Three defects, all the same mistake, all found by sweep and not by tests: the
companion has no database row for a thing to persist onto, so the thing "arrives
fresh next time" — which for a resource means infinite.
1. His spell slots refilled every fight. The ledger went on his combat SEAT, and
a seat is per-session. A human rations one pool across a 30-room run and gets
it back at camp; rationing it IS the caster's game. Now on
expedition_party.companion_slots_used, refreshed at camp. (Worth ~0pp alone —
a run holds only ~2 real fights, so the pool never binds. I predicted this was
the whole answer. It was not.)
2. His BODY refilled every fight. buildFightSeats seated him at Stats.MaxHP and
the close-out skipped him — "he arrives fresh next time", said the comment.
That is an infinite body: he soaked a share of every fight's incoming and then
reset, while the humans beside him bled all the way to camp. THIS was the
carry. Now expedition_party.companion_hp; healed at camp; a dropped companion
returns on 1 HP rather than as a corpse, because there is no companion-death
rule and inventing one inside a bug fix would be a second feature.
3. No autopiloted caster had ever healed ITSELF. simPickAllyHeal skipped
`i == seat` and bailed on !IsParty(), so a solo cleric carried cure_wounds for
a whole run and never once cast it. Now simPickHeal: heal whoever is worst off,
which is sometimes you.
Measured, 640 runs/arm, like-for-like (the leaders whose role-fill gives Pete a
Cleric, against a human Cleric follower of the leader's own level):
solo 69.0%
+ a human cleric 77.6% (+8.6pp)
+ Pete 66.1% (-2.9pp)
The reference arm is the point. Against SOLO even a mace-only Pete looked like a
carry — but parties are designed to be safer, so solo is the wrong yardstick.
Against a human peer the real bug appeared: a gearless, level-penalized hireling
was out-clearing a fully-geared human cleric of the leader's own level by 15pp,
because he was the only combatant in the game who healed to full between fights.
With the free lunches gone he is honest, and honestly a net negative — which is
exactly the plan's §2 diagnosis, unmasked: a below-median seat cannot pay for its
own enemy scaling (+15% boss HP and 2.4 enemy actions a round instead of 1).
§2(a) is next, and the sweep now argues FOR it; before this commit it would have
made things worse.
Self-heal moved solo 66.1% -> 66.2%, so the balance corpus is undisturbed and no
re-baseline is owed. It is also NOT the answer to §6 — casters reach for a healing
consumable first and the sim stocks them, so a human rarely falls through to the
spell. Pete carries no consumables, so it is his only heal.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
Every spell lookup in the engine is keyed on a Matrix user id and answered
by a dnd_* table. The companion has rows in none of them, deliberately — a
sheet on disk is what would turn him into a real character everywhere. So
the auto-picker's first statement, LoadDnDCharacter(uid), came back nil and
returned "attack", every turn, for the whole fight.
A hired Cleric swung a mace while the party died. Role-fill hands a lone
martial a Cleric, so that was the common case of the feature.
Adds a seat-scoped spellbook: seatKnownSpells / seatSpellSlots /
seatKnowsSpell / consumeSeatSlot / refundSeatSlot. A human seat delegates to
the DB functions verbatim — same queries, same order — so solo combat and the
balance corpus are untouched (both goldens byte-identical). A companion seat
is answered from his synthetic sheet and a slot ledger on his seat's
persisted statuses. The seat is the correct home and not merely the available
one: every expedition hires the same @pete, so a store keyed on his user id
would have two parties sharing one pool of slots.
He gets the same default kit a real character of his class and level gets.
The below-median stays where it was — the level penalty, the never-Masterwork
gear, the absent subclass and magic items. A bespoke weaker spell list would
be a second nerf hidden in a different file.
castActionForSeat was also a live hazard: it loaded the caster through
ensureCharForDnDCmd, whose auto-migration branch, handed a user with no sheet,
builds one at level 1 and *saves* it. Pointed at the companion that silently
makes him a player. He now takes a branch that never reaches it, and a test
counts rows in dnd_character / dnd_known_spells / dnd_spell_slots /
player_meta to keep it that way.
Measured, 640 runs/arm (10 classes x L10,L12 x 4 zones):
solo 66.1%
+ Pete, mace-only (HEAD) 83.4% (+17.3pp)
+ Pete, casting 95.9% (+29.8pp)
The fix does what it should. It also lands on top of an unpaid §2(a): the
mace-only arm shows Pete was ALREADY a carry, taking the trailing band from
6.8% to 63.6% without casting a thing. The tell is the cleric leader, who
role-fills a *Fighter* Pete — a seat this commit cannot touch — and still goes
26.6% -> 98.4%. That is enemy scaling undercharging for a seat, not spells.
