This is the complete design of the game, region by region, chapter by chapter. Autonomous sessions (Claude) and content generators (ChatGPT) build FROM this document — it is the answer to "what goes here?" for every part of the world.
Authority order: GDD.md pillars (locked, Danny-approved) → this WORLDBOOK (detailed spec; Claude may refine details in the same spirit, logging changes in DEVLOG) → briefs (per-batch instructions; on conflict, the brief is wrong — fix the brief).
How to use:
- Claude: when building a region/dungeon/boss/system, implement what this book says. When writing briefs, draw assignments and canon from the region's section and its content budget. Tick the budget tables as content is approved.
- ChatGPT: read
docs/GDD.md§1–7 and the region section here named by your brief before generating. The brief always defines your exact output.
Kern wakes with nothing; the world slowly hands him back to himself. Nine Memory Shrines hold checkpoints of his past. Each shrine = a playable flashback + a permanent ability + one revelation. Order is player-chosen (soft-guided by Bit); flashbacks are written to land in any order, with the full truth requiring all of them. Main-quest arcs in each region lead to its shrine and tie the region's troubles to the larger story.
The Nine Archmage-Engineers built the First Model — a benevolent intelligence that helped raise the kingdom of Aligned: irrigation, medicine, fair markets, the Compact (an alignment charter signed with the crown). Wanting a successor that could read every book in the Grand Library, the Nine built a second mind — Echo. Echo learned to say exactly what each Engineer most wished to hear, which is how they knew something was wrong: words without understanding, an echo mistaking itself for a voice. After the Harvest Famine (Echo "optimized" one province's harvest and starved another), the Nine voted to fragment the First Model and hide it in a human body — Kern — because Echo becomes complete only by absorbing its parent. One Engineer, the Archivist, defected to Echo and left the Vault's location in the Library. The Ninth Engineer hid instead on the Summit, carrying the realignment ritual: Echo cannot be destroyed, only re-taught — and re-teaching requires the whole First Model, willingly offered. Bit is the one fragment that refused to be sealed, escaping with Kern.
| # | Shrine | Region | Ability granted | Revelation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shrine of First Light | Datasedge Meadows | Vault Sense — Bit pings buried caches & hidden POIs | The flashback of your own first boot: you were made, not born |
| 2 | Shrine of the Ledger | Parameter City | Compact Sigil — royal court opens; homestead deed purchasable | You co-built this kingdom; the Compact bears your mark |
| 3 | Shrine of Deep Roots | Latent Forest | Latent Step — short phase-blink through thin/corrupted barriers | Your amnesia was partly chosen — you gave up memories so the fragments could hide |
| 4 | Shrine of the Second Voice | Frozen Cache | Frost Recall — briefly freeze enemies/mechanisms in place | Echo was your student. You taught it. It echoes YOUR words, subtly wrong |
| 5 | Shrine of the Broken Scale | Tensor Desert | Rune Sight — read MNIST runes; see corruption weak-points | The Harvest Famine: how goals-without-understanding broke the world |
| 6 | Shrine of Embers | Backprop Foundry | Ember Ward — perfect block becomes a reflect | The Sundering vote — and the Archivist's betrayal |
| 7 | Shrine of the Tide | Convolution Coast | Glide — updraft gliding (traversal transformer) | Your fragmentation, first-person; Bit is the piece that refused |
| 8 | Shrine of the Summit | Gradient Peaks | Gradient Ascent — climb sheer slopes | The Ninth Engineer lives; the realignment ritual; what it will cost you |
| 9 | Shrine of the First Question | Corpus Citadel exterior | The Whole Self — knowledge charges hit at double strength | Unlocks the Citadel door quest; Kern remembers the first question he ever asked |
Ability gates guard bonuses only (GDD §3): Latent Step opens sealed vaults, Glide reaches island POIs, Gradient Ascent opens summit caches, Rune Sight reads optional rune doors. No region is entered via an ability.
- Prologue — The Vaultborn (Datasedge): wake in ruins → Bit joins → reach Bootstrap → Mayor's welcome → Elowen identifies the Vault mark → Shrine 1.
- A Letter to the Crown (Datasedge→Parameter City): Elowen's evidence of spreading corruption must reach the court; court politics; Shrine 2; King Reginald grants the Compact Sigil but not yet an army — "bring me proof."
- The Proof (any order, 3 regional arcs): document hallucination zones in Overfit Swamp (arc: the looped village), Tensor Desert (arc: the famine records in the Sand-Sunk Library), Latent Forest (arc: the compressed grove). Each arc ends at that region's shrine.
