; any demo takes &energy=0.1&health=0.2), ui-coop (co-op lobby from the title) — or ?demo=<any>&ui=<screen>[:arg] (e.g. ui=shop:odessa, ui=saves:save).

Screenshots

node scripts/shot.mjs --url "?demo=farm-morning" --out shots/farm-morning.png [--w 1920 --h 1080] [--wait 1500]
node scripts/shot.mjs --url "?demo=farm-night" --out shots/night.png --frames 6 --every 250    # sequence → night_000.png …
node scripts/shot.mjs --url "?time=10" --out shots/walk.png --hold "KeyD:800,KeyS:400"        # hold keys before capture
node scripts/shot.mjs --url "?demo=farm-field" --out shots/x.png --eval "__game.setTime(19)"   # run JS after ready

Each run starts its own Vite server on a free port (parallel-safe), uses headless Chromium with GPU (ANGLE/Metal) and falls back to SwiftShader, awaits __game.ready(), prints console errors and exits non-zero on page errors. SHOT_VERBOSE=1 echoes page logs. Shots go in shots/ (gitignored).

Audio

Fully procedural WebAudio, no files: src/audio/ is the engine (mixer + generated-IR convolution reverbs + music-bus EQ + a glue compressor on the score only + master limiter, an AudioWorklet sidechain, composer, synthesised instruments, ambience beds, birdsong syllable banks, SFX library) and src/systems/audio.ts adapts it to game events.

• The score (src/audio/themes.ts): every song has a hand-written tune — scale degrees + rhythm per bar, an anacrusis into each A, an alternate final cadence — restated literally whenever A comes round, so the player learns it. src/audio/composer.ts arranges it: roman-numeral harmony with voice-led voicings, per-bar figuration variants, a fill every 4th bar (bass pickup runs, anticipations), drum fills into the final A, a stop-time (or 3/4 "breath") bar before B, section crescendi, a key lift in the title theme. The day seed only varies figuration and humanisation, never the tune. Songs run intro · A · A · B · A · C (a bridge in a new harmonic area, often handed to another voice) · A · outro, 2–3 minutes each; the counter-line answers the tune (it moves on the beats where the melody holds or rests, in contrary motion) and 'always' pads sit out the first A and thin to two voices in the later ones. Three songs per season (themes.ts + src/audio/songbook.ts), rotated by select.ts playlists (farm:<season>: day-seeded, never the same opener two days running, never the same song twice in a row): spring — First Furrow (flute + kalimba, 4/4), Clover Lane (kalimba jig, 6/8), Apple Blossom Waltz (ocarina, 3/4); summer — Long Light (marimba + nylon guitar), Porch Swing (fiddle waltz), Lemonade Afternoon (bossa nylon-guitar lead); fall — Amber Waltz (clarinet, cello bridge), Cider & Candle (cello hymn, 4/4), Woodsmoke (oboe, 6/8); winter — Hush of Snow (music box), Frostglass (celesta + harp rolls, bell bridge), Hearthside (low flute over a music-box figure, 6/8). Nights (night:<season>): Lamplight, Dew at Dusk, Firefly Meadow (summer: vibraphone over fingerpicked nylon guitar, a lydian II, flute bridge), Owl Hour, Snowlight Lullaby. Town (town:<season>, src/audio/songbook-town.ts): Market Morning (ocarina + pizzicato), Bunting & Bread (tin whistle over ukulele strums, spring / summer), Lamplighter's Waltz (accordion musette, fall / winter) and Market Morning (Frost) (celesta, sleigh bells, winter); the square's evening (town:eve, 17:30–20:00) rotates the inn's tune with the waltz. Rainy days (rain:<season>, indoors too): Window Weather (lo-fi piano), Gutter Song (vibraphone over fingerpicked nylon guitar, spring / summer showers), Grey Lantern (felt-piano waltz with a cello, fall / winter). Plus beach (steel pan + ukulele), forest (dorian whistle + harp, 6/8), inn (swing vibraphone over Rhodes comp), mine / mine-ice / mine-lava (by floor band), title, and the festivals — each with its own tune: the Lantern Jig (generic festival, 6/8 fiddle), Ribbon Parade (Blossom Parade: a lydian polka, harp + ukulele off-beats), Harvest Reel (Harvest Fair: a D-dorian reel in 4/4 with its own hook, guitar chop, bodhrán), Lanterns on the Tide, Starfall Carol. Comping varies per bar (3–4 rhythm variants per pattern, the phrase's last bar pushes, ghost notes) and the voicing window climbs through inversions over each phrase.
• The event score (src/audio/songbook-events.ts): heart events and story scenes get their own cue instead of the square's music — Kindling (tender: felt piano over a rolled harp, cello on the return), Tiptoe (playful: staccato clarinet, pizzicato off-beats, glockenspiel wink, a comic button ending), The Empty Chair (wistful: a D-minor fiddle air), Lantern Dark (mystery: celesta in D lydian, the I↔II sway, a borrowed bVImaj7) and Glimmer & Co. (sly: an A-minor habanera, clarinet with chromatic sidesteps, tresillo bass, the accordion turning on the charm) and Lanterns Relit (a 3/4 fiddle hymn for the Lantern Hall room restorations and the town turning Glimmer away, lifted a whole step into its last A with hand bells on the tune). eventCue() maps the 20 heart events and the hall / Glimmer / restoration scenes, and any new event by a vote over its lines' moods. npc:event / cutscene:start swap in the cue with a quick fade and the place's music returns at the phrase end after …:end; a cutscene's own cue: 'music' still wins; co-op farmhands spectating the host's heart event hear the same cue (the host's 'v.e' net message). No now-playing card over the actors. Hear it: ?demo=audio-event&event=june-2 or &cue=event-sly; ?demo=town-heart-event&event=<id> scores the staged event too.
• Round 12 (critic r5 fixes): one audio graph — the mine / combat cues (world/mine/sfx.ts) no longer open a second AudioContext of oscillator beeps: they voice sfx.ts designs through the audio hub (src/audio/hub.ts) at the world position they happen at (limiter, sidechain, cave reverb, voice budget, volume / mute). Each blow is one voice per monster kind (hit:slime squelch / burst, hit:crab shell clank / crack, hit:bat screech + wing flurry, hit:wisp static zap / glass spray, hit:imp ember hiss; level bit 0 = crit ring, ≥ 2 = the kill), a 3-monster sweep collapses into one voice (+1.5 dB per extra target), and the swing / pick strike no longer play twice; gem, lift, sizzle, fireball, parry, mine:reveal, passout are new designs. Animal calls and the fishing kit borrow the same context and SFX bus (the fishing kit's private surf bed is gone — the ambience owns the beach). Co-op partners' sword arcs and blows are positional (--coop checks 12 tiles ≥ 5 dB under 1 tile). Demo: ?demo=audio-mine&fight=1[&floor=14]. Bass: articulation is absolute (sustained basses tie over by 30 ms, a repeated pitch lifts for 50 ms, plucks leave 40 ms) and the soft bass releases over 0.12–0.38 s with a gentler sink — the critic's BASS-HOLE rule (50–220 Hz falling > 10 dB in the 300 ms before a downbeat) runs on every theme render. Identity: openings re-harmonised (melody-first spring and town-3, a mixolydian vamp into summer, a borrowed iv over a tonic pedal in Clover Lane, iii7 into Gutter Song, cadential 6/4 into Starfall ...), forms varied (AABA with a key lift, ABAB', through-composed ABCA, 0 / 1 / 4-bar intros), the title rebuilt round a two-bar hook ('1 2 3 5.. 3 2', eighth-note motion, IV/5 pedal, bVII) that returns as a leitmotif in spring's B and the town's bridge, Dew at Dusk rewritten as a stepwise line with 9-8 / 4-3 suspensions; the compose critic prints every song's opening and fails SAME-OPENING within a playlist or more than two Imaj7–IVmaj7 openings. New songs: Low Tide (beach bossa, vibes over nylon guitar) and Fern Hollow (forest: an oboe waltz in B minor) in the beach:day / forest:day playlists. Tone: --calibrate also measures each opening's 60–200 Hz and 2.5–6 kHz balance and loudness.ts toneTrim shelves it to the family's house curve (day / soft), so a playlist sits within ±2 dB (TONE flag over 3 dB). Winds: a player's vibrato (±20–25 c on flute / whistle, entering 250–400 ms in), a breath puff at the onset and a 2.6 kHz formant; +2 dB of 1.5–3 kHz presence on the melody track; the upright bass has finger noise and replaces the sine bass under the title. Ambience: calm nights drop the wind / leaf wash ~9 dB and calm mornings ~6 dB — critters carry the space (a rustle in the grass, a distant dog, a nightjar, a woodpecker, the rooster at first light); rain is patter (low bed high-passed at 150 Hz and −10 dB, denser drops), indoors the roof ticks at 1–4 kHz and the gutter drips; every thunder cracks before it rolls; doves vary pitch, tempo and length; surf periods wander 5–14 s with double sets; no static cicada band on the beach. Ambience presets are judged by AMB-STATIC (< 8 foreground events a minute) and AMB-FLAT (LRA < 4 LU) instead of their level under the music. Villager voices +3 dB with a 2–4 kHz consonant click; combat blows land at least level with the hoe (--live asserts it, and counts AudioContexts: exactly one). The scene cues and the title are composed in the worker at load / dawn and kept ready (never on the frame).
• Round 13 (audio pod r6): plucked basses ring to the next note (composer.ts letRing: an upright / bass-string note is never damped early, ≤ 1.4 s past its written length; stop-time hits stay short) and the upright rings longer (T60 ~2.9 s, body bloom 0.85 s) — the low end no longer gates before every downbeat (bass dips: town 7 → 0, spring-2 15 → 3, town-2 10 → 4, festival 15 → 7; BASS-HOLE now needs a 60 ms hole, a re-struck pluck's 20-40 ms notch is articulation). Owl Hour re-sung stepwise (75 % steps, was ANGULAR). Quieter calm air (calm mornings -8.4 dB, calm days -6 dB, wind high-passed at 110 Hz): the live farm floor -25.7 → -28.1 dBFS, so hover / chat / footsteps all clear it (--live: all checks green, was 5 fails); the cave roar -3 dB (a 12-tile fight reads over it), crickets ebb together on a ~23 s swell, cicadas 4.2-5.6 kHz (no HISSY noon), rain hiss low-passed at 6 kHz; indoors the rain comes in showers (roof, hiss, eaves drips and the hearth's roar breathe over ~40 s; drips are the eaves, not a puddle in the room). Summer's marimba ostinato moved hard left, away from the marimba tune. A sustained (soft) bass holds its waltz note through the bar, and a slow plucked waltz (bar ≥ 1.75 s) adds the beat-3 pluck most bars — bass dips before downbeats: 64 in the first 16 themes before, 20 over all 44 theme renders after (worst mostly 11-13 dB: a pizz decaying across a slow bar; festival-tide's jig 7). The mines get their own cave house curve (3 dB darker than the day; they were uncorrected, mine-lava's top 9 dB under the farm's) and the TONE flag judges each song against its family curve. --amb <presets> renders just those ambience presets.
• Round 14 (audio pod r7): phrasing. The hooks the critic called leap-heavy were re-sung around stepwise contours with one arpeggio figure kept as each song's signature, a placed peak (the top note once per phrase, usually bar 6-7) and a written breath (a rest, or a phrase-end hold) at bar 4 / 8: Harvest Reel 70 → 28 % leaps (unrecovered 50 → 0; a session-reel hook "D E F D A G F E" answered a step down, the top G once in B), The Warm Kettle 69 → 36 % (a blue run down from the top over the IV7), Porch Swing 66 → 38 %, Frostglass 63 → 34 %, Low Tide 62 → 39 %, the Lantern Jig 62 → 26 %, Firefly Meadow 60 → 26 %, Gutter Song 60 → 27 %, Lamplighter's Waltz 59 → 26 %, Mossway 58 → 41 %, Lemonade Afternoon 58 → 41 %, Grey Lantern 56 → 38 %, Clover Lane 54 → 30 %, Lanterns on the Tide 54 → 26 %, Market Morning 51 → 44 %, Tiptoe 59 → 46 % (its staccato arpeggios are the joke). Replay life: the short loops get genuinely new strains instead of repeats — Lamplighter's Waltz a 16-bar clarinet trio in the relative minor (54 → 90 s), Apple Blossom Waltz and Amber Waltz their 16-bar flute / cello bridges (64 → 108 s, 68 → 106 s), Clover Lane A B C B A (79 → 90 s), Grey Lantern A B A C A (79 → 96 s), Mossway … A C B A (84 → 96 s), Hush of Snow its C strain before the last A (101 → 135 s). The composition critic (critique.ts) now flags LEAPY (> 52 % of moves a skip of a third or more, or > 8 % unrecovered leaps of a fourth+), SHORT-LOOP (a song under 85 s, a scene cue under 60 s) and NO-BREATH (< 1 breath per 8 bars of tune) and reports peakPct / breathsPer8: all 44 songs clean, 0 clashes, 0 b9s. Lantern Dark (event-mystery, the one TONE fail) gets its body from the arrangement, not EQ: the cello guide sings from the first A in its tenor (C3-C4), a low string pad holds the chord under the harp throughout and the harp rolls start lower. Offline proof: audio-render.mjs writes manifest.json — every job the run is expected to produce (a default run: 44 themes, 44 mixes, every ambience preset, the SFX reel, gameplay, 3 transitions), its status / flags as it finishes, the source revision (+dirty when the audio sources differ from it) and a verdict that passes only when every job is clean with no flag at all and the composition / SFX-hierarchy / gameplay / opening-loudness checks are clean (exit 1 otherwise). Co-op performance: node scripts/audio-coop-perf.mjs — four real clients over the relay on the farm, each measured in turn at 2560x1440 "high" (uncapped, the perf.mjs timing mode) while the three partners walk / hoe / chat around it, with an A/B window holding its AudioContext suspended (services.audio.benchOff). Gates: FPS ≥ 60, the audio stack ≤ 8 ms of main thread per second, audio-on vs off within max(0.35 ms, 3 %) per frame, partner footfalls voiced. info().perf.frame.audioMsPerSec now includes the off-frame work (worker note deliveries into the cache, the 250 ms watchdog: src/audio/cost.ts, also offFrameMsPerSec). Fix found on the way: the partners' strides and reel ticks advanced by one frame's dt per ~45 ms decision pass, so a walking farmhand was voiced at ~1/3 of their real footfall rate; they now advance by the time that passed. Hear the four-player farm: ?demo=audio-coop4 (three phantom farmhands on their own paths; ?demo=audio-coop&partners=2).
• Round 15 (audio pod r8): the mines get a playlist per band (src/audio/songbook-mine.ts; select.ts mine:earth / mine:ice / mine:lava, day-seeded like the farm's, the same song for every co-op client on that band): the drifting ambient piece now alternates with a written song of another character — Lamplit Seam (earth: a D-dorian miner's tune, low clarinet over a walking upright and pizzicato off-beats, a 4-bar vamp before the tune), Hoarfrost (ice: a slow 6/8 flute air in C# minor over rolled harp, the cello taking the bridge, celesta frost late) and Cinder Hymn (lava: an oboe lament in E harmonic minor — the C–D# augmented second — over a low 3+3+2 marimba pulse and a drone). A new cave percussion pattern (a damped bodhrán heartbeat, a pick ticking far down the tunnel, a triangle glint per strain). Composition critic: all three clean (Cinder Hymn re-sung from 55 % leaps and a b9 against the cello to 44 % / 0). Low end: a plucked bass is damped by the next pluck itself (it rang out 35 ms + its damping short of every note: a 10 dB notch in the last 100 ms of each bar), the upright's body hums longer on long notes (tau 0.85 → up to 1.5 s), a waltz guitar's "pah" chords leave the low string to the bass (its E3–G3 strings and box thump sat 13–15 dB over the bass in 50–220 Hz, then sagged into the downbeat), and a soft / bowed bass holds each jig dotted-quarter — bass dips before downbeats over every theme render 22 → 7, the worst 20.2 → 13.0 dB (summer-2 4 → 1, town-2 4 → 0, festival-tide 5 → 0, forest-2 2 → 0, beach-2 1 → 0); BASS-HOLE now also flags any pattern whose low end falls > 14 dB into a downbeat. Full render shots/audio-r8/final (rev b879ce6): 113/113 jobs clean, opening spread 0.6 LU, the new mine songs at -22.0 / -21.8 / -22.4 LUFS on the cave curve. --live (real game): all checks green, the mine scene resolves its band playlist, 60 fps / p95 16.7 ms with the audio system at 2.3 ms of main thread per second. Tenor string beds under Snowlight Lullaby / Firefly Meadow repeats, winter / Frostglass's tenor pads +3.5 dB, Lanterns on the Tide's harp lower + pad up, Glass Caverns' pad into the tenor, The Empty Chair's harp lifted off the cello. All themes recalibrated. Hear them: ?demo=audio-mine&floor=2&theme=mine-2, &floor=14&theme=mine-ice-2, &floor=24&theme=mine-lava-2 (or &theme=mine:ice for the band's rotation; &fight=1 stages the combat soundcheck over it).
• Rounds 16-17 (audio pod r9-r10, critic r6): rain made of drops (src/audio/rain.ts): leaf / soil / puddle (a Minnaert bubble chirping up) / wood impacts at their own distances, baked once into seamless loops (canopy grain, near drops you can count, heavy) played by one buffer source per layer — no scheduling per drop; the old hiss carpet is −10 dB under it. Material impacts by modal synthesis (src/audio/impacts.ts): wood, stone, soil, steel, slime, chitin, membrane, ember, crystal — each a contact pulse into its own modes and loss factor (wood swallows its highs, stone barely rings, steel rings ~0.6 s, soil is a 5 ms push) plus a texture (fibre crackle, grit, chips, gloop, chitin rattle), 4 variants per material baked over idle ticks; hoe / axe / pickaxe / rock break / sword blows / parry voice them. Voice characters (sfx.ts VOICES): beyond register, each villager has a spectral tilt, a vibrato (tremor, lilt or monotone), syllable length, nasality and the line-end creak. Blind recognition (node scripts/audio-recognize.mjs): every surface / tool / impact / villager rendered 6 times with fresh seeds and lines, classified leave-one-out by the nearest class without labels — surfaces 42/42, tools 48/48, impacts 63/66, voices 44/48 (shots/audio-r10/recognize-final.log); it also measures each effect into a limiter-bypassed graph (GraphOptions.bypassLimiter) so "everything peaks at the ceiling" is checkable. Hear it: ?demo=audio-foley (impacts, then each villager speaks; &only=axe,hoe, &voices=0). Whole songs: a default audio-render.mjs run also renders one complete song per family (--full, --full all) so B / C strains and loop seams are judged, not only 30 s openings; audio-continuity.mjs --song-end checks the real game's between-song breaths (shots/audio-r16/song-end.log: 12.6 s and 8.7 s of rest, the next song starts by itself). info().audio.cost splits the audio stack's main-thread ms/s into feet / decide / schedule / remote / offFrame.
• Round 18 (audio pod r11): every strain crests once. The composition critic counted its 8-bar phrases from the top of the piece, so whenever an intro was not 8 bars long a "phrase" straddled the A/B seam; it now counts from each section's first bar, and the strains that bumped their ceiling were re-sung with one placed high point: the title (E' over the ii7 in bar 7, the only time A reaches it; phrase peak 25 → 100 %), Market Morning (C' over the IV, its B to B' on the iii7), Long Light (A' over the ii7; its answer enters by step and the half cadence falls through the V's thirds — unrecovered leaps 11 → 3), Kindling (A' over the IVmaj7, 33 → 100 %), Cinder Hymn (the first half stops on the D# so the E' is first heard in bar 5, 25 → 100 %), Amber Waltz (climbs G A Bb C to D' over the tonic once — the Bb neighbour was its ceiling four times), Snowlight Lullaby (an Am11 sigh instead of a third E), Fern Hollow, Clover Lane, Cider & Candle; Ribbon Parade's leaps resolve (21 → 6 unrecovered; the closing F# rises to the G instead of dropping a seventh). All 47 songs: mean phrase peak 99.6 %, 0 clashes, 0 b9s, no flags. New critic flag BAR-LENGTH (a tune bar that does not fill its meter — the composer only warned). Villager voices: the reel now speaks two real lines with the game's line position (one sentence's luckiest syllable had decided the spread) and they are levelled to 0.8 LU (was 5.6); Marigold is a brisk, clipped patter, Wren airy and drawn out, Linus clipped, nasal and without vibrato — blind recognition 44 → 46/48 (Marigold's margin over her nearest rival 0.8 → 2.4, Linus 1.8 → 3.2; Wren is now the one heard twice as June, shots/audio-r11/recognize-voices.log). Falling snow deadens the air: the wind is −3 dB on a snow day (its gust² swing had lifted the snow bed 3 LU and left the winter mix 'mellow'), and the snow slumps land −5 dB softer with more powder hiss. A windy day blows in sets — a 3-7 s gust, then a 4-10 s lull — instead of independent random targets that could average into a steady roar (fall-wind LRA 2.3 → 6.6 LU on the draw that flattened it); indoors the eaves drip a little quicker (house rain 3.9 → 6.3 audible drops/s).
• Round 19 (audio pod r12): whole songs, not just openings. The r11 whole-song renders flagged what a 30 s opening never reaches; each is fixed in the arrangement, not the meter. Chord-change damping (composer.ts dampAtChanges): a comping / pad note was written to the end of its span (+2 %,
  • the humanised drift), so the old chord rang on under the new one — 18-19 notes sounding at once at the changes of Snowlight, the title and the Harvest Reel (FORM-CROWD); the strings not in the next chord now let go 50 ms before it lands (their own release still decays them), common tones ring through, a re-struck string stops its previous sound and a roll that doubled its top note strikes it once — every song now peaks at ≤ 14 notes. Handed-off strains: the tune's doubling (a glockenspiel an octave up) colours the tune's own instrument only — it no longer sparkles over the nylon guitar's bridge or the clarinet's B (double.handoff keeps it, as winter's glock over its celesta does); the counter-line rests while its own instrument has the tune (Market Morning's clarinet B, First Furrow's clarinet bridge, the Warm Kettle's B). The clarinet's clarion rounds (instruments.ts clarion): above C5 it loses upper partials instead of gaining them — its D5-C6 sat at a 3.1 kHz centroid with 44 % of the tone in 2-5 kHz against the flute's 1.9 kHz / 30 % (First Furrow C and Market Morning B: FORM-GLARE). First Furrow's bridge also drops into the chalumeau it was written for (melody.cOctave; C strain 2457 → 1072 Hz centroid, 33 → 10 % presence), and Market Morning's clarinet B answers the high ocarina an octave down (melody.bOctave: written E5-B5, its third harmonic sat at 2-3 kHz — 40 % of the strain in 2-5 kHz after the ocarina's 4 %). The nylon guitar sings sweeter up the neck (PLUCKS.guitar.sweet): above G4 its tone ceiling falls instead of rising with pitch (Long Light's guitar bridge 3.5 → 2.8 kHz centroid; the comping register is untouched). Two unbreathed register jumps smoothed (Salt & Sun's B climbs into its high A from the tonic instead of leaping a ninth off A's G#; Mossway's B closes by step into the pickup instead of dropping a tenth). The composition critic judges NARROW / WIDE per voice (a strain handed to another instrument is another player's compass). Combat foley: the crab answers hollow — a narrow ~1.1 kHz cavity "tok" with an upper shell ring and two claw snaps instead of a 380 Hz knock on the blade's 300 Hz slap — and the imp spits a 200 ms crackle of embers: blind impact recognition 63 → 66/66 (shots/audio-r12b/recognize-imp2.log). Hear a bridge without waiting for it: ?demo=audio&theme=spring&from=C (from = B, C, outro, B2 / A3 for a later strain, or seconds; music.ts MUSIC_SEEK), e.g. &theme=town&from=B, &theme=summer&from=C.
• Round 20 (audio pod r13): second-time bars. A strain played twice in a row (A A, B B) used to be restated note for note; Tune.again (composer.ts) gives the second playing its own bars ('' = as written) the way a fiddler plays a repeat — the hook bars stay, what changes is where the strain goes. The Harvest Reel's second A turns bar 3 round the tonic (F E D E F G A F) and closes D F E D instead of the E-D drop, its second B comes down through the v and rolls home "D A, C D"; Market Morning's second A walks the ocarina down G F# E D into the clarinet's low B; Long Light's second A runs up the V's scale into B's high G; First Furrow's held tonic walks up G A into B's Bb. Hear a second time: ?demo=audio&theme=festival-harvest&from=A2 (or &from=B2), &theme=town&from=A2, &theme=summer&from=A2. Distinct melody bars per whole song (audio-render.mjs --full): spring 55 → 57 %, summer 58 → 60 %, town 54 → 56 %, Harvest Reel 37 → 40 %. The flute's third octave rounds (instruments.ts clarion: 86): above D6 its tone loses upper partials instead of gaining them (a real flute's top octave is nearly a pure tone) — First Furrow's B, cresting on G6, was the one whole-song FORM-GLARE (26 % of it in 2-5 kHz; now under 25 %, 1785 → 1687 Hz centroid), and the title's opening centroid 1759 → 1599 Hz. Grey Lantern (rain-3) was 3.3 dB over the soft house curve in 60-200 Hz with its calibration shelf already at the -5 dB limit: the harp's rolls start on G3 instead of E3 (its roots doubled the bass an octave up) and the soft bass sits 3 dB lower (low band -2.7 → -5.2 dB re mid). All openings recalibrated (spread 0.0 LU). Offline proof, end to end: audio-render.mjs runs its jobs on --parallel N sessions (default 3: contexts in one headless browser, each job's log lines buffered and printed together; --calibrate too), so the default run — 47 themes, 47 mixes, 10 whole songs, 14 ambience presets, the SFX reel, gameplay and 3 transitions, 123 jobs — takes 38-70 min on this shared machine (load 60-200) instead of ~1 h 45 min serially. shots/audio-r13/final2/manifest.json (rev aaa0b11, clean): 123/123 jobs ok, 0 flagged, composition / SFX hierarchy / gameplay masking clean, opening spread 0.6 LU → PASS. (The run before this round's fixes, rev 1b8da1c: 121/123, rain-3 TONE and spring B FORM-GLARE — the two things fixed above.) Co-op A/B: audio-coop-perf.mjs interleaves the audio-on / audio-off windows (--pairs, default 3, ABBA order; the delta is the median of the per-pair differences) — one long "on" window followed by one "off" window had put the machine's load drift into r12b's host delta (+8.7 ms/frame "for audio" at load 67, while its audio stack used 6.5 ms of main thread per second, ~0.3 ms a frame). Run: node scripts/audio-coop-perf.mjs --out shots/audio-r13/coop-perf.json (not re-measured this round: the machine sat at load 240-640 under other teams' perf runs and the four clients had not finished booting after 25 min, so the run was stopped rather than measure the contention).
• Round 21 (audio pod r14, critic r6 fixes): the verdict can't be false-green — a per-effect SFX flag (HARSH, HOT, TOO-LOUD / TOO-QUIET-vs-set, THUD) now flags the reel job itself as SFX-<flag>(<effect>), which is a hard fail, fails the manifest and the exit code (r13's manifest passed with bundle, leave and hit:bat@2 HARSH in report.sfx). The three are fixed: the bundle and farewell harp runs sit an octave lower (2-5 kHz share 42 → 17 %, 49 → 18 %; the bundle lands on a soft low root), the bat's death squeal starts at 2.4 kHz, quieter, and the body tumbles in wing flops (36 → 24 %). Variation after the bridge (Tune.late, composer.ts): an A / B that comes back after the first C takes its own bars ('' = as written; hooks stay, again and Aend still win) — the player has been somewhere and the tune comes back changed, with written appoggiaturas and suspensions where the first statement sat on the chord tone. The Harvest Reel's returns turn on the dorian B, lean a C on the G chord (4-3), put a D' over the C chord (9-8) and its last A is lifted a whole step (appoggiaturas 13 → 18, 0 clashes); Lamplit Seam (mine-2) was A B A B A, every strain literal — the second B is now a cello bridge in F major with a borrowed Bb and G minor (the dorian B natural goes dark down the seam) and the A / B after it are varied (strong-beat chord tones 81 → 75 %, appoggiaturas 2 → 7, 140 → 188 s); Amber Waltz's returns sigh G→F and D→C over its sequence and Bb→A on the tonic, Hush of Snow's last A leans C#→B and a lydian D#→C# (strong-beat chord tones 100 → 92 / 96 %). Compose critic: all 47 clean. Hear them: ?demo=audio-mine&floor=2&theme=mine-2&from=C, ?demo=audio&theme=festival-harvest&from=A3 (the varied return; &from=outro for the lifted A's end), ?demo=audio&theme=fall&from=A3. Co-op: a farmhand's music follows the host's day — net applyCal sets the calendar without a day:start, so a farmhand kept its own save's playlist position; MusicDirector.resync reseeds and crossfades to the song the host's day opens with. The coop-perf harness booted the host at x=30.5 z=22.5, now inside a farm collider: the host never walked, which was every VOICED failure since r12b (farmhands "missing remote footsteps"); it starts at the farm spawn, key-probes that every client moves and prints what a failing client sees of its partners. A level jump after the cello bridge (found comparing whole-song renders with the 30 s openings: full-fall's first 30 s read -18.2 LUFS against the opening's -20.8, full-mine-2 -19.7 against -22.0): the bowed strings' body insert is a two-channel IR, and joining a track a mono voice already plays on it turned the whole track stereo — which its panner passes ~3 dB hotter than mono (equal-power pan law). In game the clarinet came back ~2.6 dB louder after Amber Waltz's and Lamplit Seam's cello bridges (also Hoarfrost, Cinder Hymn's cello B, two town songs); offline, a whole-song render scheduled the cello up front and was louder from bar one. music.ts folds a bowed insert that joins a mono track to mono with the pan law made up (BODY_INSERTS): the mine-2 melody stem's first 30 s is -21.16 LUFS with or without the bridge scheduled (was -21.16 / -18.29).
• Instruments (src/audio/instruments.ts): mallets are modal notes pre-rendered once per pitch (kalimba tine inharmonics + buzz + box body, marimba, music box comb modes + case, celesta, glockenspiel, vibraphone with motor tremolo, hand bells, steel pan); plucked strings are Karplus-Strong with body modes baked in; winds (flute, whistle, ocarina, clarinet, oboe) crossfade a soft and a bright spectrum by velocity, register and the note's own swell (the clarinet's even harmonics only arrive when it is pushed), with a random-walk pitch drift of a few cents, vibrato that deepens on held notes, a messa di voce on long notes and breath as noise through a resonant band tracking the pitch; the solo fiddle and cello are physically modelled — a digital-waveguide string driven by a stick-slip bow (friction curve, slight arm wander, so the Helmholtz motion, the scratchy onset and the rosin jitter come out of the physics), pitch-corrected and pre-rendered per pitch with a phase-aligned sustain loop, then played with a per-note scoop or finger slide, delayed vibrato, bow-change rosin bursts and a fixed violin / cello body filter bank (~280 / 450 / 1000 / 2800 Hz) so the vibrato sweeps the harmonics through the resonances; the clarinet gets a bore-formant insert; plucks and the kalimba carry a 90–180 Hz air-cavity thump; the pad is a five-voice drifting string ensemble with formant EQ. Shared LFOs, a two-tier note cache (~18 MB of ready float buffers + ~18 MB of 16-bit notes the worker delivers and older notes are demoted to, promoted back by a copy when played; other songs' notes go before the next song's opening and the playing song's, which are pinned; pluck tails trimmed at -62 dB; a returning song's dropped notes are re-rendered by the worker before they are due, a held-back note is asked of it urgently, and a texture note / key-bridge roll / SFX chime still missing at the last moment is left out or played by a light stand-in rather than synthesized on the frame) and a hard 72-voice polyphony cap (SFX included) keep the per-note cost low: melody, bass and SFX steal the oldest ringing tail, else the oldest lower-priority voice, instead of being dropped; texture thins first. Every note a song, its key bridge and the SFX chimes in its key will need is rendered in the compose worker before it is due.
• Transitions (src/audio/music.ts): crossfades with a key bridge — a change of place fades the old song over 1.3 s while the new one opens on a bar of its tonic chord built only from tones both keys share; a mood change in the same place waits for the phrase to end first (2.5 s fade). No dead air, no clashing keys. The director's recent decisions are in __game.info().audio.trace. Songs are composed in a Web Worker (src/audio/compose.worker.ts via prefetch.ts): the opening song is requested as the save loads (before the first click), forced demo / cutscene themes on request, the next song while the old fades — and in real time a song is never composed on the main thread (__game.info().audio.compose: worker hits vs misses).
• Continuity (the score must never "drop out"): between songs there is only a 5–15 s breath (rest in the theme defs), and a new place / mood during it starts the new song at once; a storm keeps the rain tune outdoors too (quieter, STORM_OUTDOOR_LEVEL) so doorways never stop / restart it. Music is scheduled 1.5 s ahead (MUSIC_LOOKAHEAD), so a main-thread stall shorter than that drops nothing; a slightly late note is played, only a > 250 ms stale one skipped. The adapter resumes a suspended / Safari-'interrupted' context (every gesture, statechange, a 2 s keep-alive), always restores the master after a hidden-tab fade, only kicks a clock frozen for 6 s, and a throwing music update is warned (rate-limited) and resets the director after three in a row. __game.info().audio.sched / .musicDb / .ctxState show it live; node scripts/audio-continuity.mjs [--live [--minutes N]] traces a 10-min session (farm → town → beach, a storm day with doorways, a hidden tab, 500 ms stalls) and fails under 90 % audible or on a dropped note.
• In game: a "now playing" card (src/audio/nowplaying.ts) engraves the first two bars of the new tune on a staff, and little notes float out of it into the scene in time with the melody while it is up; the morning chime quotes the tune about to play, the first day of a season its hook.
• Performance (composer.ts perform()): bars are composed in score time and then played through a continuous tempo map — a ±1.5 % mean-reverting drift, a smooth ritardando over the last two beats of every phrase (a tempo on the downbeat), a broadening final cadence and outro — with the bass a touch ahead and the tune laid back on lyrical themes, and AR(1)-correlated micro-timing per part instead of white jitter.
• Crowds (src/audio/crowd.ts): the square and festivals are made of people, not a noise wash — 4 (town) to 8 (festival) persistent formant "talkers" at their own pitch, pace and distance speaking sim-speak phrases (pitch arch, declination, stressed syllables, rising questions, turn-taking), laughter, festival applause, distant footsteps on cobbles and the shop door's bell; the wind / leaf wash sits 6 dB lower in town.
• Ambience: every bed is decorrelated stereo noise (L/R correlation ~0.3); rain is a 4–6 kHz hiss plus two looping droplet textures (45 / 110 drops/s, 2–8 kHz pings and the odd puddle plink, spread across the field); surf swells travel from one side to the other.
• Mix (src/audio/graph.ts): every song's opening (its first 30 s — what a player hears on entering a place) is loudness-normalised to -21 LUFS integrated at the default volume settings (mine -22, nights -21.8; table in src/audio/loudness.ts, regenerated by node scripts/audio-render.mjs --calibrate, which fails if two openings land more than 2 LU apart; the theme render prints the same OPENING LOUDNESS check). The glue compressor (2:1 above -14 dBFS) sits on the music bus only, so SFX never pump the score; instead world SFX (not footsteps, reel ticks or menu cues) key a real sidechain — an AudioWorklet RMS follower (src/audio/ducker.ts, 30 ms attack / 250 ms release, ≤ 3 dB) on the music chain. Farming verbs clear the score by ≥ +4 LU in the gameplay render; impacts (hoe, axe, pickaxe, rock break, sword hit, door, tree fall, hurt) carry a granular 1.5–5 kHz crunch + an 800–2000 Hz click so they read on laptop speakers, and repeat with ±2.5 st / ±2 dB variation. The music bus has a +3.5 dB low shelf at 140 Hz (day themes carry 10–20 % of their power in 60–250 Hz; the render flags THIN under 6 %), cuts 300 Hz, lifts 3.2 kHz / 7 kHz; accompaniment and counter-line sit at ±0.5–0.7, doubles are a 15 ms Haas pair, the melody gets early reflections. Phrases breathe: a ±3.5 dB arch over every 4 bars on top of a section contour, and velocity opens the winds' and strings' tone ~2.5×; wind melodies slur (portamento) through stepwise lines.
• Birds & beds (src/audio/birds.ts, ambience.ts): birdsong is sequenced from banks of ~40 pre-rendered syllables per species (fundamental + 2nd/3rd harmonics with their own decays, 30–120 Hz FM, a band-pass formant, trills), and two birds of a species counter-sing from either side. Cicadas come in pulsed 4–7 kHz choruses that swell every 10–25 s; rain and wind move with a 0.05–0.2 Hz weather swell (±4 dB, ±30 % cutoff, drop density); puddle drips are < 80 ms bubbles; wind chimes are inharmonic tubes.
• Hear it: ?demo=audio&theme=<id> (also audio-summer / audio-fall / audio-winter, audio-night = a summer night, audio-town = the square on a winter morning, audio-eve = the square's evening, audio-rain = a summer shower on the farm, audio-coop = the phantom farmhand, audio-brook = the forest brook's babble, audio-noon = the summer noon cicada chorus, ?demo=audio&ui=inventory = the menu duck; festivals: fest-spring (Ribbon Parade), fest-fall (Harvest Reel); theme takes a song id or a playlist like farm:fall; &theme=none for ambience only, &sfx=<name> repeats an SFX every 2.5 s, &audio=1 starts the context without a click where autoplay allows, &card=1 pins the now-playing card, &card=0 hides it). Any demo plays its own music after a click.
• From code: game.services.audio.play('coin'), .music('festival' | null | 'none'), .state(), .meter(); cutscenes use { do: 'cue', cue: 'music' | 'sfx', arg }. __game.info().audio shows the live state.
• Co-op / positional: audio.playAt(name, x, z, { map? }) pans along the camera's screen axis and fades with distance from the local farmer (inaudible sounds cost nothing), audio.stepAt(x, z, { run? }) voices a remote farmer's footfall on the tile's surface, audio.say(id, text, x?, z?) speaks a chat line in sim-speak with a stable voice per id; SFX join / leave / chat and emote:<kind> exist for the net layer. tool:impact and crop:harvested are already placed at their tile, so a partner's replayed intents pan and fade by themselves. Real remote farmhands are voiced by the adapter itself (remoteVoices): a footfall on every stride of their interpolated walk, and their fishing from their angler's state (cast, bite, the reel's ratchet, catch / escape) at their position. Hear it with ?demo=audio-coop (= ?demo=audio&coop=1: a visible phantom farmhand circles you, stepping, hoeing, emoting, chatting and watering). Dialogue speaks each typed word as it appears (the real word: its syllables, vowels, a question's rise, an exclamation's accent, a falling line end; words queue so a fast typewriter never stacks them).
• Judge it without speakers: node scripts/audio-render.mjs renders every theme (30 s), theme+ambience mixes, ambience presets, the SFX reel and three live-director handoffs (transition-*.wav, checked for overlap) through the real mixer with OfflineAudioContext into shots/audio/*.wav (+ piano-roll/spectrogram PNGs) and prints loudness (LUFS), true peak, clipping, silence, spectral centroid and band balance with flags (day themes fail as DULL under 10 % presence + air and are reported mellow under 12 %; see the calibration note in the script; each mix-* must hold its ambience within 10 LU of the music — AMB-BURIED — and mix WAVs are analysed but only kept with --keep-wav). --describe <theme> dumps the melody, --stems --only <ids> solos every track, --live boots the game and checks theme-per-scene, audible output, 20 beach⇄mine handoffs, the audio-node creation rate and SFX end to end. Renders use the game's default volumes and its 72-voice budget. The gameplay render (gameplay.wav, also alone with --gameplay) plays the spring theme + farm morning under a scripted 10 s of farming (8 steps, hoe ×3, watering, harvest, coin, menu) and reports each effect's loudness over the music under it (400 ms and 1–4 kHz at the onset; footsteps' onset median must reach -2 dB) and the sidechain dip; --sfx hoe,axe renders just those effects (--sfx voices adds the villager voices). The reel asserts the SFX hierarchy: hover ≥ 4 LU under click, select ≈ click, open / close over click, the error cue level with open, the core UI set inside 8.5 LU, villager voices within 3 LU, a sword hit ≥ 2 LU over the swing, the tree crash ≥ 4 LU over an axe chop, the rock break ≥ 3 LU over a pickaxe tap, sand / snow steps level with the firm surfaces. The composition critic (--compose) also flags MASKED-TUNE (the comping at or above the tune for > 25 % of its notes; the composer's clearTune pass re-voices comping an octave under the tune) and HOLLOW-MIDDLE (> 22 semitones between the bass and the next voice). --coop runs two real clients over the relay: the farmhand must voice the host's hoe stroke as the host resolved it (a soil hit at full level, not a dull thunk — the replay carries the host's outcome and is heard from the farmer's real position) and meter it, and both must play the same festival arrangement. __game.info().perf.frame reports fps, mean / p95 frame time and the audio system's main-thread ms per second; info().audio.notes.tiers the cache tiers. Every job is isolated (a crash relaunches the browser, report.json is written after each job). node scripts/audio-lab.mjs keeps one browser + dev server alive and renders on request (curl 'localhost:5199/gameplay', /reel?names=…, /theme?id=…[&solo=melody], /amb?p=…, /notes?inst=fiddle&seq=69:4,74:1,76:1~,78:2 to audition one instrument, /calibrate) for fast iteration.

