v0.8.0.17 — four things the game knew and the screen did not say

All four reported from a table on Day 1 of v0.8.0.16, and all the same shape.

ABS SIGNALS COULD ONLY BE PLAYED ON ONE MAINLINE CARD, while its tooltip said
"any Mainline card". The engine was never wrong: check accepts any node whose
kind is mainline and legalActions filters by check, so all of them were legal.
The failure was the LABEL — describeIntent named i.placement and never i.node,
so every placement described itself as plain "play ABS Signals", and the action
list drops duplicate labels. All but the lowest-index node were discarded before
the menu saw them. This is the THIRD time that trap has fired and the file
documents the other two three lines apart: a turnout's two rotations, and three
Department discards. Same fix — name what distinguishes them.

The card is also called what the card face calls it. prettyKey rendered
absSignals as "Abs Signals" beside a tooltip saying ABS, an acronym no
key-splitter can recover, so the authored names now win. Three of those names
were transcribed in sentence case and were CORRECTED rather than adopted: the
repository says "Yard Office" 36 times against "Yard office" twice. A lookup
that imports its own source's typos is the drift it exists to prevent.

NOTHING ON A MAINLINE CARD SHOWED WHAT WAS STANDING ON IT. Played, ABS left no
mark and you found out by hovering — the same complaint the Heavy Grade wedge
answered, and it matters more here because ABS decides whether a second train on
that card is safe. It draws a signal mast with a lit lamp now; a signal is the
literal object and needs no room for words, which is what lets it sit clear of a
name as long as "Uncontrolled Siding" on a 152px cell. The Mainline modifiers
draw as BRK, AIR and HLP. Realignment is deliberately not among them: reduce
takes the `became` branch and changes node.card, so a realigned Trestle IS an
Uncontrolled Siding afterwards. Asserted, so the absence reads as a finding.

A FREIGHT AGENT TURN SAID A CAR MOVED WHEN NONE HAD. Three faults behind one
line. It asserted an outcome, where §6.3 requires no action and the bot declines
deliberately — unjamming a healthy box destroys a load that cost a whole action
to stock. An idle Agent was then silent, which read as a dropped turn; a new
freightAgentIdled event says so and why, reducing to nothing exactly like
switchingEnded. And the work named a coordinate rather than the industry, though
a `place` helper has existed for precisely that since the switching lines moved
to it. "Loaded a loaded boxcar INTO the green Outbound box at the Freight House",
with the direction in capitals because to-or-from was the question asked.

THE LOG AND THE ACTION MENU SPELLED THE SAME SQUARE DIFFERENTLY. view.ts wrote
(col,row) — X,Y, east/west then north/south — with a comment saying why;
narrate.ts wrote the internal storage order with no comment at all. So the menu
offered a move to "(1,-1)" and the log reported it at "(-1,1)", side by side.
Pinned by a test that renders one square through BOTH describers and compares
them to each other: a test written against either file alone would have passed.

THE DOCUMENTATION IS REACHABLE FROM A RUNNING GAME, AND ALL OF IT IS PUBLISHED.
v0.8.0.16 published the Quickstart and nothing it points at — its §8 links five
documents by relative path and every one 404'd on the package, verified against
the running container. The build publishes the full set, and the test reads the
links OUT OF the guide rather than listing them. They are linked from the This
Game card, where reference already lives, rather than the header that must not
wrap; no mode awareness is needed, because solitaire and multiplayer are the
same page on the same origin.

THE REFERENCES DROPPED THE VERSION FROM THEIR NAMES. Four described v0.8.0.16
and had since the v0.8.0.15 audit; the v0.4.5 was the prototype edition they
were first written against, kept only because 36 citations pointed at it — and
it read as documentation five minor versions stale. They are quickstart.md,
rules.md, home-deck.md, mainline-deck.md and components.md now, kept current
with each release rather than published as editions. Two errors surfaced while
checking them against this release, which is the argument for doing it:
home-deck.md filed ABS Signals under Enhancements "played into your district"
that "change what a square does" — it does neither, this release's bug written
down — and mainline-deck.md, which lists everything playable onto a Mainline
card, never mentioned it at all.