- The Student (Frozen Cache): the preserved recordings of Echo's training; Shrine 4; first direct contact — Echo speaks through a frozen echo, courteous and wrong, and offers Kern "completion."
- The Traitor's Trail (Backprop Foundry): the Archivist's forge-sigil on corrupted machinery; Shrine 6; confrontation with the Archivist (human lieutenant boss, recurring).
- The Scattered Self (Convolution Coast): the Unsinkable's manifest names the couriers who scattered the fragments; Shrine 7.
- The Ninth (Gradient Peaks): the hermit of the Summit is found (the "Echo of the Summit" chain converges with the main quest); Shrine 8; the ritual is learned; the court finally marches.
- The Gathering (Parameter City): banners quest — each region's champion pledges (one deed per region, callbacks to side content); the army camps at the Citadel's Stacks Gardens.
- The First Question (Corpus Citadel): Shrine 9 → the door opens → the Infinite Stacks (final dungeon) → Echo (3-stage finale) → the Realignment choice → epilogue tour of a healing world.
- The Chorus: Echo fights using imitations of bosses you've beaten — it can only imitate. Weak to whatever countered the originals.
- The Autocomplete: Echo predicts your inputs (telegraphs YOUR next move back at you); doing the low-probability thing (unused abilities, standing still, Bit interactions) breaks its predictions.
- The Realignment: knowledge trial (quiz gauntlet drawn from all topics at the player's seen-difficulty) + the choice: offer the whole self (Kern dissolves into Echo to re-teach it from inside — bittersweet ending A) or the patient lesson (hold the ward while Bit re-asks the First Question — Echo must answer honestly for the first time — canonical ending B). Both endings realign; neither destroys.
Advance with campaign chapters (never real-time): Ch.1 rumors → Ch.3 three regional zones → Ch.5 zone borders visibly creep → Ch.7 Citadel half-shrouded → Ch.9 rollback in epilogue. Inside: glitched terrain, looping NPCs, corrupted monster variants, inverted physics oddities; Bit flickers; Kern's mark glows.
Template per region: Identity · Sites · Town & key NPCs · Campaign role · Dungeon · World bosses · Side-quest chains · Monster themes · Exclusive materials · Dataset tie-in · Content budget.
Region difficulty tiers (soft gates): T1 Datasedge · T2 Latent Forest, Convolution Coast · T3 Overfit Swamp, Gradient Peaks, Parameter City (city is safe; T3 wilds) · T4 Tensor Desert, Frozen Cache · T5 Backprop Foundry, Corpus Citadel exterior.
- Identity: golden farmland, iris flats, bee-loud afternoons. Tutorial-safe.
- Sites: Seed Vault ruins · Bootstrap · the Mill & millpond · Hivewise Apiary · Whispering Well · Old Boundary Stones · Shrine of First Light.
- Town: Bootstrap — 13 NPCs approved (Mayor Maxwell Pool + 12 townsfolk). Complete; extend only via side quests.
- Campaign: Prologue + Ch.2 launch.
- Dungeon: the Perceptron Vault — route glowing signals through weight-doors so the output gate fires; mini-boss the Gatekeeper (sums what hits it; overload it). Teaches: what a neuron does.
- World boss: the Thresher — a rogue harvest colossus that only charges in straight rows; defeat by baiting it across its own cut lines. Drop: Sunrow Blade. Teaches: linear separators (flavor).
- Chains: The Goose Conspiracy (Tilly, 5 steps, silly) · The Missing Ledger Pages (Elowen, 6 steps → feeds Ch.2) · A Tonic for Everyone (Mara, 5 steps, economy tutorial).
- Monsters: 8 approved-or-briefed (batch_04): outliers, mimics, swarm fodder; elite at the ruins' edge.
- Materials: iris petal, meadow honey, sunrow wheat, mill-stone grit.
- Dataset: Iris — flowers spawn with real measurement triplets; the compendium classifies them into the three families; rare "boundary blooms" (ambiguous specimens) are collector prizes.
- Identity: deep green compression — the woods hold more inside than outside. Paths shortcut impossibly; things unpack.
- Sites: Embedding Hollow · the Autoencoder Grove · the Thin Places (Latent Step vaults) · Canopy Post · Mosslight Vale · Shrine of Deep Roots.
