The plateau was the tell. Roughness changed the component COUNT (it
manufactures noise pockets) but the giant component sat at ~0.22 in every
variant, and widening connectors past the proven roughness bound barely
moved it. That is a random graph below its percolation threshold: 0.6
sites, 0.35 bonds, and a 1.6-cell pair cutoff that drops many neighbour
pairs once jitter spreads them 1.7 (orthogonal) to 2.4 (diagonal) cells
apart.
So the lever was topology. Every shaft now emits a deterministic connector
to the nearest shaft STRICTLY closer to the origin, so chains drain inward
and terminate at the spine. The probabilistic connectors stay as texture
and loops -- the tree guarantees you can get out, the noise keeps it from
reading as a diagram.
Deliberately NOT tuned: raising CrossConnectChance/ShaftDensity/the cutoff
toward the percolation threshold buys a world connected at one seed and
shattered at the next, which is exactly the 1-in-16 behaviour we had. A
phase transition is not a knob.
seed 1337 components 30 -> 17, largest share .220 -> .975
16 seeds spine is the largest component in 16/16 (was 8/16)
largest share .58 - .9999
Seam safety, because a parent computed from a 3x3 window would differ
between chunks and the connector would exist in one and not the other:
collect over 7x7, emit only for the inner 3x3, whose 5x5 candidate windows
are then fully contained. 154 seam probes per path, 0 mismatches.
Box verdicts re-checked against the new air: 27 proved, 33 mixed,
0 violations. Stack mirror bit-identical over 20,000 samples.
Perf: 1.634 us forced rebuild, 0.100 us hot call -- the 49 rolls happen
only on cache rebuild, never per voxel.
⚠️ ACCEPTANCE STILL FAILS: arrival->departure 4/16 (was 1/16). Reported,
not tuned. With 97% of the air in one component, two mouths that both land
IN the field would essentially always connect -- so the remaining failure
is placement, not topology. Next.
Build clean, 20 succeeded / 0 warnings / 0 failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Bp7FxoQcSoiuhxjuLr6aBM
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5
7a20eeed0d