Town & villagers

Hearthvale town (src/world/town/): the plaza with its fountain and the Lantern Hall, Thimble & Pip's store, The Hearth Oven bakery, the market row, the river with the Kettle Bridge and a rope footbridge, Flint & Ember forge, The Copper Kettle inn, the Birch house + lumber yard, the lamplighter's cottage, and Meadow Lane in the south (Willowmere Clinic, the schoolhouse with its bell cupola, the Pennywhistle cottage's kitchen garden, an orchard). Street life: everyday festoon lights (world/town/festoons.ts: strings over the plaza, a zig-zag over the market row, the inn terrace; on from dusk, coloured holiday bulbs in winter), songbirds, the town cat asleep on the west plaza bench; winter adds shovelled cobble lanes with snow banks along their edges, drifts against every building, snowmen, snow lips and icicles along the house eaves and winter goods on the produce stands (burlap lids, firewood, preserves, wool), and the fountain freezes over (world/town/winter.ts). The Hall's door wreath is dressed per season (blossoms in spring, daisies and sunflowers in summer, russet leaves in fall; bare holly in winter). House roofs carry segmented ridge caps, dormers, chimneys, moss and slipped tiles (buildings.ts buildRoofDressing). Layout data lives in world/town/layout.ts (buildings, streets, props, trees, festoons, snowmen, named SPOTS). Static props are merged per 12 m cell and fed to one BatchPool: one multi-draw per material, per-cell culling. Meadow Lane breaks the shared house template (buildings.ts silhouette kit: dormer, porchRoof, roseTrellis): the clinic has a portico, two dormers and climbing roses, the Pennywhistle cottage a veranda and a dormer, the schoolhouse a lean-to woodshed; the south lawn has a picnic and meadow flower clumps (picnic, wildflowers props). Tree canopies whose centre projects into the bottom ~22 % of the frame are hidden while they're there (npcs.lensCull, outside conversations and events), so foreground blobs never fill the lower third of the view. Schedule spots resolve to sub-slots 1.2 m apart (chibi heads never touch) and idle villagers keep 0.9 m apart.

Ten villagers (src/data/npcs.ts): look (height, build, face, 11 hair styles, hats incl. earmuffs, outfits, accessories) with a seasonal wardrobe (winter coats, scarves, knit hats, mittens, long sleeves — no sunhat in the snow; seasonLook(); a changed look rebuilds the villager's mesh in place), winter bark pools and winter schedules (fewer idlers: the inn, the forge, indoors), walk style, schedule + rainy schedule over named spots (A* on the tile grid, world/town/pathfind.ts; seven of them work the square between 9 and 12), activities (sweep, read, paint, water, knead, hammer, saw, fish, sit, play, chat…), gift tastes, birthday, dialogue groups (first meeting, birthday, season, weather, hours, hearts; [mood] tags swap the portrait) and two heart events each (scripted mini cutscenes: walks, emotes, choices with friendship deltas, extra actors such as Pip the shop cat).

• Models (entities/villager.ts, one skinned mesh each, frustum-culled): chibi heads (1.2×) tilted chin-up so faces read from the diorama camera, glossy eyes, an ink-edge + rim shader instead of an outline pass, 13 gesture clips (hand to chest, shrug, laugh, look down, point, wave, think, wring, surprise, stamp, nod, open arms, hug) that follow each line's mood, squash and stretch, emotes as AO-safe billboards. Face moods: squinting cheek-lift smile (happy) vs a small calm mouth (neutral), ^^ laugh, a 35° knitted V with a crease (angry), tented brows + tear (sad), freckles. Idle facing, look-arounds and arrival yaws favour the lens (±70°); hat brims tip back. Seated actors keep the bench's yaw and turn only their head (headLook). Night talks / events lift faces with an albedo-relative lens-side fill (VILLAGER_FILL: deep skin tones keep their colour and read).

• Camera director (systems/npcs.ts): heart events cut between wide, two-shot and close-up; the angle is scored so the speaker is three-quarter to the lens, the listener or a bystander isn't in front of their face and no building cuts a sight line (swing ±15–45°, raise, pull in), trees in the way are hidden (sphere-cached), and the actors sit above the dialogue box; tilt-shift focuses on them. A speaker who addresses a thing (a lantern, a rose, a cat on a roof) gets a reverse three-quarter lens in front of them instead of their back; villagers who turn to another actor (or to the farmer in a chat) cheat ~25° open towards the lens; unlit festoon cords come down for daytime events. npcs.auditEvents(id?) checks every talky beat of all 20 events (incl. actors standing inside a bench / prop), npcs.auditFaces(id?) renders every night beat and reads back the speaker's face (sRGB luma ≥ 42; the dark-crushed r3 frame measured ≈ 20), npcs.auditTalk(hour?) solves the live talk lens for every villager at their spot (fountain / bystander-in-front clutter is scored for both talks and events). Conversations lean in the same way through the look offset (no cinematic, so co-op farmers stay visible). Heart events keep up to four villagers behind the scene (or bring a chatting pair out) so the town lives on in the background.

• Co-op (pillar 13): the host streams villagers (v.s), a farmhand's talk locks the host's villager onto them (v.t); friendship stays per player but is host-authoritative (relationships.ts: farmhand intents r.talk / r.gift / r.ch, the host's ledger answers r.set); every gift's reaction is broadcast (v.g: the item arc, hearts / puff, the villager turning to the giver on every client); the host's heart events play for farmhands in town as spectators (v.e / v.l / v.c: title card, the lines, the choice locked "Waiting for the host…", the answer).

• Gifts: the item arcs from the farmer's hands, the villager squashes and reacts (hug / open arms / shrug), hearts, sparkles or a grey puff burst over the head, and the new heart pops on the meter.

• systems/relationships.ts owns points / hearts / gifts (meet() for demo staging), ui/dialogue.ts the typewriter box (name tab, top-left layout-stable text, choices, gift ribbons, heart meter, birthday toast), the 'social' page and the 'portraits' model sheet. Portraits are the villagers' own 3D models (renderVillagerPortrait in entities/villager.ts: the same mesh, outfit for the season, face rig and gesture for the mood, a three-quarter bust under a studio key / fill / rim light in a small dedicated WebGL context, a baked ink outline), composited by ui/portraits.ts over the painted backdrop with the mood's colour temperature (warm gold joy, cool blue sorrow, red-rimmed anger) and manga marks; cached per villager × season × mood and pre-warmed when the talk prompt pops. The painted SVG bust remains the no-WebGL fallback. r5 painted pass (PORTRAIT_PAINT): the bust renders into a lit target plus an id target (flat albedo + the RigBuilder part id: skin / hair / eyes / cloth / hat), then a painter shader turns it into an illustration — Kuwahara brush patches, coloured ink on every material boundary, cel bands relative to albedo, radial hair strands with a jagged shine ring on the lit side, warm skin / cool cloth shadows, a painted rim and canvas tooth. Each villager has their own eye cut (eyeShape: round / wide / almond / narrow / sleepy / beady, lashes) and brows (brow thickness, browArch); full beards have a mouth hollow and combed strands. Farmers dress for winter like the villagers (dressFarmerWinter: beanie, coat, scarf, mittens; farmhands get a beanie + scarf look and the coat overlay). Heart events can carry hero props (ledger held on a lap, Kit's map, forge sparks with a glow light); the event lens scores lamp posts behind a head (tangents), keeps the listener out of the near foreground and backs off until every framed head fits the letterbox (auditEvents(): 78/78 beats).

• r6: Body proportions — NpcLook.torso / shoulders / belly / neck / hands drive a rig-space warp (RigBuilder.warp: the torso stretches, the shoulders square up behind a yoke, a belly pushes out, arms and held props ride with the shoulder) so the cast reads by silhouette: Kit 1:1.6 heads, Bram a barrel with a rolling pin, Linus lanky with a long neck and a doctor's bag, Odessa and Rowan tall and broad, Marigold and Hazel short and round; signature belt / shoulder pieces (rollingpin, tongs, docbag, keys, trowel, lantern, towel). Portraits — the painter posterises each material into hand-tuned ramps with hue-shifted shadows, inks material edges ~4 px plus normal-break contours (jaw, nose, ears, arm over chest), lights hair clumps on the key side, crops tighter, and the brows + mouth are drawn as 2D ink linework over the bust in the face's own frame (drawFaceInk: a 45° anger V with clenched teeth, tented sorrow, an open "D" grin, a round gasp, a quizzical brow; PORTRAIT_INK); a tenth mood, wistful (lowered lids, soft closed smile, one tear). Lens — non-participant villagers in the near / low foreground of a chat or scene step out of the shot (fgCull; auditTalk fails > 8 % coverage), the event's owner opens to ≤ 50° of the lens (cheatOpen, seated owners pull the lens round to the bench front), no pole / trunk within 0.6 head-widths of a framed head (screen space, scored + audited), the portrait card never covers a face (the frame pans), and an event's subject (the Kettle Bridge in "Painting the Bridge") must be in the opening wide shot. Co-op — farmhands spectating a heart event ride the host's lens (v.k at 5 Hz, eased via the look offset, the host's farmer stays visible) and the heart row shows the host's friendship ("Host's friendship · 2♥"). Dialogue — box and portrait card are one joined, equal-height frame with a riveted seam; town-dialogue meets each villager at their place of work (&at=square for the old plaza staging); no ambient emotes or "Now playing" card during a talk; speech bubbles rise over co-op name tags; barks carry context tags ({store_front}…, {@kit}…). Gifts — a 0.5 s eased arc a beat after the box opens, a hit-stop squash on the catch, and the item held up at the chest through the reaction line. Town — a restoration scaffold (tarp, paint pots, "Friends of the Hall" board, ivy) over the Hall's west window, and seeded street-edge dressing along Meadow Lane (wildflowers, pots, picket runs, mailboxes, barrels).