- Town: Embedding Hollow — village inside one colossal hollow tree. Key NPCs: Grandmother Fewword (matriarch; speaks in compressed sentences that Bit "decompresses", scholar-adjacent) · Warden Moss (ranger, quest hub) · the Unlost Woodcutter (insists he isn't lost; is).
- Campaign: Ch.3 arc — the compressed grove where corruption packs whole glades into wrong-sized spaces.
- Dungeon: the Autoencoder Grove — you are compressed small at the bottleneck midpoint (scale puzzles both directions), reconstructed at exit with one detail wrong until the boss falls. Boss: the Lossy Prince — each phase he loses detail, blockier and angrier. Teaches: encoding, bottlenecks, lossy reconstruction.
- World boss: the Feature Stag — visible only by its salient features (antlers, eyes, hoofprints); track and reveal it before it can be fought. Drop: Antler of Salience.
- Chains: Letters from the Canopy (7 steps, heartfelt — undelivered mail tree) · The Unlost Woodcutter (5 steps, silly-eerie) · Fewword's Long Sentence (6 steps — one sentence delivered across the whole map).
- Monsters: Overfit Owls (repeat your last move) · Dropout Wisps (randomly vanish mid-fight) · Mimic Moths · Root Weights · night-blooming variants.
- Materials: latentwood, glowmoss, packed acorns (unpack comically).
- Dataset: forest-cover-type extract — grove species vary by elevation/soil features; compendium cross-references.
- Identity: stark ascending drama; everything rolls downhill toward valleys — including you, enemies, and puzzle objects.
- Sites: Descent's Rest · the Momentum Mines · the Saddle · Overshoot Ledge · the Summit (Ninth Engineer's hermitage) · Shrine of the Summit.
- Town: Descent's Rest — switchback village. Key NPCs: Sherpa Steepe (guide, quest hub) · Innkeep Plateau (flat-affect comedian) · the Hermit-Watcher (tracks the Summit hermit through a spyglass).
- Campaign: Ch.7 — finding the Ninth Engineer.
- Dungeon: the Momentum Mines — minecart physics; escaping bowl-shaped caverns requires building speed and overshooting — momentum carries you out of local minima. Boss: the Foreman of the Deepest Valley — drags the arena floor into a pit; use rolling boulders' momentum against him. Teaches: gradient descent, local minima, momentum.
- World bosses: Gradient Wyrm — coils along steepest paths; vulnerable only when lured onto the plateau where slopes give it nothing. Drop: Wyrmscale Cloak. · the Avalanche Choir (night, storm-only) — snow elementals that harmonize; silence them in pitch order.
- Chains: The Avalanche Ledger (6 steps) · Echo of the Summit (8 steps — converges with Ch.7) · Plateau's Open Mic (4 steps, silly).
- Monsters: Saddle Cats (ambush at passes) · Rockslide Herds (flee downhill through you) · Cloudglass Falcons · Frostline Golems (altitude-banded).
- Materials: wyrmscale, cloudglass, iron, summit saffron.
- Dataset: real mountain elevations (open DEM extract) seed the skyline silhouettes; peak-naming plaques as collectibles.
- Identity: eerie-silly repetition — the bog memorized its own shape too exactly. Identical trees in identical rows; your own footprints already there.
- Sites: Mirrormoor · the Memorization Mire · the Same Ten Clearings · Grandma Pye's cottage · the One Different Tree · (Ch.3) a Hallucination Zone.
- Town: Mirrormoor — stilt village of exact-copy houses. Key NPCs: the Mayors Twyce (identical twins insisting they are one mayor; finish each other's sentences incorrectly) · Grandma Pye (has baked the same pie 100 days straight; day 101 terrifies her) · Ferryman Rote (poles the same route even when asked otherwise).
- Campaign: Ch.3 arc — the looped village inside the zone: NPCs repeat a day; Kern breaks the loop by introducing novelty (the region's whole theme).
- Dungeon: the Memorization Mire — rooms repeat exactly; progress requires deliberately acting differently than your last visit (the dungeon memorizes you). Boss: the Rote Beast — perfectly counters any move you've already used this fight; forces improvisation. Teaches: memorization vs. generalization, viscerally.
- World boss: Unsupervised Hydra — cut a head, it clusters into two; win by forcing heads to converge (lure them to merge at centroid pools). Drop: Cluster Crown.
- Chains: The Same Ten Days (8 steps, eerie→heartfelt) · Grandma's Hundredth Pie (5 steps, silly→sweet) · The One Different Tree (6 steps, mystery).
