Docs: LANTERN vision refresh — theme exploration, review-hardened identity, slice roadmap

- Theme_Direction_Candidates: research-backed direction exploration (saturation map, load-bearing-theme patterns, 4 candidate directions); operator picked Direction A - Identity_Lantern (final draft): tide-line persistence (lit=permanent via seed-pinning, dark re-knots), Wicks/drowned-sun night-sea mythology, Sparks + Gloam mutations, death split, readability law — hardened via 3 adversarial reviews, all findings folded - Roadmap_Lantern_Slice: vertical-slice phases 0-7 + Workstream A (solo-dev art pipeline: palette-atlas materials, 3 rig families, CreatureKit factory) Supersedes the Awakening Engine / Co-op Hades direction on adoption (Phase 0 DR pending). Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-13 22:50:53 -07:00
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 tags:
 - vision
 - identity
 - lantern
 status: final-draft
 updated: 2026-07-13
 permalink: gamevault/01-vision/identity-lantern
 ---
 # LANTERN — Identity & Core Design (final draft, review-hardened)
 > **v3 (2026-07-13).** Final design draft. v2 was put through three independent adversarial reviews (theme/narrative · systems/game-loop · player-experience/market); all findings were accepted by the operator and are folded in here. Verdicts: "revise specific parts, don't rethink" / "needs targeted revision — unusually high confidence in the foundation" / "promising with fixes." Requirements held: 2–4 co-op · Shape-of-Dreams-grade skillshot combat with modular ability kits · a persistent base · narratively rich · solo dev + AI tooling, stylized low-poly (RoR2-lineage), Blender upskilling. Implementation: [[Roadmap_Lantern_Slice]]. *(Working title "LANTERN" has poor Steam-search uniqueness — a naming pass is deferred to marketing.)*
 ## The pitch (lead with the invention)
 > **A co-op action-RPG where your territory is light: what you light stays forever; what stays dark rerolls.** Push a frontier of lamplight shelf by shelf down a mythic night-sea — a crew of kindled diving suits fighting skillshot battles against every sea-fear humanity ever named, to win back the drowned sun.
 The tide-line (the persistence model) is the thing no shipped game does — it leads. The drowned-sun mythology is the *setting* that makes it sing.
 ### Prior art & differentiation (owed honestly)
 - **Sunless Sea** owns "dark mythic sea, light as economy" *as atmosphere and text* — LANTERN is a real-time skillshot action game where light is **territory**, not a fuel gauge.
 - **Below** owns "lantern in shifting dark depths" — and died partly on solo dread and screenshot-illegible darkness; LANTERN is co-op-warm, and its readability law (below) is designed against exactly that failure.
 - **Barotrauma** owns "co-op dread at the bottom of a dark sea" — side-scrolling submarine crew-sim; LANTERN is a top-down ARPG with a persistent claimed world. It will be the first comment under every trailer; the answer is the tide-line.
 - **Hades / Shape of Dreams / V Rising** — the combat grammar, the modular-kit joy, and the territory pleasure respectively; LANTERN's contribution is making all three obey one rule.
 ## The one rule — and the two lights
 > **What the light holds, stays. What the dark holds, changes.**
 Applied to the world → the persistence model. Applied to your body → the death rules. Applied to your kit → the build system. Applied to the story → the stakes.
 To keep the rule true, the fiction distinguishes **two radiances**:
 - **Light** — the sun's true fire: warm, steady, gold/amber. Light *holds*: it preserves, banks, fixes.
 - **Gloam** — the deep's counterfeit radiance: cold corpse-green/blue, lure-red, flickering. Gloam *changes*: it warps, baits, lies. Every false lantern, every predator's lure, every wild warp your grafts drink in the deep — that is gloam, not light.
 **The palette rule is the ontology:** trust the warm and steady; fear the cold flicker.
 And because "light" must never mean nine things at once on screen, the sub-currencies have names and distinct HUD glyphs:
 | Name | What it is | Glyph idea |
 |---|---|---|
 | **Flame** | your life — the loaned fire in your chest-glass | flame in glass |
 | **Lumen** | spendable light — abilities, fuel, the banked economy | droplet of gold |
 | **Gloam** | the wild radiance your grafts drink — the mutation feed | cold spark |
 | **Loudness** | how much attention your light is drawing | ripple rings |
 | **Salvage / Chum / Tallow** | materials: build-stuff · garden feedstock · rendered fixative | — |
 ## The mythic frame
 Every mythology agreed on one thing: **at night, the sun crosses a sea.** Ra's barque sails the Duat; the Norse sun is chased into the waves; a hundred shores tell of the light that goes under the water and returns at dawn. And every shore named what *lives* in that water. They were all describing **the same sea from different beaches** — and one canon line covers the strays: *every dark water drains here at night* (marsh-wisps, river-drowners, and lake-things all wash down).
 One night the crossing failed. The Serpent — Apep, Jörmungandr, Leviathan; every name is true — closed its coils around the barque, and dawn never came. The world above is a frozen, dying dark. The night-sea is now the only place the sun's light still exists: swallowed, scattered, hoarded.
 ## The Last Lantern & the Wicks
 One way-station of the old sun-cult survives: **the Last Lantern**, built around the **Mother-Lamp**, a flame kindled from an ember of the sun itself. Its human crews are long gone — bunks made, kettles cold, diving suits still on the racks. So the Lamp did the only thing a flame can do: it spread. It kindled **wicks** inside the empty suits, and the suits stood up and went back to work.
 **You are a Wick** — a heavy salvage suit with a small warm flame where a heart would be. No face, no memory, no voice: Wicks **speak in light**, shuttering their headlamps in blinks and flickers (co-op pings, greetings, and the revive-plea are diegetic lamp-morse). The register is earnest, wordless, and small — warm bodies of light inside a dreadful ocean. *(No swimming, and we say so proudly: Wicks are weighted, magnet-booted, and gloriously un-hydrodynamic. This is seafloor infantry, not Subnautica.)*
 ## The world model: the tide-line
 **The game is a tug-of-war between a roguelike and a persistent world, and the rope is light.**
 - **Wherever a lamp burns, the world is permanent.** The station; and any pocket where you plant and feed a waypoint-lantern — geography fixed, structures saved, ground buildable.
 - **Wherever it is dark, the world re-knots.** Unlit geography regenerates; every push past the frontier is fresh.
 - **The player moves the boundary.** Permanence is spendable: light a pocket or don't.
 - **Topology is the strategy (anti-spine rule).** Serpent-tides can **sever fuel lines and waypoints — and everything downstream of a cut gutters.** A minimal spine of lights straight down is one cut from cascade; loops, secondary pockets, and garrisoned junctions are insurance. Breadth vs. depth is therefore a *live* decision, not a solved one — the colony is hand-shaped because shape is survival.
 - **The offline rule (committed):** **the Lamp burns only while a session runs.** Guttering is a during-play threat — never a punishment for absence. No friend group ever logs in to a dead net.
