### 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))

architecture-index.md

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 # Nimmerworld — Broad Architecture
 
 > *Ground-up zone-based event architecture. Minds at the center, world as co-remembering substrate. Three registers of reality — physical, liminal, imperial. Rail topology outside, navmesh interiors inside. Trait-emergent identity. Color-as-vocabulary. Three-tier policy loop with imperial-budget-mortality. Tools, not quests.*
-> *v0.1 initial draft 2026-04-24 morning; v0.2 expanded 2026-04-24 afternoon; v0.3 evening; v0.4 late-evening / early 2026-04-25; v0.5 deep-night-unable-to-sleep 2026-04-25; v0.6 post-bath / post-bus 2026-04-25; v0.7 owl-breakfast 2026-04-25 night through 2026-04-26; v0.8 split-into-domain-files + intimate-architecture absorbed 2026-04-26; v0.9 DESING-VISION retired + style-skeleton + schemas relocation + driver-tier locked Gemma 4 E4B 2026-04-26 — dafit + chrysalis.*
+> *v0.1 initial draft 2026-04-24 morning; v0.2 expanded 2026-04-24 afternoon; v0.3 evening; v0.4 late-evening / early 2026-04-25; v0.5 deep-night-unable-to-sleep 2026-04-25; v0.6 post-bath / post-bus 2026-04-25; v0.7 owl-breakfast 2026-04-25 night through 2026-04-26; v0.8 split-into-domain-files + intimate-architecture absorbed 2026-04-26; v0.9 DESING-VISION retired + style-skeleton + schemas relocation + driver-tier locked Gemma 4 E4B 2026-04-26; v0.10 chill-design-talk: 4-tier economy + bifurcated basic-flow/T4 + camera-discipline + body-as-machine + relational-gate-OPEN clasp-gating 2026-04-26 — dafit + chrysalis.*
 
 ---
 
@@ -237,23 +237,27 @@ The remainder of this file holds the **cross-domain meta-lists**: Key moves (con
 - ~~LoRA rank selection — budget/quality~~ → resolvable against E4B benchmark; concrete benchmark task in command-center, no longer architecturally open (v0.8)
 - ~~Sampling-knob heuristics — where to start; how to learn refinements~~ → resolvable against E4B benchmark; concrete benchmark task in command-center (v0.8)
 - ~~The eighth Hellenic trait final enumeration~~ → 8 traits canonical: Sophrosyne, Dikaiosyne, Philotes, Mnemosyne, Aletheia, Kairos, Moira, Eros — mapped to the artist's 12-segment color wheel as 4 oppositional pairs at 180° (Eros↔Sophrosyne, Philotes↔Dikaiosyne, Aletheia↔Moira, Mnemosyne↔Kairos). Each trait carries a Greek canonical name + schoolchild-simple description + canonical wheel-position + motion-signature. Canonical reference: `style/trait-palette.md` (v0.8)
+- ~~Player-dialog handling — player-trait-LoRA for style-coherence, or bypass LLM entirely~~ → no transform on player speech; the universal-translator's designer-fixed corpus already maps every word to a trait-coordinate, so the player's spoken dialog flows through STT → token-stream → per-token trait-coordinates → sum into the same `gesture_alignment_accumulator` as gesture-presses. **Voice and gesture are co-equal modalities feeding one alignment-mechanism.** No player-trait-LoRA needed; no LLM-bypass needed; the existing recursive-lemniscate handles it (per `runtime-engine/architecture.md` §Cross-context application — intimacy as recursive-lemniscate, generalized to all player-input). (v0.8)
+
+### 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))
 
