alpha 10.0.0 — The room that plans it, the space it happens in, and a Director that only rules

The first release carrying the Writers' Room and the geometry system, and
a substantially revised orchestrated Director. 469 commits since alpha 9.10.2,
most of them never on main until now.

The Writers' Room is an author that works beside the story rather than
inside it: a Story Planner that keeps the prepared horizon, a Dramaturge that
proposes direction and builds nothing, plot packages that land all-or-nothing
through typed operations, and mandates that record in the player's own words
what the room has been allowed to do. It plans the ground a story opens on
before the Director ever runs.

The geometry system gives a room a floor. Anchors placed on their walls,
bodies at cells, sight cast across the shape by recursive shadowcasting with
eye height from posture, light and sound as scalars over one shared grid,
storeys, extents and room shapes. A fixture stands where its own description
says it does.

The Director was already orchestrated at 9.10.2; here it is revised to
stop encoding the world at all. It slices, routes and rules, and the five
specialist hands own the channels.

Everything in the sections below was found by launching stories rather than
by reading code. Six live quick starts from one greeting produced five
distinct defects in the opening path, every one of them in work landed the
same day, and the sixth run is the first where a plan published.

Known failures, carried into this release deliberately

31 tests fail on this tag. Twenty-nine of them were already failing
before any of this work began; the other two are Japanese twins of two of
those, visible only now that the English-only mandate is retired and the
Japanese checks run again. None is a regression from this release.

They were triaged rather than fixed, and the triage is the finding:
fourteen are stale locations where the rule is alive and has moved to a
specialist hand, five ask about structures retired on purpose, and ten are
real. The real ones share a cause. 38b560c6 (2026-09-12) correctly retired
the Director's monolithic sheet and moved its channels to the five hands,
but only seven clauses were relocated and the rest went out with the sheet,
including duties that still have an owner and still have code feeding them.
The full list, each verified against the tree, is docs/UNBUILT_PIPELINE.md
§ 1.164. The one to fix first is that the world-pressure must-tick retry
cannot fire on a real beat, which means the floor that makes the world act
while the cast talks is off.

The opening plan is new and thinly proven. It published on one of six
live runs. Three defects in it were fixed today and the fixes have one
successful run behind them, not a measured rate. It fails silently by
design: a plan that does not land costs nothing but the plan, and the
opening runs as it always did.

Two other things are named and not changed. The establish sheet grew by
half when it took the shared place vocabulary, and the provider silence
budget is ten seconds while that sheet's successful call ran forty-three;
two of six runs died on that timeout before any token arrived. Both numbers
are the owner's to set.

All of the above will be addressed. They are written down here so the next
person to ask "when did this break" has a dated answer.

The opening plan, after its first six live runs (2026-09-16)

It published nothing in five quick starts from one greeting, for three
separate reasons, all of them in the feature rather than around it. The step
budget cut the plan off one call from the end: chat 127 drafted every
operation, validated clean, and stopped without publishing a finished
package. A placement drafted before the rooms it names could never validate,
because the package preview only knew about rooms from plan_rooms
operations it had already walked past -- so chat 131's placements at
reception were refused as nowhere while the same package planted
reception two operations later, and the planner spent seventeen calls
re-drafting rooms that had been right all along. A package lands in one
transaction, so its rooms are known to the whole preview now. And nothing
recorded what the room did: a planner exchange is captured against a turn,
and this stage runs before turn 0 exists, so the opening_plan row carries
a tool-by-tool trace, refusals included.

Japanese is back at protocol parity, and the English-only mandate is over (2026-09-16)

tools/project_check.DEFERRED_PACK_PARITY is empty again, so every English
prompt edit must carry its canonical tokens into ja in the same change. The
week the deferral ran cost 97 tokens across 17 prompt leaves: schema keys,
enum values and JSON shape fragments that a translation pass had rendered into
Japanese or dropped, and whole paragraphs ja had never had at all -- storeys
and what the walls give back, the cell grid, the errand that carries word, the
detail a body perceives on a thing, and the opening the Story Planner now runs
before the first beat. A Japanese Director emits routable JSON again.

Two things worth knowing about that work. A token is never translated: look,
left, where, spent, proven, at, purpose and bare are field names
and enum values that happen to be ordinary English words, and every one of them
had been translated. And the Japanese narrator has adopted its first section
marker, so the dialogue-placeholder block is now loaded only on beats that
carry dialogue, exactly as English does; the rest of that sheet is still one
core section.

Wall-adjacent cells are not restricted in any way (2026-09-16)

Two rules kept fixtures off the ring of cells against a room's walls, and
both are gone on the owner's ruling. A fixture with a bearing was pushed one
pace inward whenever it carried any height other than floor, to leave a
lane a body could take cover in; a fixture with no bearing was seeded into
the interior only, so it could never reach the ring at all. Between them the
outer ring of every room was reserved for doorways.