§2(a) is next, and is not optional.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
N3 widened the combat *roster* from 1 to N but never widened the action model,
the scaling model, or the test net to match. Building the hireable companion
walked into all three. Only one of the four defects found was the companion's;
the rest have been live in prod for every human party since N3.
The party golden did not exist (§5)
Solo combat is pinned exhaustively (7468 lines); the entire N-body layer had
nothing. That is why a healer class that cannot heal shipped without a test
going red. Adds party_characterization.golden (9 scenarios x 5 seeds, incl.
weak and dying seats) and TestPartyCharacterization_OneSeatIsStillSolo, so the
N-body path can never quietly stop being a superset of the balance corpus.
Regenerate only on purpose: -update-party.
No action could target another seat (§1)
Every heal in the engine was self-scoped. A party cleric could not put one hit
point on a friend. Adds turnActionEffect.AllyHeal/AllySeat, `!cast <spell>
@user` and `--target @user` -- the latter has been advertised in !help and
silently swallowed by parseCombatCast since SP2 ("reserved for SP3"). The auto
picker uses it too (simPickAllyHeal), so away-players and engine-driven healers
behave like competent ones. It will not raise the dead.
Corpses kept buffing the boss (§2b)
enemyActionsThisRound counted len(st.actors), dead included -- so a party that
lost a member kept paying for them, and the survivor faced a boss still swinging
at two-player cadence, alone. A death spiral with the arrow pointing the wrong
way. Now counts livingActors(). Party golden moved deliberately for this.
An engine-driven seat was a bool any command could clear (§3)
autoDriveCombat drives a party by dispatching each seat's turn AS that seat, so
a companion's own auto-played move arrived at beginCombatTurn looking like a
player returning to the keyboard and cleared the latch that was moving him. He
then stood in the fight doing nothing while the boss he had inflated killed
everyone. ActorStatuses.EngineDriven is now a persisted seat property that no
command clears, and the driver calls driveEngineSeat instead of impersonating.
"The party" could be empty (§4)
A solo expedition has no expedition_party rows, so asking the roster who was in
the party answered "nobody" -- and every caller fell back to something plausible.
That is how the companion got hired at level 1 for exactly the player the feature
exists for. expeditionParty()/partyHumans() always include the owner.
The companion himself (!expedition hire [class] / !expedition dismiss)
Day 1, leader only, costs coins, role-fills the gap, globally exclusive. He is an
NPC seat and must never become a player: no player_meta, no dnd_character, no
inventory, no DM room -- mint him a player_meta row and
ensureDnDCharacterForCombat will auto-build the news bot a real character, and
he starts appearing in the graveyard and filing death notices about himself.
Mail and seats are different sets: he fights, he does not get written to.
Measured on millenia, n=750/arm. Before these fixes he was -28pp -- worse than no
companion at all. After: solo 48.5% -> 63.9% clear (+15.3pp), with +28.0pp for
trailing players and +2.0pp for leaders. Help, never a carry.
The solo golden is byte-identical throughout: solo combat provably did not move,
and the balance corpus is intact.
Known gap: the companion cannot cast (castActionForSeat loads a sheet from the DB
and he has none by design), so a hired Cleric is still just a bad fighter.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
Run the actual Adventure module against a copy of the prod DB with no
Matrix client, to smoke-test before deploy.
- expedition-sim: -real-user @mxid runs an EXISTING character loaded from
-data's gogobee.db instead of a synthetic build. SimRunner gains
PrepareRealCharacter (heals to full + tops up bankroll; keeps real
race/class/subclass/level/gear/spells).
- plugin.SendReply now honors the MessageSink like SendMessage/SendDM.
Reply-based handlers (duels, !town, !rivals, !achievements) previously
bypassed the capture seam and hit a nil client under the sink. Prod
behavior is unchanged (sink is nil in production).
- exercise_prod_test.go (build tag: prodexercise) drives every N-series
feature — world boss, duels, Shadow, Renown, achievements, journal,
town registries, vault, gifting — against a prod DB copy with all
outbound messages captured. Gated on GOGOBEE_PROD_DB_DIR; never runs in
normal CI.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
activeOmen() is a pure function of the UTC ISO (year, week): omenTable
indexed by (year*53+week)%len, so it advances weekly with no schema, no
ticker state, no persistence. Five non-combat seams read it — harvest yield,
supply freebie, expedition start mood, arena payout (scales gross earnings
before the pot tax), and ingredient drop chance. TwinBee reveals the active
omen in the existing morning DM (no net-new scheduled message).