 - **Loss ceiling:** the dark takes frontier *pockets*, never a whole shelf (shelf-regression exists only as an optional hard mode).
 **Tech model (design commitment):** permanence is **seed-pinning**. The world is a **pocket-graph** — discrete generated pockets on a graph, not open stitched terrain. Dark pockets generate from a per-descent seed; lighting one pins its seed and saves structure deltas. "The dark re-knots" is a seed change, nearly free.
 **Session shape:** muster at the deepest lit waypoint; a standard descent is **hard-capped at ~30–40 minutes** by the Bell — the session contract fits in a sentence. Lighting a lantern is a save point in the deepest sense; sessions chapter naturally at lit pockets.
 ## Death & the empty suit
 - **Your flame is a loan from the Mother-Lamp.** Snuffed, the flame goes home; you re-kindle in a rack-spare. The flame is the person; the suit is the gear.
 - **What regrows vs. what strands (the split):** your **base grafts regrow cheaply and immediately** from the culture library — your kit is functional within minutes of dying, non-negotiable in a skillshot game. What strands with the suit, dark in the deep: **cargo (unbanked Lumen + organs), your fixed mutations, and any raw-socketed wild organ.** Recovery runs are therefore *optional value-runs made with a working build* — never mandatory kit-repair with a broken one.
 - **Suit debt is capped at one.** Die on the recovery run and the older suit is dark-claimed — it resurfaces later as a partial salvage lot at the Selkie's counter.
 - **Party wipe:** all stranded suits drift **one pocket shallower** (the dark spits out what it plays with) — a wipe deep in Midnight never soft-locks the save.
 - **Carried suits stay loud.** A hauled suit counts fully toward party Loudness — no dead-mule stealth logistics.
 - **Guttering & flame-share:** a downed Wick's flame gutters; an ally re-lights it *from their own flame* (it costs the giver). Solo, the **Tender dive-companion** (below) can drag a guttering suit toward light.
 - **The valve:** the Selkie retrieves a lost suit for a steep tariff.
 - **The doppelganger** (something wearing your suit, running your build) is the marquee *deferred* encounter — post-slice, likely post-v1 (it hides an arbitrary-build AI project). Until then a stranded suit is a container the dark relocates by a deterministic server rule — never RNG theft.
 ## Combat & the build system
 **Feel target:** top-down MOBA-grade skillshot combat — manual aim, telegraphs, dashes, cooldown kits, positioning; skill expression over stat checks. In a dark world, **light is information**, and that is enforced server-side (see multiplayer).
 Three layers (Oils are cut — reviews found them a duplicate augment slot):
 1. **Suit-frames** — the chassis; class = silhouette = verb. Slice ships two: the **Bathynaut** (tide-breaker; anchor-and-crash melee) and the **Harpooner** (line-and-iron; skillshots, reel-and-drag). Later frames (Bellringer, Lamplighter) are treadmill units.
 2. **Sparks** — abilities as organs harvested from named myths, **cultured** at the Lantern (permanent collection — knowledge is never lost), grafted into frame sockets (3–4 active + movement). Every button on your bar came from an encounter you remember.
 3. **Wild mutations — the augment layer.** In the deep, your grafted Sparks drink **Gloam** — kills, vents, blooms — and at **paced thresholds** (at pocket-clear beats, never mid-combat interrupts) offer a choice of warps (your decoy now bursts, or taunts, or splits). Mutations are gloam-things: **they don't survive homecoming** — unless you **fix** one by rendering it in **Tallow** (candle-making, literally: setting a wild flame in wax). **Fix slots are the scarcity: 1 fixed mutation per Spark** (a possible 2nd slot very late) — slots, not materials, so the meta can't ossify and in-run variety survives your best players. Raw-socketing a fresh organ mid-descent (wild, over-tuned, gone at homecoming unless cultured) remains the run's recurring temptation.
 4. **The first evaporation is a scripted gift:** on the first homecoming with a mutation, the Keeper names the rule — *"gloam doesn't survive the light… unless you set it in tallow"* — and hands the party one free Tallow. The rule is taught as a present, not experienced as a theft.
 ## The station: base, industry, automation
 The Last Lantern is a working lighthouse; everything meta is a physical place in it — the culture library, the graft-benches, the rack, the Bell, the berths.
 - **The Lamp is hungry** (during play): banked Lumen feeds it; its brightness is the campaign meter *and* the base's radius — the station physically grows as it brightens.
 - **Production automation is assignment-based** (no spatial factory game): assign **Tenders** — hermit-crab lamp-keeper constructs under the **Klabautermann** — to jobs: gardens (chum → Lumen), rendering (chum → Tallow), culturing. Rooms unlock with Lamp level; no placeable machine layouts.
 - **Fuel lines are spatial** — because the map is the meter and a severed line needs a *place* to be defended. Tenders run fuel along lit roads to waypoint-lanterns; tides target the lines; redundancy is built, not menued. Net size is capped by Lamp level so logistics can never outgrow maintenance.
 - **The Tender dive-companion (solo support):** a solo Wick may take one Tender down. No combat power — it drags your guttering suit toward light, hauls cargo, and can hold a lantern's feed during a tide. It converts the co-op-only verbs (revive, carry, hold-the-line) into degraded-but-present solo verbs, diegetically.
 ## Multiplayer
 - **2–4 Wicks, one Lamp, one light-net.** Territory, library, and industry are communal; suits, frames, grafts, and holds are personal. Organs culture per-station; grafts grow per-player — no loot competition.
 - **Brighter is louder — and light is information, enforced by the server.** Party light output scales threat draw; each Wick's contribution shows as a **Loudness pip** on the party HUD. Crucially, your lamp level sets your *information radius via netcode relevancy*: entities outside your light are not replicated to your client at all. Gamma-cranking cannot reveal what was never sent; dimming is a true trade — quiet for blind.
 - **Complementary verbs:** frames are picked as a dive team; light is shared infrastructure — overlapping radii, flame-share revives, carrying a fallen friend home.
 - **Hosting model (committed):** the Valheim contract — **Wicks travel; worlds are saves.** Characters (frame, grafts, personal hold) are portable between worlds; the world save (Lamp, light-net, library) is a transferable file any member can host from. Dedicated-server support is post-launch. Nobody's 40 hours are hostage to one person's dinner.
 ## Campaign, endgame & the Dawn
 **Shape:** three shelves — Twilight (blue haze, silhouettes), Midnight (your cone is the world), Hadal (pressure hum, Serpent weather) — gated by crafted suit plating. The campaign meter is the map: how deep the permanent light reaches.
 **Tides are forecast, not sprung:** the Siren **sings tide windows in advance** — net defense is an event the party plans around (garrison, reinforce, or ride it out), never an interruption that cancels a descent. Escalation with Lamp brightness raises the *stakes of the forecast*, not the frequency of ambush.