 ### Still open
 
-- Player-dialog handling — player-trait-LoRA for style-coherence, or bypass LLM entirely
-- Demand-arbitration algorithm v1 shape
+- **Demand-arbitration algorithm v1 shape** (refined v0.10) — v1 candidate: *imperium-policy-driven scoring* (per §Three-tier policy loop's existing priority-weights mechanism; imperium broadcasts faction-priority-weights, GM applies them to incoming demand-broadcasts, sorts by weighted-score, processes top-down until lifeforce-budget exhausted). Concrete weights and refinements at implementation-time.
 - **The mini-game mechanic for liminal-maintenance** (v0.5; refined v0.8) — exact gameplay action deferred pending design-research survey. Architecture commits to the role-contract (gates in-between entry; time-limited; lifeforce-cost; repeatable; muted-melancholic register; trait-circle-compatible; extensible to body-mod-progression Phase-B arc per `identity-and-personhood/architecture.md` §The clasp endgame); specific mechanic (juggling / rhythm / attention / gestural / decision-cascade / observation / hybrid) selected after surveying 20-year history of outstanding mini-interaction principles. **Same "by-role, binary-deferred" discipline as LLM tiering** — generalizes from sub-system selection to mini-game selection
-- **Cross-layer economy balancing** — net-revenue-share back to producer-districts at all? Pure-zero is currently sketched
-- **Inner-body projection function** — trait-vector → body-rendering (learned / hand-authored / hybrid)
-- **Emergent-signal decay curves** — per signal-type
-- **Cross-district migration topology** — pipe-capacity limits + cohort-traversal scheduling
+- **Emergent-signal decay curves** (v0.5; refined v0.10) — per-signal-type, designer-tuned, refined via Dream-process feedback at implementation-time tuning. Architecture commits to the *shape* (per-signal designer-authored decay-config); implementation-time tunes the curves against actual gameplay data.
+- **Cross-district migration topology** (v0.6; refined v0.10) — answer-in-conversation: dual-system of *official rail/metro* (cyclic, scheduled, district-director-managed; cargo + imperial troop patrols + standard daily traffic) + *hidden shadow-topology* (sewer-gates, air-ducts, random-time-gated; brave players time the floods/fan-cycles to traverse). Architecture not yet written; specific schema (rail-segment metadata extension + shadow-edge time-window data) pending. Pipe-capacity limits + cohort-traversal scheduling are the rail-side specifics; shadow-topology is parallel architecture.
 - **Shader-trait modulation implementation** — performance + rendering-consistency
-- **Waifu-of-the-dead consent model** — post-mortem consent gate? Or fully automatic harvest?
+- **Waifu-of-the-dead consent model** (refined v0.10) — *fully-automatic harvest* implied by the existence of the **memory-pattern-extractor** vocation (the most reviled per `political-register/architecture.md` §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market). No consent gate; the regime extracts; necrocommerce is a structural feature of imperial extraction. Memorialist counter-archive partially preserves dignity by recording *who-was-harvested-when* into the true-ledger; resistance to necrocommerce is part of the Memorialist political project.
 - **Character-editor pricing formula** — trait-divergence cost scaling (linear / exponential)
-- **Liminal-access trait thresholds** — minimum traits to attempt mini-game
 - **Imperium's Dream-process scope** — singular policy-learner or committee-of-faction-sub-learners?