Launch set is buffs-with-texture on non-combat levers only: Bountiful
Harvest, Quartermaster's Blessing, Golden Purse, Overflowing Satchels, Still
Waters. Nothing touches SimulateCombat or the turn engine — the omen is keyed
on the real clock, so a combat mutator would make the golden and the balance
corpus week-dependent. The plan's "elites +2 ATK" is deliberately dropped for
that reason.
The balance sim drives the real expedition loop and would otherwise traverse
all five seams, making corpus sweeps depend on the wall-clock week. NewSimRunner
sets simOmenDisabled (mirrors simAutoArmEnabled), so activeOmen returns a
no-effect omen under the sim. Still Waters subtracts from the daily threat
*rise* only, floored at hold-steady — it never forces active decay.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
Adds -party N / -party-classes to expedition-sim. Followers are seated
through the real !expedition invite / !expedition accept pair, so the
harness measures the tier gate, the busy guard and the supply pooling
rather than a roster hand-built to succeed. A follower who is refused
halts the run: a party reading taken from a walk that was secretly solo
is worse than no reading.
It immediately found what it was built to find. Only elite and boss
doorways seat the roster; exploration rooms, patrols and harvest
interrupts all resolve through SimulateCombat against ctx.Sender, and
P6d made the walk commands leader-only. So on a 38-room T5 expedition
the party fights 2-3 rooms together and the leader solos the rest -
then dies alone, tearing down the run rows only they own.
Measured at L15/16 over dragons_lair + abyss_portal, party of 3, n=15
per cell: zero TPKs and zero member deaths across 240 seats. Every
failure is the leader falling while two untouched members stand at full
HP. Fighter clears 100% (solo: 47-67%), cleric 33-53% (solo: 13-47%).
The band is unreadable until inline combat seats the party, so the C1
contingency - +35% monster HP per member - stays on the shelf; it would
punish the trash the leader already fights alone.
Hence the outcome vocabulary grows a third word. "tpk" used to mean any
run-ending event, which is how a leader dying beside a healthy party
stayed invisible through P5 and P6. Now: tpk (roster dead),
leader_down, fled (run over, leader alive) - read off the death flag,
not off HP, which the close-out leaves anywhere. A one-seat roster
makes leader-dead and all-dead the same predicate, so solo keeps its
labels for a real death.
Two bugs found in review before this landed:
- An unknown class was not an error anywhere: -class fightr built a
1-HP character and reported an ordinary outcome for it. Guarded in
BuildCharacter, not the flag parser, since the leader had the bug
long before parties did.
- The roster short-rest healed the dead - handleDnDShortRest does not
gate on the death flag, so a member killed in a won boss fight got
rested back above 0 and stopped counting as a casualty.
Golden byte-identical; go test ./... green.
`!fight` seats the expedition's roster instead of the one player who typed
it. Seat 0 is the leader, always: the session row is theirs, the lock is
theirs, and `!flee`, the fork, and `!extract` stay their call.
A monster that wins initiative now swings before anyone speaks. The session
layer used to park every new fight on a player_turn, which is true of the
hardcoded solo order and a lie about a party's -- the enemy would forfeit
round 1 and nobody would notice. `startPartyCombatSession` rolls the order
and sets the phase from it; `handleFightCmd` settles the round before it
announces, so the opening block narrates the hit rather than quietly
showing its damage.
Members were invisible to two commands that had no business ignoring them:
`!cast` queued a spell for "next combat" while its caster was standing in
one, and `!rest` healed a seated member to full mid boss fight. Both now
resolve through the party.
Nobody leaves without an answer. A downed member's `!fight` opens the
party's fight and tells them why they are not in it. The leader's `!extract`
reaches everyone it drags out of the dungeon, and everyone rolls for what
moved into their house while they were gone.
Supplies burn at 50% x N x 4/5 -- a party eats more than one and less than
N. The ratio is exact: 0.8 as a float truncates a party of three to 119%,
a permanent tax nobody would have found.
Solo is untouched, byte for byte. One seat means one build, one INSERT, no
participant rows, the same RNG draws in the same order -- the combat
characterization golden does not move, and neither does the balance corpus.
A solo fight is a conversation: the player types, the engine answers, and
nothing happens in between. A party fight is a queue, and three things follow.
Turn ownership. Only the seat on the clock may act, so beginCombatTurn resolves
the sender's seat and refuses the rest before anyone spends a slot or burns an
item. A fight lock, because three members typing !attack at once took three
different user locks and the check would have passed for all three: it takes the
fight's lock (keyed on seat 0) then the member's own, always in that order, and
a solo fight -- whose owner is the sender, and sync.Mutex is not reentrant --
takes exactly the one lock it always took. And a turn deadline, because one
member who wanders off must not freeze the other two for the hour it takes the
session reaper to wake up.
