Skyrim Forge 5.2.1

This is the last standalone Skyrim Forge release. Development continues inside the
Ultimate AI Starter Bundle,
at BUNDLED-TOOLS/skyrim-forge. Forge 6.0.0 and later ship from there.

The bundle installs Forge, and the two lived in separate repositories — which
is how bundle 7.8.0 shipped an installer that read a field Forge has never
emitted and aborted every install, with all gates green on both sides. Two
files that must agree do not belong in two repositories.

5.2.1 keeps working and stays downloadable. Upgrading is a normal install:
the bundle migrates a Skyrim-Forge-5.2.1 folder onto the versionless
Skyrim-Forge name and preserves Workspaces, .venv, REPORTS and a local
config.toml. 6.0.0 removes forge bundle-contract, which existed only to
negotiate across the split this notice is about.

Two releases in one: 5.2.0 was built but never published, so this tag carries both.

5.2.0 — bundle handshake

forge bundle-contract --bundle-version X.Y.Z proves whether this build and an Ultimate AI Starter Bundle can safely cooperate. It returns capabilities as JSON and exits non-zero on an incompatible range (>=7.8.0,<8.0.0). Bundle 7.9.0 installs, self-tests, registers and contract-checks Forge unattended.

5.2.1 — the version gate only checked the files it remembered

forge --help, the GUI window title and the Go native self-test fixture all announced the 4.2 series from inside a 5.2.0 install.

Forge already had a version gate. It compared eight enumerated sources — version.py, pyproject.toml, CURRENT.txt, VERSION.txt, START-HERE.bat, README.md, the Go constant, the skill series — and they all agreed. None of the three offenders was on the list, and enumeration cannot find what it does not enumerate.

The gate now also sweeps every shipped .py, .ps1, .bat and .go file for a product-name literal carrying a major.minor, and fails on any that is not the current series. Proved by reintroducing the literal:

stale product-version literal in shipped source: skyrim_forge/cli.py:15 says 4.2, series is 5.2

Also:

• tests/test_bundle_contract_v520.py hardcoded "5.2.0", so every patch release was a test edit. It pins the 5.2 series — the thing the contract range actually promises.
• The README now documents the install directory as Skyrim-Forge, without a version suffix. Every AI provider stores the MCP command as a hard absolute path, so a Skyrim-Forge-5.2.1 folder disconnects all of them the next time you upgrade — silently, because a provider that cannot spawn its server just shows no tools. The installed version is in VERSION.txt.

Verification

scripts/validate_repository.py   PASS, idempotent across three runs
tests                            162 tests, 0 failures
native helpers                   rebuilt reproducibly under pinned Go 1.23.2
release archive                  identical SHA-256 across two builds
GitHub CI                        12/12 checks green on 23d8689

Live MCP proof against the installed build, including a tools/call with no _meta: resultType: complete on every response.

Install

Extract as Skyrim-Forge — no version in the folder name — next to your other Skyrim tools, then run START-HERE.bat.

If you use the Ultimate AI Starter Bundle, do nothing: 7.9.0 ships this build and installs it for you.