alpha 10.1.0 — A character who walks away gets a life, and the world answers

Twenty commits since 10.0.1, most of them found by launching stories with no
player in them and reading what the characters actually got.

A character outside the player's reach gets a frame of their own. Until
this, walking away was a pause: her scene was preserved exactly as she left it
and she stood in it, beat after beat, until somebody played her. Measured
before it landed (the Millbrook run, 2026-09-17): a courier crossed to the far
shore and stood on the landing for three player beats, her frame's scene
byte-identical each time, and formed not one memory. The trigger is RANGE and
not a declared zone — a cast body the beat does not attend to has left, read
off the same set the Director is shown so the payload and the range cannot
drift. Her beat runs the ordinary pipeline minus the two stages that exist
because a player is watching: no interpret call, because there is no declared
line to read, and no narrator, because nobody is reading the page and prose no
eye receives is the one way this could leak. The town can answer her —
background_react belongs to a bubble's beat, since a bubble's beat is a beat
somebody is in — and a bubble's turn 0 is never treated as an opening, which
had been placing and dressing a player who did not exist.

The Writers' Room designs the ground a story opens on. An inhabited
location used to be one utility call that asked for the whole object at
once — map, institutions, posts, upkeeps, economy, naming law — with one
attempt and no way to be told it was wrong; chat 136 spent an entire 16k
budget on a reasoning trace and returned JSON cut off inside a washroom. It is
now the Room's work, drafted through tool calls it can be corrected between.

Claude Code is a provider kind. A host signed in to Claude Code can play
under that login with no API key stored in the engine: one call is one
process, tools and slash commands and MCP off, no session persisted, run in an
empty scratch directory so no CLAUDE.md is discovered. It is a DEVELOPMENT
backend and the hint and the guide both say so.

What the world was failing to answer

Four things the engine knew and did not say, each found by reading a beat as
fiction rather than as a diff.

A beat now costs what happened in it. state_diff.time belonged to the
spatial specialist, and a specialist receives the ledger rows selected for it,
never the beat — so its own sheet asked it for "the sum of its parts" while the
fan-out handed it a subset of the parts. It declined, which is the correct
answer to that question. Measured 2026-09-20: the channel was in that hand's
scope on 38 of 60 playerless beats and 50 of 118 live beats since 2026-09-15
and was written on 0 of either, while the prose author routed the category 0
times in 3,000 stored resolve variants. Every beat fell to
UNCLAIMED_BEAT_SECONDS = 10.0 — 0.0028 hours against the charter's own "a
beat is minutes of story" — so after sixty beats the off-screen clock still
stood at the presim's 72.0 and had never ticked once. The ask moved to the
agent that cuts the steps: each ledger row carries seconds, and code sums
them. Verified in play: 24 of 24 beats priced, durations 2–15s against a 10s
floor, and the charter clock advancing for the first time.

A thing somebody sets down can be seen. scene.entities had no sight path
to any composed view at all: the furniture reader answers for a room's
ANCHORS, and perception's only walk over scene entities was the scent loop,
gated on entity.scent. A thing reached a mind only through a channel that
owned it for some other reason — attire, a pose, a contact, a smell. Measured:
Sal Weatherby laid a copper coin on a taproom counter, the commit recorded it
exactly, the coin appeared in 0 of her 24 views, and two beats later her
own view named the host's coin pouch and not her coin, so she drew a second
coin and paid twice. A stationed thing inherits the visibility of the anchor it
stands at, so the cone, the line, the occluder and the light are already
decided and nothing new judges what an eye reaches.

The sky reaches the body under it, and a canopy is cover.
weather_for_room had already reduced the weather per room and per channel —
can this body see it, is it landing on them, does the wind reach — on its own
grounds that "a cellar under a downpour sees nothing, feels nothing and may
still hear it". No mind read any of it: composer.py contained the word
"weather" zero times. A character in a freezing thundersnow gale was told the
room was dim and that it was loud. Sight and touch now carry it separately,
hearing is left to the soundscape that already folds rain in, and exposure is
asked of the STATION rather than the room — a market square is open, so every
body in it stood in the rain including the one under the stall canopy.

A planned thing standing where somebody stands becomes real. The plan
tier's handoff was "the Director renders a plan when it comes into view", and
the causal Director's sheet forbids that row in so many words: "initial
standing descriptions and unchanged background facts are context". A police box
on sand is not an event, so a plan was rendered only when a body TOUCHED the
thing — which nobody does to a thing they cannot see. Measured in the owner's
own story: a granted mandate, a complete plan with a look and three truths,
both bodies standing in the room it named, and scene holding no TARDIS after
four beats. It is stood up deterministically now, placed on a cell so a map can
draw it, and the night it stands in is no longer pitch black — the sky's
account had no moon in it, so a beach whose own weather read "a clear black
night sky strewn with stars, the full moon high" composed dark in every view.

Simulation reach is gone

The dialogue panel's off-screen cognition ladder and its four living-world
approaches are retired. Charter, the Writers' Room and causality bubbles
superseded every rung; the antagonist ladder went last, as the owner's "lesser
version of the causality bubbles". What replaces the dial is max open
threads — how many bubbles may EXIST, refused at the opening and never by
pausing an open one, which is a different cap from the one struck down in
September ("a character should never freeze unless they've been made dormant").
Room drift, due consequences and a place's owed history are unconditional now,
on the argument that retired rumour transport before them: a world whose fires
do not burn down and whose causes do not land is not coherent at any setting.

The retired config KEYS survive, defaulted and unread. Deleting them was tried
and measured: 120 readers index offscreen_life directly, several inside the
commit path, and turns rolled back. The readers come out first.

Known failures

32 tests fail on this tag; 31 of them also fail on 10.0.1 and are the set
triaged in 10.0.0. The thirty-second,
test_charter_registry_cache::test_frames_cache_separately_and_ambient_follows_the_pipeline,
is a flake under the parallel runner rather than a regression: it passes in
isolation at both tags (measured twice each), it failed in one full parallel run
here and passed in another the same afternoon, and it did not fail in the
10.0.1 run measured for this release.