The deadline is three minutes, not the plan's sixty seconds. The sweep rides the
existing one-minute ticker, so any deadline really fires in [d, d+1m); and
expeditions here run for days, so the asymmetry favours patience over robbing
someone of their boss turn while they read the room on their phone. A lapse
latches that seat onto the auto-picker for the rest of the fight, so an absent
member costs the party one wait rather than one per round. Typing anything hands
the wheel back. Solo is never swept.
Three seat-0 leaks fixed on the way past, all of which would have surfaced as
the leader quietly doing everyone's business:
- mid-fight buffs folded into the session's embedded ActorStatuses, so a
member casting Shield on themselves would have armoured the leader;
- pickAutoCombatAction read sess.PlayerHP and Statuses.ConcentrationDmg, so
playing an away member's turn would have healed the wrong person and
re-armed the wrong aura;
- runCombatRound rested on any player_turn, and a downed seat still holds one
-- the round would have come to rest on a corpse and waited for a dead
member to type !attack. settleCombatSession drains it. beginCombatTurn
settles before reading the clock, which also fixes a latent solo bug: a
fight interrupted mid enemy_turn resumed parked there and silently ate the
player's next !attack.
The narration turned out to be written in the second person -- "You score 9
damage", "A hit gets through your guard" -- so swapping a name per seat would
have told three people they each landed the same blow. A round is rendered once
per reader instead: your own events go through the untouched flavor pool, your
allies' through a terse third-person summary. CombatEvent carries the seat to
make that possible, stamped once per phase step rather than at the twenty-odd
append sites in the primitives, which emit against the cursor and know nothing
of seats.
Closing out fans along the seam the data model already cut. Threat, the
zone-kill record, the boss-defeat drop and the run teardown all resolve through
getActiveExpedition or getActiveZoneRun, and a member owns neither row -- so
they fire once, for the owner. Fanning them out would have tripled the threat a
single kill costs. HP, XP, loot and death are the character's, and every seat
gets their own. A member can be dead in a fight the party won, so death is read
per seat off HP, not off the session's status.
The reaper stays attack-only. Finishing an abandoned fight should not quietly
burn the player's spell slots and potions; the deadline latch does use the
picker, because that member is mid-fight with a party waiting on them.
startPartyCombatSession has no production caller yet -- handleFightCmd still
opens a solo session. P6 seats the party.
TestCombatCharacterization is byte-identical: solo balance did not move.
Diagnosed a cleric "death loop" (L14 dying at T2/T3 bosses while
over-levelled): the boss isn't overtuned — caster sustained DPS is
under-delivered, compounded by a fragile healer build.
Engine fix — concentration AOE re-tick:
- Concentration damage spells (spirit_guardians, heat_metal, spike_growth,
call_lightning, flaming_sphere) now tick the enemy every round at
round_end instead of resolving as a one-shot, via a new
CombatStatuses.ConcentrationDmg armed on cast and round-tripped through
the turn engine. Closes the long-tracked turn-engine concentration gap;
the burst still lands the casting round, then the aura lingers.
- Sim picker skips re-casting an already-active aura (models competent play
and prevents a burst+aura double-dip). Re-baseline (n=30 sweep + n=100
confirm): bard +47pp T3 (heat_metal), druid +3-7, cleric/mage flat,
fighter unchanged — no regressions.
Player-data bootstraps (idempotent, run once on Init):
- bootstrapCasterSpellBackfill: ensureSpellsForCharacter only seeds an empty
book, so defaults added after a character's roll never reach it. Backfill
missing defaults into known+prepared for existing casters (gives the
affected cleric inflict_wounds + a working healing_word, since her
healing_word_spell is a dead alias).
- bootstrapGrantStarterPet: one-off L10 pet for an endgame player who never
got the morning arrival roll; adds per-round proc damage + deflect.
- TestScenario_JosieCasterAid verifies both against a copy of the live DB,
incl. idempotency.
Also fix a pre-existing wall-clock flake in
TestFireBriefings_EventAnchoredActivePlayerDelivers (start_date defaulted to
real now, filtering the row out when the suite runs after 06:00 UTC).
T4 monster tuning so martial leaders land in the 60-75% band (underdark
59/80, feywild 65/84 at L10/L12, n=50); casters trail (class-side gap that
monster tuning provably can't compress -- Pass 1 showed casters pinned at 0%
while martials moved). T5 deferred (walls everyone at its L12 floor; needs an
L15-16 corpus).
- dnd_bestiary.go: underdark elite/boss HP+AC up + caster-lethal proc cuts
(mind_flayer/drow_mage/roper); feywild HP+AC up.