Measured on chat 127, a four-pace-square reception room: four of its five
authored fixtures stood off the walls their own descriptions name, the west
and south walls held nothing, and the remaining two-by-two middle had to
hold five fixtures, so the door shared a cell with the table and the bench
with the chair. The corpus hid it -- 918 of 930 authored anchors predate the
height field and normalise to floor, so only 8 had ever been pushed -- and
every story authored under the current card would have been chat 127.

The lane is now AUTHORED, not inferred: an anchor says lane when it is
something you work behind, which a bar, a shop counter and a screen with a
blind side are, and a bench, a shelf and a hearth are not. Height was the
wrong proxy, because a bench and a counter are both waist-high and only one
of them has a behind. Cover still works where a lane is authored, and where
one is not it falls through to the room side, which is the right answer: a
thing flat against a wall has no behind to hide in. 155 free-standing
anchors move in the live corpus, and every wall-bearing anchor now touches
its wall.

A failed quick start can be retried again (2026-09-16)

A greeting quick start that died AFTER writing turn 0 could never be
resumed: the retry re-inserted the same row and answered 500 with UNIQUE constraint failed: turns.chat_id, turns.idx. Every other stage of the
resume path asks the chat whether its own work is already there; the turn
insert was the one that did not, so the failure kept so the story could be
resumed was the failure that made resuming impossible. Measured on chat 128,
which had turn 0 written and one stage saved. The row is reused now, and the
pipeline restores and re-runs what is stale, which it already knew how to
do.

Glare is gone (2026-09-16)

The light field's glare cap -- a lit source within two cells of the
observer's front cone, with the target beyond it, capping sight at shapes
-- is removed outright, with its two constants and its glare cause. Owner's
ruling: light that falls on a thing shows it, and a source between two faces
does not hide either one's detail short of something no fiction here has
authored. Measured over every checkpoint of chats 60-126 before the cut:
5 firings, all one wall sconce stationed at the bench its observer sat
on (chat 126, turns 2-6 -- a guest at arm's reach became "an indistinct
figure"), and 0 on a case a reader would accept. Raising the threshold to
bright would have fired 0 times on the corpus and dazzled every occupant
of a bright room, since a bright room is lit by bright fixtures; so the rule
is gone, not weakened. tests/test_light_field. test_a_lamp_held_in_your_face_costs_nothing pins the rule's own strongest
fixture at full. DESIGN_LIGHT_FIELD.md § 4b carries the retraction.

A room the opening does not see is a stub (2026-09-16)

Chat 126's opening wrote the parlor's back room, which nobody had seen, as a
described room: a placeholder desc ("not currently visible from the
reception parlor"), a guessed light: dim, no anchors. Nothing in the
engine could tell that from a description, so when the door opened and the
player walked in the spatial hand was handed moves and nothing else, the
placeholder rendered verbatim into every view, the guessed light told the
narrator sight was "degraded: dim light -- shapes, not detail", and the
narrator invented a table. The establish sheet now says A ROOM THE OPENING
DOES NOT SEE IS A STUB: planned: true, a purpose, exits, and no desc,
light or anchors -- the registry's own stub shape -- and RoomDef declares
the three keys, so the first beat that enters or looks into it is briefed
and furnishes it (tests/test_opening_room_stubs.py).

The opening is planned before the Director runs (2026-09-16)

Both launches -- a scenario chat's first turn and the greeting quick start
-- now run the Story Planner once before the first turn row exists, in a new
opening regime: an engine-minted mandate covering plan_rooms, a new
place_at_opening operation and director_note, expiring with turn 0; ten
steps, one pass, questions dropped rather than asked, and no
request_location -- a charter is an option the player takes on the
launch screen, never one the planner assumes (owner). The package it
publishes is at turn -1, which turn 0 sees; the establish stage reads
opening_placements, furnishes those rooms as the plan's, and moves a placed
body the Director put elsewhere back, with a warning. The string match on
planned names is now the fallback. Chat 126 is the measured case: its Room
drafted the parlor at turn -1 in 21 calls, asked for a charter grant nobody
answered, and never published. docs/design/DESIGN_OPENING_PLAN.md,
tests/test_opening_plan.py.

The opening reads the hands' place vocabulary (2026-09-16)

director_establish had drifted 23 rule headings behind the spatial hand
(the same opening wrote every anchor without a height). The ten place
paragraphs -- size, shape, light, quiet, bearings, insides, anchors and
their heights, storeys, surfaces -- are now one fragment,
room_vocabulary.txt, that the rooms chunk and the establish sheet embed by
reference, en and ja; the establish sheet also gains the page rule for the
greeting quick start (the passage is on the page verbatim; the scene fits
its words) and the hands' shape for quiet, surface, storeys, anchor opacity
and station cover/cell. The Japanese sheet carries the vocabulary and not
the new English clauses (english-first mandate). The fan-out of the opening
-- the destination -- is filed as UNBUILT_PIPELINE.md § 1.163; the doorway
cone's cell blindness, found in the same chat, as UNBUILT_WORLD.md
§ 1.162.