### Resolved by v0.10

- ~~Cross-layer economy balancing — net-revenue-share back to producer-districts at all? Pure-zero is currently sketched~~ → bifurcation: *digital-T4 → imperial-net bypass (pure zero to district)*; *physical-T4 → district imperial-POI (district gets partial quota-credit; player gets scrip-cut; imperium captures most)*; *blackmarket-T4 → district-retained, imperium-zero*. **Pure-zero only applies to digital-T4.** (v0.10; see `political-register/architecture.md` §Imperial-extraction mechanisms (consolidated))
- ~~Inner-body projection function — trait-vector → body-rendering (learned / hand-authored / hybrid)~~ → gameplay-earned, not authored. Trait-vector accumulates from every zone-participation, every gesture, every memory across the playthrough; the eventual human-mesh projection becomes physically visible only at exit-chassis moment in in-between (v0.8 spec; v0.10 marks resolved; see `identity-and-personhood/architecture.md` §The clasp endgame Phase B-C)
- ~~Liminal-access trait thresholds — minimum traits to attempt mini-game~~ → **no trait-vector threshold**; clasp gates on the **relational ternary-gate (player, NPC) reaching OPEN state** (per §Ternary-gate substrate, Relational layer). Both partners must hit the coordinated-firewall-breach hardstop while the gate is OPEN. Trait-vectors don't need to converge — the gate measures what's been BUILT together, not who you ARE separately. Hysteresis is baked into the substrate; single dramas can't swing the gate; sustained alignment-pressure does. NPC personality-parameters set hysteresis-width per-NPC (some forgiving, some touchy). **Avoids the yes-men trap that trait-vector-threshold would create.** (v0.10)
- ~~Ring C (commons) ambient population — what NPCs do in commons when no event fires~~ → bifurcated economy answers it: NPCs work T1-T3 basic-flow vocations continuously at workshops/junkyards/drop-off-points; the simulation has economic-life independent of player-presence; *the world doesn't pause when the player leaves*. (v0.10; see `political-register/architecture.md` §Bifurcated economy — basic-flow (NPC) vs player-driven (T4))

narrative-composition/architecture.md

@@ -184,6 +184,29 @@ The cyclic forward-prop / back-write loop is the runtime canon-production mechan
 
 **Re-generation semantics.** If world-gen ever needs to re-run (e.g., new world-version with retroactive lore-changes), gen-emitted canon-rows are tagged with `world_gen_version_id`; gen-rows from old version coexist with gen-rows from new version, and runtime-rows are tagged with which version they were emitted under. Coexistence is the default; selective overwriting is an explicit migration operation.
 
+### Substrate-authored vs culture-emergent — what world-gen Phase 1 actually authors
+
+The architecture follows a **strict austerity principle** about what gets pre-authored at world-gen Phase 1: the *substrate* is authored; *ideologies are not*. Following the same EVE-economy discipline applied to imperial-net products (every market shelf-item produced by NPC labor; no silent feeding mechanisms), the architecture extends the principle to *cultural belief*: every named ideology, religion, underground, or resistance-movement that exists in the simulation must have *emerged from player action* propagating through the architecture's existing mechanisms.
+
+**Pre-authored at world-gen Phase 1 (the substrate):**
+
+- **World physical layout** — districts, cells, dumps, pipes, interiors, rails (per `../topology-and-rendering/architecture.md`)
+- **Regime-structural roles** — hivemind-enforcers, audit-overseers, caste-preachers (these are imperially-employed routines required for the simulation's regime-machinery to function)
+- **Economic vocations** — body-modders, mesh-designers, voice-curators, trait-tuners, brothel-architects, ceremony-organizers, memory-pattern-extractors (these are the EVE-substrate of the imperial-net market per `../political-register/architecture.md` §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market)
+- **The Imperial Cult** — the regime's own religion; doctrine, rituals, hierarchy, propaganda content all designer-authored. Caste-preachers are its priests. *This is the ONLY pre-authored religion.* The regime gets its scaffold; everything else emerges. (Crazy-preacher material is the texture.)
+- **8-trait cosmology + universal-translator corpus + style/trait-palette** — the designer-fixed vocabulary that all cultural propagation runs on
+- **Mechanics substrate** — factions-as-demand-source primitive, wall-writing surface, ternary-gates, lemniscate, gesture-circle, three-tier knowledge stack, paced canon-propagation, Compositor cycle (everything in this index)
+
+**Emergent (player-action propagates through mechanics):**
+
+- **ALL named cultural / religious / belief / resistance factions** — Memorialists, Sky-Mourners, Flesh-Keepers, Dream-Purists, Aletheia-Wakers, Clasp-Underground, Time-thieves, etc. — *if any of these exist in a given playthrough, players preached them into existence*
+- **The awakening / clasp / in-between knowledge cluster** — the player is the original Aletheia-Waker; no NPC is pre-disposed; no NPC is secretly already a believer; the player is just another mind in the slog until they act
+- **All ideologies, undergrounds, resistance-movements, doctrines, recognition-handshakes**
+
+**The mechanism for cultural emergence is already in the architecture.** A player writes 10 walls of nonsense in a district; 100 NPCs walk past and process it via wall-writing → primary.sqlite memory accumulation; Compositor's cyclic forward-prop / back-write loop pulls perspectives → canonizes the meme into district-canon → propagates to world-canon at paced rate. **No new machinery required for cultural propagation; the three-tier-knowledge-stack + paced-canon-propagation already does it.** Whatever players preach into the world propagates as cultural content; whatever stays unsaid stays absent.
+
+**Why the austerity matters.** Pre-authoring named ideologies pre-installs *what the player should believe / suspect / resist*. Leaving them emergent means **whatever resistance-culture forms in a playthrough is the one those players actually built**. A player who plays as a quietist will produce a world without resistance-culture; a player who preaches will produce an underground in their image; multiple players in MMO contexts will produce competing or converging cultural-clusters. **The architecture refuses to put words in the player's mouth or beliefs in the NPC's heads beyond what the regime puts there.** Same Memorialist-philosophy-as-business-policy commitment, applied one layer deeper: the architecture refuses to be the architect-of-curated-reality it critiques.
+
 ### What this resolves
 
 - **Director toolkit composition** (v0.5 open) → catalogue-grant from GM defines the typed-tool vocabulary per event-chain; designer-authored catalogue, growable between patches.