- bestiary_srd.go: feywild multiattack profiles (fomorian/night_hag/green_hag)
+ Thornmother 2->3 lashes -- HP/AC alone didn't move feywild's low-damage
roster; multiattack is what pulls facerolling martials into band.
- zone_graph_feywild_crossing.go: free fork1's marsh edge. fork1 was the only
fork in the game with every exit skill-locked (CHA+Perception, no LockNone)
and deterministic no-retry rolls -- a prod SOFT-LOCK stranding ~60% of
players (low CHA+WIS). Kept grove's CHA bargain as a bonus route.
- expedition_sim.go: firstUnlockedForkChoice -- sim fork policy picks the
first unlocked option instead of blind 'go 1' (which looped forever on
locked forks); halts fork_all_locked if none.
- tests: graph-wide TestZoneGraphs_NoSoftLockedFork + fork1 free-path guard.
Writeup: sim_results/d8f_findings.md
Prod autopilot resolved boss/elite fights inline via SimulateCombat, which
swings the enemy once per round (Combatant has no ID to look up the SRD
multiattack profile). Manual !fight uses the turn engine, which loops the
full profile — so autopilot players faced strictly weaker bosses than
manual. D8-e confirmed this is the gap, not a turn-engine artifact.
- Promote the sim's autoResolveCombat/simPickCombatAction to shared plugin
methods autoDriveCombat/pickAutoCombatAction (single source of truth; the
sim now calls the same code prod does).
- Add MessageContext.Silent + a replyDM helper; the turn-engine combat
handlers route their DMs through it so the background autopilot can drive
the real !fight/!attack engine without spamming a DM per round (the EoD
digest summarizes the outcome).
- tryAutoRun now calls runAutopilotWalkDriven (inlineBossCombat flipped
true->false): walk->fight->walk loop so one tick still covers ~autoRunRoomCap
rooms, but boss AND elite now face the player's full kit against the
enemy's full multiattack. Loss surfaces as stopEnded (run already
force-extracted by finishCombatSession).
Trash mobs stay on the fast inline path. GOGOBEE_SIM_INLINE_BOSS=1 A/B
toggle preserved. Build + plugin tests green; sim smoke-run unchanged.
Diagnostic env toggle (off by default) routing the sim's boss/elite
doorways through the inline SimulateCombat path instead of the turn
engine, for A/B-ing the martial T4/T5 'regression'. D8-e confirmed the
gap is honest multiattack math (inline swings the enemy once/round; the
turn engine loops the full SRD profile) and that prod autopilot is
secretly easier than manual !fight. Toggle left in for the D8-f parity
work.
- expedition-sim matrix worker now captures child stderr and dumps
runErr/stderr/stdout-snippet on failure so halted rows have a cause.
- simPickSpiritualWeapon walks slots 2..5 and upcasts when L2 is spent
instead of silently skipping the spell on high-level clerics.
- advanceOnceWithOpts !inlineBossCombat branch now emits the same
"Room X/Y — Boss/Elite. Type !fight to engage." line as foreground.
Adds inlineBossCombat alongside compact in runAutopilotWalk and
advanceOnceWithOpts. Production background autorun keeps both true
(inline auto-resolve), foreground stays both false (manual !fight), the
sim now uses compact=true + inlineBossCombat=false so the boss/elite
doorway returns stopBoss/stopElite after the safety gate — autoResolveCombat
+ simPickCombatAction / simPickSpell drive the fight via the turn-based
engine. The picker (and D8-b upcasting) has been dead since D3's
compact-inline boss rooms; this re-wires it.
n=50/cell L10 smoke vs d7d (zones T1-T3):
bard forest_shadows 61 → 100 (+39)
bard manor_blackspire 10 → 34 (+24)
cleric forest_shadows 15 → 96 (+81)
cleric manor_blackspire 0 → 54 (+54)
fighter T1-T3 100 (unchanged)
Also parallelizes matrix mode via subprocess workers (each child has its
own SQLite — db package globals preclude in-process parallelism). New
-jobs flag, defaults to runtime.NumCPU(). 8 workers gave ~7x speedup on
the smoke matrix.
simPickSpell now enumerates one candidate per available slot >= native
for every prepared damage spell, scored via spellExpectedDamage with the
existing "+1 die per slot" scaling. Cantrips contribute a single slot-0
candidate. Tie-break: highest slot first, then highest expDmg. Picker
returns "<id> --upcast N" when the winning slot exceeds native so
parseCombatCast upcasts in the engine. Build + plugin tests green.
Then: measured zero impact. d8b_corpus.jsonl (same 10x5x100 matrix as
d7d) lands every class within +/-1.5pp of d7d baseline.