• Round 7 — Faces: NpcLook.fp (FaceShape) gives every villager their own head under the hair: skull width / length (crown anchored), jaw block, pointed / soft chin, eye size / spacing / height, six noses (button, bulb, long, hook, snub, broad), mouth width, age lines (crow's feet, bags, smile folds, forehead), cheek discs, ear size, cleft — the 3D head is built from it, so the painted bust is too. Stubble is a skin-tagged jaw band (r6's hair-tagged shell sat over Rowan's eyes) and the painter's hair ramp keeps the hue (dark hair no longer glints grey); beards / moustaches are id 6. npcs.auditPortraits() renders every bust in every mood and fails on hair over the eyes (> 22 %) / nose bridge (> 20 %) or painted hair colour off the look; it and auditEvents() are in npm test. Every mood is cropped to the neutral pose's head (curls, buns, beanies and brims fit). Heart events — each event carries insert cards: a painted close-up (ui/portraits insertArt: the letter, the canvas, the ledger, Pip on the board, the charcoal loaf, the lantern cage, the last match, Kit's map, the seed tin…) taped up beside the scene while a line about it plays (spectators too); the letter events hold a letter at the chest; in a close-up the farmer steps out of frame when nearer the lens than the speaker; the card-avoid pan never pushes an actor off the left edge. Live talks — the farmer slides back to a 1.3 m gap, demo-marked bystanders step aside too, anyone clipped by the frame edge at the pair's depth is culled, and dev builds self-audit the open talk (npcs.liveAudit()). Co-op — a farmhand's gift waits for the host: ghost hearts breathe on the row ("Gift on its way to the host…") until the host's r.set acks; no ack in 9 s rolls the lock back and returns the item. Box — amber parchment, 34 px ink, the box hugs its text (≥ 3 lines) with the portrait card standing taller at its end, the gift ribbon under the name plaque at 18 px. Gifts — a loved gift hops (0.3 s, squash), pops a heart emote and a sparkle where it lands; the line waits for the arc. Town — a "Relight the Hall" banner over the east window (no more red X of boards), festoon masts 0.4 m higher, winter / day chat pairs side by side across the view, 1 m personal space, barks never repeat in a day, bark bubbles carry a name tab in the speaker's colour, and town-evening sits on a closer, lower lens (faces read, the Hall's rose window crowns the frame, the fountain clears the toolbar). Live talks also re-block the farmer across the lens (clear of lamp posts) and drop bystanders within 2.2 m of the pair from the shot.

• Round 8 — Live talks: every F-talk runs the scored lens solve the demos use (liveResolve: up to four re-blocks of the farmer / villager, keeping the placement with the fewest talkFrameFails — a post between the pair, a pole on a head, the lens inside a prop, a sight line behind a building, a head cut by the frame); npcs.auditLive([9, 13, 17]) stands beside every villager at three hours and is in npm test. Portraits — the dialogue cards are the painted SVG busts (portraitOpts.model3d keeps the 3D-bust A/B): ink outline, two-tone cel shadow, a drawn jaw and chin, gradient-oval blush, brows clamped above the iris, a backdrop picked for a ≥ .25 value gap from the skin; auditPainted gates brows / value gap / face fill. Sad / worried lids are a mauve crescent tucked under each eye (the blue cheek ellipse read as a bruise). Bubbles — a screen-space solver places every bark clear of all head boxes (its own speaker's too), other bubbles, name tags and the frame edge, with a separate tail aimed at the speaker's head; a speaker turned away behind a nearer head fades. Faces — villager bodies draw into the AO G-buffer (userData.ao): flagged out, the AO of whatever stood behind them was multiplied onto their pixels — the grey-brown jagged 'muzzle' on lower faces, cookie-dough blotches on Kit's / Wren's hair, the dark disc on Rowan's cheek. Jaw / cheek / chin masses shade with the skull's own normals (RigBuilder.nrmTo), the soft-chin pad is gone (from the chin-up tilt it sat over the mouth as a disc), ears are skin, stubble stays in the jaw band, and a face LOD grows eyes / brows / mouth ~18 % beyond ~18 m. Talks and events by day get a gentle lens-side key too. Staging — showcase marks open to ≤ 45° of the lens; june-2 tips Rowan's chair back; odessa-4 puts the lantern cage in her hands; wren-2 turns the canvas to the lens; the farmer steps out of any tighter event shot when well in front of the speaker; chalk A-frame boards with a painted menu on both faces (world/town/aframe.ts). Demos — town-day / town-winter on a lower, wider lens (the Hall's rose window in frame, the farmer facing the lens), winter's lower third gets Marigold sweeping snow and Kit playing, town-cast lines the ten up south of the benches, and town-dialogue&npc=… no longer flashes Marigold's default line first.

• Round 9 — Performance: villagers carry a second, half-segment mesh on the same skeleton (entities/villager.ts SEGK, lodFor; past 19 m of lens, ?vlod=<m>, 0 = off): ~13k → ~5k triangles a body with no visible change at plaza distance; far street clutter (pots, barrels, sacks, wildflowers, crates…) is batched per 12 m cell and drops out past 40 m of the lens (?farclutter=); the stone bridge's 80 blocks lost a bevel segment (65k → ~40k with shadow); slimmer wildflower stems. Relationships — every heart-event answer leaves a memory flag (<npc>.<word>; relationships.recalls / remember / townRecalls, saved; co-op: per farmer, host-authoritative, r.mem up and the host's town memory r.hm down). 30 new scenes at 6, 8 and 10 hearts (the 8s are invitations: supper, choir, a studio sitting, the workshop, the clinic's open evening, the longest night, the lamplighter's anniversary, the dock club, a housewarming, the seed swap) whose if / unless steps quote the earlier answers back. keeps turn memory into consequences: barks, changed routines on fair days (Tobias's tea on Rosalind's bench at ten, Odessa's night rounds at the hall lantern, Linus fishing, Hazel watering the seed beds…), flag talk lines, keepsakes left in the town (Pip on the shop step, a rhubarb pie on the bench, the lantern cage on the hall step, Rowan's mended chair at the inn, a second candle on the inn step, Wren's river painting by the water, Rosalind's rose in bloom) and cards pinned on the notice board (Kit's map, the clinic, the choir, Friday supper). Co-op cinematic mode — during a heart event the roster, chat log, watch chip, emote nudges and name tags step out (body.hv-cine); the spectator's title card names whose scene it is and the heart row reads "Juniper's 4♥ · yours 2♥". Portraits — a per-villager Persona (ui/portraits.ts): iris-to-white ratio, lash / lid weight, under-eye bags, a resting asymmetry, a mouth of their own (prim, wide, full with lip colour, gap-toothed, soft, lopsided), crow's feet / forehead lines / jowls / cheekbone hollow, a flour / soot / paint / dirt smudge, shoulder width and slump, and only the marks they would make (Tobias's and Bram's jaws set instead of a tear — the 3D face agrees; Odessa's one tear is rare; Bram sweats; Kit does everything). Town — town-day is now an establishing frame (plaza edge, bakery, market row, Kettle Bridge, river) with the town at work in asymmetric knots: free marks (profiles, backs, no lens cheat), walkers on real A* paths caught mid-stride (&live=1 lets the demo run), a carry activity (crates of stock, on Bram's, Marigold's and June's schedules); town-square keeps the old plaza frame. Winter — the villagers' winter routes rasterised into a traffic field: grey-brown slush on the busiest lanes and stamped where people stand, boot-print trails off the cobbles, shore ice and floes on the river. town-evening is re-blocked the same way (Tobias at the lantern with his back to us, a knot of four at the bakery, two friends walking home, Linus crossing the foreground).

• Round 10 — Faces: Odessa's headscarf sits on her brow over a visible hairline band (it was tilted back over a bald dome of forehead: "a featureless brown sphere"), with bigger eyes and brows; Tobias's pale moustache droops as a flattened walrus a shade darker than his beard (the upswept white wings read as tusks beside a white nose) and his hair tips back under the flat cap (no white sweatband under the brim). Talk lenses: small street props (logs, stumps, barrels, crates) looming in the near foreground of a talk / event lens drop out with the bystanders and tree crowns (NpcSystem.propBalls / fgProps: nearer than ~70 % of the focus distance and filling more than ~2.5 % of the frame; Rowan's lumber-yard talk had a dark stump blob over the box). A scene's painting turns its face to the lens on a cut (wren-2 showed the blank back of the canvas), and Wren's insert card is the same swirling, won't-sit-still river as the canvas on her easel. UI: the heart strip is pinned to the portrait's foot (a gift ribbon slid it over the name plaque); bark bubbles and emotes ignore fog (far barks read as ghosts in the town-day haze); the portrait value plate goes deep cool slate when the backdrop's hue sits within 45° of the skin (Bram's tan face on sunk bakery orange). Blocking: town-day puts June on the far side of her chat with Hazel (face and bark to the lens), town-winter's Kit plays in clear snow right of the fountain (the bowl's rim cut him off at the chest), town-evening's knot of four opens up so every head reads. Kit's mop is a shallow, near-even shell under the tufts (deep hem scallops showed bare scalp between the locks: "cookie dough").

• Round 11 — Plaza identities (r8 critic: "two near-mirrored storefront masses"): Thimble & Pip's gets a jettied, half-timbered loading gable that breaks the eave and climbs nearly to the ridge (painted name board on its band, a loft door open on a lit storeroom, a hoist beam with a pulley and a crate of stock mid-lift; buildStoreFront); The Hearth Oven a domed brick bread oven on its plaza gable with a glowing mouth and a firewood stack, a tall round smoking flue, a louvred ridge vent under a gilded wheat-sheaf vane and a painted board standing on the roof (buildBakeryFront). The twin dormers are gone; both boards share one canvas atlas and skip the shadow pass, the oven glows in the shared lampGlow (no new draw call per pass). Hazel's cottage grows a plant theatre on its west gable: white posts under a whitewashed glazed roof with a vent propped open, three tiers of staging crowded with potted blooms, hanging baskets, a potting bench and a water butt (buildGlasshouse). Coverage: town-winter now sits on the town-day establishing lens (the bakery's flue smoking, the market under snow, the iced river and the Kettle Bridge) with its own winter blocking (Bram hauling a crate to the oven, Marigold clearing the market lane, Kit by the snowman, Odessa and Rowan at the stall end, Wren painting the frozen river, Linus trudging to the clinic); the old plaza frame is town-winter-square. town-evening swings 26° round to the bakery and the market row (Hall left, oven board centre, stalls right, fountain foreground) with Marigold and Hazel setting off home, Wren drifting over to the bakery knot and Linus crossing the near foreground. Street life: a sweeper pushes a seasonal drift (petals, clippings, leaves, snow clods) along the cobbles stroke by stroke into a pile at the broom's end; a reader turns a page now and then. Heart events: a close single drops a farmer standing off to the side (odessa-4's dark hat at the left edge, the blind judge's "out-of-focus foreground figure"); Odessa's headscarf comes forward to her brows and the broad nose's alae tuck into the tip (they inked a snout).

• Round 12 — Heart-event staging: an intimate line (sad, blush, worried, wistful) or a question is said to the farmer — a speaker still turned to the anvil / lantern turns round first (addressFarmer; odessa-6 had the director swing a reverse angle through the forge roof with the farmer stacked behind her). The lens solve and auditEvents now measure how much of the frame a building's walls / eaves cover in front of the actors (roofCover: a 9 × 6 grid of lens rays) and fail two actors' heads stacked on screen or standing < 0.9 m apart; a farmer stacked with an actor or sunk behind the box steps out of the shot. kit-10 turns to the farmer before the club rules; hazel-2 stands beside the planter, side-on to the square (the reverse angle squeezed between the Hall and the store and looked down on her sun hat); stone-bridge pillars count as waist-high posts, not lamp posts. Live cutscenes: every event shot breathes (a slow 2° drift and a 4 % push-in from the cut), and while a choice is open the asker holds the portrait's thinking face with a living think pose (chin tap, sway, a glance down at what they are weighing) — for co-op spectators too. Live talks: a closer, lower lens (6.5 m, 20°, ?talkd= A/B) centred on the villager, faces at ~10–12 % of the frame near the upper third; the plaza posts' hanging lanterns (face height) count as occluders and a post or lantern over / level with a face is a hard fail in the re-block; a villager showing the lens the back of their head costs far more; close lenses keep their background (lighting.fogDistMin). Faces: the 3D eyes are the portraits' eyes — a warm white, a big iris in the villager's own colour (dark rim, bright lower crescent, pupil, two catch-lights) and a heavy upper lash line with an outer flick (per-villager iris size / lash weight from the painted Persona); the thinking face is pushed so it reads from the event lens. Barks: the bubble's bottom edge sits ≤ ~0.6 m over the speaker's head (sliding sideways rather than up) with its tail on them, a dark walnut name chip with cream lettering and a dot in the villager's colour, and no bubble for a speaker off screen or behind a building. Emotes that would cross the top of a close lens slide down beside the head. &ask=1 stages straight to one of the villager's own questions with the choices up; joking lines carry happy / laugh tags. Portraits: brows carry the mood (anger's inner ends drive down ~25° with a hot flush over the nose and a shadowed brow ridge, sorrow's lift hard), sad slumps, wistful looks away, the thinking bubble stays inside the card, every hair lock gets three tones (a dark parting line, the lit band, a sheen strand). Winter: the fountain freezes (ice sheets with cracks, trapped air and blown snow over the pool and the bowl, the crown jets frozen mid-arc, overflow caught as icicle columns, icicle fringes; fountain.ts buildFountainIce), a cold blue contact shade pools round every building and prop (winter.ts buildWinterShade, one multiply decal), and town-winter is a clear winter afternoon. Town: plaza wear (plaza.ts: a polished foot-traffic ring and desire lines to the shops and Hall, moss in the quiet joints, damp under the basin, petals blown into the corners); town-establish frames the east bank in one shot — the Kettle Bridge in front, Flint & Ember left, The Copper Kettle right, the town busy on it.

• Round 13 — Portraits (critic blocker: "of Bram's 10 moods maybe 3 read"): the eye SHAPE carries the mood (MOOD.lidO / lidI / lowUp / irisK in ui/portraits.ts): a relaxed lid at rest, a smile squint, anger's lid slanting down into the nose over a raised lower lid, sorrow drooping at the outer corners, half lids when wistful, white all round a small iris in shock; the lash line rides the dropped lid. Brows are drawn over a hat brim / toque band (Bram, Tobias, beanies) and the toque sits higher. Every mood has its own mouth shape (gritted teeth with tooth gaps, a frown with a trembling lip, an open crooked worry, a lopsided wistful smile) and a full beard gets a warm lip window with a near-black interior so the mouth reads through the hair. Gruff men (Persona.gruff: Bram, Tobias, Rowan) lose lash flicks and rosy cheeks outside a real blush / belly laugh. Hazel's red lip stripe and cheek smudge are gone, Wren's paint is two crisp swipes low on the cheek. Cards take the scene's light (setPortraitLight, from the hour): dusk a rose wash, night a blue-violet place with lamp bokeh, a warm key and a cool rim. Gates: npcs.auditPortraitContrast(min = 9) rasterises every card and fails a mood whose face region differs from neutral by < 9/255 (worst now 13.5); npcs.auditPalette() fails two villagers' coloured outer garments within 20° hue and 0.1 value in any season (Rowan's winter coat is now teal over a mustard scarf, Kit's top a redder orange). 3D faces: the mouth is four shapes on their own bones (B.mouth the closed smile / frown line — a shallow arc hung from one point, never a V — mouthO an open grin with teeth and tongue, mouthR a round 'o', mouthT gritted teeth), chosen per mood like the card; a talking line mouth opens into a small flapping grin. The mouth sits clear of the nose (Odessa's frown on her broad nose's tip read as a beak); the tear is a small wet streak tinted through the skin; sleeves end in turned-back cuffs. Dialogue: the gift ribbon is pinned over the card's top edge (the column never grows over the name plate), the item arcs from the farmer's hands on the villager's side and is caught at the chest; &mood= demo lines only come from groups the relationship can reach (no first meeting at 7 hearts). Heart events: tobias-8's tea is a cup and saucer in his lap; wren-2's farmer stands lens-side so her question is a two-shot with the farmer and the painting faces the lens between them. Winter: a thin snow dust over the cobbles, cleared along the villagers' A* routes (the trodden lanes read against white), boot prints as paired pressed ovals with a packed rim, 1.6x snowmen, and the lawn grass sleeps under the snow (the dry blades read as twigs). Town: clipped hedges built as one irregular body (world/town/hedge.ts, no more caterpillar of balls); a sandstone sett ring round the basin and a herringbone brick runner break the plaza's cobble field, with two near-mirror rain puddles; a low picnic replaces town-day's blown-out foreground parasol; Kit runs at the lens. town-evening is 19:36 (violet ambient, warm lamp pools, the Hall's rose window in frame). Perf: villager mesh LOD at 15 m (was 19).

• Round 14 — Cherries (critic: "the cherry tree is a pink cotton-candy blob with no branch breakup"): the town's blossom trees are grown one by one (world/town/cherry.ts): a leaning S-trunk forking into four or five arching boughs that fork again, a cauliflower cluster on every fork tip (a body plus three or four lobes, flat shaded undersides, gaps where the dark wood shows), crown clusters over a leader, bare twigs poking out. The blossom shader paints five-petal florets (3D cellular: pale petals, magenta eyes, buds, deep rose in the gaps, mauve under the clusters, sun-side glow); in spring a petal drift lies under each tree (downwind-skewed) and petals flutter down out of the crown (vertex-animated; lying and falling petals share one instanced draw); summer green, fall amber, winter bare boughs. One BatchPool (bark + bloom), ~40k triangles in town-day; the rim forest no longer plants generic blob blossoms (their batch cost two draws in every town frame) — smoke's town budget 298 calls. The cherries sit under a trees node, so the talk / heart-event lens culls a crown looming between it and the pair. Held props: a heart-event prop is held, not pinned to the chest — a chest prop (letters, the map, the ledger) is cradled in both forearms (applied after the mood gestures), and Odessa's lantern cage hangs plumb by its ring from her raised right hand (holdProp(…, 'hand')). Faces: Rowan's face is shorter with round eyes and a wider smile (the sleepy lids and long jaw read as a blank stare in the cast); the doctor's eyes a touch larger; Odessa's headscarf has a fine print and a slim hem (big white dots on a red dome read as a toadstool). Blocking: town-day's Kit runs clear of the laundry line, Odessa walks up the road in view (she was behind the bridge abutment / the cottage roof), Marigold and winter Linus step off the festoon poles.

• Round 15 — Determinism: every run-time choice the town makes (villager blink / look-around phases, wander targets, chat moods and emotes, bark cooldowns, gift-burst sparkles, forge sparks) draws from a named stream of one town seed (world/town/rng.ts: townRng('npcs.idle.<id>'), no Math.random left in the town code); demo staging reseeds it, ?townseed=N picks another take and __game.info().town reports { seed, streams: draws per stream, seq }. Capture sequences: &seq=<seconds> on any town demo hands shot.mjs --frames N a sim clock (__game.seqFrame: frame i = the game stepped in 1/30 s ticks to i·seconds/(N−1), holdLoop on) — the typewriter runs on that clock, finished lines and choices advance themselves (dialogueBox.clock / pump), fades are skipped; town-heart-event&seq= plays the scene for real from &step= (default: two lines before the choice), town-dialogue&gift=…&seq= the whole gift, town-day&seq= the town's walkers / sweepers / readers. Co-op: a spectator's heart strip is two labelled rows, the host's hearts ("Juniper") and "Yours", each with its count (r14's spectatorHearts was never wired to the box — the critic's empty row); host-owned choices carry a padlock, "Juniper's choice — waiting for them to pick…", and the host's pick lights up before the reply; town-heart-event&spectate=1 stages the farmhand's view (&seq= plays the handoff). Dialogue: the parchment hugs its text (a one-liner is a ~115 px slab, the portrait card keeps its size and stands up out of the frame). Dusk / night tone (world/town/tone.ts, a chained scene.onBeforeRender like the mine's): through the blue hour the sun loses its red, the sky fill turns cool lavender and lifts 40 %, the magenta haze cools, red gain / saturation / bloom come down; at night a cool moonlit fill keeps the frame's thirds out of near-black; lamp pools are gold, broader and softer (decay 2 → 1.45, 8.5 m). Winter: roofs carry a stepped snow pack (buildings.ts roofSnowWinter: strips 10–17 cm thick whose reach wanders up the slope, a wind-packed roll on each step, a back-eave cornice) over melt-darkened wet tiles at the ridge (its own no-snow material) — every house in both districts; floes are broken plates, snow lies on the river ice in long wind streaks. Landmarks: the forge's west gable (the bridge road's view) gets a slate anvil-and-sparks emblem, a horseshoe rack, a cartwheel, iron hoops and an anvil weathervane; the inn's gable cross-braced timbering, a big round copper-kettle emblem, wall lanterns and a copper-capped louvre cupola on the ridge. Faces: Odessa's kerchief is the portrait's (bold dots, a rolled band, the knot and tails at her left temple), with larger eyes; odessa-4 is re-blocked so the HALL CLOSED notice reads beside her. Perf: villagers past ~30 m leave the shadow pass; the roof packs use single-segment bevels.

• Round 16 — Talk lens: while a talk / heart event owns the frame every farmer's opaque parts opt into the GTAO G-buffer (npcs.farmersAO; farmers skip it for perf, so the AO of the bakery window behind printed through the hat like a ghost). A lens cut-away (world/town/lenscut.ts): the director publishes sight capsules (lens → each framed head and body) and every town street-prop material screen-door fades the fragments inside one, nearer the lens than the actor (the lamp-post lantern over the farmer's face in a real talk); live talks also fade props ≥ 1.3 m in front of the nearest actor (the bench across the foreground). Static props are merged per cell, so this is per fragment, one uniform branch when off. Grass round the speakers' feet shrinks to a lawn during a talk / event (installGrassClear), no grass grows on paved lanes, and a sizeable bystander head beside the pair's heads steps out of a live talk (Kit's big head in the background). Portraits (portraitOpts.chibi): the painted busts take the models' chibi grammar — a rounder, shorter face, big low-set eyes with a large iris, a toy nose (a soft wedge under a lit dot), a small mouth with no lip shapes, smile folds, jowls or cheekbone hollows, narrower shoulders; curly hair is the model's cloud of big puffs (no sausage coils); neutral brows relax (June's neutral read as a scowl); the crop keeps the face ≥ 57 % of the card. Gifts: produce is held as the real 3D crop mesh in both hands, lifted from the waist over 0.3 s (ease-out-back); the heart burst stays a tight crown round the receiver's head. Heart events: wren-2 "Painting the Bridge" re-blocked across the river — Wren at her easel facing the water and the lens, the farmer at her shoulder on the lens side (both faces three-quarter in the choice two-shot), the painting between them, the Kettle Bridge arching beside them; an event subject with hold stays in every two-shot (scored in the lens solve). Chibi portraits keep the chin on the neck (the crown comes down; Kit had a giraffe neck), no lid creases, and Odessa's kerchief print stays inside the dome. The stone bridge's end-post flower pots floated on the deck axis 1 m up (the critic's "stray red octagonal prism"): gone. Street life: town-day has a verb in most hands (Marigold sweeps the market lane, Rowan and Odessa haul crates in — walkers carry while walking — Tobias reads, Bram unloads, Wren paints, Kit runs); the evening bakery knot opens to the lens; Odessa is taller and leggier, Marigold, Hazel shorter, Rowan taller. Barks: a far bubble grows to keep ≈ 8.5 % of the frame height (×1.9 max) and writes a near depth so the post-process height fog no longer greys it. Town: Hearthvale's own sett texture (world/town/cobble.ts: smaller stones, per-stone hue and value — sandstone, blue-grey granite, a few mossy stones — worn chipped edges, a polished crown); roof moss clumps each their own size, stretch, turn and tone; June's tea towel is two thin bands hugging the bodice (no paper tabs); Odessa's bandana carries a fine cream-gold print (no toadstool spots; the portrait agrees). Winter: a clear cyan-blue sky fill and blue shadows on the snow, a warm cream sun, exposure and gain off the clip with more contrast (tone.ts), roof snow in wider overlapping strips along one slow wave (no stair-step jaggies), slush warmed to a brown-violet melt.

