d8f7dabee891ab0418eb306f29ef71b3950fba05
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it -- the system assembling worlds from data assets and a seed -- so the 2026-08-16 handoff's "do NOT start Phase 3" is superseded.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
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