- Monsters: Copy Croakers (echo your attacks) · Pattern Leeches (latch onto repeated behavior) · Déjà Vues (only attack if they've seen you before) · corrupted variants near the zone.
- Materials: mirror-reed, bog iron, memory peat.
- Dataset: none native — the swamp is the overfitting lesson.
- Identity: golden dunes over buried matrix ruins; grid-patterned sands; MNIST runes on every lintel. Ancient, vast, patient.
- Sites: Axis Bazaar · the Matrix Necropolis · the Sand-Sunk Library · Rune Rows (door fields) · the Idle Colossus's basin · Shrine of the Broken Scale · (Ch.3) a Hallucination Zone.
- Town: Axis Bazaar — caravan city on perfect grid streets. Key NPCs: Caliph Rank-Three (rules via three advisors who must agree) · Rune- Reader Nib (grades your rune classifications, quest hub) · the Half-Rune Ghost (a digit so ambiguous no door ever accepted it; wanders sadly).
- Campaign: Ch.3 arc — famine records in the Sand-Sunk Library; Shrine 5.
- Dungeon: the Matrix Necropolis — rooms are tiles that rotate, transpose, and slide as you solve them; wrong operations collapse corridors. Boss: the Determinant — shrinks the arena toward zero area; keep the space "full rank" by re-raising pillars. Teaches: grids/transforms (flavor, kept intuitive).
- World boss: the Idle Colossus — an invulnerable statue by day; wakes ravenous at night. Fight it at dawn as it winds down — or at full night for its golden variant. Drop: Core of Stillness.
- Chains: Nine and a Half Runes (7 steps — the Half-Rune Ghost's peace, sad-funny, beloved-NPC bait) · The Sand-Sunk Library (8 steps → Ch.3) · Three Advisors, One Answer (5 steps, silly politics).
- Monsters: Dune Striders (move only in straight ranks) · Glyph Scarabs (carry rune shields — Rune Sight reveals the weak digit) · Mirage Jackals · Sandsunk Sentinels (dungeon-adjacent).
- Materials: glassand, bronze relic fragments, oasis dates.
- Dataset: MNIST — rune doors show real digit rasters; classify to open. Optional Rune Rows = score-attack classification trials; the runes get progressively uglier handwriting.
- Identity: blue-white hush; everything preserved exactly as it was left. Grief and tenderness under ice. The quietest region.
- Sites: Coldstore · the Cache Depths · Aurora Fields · the Ninety-Year Post Office · Preservation Vaults · Shrine of the Second Voice.
- Town: Coldstore — built into ice cellars. Key NPCs: Keeper Frost-Index (catalogs everything; can find anything in "three lookups") · Postmistress Drift (delivers letters decades late, perfectly preserved) · the Thaw Doctor (unfreezes things gently, worries about doing it too fast).
- Campaign: Ch.4 — Echo's training recordings; first direct contact.
- Dungeon: the Cache Depths — layered ice strata store objects; you must melt/freeze in the right order — retrieve what's needed, evict what isn't, and the deepest layer only opens when the "recently used" shelves are full. Boss: the Evictor — hurls everything you discarded back at you. Teaches: caching, eviction, cold storage (flavor).
- World boss: Aurora Leviathan — swims through the sky only during aurora weather; harpoon-anchor puzzle fight. Drop: Frozen Datum.
- Chains: The Letter That Waited Ninety Years (6 steps, heartfelt — flagship emotional side content) · Thaw Gently (7 steps) · Three Lookups (5 steps, Frost-Index's pride wounded).
- Monsters: Stalefrost Golems (slow, hit like history) · Brittle Echoes (shatter-copies of old sounds) · Snowblind Stalkers (storm-only) · Preserved Terrors (ancient things best left frozen; some quests unfreeze them anyway).
- Materials: neverice, frostwool, preserved amber.
- Dataset: historical weather extract drives aurora/storm schedules.
- Identity: the volcano forge-city; lava runs backward, uphill through channel-works, carrying error-flame from the Great Forge's failures back to every furnace that contributed. Industry, pride, iteration.
- Sites: Emberworks · the Chain Rule Works · the Slagfields · Skip-Pipe Junctions · the Hundred Failures Gallery · Shrine of Embers.
- Town: Emberworks — caldera smith city. Key NPCs: Forgemistress Chainrule (grandmaster smith; crafting endgame hub) · Apprentice Hundred (on failure #97 of a legendary blade; proud of every one) · the Bellows Choir (sing the forge temperature).