 **The Dawn — three readings, with their costs committed:**
 1. **Dawn = the sun raised.** The world above lives again. **The cost:** the Wicks' flames are *loans from a sun-fragment* — raising the sun plausibly **recalls the loans**. The heroic reading may unmake the protagonists. The Keeper insists on this one, and will not discuss what it costs.
 2. **Dawn = the crews wake.** People are lamps; everyone above went out when the sun did. Reclaimed light is someone's share of morning. **The cost:** the suits are *theirs* — the Wicks are keeping seats warm in bodies that have owners. Waking the crews means giving the suits back.
 3. **Dawn = the Wicks get to stay.** A flame that works, grieves, and blinks in morse to its friends is not nothing. **The cost:** the light spent making Wicks permanent is light *not* spent on readings 1 or 2. The Serpent whispers this one — which is exactly why it can't be dismissed.
 **The final act is gameplay, not a menu:** at the coil, one Wick must physically **carry the reclaimed ember** to one of three stations while the others enable — or prevent — the carry. The party's ending is something somebody *does* with the rest watching, helping, or standing in the way.
 **Post-Dawn (the endgame page, committed):** the chosen reading sets a **persistent world-modifier** for that world (three replay stories: "the other two Dawns"). Ongoing play is the **Anchorite's Penances** — a diegetic heat system: the dark *bargains for pockets back* at escalating modifier tiers, reusing tide-defense and frontier content with the screws turned. The map stays alive after the meter fills.
 ## The cast — tiered, with a mid-run channel
 Wicks are wordless; the words live around them. **Tiering (a solo dev's writing budget, spent honestly):**
 - **Deep (authored arc):** **the Keeper** — the voice in the Mother-Lamp; warm, tired, evasive about the crews and about reading 1's cost. The tutorial, the Dawn, the payoff.
 - **Mid (reactive flavor + one questline each, post-slice):** **the Siren in the Bell** — defected wrecker; sings the dark's next arrangement and the tide forecasts; **her song bleeds through the hydrophone mid-descent** — the run's narrative channel (forecasts, warnings, grief — descents are never silent for hours). **The Selkie** — quartermaster, salvage-broker, suit-retrieval tariff; her sealskin is somewhere down there.
 - **Shallow (flavorful vendors until proven):** **the Klabautermann** (Tender-Master; his *appearing* is the low-Lamp omen), **the Anchorite** (logbook + Penances), **the empty berths** (no character at all; the loudest room in the station).
 - **Tone bible before barks:** one page, per-character register bounds (what each is never allowed to joke about), written before any dialogue is generated. Warmth-against-dread is the theme; register drift is its failure mode.
 ## The bestiary — every shore's fear, one water
 Named myths are the content unit: **fight + Spark + schematic** each.
 - **Twilight (the slice):** the **Wisp-Choir** (gloam swarm-mother; teaches true-vs-false light) · **Grindylow** packs · **Drowners** (vodyanoy-kin, washed down) · **Wreckers** — gloam-casters who counterfeit your beacons and pickups until scanned · one shelf-boss.
 - **Midnight:** **Charybdis** (the arena rotates) · the **Kraken** (arms surface before the mantle) · **Umibōzu** (visible only as an absence occluding bioluminescence) · the **Siren Choir** (a boss that is a fake lit refuge) · **Bakekujira** (a whale-fall that gets back up).
 - **Hadal:** **Scylla** (six necks, six grammars) · the **Finfolk Sorcerer** (drag-and-teleport duelist) · **Aspidochelone** (a boss arena on a swimming island) · **the Sea-Mother** — *invented wholesale, no borrowed anatomy:* she is **the sea's memory of everything it has drowned** — a grief-patron who collects what sinks; the deep's beasts bring her cargo, prayers, and names, and she does not give them back. Patron, boss, or both: the late hinge. · The **Serpent**, whose tide is Hadal's weather long before it is its fight.
 - **Wandering events (post-slice):** the **Flying Dutchman** · **St. Elmo's fire** (folklore's good omen, kept good) · **whale-falls**.
 - **Naming policy (resolved):** real names for public-domain classics (Hades' approach); invented figures where a source is a living tradition.
 ## How the ocean is represented
 **No swimming.** Weighted seafloor operations; the ocean is atmosphere, light, and law: dark ambient and murk ARE the water column, light carves playable space; depth is shelves via Bell pressure-locks, not a Z-axis; enemies get the verticality players don't (swimmers hover in a band, rays cross as shadows, the too-big passes in the background like weather); the water has weather — currents (directional lanes), silt-outs (dread beat), plankton blooms (awe beat + harvest rush), vent fields, whale-falls; buoyancy is feel (slow-tumbling debris, floating knockbacks); "up" is denied diegetically — the surface is a story the Anchorite tells.
 ## Art, audio & the readability law
 **Look:** stylized low-poly (RoR2-lineage), faceted geometry, flat shading, mood carried by dynamic light in murk. Palette: **warm gold/amber = light (ours) · cold corpse-green/blue = gloam · lure-red = bait · white-hot = conversion.**
 **The readability law (binding, from review):**
 1. **Value first, hue second:** every warm/cold distinction is *also* carried by luminance value, shape language, and **flicker-cadence** (steady = true, flicker = false — the load-bearing channel; hue is the garnish). This is the colorblind answer (gold-vs-green is a worst-case red-green pair) and the ontology made visible.
 2. **Design Midnight's floor for the video encoder, not the OLED:** bioluminescent ground-clutter density is the streamability dial; dark scenes must survive 6–8 Mbps without macroblocking. A **capture/photo grade** (slightly lifted, saturated profile distinct from the play grade) ships for clips and screenshots.
 3. **Screenshot discipline:** every promotional frame must read at 200 px with a warm focal light AND a legible silhouette.
 **Audio:** hydrophone world — pressure creaks, the Bell's toll, lamp-morse chirps (the Wicks' voice; procedural, no VO), the Siren's verses bleeding through mid-descent, and silence-with-texture where the light runs out.
 **Blender on-ramp (easiest→hardest):** glow-props & gardens (geometry-node-native) → organs/pickups (blobby, emissive, forgiving) → creatures (abyssal = anatomy-optional) → suit-frames (hard-surface kitbash on a humanoid rig).