• Round 17 — Crisp bubbles: villager barks and emotes sit on their own layer (BUBBLE_LAYER) and NpcSystem draws them over the finished frame (game.afterRender, the remote-emote precedent) — the tilt-shift no longer smears a bark in the soft top band of the establishing lens; a turned-away speaker behind a nearer head keeps a whole bubble (the 35 % ghost read as a glitch in town-coop). Close lenses: any lit festoon string hanging in frame nearer the lens than the nearest actor comes down for the shot (odessa-4 had a row of blown bulbs across the lower third). Faces: the 3D 'thinking' face arches one brow and half-drops the lids with no inner-down knit (it read as a scowl while the card mused). Gift tag: the "Loved it!" ribbon hangs from the card's top edge over the scene, never over the portrait's hat or brow. Town: hero cherries grow smaller blossom clusters with air between them, satellite sprays on the twigs, fresh leaves among the florets and a warmer pink (the crown read as one lilac cloud); sun-faded stall canopies and shop awnings (the near-white stripes clipped in town-day); Kit's chalk on the plaza (a numbered hopscotch court, a smiling sun, a heart, an arrow to the bakery, a dropped stub) breaks the foreground setts of the plaza lenses; the dusk tone is bluer (sky fill, ground, fog, gain) so the evening plaza reads blue-violet under warm pools; in winter the swept lanes keep snow in their joints and a thin uneven dusting. Evening knot: Odessa stands at Bram's left instead of between him and the lens. Planters (hedge.ts buildTownPlanter): the town's stone planters hold a cottage-garden mound of small leaf lobes, leafy spills over the lip, five-petal blooms in the box's colours and staked lavender spikes (they were a row of green balls with pastel eggs).

• Round 18 — Odessa's headscarf (blind judge on The Lantern Cage: "a mushroom-cap hat that sits like a bowl"): the scarf's cloth dome was 0.8 of the skull's height, so her scalp poked through the crown as a brown patch and the grooved hairline band poked through as a dark blot over the brow — the dome now covers the skull (0.97), the hairline under the hem is a thin even band, and the kerchief is workwear indigo with the fine cream print (red with pale dots was the toadstool read; the portrait follows hatColor). Frozen river: the town uses the ice — skate tracks carved in figure-eight loops and long glides up- and downstream of the Kettle Bridge, and an ice-fishing hole (open black water in a chipped slush ring, a pail, a fish on the ice; winter.ts). Roof snow strips each take their own value (older wind-glazed strips cool blue-grey, fresh ones bright) instead of one white sheet. Night: a little more moonlit fill and less vignette (tone.ts) so the mid-ground of night events reads. Determinism: the festival lights' flicker phases were the last Math.random in the town (golden-ratio phases now). Motion: town-commute (11:57 on the plaza lens, the town's own schedule running — at noon Wren leaves her easel for the café and Marigold the store for the fountain on real A* paths); with &seq=10 and --frames 6 it is one uninterrupted schedule change. Review sequences (shots/town-r18/sheet-*.png, built by _sheet.py from shot.mjs --frames): town-commute&seq=10, town-day&seq=8, town-heart-event&event=odessa-4&seq=10 (wide → close-up cut, typewriter, insert card, tear), …&spectate=1&seq=10 (the farmhand's handoff), town-dialogue&npc=bram&gift=pumpkin&seq=6. Perf (pillar 14): wall-clock fps in the shot logs is the shared GPU (load 30–470 while ten teams render), not the frame — scripts/framebench.mjs (min-of-samples, the whole frame rendered back to back) puts town-evening at 6.3 ms min / 9.7 ms p20 at 1440p High (load 30): ≈ 2.6x headroom on the 16.7 ms budget; per-group deltas: props −0.77 ms, GTAO −0.97, point lights −0.40, trees −0.37, the ten villagers +0.13 (noise). The town's own JS (cpuprof.mjs) is ≈ 0.6 ms a frame (npcs 0.29, villagers 0.16, town 0.15).

• Round 19 — Portrait lab: src/world/town/lab/portraits.html renders the painted busts without booting the game (node scripts/shot.mjs --url "/src/world/town/lab/portraits.html?npc=tobias,bram&light=day|dusk|night&s=360&cols=5", ≈ 30 s a sheet instead of ≈ 3 min). Turned heads: a three-quarter mood swung the far eye onto the cheek's silhouette (Tobias / Bram blush, thinking, sad, wistful: the far eye half under the sideburn with the face's ink line through it) — the turn is gentler (0.46) and the face outline follows a third of it; Bram's sideburns are slimmer. Hats with volume: the baker's toque is a pleated band under a mushrooming starched puff (pleats, overhang shadow, far-side shade, lit crown), Tobias's flat cap wool tweed (flecks, seams, shaded peak, a brim shadow on the brow), Rowan's beanie knitted (rib columns over the crown, the cuff's fold shadow), Hazel's sunhat woven straw, Odessa's kerchief cloth folds — they were flat fills. Bram's flour is a dry dusting high on the cheek (the blurred white wisp by the moustache read as steam). The Lantern Hall card is a day place (sky, grey gable, rose window) — it was a starry night at eleven in the morning; the night wash still darkens it after dusk. 3D: the flat cap loses its eight umbrella seams (from the plaza lens Tobias wore a green parasol). Blue hour: town-evening now plays at 20:06 — the cobalt ambient with warm lamp pools the critic asked for (at 19:36 it was still sunset: a lilac-pink wash); the dusk tone is bluer and keeps its saturation / contrast (TOWN_TONE.duskSun / duskSky / duskGround / duskHemi are live knobs). Sun-clipped whites: the stall canopies' light stripes are unbleached linen, Hazel's glasshouse glazing sage-grey glass on off-white bars (both clipped to paper white at noon).

• Round 20 — Buried mouths (a real bug): wide faces (fp.w > 1.01: Kit, Marigold, Hazel, Bram, Odessa) carry a cheek / jowl mass in front of the skull, and the mouth sat on the skull inside it — the laugh 'D', the round 'o' and the grin were buried and only the thin rim peeked out, so Kit "laughed" with ^^ eyes and a closed smile while his card grinned. The mouth now rides on whichever surface is in front (jowlZ). Odessa's close single (blind judge: "crude and blocky face", "a hard bowl clipped onto the head", "the right third falls into murky darkness"): the 3D jaw block saturates at fp.jaw 0.7 (the card keeps the full value), a floor of cheek warmth (cheeks 0 was one flat brown disc), straight-bar brows capped at 1.12 thickness (bushy elders > 1.5 keep theirs); the headscarf has deeper folds that swirl to the knot, four tension creases pulled from the knot over the crown and a slimmer rolled hem (the 2.4 cm torus stood out as the rim of a bowl); "The Lantern Cage" sets her work light down by the crates — a candle prop with glow (an additive ground pool, no new PointLight → no shader recompile mid-event) as a deliberate warm focal light in the right third. Tobias: the hook nose is a short wedge sunk into the face (the 9 cm bridge capsule read as a pale finger between his eyes); the flat cap rides 0.05 R higher with the peak tipped up (it sat on his brows and hid the mood). Rowan: the beanie's 16 rib tabs are gone (on the tilted cuff they stood off its lower edge at a slant and read as a row of staples in his close singles; the painted card carries the knit). Perf (shot logs, 1920×1080 High, vsync-capped): town-day 59.8 fps / 231 calls / 1.24 M tris, evening 60 / 231 / 1.15 M, winter 60 / 210 / 1.05 M, heart event 60 / 189 / 0.91 M, dialogues 60 — no new lights, the work light is 6 draws for the event only.

• Round 21 — Heart-event footing (critic blocker: wren-2's farmer stood IN the river among the cattails): every event mark lands on dry ground (NpcSystem.landOf / wetAt: the ground under the feet and 0.4 m round them ≥ 16 cm over the waterline, on a walkable tile, else the nearest such point), and auditEvents() fails any beat with an actor's feet in / at the water. wren-2 is re-blocked: the farmer comes up the bank on Wren's landward side and the lens looks down the bank from the north, so the Kettle Bridge's arch reads side-on over the water behind the pair (it was the deck end-on, ~40 % of the frame); a painter who has turned to talk opens to the lens like any owner (facedActor). An event's painted insert card only shows when the thing it paints isn't already on screen (insertNow). Faces (critic: "capsule brows, slab beards, decal blush that reads as wounds, mannequin-blank faces"): brows are tapered brush strokes laid on the brow ridge (browStroke: a round inner head thinning to a fine tail along the villager's arch, a raised spine); cheek warmth and the blush mood are soft radial discs that follow the face's curve and fade into the skin (surfDisc + RigBuilder's per-vertex fade to an edge colour; the flat circles cut through the cheek as pink wedges, the hatch strokes poked out of Bram's beard as "fangs"); a full beard is a volume grown out of the face (beard === 'full': a shell over the skull / jowls from sideburn to sideburn whose thickness ramps from a broken hairline — temples → under the cheekbones → the mouth corners → under the lower lip — to a chin that hangs below the jaw, combed into strands) with a moustache of two tapered strokes wrapping the upper lip (no sausages); the lower face lights wholly as the skull's surface (Odessa's banded jaw seam); eye glints smaller and ivory (no blown-white "tears"); gritted teeth are a rounded grimace (no postage stamp); the closed mouth line is firmer with a soft lower-lip shade (Dr. Pell has a mouth in every mood); crow's feet / the anger crease are softer. Tobias's flat cap crown reaches down over its band (a skin gap showed). Hair: Kit's tufts are rounded flame locks lying along the scalp (cone points read as devil horns; the portrait's two crown flicks became one cowlick and the ear tufts hang), Wren's bob has deeper strand grooves and two loose strands. Portraits: a big-headed villager (look.head > 1) gets a rounder, shorter, wider painted face so the card is the bust of their own model (Kit read as a teenager). Face lab: src/world/town/lab/faces.html?npc=…&moods=…&s=…&pitch=…&yaw=… renders the 3D faces as the talk lens sees them (~300 px) without a game boot and gates every villager's full mesh under 20k triangles. Dialogue box (critic: "~290 px portrait with the heart strip over the chin"): a 384 px portrait (268 px on small screens) in a thick carved frame (ink line, gilt bead, wood moulding, bevel), the heart meter moved off the face into the name-plate band under it (plaque left, hearts right; a spectator's two labelled rows stack under the plaque), and on a gift / heart-event answer the fill pours into the hearts over ~0.9 s with a "+♥" tick. Gifts: one heart signal (the burst rises from above the hair; no extra heart emote), produce held cap-forward and berries bigger, non-produce gifts held up as an unlit cut-out card in front of the hands. Talks: the farmer faces the villager with a ~26° stage cheat to the lens (a three-quarter back view with the cheek and nose, not the hat brim); a live talk lens with a roof slab across its top band re-blocks (roofTop in talkFrameFails). Street life: noon is the peak — Bram serves at the bakery door with June in the queue, Odessa and Hazel lunch north of the fountain (plaza_lunch), Rowan and Marigold chat at the fountain, Kit plays hopscotch (plaza_hop), Linus reads the notice board, Tobias on his bench (town-noon demo, 12:20, the schedules' own peak); town-coop has its own blocking in knots of two and three (no ring); bark bubbles stack straight up over their speaker before sliding sideways (short tails), and unexplained "!" marks are gone from the staged demos. Blue hour: a character-only fill on every villager from dusk (the albedo-relative lens-side lift, weaker than a talk's), less raised black, more contrast / saturation, bloom held, richer gold lamp pools; town-evening breaks the bakery line-up into pairs (Bram and June at the door, Odessa and Rowan under the market lamp), Tobias turns side-on at the hall lantern and Linus leaves along the east lane (not behind the toolbar). Winter: the flower carts are tarped over with the winter trade on top (a chestnut brazier with paper cones, knitted hats and mittens, preserves). Perf: Odessa's mesh 22.0k → ~19k (the scarf's hairline band 2.5k → 0.5k, the under-scarf shell rows halved, plait lobes lighter); shot logs (1920×1080 High, vsync-capped, ten teams on the GPU): town-day 60 fps / 230 calls / 1.26 M tris, town-evening 60, town-noon 60.

Demos: town-day (the square in full swing, villagers spread over the steps, stalls and benches), town-river (the stone bridge, market row, river and inn terrace in one frame), town-establish (the Kettle Bridge with the forge and the inn either side, r12), town-evening (20:06, the blue hour: lamps lit, the bakery and market row), town-commute (r18: noon on the plaza, the schedule runs — &seq=10), town-noon (r21: 12:20, the lunch rush on the plaza), town-winter (the establishing lens in snow, its own winter blocking), town-winter-square (the plaza in snow), town-coop (two scripted farmhands: Juniper chats with Bram, Pip gives Wren strawberries — the host paths a real farmhand's intents take), town-rain, town-east, town-south, town-cast, town-dialogue (&npc=<id>&mood=<mood> · &gift=<item> · &ask=1 · &first=1 for the first meeting; bystanders vary per villager and hour, busy with their own things), town-night-talk, town-heart-event (&event=<npc>-<2|4|6|8|10>&step=N, &alt=1 = the second answers remembered, &spectate=1 or town-heart-spectator = a co-op farmhand's view), any of them &seq=<s> for a frame sequence (r15), town-memories (&mem=all|alt|<flag>,…: the town a year in, keepsakes out), town-square, town-portraits (&ui=portraits:<npc> = all ten moods), town-social, festival.

Driftsand Beach & fishing

Driftsand Beach (src/world/beach/) is reached from the east edge of the town square (the farm connects through town; there is no direct farm-to-beach path). ocean.ts is the stylised sea (a depth gradient from the terrain height texture, swash run-up that stays in sync with the wet band on the sand, breakers over the sandbar, broken domain-warped foam lace, sparse whitecaps that sit on the crests, foam collars around the pier pilings, sun glints, horizon haze, a far plane that continues the near grid's depth) and the still tide-pool water. sand.ts shades the ground (wind ripples, a wet band, caustic filaments, the wrack-line tint, the rock shelf, pool floors). props.ts builds the pier, the shack, the lighthouse, the rowboat, four driftwood silhouettes, the kelp and shell wrack line, and the boat, campfire and sign vignettes. The pier's rail rope has its own material (railRopeMaterial) that dithers itself out in a capsule round every farmer on the deck (local + remote, setRailAvoid), the west rail is unhooked at the walkway fishing spot (PIER_FISH_GAP, toe board + ropes hung back on their posts), and the bracing runs pile-to-pile above the swell. clusters.ts dresses the open sand (net drying rack, lobster-pot stack, fenced dune-grass islands, BEACH_CLUSTERS); a second, sparser tide line of shells and kelp runs along the wet band; crabs are Poisson-scattered (≥ 2.5 m); the headland has a sandy track to the lighthouse door, thrift cushions and a wind-burnt rim. Flotsam comes in four kinds (plank, bleached branch, bottle, kelp raft), each sized and turned its own way, kept out of the walkway cast corridor. At night the dry sand keeps a moonlit value, the shallows darken, the surf edge glows faintly (bioluminescence) and the moon's glitter road runs up the sea ahead of the camera. shells.ts handles the tide-line forageables (with contact blots and star glints) and the tide-pool anemones. life.ts has the gulls, crabs and leaping fish. Beach stone (rocks.ts) is faceted: a low-poly noisy icosphere cut by 3-5 cleavage planes, split faces with normals leant 72 % towards the face normal (chipped planes, soft roll at the edges), curvature AO, lichen only as sparse rosettes on up-facing tops. The tide-pool shelf (shelf.ts) steps down in 21 cm wave-cut terraces, each bed tinted its own warm / cool sandstone with a sunlit lip and a shaded riser; patchy weed round the pool lips (no collar ring), small spray puddles, real barnacle + limpet colonies along the wet sea rim (buildShelfCrust) and rubble groups (a broken block + cobbles) on the ledges. The headland sward varies straw-warm / blue-green with darker tussocks, the thrift clusters along its rim.

Fishing (systems/fishing.ts, visuals in world/beach/tackle.ts + fishmesh.ts, UI in ui/fishing*.ts, data in data/fish.ts) works on any map with water: the farm pond, the town river and the sea.

• Cast: hold use to charge the power meter (sweet spot at 90–100 %, MAX flash, a tick every 25 %). Aim at the pointer (for casts started with the mouse) or with the movement keys (8 directions); the farmer turns to face the aim. Max range grows with the fishing level and the rod.
• Bite: a "!" speech bubble, a splash crown with a spray column, the float dunked under, camera shake and a 60 ms hitstop. Press use in time to hook.
• Reel: bar-and-fish minigame (lift 3.6, gravity 3.0, velocity cap 2.0, bounce off both ends), progress starts at 35 % with a 0.6 s grace period (2 s in practice), plus treasure chests. Quality comes from the time the fish spent inside the bar, a perfect fight, the perfect-catch streak, the cast and the skill. It is not a dice roll.
• Progression: fishing XP per catch (difficulty-weighted, ×1.5 for a perfect fight), levels 0–10 (a taller bar and longer casts). Bait is used up one per cast and halves the wait. Tackle works while carried and wears out after 20 catches: the Cork Bobber makes the bar taller and the Glimmer Lure makes treasure more likely. Rod tiers are Bamboo, Fiberglass and Iridium. Buy all of these at the shack's Bait & Tackle honesty box (interact at the porch, or openUI('tackle')).
• Catch: the held fish is sized from the rolled length (species base × length / median, 0.7-1.8×); a fish ≥ 1.1 m held is a trophy (a wider "ta-da" V, a camera push-in, a drum-roll fanfare). Every catch is shown over the hat with both arms flung up in a V (the chibi's short arms straight up vanish inside the head); for the celebration the farmer joins the GTAO G-buffer (otherwise the deck's groove AO behind prints through the face). The collection record is written the moment the fish lands (the card's NEW / RECORD badge comes from that write). The line is a verlet rope with a bending constraint and a water floor with friction. Casting right at the pier rail steps the farmer 0.42 m inboard first.
• Service: game.services.fishing → state(), available(), cast(power), level(), xp(), rodTier(), upgradeRod(t), records(). Events: fishing:cast|bite|hook|catch|escape|level.
• Round 6: a trophy (held length ≥ TROPHY_SCALE) is presented level across the chest in both hands, three-quarter to the lens with the back tipped forward (FishingGear.presentHeld, a one-turn arrival twirl + sparkles; remote farmers too via poseAnglerArms(..., trophy)); smaller fish still hang from the fist by the tail. The line is laid analytically while the float flies (ease ≥ 1 stores no momentum) and every verlet step is velocity-clamped (no phantom V). The real-play fishing camera swings 50° off the throw's perpendicular (the angler faces the lens three-quarter) and drops to 34° pitch once a fish is on; candidate yaws whose ray to the angler's head hits the map's trees group are skipped (pond canopy). Pilings stop 0.7 m under the surface; seagrass is clumped tufts (two fixed blade leans), wind slicks and creased ridge normals are gone from steep views, bed caustics fade out by 1.15 m. A farmhand's catch line goes into their own name-tag speech bubble.
• Round 7: the far sea by day is a saturated cerulean all the way to a true horizon line (deeper far reflections, the haze colour reached just inside the camera's 400 m far plane, and createHorizonClouds paints the band below the horizon in the same colour, then a pale horizon wash deepening to a cerulean zenith over the whole visible sky). Steep lenses at dusk read a calmer reflection normal; the sun's side gets a few large 4-point stars past 9 m (no warm confetti under the pier). Rocks take 60 % of the distance fog (the dusk headland keeps a silhouette); the moored dory pushes slow ripple rings and darkens the water round its hull. Every catch is now presented across the chest in both hands, local and remote (presentSpread: hands spread with the fish's length, smaller fish ride higher; poseAnglerArms(..., spread)), with a 0.4 s twirl; the catch card picks the side / height that covers the fewest other farmers (CardAnchor.avoid). Reel pacing: gain 0.155-0.075d, loss 0.06+0.1d, and a hot streak (+30 % after ~2 s of unbroken tracking, the bar glows gold) — commons land in ~4-7 s; the sim test adds a laggy 60 ms-polling controller. The reel panel stays below the clock HUD (and scales on short windows). Casting draws a dotted arc from the rod tip to the reticle, the meter sits out over the water, the rod is loaded upright and the farmer crouches with the power. Pond / river ripple rings sit under the lily pads. __game.teleport resets the camera to the follow defaults (a demo camera no longer outlives it; &x=/&z= URL nudges keep it).
• Round 8: the day sky over the sea is blue with separate cumulus heaps (round lobes on a flat base, cauliflower bumps, cool white crowns, shaded creases, clear sky between them, integer cells round the horizon so there is no seam) instead of one continuous bank that read as a beige overcast lid; the sea past the far plane and the ocean's far haze are a deeper blue than the sky, so sea and sky meet on a crisp line. Slack line never hangs more than lets it fall in one curve into the float (no U-shaped hammock on long casts from the pier) and the sideways breeze bow scales with how much of it reads sideways on screen. beach-sunset lays a 9 m line out over the lit shallows. The moored dory has floorboards and rides 7 cm higher (the sea drew over its bare inner skin). Kelp rafts are wavy segmented fronds fanned down-current round a dark knot with gas bladders, the floating stick is a crooked waterlogged branch, and flotsam rides in the water rather than on it; gulls have a cool slate mantle and black primaries. Wind-up: both fists on the butt in front of the right shoulder (the raised hands vanished behind the hat). The fight: the hooked fish is a dark silhouette just under the top pulling away beyond the float (local and remote anglers), a thrash breaks the surface with a splash crown, and the fight splashes burst at the float where it is now (they used to burst at the cast spot).

Demos: beach-day, beach-sunset (a line in the water at dusk), beach-night, beach-tidepools, beach-tackle (the honesty box), fishing-cast, fishing-flight (the cast arc in the air), fishing-wait, fishing-bite, fishing-reel, fishing-catch, fishing-pond, fishing-river. Fishing demos take &fish=<fishId> and &phase=cast|flight|wait|bite|reel|catch; fishing-catch also takes &size=<0..1> (where in the species' size range the catch lands, default 0.78). The staged phases take &cast=<m> (float distance, default 5.2; 9 in beach-sunset) and &aimdeg=<deg> (the aim turned off the facing, + = counter-clockwise from above; -12 in beach-sunset). openUI('fishing') starts a practice fight on the spot.

Farming

systems/farming.ts runs the loop (hoe → water → sow → grow → harvest) and its game feel; visuals live in world/props/ (soil.ts lofted furrow mounds + torn sod lips + sub-tile wet flood — dry soil is pale, warm and crazed with hairline cracks, wet soil dark, cool and glossy; crops.ts 18 crops × 6 stages with soft-plant light (wrap + sun transmission + rim), giant crops on a heaved soil berm with radiating vines (fractal-floret giant cauliflower cupped by ribbed leaves), crow-eaten stubs, produce crates; farmfx.ts clods / torn-sod blades / can stream (tapered camera-facing ribbon + 2 side jets, droplets, splash crowns with ripple rings) / dusty slam stamps / dust walls / harvest pop + 3D quality star / swing smear / sprinkler mist / scarecrow radius; tilecursor.ts corner-bracket cursor (solid on the worked tile, a faint smaller bracket on a hovered tile out of reach), tools.ts tiered tool meshes, crows.ts), poses in entities/farmer-actions.ts. Tilling culls grass tufts and ground cover overhanging the tile (grass.clearTile margin, farm clearGroundCover).