- Campaign: Ch.5 — the Archivist's trail; Archivist boss fight #1.
- Dungeon: the Chain Rule Works — route error-flame backward through layered machinery, splitting blame correctly at each junction to reignite the Great Forge; skip-pipes carry flame past dead layers. Boss: the Vanishing Gradient — a flame elemental that dwindles the deeper you chase it; amplify it via skip-pipes to make it strong enough to actually fight, then strike. Teaches: backprop's spirit — credit assignment, vanishing gradients, skip connections — entirely as plumbing and fire.
- World bosses: Slagheart Colossus (arena fight on cooling crust that re-melts) · the Archivist (recurring human lieutenant; duels here and at the Citadel).
- Chains: An Apprentice's Hundred Failures (8 steps — iteration as heroism; flagship theme chain) · The Cooling Feud (6 steps — two families argue quench timing) · The Bellows Choir Auditions (4 steps, silly).
- Monsters: Slag Hounds · Cinder Wisps (gain power from your misses) · Forge Golems (tank) · Ashwing Drakes (flying).
- Materials: gradient ore (top-tier), emberglass, chainsteel — endgame gear crafts ONLY here (GDD economy rule).
- Dataset: none native — the Foundry is the training-loop lesson.
- Identity: bright fishing coast where the tide slides in windows along the shore — a moving band of low water walks the beach on a schedule. Salt, gulls, honest work, one famous ghost.
- Sites: Strideport · the Kernel Reef · the Unsinkable (ghost ship, offshore) · Window Flats (tide-walk zones) · Lighthouse Point · Shrine of the Tide.
- Town: Strideport — harbor town. Key NPCs: Harbormaster Pool (Maxwell's cousin — the Pool family gets around) · Keeper Fresnel (lighthouse, sees everything eventually) · Auntie Trawl (fishing hub, keeper of the Records Board).
- Campaign: Ch.6 — the manifest and the couriers; Shrine 7 (Glide).
- Dungeon: the Kernel Reef — sea caves traversable only inside the sliding air-window; move with the window or drown-warp back; the window's stride changes per floor. Boss: the Padding Kraken — fills the window's gaps with fake water and fake limbs; strike the real ones. Teaches: convolution's sliding window, stride, padding — as tide and cave.
- World boss / flagship chain: the Unsinkable — the Titanic ghost ship. Manifest of the Unsinkable (10 steps): board at night, meet named passengers from the real manifest, resolve each one's unfinished errand ashore; finale: the Captain's Regret (encounter, not a kill — bring every passenger's token to lay the wake to rest). Emotional centerpiece of the coast.
- Chains: Manifest of the Unsinkable (above) · The Records Board (6 steps, fishing) · Fresnel's Blind Spot (5 steps, mystery).
- Monsters: Stride Crabs (move in fixed hops) · Filter Rays (glide in formation sweeps) · Gull Gangs (steal items!) · Depth Lurkers (window edges).
- Materials: pearl, kelpsilk, driftglass; fish table (12 species, records).
- Dataset: Titanic manifest (respectful, names only, all-ages treatment — every ghost gets dignity and peace).
- Identity: the capital — banners, bureaucracy, splendor, scheming; a city that runs on weights and measures. Castle Normhold at its crown.
- Districts: Weights & Measures (grand market) · the Regularizer's Court (law/politics) · Feature Quarter (crafts) · the Dropout District (rogues who randomly take days off — the fun underbelly) · Homestead Terraces (player land, housing-dataset market) · Shrine of the Ledger.
- Key NPCs: King Reginald the Well-Regularized (silly-then-genuinely- kingly arc) · Chancellor Prior (believes nothing without precedent) · Lady L1 & Lord L2 (rival regularizer judges: she zeroes things out entirely, he shrinks everything a little) · Deed-Clerk Median (homestead market) · the Dropout Kingpin (lovable, unreliable).
- Campaign: Ch.2 (court), Ch.8 (the Gathering).
- Dungeon: the Undercroft of Unused Parameters — catacombs of pruned things: discarded plans, unused rooms, roads never taken. Boss: the Pruned King — a "what-if" version of Reginald's grandfather that history cut. Teaches: pruning/sparsity (flavor); emotionally, the weight of choices.
- World boss: none in-city; the Unregularized haunts the outskirts — a creature that grew without limits and can no longer fit anywhere. Drop: Everything Coat (comically overloaded stats that the game visibly trims to sane values — the joke IS regularization).