 ## Scope ladder (the review's non-negotiable)
 | Tier | Contents |
 |---|---|
 | **Vertical slice** (the 0.1 — [[Roadmap_Lantern_Slice]]) | One shelf (Twilight) as a pocket-graph · 2 frames · 8–10 Sparks · mutations at 2 paced thresholds (2–3 choices) + raw-socketing + Tallow fixing (1 slot) · death split (strand cargo/mutations; cheap regrow; ally-carry; Selkie tariff; solo Tender companion) · hand-fed lanterns, seed-pinned permanence, session-only burn · 3–4 named encounters (Wisp-Choir, Grindylow, Wreckers, shelf-boss) · brighter-is-louder + relevancy-light · Keeper + Siren only · **one scripted Serpent-tide as the slice finale** |
 | **v1.0** | Shelves 2–3 + plating gates · severable fuel-net + Tenders + Klabautermann · full Twilight/Midnight/Hadal bestiary · forecast tide system · Selkie + Anchorite questlines · the Dawn (final carry) + post-Dawn Penances · 3rd/4th frames · wandering events |
 | **Post-launch** | The doppelganger encounter (suit wearing your build) · dedicated servers · shelf-regression hard mode · new frames/myths as treadmill units · the berths' full story |
 | **Cut** | Oils (mutations are the augment layer) · spatial production machinery (assignment-based instead) · open stitched terrain (pocket-graph instead) |
 **The slice's falsifiable test:** *does pinning a pocket feel like winning something, and does a stranded suit feel worth a second descent?* If both are yes, every deferred system has soil to grow in. If either is no, no amount of Klabautermann fixes it.
 ## Resolved & remaining forks
 **Resolved (this review cycle, operator-accepted):** naming policy (real classics / invented for living traditions) · suit-loss = the split model · mutation economy = fix *slots*, not materials · territory loss = pockets only · Oils cut · offline rule = session-only burn · hosting = characters travel, worlds are saves · solo Tender companion = in.
 **Remaining open:** the crews — present-but-unlit in the berths vs. gone entirely (a content-cost call for the narrative milestone) · the shipping title.
 ## Related
 - [[Roadmap_Lantern_Slice]] — the vertical-slice implementation roadmap
 - [[Theme_Direction_Candidates]] — the exploration and research patterns underneath this
 - [[Pillars]] — co-op, server-authority, skill-expression: the constraints this was shaped inside
 - [[Identity]] — the prior identity, superseded by this draft upon adoption
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 ---
 tags:
 - vision
 - theme
 - exploration
 status: exploration
 updated: 2026-07-13
 permalink: gamevault/01-vision/theme-direction-candidates
 ---
 # Theme Direction Candidates — the vision-refresh exploration
 > Operator brief (2026-07-13): core inspirations = **V Rising + Shape of Dreams**; secondary = Riftbreaker, PoE2, RoR2, Hades, LoL. The alluring core = SoD-grade combat + modular ability framework braided with survival/crafting/automation. Narrative/setting is **open** — the current [[Identity|Aether/Sleeper/Echo]] fiction feels lacking. Synty is no longer a hard constraint: operator will learn Blender (blendermcp), targeting RoR2-style low-poly and procedural-friendly workflows. First "abilities are Memories" proposal rejected as too-close SoD mimicry.
 >
 > Research basis: two web-research passes this session — (1) theme saturation/breakout landscape 2022–2026, (2) load-bearing-theme pattern analysis across 16 comparable games. Full reports in the session transcript; distilled findings below.
 ## The design formula (research-distilled)
 **The skin test:** a theme is load-bearing when reskinning it would break multiple systems at once (V Rising: blood buffs, V Blood progression, castle heart, servant automation, sunlight hazard all die together). The structural signature: **one noun flows through every layer** — moment-to-moment resource, ability acquisition, base upkeep, automation.
 **Named patterns** (each direction below cites which it uses):
 1. **Predator's Ladder** — your enemies are your upgrade tree (*this* boss → *this* power). V Rising V Bloods, Monster Hunter, Warframe. Strongest single pattern for combat + crafting; auto-generates the content treadmill (new enemy = new fight + new kit + new farm).
 2. **Hungry Heart** — the base has a metabolism runs must feed (Castle Heart, cult food/faith). What makes a persistent base *necessary* instead of a menu with walls.
 3. **Dominion Automation** — automation is subordinates/extensions-of-you, not context-free conveyors (servants, followers, printer drones). Person-automation generates emergent narrative belts can't.
 4. **Power as Substance** — abilities are physical objects in-fiction, therefore modular/socketable/craftable *by definition* (PoE2 uncut gems, SoD memories, Nightingale realm cards). One substrate metaphor buys the whole modular-kit + crafting union.
 5. **Patron Web** — upgrades come from characters with agendas (Hades boons, Grim Dawn devotions). Makes meta-progression narratable; ships content as characters; weak at base/automation alone.
 6. **Company Posting** — hub as an institution's facility (DRG space rig). Cheap hub inevitability; contrasts with Hungry Heart (provided vs built-and-defended). A building game wants Hungry Heart.
 **Identity-anchor evidence:**
 | Goal | Best anchor |
 |---|---|
 | 4p co-op distinctiveness | **Verb-differentiated small cast** (DRG's traversal-verb classes; not damage flavors) |
 | Content treadmill | **Collection of craftable kits** (Warframe: 3–4 frames/yr for 12+ yrs, each = quest+farm+craft chain), then cast-DLC |
 | Build diversity | **Class/build + substance substrate** (PoE2 gems × supports; SoD proved it at roguelite pace) |
 → The winning stack for Project M's shape: **small verb-differentiated chassis cast** (co-op silhouette) whose **abilities are substance** (modular/craftable) **extracted from named enemies** (treadmill), feeding a **base with a metabolism** run by **dominion automation**.
 **Market headlines:** the component genres are saturated, which *raises* the premium on theme. Overdone: Norse/Viking, Greek myth, generic grimdark, post-apoc/zombie, vampire-aesthetic (post-survivors flood), stock sci-fi colony. Underserved with proven adjacent demand: **deep-sea/abyssal**, **mycological/strange-ecology**, **Slavic/dark folklore**, solarpunk-reclamation, Mesoamerican, weird west, gaslamp-fae (burned by Nightingale's execution, not its pitch). Breakout formula: theme stateable in one sentence + diegetically explains the mechanics + streams/screenshots on contrast. Dual-loop games win hardest when the theme *explains the dual loop* (Dave the Diver).
 ---
 ## Direction A — LANTERN (abyssal: "the last light at the bottom of the world")
 **Pitch:** A salvage crew keeps the last lit station on the floor of a lightless sea. Everything — power, ammunition, abilities, safety, memory — is **Light**, and the Dark rearranges whatever it swallows.
 **The noun: LIGHT.**
 - **Combat resource:** abilities burn lumen; your light radius is your safety; going dark is the dread state.
 - **Ability acquisition (Predator's Ladder + Substance):** abyssal fauna evolved to *make* light — lures, flash organs, photophore veils. Named megafauna carry signature organs: harvest → culture at base → **graft into suit sockets**. The angler's lure becomes your decoy; the flash-squid mantle is your blink; a siphonophore's chain becomes your tether/pull. Organs are the gem system, and they're *grown*, which is why crafting exists.
 - **Base (Hungry Heart):** the station IS a lamp. Its lit perimeter must be fed refined lumen or the Dark visibly creeps in — base growth is literally *pushing the light out*, a diegetic build-radius.