• Mechanics: seeded rolls (game.rng.fork('farming')); farming XP + level 0–10 (farming.level(), farming:xp, farming:level); quality = skill + fertilizer + care (1 % gold at level 0 without fertilizer); fertilizer / qualityFertilizer items; greenhouse ground (farming.setGreenhouse(rect), or a greenhouse plot on the map) ignores seasons; energy may run to −15 (farmer trudges, sweats) then passes out; charged slams are refused at 0 (tool:refused, energy:refused); missed swings cost 1.
• Harvest feel: yank (crouch → spring) → the produce arcs into the raised right hand, lands with a squash (1.25 / 0.8 → 1, ease-out-back), is held up ~0.4 s with a rim-lit presenting sway while a bevelled 4-point quality star spins in beside it (0 → 1.3 → 1, emissive → bloom, twinkles), then its icon flies to the toolbar slot (460 ms, 1.15 slot bounce). Co-op: another farmer's harvest (harvest(x, z, 'instant')) pops the produce in place over the tile.
• Events for audio: tool:swing / tool:impact (impact frame; soil:tilled / soil:watered / crop:sown land on the same tick) / tool:charge / tool:refused, can:refill / can:empty, soil:tilled / soil:watered / soil:fertilized, crop:planted / crop:harvested / crop:withered / crop:giant, crow:arrive / crow:eat, sprinkler:spray, harvest:collect, energy:exhausted / energy:passout, soil:blocked (one dull tick per tile a charged swing had to skip).
• r14 polish: every crop shows all six stage meshes (no zero-day stage); dry tilled soil is dusty tan, wet soil deep and glossy (the soak is the payoff); the can pours glassy, tapering bead ropes and lands as a low radial crown
  • double ripple (no geyser); sprinkler beads are see-through, velocity-stretched streaks that bloom into flat crown rings where they land; charging previews the whole footprint (red ✕ on tiles it will skip) and a multi-tile charge draws one merged gold outline + per-tile wash instead of nine bracket sets; the target bracket is bolder with a dark under-stroke and a ~10 % state-tinted wash; ripe strawberries carry 9 fat berries over the rosette, eggplants hang big glossy fruit, ripe sunflowers tip their faces up to the lens; held pumpkin = ribbed field pumpkin with a woody stem, held parsnip pale cream; the quality star floats beside the produce; giant pumpkin / melon fill the 3×3 block; vine leaves vary in hue / tilt; farm-giant frames the farmer 3/4 looking at the giant, farm-sprinkler keeps the farmer beside the bed facing the lens, farm-crows shows the scarecrow ring, farm-crops-all puts tall rows at the back of each block.
• r15 polish: summer hero field = one melon row a side (giant in the SW corner), the NE bed packed with peppers + tomatoes, blueberry / pepper / tomato blocks up front; peppers are rounded glossy bushes wearing their red pods on the outside, blueberries woody balls of small leaves with dusty-blue clusters on the lens-facing side, strawberries low trifoliate clumps with 5–7 berries hung off the rim on pedicels, corn a fuller fan, tomatoes four leaves a tier; seedlings carry a signature from the first true leaves (serrated staked tomato, glossy round pepper, purple-stemmed velvet eggplant) and stages 1–2 are larger. Freshly hoed (or slam-struck) earth is dark, crumbly and fluffed ~50 % taller for ~5 s with no tread seams; dry beds have deeper troughs. The hoe blade is 1.4×; chop / slam impacts drive a ~29° lean, a knee-dipped lunge and a two-frame squash. Tool impacts startle butterflies (a farmer at work keeps a ~2.4 m bubble; staged stills snap them out of ~3.6 m). The pour leaves as the can tips, lands ~0.24 s later (fatter, sparser droplets around a thicker core) and splashes until the tail lands, ~80 ms into the lift. Sprinkler heads turn lazily (1.25–1.6 rad/s) and throw uneven jets on real 0.6–0.9 m arcs with sun glints, beads thickening with camera distance. Crows are near-black with a black bill (blue lives in the rim sheen); the farm-crows ring is opt-in (&ring). Pulled roots leave a dark hole + a ring of crumbs and a bed kick (a farmhand's too). A charge is paid by the share of its footprint actually worked (≥ 2) and skipped tiles keep their red ✕ through the slam; the slam ripple is 12 ms a tile. Demos: farm-tools swung 24° (blade in front of the body), farm-pop 3/4 with the farmer standing in the bed, coop-farm-work (the co-op loop seeked mid-pick / mid-pour; demo-table t=<sec> token).
• r16 polish: Sequences are one action — shot.mjs --frames N calls __game.seqFrame(i, n) before each frame; action demos (farm-tools, farm-water, farm-slam, farm-pop, farm-harvest, any &tool= / &loop=) hold the rAF loop, restart ONE action from rest (energy + clock frozen) and step the sim by hand to 8 authored moments (SEQ_PLANS: hoe = ready · anticipation · wind-up · wind-up top · downswing · impact · bite + recoil · recovery; pour = lift · tip · stream leaves · lands · soaking · full soak · tail lands · wet tile); the harness prints each frame's phase label + the events it acknowledged (tool:swing, tool:impact, soil:watered …). Swing body — the free hand is IK-locked on the handle (two-hand grip through wind-up, blow and recoil), the pelvis leads (hips pitch / twist keys), a lunge splits the legs with the body dropped so the boots stay planted (knee compression), the blade bites ~5 cm into the soil then drags back toward the boots. Water — thin translucent threads that break into separated droplets low on the arc, restrained glints (no bloom), short low splashes, a timed ~0.8 s soak gradient spreading from where the water lands; sprinkler throws ~0.35–0.5 m apex, 72 beads a jet, thinner + sparser. Cursor — thin strokes, state-tinted fill, compresses + fades on the impact frame. Crows — upright on visible legs, neck-driven pecks, two-footed hops with wing flicks + landing squash, contact shadows, a startled crouch-and- leap escape; farm-crows shows guarded rows inside a crisp gold scarecrow ring next to the raided ones (&ring=0 hides it). Death — per-crop skeletons (heaved root shoulders, rotted cauliflower, bolted kale, dead sunflower heads, husked corn cobs) in paler ashen tan with ±20 % size. Young crops — stage 2–3 identity cues (hilled potato ridge, strawberry runners + daughter crowns, melon / pumpkin runners + tendrils, first pepper / eggplant / tomato flowers, twining yam, woody blueberry base). Hero fields keep a wider sharp tilt-shift band (rc.tiltBand); farm-harvest-fall is staged in warm late-afternoon light. New demo farm-coop-tools: the host hoeing beside three real co-op farmhand avatars caught on one beat (hoe at blade contact, mid-pour onto a wet tile, a crop caught in raised hands with a gold star). Sequence: node scripts/shot.mjs --url "?demo=farm-tools" --frames 8 --out s.png.
• r17 polish: Events on the hit — soil:tilled (hoe + charged slam) and soil:watered fire on the impact / landing tick together with tool:impact (the logic still flips at the button press); crop:planted stays the synchronous state flip (co-op seed accounting reads it inside item:use) and the new crop:sown is the sow beat on the seeds' impact tick; the pour's tool:impact is the water landing (~0.51 s), not the can tipping; untillable ground answers with tool:impact hit: 'blocked' (blade glances off the turf, grass flecks, the red ✕ pops; the bracket stays red through the swing). Soil — soaked soil is darker, warmer and more saturated than dry (≈ −60 % value), matte-damp (roughness 0.68, env reflection cut 85 %), glossy only along the advancing meniscus; freshly hoed earth is darker than the dry bed (moist, crumbly), never glossy. Cursor — no wash at all (brackets + dotted rim only). Clods — faceted three-crumb clusters with per-facet shading in three size classes, pre-advanced so they are airborne ON the impact frame, paler dust ring; the hoe smear is half strength. Swing — the wind-up coils out to the camera side (blade clear of the hat), the pitch range is ~0.45 rad (no lurch toward the tile); farm-tools is framed at ~1.8× gameplay zoom, whole farmer + bed. Sprinklers — 3 jets a head (4 cross), 80 % of beads strung on the rope with tight spread, one soft translucent ribbon per jet (same draw), darker soak crescents riding under each landing point. Giant melon — pebbled rind bump + netted mottling + freckles, a wider darker contact pool, three vine runners climbing the belly with leaves, five big leaves leaning against it. Summer hero field — one species per block with bare spacing rows (corn | sunflower, tomato | pepper, melon patch | blueberry + tomato), red-fruited rows ~45 % ripe. Sequences — the pour plan follows the real flight (lands 0.52, tail 1.05, settled wet tile 1.6; the harness keeps stepping past the action's end). farm-coop-tools reframed (all four farmers inside), the watering farmhand yawed ~60° so the can reads in profile.
• r18 polish: Summer hero field — no bare spacing rows (one plant a tile, Stardew-dense): corn | sunflower at the back, tomato | pepper packed edge to edge in the NE bed, a blueberry row, pepper | tomato blocks, and melon only as one front row a side plus the giant's 3×3 corner; peppers ripe ~2/3 of the time (stage-4 sprigs read as bare soil). farm-tools — shot from the farmer's front-left at ~1.3× gameplay zoom (face, lean and blade all to the lens; the r17 lens sat behind his shoulder), the hoe sequence uses the same lens. Pour — the can stays tipped until 0.84 s, the stream runs ~90 ms into the lift and the tail lands ~1.15 s, so every splash lands while the can is still pouring (sequence moments 0.68 / 0.84 / 1.12 / 1.75); a ~2 cm core rope + 1.5 cm side jets, beads scale with camera distance (never under ~3 px); bounce spatter low and outward (no vertical spurt). Sprinklers — wider, more opaque jets that scale with distance (readable from the 11–17 m hero lenses), the coherent ribbon only over the first ~60 % of the throw, then short streaks with gaps (separate drops, not a hose). Fall field — the bare spacing row is a beet row. Charged slam — the gold area wash is fainter (5 %) and gets out of the way on the hit.
• r19 polish: Perf — field crops cast a STILL shadow (no wind depth material), so the static shadow cache bakes the whole field instead of re-drawing every crop into the sun's map each frame; giants (which breathe every frame) live in their own crops-live batch pool and keep the swaying depth pass (?cropsway=1 = the old path for A/B). __game.info().perf.frameOk is the frame-time half of pillar 14 (≥ 58 fps mean and p95 ≤ 20 ms; ok / budgetOk stay the geometry budget) and shot.mjs warns when it fails. Sprinkler soak decals halved. Pour — dip (knees give, can swings back) → heave to shoulder height → a committed tip with the shoulder rolled into it, face kept up; the stream is launched ALONG the rose (flight time solved from the spout's pitch, ~0.35 s) so it leaves forward and curves into the tile 0.3 past its middle; a tapered glass rope (necking in travelling waves) over the first half of the flight breaks into the bead ropes; first contact = one broad low splash + crown + a dark wet pulse; farm-water is lensed 3/4-profile so the arc reads (sequence moments: dip · lift · tip · arc · lands · soak · tail · wet tile). Hoe — a real crouch with the blade skimming the ground, then a bat-style two-hand coil: the handle laid back over the wind-up shoulder, free arm across the chest, blade cocked beside / behind the head (face clear), legs split; the downswing drives the hands forward at chest height with the blade low in front, then the lunge, the bite and a springier recoil. Harvest — the reward is reserved at the harvest (inventory), but the toolbar slot keeps its old count until the item's icon lands in it; landing fires harvest:land (audio hook) and a quality-tier star burst on the slot (silver / gold / iridium). Sprinklers — rope beads leave in packets of six with clear gaps (beaded throws, not rods), rounder drops, a short soft glass column off the nozzle, apex mist per jet. Cursor — thinner strokes, darker contact under-stroke, seated inside the tile, collapses + fades hard on the hit; the charged footprint outline is a fine line. Field — the summer hero field plants one family per bed side (staked tomatoes | pepper bushes, peppers | tomatoes up front). Giants — ~8 % smaller, slumped heavier bodies, dark pressed-soil pools (pumpkin too). Demos — farm-coop-tools reblocked into lanes (hoe at the north edge, the pour in the front bed in profile, the lift at the east end); farm-crows&raid=flee stages the takeoff beat.
• r20 polish: Co-op can — upgraded cans are satin, mostly-diffuse tier metal (copper / steel / gold body, darker rolled bands, a domed shoulder + filler cap), so a farmhand's can never reads as a hollow hoop; songbirds flee the nearest farmer, co-op avatars included (farmerBubbles in entities/critters.ts), and staged stills whisk any bird inside a farmer's 3 m bubble away. Scarecrow reach — a thin dashed gold line with a dark contact under-stroke draped on the ground (no wash band), shown only while a scarecrow is held; farm-crows stages it only with &ring. Pour — the stream lands ~0.32 m forward of the rose along the pour (a visible parabola, kept on the tile), drains in ~80 ms once the can lowers and the splash dies with it; dry tilled soil is sandier / warmer and soaked soil darker, with a cool sheen riding the meniscus. Hoe — the wind-up lays the shaft back over the shoulder at ~45° (fists at the chest, blade cocked behind), a two-key downswing (~70 ms), a blade-down recovery; low earth-toned dust breath instead of pale dust sheets, a small warm blade flash (no bokeh disc), a 1.45 two-frame soil pop and a fresh furrow fluffed ~75 % and ~1.5 cm proud. Farmer materials (player + co-op) carry a soft highlight knee so sunlit pale cloth never crosses the bloom threshold. Sprinklers — rope beads in evenly spaced packets (dashes with real gaps), a fainter, shorter glass column, wet glints on the leaves the jets hit; heads differ by tier (squat cast-iron hub with copper tips · copper dome with swan-neck arms · gold turret with jointed arms + spire). Crops — the giant melon's rind is glossy (gloss bucket) with a thick woody stem and a corkscrew tendril; pepper pods hang from arched pedicels at the canopy rim; ripe eggplants carry big velvet leaves over smaller drooping fruit; fall beets / yams are grown in densely and the fall NE bed is eggplant. Staging — the summer hero pulls a melon from a melon row (west side of the row in front of him); the quality star grows with lens distance and wears a warm halo; a farmhand's lift uses the host's held-produce scale. Gameplay zoom — cursor strokes ~1.8× past 12.5 m, hoe clods and splashes scale with lens distance (FarmFX.lensK).
• r21 polish: Hoe — the smear samples only the two downswing keys (window ends at the bite) and is cut on the impact tick (SwingTrail.cut()), tinted toward warm dust: the impact frame shows the blade in the earth with clods already ~70 ms airborne (big chunks) / 35–75 ms (clods), never a pale glass ribbon over the tile. Sprinklers — a faint pulsing veil ties each jet's bead packets into one arc out to ~3/4 of the throw (no disconnected stipple). Crops — mature pepper bushes close into a leafy dome (mid-branch leaf skirt, wider leaves); the giant melon's stem is a short dark green-brown stub with a button end (no pale curl). Staging — farm-water lens pulled back to 9.4 m (hat + can + target tile in frame through the whole pour); farm-sprinkler puts the farmer beside the bed in profile watching the head (no head looming at the lens).
• r22 polish: Hoe — an overhead heave instead of a twist toward the lens: deep crouch (chin up, face clear of the hat), then the body arches back tall in a wide split stance with both fists climbing past the hat on the camera side (cartoon arm reach 1.34) and the shaft laid back ~75° with the blade high behind; the downswing jack-knifes the body and whips the blade out in front (never across the face), the recoil rips the blade out low by the shins with the body springing up past rest; head pitch stays chin-up through the lunge. farm-tools is lensed 3/4 front-profile (yaw −38°, 8.2 m) so the arc reads. Pour — the can rises to chin height and tips ~45–54° with the shoulder rolled hard into it; the stream throws ~0.75 m from the rose (flight 0.33–0.40 s, lands in the far half of the tile), fuller 2.6 cm core rope; farm-water lens 7.6 m, 3/4 front. Harvest — the whole reward beat is one sequence (farm-pop --frames 8: reach · crouch · yank stretch · catch squash · present + star · to backpack · icon arcs to toolbar · lands +1 with the tier burst): toolbar flights launched during a capture are paused and scrubbed on the sequence clock (seqFlights); the pickup toast is hidden until the icon lands (reward after cause); produce with no toolbar slot arcs into the bar's last slot (the bar itself is never bumped — its bounce replaced its centring transform). Sprinklers — each jet is a fan, not a wire: ~1/3 of the beads shed into a widening cone (angle jitter ×3.5, per-bead arc height ±15 %), packet spacing jittered per drop, bigger + broader landing crowns, the glass column / veil halved. Field — a bare furrow lane in the summer SE bed between blueberries and staked tomatoes. Giants — ~6 % smaller again and settled (x/z 1.04, y 0.9). Crows — farm-crows&raid=beats stages beats: a late-comer swooping in, the near raiders startled up off their plants while two keep tearing (wall-clock timed, so the default still stays the all-pecking raid). Death — each family withers in its own dead colour (tomato olive-khaki, pepper umber, gourds straw, berries mauve-grey, corn bleached straw, sunflower sienna). Perf — out-of-season husks are hidden (they were a moving shadow caster every frame), clod / leaf particle pools draw only up to their last live body.
• r23 polish: Fresh till — freshness is read per TILE in the soil fragment shader (the tile's own heave texel, filled out to a noise-bitten crumbly edge) instead of the bilinear per-vertex blend: the whole new square turns dark, moist and crumbly on the impact frame (r10 critic: only a dark smudge in its middle, the rest as bleached as the dry bed), with a soft ~0.2 spill onto neighbouring tiles. Giant melon — 160 × 84 rind with flame-edged tiger stripes (two serrated harmonics along the length, band-to-band width variance, a darker core vein inside each band), a soft waxy bloom instead of the hot painted highlight, dried soil splashed up the low flank. Giant pumpkin — fruit({ rind }): fine wobbling striations inside each lobe, broad ripening mottle, a green-grey shoulder round the stem and soil on the low flank (84 × 34, was a smooth 44 × 20 lathe). Events — the soil / crop event contract is documented on the event types (soil:tilled on the hoe's impact tick, soil:watered when the water lands, crop:planted is the press-time state flip — voice crop:sown). Captures — sequence captures pause only the flying item icon (.hv-flyitem), never other HUD animations started that tick. Soak — the wet flood starts with a dark spot under the splash on the landing frame and crosses the tile in ~0.35 s (was ~0.5 s from a near-zero start, so the soak only read once the can was lowered).
• r24 polish: Plots — hero fields frame every bed block in pale, sun-bleached timber edging with squat corner posts and mid stakes (world/props/bededge.ts, one merged mesh) so the field reads as intentional, grid-like plots with a crisp light line between the dark soil and the trodden path (blind judge: "tidy the bed layout", "soil, paths and fence compete"); bare spacing lanes stay dry and pale (walkable negative space); the ring path in front of the beds is cleared of tall lawn tufts. The giant joins a hero field only with &giant=1 (it pulled focus from the farmer; farm-giant is its own showcase). farm-harvest / farm-harvest-fall lenses are ~15 % closer on the farmer; crop leaves carry a brighter rim. Pour — the can rides nearer the body (reach 1.18) and the water lands ~0.95 m out past the tile's middle after a 0.37–0.45 s flight: a parabola that visibly crosses a gap between rose and splash (pour plan retimed: lands 0.80). Hoe — the wind-up shaft stands ~45° back in the torso (it lay flat behind the neck like a bindle once the back arch added its lean), gripped at the butt so no handle end crosses the face. Sprinklers — a feathered mist sheath breaks into travelling puffs round each jet's apex. Harvest — the landing burst bursts on the bar's backpack end when the produce has no slot yet, draws above the HUD (it hid under the toolbar), a tier-coloured +N pops off the slot as the count ticks, and sequence captures pin both at their peak on the landing frame. Row markers — hero beds carry a stake
  • slanted sign + a sample of the crop at the walkway end of each family block (buildRowMarkers, one merged mesh). Perf — the closer harvest lens costs ~15–20 % more GPU fill than the old 17 m one in A/B; all six farming demos 59–118 fps avg under load ≈ 190 (history on a quiet machine: farm-harvest ~102). Co-op — farm-coop-tools lanes: hoer N-west, host N-east, waterer at the bed's west end pouring east into the front row, harvester at the east end turned 3/4 to the lens.
• r25 polish: Hoe — a centred overhead coil (no torso twist / side roll, chest stays on the tile; both fists straight up over the hat, the blade high behind the crown, a light back arch — a deep one turned the face up into the high lens and read as a turn to camera); farm-tools lensed 3/4-profile (yaw −26°) and the whole --frames run holds one camera. Clods flip OFF the blade (forward + sideways fan, low hops; none thrown back at the farmer), dust is warm umber, low (< 0.25 m) and gone in ~0.3 s. Charged slam — per-tile bursts are sparse (55 % clods, crumbs halved) and short-lived (0.7–1 s), freshness fades only toward a NOT-fresh neighbour (no seams across a contiguous slam), the gold area wash switches off on the hit, upgraded hoe blades +6 % a tier. Water — the can pours one continuous tapered glass sheet over ~88 % of the flight (beads only as the break-up in the landing third); sprinkler jets carry a solid glass core ribbon (refracting edges + specular streak) inside a feathered apex mist, rope beads only near the landing. Hero fields — no bare bands: the walkway moves to x 21 so the map's scarecrow stands at the head of the walk and the can stump at the cross path; the east beds split into species blocks both ways ([west, eastNear, eastFar], split at x 26): summer gets a hops trellis block, fall its own plan (corn + sunflowers, eggplant | beet | eggplant, pumpkin patch beside a grape vineyard block, beets + eggplants up front) with fallen-leaf litter (buildLeafLitter, one instanced draw). Row markers — weathered planks with the crop's inventory icon painted on a cream oval (canvas atlas, buildRowMarkers(spots, seed, itemIconUrl)), twine lashing, no floating sample; 1.45×. Crops — fall foliage pushed further to olive-ochre with yellowing leaf tips; ripe pumpkins / melons vary ±12 % size, squat ↔ tall and a wider rind tint swing; beets / yams / eggplants fuller; seedlings (stages 1–2) ~10 % bigger; stage 0 is a dark moist dibble hole with a smooth lip, one seed standing tip-up and a pressed drill line (no pebble ring). Cursor — a held tool always keeps a quiet neutral bracket on the facing tile (it vanished at the gameplay lens after acting).
• r26 polish: farm-giant stages its giant again (the r24 &giant=1 opt-in had left the showcase with no giant at all). Fresh-till earth is crumbly, not a smooth dark smudge: two scales of lumps with lit tops and near-black crevices in the soil shader. Sprinkler jets: the glass core necks and fades over 0.42–0.7 of the throw and the rope beads take over from 0.36 (the r25 full-length core read as a white wire from the hero lens). Mature tomatoes carry five broader leaves a tier plus a leafy crown (the front tomato block read as staked poles). Live-play event check (?map=farm, tile 36,31): soil:tilled lands with tool:impact (+13 frames after tool:swing), soil:watered one frame after the pour's impact, crop:sown with the seed impact, and hoeing untillable lawn sends tool:impact hit:'blocked'. Perf: farm-harvest 194 draws / 0.82 M tris (crops 228 k), farm-harvest-fall 193 / 0.79 M, both at 60 fps in the harness.
• r27 polish: Hoe — the anticipation crouch is deeper and HELD two frames (sy 0.73, knees loaded, rear foot planted) with the pelvis coiled away from the tile (hips twist 0.3, chest counter-turned onto the work), the coil held through the top and unwound from the legs on the downswing; the wind-up raises the hoe nearly upright overhead (shaft ~35° back, blade high above the hat crown, hands at the brim) instead of laying it back across the head; a stronger recoil (stretch 1.16) keeps the blade pointing down at the shins (r26 flipped it blade-up mid-release). farm-tools lens has headroom for the raised blade (offsetY 0.35, 9.3 m). Pour — a real dip (can cocked back, knees give), an overshooting heave, then the whole body leans into the pour (chest over the front foot, shoulder rolled ~20°) with the can tipped ~55° → 62° as it empties; the stream's glass sheet is ~5 cm off the rose (was 4 cm), more opaque; farm-water lensed nearer profile (yaw −20, pitch 26) so the parabola crosses the frame instead of running away from the lens. Sprinklers — the glass core is only the first quarter of the throw (fades 0.16–0.36, thinner) and the rope beads take over from ~0.14: beaded packets with gaps carry the arc, no pale wire / ice rod. Perf — the soil shader branches out of the per-tile freshness fetches (3 texture reads + noise) and the turned-earth crumb noise wherever the tile is not fresh (nearly every bed fragment). Interleaved GPU-timer A/B on farm-harvest at 2560×1440 high (material.visible toggles, shadow cache untouched): whole frame ≈ 9.5 ms GPU on a quiet window, soil ≈ 1.8 ms (the only farming system above noise: crops / farmfx / grass within ±1.5 ms); harness stills at load ≈ 95: farm-harvest 59.4 fps p95 16.8 ms, farm-harvest-fall 60 / 16.7, farm-tools 61 / 16.8 (vsync-capped). Sub-40 fps critic numbers were measured with the GPU shared by ~10 agents' browsers — npm run perf flags those runs as REGR? (contended), re-run quiet.
• r28 polish: Watering soak — the can's landing no longer leaves a pale glass pane over the soaked tile: the splash drops its mist puffs (they outlived the pour by ~1 s) and white glint, its ripples are dim and quick (0.3 s, a whisper of inner wash) and every splash lays a dark wet blot instead, so watered = darker the whole way through. Sprinklers — each jet carries one soft translucent ribbon over the whole throw (bead packets ride inside it: one arc of water per jet, not stipple), dimmer landing crowns, and a dark soak crescent (~14 wet blots a second per jet) sweeping round behind each landing arc (wet-decal pool 96 → 192). Hero field — the summer front beds are clean single-species blocks: a melon patch west of the walk, blueberry | tomato blocks east (no pepper / tomato / melon mix, no red-dot carpet). Giant melon — two vine runners climb the flanks onto the crown with leaves lying on the rind and a tendril each (grown under its own vine, not pasted on), stronger flame-edged stripe breakup and broader lumps. Hoe — the impact dust ring / cloud is a little denser and longer (0.26–0.38 s, warm umber). farm-coop-tools lens pulled back (13.1 m, offsetX −1.05) so all three farmhands and the scarecrow sit in frame. Note: crop:planted is the state flip at the press (the co-op seed-refund check reads it synchronously inside item:use); SFX key on crop:sown / tool:impact, which land with the seeds.
• r29 polish: Hero fields (blind judge: "red / yellow blob shapes … unclear whether bushes or boulders", "add more life — a coop, barrels or lamps"): the lumpy flora bushes inside the hero frame are cleared, the orchard tree whose canopy poked into the fall frame's left edge as a flat orange lump is felled for the still, and a farmyard stands west of the front beds (stageYard: a red hen house on legs, round + square hay bales, a keg row, a lantern post, a crate of the season's own produce models, a wheelbarrow — one mergeStatic mesh, ~+6 draws) with three hens scratching / pecking round the coop door (entities/critters Chicken). Fewer tumbling leaves over hero fields (map leafGusts 0.25: near the lens they flew by as big flat orange squares) and the bed litter only where wind piles it (bed edging / path margins — no "confetti"). Ripe gourds vary only ±8 % on top of their own fruit variation (three stacked spreads gave a 2.5× size range; one front pumpkin read as a giant). Scarecrow (farmkit) modelled like the crops: split post lashed to the bar, straw skirt at the foot, plaid shirt with sagging sleeves, rolled cuffs and straw bursting from cuffs / collar / waist, red neckerchief, patched bib overalls with hanging legs, a cinched burlap head with cross-stitched eyes, button nose and stitched grin, a ragged wavy straw brim with a torn notch. Hoe — the wind-up top is a cartoon stretch: arms rubber-hose up (reach 1.75 → 2.0, the chibi's arms straight up ended at the hat brim, so the hands read "at the chin") with the hands slid down the shaft, the whole hoe above the head and the blade cocked high behind the crown; farm-tools lensed lower (pitch 25, yaw −20) so the overhead arc reads against the porch. Pour — the rose throws a fan of fine streams that diverge from the rose (linear fan) and show along the whole arc (they used to appear only in the landing third), so the pour reads as a shower from can to soil; the can is tipped at chest height (held at the chin it hid the face for the whole pour); farm-water lens 8.3 m, yaw −34 (face + can + arc + tile in frame, no cropped hat on the lift). Sprinklers — the per-jet veil is broken into travelling slugs of water (impact-head pressure pulses) with clear gaps, so a jet never reads as one continuous glass wire.
• r30 polish (r10 critic 7.4 — contact, impact juice, water, blueberries, crows): Hands on the tool — two-hand swings solve the tool FIRST (pose + blade-tip IK in an unstretched arm frame, so the cartoon reach never shears the hoe), then IK BOTH arms onto grip sockets on the shaft (top hand on the butt at y −0.2, lead hand ~40 % down at +0.2) and pin the tool back to its solved world transform under the re-aimed arm (FarmerActions.solveTool / gripSolve, raw matrix while posed); farmhands get it too (same class). Big produce — FarmerActions.hug (held half-width) IKs both palms onto the rind's flanks, seated a touch low and forward, and the produce rides hugCenter() against the bib (host + staged farmhand). Swing — body yaw locked (no hip / chest twist through the swing), a front lens winds up over the FAR shoulder (cameraAhead) with the shaft rolled out so the blade clears the hat, chin-up impact; farm-tools lensed 3/4 front-side (yaw −46, pitch 26, 8.7 m) — face and blade both read. Impact — 4 tumbling big chunks + 14-18 clods in three classes that bounce once, a dry-soil dust bloom (lighter than the bed, ~0.4 s), a spill lip of crumbs that rolls over the tile rim and stays ~4 s, a double shock ring, hit-stop 65 ms, camera kick 0.34. Water — the can's glass rope ~2× (10 → 5 cm), denser with a blue rim, beads ~1.7× breaking off along the whole arc, splash crown ~2× with four bounce drops; sprinkler rope drops ~1.7× with a bright highlight + blue rim, sparser shed spray, wider landing mist rings, a firmer veil. Harvest pop — the ground plant is gone within ~2 frames of the yank (no double parsnip); the toolbar icon flies at 104 px with two ghost trails, stretches on the drop and squashes into the slot. Hat — no 85 % shrink while working (the hair poked through the brim and read as a see-through hat). Blueberry — 3-4 overlapping top-lit leaf clumps (no spiral crown seam), leaves laid along the surface, ripe fruit = 5-8 dusty-blue berries a cluster with a dark crown dimple, hung off the upper flanks; the hero bed is staged ~all ripe. Crows — 0.62 (staged 0.66) of the old size, pale horn bill, bigger eye glint + lid ring, cocked tail; one staged bird flutter-hops with its wings spread (display); torn leaf litter round the chewed stub; farm-crows shows the scarecrow reach by default (&ring=0 hides it). Litter — fallen leaves are veined maple / oval-on-stalk atlas cards (alpha-cut, two-tone, sunk a few mm), not orange chips. Withered — every dead plant gets a ~0.3 m stalk that flops over with curled leaves (husks read at the gameplay lens). Cursor — the neutral held-tool bracket is firmer (0.7).
• Demos: farm-harvest (summer hero field, farmer mid-harvest holding a melon with a gold star; &act=none for an empty-handed field, &crop=<id>), farm-harvest-fall (pumpkin), farm-harvest&season=spring (cauliflower), farm-giant, farm-crops (gallery: every crop × stage, &crops=melon,pumpkin, &season=), farm-tools (hoe, side-on, frozen just after impact), farm-water, farm-pop (produce held up with a gold star; &quality=0..3), farm-slam (tier-3 charged hoe), farm-crows (a raid in progress: crows pecking, feathers, a chewed stub; &raid=fly = crows flying in, &ring = the scarecrow's reach), farm-wither (per-crop dead silhouettes: staked tomato, slumped pepper, caved-in melon / pumpkin on a collapsed vine mat), farm-field, farm-lift (two-hand chest hug of a melon), farm-sprinkler, farm-crops-all (all 18 crops × 6 stages, every season, farmer out of frame, two blocks either side of the field's scarecrow / can-stump column; &crops=all on any gallery).
• Readability (r7): hero fields plant tall crops as single-species blocks either side of the walkway with a bare spacing row (HARVEST_ROWS [west, east] pairs, 'gap'); stakes stop a hand above the plant with a twine tie; corn is a paler yellow-green block, beans a dark blue-green; stage 1 is a per-family signature seedling (corn grass blades, gourd heart cotyledons, brassica frilly rosette, beet red stems, bean hooked sprout + tendril to the twine, …) and stage 0 shows the crop's own seed; ripe plants twinkle (updateRipeGlints). The hoed tile springs 0 → 1.3 → 1 out of the turf with a dark inner sod rim, 2–3 big chunks + 10–14 clods, a low dust ring and a 1-frame blade flash; the can pours three fat bead ropes + flanking jets with a bounce spatter; the wet flood fills the tile in ~0.3 s with a dark meniscus at the front and a glossier finish; sprinklers throw denser bead ropes (size falloff), pulse dark soak spots under the turning jets, glint at the nozzle and (near the lens) hang a faint mist at the apex. Params: &tool=hoe|wateringCan|scythe|axe|pickaxe|sow|harvest|charge, &pose=<s> freezes the action at s seconds (__game.game.services.farming.scrub(t) advances a frozen pose), &loop=<tool> repeats the action, &slow=0.25 slow motion (so --frames 8 --every 80 spans a whole swing), &tier=0..3. e.g. node scripts/shot.mjs --url "?demo=farm-tools&loop=hoe&slow=0.3" --frames 8 --every 80 --out shots/hoe.png.