Root cause discovered post-corpus: simPickSpell is dead code in the
current sim path. Commit 68ed8e7 ("Long expeditions D3: compact
autopilot auto-resolves boss rooms") added a !compact gate at
dnd_expedition_cmd.go:810 so compact autopilot inline-resolves boss/
elite rooms via resolveCombatRoom -> runZoneCombat -> SimulateCombat
instead of returning stopBoss/stopElite for autoResolveCombat to handle.
The sim uses compact=true (expedition_sim.go:433), so autoResolveCombat
- the only caller of simPickCombatAction/simPickSpell - never fires.
Verified empirically: a stderr-traced simPickSpell produced zero hits
across full bard/cleric L10 runs.
This rewrites the picker-era retrospective. J2's baseline_j2a_v2_all10
(bard 40%, cleric 39%) was measured before D3 with the picker live.
d7d's L10 baseline (bard 34%, cleric 21%) is post-D3 with the picker
disconnected - that 6-18pp drop is the post-D3 caster regression, not
"long-expedition mechanics didn't help casters" as d7d framed it.
D8-a's "+2.2pp cleric" was also noise (1sigma ~ 1.8pp on n=500).
D8-b code kept in tree (correct, currently inert, turns on as soon as
the wire reconnects). Plan rewritten in section 8: D8-b and D8-c are
deferred behind D8-prereq, which splits compact so the sim opts out of
compact-inline boss/elite combat without affecting prod rendering.
Files:
- internal/plugin/expedition_sim.go: simPickSpell upcast enumeration
- gogobee_long_expedition_plan.md: D8-b implemented-but-inert,
D8-prereq added as next step
- sim_results/d8b_corpus.jsonl: 5000-row corpus retained for the
picker-dead baseline
Fix sim regression introduced by D5-b: bare `expedition start <zone>`
returns the loadout prompt DM without outfitting, so SimRunner.RunExpedition
was halting before persisting any expedition. Pass `heavy` from the
harness — tier-max packs, no prod paths touched.
D7-d corpus (sim_results/, gitignored): n=100 × 10 classes × 5 zones ×
L10. Leaderboard mirrors J2b — martials 78–82%, casters 21–42%, cluster
gap unchanged by long-expedition mechanics. Cleric worst at 21% (L10).
Bard/cleric trailers not relieved by autopilot camp pacing; remains
J3-territory. T3/T4 cleared runs hit their §2 target durations.
D5-d retune decision: no change. phase5BDailyBurnRatePct=50 + per-tier
DailyBurn stay as-is — heavy-preset cleared runs end with 78–98% SU
surplus; even TPK runs leave packs mostly full. Supply economy is not
a binding constraint at heavy preset.
Closes the long-expedition track.
cmd/expedition-sim -days N caps runs by synthetic day rollovers
(Outcome="day_capped"). SimResult.DaySnapshots traces HP/SU/threat/rooms
at start, every Night-camp rollover, and end-of-run — unblocks empirical
D5-d retune of phase5BDailyBurnRatePct against per-day SU draws.
maybeAutoCamp / pitchAutopilotCamp / pitchBossSafetyCamp now take a
now time.Time so the sim can inject a synthetic clock; tryAutoRun
still passes time.Now().UTC(). SimRunner.RunExpedition advances simNow
by autoRunCooldown per walk and runs the production camp scheduler
after each soft stop (and pitchBossSafetyCamp on stopBossSafety),
dwelling minAutoCampDwell + breakAutoCampIfDue so the next walk can
proceed. Effect: HP-low mid-day rests, base-camp waypoints, Night-camp
rollovers, and boss-safety holds all fire under the sim; D7-a's
tickEventAnchoredRollover shortcut is retained on TickDay for tests
and the pre-cutoff legacy path.
deliverBriefingEventAnchored reads time.Now().UTC() for its safety-net
check, so synthetic TickDay calls never advanced CurrentDay on D2-b
expeditions — DaysAtEnd / SUEnd stayed at start values. Short-circuit
in TickDay: when isEventAnchored, fire nightRolloverBurn → optional
applyCampRest (Standard, Rough fallback, skipped on low-SU) →
nightRolloverDrift(briefAt). Mirrors pitchAutopilotCamp Night=true.
Production paths untouched.
Unblocks D5-d retune of phase5BDailyBurnRatePct and the class corpus
re-run.
Synthetic sim chars are vanilla base-class (no pet, no subclass), so the
per-round pet attack/deflect/whiff path was never exercised in the sim.
Add -pet-level N (1-10) which stamps a base Massive Dog (no armor) onto the
AdventureCharacter via the normal save path before the run, so combat's
DerivePlayerStats sees HasPet()==true. 0 (default) stays petless.