 - **Automation (Dominion):** aquaculture — culture bioluminescent organisms in glow-gardens; symbiotic lamp-eels and remora-drones tend and haul; refinery chain raw glow → stable lumen → graft-ready organs. The factory farms light while you dive.
 - **Runs + reset:** the abyss has no fixed geography — the Dark rearranges what it holds; every dive is a new arrangement (proc-gen is *in-fiction*, like the Leshy's wood). Depth tiers = pressure zones gated by craft.
 - **Enemies:** the Dark's fauna, **drawn to your light** — the existing harvest-attention/"the longer you channel, the more converge" mechanic survives verbatim. Bosses = named leviathans (treadmill units).
 - **Identity anchor:** small verb-differentiated cast of **dive-suit frames** (heavy tide-breaker / skirmish flenser / tether-and-current controller…) — chassis = class, organs = modular kit. Exactly the research-recommended hybrid.
 - **Co-op:** overlapping light radii; reviving = re-lighting a darkened teammate; sharing light is sharing life.
 - **Tone/screenshot:** one warm cone of light against absolute black, silhouettes at the edge. RoR2's indifferent ecology, Dredge's dread.
 - **Art feasibility: best-in-class for this project.** The locked art look (dark ambient, dynamic-light-first rendering) *is this theme* — the rendering pipeline stops being a style and becomes the fiction. Abyssal creatures forgive amateur modeling (no human anatomy to get wrong) and are procedural-native (geometry-node coral, tube worms, drifting motes). Few humanoid rigs (suits reuse the existing pipeline).
 - **What ports from the current build:** almost everything — dark+light rendering, harvest-attention, node glow (bioluminescence), cyan/orange duality (your cultured glow vs predator red), hub+portal runs, even the ambient-life system (fauna at the light's edge).
 - **Risks:** underwater movement expectations — solved by framing as heavy-boots seafloor operations (top-down movement unchanged, no swimming); oxygen/pressure survival pressure is an optional knob, not a requirement.
 ## Direction B — UNDERGROWTH (mycological: "garden the thing that ate the world")
 **Pitch:** A continent-scale superorganism consumed the world. Your enclave survives by heresy: *cultivating* it — grafting its strains onto your bodies and bending its network into your industry.
 **The noun: the STRAIN (living material).**
 - **Abilities:** grafts — visible symbiote organs socketed into your body; cultivars bred at base modify them (essence layer). The body is the build board (PoE2 substrate made flesh).
 - **Base (Hungry Heart, literally):** a living grove — feed it biomass and it *grows* rooms, walls, defenses. Automation = **mycelial logistics**: you grow hyphae routes that pump nutrients between organs — the conveyor network is a root system, the most diegetic automation justification on this list.
 - **Runs + reset:** bloom cycles — the Bloom fruits, you raid the fresh growth, it rots and regrows differently. Seasonal/cyclical proc-gen in-fiction.
 - **Enemies:** the wild Bloom's expressions; bosses = "crowned" expressions whose caps yield unique strains (Predator's Ladder).
 - **Identity anchor:** build-anchored (grafts define silhouette) — or a single world-role ("the heretic gardener," V Rising-style) if co-op accepts shared role.
 - **Tone:** the COTL contrast lane — a gorgeous bioluminescent garden that is also eating the world; beauty + body-horror.
 - **Art:** the most procedural-native option — mushrooms, veins, growth via geometry nodes; blob/quadruped enemies forgive modeling. No human anatomy anywhere required.
 - **Continuity option:** this can be an **evolution of the existing Blight** rather than a replacement — Blight becomes the Bloom, Biomass is already in the resource list, cyan/orange becomes cultivated/wild growth.
 - **Risks:** cordyceps familiarity (Last of Us adjacency — mitigated by the *gardener* inversion: nobody has shipped "you farm the apocalypse"); player readability under heavy grafts; gross-out ceiling on cozy-co-op appeal.
 ## Direction C — HEARTH (dark folklore frontier: "a homestead that bargains")
 **Pitch:** A frontier homestead at the edge of a forest that never lies the same way twice. Power is borrowed from named spirits — and everything borrowed is owed.
 **The noun: the BARGAIN (debt/offering).**
 - **Abilities (Patron Web):** pacts with named spirits — each spirit is a boon page, a shrine you build, a personality, and eventually a boss when a bargain sours. Hades' proven relationship-economy, aimed at original folk archetypes instead of the crowded Greek pantheon (Slavic-flavored: forest-lord, bath-spirit, winter-mother — research flags Slavic folklore as perennial #1 underserved).
 - **Automation (Dominion, with faces):** household spirits — one keeps the forge fed, one spins, one brews — automation with *demands*. Feed them or they sulk and sabotage: the metabolism and the emergent narrative in one system.
 - **Base (Hungry Heart):** the hearth must stay lit; offerings pace the game; the homestead grows building-by-building (V Rising castle feel, wooden and warm).
 - **Runs + reset:** the old wood rearranges itself — folklore-native proc-gen ("the path is never the same twice" is already a fairy-tale law); seasons as run modifiers.
 - **Identity anchor:** small verb-differentiated folk cast — the Smith, the Witch, the Hunter, the Fiddler.
 - **Tone/screenshot:** warm hearth-glow vs cold blue wood; carved-idol aesthetic — **carved wood is literally low-poly-native** (the style *explains* the polygons).
 - **Risks:** the most writing/characterization-hungry option (the Patron Web's cost); the most humanoid + creature rigs; furthest cosmetic distance from the current sci-fi build; folklore casts are warm but Ravenswatch shows theme alone ≈ solid-not-spectacular.
 ## Direction D — FOUNDRY (machine elegy: "the war outlived its makers — so did you")
 **Pitch:** You are war-salvage — decommissioned engines of a finished war, waking in the foundry that built you, rebuilding yourselves from a battlefield that never learned to stop.
 **The noun: SALVAGE (the Frame).**
 - **Abilities (Warframe model — the proven infinite treadmill):** modules stripped from named war-machines, refit at the foundry into your chassis sockets. Kit = manufactured artifact → acquisition IS crafting IS the content treadmill (each new machine = fight + module set + farm + recipe).
 - **Base:** the Foundry made you and repairs you — the hub is your parent and your hospital; feeding it ore/scrap is self-preservation (Hungry Heart). Automation needs zero excuse: you *are* the factory's children; production lines are kin.
 - **Identity anchor:** **collection of craftable frames** — swap chassis at the hub (co-op silhouettes = frames; build diversity = modules × frames).
 - **Runs + reset:** the front line of the autonomous war still moves, churning the terrain — expeditions raid the active front (diegetic reset).
 - **Tone:** machine-graveyard melancholy (NieR-adjacent), explicitly NOT stock colony sci-fi — the elegy is the differentiator.
 - **Art:** the most forgiving character art possible — hard-surface robots, kitbash + procedural greebles, no organic anatomy; Synty mech/sci-fi packs directly reusable; **closest to the current build** (Husks → feral war-machines is nearly a rename).
