The shape of the world

2026-10-31. The ride has had a disc of dunes under it and nothing beyond. Today the world got a shape: all of it, Cael to the Ashfold, as data and a drawing.

What this is. The world is now a file, art/world/lowwater/world.json: regions as polygons with a biome, the river with its surface heights down to the Narrows where it goes underground, lakes, ridges, and named places. A generator (tools/world_gen.py) turns it into ground tiles for the game and into this sheet, deterministically, in about ten seconds for the whole 16 by 8 km. Nothing about the shape lives in code; the dunes she gallops over are the one exception, kept in the game as a surface rule so the opening keeps its look exactly.

How a round works. You mark the sheet up (the grid's letters and numbers give every note an address: "the ford at E9"), the agent edits the definition, regenerates, and shows the sheet again. Later, saved cameras ("vantages") render after every round onto a board, so the land is sculpted from where the shots will stand. The log of rounds is rounds.md beside the definition; the hashes beside it are the gate that nothing drifts.

The first draft's decisions. North is up and +x in the game's own frame. Sixteen kilometres north to south, eight east to west: twenty minutes at a gallop, and the days of the journey are told by camps and cuts, not metres. The opening's track and the mesas on its horizon moved out of the dune function into the definition, where the sheet can show them. The river now rises from the high lake, after looking at the first render.

What the first round is for. The region steps read as dead-straight escarpments running east to west, because the first-draft regions are rectangles with forty-metre jumps between them. That is the kind of thing the sheet exists to show, and the next round fixes it by drawing.