Story, quests & the Lantern Hall

"The Lanterns of Hearthvale" (data in src/data/story.ts, story-scenes.ts, bundles.ts, quests.ts): Gran Rosalind's letter read on the rainy evening coach, the coach pulling into Hearthvale at dusk (a low three-quarter crane from the north verge, lamps on, road dust) where Mayor Hollis waits with a lantern, the overgrown farm by lantern light, the first night at her kitchen table. The Lantern Hall at the top of the square is dark: six rooms (Seed · Sun · Harvest · Hearth · Crafter's · Tide), 26 bundles. Filling a room relights its lantern (celebration cutscene: ignition, glowmoths, the room's dressing swaps from derelict to restored) and restores something in the valley (blossom arch, market day, the harvest-lantern lane, the Hall chimney, flower baskets, glowing koi). Glimmerco's Sterling Vance surveys the Hall, leans on Marigold's shop, then — after Kit confides that the charter would reopen the old mill and bring his dad home from the city — makes an offer on the Hall steps at three rooms with three answers: sign (+5,000 g, EverGlow white Hall, three villagers cool on you), ask for time (a wager: four rooms lit by hand within 28 days → Sterling tears the charter up in public; miss it → he returns with 8,000 g and one last choice) or refuse (his kiosk packs up; after the Hall is lit by hand he returns, redeemed). Each answer brings three follow-up letters and changes what Marigold, Bram, Hazel, Kit and Odessa say to you. Winter 28's Lantern Festival lights the whole valley: the speech on the steps, sky lanterns over the Hall, then a crane out along the west lane as its lanterns light outward from the Hall in groups (0.15 s apart), ending behind the farmer and friends. Gran's sealed letters, villager mail and Glimmerco flyers arrive in the farm mailbox; daily Help Wanted notes are pinned to the board in the square.

• Bundles (data/bundles.ts): pick-N-of-M slots (pick, "any 4 of 6"), minimum produce quality (quality: silver / gold star — quests.offerable() only counts qualifying stacks), cross-system asks (forest forage per season, the mine's ores and gems, barn and coop produce, pond / river / sea fish, beachcombing), grinds capped at 30–50. Rewards unlock things: sprinkler tiers, fertiliser, tackle, chests, and standing perks (reward.perk: the Treasury's Market Charter pays Help Wanted +25 %, the Beachcomber bundle makes every morning a three-note board).
• Help Wanted (systems/quests.ts): a note only asks for what can be delivered in time — already in the backpack, wild (forage, fish, wood, stone, fiber), or ripe / ripening on the farm by the deadline; otherwise a smaller ask or fiber.
• The Hall (systems/story-hall.ts): every room has a hero piece with its own silhouette — Gran's sage seed cabinet with a library ladder, a glasshouse lean-to with lemon trees, the cider press + four barrels + a table for forty down the whole room, the great hearth + an open bookcase + rocking chair, the hundred-drawer wall + a floor loom, lit caustic tanks + the rowboat on the wall + net swags — each lantern its own cage (verdigris globe with enamel petals, gilded sunburst, iron-ribbed pumpkin, silver onion dome with icicles, geared copper box, teal ship's lantern), one diagonal festoon per room, raised-panel wainscot on the knee walls, vertex contact AO + baked floor shadows under every footprint. Dark: split boards to the soil with weeds, ivy in from the walls, leaf drifts, cobwebs, toppled chairs, a fallen banner, the room's goods spoiled; two moon shafts pool on the nave runner, the Great Lantern keeps an ember, the farmer's lantern carries the frame.
• Systems: systems/story.ts (flags, mail, beats, the scene queue — a room completed behind a panel / the pause menu / another scene plays its celebration as soon as the way is clear), systems/quests.ts (bundles + Help Wanted), systems/cutscene.ts (camera keys + Catmull-Rom rails, letterbox, fades, captions, actors walk / face / emote / hold props, dialogue + choices, hide / show, cues for world beats; Esc twice skips; actors opt into the GTAO G-buffer for the scene so close-up faces never pick up the AO of the wall behind them), systems/story-hall.ts, systems/story-world.ts (coach + headlamps + dust, Hall landmark, valley restorations, Glimmerco kiosk / van, finale dressing, sky lanterns and the instanced valley lights). UI: ui/journal*.ts (journal J, bundle altar — 3-column slot grid, pick / quality chips, progress bar, breathing lantern, the restore seal with its spark burst that closes the altar itself — notice board, letter reader, cinema overlay + painted coach window).
• Services: story, letters, quests, cutscene (play, stage(scene, mark), skip, audit()).
• Co-op (host-authoritative; the net layer drives it): story.setRole('host'|'guest'); the host authors every beat (story:scene → guests story.playRemote(scene), which returns the farmhand to where they stood), picks the moral choice (guests see it locked, story:choice → cutscene.resolveRemoteChoice(i)), and owns the shared state (story:dirty once a frame → story.netState() / applyNetState(): flags, mail, bundles, board). Farmhand hand-ins reach the host as quests.contributeRemote / contributeGoldRemote / deliverRemote. Co-op avatars (remote-farmer) and ambient villagers who would twin a cast member or block the lens step aside while a scene plays.
• Perf: the Hall's showing room dressings + bundle sacks are merged per material (hall-dressing); the finale's sky lanterns and valley lights are one instanced draw each; bloom is held at 0.42 while the finale plays; cutscene tree occlusion tests cached canopy spheres every third frame (no per-frame raycasts).
• Demos: intro-letter, intro-establish, intro-arrival, intro-farm, intro-night, lantern-hall-dark, lantern-hall-restored, lantern-room-lit, lantern-room-reveal (&room=seed|sun|harvest|hearth|craft|tide), bundle-ui (or ui=bundles:<room>), bundle-complete (the whole room-complete flow, unpaused: "Offer all" is pressed for you, the seal lands, the altar closes, the celebration plays; &room=, &auto=0), journal (ui=journal:quests|hall|letters), help-board, glimmer-kiosk, glimmer-survey, glimmer-marigold, glimmer-doubts (Kit), glimmer-offer (the three-way choice), glimmer-accept, glimmer-concede, glimmer-return, glimmer-town, lantern-hall-glimmer, sterling-redeem, lantern-festival, lantern-festival-sky, lantern-festival-valley. &lit=N sets rooms lit; &coop=guest stages a scene as a farmhand sees it (e.g. ?demo=glimmer-offer&coop=guest: the choice, locked).

Seasonal festivals

Four festival days, each a transformed map built lazily on first visit (world/festivals/*, system systems/festivals.ts, data data/festivals.ts): Blossom Parade (spring: flower floats along the avenue, petal storm, blossom-pole ribbon dance with a partner you choose), Tide Lantern Night (summer: lanterns on the bay, fireworks over the water, bioluminescent surf + plankton drifts, boat wake rings), Harvest Fair (fall: stalls, giant-produce judging with rosettes, sack race on a limed lane, corn maze), Starfall (winter: snowbound square, the Great Fir, frozen-river skating under lantern reflections, gift circle, aurora). One GPU-posed crowd mesh per map (festival outfits, 19 clips), one-draw fx (petals, lanterns, fireworks, snow, aurora).

• Mini-games (world/festivals/games.ts): Ribbon Dance, Lantern Release, Sack Race, Produce Judging, Gift Exchange, Starlight Skate. openUI('festival:<activity>') starts one on its map; while paused (demos) it plays itself (attract mode plays skilfully, ~85–90 % accuracy). Real stakes (PRIZES in data/festivals.ts): a gold trophy (1st) / blue (2nd) / red (3rd) rosette, each with prize gold (e.g. sack race 500 / 300 / 150 g) and hearts with the activity's host or partner; below the ribbon line a wilted flower — no prize money, no friendship (unless the partner already loves you). A win gets a slow title slam + rays + confetti storm, the whole nearby crowd cheering in 3D and the rosette pinned to your chest for the rest of the day. Produce Judging draws three rivals per year (stronger each year), stages your entry on a draped plinth (judges gather round it) and adds a presentation pick (the judges favour one touch a year). Sack Race: five 1.05 m lanes whose 3D positions are the HUD's progress, dust on every landing, tumbles on wobbles, finishers fan out past the tape, the camera tracks the pack. Gift Exchange unwraps the present in 3D in your hands (the circle steps back and you face the lens beside the recipient; cards sit to the side). Lantern Release (a low three-quarter from the east sand: your face lit by the paper toro lantern in your hands — the fireworks flash light doubles as its glow — the dark bay and the lighthouse headland beyond): five throws on a quickening swell, a radiant-streak bonus, and each of your lanterns joins the flotilla colour-coded by how well it was let go (gold radiant … dull sputter). Produce Judging runs as a lower-third ribbon while the judges walk plinth to plinth in 3D and the rosettes are staked beside the winners.
• Fireworks (tide night): shells launch on one shared period, evenly staggered, so every frame of the show holds a crisp opening starburst (radial comet streaks) rather than only late falling glitter; stars go out at the waterline and the bay carries a dim, points-only reflection. Starfall's aurora also lies on the frozen river as drifting green / violet curtains with fine rays (the high camera sees the ice far more than the sky).
• Crowds: townsfolk get 12+ hue families a season, ~40 % seasonal hats (the rest bare hair / headbands / earmuffs / bows), elders + children, ±10 % height / ±8 % width, bags; the staged crowd is relaxed so nobody stands inside anybody else (FestivalMap.separateCrowd); in close mini-game framings anyone within ~5 m of the lens shrinks away (Crowd.nearCam), so no giant cropped heads fill the frame. (r8) Winter hats come as beanies, floppy stocking caps, fur trappers and face-framing hoods; extras get round / long / square heads. Night festivals light faces with a per-crowd warm lantern fill + cool moon rim (Crowd.light, FestivalMap.faceLight). Name pips only tag the two villagers within 4.5 m of you.
• (r8) Composition: Tide night keeps its bottom third clear (no reeds / poles across it), half the flotilla, paper lanterns held under white (candle-lit gradient, Lanterns glow), villagers on dry sand, and two things to do in front of the lens — the wish table (write a slip, fold a toro lantern, a line of written wishes; buildWishTable) and a grilled-corn snack cart (buildSnackCart). Starfall's postcard looks over the skaters on the ice to three hero zones (fire + cocoa, the gift circle round the Fir with you at its open side, the ice sculptures) with the star against the aurora; no posts or onlookers in the gift circle's sightline. Sack racers stand in creased burlap sacks pulled to the chest (sackGeometry), crouch before take-off, pitch forward in the air and squash on landing; attract mode joins the race mid-lane. Skating banks into carves with a forward push crouch, an edge-spray fan and a bright speed streak in the blade trail; lens-side strip skaters clear the course. Ribbon Dance partners hold hands a step apart and swing round each other on big Blooms.
• (r9) Crowds: about 40 % fewer extras, placed as authored vignettes (world/festivals/vignettes.ts: a picnic on a blanket, an elder on a bench with a friend, a couple watching, three neighbours gossiping, kids chasing round a loop); townsfolk come in five body archetypes (average / stout with a belly / lanky long-legged / stooped elder / child) with seven eye cuts, and named villagers keep their belly / shoulders / hands / leg length. A 4th crowd data row drives six desynced idle families (weight shift, hands behind back, arms folded, hand-on-hip pointing, thinking, clasped + stretch), three cheer variants, left / right waves and laughing talkers; an albedo ceiling keeps white hair from blooming. Framing guard (Crowd.screen): in every mini-game camera an onlooker whose projected head is big enough to read and crosses the frame edge or a HUD panel rect folds away (participants are kept); node scripts/fest-crop-test.mjs asserts zero cropped heads in all six mini-game cameras via FestivalMap.cropCheck(). Name pips are on or off (no half-faded ghost tags); postcard stills get a gentler tilt-shift and a gold contact ring under your farmer.
• (r9) Ribbon Dance: the couple promenades round the pole (one lap ≈ 30 s, camera anchored on the green), turning round their joined hands; every Bloom swings them half round with a twirl, every other one lifts the partner; notes fade in inside the lane and never pass under the combo column. Gift Exchange is a choice: a hint about the recipient, three peeks (they act out each one in 3D) on a reaction meter, then the verdict swings the meter; the unwrap is three beats in 3D (ribbon, lid, the real keepsake rising on a glow) at a low three-quarter under the Fir. Starlight Skate: deep blue-teal ice with crisp lamp streaks and carve marks, cracks are black fractures with a pulsing red rim, a clear band round the course, judgement pops ride above your head. Starfall: an open northern ridge so the postcard sees night sky — stars and three distinct aurora curtains — round baubles + a warm tinsel garland, four different chalets. Tide night: lantern-topped wish-line canes, streaking firework stars, a crisp moon, a crenellated sandcastle with a pennant. Harvest Fair: toned marquee, ferns not round bushes, 1.8 m maze walls with a lookout tower + scarecrow at the centre, draped baize plinths with pennant skirts, racers warming up with small hops; the sack-race result frames you left of the card and the co-op board shows the purse (500 / 300 / 150 g); standing by the lane while another farmer races swings your camera to a grandstand view that tracks the pack.
• Perf: at most 3 dynamic point lights per festival map (constant count; lamps / stalls / lighthouse are glow sprites + pool decals, the firework flash is one shared light + a sea tint); the cocoa lamp rides with the skater in the skate.
• Events: festival:start / festival:end, festival:music (tempo / mode / timbre hints), festival:minigame, festival:score (co-op relay payload).
• Co-op (host-authoritative end to end, world/festivals/coop.ts): the host owns every activity — session id, seed, start tick, the start-line lobby + lanes, live race progress, the outcome and every staged moment. A farmhand only submits inputs (fe.req start, fe.ev moment, fe.in progress claim, fe.end result, fe.line / fe.start / fe.leave at a start line); the host validates them (known activity + event kind, finite values, progress capped at the game's top speed, finish times inside a 1 s lag window, scores inside the par band) and broadcasts fe.stage / fe.x / fe.go / fe.st (10 Hz) / fe.res / fe.fin / fe.bd. The host ranks the sack race (farmers + villager racers, whose run is a closed-form function of the host's seed and the race clock, sackNpcPos, so racer HUDs, spectators and the host agree); every machine shows the host's places. Spectating: another farmer's dance (partner steps up, plait + hearts), lantern release (their lanterns join the flotilla), judging (judges walk, rosettes staked), gift exchange (recipient + present in their hands), skate (edge spray) and sack race (the villager field in lanes, sacks on the farmers) are staged in 3D on everyone else's map (FestivalMap.spectateBegin / Event / End / Race), their avatar posed with the activity's own body animation and the nearest onlookers turning to watch, then applauding the host's result. A late joiner gets live sessions + races in the join snapshot. festivals.coopStats() → msgs, relayed, rejected, watching, staged. node scripts/fest-coop-test.mjs checks lobby → host lanes → live progress → host standings (places agree) → a watched solo race (relayed hops, posed avatar, villager field) → a forged teleport claim rejected → fe.fin closes it for everyone → late-joiner boards.
• Demos: fest-spring, fest-summer, fest-fall, fest-winter (8:10 pm, aurora up), fest-winter-night, fest-winter-dusk (afterglow, aurora just rising), and the mini-games fest-spring-dance, fest-summer-lanterns, fest-fall-race, fest-fall-judging, fest-winter-gifts, fest-winter-skate. &result=1 ends on the result card; &coop=1 adds two visiting farmers (villager-safe names, seeded skill vs each game's par) to its board AND stages them in 3D at the activity spots with name tags.

Farm buildings, interiors & animals

Enterable dollhouse interiors (world/interiors/*: house.ts grandmother's farmhouse — quilted bed, stone hearth with animated fire + embers + glow, kitchen, braided rug, shelves, family photos, window light shafts + dust; coop.ts, barn.ts, shared room.ts shell / light profile, lighting.ts indoor light rig, pen.ts straw / hay / lantern kit). Farm structures + carpenter's board (world/buildings/*): coop and barn are ordered at the board by the farmhouse (gold + wood + stone), stand as a staked site overnight, and are finished next morning. Animals (entities/animals*.ts, systems/animals.ts): chickens, ducks, cows, goats, sheep, pigs + the family dog or cat — one skinned mesh each (idle / walk / eat / sleep / sit / happy hop), petting hearts, hay troughs, eggs / milk / wool / truffles with quality from friendship + mood, pasture on fine days, pet bowl + kennel (hearth-side at night). Sleeping in the farmhouse bed ends the day (systems/sleep.ts; sleep:summary, animals add animals:summary).