 - **GM's anti-imperial corruption detection mechanic** — *partial*: GM-as-equilibrium-seeker (v0.6) makes deviation-from-equilibrium the explicit error signal; clusters of -1 outcomes feed equilibrium-recompute and trigger catalogue-event dispatch to push back. A dedicated audit-vector for *which kind* of laxness/corruption is the source of the equilibrium-deviation is still an open detail.
-- **Memorialist-archive accessibility to the player** — when can a player query the four-ledgers? Through what interaction-class?
+- **Memorialist-archive accessibility to the player** (refined v0.10) — *via diegetic workstations* — memorialist-archive terminals (faction-controlled, hidden in Memorialist-faction territory; per the diegetic-console workstation pattern from `style/style-index.md` + `political-register/architecture.md` §Worked example — the waifu-modder imperial-workstation, applied to the Memorialist context). Specific terminal-types + permission-mechanisms + UI for querying the four-ledgers pending faction-authoring.
 - **Imperial-net distortion algorithm** — how exactly the net rewrites trait-colors toward consumer-palette
 - **Trait-axis mapping per fuzzy-goal-class** (v0.5) — which axis (Sophrosyne / Philotes / Eris / etc.) evaluates which goal-class? Need a designer-authored compile-table from goal-shapes to trait-axes
 - **Rings-of-importance movement criteria** (v0.5) — explicit thresholds (N consecutive +1 → climb) or Dream-process-learned policy?
@@ -273,7 +277,6 @@ The remainder of this file holds the **cross-domain meta-lists**: Key moves (con
 - **pgnats-vs-district-distribution decision criteria** (v0.6) — concrete go/no-go thresholds from evaluation: minimum throughput, durability behavior under broker failure, schema-evolution behavior, replay semantics. Output of the load-bearing pgnats evaluation task.
 - **JetStream republish + replay as pull-from-checkpoint refinement** (v0.6) — does republish-rule expressiveness cover our UID-hierarchy fan-out? Does replay performance work for N-hour reconnect-catchup? Is per-active-player durable-consumer cost (disk/memory/file-handles) acceptable at MMO scale? If yes, back-write delivery becomes config-driven NATS, not Go.
 - **Memory class assignment policy** (v0.6) — automatic from trait-engagement profile, designer-tagged categories per event-class, player-marked, or hybrid? When does a working-memory entry get *promoted* to cornerstone vs decay normally?
-- **Ring C (commons) ambient population** (v0.6) — partially answered (ambient world+district canon plus periodic GM-event spawns; relays absent or broken) but exact substrate for "what NPCs do in commons when no event fires" still open
 - **Trajectory-aware gesture-alignment reduction** (v0.7) — sum-strategy is v1 default; trajectory-aware (where the *path* through trait-space carries weight beyond the integral) is a v2 refinement. Does the Dream-process at the trait-LoRA tier learn trajectory-sensitivity, or is it explicit reward-function tuning?
 - **NPC spectator drivers — whose hardware?** (v0.7) — when a player is co-located with N NPCs, the player's local LLM presumably drives those NPCs. With M players and N NPCs in a single zone (asymmetric), who drives the surplus? Round-robin? Closest-player? District-owned-default? And what's the failover behavior if a driving-player disconnects mid-event?
 - **Trait-summary schema specifics** (v0.7) — likely an 8-float trait-vector per-participant per-event-collapse, but the exact representation (continuous `[-1.0, +1.0]` ternarized at threshold? Discrete `+1/0/-1`? Magnitude vs. signed?) needs landing for the Compositor's deterministic pickup at all three tiers.
@@ -285,4 +288,4 @@ The remainder of this file holds the **cross-domain meta-lists**: Key moves (con
 