Measured lift (n=40, 10 classes x L3/7/12 x 3 zones): overall clear-rate
38.3% petless -> 47.8% at pet L10 (+9.4pp); biggest gains go to the caster
trailers (bard +13.3, warlock +11.9, cleric +11.4), narrowing class spread.
Mirror runAutopilotWalk's multi-region auto-advance in the headless sim:
on a mid-zone stopComplete (active multi-region exp with a next region),
advanceToNextRegion and keep simulating instead of scoring a premature
"cleared". A transit error there is now recorded as halted, not cleared.
Also fix misleading run-complete wording: a non-boss region clear of a
multi-region zone now reads "Cleared {region}. The way to {next} opens
ahead." instead of "Cleared {zone}. Run complete." New midZoneRegionClear
helper shares finalizeExpeditionOnZoneClear's gating; the path is shared
with manual !region travel, so both autopilot and manual play get it.
(cherry picked from commit 5d2bba70849a0a3fdeac285cc55ea9b8fadea29c)
autoResolveCombat now calls maybeShortRest after a won fight (HP < 60%
or any slots used, charges > 0), mirroring what a competent prod player
does between rooms. Re-baseline at n=100 across the full 10×3×5 matrix
written to baseline_h5sim_all10.jsonl.
Headline (vs baseline_j2a_v2_all10.jsonl, full delta in h5sim_findings.md):
mage L12 manor +8pp, cleric L12 manor +7pp, but bard L12 manor stays at
1pp and bard/cleric L12 underdark still 0. J2c (defaultKnownSpells
damage option at L3+ for bard, L4+ for cleric) is still the lever for
the trailers. Four borderline -9pp regressions on n=100 cells; flagged
for an n=300 re-run before declaring a sim defect.
The post-J1 sweep had the casters clustered at 19–22% L12 clear, vs
martials at 70–80%. A per-round trace across 240 boss-room fights showed
why: autoResolveCombat dispatched !attack only — zero spell_casts, zero
mid-fight consumable uses across every caster class. The entire "caster
cliff" was the sim measuring a strawman where casters couldn't cast.
J2a teaches the sim's autoResolveCombat to mirror a competent prod
player: heal at low HP if an inventory consumable is available, otherwise
cast the highest-EV damage spell (slot or cantrip), otherwise swing.
BuildCharacter now seeds the known-spell list via ensureSpellsForCharacter
so the synthetic spellbook is populated. A -trace flag on the cmd
attaches the raw CombatEvent stream to the last combat of each run for
post-hoc diagnostics.
A first re-baseline (n=100, all 10 classes) showed Ranger regressed
-35.8pp — the picker was burning L3 slots on lightning_arrow when
Ranger's weapon chassis (Hunter's Mark + Extra Attack) was the better
play. Added simMartialFirstClass to gate the picker off for Ranger and
Paladin (whose default kit is also weapon-first / no damage spells).
J2c experimented with widening the picker to control + heal spells;
heal-spell preempt cost druid 10pp (slot heals are 10HP vs 40HP
consumables) and control-spell scoring at 22 cost warlock 6.6pp. Both
reverted. Corpora retained under baseline_j2c*.jsonl for the post-mortem
in sim_results/j2b_findings.md.
Post-J2 L12 leaderboard (baseline_j2a_v2_all10.jsonl, n=100):
fighter 80.0, ranger 80.0, paladin 78.4, rogue 76.8,
druid 61.6, mage 53.4, sorcerer 50.6, warlock 48.2,
bard 40.4, cleric 39.0.
The caster cluster is dissolved; martials are within ±5pp of J1 (sweep
noise). Bard/cleric still trail, but it's no longer a sim artifact —
their defaultKnownSpells damage rosters cap at L2 and the picker can't
pick spells they don't have. That's a prod-level fix, deferred.
J3 trace (sim_results/j3_findings.md): T5 dragons_lair walls every solo
class at 0% (Infernax 546 HP vs solo player HP 110–175; ~25% boss HP
eaten before TPK across all classes). Per the J3 plan menu, this is
party-shaped content the engine doesn't yet have parties for. Surface
a TwinBee-voiced heads-up in handleDnDExpeditionCmd's start path and a
matching tag in !expedition list — players see "raid-shaped — solo
runs not yet survivable" before they spend outfitting coin. No combat
or class balance changes.
Files: cmd/expedition-sim/main.go +trace flag; expedition_sim.go picker
+ SimCombatSummary.Events + spellbook seed; dnd_expedition_cmd.go
raidContentWarning + list tag. All baselines + traces + findings
checked in under sim_results/.