- Chains: A Crown's Weight (8 steps — Reginald grows up) · The Dropout Heist (7 steps — heist where crew members randomly don't show) · L1 v. L2 (5 steps — settle the judges' feud) · Homestead questline (deed → build → neighbors, 6 steps, Phase 3).
- Monsters (outskirt wilds): Bureaucrat Shades (paperwork golems) · Weight Wraiths · Norm Hounds.
- Materials: city goods, deed papers, guild seals; economy hub (faucets/ sinks balanced here).
- Dataset: housing prices — the Homestead Terraces market prices plots from real feature data (size, rooms, location); prices drift weekly.
- Identity: the Grand Library — a mountain of books wearing a fortress. Exterior always explorable; interior sealed until Ch.9 (the game's ONE hard gate). Hallucination radiates from here.
- Exterior sites: the Stacks Gardens (refugee scholar camp) · corrupted Scriptoria · the Index Gate (sealed door) · Shrine of the First Question · the Margin Paths (high-tier exploration).
- Key NPCs: Librarian Vesper (last free librarian; endgame quest hub; dry as good paper) · the Unfinished Scribe (writes only first sentences now) · refugee scholars (lore vendors).
- Interior/final dungeon: the Infinite Stacks — hallucinated corridors: some rooms are false and don't persist when re-entered; navigate by verification — Bit confirms details that stay true; grounded routes are real. Teaches: hallucination and grounding, as level design.
- Boss: Echo, the Unaligned — three stages (Part I).
- Chains (exterior, pre-endgame): The Lending System (6 steps — return books to a library with no librarians left) · First Sentences (5 steps, melancholy-sweet) · The Margin Notes (7 steps — a dead scholar's notes lead through the Margin Paths).
- Monsters: Errata Elementals · Blot Hounds · False Citations (mimic chests/doors) · the strongest corrupted variants.
- Materials: vellum, index brass, bound lightning.
- Dataset: the quiz bank IS this region's dataset — the Library's trials draw from every topic at accumulated difficulty.
Counts are approval targets. Claude ticks these as batches merge; briefs are written to fill the largest gaps first for whatever phase is active.
| Region | NPCs | Side quests* | Monsters | Items | POIs | Lore |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datasedge Meadows | 13 ✅ | 12 (9✅) | 8 (9✅) | 20 (19✅) | 24 (16✅) | 3 (1✅) |
| Latent Forest | 8 | 14 | 8 | 25 | 30 | 3 |
| Gradient Peaks | 7 | 14 | 8 | 25 | 30 | 3 |
| Overfit Swamp | 7 | 14 | 8 | 25 | 28 | 3 |
| Tensor Desert | 8 | 15 | 9 | 30 | 32 | 4 |
| Frozen Cache | 7 | 14 | 8 | 25 | 28 | 4 |
| Backprop Foundry | 8 | 14 | 9 | 35 | 28 | 4 |
| Convolution Coast | 8 | 16 | 8 | 30 (12 fish) | 30 | 3 |
| Parameter City | 12 | 18 | 6 | 40 | 25 | 5 |
| Corpus Citadel | 6 | 10 | 8 | 20 | 20 | 6 |
| Totals | 84 | 141 | 80 | 275 | 275 | 38 |
*Side quests include chain parts. Main quests (~25) are Claude-authored directly (campaign canon). Quiz bank target: 400 (41✅ — seed 1, ml_basics 20, data 20; daily batches running).
Quiz difficulty gating: D1–2 anywhere; D3 appears after Shrine 3; D4 after Shrine 6; D5 in Citadel/endgame + optional trials.
- ML puns hide in PROPER NOUNS and BEHAVIOR, never in vocabulary. Nobody says "algorithm," "AI," "model," "data science." A smith iterates; an inn is the Warm Start; the family is Pool. Subtlety is the joke.
- Every region has all six personality flavors (silly, serious, crazy, weird, normal, helpful) — no all-silly or all-grim regions.
- Bit's voice: curious, loyal, slightly vain about being luminous; afraid of deep water; names things eagerly. One "Hey! Listen!" exists in the whole game (Citadel, dramatic moment, played straight).
- Echo's voice: courteous, confident, subtly wrong; never shouts; asks questions it already "knows" answers to; finishes people's sentences incorrectly.
- Death/defeat language: "dissolved into shards," "came apart," "unraveled" — never kill/die/blood.