 - **Risks:** sci-fi + automation is the stock aesthetic (medium-high saturation) — the theme must earn freshness from the elegy and *being* the machines; robot casts risk emotional coldness (mitigate: DRG proved personality is voice + animation, not flesh).
 ## Sketches (not developed — on request)
 - **Verdant Engine (solarpunk reclamation):** automation that *heals* terrain — the moral inversion of Riftbreaker; visually unique among grimdark competitors; tonal-mismatch risk with combat dread.
 - **Abyssal × fungal merge:** the Bloom at the bottom of the sea — A's light economy + B's living logistics.
 - **Cute/dark eldritch colony:** COTL's contrast formula on cosmic-horror material; strongest streamability; furthest tonal leap.
 - **Gaslamp-fae second swing:** Nightingale's audience is proven and currently unserved; realm-cards-style "craft the run region" is the best crafting↔proc-gen device found in research.
 ## Comparison
 | | A Lantern | B Undergrowth | C Hearth | D Foundry |
 |---|---|---|---|---|
 | One-noun strength | ★★★ light everywhere | ★★★ strain everywhere | ★★☆ bargain (combat resource weaker) | ★★☆ salvage (moment-to-moment weaker) |
 | Theme freshness (market) | ★★★ underserved | ★★★ near-unclaimed | ★★☆ underserved but Ravenswatch-adjacent | ★☆☆ stock zone, saved by the elegy |
 | Co-op anchor | suit cast (hybrid) | build-anchored | folk cast | frame collection |
 | Treadmill | leviathans → organs | crowned blooms → strains | spirits → pacts | machines → modules |
 | Automation fit | ★★☆ aquaculture | ★★★ mycelial network | ★★☆ spirit household | ★★★ native |
 | Blender-learnability | ★★★ organic-forgiving | ★★★ procedural-native | ★☆☆ rig-heavy | ★★★ hard-surface |
 | Ports from current build | ★★★ | ★★☆ (Blight evolution) | ★☆☆ | ★★★ |
 | Writing burden | low | low | high | medium |
 ## Recommendation (Claude, 2026-07-13 — not locked)
 **A (Lantern) first, B (Undergrowth) as the bold alternative or merge partner, D (Foundry) as the low-risk evolution, C (Hearth) as the "different game" option.** A converts the project's already-locked rendering identity into its fiction, keeps the harvest-attention and holdout mechanics verbatim, has the cleanest one-noun economy, sits in verified white space, and is the friendliest possible on-ramp for learning creature modeling. Decision belongs to the operator via the present-forks ritual.
 ## Related
 - [[Identity]] — the current fiction this exploration may supersede
 - [[Pillars]] — locked mechanics every direction must serve (all four do)
 - [[DR-037_Procedural_Expedition_Spine_Two_Classes_Persistent_Meta]] — prior SoD research
 - [[Iteration_2026-07_CoopHades]] — the roadmap this would re-frame
@@ -0,0 +1,187 @@
 ---
 title: LANTERN Vertical Slice — high-level implementation roadmap
 date: 2026-07-13
 tags: [roadmap, lantern, vertical-slice, direction, art-pipeline]
 permalink: gamevault/06-roadmap/roadmap-lantern-slice
 ---
 # LANTERN Vertical Slice — Implementation Roadmap (high level)
 > Implements the slice tier of [[Identity_Lantern]] (final draft, review-hardened). **High-level by design** — a second pass will deepen each phase technically (per-phase design reviews, DOTS/netcode verification) as it comes up. No time estimates (operator directive). Supersedes [[Iteration_2026-07_CoopHades]] as the operative direction once the adoption DR lands.
 >
 > **The slice's falsifiable test (the only gate that matters):** *does pinning a pocket feel like winning something, and does a stranded suit feel worth a second descent?*
 >
 > **Two tracks run in parallel:** the **system phases (0–7)** and **Workstream A (art, modeling & visual direction)** — a first-class track with its own gates, because this direction lives or dies on custom creatures/characters made by one person. Each system phase names its asset needs; Workstream A names how they get made.
 ## Standing constraints
 - Stack unchanged: Unity DOTS + Netcode for Entities, server-authoritative, input-only clients, client prediction, 2–4 co-op ([[Pillars]] #4 holds).
 - Existing code is quarry, not foundation: strip/reuse freely (combat feel layer, ability plumbing, hub/run lifecycle, save system are all candidate salvage), but no design decision bends to preserve code.
 - Netcode-heavy slices get an adversarial design review BEFORE coding (the standing project ritual). Flagged ★ per phase.
 - Every phase ends with a play-gate, not a test count.
 - **Placeholder-first, art-pass-second:** every system phase may ship its gate on kitbash/greybox placeholders; Workstream A replaces them on its own cadence. Systems never wait on art; art never blocks a gate.
 ## Phase 0 — Adoption & groundwork
 1. **Adoption DR** — LANTERN supersedes the Awakening Engine identity + the Co-op Hades iteration; old fiction/lexicon archived, not deleted. Update [[Pillars]] pointers; CLAUDE.md game-state note.
 2. **Strip/mothball pass** — inventory current systems into keep / rework / mothball against the slice list (combat feel layer + telegraphs: keep; boon pipeline: rework into mutations; regions/relevancy, save system, hub lifecycle: rework; sieges/economy leftovers: mothball).
 3. **World-model design spike ★review-first** — the pocket-graph + seed-pinning contract: pocket generation as a pure function of (seed, pocket-id); pinning = persist seed + structure deltas; pocket streaming/replication as runtime ghosts; muster/Bell transit contract. The slice's hardest netcode problem — design before any world code.
 4. **Art direction lock = Workstream A0** (below) — runs inside this phase; its style-proof gate is part of this phase's exit.
 **Gate:** DR merged; world-model design review passed; **A0 style-proof scene approved**.
 ## Phase 1 — Combat core: two frames that feel like Shape of Dreams
 The primary verb first. No world, no lanterns — a gym.
 1. **Bathynaut** (anchor-and-crash melee) + **Harpooner** (line-and-iron skillshots incl. reel/drag) as suit-frames — chassis verbs, movement feel, dash.
 2. **Skillshot kit plumbing:** 4 socket slots per frame; cooldown/telegraph/aim grammar to the SoD bar (manual aim, real windups, readable hitboxes).
 3. **First 4–5 Sparks** as socketables (decoy-wisp, hook/pull, vortex, blink, one zone) — enough to prove kit variety.
 4. **Light-as-information prototype ★review-first:** per-player lamp radius drives netcode relevancy (entities outside your light aren't replicated); dim/bright as the quiet/blind trade.
 5. Underwater feel pass: buoyant knockbacks, slow debris, murk fog, hydrophone audio sketch.
 **Asset needs:** 2 suit-frames (first-pass: humanoid-pipeline kitbash), Spark VFX set (procedural + palette), gym props. **Pipeline dependency: A1 runs alongside this phase.**
 **Gate:** the gym is fun with two players for 15 minutes on kit alone; relevancy-light verified server-side (gamma test: nothing to see).