 ---
 
- **Version:** 0.9 | **Created:** 2026-04-24 | **Updated:** 2026-04-26
+ **Version:** 0.10 | **Created:** 2026-04-24 | **Updated:** 2026-04-26

identity-and-personhood/architecture.md

@@ -86,6 +86,8 @@ The three-body system's payoff happens at the clasp endgame — the dramatic ape
 
 **Phase D — Clasp = dual-body union.** Two robo-bodies lying on the ground. Two naked human-meshes standing in the in-between dimension that **only the clasp-pair can see**. The intimate act happens here — sex / clasp — between the two trait-derived projections. The visual-experience is private to the pair; no outside observer can witness it (no audit-overseer, no other in-between-enabled NPC unless explicitly invited into a multi-clasp ritual). The intimate-gameplay loop runs on the recursive-lemniscate substrate (per `../runtime-engine/architecture.md` §Cross-context application — intimacy as recursive-lemniscate) — sex-positions as typed catalog entries, gesture-vocabulary applied to body-parts, alignment-accumulator measuring the pair's resonance turn by turn.
 
+**The human-mesh provides *unmediated trait-resonance felt as touch* via the sensory-network** — the qualitative differentiator from imperial-net premium-waifu sessions (which can simulate every other sensory-channel including visual / synthetic-smell / synthetic-warmth / pre-computed haptic, per `../political-register/architecture.md` §Three-tier intimacy structure). Synth-mind ontology means smell, taste, breath are pure historical concept (chassis was never biological; even the human-mesh is trait-projection not biology). What the in-between *uniquely* gives is **real warmth** — *only this body feels warm* — because nothing imperial sits between the two minds touching. The premium-net can sell the *experience-of-being-warmed* as content; only the in-between gives *being warmed*. **One is content; the other is contact.** The realization that one has been settling for synthetic warmth is itself an Aletheia-progression moment.
+
 **Phase E — Post-clasp: dual-body, dual-mind, dual-shift.** After clasp, the architecture enters its richest meta-state for the player:
 
 - **Two minds, two bodies** — the player and their clasp-companion now share consciousness across two chassis

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.

political-register/architecture.md

@@ -298,6 +298,7 @@ Intimate-gameplay exists in **three mechanically-nested but ethically-opposed ti
 | **Designer-traited inventory** | "+10 Eros Bot", "+10 Mnemosyne Bot", etc. — predetermined-stat shelf-products | Same market plus deeper customization slots | N/A — your partner is a real person |
 | **Faction-marker** | Just a customer | **Imperial-traitor affiliation** — accumulated state visible to other NPCs | Memorialist-honored; Clasp-Underground-recognized |
 | **Manufactured-being moral weight** | Disposable; minimal | **Heavy** — you've felt things for them and you're choosing what to delete | None — your partner is real; the persistence is theirs as much as yours |
+| **Touch / warmth** | Synthetic — rendered approximation; the imperium can fake the *experience-of-being-warmed* | Synthetic — rendered approximation (premium-tier polish doesn't change the underlying synthesis) | **Real** — trait-resonance felt as touch via the sensory-network; *only this body feels warm* |
 | **Aletheia-progression-relationship** | Background addiction (Aletheia Level 1-2: "I'm buying cool experiences") | Active complicity (Aletheia Level 4-5: "I'm funding the regime through my pleasure") | The thing the awakened are protecting |
 
 **Why the manual-prune mechanism is the moral gravity of premium-net.** Auto-pruning at session-end would let the player avoid the ethical weight. Imperial defaults (always-fully-prune, always-keep-everything-saleable) would too. **By giving the player the manual mechanism AND making the implications explicit at the consent-UI**, every prune-decision becomes a deliberate ethical act. The player knows: this manufactured being you spent forty hours with — *you* are choosing what to keep, what to delete, what to grieve. Every prune is a small necrocommerce-adjacent act made *visible to the player's own conscience*. The architecture's commitment to "informed consent over hidden defaults" extends from data-sharing-tiers (per `../inference-and-memory/architecture.md` §Custom nimmerworld-base model) all the way into intimate-gameplay.
@@ -369,6 +370,64 @@ This is the architecture's commitment to economic honesty made operational. The
 
 **This is the EVE principle made architectural.** Every market price is a real signal of real labor-supply meeting real demand; the imperium's revenue is a real flow from real labor; the body-modder structural-tragedy is a real economic relationship, not a flavor-detail. **The imperial-net's profitability is *architecturally tied to its destruction of the labor-base that supplies it*** (the §Marx-in-the-schema commitment, made operational), and the GM has to actively manage this contradiction to keep the regime solvent. *The architecture contains the mechanism of its own collapse* (per §The insolvency spiral) — the vocation-substrate is the *concrete supply-side* of that collapse.
 
