A long design conversation, written down as it happened. The headline: the
op stack's "Phase 3" is REOPENED. Asked what the world was missing, Jahni
described exactly it -- the system assembling worlds from data assets and a
seed -- so the 2026-08-16 handoff's "do NOT start Phase 3" is superseded.
Then a correction that moved the whole thing a level deeper: he does not want
to author strates either. The system must INVENT them. He authors raw content
(operators, meshes, materials, sounds, creatures) and tags it; everything above
that is composed and measured.
Decided along the way: worlds are wiped every 6-12 months, which dissolves the
"generation is frozen forever once public" problem -- generation is frozen only
within a season. Shared player builds are blueprint structures, vote-ranked.
Housing is an instanced level built from a snapshot of land the player chose.
Danger is depth x a per-strate multiplier, not a sort. Every strate has a
findable entrance and exit -- built first, generated around.
The range problem turned out cheap: don't roll 73 parameters independently
(that is what makes mush), blend known-good ones with FStrateGenerationParams::Lerp,
which already exists and already blends the whole field set. Ranges come from
the spread of the existing corpus, not from authored numbers. Verified against
the code: the X-macro is in sync with the struct, only Alpha differs.
Recurring mechanism, arrived at three separate times: measure, don't declare --
and promote what measures well back into the corpus, so the system's vocabulary
grows from its own history.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DPUuCtn5zTLui6WybLbkNb