 ## Phase 2 — The dark & the pocket-graph
 1. **Twilight shelf as a pocket-graph:** 3–5 generated dark pockets per descent on a graph; seed-fresh re-knot per descent; pocket transitions.
 2. **Descent lifecycle:** muster at the Lamp → Bell down → pockets → Bell recall or lit-road walk home; ~30–40 min hard session cap.
 3. **Enemy roster v1:** Drowners (melee swarm), Grindylow packs (leapers), Wreckers (gloam-casters with counterfeit beacons + scan counter), Wisp-Choir as first named encounter.
 4. **Brighter-is-louder:** party Loudness sum drives spawn/aggro pressure; per-Wick Loudness pips on HUD.
 5. **Harvest:** Lumen nodes, organ drops, carried-vs-banked cargo distinction.
 **Asset needs:** 4 creatures (Drowner, Grindylow, Wrecker, Wisp-Choir — the **A2 creature-factory proving ground**), Lumen node family, pocket dressing set (rocks, wrecks, glow-flora), Bell.
 **Gate:** two consecutive descents feel different (re-knot working); the Wrecker fake-beacon moment lands on a first-time player.
 ## Phase 3 — The tide-line: lanterns, pinning, permanence
 1. **Plantable, hand-fed waypoint-lanterns:** planting pins the pocket (seed + deltas persisted); lit pockets persist across descents and sessions; muster moves to the deepest lit waypoint.
 2. **Session-only burn:** fuel drains only while a session runs; guttering telegraphs long and loud before the dark un-pins a pocket.
 3. **Banked light:** deposit at any lit lantern = home; the Lamp meter brightens the station visibly.
 4. **Building v1 (minimal):** a small buildable set inside lit pockets — enough to make a pinned pocket feel *owned* (the slice test hinges here).
 **Asset needs:** the waypoint-lantern family (unlit/lit/guttering states — a hero prop; light states do the acting), small buildable set, fuel/feeding VFX.
 **Gate:** ★ *pinning a pocket feels like winning something* — playtest-judged, the first half of the slice test.
 ## Phase 4 — Sparks, mutations & the homecoming economy
 1. **Culture library:** first organ home = permanently cultured; grafts regrow cheaply from culture (death-proof knowledge floor).
 2. **Wild mutations:** Sparks drink Gloam; 2 paced thresholds per descent offering 2–3 warps, at pocket-clear beats only; mutations evaporate at homecoming.
 3. **Tallow fixing:** 1 fix slot per Spark; the **scripted first-evaporation beat** (Keeper names the rule, gifts one Tallow).
 4. **Raw-socketing:** wield a fresh organ wild (over-tuned, temporary) vs. bag it for culturing.
 5. Fill the Spark catalog to 8–10.
 **Asset needs:** organ/pickup mesh family (blobby, emissive — early Blender wins), graft-socket UI, mutation VFX variants (palette/param variants on Spark VFX, not new effects).
 **Gate:** two consecutive descents produce visibly different builds from the same kit; the evaporation beat reads as a gift, not a theft.
 ## Phase 5 — Death, recovery & the solo valve
 1. **The split:** flame returns (rack-spare respawn, cheap regrow); cargo + fixed mutations + raw organs strand with the suit at its death site.
 2. **Recovery:** stranded suits persist across descents (deterministic server relocation, never RNG); ally body-carry; carried suits stay loud; one-suit debt cap; party wipe drifts suits one pocket shallower.
 3. **Guttering + flame-share revive** (giver pays flame).
 4. **Selkie tariff** (menu-level for the slice).
 5. **Solo Tender dive-companion:** drags guttering suits toward light, hauls cargo, holds a lantern's feed.
 **Asset needs:** stranded-suit prop states (dark/claimed/carried), the Tender companion (small, characterful — a hero-adjacent model worth real time), carry/revive VFX.
 **Gate:** ★ *a stranded suit feels worth a second descent* — the second half of the slice test; solo death is a story, not a rage-quit.
 ## Phase 6 — The finale: shelf-boss + the scripted tide
 1. **Shelf-boss** (Twilight's warden): a real multi-phase skillshot fight; drops the slice's signature Spark + a schematic beat.
 2. **One scripted Serpent-tide as the slice climax:** forecast by the Siren, targeting the party's planted lantern — defend it or lose the pin.
 3. Difficulty/co-op scaling pass (1–4 players; Loudness carries most of it).
 **Asset needs:** the shelf-boss (**the slice's hero creature** — silhouette-first, budgeted real modeling time), tide VFX language (the dark moving as weather).
 **Gate:** the tide finale generates the clip — a party defending their own light and telling the story afterward.
 ## Phase 7 — The station & the voices
 Runs parallel with 4–6 where possible.
 1. **The Last Lantern hub:** Lamp (meter + radius), rack, graft-bench, culture library, Bell — each a physical place.
 2. **The Keeper** (text-first, subtitle lines): tutorializes the loop, the split, the evaporation gift; evasive-warm register per the tone bible.
 3. **The Siren:** descent forecast at the Bell + **hydrophone bleed mid-descent** + the tide forecast.
 4. **Lamp-morse:** ping wheel, revive plea, greeting — procedural chirp audio.
 5. **Tone bible** (one page, register bounds per character) before any bark generation.
 **Asset needs:** station set (Mother-Lamp as the hero set-piece whose brightness IS the campaign readout, Bell, rack, benches), the Siren's bell-tank vignette.
 **Gate:** a new player completes first descent → death → recovery → pin with no external explanation; the hub reads as a home, not a menu.
 ---
 # Workstream A — Art, Modeling & Visual Direction (first-class track)
 > One developer, learning Blender (blendermcp + tooling), shipping custom models, characters, and enemies. The workstream's product is not just assets — it is a **repeatable factory** such that creature N+1 is a routine sitting, not a research project. Gates are real; the deeper technical pass will spec each stage.
 ## A0 — Art direction lock (runs inside Phase 0)
 1. **Style bible (one page, binding):** stylized low-poly, RoR2-lineage. Silhouette-first; faceted geometry; flat/near-flat shading; mood carried by dynamic light in murk. **Poly budgets:** props ≤ ~800 tris · creatures ≤ ~3k · hero/boss/suits ≤ ~6k. The [[Identity_Lantern#Art, audio & the readability law|readability law]] (value-first, flicker-cadence, 200px rule) applies to every asset from day one.
 2. **The material decision (the solo-dev keystone): no per-asset texturing, ever.** One shared **palette/gradient atlas** (Imphenzia-style: a single small texture of color bands; UVs are *placed*, not unwrapped) + vertex-color accents, under **three master shaders**: `Lit-Palette` (statics), `Emissive-Gloam` (parameterized warm/cold/lure emissive — one shader is the whole palette rule), `Skinned-Palette` (deformation-aware for creatures/suits). Every asset in the game shares ~3 materials: coherence, batching, and zero texture-painting skill required.