• Co-op (host-authoritative): animals.setAuthority(false) / buildings.setAuthority(false) on a farmhand. Farmhand actions leave as animals:intent / buildings:intent → host applyIntent(peer, intent); collected items come back as animals:grant / buildings:grant → farmhand receiveGrant(items). Shared state: host animals:changed / buildings:changed → snapshot() → farmhand applySnapshot(). Herd poses (same map as the host): host animals.poses() at ~4 Hz → farmhand animals.applyPoses().
• Bedtime: the bed asks "Go to bed for the night?", the farmer lies down under a folded-over quilt, lamps + fire dim, Zzz, fade; in co-op a farmer waiting for the others lies tucked in. The day-end card gets an Animals row (fed / produce with quality stars / hungry names / the pet's bowl) from animals:summary via sleep:summary.animals.
• Petting: a ~64 px heart pop (ease-out-back) with mini hearts + sparkles, the animal's name + heart meter, a squash on the animal and a crouch-and-reach pose on the farmer; at most 3 curious animals walk up at a time (20–40 s cooldown). Eggs are picked per nest box and shown off overhead with their quality star. (r11) Tall stock is staged side-on at the farmer's reaching hand (crown under a one-bone arm IK, muzzle ≥ ~0.9 m from the farmer's face, turned towards the lens), tips its head into the hand with its eyes shut; the host stages a farmhand's pat the same way and the herd poses carry it. Homebodies: on a pasture day one or two coop birds (and one barn animal) stay in — a hen sunning on the roost bar, a late sleeper — deterministic per day + id (animals-* showcases keep everyone out, &homebodies=1). Coat relief per part (aCoat: short hair / wool curls / feather scales / skin) as a screen-derivative bump.
• Demos: house-interior, house-night, house-bedtime (prompt), house-asleep (tucked in), animals-dayend (day-end card with the Animals row), coop-interior, coop-eggs (&nest=0..5), coop-night, coop-dawn, barn-interior, barn-night, animals-pasture, animals-petting (close-up), animals-coop (pasture + three co-op farmhands, perf), animals-gallery (every species + coat), pet-yard, carpenter, carpenter-animals. &pet=dog|cat picks the pet, &hearts=0 stops the staged petting hearts, &petted=1 pre-marks today's petting.
• Weather: rain / storm sends the herd trotting back through the pop doors (weather:change), the pet curls up in its kennel; non-duck animals keep a body-width clear of the duck pond (ducks float low in it). Indoors at night the moonlight shadow fades to 40 % (the farmer no longer throws a black wedge across the lamp-lit floor).
• Farmhouse floor plan: zoned rooms round an open walking floor (kitchen, dining, hearth circle, bed nook behind the arch, desk + spinning wheel, mudroom along the front knee wall) — no loose prop islands in the middle.
• r12 (round 10 critique): three readable farmhouse zones — kitchen + dining on one quarry-tile floor, the hearth circle, the bedroom on its own broad woven rug — with the puzzle table, knitting pouf, reading rug, harvest crate and floor strays gone and a clear bed → bedroom doorway → front door lane; softer window shafts (house 1.75 → 1.05, coop / barn ~0.75x) and a calmer night fire (flame gain falls at night, back-glow + slab pool trimmed). Barn stalls lived in (Maple head-down in her hay, Cocoa turned 3/4, a sheep side-on nosing the bedding, the pig rooting on the diagonal, Daisy craning to the aisle; livestock 0.9x inside). Pasture spread over three depths (jersey to the open west half, one hen fewer, pond ringed by clear grass). Petting card smaller (48 px), shorter-lived (1.45 s), capped growth from far lenses, never flipped onto the farmer by a prop.
• Co-op authority (r12): every farmhand animal intent is checked on the host against the net layer's validated last map + position (not the interpolated body): eggs only in the coop at the nest shelf, hay only in that building at its trough, a pop door only at its hatch, truffles / the pet bowl only beside them, a pet only on the map the animal is on (+ reach when the host shares it); unknown position = refused (animals.rejected counts). Carpenter orders from a farmhand need the wood / stone in the host's mirror of their backpack (a stale mirror is debited per accepted order; a refused order refunds at most what the mirror shows). npm run mp-test sends the hostile set from the pasture and checks the host state is untouched.
• Action demos (r12, real input / weather / carpenter / sleep paths, nothing pinned, sim running; &act=0 holds the start): animals-chores (coop morning: two eggs off the nest shelf, hay into the trough with the 0 key, the flock comes to eat, a pat — --frames 11 --every 1400), animals-rain (a shower at ~2 s, the herd trots home — --frames 7 --every 1500), animals-live (the herd's own morning), animals-overnight (order a coop at dusk, bed, day-end card, wake, the coop stands — --frames 10 --every 1800).
• r13 (round 8 critique): Petting contact — tall stock stands ACROSS the farmer's front (between them and the lens), in profile turned ~25° to the camera, the crown ahead of the farmer and a little to the head side, so on screen the face sits below and beside the farmer's (side by side at one depth the two heads met — the "kiss"); the hand IK lands on the real crown surface (Gait.crown), a clearance pass keeps the farmer ≥ body radius + 0.5 m off the barrel and ≥ head radius + 0.62 m off the head (local farmer steps back, else the animal eases away), and a farmhand's pat is staged on the side their lens sees. The heart slides sideways in the camera plane off the farmer's face (the name card moves with it), and a farmer's own pat is re-popped if a same-map reload (teleport / co-op resync) wiped it within 1.2 s. Fire — three licking tongues per card in saturated linear colour under normal blending (no white lamp), a smaller deeper back-glow, a warmer hearth-rug pool by day. Animals — sculpted lofts (animals-rig.ts loft()): the cow (square pins + hooks, brisket keel into a dewlap, rope tail to a hair switch), the pig (ham, dipped back, jowls, a flared snout disc, cupped leaf ears, a corkscrew tail), the goat (a lean ridged topline, countershaded, britches); anatomical legs + cloven hooves; hens get a cocked tail of separate cupped feathers, a hackle ruff and fanned primaries; size-aware sphere tessellation; a 4 cm shadow normal offset (no acne bands on the round barrels). Coop — a soft trodden-lane / damp-ring / droppings floor-wear decal, a dust-bath decal instead of stacked discs, 60 % fewer floor straws, a coop of 2+ birds keeps one at home on a fine day; outside, a chicken-wire run on the west wall (wire + a grey veil so it reads from the yard). House — 10 cm boards ~12 % lower in value, a sofa table behind the loveseat (books, fern, photo, apples) fills the open band, a draped knitted throw at the bed's foot (was a slab), softer vignette, brighter night. Barn — greyer trodden drifts and cool damp patches by the tank, fewer aisle straws. Paler pasture wallow centre.
• r15 (round 10 critique + blind judge): Pasture — the paddock wear has defined edges (the wobble field moves where the edge of the worn earth falls instead of multiplying its value: the judge's "blotchy path"); the pen gets animal homes and chores furniture — the pig's corrugated sage ark with a straw tongue spilling from its arched door, the hens' galvanised feeder + red drinker with spilled grain by the coop gate, a grain sack, a feed pail and a hay fork at the manger (buildPigArk, buildHenFeeders, solid via PASTURE_PROPS); animals-pasture / animals-coop lens tightened 21.5 → 18.5 m so the herd and buildings fill more of the frame (also ~5 draws / 40k tris fewer). Contact shadows — one instanced soft dark pool under every grounded animal (perched / bed-shelf / afloat skipped), all maps. Resting — livestock lie down awake now and then to chew the cud (eyes open, head up, slow chew, no Zzz; real behaviour, synced to farmhands as stateCode + 8); staged: the second pasture sheep, Cocoa in her straw. Barn — three behaviours along the stalls (munching, lying down, rooting) on varied yaws instead of five chins over five mangers; the barn's open door shows a recessed vestibule (dim straw, a stall partition, a bale) instead of a black card. Petting — the heart clears a crouching farmer's face (checked over the 1.05–1.5 m head span, + the crouch's lean) and the mini-heart burst follows it. Homeward — a herd sent in (rain, evening) walks in two legs: a mark square in front of its gate, then the door, arriving within a body radius of it (they used to jam shoulder to shoulder short of the exact door spot, or stick on a prop on the straight line, for the rest of the day).
• r16 (round 10 critic, 8.4): Petting staging — the animal stands BESIDE the farmer at the same depth (a touch towards the lens), side-on and turned ~45° to the camera with its head pointing away; the farmer strokes its back from the flank (arm IK on AnimalActor.backPoint) and turns 3/4 to the lens; the petted animal looks back over its shoulder (shut eyes) so its face lands square to the camera. Stall animals: the farmer steps beside the manger, never in front of the head. Same staging for a farmhand's pat (host side, the farmhand's lens). Sleeping pets — a dedicated curled model (buildCurl: a "C" coil, haunch + tucked paws, chin on the paws, eyes shut as arcs, ears folded, tail wrapped under the nose) snapped onto the bed cushion with a contact AO pool (AnimalActor.curlAt); the pet bed 1.25x roomier and moved clear of the rocker. Cows — a crested neck bound to the head bone bridges the head into the shoulders, knobbly knees + pointed hocks on every hoofed leg, cows 0.8x in the barn (straw shows both sides), the trough drinker dips to the water line (dipK). Framing — coop lens 11 → 13 m, house farmer by the door, barn farmer on the aisle partition line. Barn warmth — lanterns light from mid-afternoon (lampEarly), a warm lamplight wash on the back wall, brighter sun pool, less cool fill. House — lit parchment floor-lamp shade + its own warm lamp + a bigger pool, window shafts brightest at the window thinning to the floor (left window 0.5x via the new per-window shaft), a sewing basket + the dog's rope toy anchor the floor by the door runner. Coop — three straw tones in soft drifts, pale scuffed lanes with broken stalks (not dark trodden earth), a sand dust bath with grit / quartz grains, hay portions as a loose heap of ~70 crossing strands. Day-end — the gold-star reason reads "well loved" only when those animals were petted; the bowl line / chore agree ("stayed full all day" → "Top up …'s drained bowl", the bowl empties overnight).
• r17–r19 (round 10–11 critics): Faces — one eye recipe for the whole herd (thin warm rim, lens + two catchlights, tipped up to the lens); joy (a pat, a treat) now shuts the eyes into dark "∩" arcs on their own lids bone (the old 10 % squash of the eye left a slanted white slit that read as a scowl on the petted goat). Pig — a pear in plan (round hams past the shoulders, a soft waist, an arched loin, a sagging belly; no two loft stations share a width), peach back / cream-pink belly / blush skin paint, and broad ears flopped forward and out over the brow, backs to the sky, framing the face (they were 20 cm flaps edge-on to the lens). Cows — tail switch as a brush of tapered locks, gentler fur grain on dark coats, the Jersey's forelock as smooth curls (8 x 6 balls read as stacked hex coins). Petting — tall stock stands 0.72 m out (less of its rump under the farmer's face on screen), birds 0.4 m out with a deeper kneel, the coop demo hen staged within arm's reach; the barn pig roots on a 30° diagonal so its snout and eyes read (every stall but the goat's empty one shows a face). Herd — local avoidance + social spacing (no fused bodies, a full pen still finds room), a semicircle of curious slots behind the farmer; the paddock gets a five-bar front gate (buildPaddockGate). Coop — 9 shed feathers (was 16), cream not white, under the roost / nests only; the dust bath smaller and two values darker with a sunlit lip and a shaded inner slope (a dent, not a pale stain), the window's sun pool 0.3. House — morning shafts 1.3x with the glazing bars carried down the beam and a thinning far face; the top-shelf bowls oatmeal-glazed (they bloomed into a white orb at night). Action demos — animals-chores / -rain / -overnight / -live capture one frame per milestone with shot.mjs --frames N (egg lift, hay, pat, rain, doorway, quilt, fade, card, wake, new coop); the overnight demo now goes to bed in the farmhouse bed. sleep.phase exposes the bedtime stage; while a capture holds the loop the bedtime beats run in sim time, and under automation (navigator.webdriver) an action demo waits 8 s for the capture to start it (on a loaded machine the act used to run out before frame 0 — every frame showed the next morning).
• r20 (round 9 relay, stale 7.4 verdict): Co-op chores — the host's per-peer intent gate is a token bucket (4/s sustained, burst 3) instead of a fixed 240 ms gap: a farmhand lifting the second nest box right after the first had it refused (the first egg's grant came back inside 240 ms on a fast relay) and the egg went missing from their run; a refused intent re-broadcasts the authoritative state at once (the farmhand's optimistic prop removal is undone immediately). The host keeps animals.intentLog (last 24 farmhand intents + outcome: harvest / pat / eggs n / refused (rate | reach)), printed by scripts/animals-coop-test.mjs; the matrix counts heart pops with a monotonic pops.popped (the live-pop count raced the 1.5 s pop life on a loaded machine). Barn — the herd at three depths instead of a back-wall lineup: Maple, Cocoa and Daisy in their stalls, Mochi in the aisle with the farmer, the pig rooting the straw at the board walk's edge front-left and Poppy lying by the stock tank chewing the cud front-right (two stalls stand empty; &lineup=1 restores the old staging). Farmhouse — grandmother's corner between the hearth and the bedroom: a walnut console with a lace runner under her portrait, now large (0.62 x 0.82 m) in a carved gilt frame with the recipe card and the couple's photo tucked in its corners, a lit taper whose halo warms the wall (stronger at night), dried flowers, her folded spectacles and teacup; the dog's rope toy + rag ball left the walking floor. Coop — the nest boxes differ (straw heaped higher / lower, fresher / older, a coloured name tab per lip, gingham curtains drawn aside on two boxes, the egg-tally mug on the frame); shafts 0.95 -> 0.68. Feedback — the heart pop 52 -> 46 px, the name card 40 -> 36 px. Lens — inside the farmhouse / coop / barn the tilt-shift clear band widens to 0.42 at 0.4 strength (held by the buildings system every frame, restored on leaving): the whole room is the diorama, and the default band smeared the back wall's story props (the portrait, the nest boxes, the stall row). Verification — critic-ready stills of the five demos in shots/animals-r20/final/; perf at 2560x1440 high (contended: 4 foreign Chromium GPU processes, load ~55): house-interior 167 fps / house-night 117 / coop 171 / barn 145 / pasture 97 avg, 124-214 draws, p99 28-32 ms (the strict 25 ms p99 gate needs an uncontended run). Co-op matrix scripts/animals-coop-test.mjs: 23/23.
• r21 (critic r10, 8.3): The flock comes to eat — hay is only eaten head-down at a trough slot (a hen pecking the floor when the hay went in used to count as fed where she stood and never came over); filling the trough makes every hungry animal drop what it is doing and scurry (birds 2.7x) to a slot. Slots are matched to the birds in order along the trough (crossing-free) and a bird takes a nearer free portion on the way in; the walk is routed round the furniture's real footprints (corner waypoints; indoors walkability is the props' rects, not whole grid tiles — the hens froze beside the bales), round farmers, and falls back to the errand walk after 4.5 s. A meal is 8 s of munching that works the portion down and uses it up (hay[slot] cleared, host / solo; a trough filled where the host isn't looking is eaten after 24 s) — one hay no longer fed an animal forever. Sated birds linger at the trough instead of trotting over to the farmer. animals-chores beat "flock comes to eat" waits for the birds at the trough and prints the count; the farmer collects the eggs a tile back from the shelf, fills from the trough's end, watches from the nest boxes and pats the bird at the row's end from behind (the bird on the lens side). Touch — the pat's heart waits for the hand: the arm on the animal's side reaches (the right hand no longer stops at the chest for an animal on the left), the body half-steps up to 0.34 m towards a far target, and the heart pops when the hand is within 0.15 m of the stroked point (animals.reachGap); for tall stock the farmer turns further to the lens (face 3/4). The host stages a farmhand's milking / shearing (crouch at the flank, pumping hands, a tin pail under the udder, the burst) — animals.remoteHarvests; the co-op matrix checks it and the farmhand's hand gap (25 checks). Coop — farmers drawn at 0.84x inside; the translucent hat fade is gone (it drew as a ghost hat); a galvanised fount (pan, ribbed tank, bell lid, bail) replaces the blue pot; the floor is planks under straw (seams, two tones, crisper stalks), the damp ring halved. Farmhouse — the curled dog's face: coat-toned muzzle, a slim cream blaze, a small nose tipped into the tail, bigger closed-eye arcs (no more "staring eyeball"); lamp glow pools are clipped to the room's floor (no light on the void past the front wall). Barn — the shorn fleece lies flat on a slatted skirting table (it read as a headless sheep on a stool), each stall bedded differently plus a hay net + bucket, a goat's crate + cabbage, the pig's root trough with turnips and apples; the pig turned 30° to the lens; lens 16.2 -> 15.3. Herd — the jersey's head ~0.85x the holstein's and side-on in the pasture; the sheep's head + ears lifted 6 cm / 3 cm forward out of the fleece on a short neck, the plain face a deeper taupe; hens: bigger eyes, comb set back on the crown, slimmer deeper-red wattles, a bigger beak between.
• r22 (critic r10, 8.1): Smooth stock — the herd now opts into the GTAO G-buffer (userData.ao on every animal mesh, far LOD and curled pet included). The animals group was noAO, so the half-res AO of whatever stood behind an animal (fence rails, stall boards, the barn's stone footing) was multiplied onto its pixels: the "faceted box" Jersey was really dark horizontal fence-rail bands across a smooth flank, the pig's blotches the stall boards (+12 G-buffer draws in the petting lens, ~1.0 M tris total, 60 fps). Big stock keeps the full sculpt out to 18 m (14 for birds / pets): the Jersey at the petting lens's back fence was on its coarse LOD. Cow barrel rounder (softer rump corners, belly swelling below a dipped back, udder lowered to match), forearm / gaskin a touch fuller (1.12; 1.3 pushed the leg tops out of the flank as pillows), the Jersey shades darker over the haunch and shoulder top. Pig: the rump rounds over ~12 cm into hams with a waist (it closed in 3.5 cm — a flat disc on a straight pink tube from above), tail set back to match. Petting — a sheep is staged a fleece-width (0.12 m) further out and only 0.36 m towards the lens, and the hand lands on the near shoulder of the fleece (it went into the wool / up behind the chibi head). The petting close-up's pig steps out from under the energy HUD onto the wallow rim and the goat holds a mark by the pond (it wandered out of the frame corner); the drinking Holstein stands 14 cm further in so her muzzle is over the water, not on the trough's rim. Coop — the calm bedding gathers into ~26 drifts with a sparse scatter between, over three-tone planks with darker 3 px seams: the boards read through ("brown mush"). Co-op: all of it is local rendering or the shared staging path (settleForPet(from) stages a farmhand's pat the same way), so remote farmers see the same thing. Shots: shots/animals-r21/.
• r23 (round 9 loop, critic r10 list re-checked against HEAD): Pig — one continuous pear (the 0.275 waist between 0.34 hams and 0.298 shoulders + a dipped back read from the barn lens as three stacked rolls); the barn pig stands snout-up 3/4 to the lens (rooting head-down, its flopped ears closed over the face). Goat — horns a third shorter (they crossed the farmer's face on screen in every pat). Petting — tall stock staged 0.84 m off the farmer's flank (was 0.72). Close-up — the Jersey at the back stands side-on with her face 3/4 to the lens (tail-on she foreshortened into an upright "sitting" cow). Coop — a barn-red enamel grain feeder (the galvanised one was the water fount's twin); barn — coiled lead ropes / webbing halters on the stall pegs (single tori read as floating donuts). Perf (contended, load 200-300): house 59.6 fps / night 58.8 / coop 60 / barn 60 / pasture 60 / petting 60, p95 16.7-16.8 ms, 126-225 draws, 0.28-1.0 M tris. Shots: shots/animals-r23/ (base-* before, v3/ + v2/ after).
• r24 (round 10 relay of the r9 critic + blind judge): Pasture — the paddock's own two-tone split-rail fence (buildPaddockFence: hewn seven-sided posts a value darker than the grass, pale sun-silvered rails a value lighter, sagging half-rails, the odd fresher replacement, contact AO + an uncropped grass tuft at every post foot; the five-bar gate matches; ?pfence=0 = the shared farm fence for A/B); the barn roof a full value lighter (weathered slate with lighter / darker shingle courses — the judge's "black roof is heavy"); the silo 5.2 -> 4.6 m; the duck pond mirrors its far grassy bank as a soft green-dark band along the rim ("the pond is a bit flat"); the barn's wall shell now leaves the big doorway open (the r15 vestibule sat inside one solid box: the open leaf showed more red boards) — a dim straw-floored way in with a lit lantern hanging inside; animals-pasture lens re-framed (pitch 52, 24 m) so the barn's cupola + the silo dome sit whole in frame, farmer + goat a step north clear of the hotbar. Coats — a soft albedo ceiling on coat parts (whites no longer clip; eyes / catchlights keep their white), colour cavities that follow the relief (wool darkens between its curls, feathers at each scale row's tucked edge) and per-coat roughness (wool 0.97 matte, hair 0.88, feathers 0.74, pig skin 0.64). Feedback — heart 46 -> 40 px, name card 36 -> 33 px; a pat shakes a couple of feathers off a bird / a wisp of fleece off a sheep. Barn — half-doors each their own (sage, bare oak, faded red), Poppy's + Truffle's stand swung open on their hinges (solid leaf, plaque moved to the manger skirt), hand-hung plaques askew, greyer wall boards + a cooler daylight fill against the lantern pools. Interiors — window views 1.3 -> 1.0 peak (the coop's back window was a blank white slab), a warmer night lift + less saturated moon fill (no cyan-black edges), the moon's indoor shadow 20 -> 8 % (the farmer's long wedge across the night floor), grandmother's portrait 0.46 x 0.86 -> 0.54 x 0.98 m, dust motes updated with scalar maths (~7 KB/frame less churn). Co-op matrix scripts/animals-coop-test.mjs 25/25. Perf (2560x1440 high, contended load 40-105): house 144 fps p99 14.4 ms / night 141 / 13.4 · coop 187 / 7.7 · barn 149 / 10.9 · pasture 109 / 12.2 · chores 150 / 9.7 · co-op pasture 99.5 / 24.0, 125-223 draws, 0.28-1.06 M tris. Shots: shots/animals-r24/ (base/ before, final/ after).
• r25 (round 11 relay of the r10 critic): Petting — a new topology for tall stock instead of more offset tuning: the animal stands on the LENS side of the farmer (body radius + ~0.55 m towards the camera), side-on and turned ~30° to the lens, stroked near the hip so its head stands well clear; the farmer stays behind it facing the camera and reaches down onto the coat with the near arm, the bliss head-tip leans away, and the sparkle dots fan away from the farmer. __game.game.services.animals.petOverlap() projects the farmer's head + hat and the animal's head / neck to screen boxes and logs the overlap (0 px² in the barn and pasture stills it was tuned on; up to ~1.7 k px² mid-bliss, when the near horn's box brushes the farmer's forearm — the face itself stays clear). Coop — the bird peck cycle is ~70 % head-up; in the coop still only one bird pecks, the rest idle faces-up; the hen's tail fan ~35 % smaller and cupped; the duck's wings folded flush (root inside the body loft, tips crossing over the tail); hay bales keep a body radius clear in the herd's walkability. Show-off — a lifted find is held in both hands in front of the chest (two arm IKs on its sides), ~0.4 of the head's width; quality stars are metal-tinted (silver cool grey-blue, gold warm, iridium purple) with a dark outline, bevel and twinkle; hay selected round the herd shows a hay armful hugged to the chest. Barn — the doorway is a dark mouth (floor / sides / back at 25-35 % value with a falloff to the back, the floor raised over the plinth's cream trim slab that showed through, a stall partition silhouette, a lantern on the post), the hoist rope stops above the header (no hung bale); stall bedding desaturated, flattened and varied per stall. Cows — the Jersey is polled (the near horn read as a grey chip on her brow), ears set higher, a flat three-tuft forelock; the pasture Holstein stands beside the trough head-up, face 3/4 to the lens. House — the farmer stands a metre further in (on the runner line), a true frontal fill at night, grandmother's portrait lit by a brass picture light (her own self-lit material + a soft wash; the candle halo kept down round the table). Fence — rails 1.6x, posts 1.4x and a value darker, a dark cap-shadow line under the top rail. Shots: shots/animals-r25/ (final/, c-chores_*.png).

Co-op multiplayer (1–4 farmers)

npm run server        # relay + lobby server on ws://<host>:8787/ws (also serves dist/ after npm run build)
npm run dev           # then Title → Co-op → "New farm" / "My saved farm" (host) or type the 6-letter code (join)
npm run mp-test       # e2e + adversarial: relay + Vite + headless clients; screenshots + results in shots/mp/
node scripts/mp-shots.mjs [--jobs f --dir d]   # every co-op demo still from ONE Vite + browser (+ draws / tris / fps)

Friends on other machines open the game from the host's address; the relay defaults to the page's host on port 8787 (?server=ws://host:port/ws or the Co-op screen's "Server" field overrides it). Mid-game: Pause → Co-op → "Open farm to co-op". URL shortcuts: ?coop=host&name=Ann, ?join=ABC123&name=Bob&preset=0..2.