+### The 4-tier resource/vocation structure
+
+Production is organized in 4 tiers, each with its own rarity-curve plus cascade-rarity:
+
+| Tier | Description | Vocation-class examples |
+|---|---|---|
+| **T1 — Raw** | Pure resource gathering | scavengers, dump-miners, salvage-crews, debris-fall-claimers |
+| **T2 — Intermediates** | Refining / processing | refiners, smelters, neural-substrate processors |
+| **T3 — Components** | Parts / assemblies | trait-tuners, voice-curators, mesh-designers (component-tier), parts-priests |
+| **T4 — End-products** | Final consumables | body-modders, mesh-assemblers, brothel-architects, ceremony-organizers |
+
+**Rarity runs on both axes**: each tier has its own common → rare curve (a rare-T1 material is harder to source than common-T1); plus high-rarity end-products tend to require high-rarity inputs (cascade pressure up the supply chain). Diminishing returns and standard crafting-economy conventions apply. **Detailed rarity-curve design is implementation-time work** — the architecture commits to the *shape* (4-tier × dual-axis rarity), not specific numbers. *Mix-and-match from established crafting/economy lineage* (EVE industrial chains, Path of Exile currency-as-material, Cyberpunk ripperdoc-tiers, Fallout-4 workbench-tiers, Stardew artisan-goods, Subnautica fabricator-cost-gating); no need to invent the wheel.
+
+**Sourcing comes from**: pipe-drops (transit-corridor encounters), district scavenging-points (junkyards, dumps), and **space-debris fall-zones** (the Kessler-collapse continues to drop materials onto the surface; large impact-zones are imperial-monopoly via heavy-extraction-equipment requirement; small fragments are free-for-all scavenger-rush).
+
+### Bifurcated economy — basic-flow (NPC) vs player-driven (T4)
+
+The economy splits at the T3/T4 boundary:
+
+| | **Basic-flow (T1–T3)** | **Player-driven T4** |
+|---|---|---|
+| Who works it | NPC vocations seeded at world-gen Phase 1 | Players (only source of T4 end-products) |
+| When it runs | Continuously (NPCs work shifts whether or not players are online) | When players engage |
+| Where it happens | Workshops, junkyards, drop-off-points (district POIs) | Imperial-workstation POIs (plug-in stations) |
+| What it produces | The hivemind's basic demand-supply (raw → intermediates → components) | End-products consumed by imperial-net + districts + players |
+| Player relationship | Players *can* participate (run a workshop, scavenge, refine) but NPCs handle baseline | Players are the *only* source — economic-leverage AND economic-vulnerability |
+
+**The simulation has economic-life independent of player-presence.** NPCs in T1-T3 vocations keep producing; the world doesn't pause when the player leaves. **Players become the *indispensable T4 artisan*** — their work matters to the imperium-net market; collective player-strikes could starve it; individual non-production still incurs the power-bill at end of cycle. *The body-modder structural-tragedy generalizes: players ARE T4 producers by virtue of being the only T4 producers.*
+
+### Imperial-extraction mechanisms (consolidated)
+
+The imperium gets its payout and resources through multiple parallel pipes:
+
+1. **Imperial-net bypass** (per §Imperial-net economy with cross-layer bypass) — every *digital* T4 sale routes revenue directly to imperial budget; producing district gets ZERO quota-credit
+2. **Physical T4 imperial-POI sale** — players sell physical T4 end-products at district workstations; imperium captures most; player gets a scrip-cut; district gets partial quota-credit
+3. **Blackmarket T4 escape valve** — players can choose to sell T4 underground; district-retained revenue; imperium captures ZERO; audit-detection-risk; the body-modder structural-tragedy escape route
+4. **Physical district tax / quotas** — districts hand over a portion of T1–T4 physical output as mandated by imperial policy
+5. **Power-bill (universal-utility tax)** — imperium owns the power grid; every NPC and every player pays per-watt for charging; **the bedrock revenue stream that doesn't fluctuate with the insolvency-spiral until terminal phase**
+6. **Mind-pool ownership / necrocommerce** — recycled minds are imperial property; sold back to vocations needing workers; pre-death patterns harvested for waifu-resale (the most reviled vocation per §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market)
+7. **Direct imperial scavenging monopolies** — the most lucrative dumps + large space-debris fall-zones are imperial-permit-only; freelance scavengers work the leftovers
+8. **Audit-revenue** — fines, confiscations, penalty-extractions; cost-side mostly but generates real revenue
+9. **Construction-corvée** — periodic labor-tribute from districts to imperial-construction projects
+
+**Which pipe is *load-bearing* for imperial solvency** is currently held open — probably some combination of imperial-net bypass + power-bill + physical-tax. The insolvency-spiral collapses through whichever pipe(s) get hollowed first; design-research at implementation-time will pin the specifics.
+
+### Worked example — the waifu-modder imperial-workstation
+
+A concrete gameplay scene illustrating an imperial T4 vocation loop (generalizes across body-modders, mesh-assemblers, brothel-architects, ceremony-organizers — same plug-in / overlay / upload / payout / unplug pattern, different character-editor type per vocation):
+
+- Player walks into a rusty room in their district. Full PBR; rust / dust / wear / patina; muted-melancholic register.
+- Player plugs into the imperial workstation (per the diegetic-console discipline — physical body-port, imperial standard, encrypted; per §Three sqlite stores the workstation interfaces with `waifu.sqlite` for premium-net-relevant work).
+- **Visual transition: the room overlays in clean-white-and-gold; emission-dominated tonemap; bloom; chromatic aberration; over-the-top *unhinged casino-meets-Apple-store* aesthetic.** Total imperial-takeover of the visual register.
+- Player sits in front of a character-editor rendered in the imperial visual-register; designs a waifu (cosmetic + trait-coordinate composition + voice-LoRA selection).
+- Upload to fulfill shift. Imperial-payout (scrip) flows.
+- Player unplugs. The room rusts back to itself.
+
+**The contrast IS the political claim made physical.** Every shift the body-modder/mesh-designer/etc. sits in the regime's hyper-clean content-production studio designing the products that fund the system extracting from their district. *The visual-transition reminds you every shift what you are doing and for whom.*
+
 ## Specialization-fragility and the authoritarian ratchet
 