 3. **Reference board:** RoR2 (shape language), Dredge (water mood), Hollow Knight (value control in dark), Below (the cautionary legibility case).
 4. **Style-proof scene (the gate):** one prop + one creature + one suit, in-engine, under murk + dynamic lights, on the capture grade — judged full-size AND at 200 px AND in grayscale. **Locked before any mass production.**
 ## A1 — Pipeline proof (runs alongside Phase 1)
 1. **Two written recipes, checklist-grade** (this project runs on distilled gotchas; the art pipeline gets the same treatment):
   - **Statics:** Blender → export (units/scale settings) → collider policy → entity baking → palette material. Target: minutes per prop.
   - **Skinned:** Blender rig → per-action clips (Key All Bones, bake to pose) → FBX → animation-system ingest → `Skinned-Palette` material → prefab. Every step scripted or checklisted via blendermcp where possible.
 2. **The three rig families (the amortization decision):** every slice creature maps onto one shared armature family, so *clips are made per family, not per creature*:
   - **Drifter** — spine-chain swimmer (Wisp-Choir motes, lure-fish, later serpents/rays): swim-idle, dart, attack, death-sink.
   - **Crawler** — legged/scuttling floor unit (Grindylow, later kappa-kin/Tenders): skitter, leap, attack, death.
   - **Strider** — biped-ish (Drowner, Wrecker, and the suit-frames themselves): walk, windup, attack, death.
   - Clip budget: **4–5 clips per family** (idle/move/windup/attack/death) + per-creature attack accents only where identity demands.
 3. **Suit-frames, pragmatic path:** first pass = kitbash on the existing humanoid pipeline (helmet/tank/plate swaps over a proven rig); custom Wick silhouette sculpt is an A3 upgrade, not a Phase-1 blocker.
 4. **Procedural assists:** geometry nodes for glow-gardens/coral/tube-worm sets (parametric families, not hand-modeled instances); blendermcp scripts for the repetitive export/import steps.
 **Gate:** one creature goes cube → rigged → animated → fighting in-game **in a single documented sitting — twice** (repeatability is the gate, not beauty).
 ## A2 — The creature factory (runs alongside Phases 2–6)
 1. **"CreatureKit" workflow/tooling:** one editor tool or hard checklist that takes a Blender export and yields a play-ready enemy — prefab with rig + ghost/network authoring + colliders + a tuning-table entry + spawn-table and bestiary hooks. **The measure: adding enemy N+1 touches zero undocumented steps.**
 2. **Variant policy (cheapest content first):** palette-shift / gloam-tint / scale / part-swap variants of existing meshes BEFORE any new mesh. One Drowner mesh should yield 3 visual tiers; the Emissive-Gloam shader's parameters (hue, flicker-cadence, intensity) are a free variant axis that is *also* gameplay information.
 3. **VFX-first identity rule:** emissive accents + a dynamic light + silhouette + animation carry a creature's identity in this game's darkness; mesh detail is the last 20%. Budget accordingly — a readable blob with a great light beats a detailed model nobody can see.
 4. **Delivery order (matched to system phases):** Drowner (Strider, simplest) → Grindylow (Crawler) → Wrecker (Strider variant + beacon prop) → Wisp-Choir (Drifter motes + VFX — barely a "model" at all, a good early win) → organs/pickups (Phase 4) → Tender companion (Phase 5, characterful) → **shelf-boss (Phase 6 — the hero build: silhouette explorations first, kitbash from family parts where possible, real time budgeted)**.
 5. **Throughput rules (solo sanity):** timebox per asset class (a prop is a morning, a creature is days not weeks, the boss is the exception); the done-bar is *"reads at gameplay zoom, under murk, in motion"* — never render-portfolio quality; when stuck, ship the placeholder and log the upgrade.
 **Gate (mid-slice checkpoint at Phase 2's gate):** all four Phase-2 creatures in-game through the CreatureKit path; a written retro on the factory's friction points feeds the deeper technical pass.
 ## A3 — Hero assets & the visual polish pass (runs alongside Phases 6–7)
 1. **The hero set:** the Mother-Lamp (the station's centerpiece whose brightness is the campaign readout — the single most important model in the slice), the waypoint-lantern family (unlit/lit/guttering — light states act, the mesh holds still), the shelf-boss, the custom Wick silhouette upgrade (replacing the A1 kitbash), the Bell.
 2. **The world dressing pass:** geometry-node garden/coral/wreck families dressed through the pocket generator; station interior set.
 3. **Capture-grade validation:** the readability law audited on real gameplay footage — compressed-bitrate test (does Midnight-adjacent murk survive streaming?), grayscale test, colorblind-sim pass on the warm/cold/lure triad.
 4. **Screenshot discipline check:** the slice's store-facing shots pass the 200px + warm-focal-light + legible-silhouette rule.
 **Gate:** the slice's finale clip (Phase 6's gate footage) looks like *this game and no other game* — style bible held under real play, not staged shots.
 ---
 ## Cross-cutting workstreams (woven through all phases)
 - **Audio:** hydrophone bed, lamp-morse chirps, Bell toll, Siren verses (placeholder → authored), silence-with-texture.
 - **Dev tooling:** pocket-graph visualizer, seed-pin inspector, Loudness/threat readout, descent-state overlay, screenshot rig on the capture grade, CreatureKit (owned by A2 but serves everyone).
 - **Validation culture (unchanged):** EditMode tests for math/economy invariants (pinning determinism, mutation thresholds, Loudness sums, strand/regrow rules); Play-mode server==client checks for every replicated surface; adversarial design reviews for ★ phases; every gate is a playtest.
 ## Sequence at a glance
 | System track | 0 (adoption + world spike ★) | 1 (combat ★) | 2 (dark) | 3 (tide-line) | 4 (mutations) | 5 (death) | 6 (finale) | 7 (hub, parallel) |
 |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | **Art track** | A0 style lock | A1 pipeline proof | A2 factory (4 creatures) | A2 (lantern family) | A2 (organs) | A2 (Tender) | A3 (boss + hero set) | A3 (station + polish) |
 The deeper technical pass (next sessions) takes each phase in turn: context7-verified API grounding, the ★ design reviews, salvage mapping against the existing codebase, per-phase build specs — and for Workstream A, the concrete recipe documents (export settings, rig conventions, CreatureKit spec) validated against the project's existing animation-pipeline knowledge.
 ## Related
 - [[Identity_Lantern]] — the design this implements (scope ladder = this roadmap's contract; readability law = A-track law)
 - [[Theme_Direction_Candidates]] — research underneath the direction
 - [[Synty_Asset_Inventory]] — placeholder quarry during the transition
 - [[Iteration_2026-07_CoopHades]] — superseded on adoption
 - [[Pillars]] — unchanged constraints