• Topology (server/, no dependencies): a tiny Node WebSocket relay (ws.mjs is a hand-rolled RFC 6455 implementation) with lobbies, 6-char invite codes, 4 slots and heartbeats. It never parses game traffic (R<to>|payload → M<from>|payload), so it doubles as a signaling channel for a later WebRTC upgrade. Identity: every browser has a persistent player id (localStorage hearthvale.pid); a dropped farmhand reclaims its slot by session token or pid (a crashed tab / new tab gets straight back in, same backpack), a second live tab of the same browser gets a derived pid. Names are unique per lobby ("Ash", "Ash 2"). A full lobby evicts a slot that has been away ≥ 10 s; the host can Kick (lobby cards / pause menu; refused for 60 s).
• Transport (net/transport.ts + net/socket-worker.ts): the socket lives in a Web Worker, which answers and times pings itself, so stats().rtt is real network RTT (relay legs in relayRtt, main-thread round trip in appRtt). All periodic sends run on a 50 ms interval ticker (not the render loop) and carry the timestamp of the frame the state was sampled on. Non-volatile messages queue while reconnecting and flush, in order, on re-admission.
• Host-authoritative (src/net/system.ts): the host's browser runs the simulation. Farmhands send intents (use tool/seed, act harvest, gold, psave, chat, emo, bed, look) and their own movement (st, 20 Hz, to everyone: the host validates it, the other farmhands interpolate it on the sender's clock — no host re-stamping). The host validates (reach, speed in the sender's clock, blocked tiles, rate, owns the seed via a mirror of the farmhand's backpack) and applies intents through the farming system's normal item:use path (net/farmsync.ts runs it "as another farmer"), then broadcasts its own 20 Hz sample, did events (replayed with full FX at the swing's impact frame), per-tile farm deltas (≤ 5 Hz, only when something changed), calendar, weather and the purse. Every morning (and on join/rejoin) farmhands get the whole farm (full).
• Shared purse: farmhand purse changes are sequenced intents; the host drops resends it already applied, refuses a spend the purse can't cover (two farmhands spending the same coins → gdeny: the loser's purchase goes back) and absurd gains. Changes made while disconnected are queued + resent after the rejoin, so purses always converge.
• Prediction + reconciliation: a farmhand's own swings, seeds and harvests play instantly; the host's ack (applied / refused / no-op) carries the touched tiles, a lost race refunds the predicted seed, a 2.5 s drift check fixes anything else, predicted loot yields to the host's give. Another farmer's swing is replayed at its impact frame; the host flushes that swing's tile delta at the same frame, and a replay the host hasn't confirmed yet waits (≤ 0.45 s) for it instead of being reverted. stats() splits reconciles (host edits = other farmers' work), mispredicts (our prediction / replay was wrong — a visible pop; mispredictLog) and drift (driftLog; paused between our own night and the host's morning farm, whose weeds / crows legitimately differ until it lands). Movement is predicted; the host's fix is reconciled against the position history and bled in over ~150 ms. Remote farmers use an adaptive jitter buffer (100 ms floor, grows with measured arrival jitter up to 260 ms) with brief extrapolation; their rendered speed is capped at 1.4× the path's own pace, measured over a ±150 ms window of samples (not the current segment), and the excess is absorbed over the next frames — also across a playout-clock restart after a sender froze for seconds. A guess that ran ahead (the sender stalled) is absorbed by letting the real path catch up under it: the farmer pauses instead of stepping back. Samples are stamped with the sim time of the position they carry (frame clock − the fixed-step accumulator, game.simLag), so a frame that ran 0 or 2 sim steps no longer reads as a 0× / 2× pace on every receiver (the r5 walk surge). Input presses are latched for the fixed-step sim (input.takeFixed), so a tap shorter than a frame still swings the tool.
• Saves: a farmhand never writes the host's farm into its own slots (SaveManager.guard: "saving" stores the personal part on the host + a local per-farm copy). Personal state (psave: backpack, energy, friendships, skills) is versioned and sent on every backpack change and on pagehide; on (re)join the newest of the host's and the local copy wins, so a reload never rolls the backpack back (no dupes). First visit = a fresh farmhand kit. Leaving (or the host closing up / kicking you) restores your own farm exactly as you left it (or the title screen if you joined from it). No host migration: if the host leaves, farmhands go home.
• Shared: farm tiles, crops, debris, sprinklers, gold, calendar, weather (plus, through net/bridge.ts, the animals / buildings / story / Hall pods' own co-op hooks and fishing's host rolls). Per player: backpack, energy, skills, relationships. net:ext payloads are only delivered from lobby members.
• Farmers (entities/remote-farmer.ts): one skinned mesh per farmer (1 draw + 1 shadow), the same shapes and the same FarmerActions tool poses as the local farmer; 6 hair styles, 5 hats, eyes / brows / mouth, 4 outfit cuts (overalls, pinafore, waistcoat, apron), an accessory (glasses, daisy, knitted scarf), skin / hair / shirt / outfit / kerchief / hat colours (entities/remote-look.ts; the extras are optional on the wire). Readability from the high camera: heads tip ~9° toward the camera, caps sit pushed back, a face-fill term keeps faces out of the hat's shadow, hair roots a value step darker than the locks. Emote bubbles are 3D sprites (remote-emotes.ts) that pop with an overshoot and a burst of twinkles (a sparkle ring child of the bubble, ~0.5 s), and the farmer who emoted does a little squash-hop. Name tags / chat bubbles are DOM, placed after each render (game.afterRender, so they match the frame's camera even while paused) and stacked when farmers bunch up; emote bubbles sit beside the pill on the side away from the nearest other farmer (so they never read as the neighbour's); your own chat shows over your own head too. The whole layer hides under menus, the day-end card and cutscenes. The creator turntable's farmer keeps glancing at the camera (RemoteFarmer.gaze).
• UI (ui/coop.ts): Title → Co-op screen (character creator with a live turntable on a grass tile — tabs Hair & hat / Face / Outfit, "Try an emote", Surprise me — Host / Join by code, lobby with invite-code tiles, 4 slots, ping bars, Kick), roster plate (top-left), chat (T: a parchment "Say:" row with a counter; a "…" bubble shows over whoever is typing, sent as a volatile typ message; log chips fade after 8 s, bubbles after ~6 s), emote wheel (hold G, 1–8; opens beside your farmer with a notch pointing at you, never over your face; number under each icon), join/leave toasts, bedtime overlay ("waiting for 2 farmers"; the host gets Sleep anyway after 10 s), a Co-op card in the pause menu (players, away state, Kick).
• Day end: the bed (farmhouse) or your cabin door marks you ready; the day ends when everyone connected is in bed (a farmer who drops no longer holds the night hostage). Cabins (net/cabins.ts) appear for each farmhand: log walls, a pitched shingle roof (one plane per side: deck, flush courses, fascia, barge boards, ridge cap), a porch lamp that is a real point light at dusk (through the renderer's light budget, so no extra shader cost), and a "Zzz" bubble over the roof while its farmhand sleeps inside. Shingles in the owner's colour (weathered toward a warm brown: whose cabin is whose reads across the farm), lapped siding on the gables flush with the log faces + a round vent window, festoon bulbs up the front barge boards and a skylight on the east slope (both glow after dusk, so the roof never reads as a black slab at night), a fieldstone chimney with a slate cap, clay pot and a smoke wisp (one SmokeEmitter per cabin). Every machine clears a cabin's footprint itself; the host flushes those tiles right away and farmhands fold them into their mirror, so it never reads as drift. The day-end card's "Farm today" row has a legend (Harvested · Watered · Tilled · Sown) and a "Busiest" ribbon.
• Perf: 3 remote farmers cost ~17 draws; all cabins 3 draws (wood, glass, bulbs) + 1 shadow draw + one smoke wisp each; net work is a few small JSON messages per tick; farm digests only when dirty. The co-op screen (ui/coop-stage.ts) renders the world once into a GPU-blurred still and draws the turntable with the main renderer (no second WebGL context): ~4 draw calls per frame. services.net.stats() reports fps / frame-time percentiles, RTT, bytes, queue and reconcile / refund / denied counters.
• Tests: node scripts/mp-interp.mjs (node only) tortures the playout clock: jitter, spikes, stalls, a busy fixed-step sender at 150±40 ms one way (≤ 1.45× pace over 5 seeds), a sender stamping frame time, and a sender tab frozen 0.6 / 1.2 / 2.5 s mid-walk. The playout's speed cap follows the path's windowed pace, clamped per anim code to what the player controller can do (walk 4.6, run 6.9 m/s — energy / combat only slow farmers), so bunched stamps from a lagged sender can't lift the cap past ~1.45× a walk (r6: Cole at 1.62×). node scripts/mp-adv.mjs [--delay 150 --jitter 40 --walks 5] (4 clients, one behind a 75±25 ms proxy) adds per-frame pop checks (only frames the game drew; ≤ 1.5× pace over 5 walks + a run), harvest races, drop / crash rejoin, bedtime and a per-client frame-time gate (each client measured while the other tabs skip drawing: p95 ≤ 20 ms). npm run mp-test (relay in its own process + Vite + headless clients) covers sync, convergence, RTT, farmhand→farmhand smoothness, drop/rejoin, and the adversarial cases: own save untouched by a co-op night, return home on leave, reload without dupes, crash of the last awake farmer, crash-tab rejoin, same-name impostor, kick, gold while disconnected, double spend, sowing race refund.
• Demos: coop-farm (host view, late afternoon, a 26 s loop in net/demo-farm.ts: Juniper and Pip work the berry bed from the grass lane behind it, facing the camera — Juniper picks and lobs berries into the basket, Pip waters the row in front of him; the host stands three-quarters to the camera at the bed's corner and picks too; Rowan hauls the full basket past the bed and up the path to the bin, turns round with a grin, jogs back and waves everyone over for coffee. Every line said goes through net:chat, so the log matches the bubbles; &t=<sec> seeks the loop for stills — the loop restarts at that time once __game.ready() resolves, so a still taken N s after ready lands N s into the coffee beat whatever the boot took; default t = 19.9, everyone facing the camera until ~23.5; services.net.demoSeek(t) re-seeks a live page; shot.mjs --frames n --every ms on it is hand-stepped — the loop holds and each still is &seqms= (default 150) ms of loop time after the last, starting exactly at &t=, so a sequence sheet shows one pick → hold-up → lob → basket pop in order however slowly a loaded box captures), coop-chat (golden hour at Juniper's porch: mugs, everyone on the lens, the host typing a reply), coop-bedtime (you at Juniper's festooned cabin under its porch lamp, a Zzz over the roof, the bedtime banner; the lens sits north of the blossom tree so no canopy crosses the frame), coop-emote (its own place: 5 pm at the shipping bin by the farmhouse porch — Briar holds the empty basket up, "Six baskets shipped!", Fennel's "Wow!" held at the pop's peak (overshoot + sparkle ring + hop; &live=1 lets it play out), Juniper's heart, your wheel open over the grass to your right). Static stagings turn each farmer (and the host) toward the lens itself plus a small social bias and pin their eyes on it (RemoteFarmer.gaze), so no one reads in profile at the frame's edge or glances away in a still, coop-dayend, coop-lobby (creator + lobby; your lobby card follows the creator live; a "Cabins on your farm" row draws each farmhand's cabin roofed in their colour, free slots greyed), coop-cabin (r8: a friend has just joined — Briar's cabin is raised beside Fennel's, Juniper calls a welcome, Fennel cheers, Briar's heart on her new doorstep; &raise=<s> holds the still at that point of the raise — default 0.45, half risen in the dust; 1.25 = the landing sparkle — and &live=1 raises it again every 5 s). Cabin raising (r8, net/cabins.ts): when a new farmer joins live, every machine (host via hello, farmhands via the roster) raises that farmer's cabin: it springs out of the ground to a 10 % overshoot at 1.1 s and settles with a damped squash-and-stretch, inside a billowing earth-dust skirt (smoke-puff billows lit by the sun / sky like the chimney smoke, one Points draw), thrown turf and wood shavings, a gold sparkle over the ridge on the landing, with axe-tap / thump / chime cues at the cabin's position (audio.playAt). The rising cabin is its own small mesh (~6k tris, 3 draws) for ~2.3 s and then merges back into the shared cabin mesh; a rejoin, a map change or loading a farm never animates. services.net.raisingCabins() lists cabins mid-raise. The creator's chip rows that wrap become even grids (equal-width chips, no lone orphan on the second line). mp-shots.mjs writes <dir>/evidence.json (every still's URL, draws, tris, fps, p95, page errors, git rev) so a reviewer without a local server or GPU can judge the pack from files. Emote bubbles are drawn in a small overlay pass after post-processing (renderEmoteOverlay, from game.afterRender) so tilt-shift / bloom never smear them. MP_TIMEOUT_MIN raises mp-test's wall-clock guard on a saturated machine (default 25). Debug: services.net (host(), join(code), kick(id), players(), stats(), simulateDrop()), services.net.sync.digest() (per-tile farm state that must match).

The Hollowdeep (mines, ores, monsters & combat)

The mine (src/world/mine/, systems/mining.ts, systems/combat.ts, entities/monsters.ts): a mountain-shelf entrance (entrance.ts: strata cliff, timbered mouth with a lamp-lit drift, the lift headframe) and seeded floors (gen.ts: cellular-automata caverns from (floor, seed)) in three biome bands every 10 floors: Earthen Hollows, Frostvein Grotto, Cinder Depths (biomes.ts), repeating with a tier (tougher monsters, richer ore) from 31.

• Look: cave.ts shell (per-pixel rock COURSES drawn from world height — stacked beds with a dark joint and a worn lit lip, no per-vertex banding streaks — blended biplanar slab texture + clamped derivative bump, glowing lava fissures over cooled basalt crust plates, packed snow vs glossy blue ice floors, a glossy frozen pool with caustics; deep rock merges 2x2 cells as a cheap LOD), lighting.ts (lantern spot key + belt-height fill + bounce + a cool rim light behind the farmer, 5 accent lights, per-biome grade), props.ts (timber frames with lanterns on every back wall, iron-bracket wall lanterns, one additive halo sheet for all lamps, carts on rails, crystals, spikes, basalt, vents). occlude.ts: farmers (local + co-op) and the nearest monsters get a screen-space cutaway through any cave geometry in front of them (warm rim on the cut); rock in the bottom band of the frame keeps its form under a soft fake key (no black mass), and free-standing props / rim boulders whose FOOT lands in the bottom ~19 % of the frame are removed down to their footprint (diorama open front). The farmer's head shadow-proxy casts nothing underground. Underground the HUD clock dial becomes a lantern niche and the weather badge hides (hud.ts: setUnderground).
• Rocks & ore (gen.ts, ores.ts, stone.ts): 3–5 wall-hugging ore seams plus a noise-clustered rock FIELD filling ~31 % of the open floor, with 3–4 winding lanes kept clear from the arrival (and to the lift / chest), a clearing at the arrival and ≥ 3 ore rocks within 6 tiles of it; on ~85 % of floors the ladder down hides under one plain rock out in the field (layout.ladderRock, revealed on its tile; the old random reveal still applies); one batched draw per material. Metal ores are 6–8 raised, faceted NUGGETS in saturated colours (copper salmon-orange, iron pale blue-white, gold yellow) with a self-glow rim and slow star glints on a darker, desaturated host rock; gems break out as emissive crystal clusters; coal as glossy chunks; every ore rock sits on a faint ore-coloured light pool. Hits flash the rock, squash it, knock ore-coloured nuggets and glints loose; breaks burst 20+ chunks and pop loot (≥ 1 stone per rock) that bobs over a tinted glow ring and flies to the nearest farmer within 2.5 tiles after 0.5 s (pickups.ts, instanced: one draw per loot kind). Ore by depth: 22–28 % of rocks on floors 1–5 (gems ≤ 1 %), ≈ 26–48 % deeper, iron from 5, gold from 21, diamonds from 25.
• Combat: slimes (spring jiggle), bats (pale rim + eye-glow halo), rock crabs, frost wisps (chill), cinder imps (fireballs); tier 2+ floors escalate them (darker bodies, a crystal crust on slimes, red eye glints, ★ on the floor plaque). The sword (actions.ts: short polished blade, alternating slashes) draws a warm-white → gold crescent with two lagging afterimages, held 125 ms on impact; hits knock monsters back 1.65 tiles (eased 0.18 s) with a 2-frame full-white flash and a 1.3 / 0.7 squash, damage numbers pop 1.4→1 on the victim's head and ride its knockback (rapid hits on one target merge into one ticking number, neighbours fan out sideways; crits gold + shake; the farmer's own hurt number is big red with a white outline), kills freeze the arena 60 ms, kick the camera and leave a goo splat. Goo splats have a dark meniscus rim and a wet gloss. Arriving on a floor with a farm tool in hand switches to the pickaxe (the sword if a monster is within 5 tiles). Health tube, i-frames, passing out → carried to the entrance lean-to (+2 h, some gold / loot lost).
• Co-op (coop.ts, wired through net/bridge.ts): the host is authoritative for every occupied floor — seed sync, a ledger of broken / damaged rocks, the ladder and loot, 10 Hz monster snapshots interpolated 120 ms behind on farmhands, pick / sword intents resolved by the host and broadcast (rock state + exact drops, hits with damage / crit / kill), monsters chase the nearest living farmer and their hits go to that farmer (health and passing out are per player), loot goes to whoever vacuums it. Floors the host isn't on run as headless sims on the host and migrate live ⇄ headless (same monster ids, hp, loot) when the host arrives / leaves; farmers on other floors are hidden. node scripts/mine-coop-test.mjs runs the two-browser e2e (shots in shots/mine-coop/); services.mineNet.stats() shows floors, headless sims and message counts.
• Tests: node scripts/mine-passout.test.mjs drains the tube through services.health.damage() on a floor and checks the collapse (combat:passOut, carried to the entrance, 35 % health back).
• Demos: mine-entrance, mine-floor (earth, floor 3), mine-ice (14), mine-lava (24), mine-combat (live arena + autopilot; &still=1 freezes a landed hit, &god=1), mine-coop (two scripted farmhands fighting and mining beside you, name tags; no server), mine-chest (floor 10 reforge). Params: &floor=N, &pick=1 (&still=1 freezes the pick impact), &foe=0 (no staged monster), &ui=elevator (stages the farmer beside the floor's lift cage; use with &floor=5).
• Round 6 (critic r5 fixes): the slash keys are re-solved so the blade really sweeps ~180° (wind-up ±110°, impact ∓30°, follow-through ∓70° of the facing; the old torso and arm turned against each other, so the tip moved ~35° and sat behind the hat). The crescent's head now rides the measured blade tip (SlashArc.follow), and pose callbacks sample the blade after the pose is applied (the ribbon used to trace the rest pose). Aim assist snaps side-on unless the target is almost straight above or below. Hit VFX stay under the bloom knee: a thinner crescent with a capped edge, a 2-frame pale silhouette flash clamped at 0.62, a few warm sparks instead of a white burst, and a 5 % exposure kick. Damage numbers merge per victim within 0.7 s, fan out sideways, and at most 3 are on screen. Pick staging puts the farmer where the head actually lands, ~1.3 m from the rock, and the burst shows the contact, then the shatter on the next swing. Ore veins are tilted bands of lumpy nuggets with satellites, ore rocks get slab / tall / round silhouettes at about 1.32x scale, and an ore pocket is capped at about 4 rocks. Earth floors have patches of grey stone setts that break up sett by sett, plus glossy wet-mud hollows. Every warm lantern washes the rock around it with a fake lamp pool (layout.lamps, a 16-slot shell loop, no real lights), and the key cone is wider and fully feathered. Lava basalt is a value darker, and its columns are jointed drums with ember seams. The entrance cliff gets tall vertical fractures; the headframe stands on a stone plinth beside a spoil heap. Co-op farmers arriving on an occupied spot land 1.6 tiles away. Rim boulders dropped to 80 tris each.
• Round 7: the earth floors' sett paving now lies in coherent patches with a tight ragged fringe of half-buried setts and dirt-packed joints, where it used to be a 1.5 m field of scattered loose bricks with black grout. Frostvein rocks carry patchy snow caps on their up-facing facets (stone.ts frost path, a crisp noise-broken edge and a raised lip), and the floor pebbles there take rock tints instead of warm strata tints, so no pink crumbs sit on the ice. Earthen slimes are a deeper, saturated gel green that holds its colour under the lantern and bloom. Walking monsters are pushed out to body contact with every farmer, local and co-op, host-side: a nibbling slime used to sit inside the farmer's hip, and the push still keeps it inside touchPlayer reach. The slash crescent's core band and afterimage cores are dimmer, so a crit over a pale flashed victim on a lit floor no longer sums into a white fan.
• Perf (pillar 14): the farmer / monster cutaway's discard switches off hidden-surface removal on tile GPUs, so every cut-patched material has a solid twin (occlude.ts): the shell, rim boulders, rubble and merged props are sorted into 2 m cells and each frame only the cells whose bounds can reach a cutaway ellipse or the foreground band draw the cut variant (a handful of draw ranges per mesh), the rest draws solid — same pixels. &occvar=0 turns it off (A/B); OCC_STATS (import from world/mine/occlude.ts) reports cells, cut cells and ranges.

Cindergrove forest, weather & seasons

Cindergrove (src/world/forest/) is south of the farm (warp at the farm's south gate). layout.ts holds the anchors and terrain shape; giants.ts the old-growth elders / firs (painted leaf-card canopies, winter twig crowns, laden firs) and card shrubs; cliffs.ts the waterfall cliff (a sculpted wall mesh over the plateau face + shared strata shader); props.ts mossy logs, mushrooms, winterberries / twigs, the Ember Shrine (menhir ring, ember altar) and the roofed glade tower (door, lit window, ivy); stream.ts the waterfall and flow; forage.ts seasonal forageables (interact to pick, forage:picked); motes.ts dust motes in the light shafts; foliage.ts the card textures, billboard / painted-light patches and the canopy see-through (logs stay solid; a giant trunk standing between the lens and the farmer opens one crisp farmer-sized window, sized from his projected height); arrival.ts the area plate (dodges the farmer's head, leaves on the first key / click).

Weather (systems/weather.ts, visuals in render/precipitation.ts, skyfx.ts, groundfx.ts, heightfog.ts, grade in render/lighting.ts): rain + splashes + eave / canopy drips, island puddles with a dark meniscus on darker soaked paths (world/terrain.ts tags standing water in the colour target's alpha, 0.05..0.5; the fog pass traces the reflected ray through the depth buffer, so the farmer, trunks and the bridge mirror in them; puddles shrink while the ground dries), storms (one screen-space bolt channel + 2-3 short forks, a hard cold key flash, weather:lightning then a delayed weather:thunder, scorch + steam), snow (flakes, top-facing accumulation via render/worldfx.ts, drifts, sastrugi, boot prints), wind gusts of leaves / petals, ground-hugging fog mornings with god rays, rainbows. Light shafts reach the forest floor and land in dappled sun pools (fog pass, multiplied into the surface colour). game.services.weather: strike(at?, hold?), setFog(v|null), setRainbow(v|null), state() (incl. sky for the HUD dial: clear / overcast / storm / snow / fog).

Demos: forest-day, forest-canopy (low lens under two elders, sun shafts + dappled pools), forest-rain, forest-fall, forest-glade, forest-night, forest-wind, forest-arrival, storm, storm-meadow, snow-day, snow-falls, fog-morning, fog-bridge, rainbow, farm-storm, coop-forest. Params: &bolt=0|1 (posed strike), &fog=0..1, &rainbow=0..1.

Perf notes: the fog pass (heightfog.ts) only receives the light shafts inside the view frustum and skips the striation noise for pixels away from every beam; the height-fog banks reuse the ground mist's noise when both run.

Kintara: the in-fiction $KIN layer (simulated play-to-earn)

An original, optional crypto-style layer: everything is a simulation inside the save file. No real wallet, private key, network access or money exists anywhere; $KIN has no value outside Hearthvale.

Fiction. Before the Lantern Hall went dark, families chalked harvests and kindnesses on its slate wall, the kin-tally (Kintara). Perpetua Vane, a retired lighthouse bookkeeper, wheeled a ledger cart into the square (south-west of the fountain, STALL in systems/kintara.ts) and keeps the tally on a lantern-glass ledger that every lantern in the valley holds a copy of. She refuses to sell kin ("a thing that can be bought is not worth writing down"); the Glimmerco kiosk's bought "points" are the foil. The first visit plays a five-page intro; Hall bundles, rooms and the relit Hall write kin, and a restored Hall unlocks a free Hall Keystone deed. Interact next to the stall, or click the HUD chip.

Files. data/kintara.ts (every number, the fiction, keeper lines) · core/kintara-chain.ts (ChainAdapter interface + SimulatedChain) · systems/kintara.ts (rules, service, co-op, save, stall + keeper) · world/props/kintara-stall.ts (the stall) · ui/kintara.ts + kintara.css (panel, HUD chip under the gold register, mint ceremony).

Earning (only via pay(), from a finite 1,000,000 reserve). Repeatable income is scaled by a yearly schedule (emissionFactor: x1.0, then x0.8 per year, floor x0.4), limited per source per day and by a daily ceiling (dailyCap, 32 in year 1). Sources: shipping tally (1 kin per 400g shipped, max 8/day) plus lifetime shipped-gold milestones; notice-board jobs (3 each, 6/day); festival ribbons (8 / 3, 18/day); mine depth marks (once per floor that is a multiple of 5, max 3 marks a day); angler's records (first catch of each species once, +1 for a longer record, 8/day; the Lanternjaw pays 40); Lantern Hall bundles, rooms and relighting (once each). Reflex-minigame results ("perfect") never pay extra.

Sinks (all burn kin; nothing is paid to anyone). Deed inscription fees (3 / 8 / 20 / 60 by rarity, x2 and x4 for later editions of the same item + quality, 5 seals a day); the Gold Counter (kin to gold only: 8g per kin slipping 4% per kin traded today, 10% tax, 20 kin a day); Exchange goods bought in kin; the Hearth tithe (2% of any balance over 300 is burned each morning as lantern oil); the Lantern Fund (burn kin for tiers that light the stall lamp, add +10% / +25% to repeatable payouts and allow a 4th deed edition). Gold can never buy kin. No randomness anywhere: nothing is a loot box.

Deeds (soulbound). Seal gold-quality or expensive crops, valuable fish and hard-won gems from the backpack (the item is consumed), or attest an upgraded tool (it stays in your pack). A deed records edition, date, provenance, minter, serial and the ledger hash; the chain has no transfer function. The Collection tab shows them. Sealing plays a stamp, a canvas particle burst and the kin-mint sound (particles are skipped under Reduce motion).

Ledger integrity. Transactions are hash-linked (verify()), supply is conserved (reserve + circulating + burned), and a tampered save is flagged on load. Wiring a real chain later: implement ChainAdapter (optimistic local cache + sync()) and call game.services.kintara.useAdapter(adapter); nothing else touches the chain.

Co-op (host-authoritative). One shared farm wallet, like the shared purse. Farmhands forward earning events and actions as kintara:intent; the host re-validates against the same caps, replicates the state (rep snapshot via net/bridge.ts) and refunds / delivers items through kintara:grant. Tool deeds are sealed on the host's farm only.

Debug / demo. __game.kin.state() · grant(n) · earn(source, n, onceKey?) · mint(item, quality) · convert(n) · donate(n) · verify(); &kin=250 URL param (debug grant); info().kin. Demos: kintara (the stall at dusk), ui-kintara, ui-kintara-mint | -collection | -market (or &ui=kintara:mint|collection|market); staging seeds a lived-in wallet only when nothing has been earned yet. npm test covers once-only milestones, caps, supply conservation, the counter, deeds, save/load, tamper detection and the co-op intents.