The class-identity audit (98ba416) wired Extra Attack via the new
resolvePlayerSwings helper, but only SimulateCombat (auto-resolve)
called it. The turn-based engine — every !fight/!attack and every
elite/boss gate the sim drives via autoResolveCombat — still called
single-swing resolvePlayerAttack, so Fighter L11+ got 1 swing/turn at
the gates instead of 3. The audit close-out was correct in spirit but
half-applied.
J1 baseline matrix surfaced it: Fighter L12 cleared 100% of T2 forest
but 2% of T3 manor and 7% of T4 underdark, with %boss_reached at 100%
across the board. The wall was the boss-room damage exchange, not
mid-zone attrition. Trace dump on a sample fight: Fighter dealt 79
dmg in 14 rounds (7 hits / 9 swings) — exactly one swing per round —
versus 167 enemy dmg. With multi-swing wired in, the same fight ends
in 7 rounds with the boss dead, Fighter at 87/168 HP, 16 hits in 19
swings.
n=100 matrix after the fix:
Fighter L12 manor: 2% → 100% clr
Fighter L12 underdark: 7% → 98% clr
Fighter L12 forest: 94% → 100% (no leader regression)
Mage cells unchanged (J2 territory). Rogue cells within noise.
Sim infra changes that landed alongside (needed to read the J1
signal):
* expedition_sim auto-arms class-default defensive abilities
(Second Wind / Healing Word) via the new simAutoArmEnabled toggle
+ trySimAutoArm helper, hooked before applyArmedAbility in both
combat builders. Production code paths untouched (toggle stays
off). Without this the sim simulated a player who never types
!arm, which under-counts class survival.
* SimResult.Combats captures per-fight turn-log summaries (rounds,
hits/misses, damage by side, AC values inferred from RollAgainst)
so future J-phase questions can dig into the engine without
re-running the matrix.
* sim_results/run_matrix.sh fans the matrix across (class,level,zone)
cells via xargs -P (one process per cell — each owns its global
sqlite handle). ~6× wall-clock speedup on a 14-core box; n=100
matrix runs in ~3min.
* sim_results/summarize.sh gains p50_yld_clr + %boss_reached columns
so future sweeps don't conflate "reaches boss" with "clears zone".
Baselines:
sim_results/baseline_j0_n100.jsonl — pre-fix (1350 rows)
sim_results/baseline_j1_extra_attack.jsonl — post-fix (4500 rows)
Phase J state: J0 baseline locked, J1 done. T5 dragons_lair still
0% clear universally (J3). Mage T2+ wall still real (J2).
Harden expedition-sim with the three layers a real player carries:
race mods (+1 Human across the board), tier-appropriate equipment
(weapon/armor/helmet/boots/tool promoted from tier 0 to a level-mapped
tier), and a lean consumables bundle (2 heals + 1 buff at T2-T4,
3 heals + 2 buffs at T5). Capture material yields in SimResult so
calibration sweeps actually read out the H4 signal.
Three sweeps in sim_results/ (n=10): bare baseline, +gear/race,
+lean consumables. Headline: yield is gated by combat survival, not
charge counts. Fighter and Mage hit a sharp wall at T3+ even kitted;
no class extracts the T5 dragons_lair boss. Tuning charges before
fixing class survival would over-tune against a strawman, so H4
is now flagged blocked on Phase J.
Phase J appended to gogobee_harvest_charges_plan.md:
J0 baseline at n=30, J1 Fighter T3+ wall, J2 Mage T2+ wall,
J3 T5 boss (sim artifact vs over-tuned vs raid content),
J4 validation matrix.
RunExpedition now drives expeditions end-to-end through the production
plugin paths:
- TickDay calls deliverRecap + deliverBriefing with a synthetic clock
anchored on exp.StartDate, advancing one day per call without
real-time waits.
- Autopilot bursts use compact mode so elite gates auto-resolve inline.
- Boss / surviving elite gates are auto-resolved via handleFightCmd +
looped handleAttackCmd until the session flips Won/Lost/Fled.
- Forks resolve to path 1 deterministically.
- SimResult exposes StopCode, Walks, DayTicks, Threat, plus the full
dnd_expedition_log projected as SimLogEntry rows.
SimRunner re-uses production plugin code paths against a fresh sqlite DB —
SendDM no-ops without a Matrix client, so ground truth comes from the DB.
BuildCharacter persists adv+dnd character rows with class-appropriate
ability scores and spell slots; RunExpedition loops !expedition run with
stall detection until the autopilot halts or the expedition closes.
The cmd binary is a thin orchestrator: one flag-driven run, JSON output.
Per-room structured logging, day-cycle fast-forward, and matrix batching
are next session.