1010 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MUizFYCMHRWhbWwXhp7WPR
This commit is contained in:
Jesse.Markowitz
2026-09-21 05:53:52 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent dc31555625
commit b90c0413d2
27 changed files with 819 additions and 94 deletions
+3 -3
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@@ -193,9 +193,9 @@ cannot carry this column, which is the argument for generating the page rather t
| --- | --- | --- | :---: |
| Interlocking | runningTrackStraight | — | **live** |
| Facing Point Locks | onCard | interlocking in the district | **dormantSolo** |
| Yard office | secondaryTrackStraight | — | **live** |
| Small yard | secondaryTrackStraight | — | **live** |
| Water column | runningTrackStraight | — | **dormantSolo** |
| Yard Office | secondaryTrackStraight | — | **live** |
| Small Yard | secondaryTrackStraight | — | **live** |
| Water Column | runningTrackStraight | — | **dormantSolo** |
| Overpass | onCard | — | **unbuilt** |
| Telegraph | runningTrackStraight | — | **live** |
| Telephone | onCard | telegraph on the same card | **live** |
+1 -1
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@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ read "Both" for both of them, and that was the *other half* of the same mistaken
House" named those two, §9.3 had to be describing them, so they had to be two-way. Once the Freight
House is its own card the argument evaporates, and playtesting settled it — "Grocer's Warehouse
should be receive only, does not ship anything out"; "Refinery: only ships out tanks, does not
receive anything" (Jesse). `StationMaster-Home-Deck-v0.4.5.md` prints both that way, and the modifier
receive anything" (Jesse). `home-deck.md` prints both that way, and the modifier
set agrees: all three Refinery modifiers (Pipelines, Oil Depot, Viscosity Breakers) grant **+1
outbound**, which would be an odd card set for a facility that receives half the time.
<!-- TODO v0.5.0: Mine Tipple, Produce Shed and Power Plant above (3/3/4, 2/2/3, 3/3/4) were NOT
+3 -3
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@@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ asked a third time:
rising to 50% at four players. A pre-game interrupt for a rule four games in five never see.
The docs were the actual defect. `README.md` still listed it among three open rules questions (all
three closed in v0.5.0) and `StationMaster-Mainline-Deck-v0.4.5.md` still said "the implementation
three closed in v0.5.0) and `mainline-deck.md` still said "the implementation
needs a player-selection step to match the card". Both now say settled, and why.
**Still not implemented**: the Action (10) and Space-use (12) cards, which are genuinely
@@ -555,7 +555,7 @@ Hotel) are what grow them.
now carries **2** coaches and The Sparrow **3**. The table above is left as `Trains3.pdf` prints it,
because that is what this section is for — what the design SAYS. What the game plays is
`src/engine/content.ts`, with the per-card table in
[`../StationMaster-Home-Deck-v0.4.5.md`](../StationMaster-Home-Deck-v0.4.5.md).
[`../home-deck.md`](../home-deck.md).
### Extras (X13–X22) — ten distinct trains, not four generic ones
@@ -910,7 +910,7 @@ any setting** — being a place an Extra can start is part of what upgrading buy
- **The Mainline cards were rolled, not dealt.** `buildDivision` drew uniformly from the nine card
TYPES **with replacement**, so a Division could be dealt two Interchanges or two Tunnels, and
Plains — printed twice in the deck — carried the same weight as cards printed once.
`docs/StationMaster-Mainline-Deck-v0.4.5.md` had already flagged the mismatch as needing
`docs/mainline-deck.md` had already flagged the mismatch as needing
correction; "an Extra may start at the Interchange if one is on the board" is what forced it, since
that only reads as a rule if the board holds at most one. Now dealt from the printed ten-card deck
without replacement.