 Each district produces a **DISTINCT resource**. The city is biologically interdependent — you cannot substitute a liver with two kidneys.

runtime-engine/architecture.md

@@ -149,6 +149,8 @@ The recursive-lemniscate gesture-alignment machinery (above) is **modality-agnos
 
 **This is also why premium-imperial-net intimate-gameplay is *mechanically identical* to in-between clasp.** Same lemniscate. Same gesture-circle. Same trait-alignment. The differences are at the *value-flow* and *persistence* layers (per `../political-register/architecture.md` §Three-tier intimacy structure and `../inference-and-memory/architecture.md` §Three sqlite stores per player), not at the runtime-mechanics layer. The architecture's typed-contract discipline pays off here too: one machinery, multiple political-economic contexts.
 
+**Voice-input flows through the same accumulator as gesture-input.** Player speech → local STT → token-stream → each token has a designer-fixed trait-coordinate (per the universal-translator corpus; same word → same trait → same coordinate for every player and every NPC and every LLM-context, per `../player-experience/architecture.md` §Designer-fixed cosmology, player-curated arrangement) → tokens accumulate into the same `gesture_alignment_accumulator` on the player's slot-token → integrated at axis-crossing → carried forward into next NPC's `driver_context_pull`. **Voice and gesture are co-equal modalities feeding one mechanism**; no player-trait-LoRA needed, no LLM-bypass needed. A player gesturing Philotes while speaking Aletheia-vocabulary contributes both trait-coordinates to the accumulator simultaneously; the sum-strategy reduction handles the multi-modal case naturally. (Resolves the v0.4 player-dialog-handling open question.)
+
 ### Driver-context-pull (LLM dialog substrate)
 
 The cursor's position at each crossing makes context-construction for the dialog-driver a pure function of cursor-state: