We only ever told Pete about outcomes. Nothing emitted when an expedition
*started*, which is why the two bored adventurers walked into dungeons and the
news feed said nothing at all — it wasn't broken, it had nothing to say.
Two halves:
A roster snapshot, pushed every 2 minutes. Deliberately NOT on the durable fact
queue: a fact is history and losing it loses it forever, so it retries. A
snapshot is a photograph of the present, and a retried one is a lie — by the
time it lands, she's moved. The next tick carries the truth. That's also what
lets Pete's staleness timer work: if we stay down, nothing arrives, and the
board stops claiming to be live instead of insisting forever that Josie is
still in holymachina.
And a "departure" bulletin when a bored adventurer lets itself out.
The snapshot omits opted-out players rather than anonymizing them, and carries a
board token distinct from every event token, so a standing row can't become the
key that links a player's dispatches back together.
The player_meta scan folds last_player_action_at/created_at in Go instead of
COALESCE()ing in SQL — modernc rebuilds time.Time from the declared column type
and COALESCE erases it. A failed scan here would publish an empty board and
every adventurer would vanish from the page.
last_player_action_at is NULL for every existing row on the deploy that
adds it, and loadBoredomCandidates COALESCEs the NULL onto created_at.
created_at is account age, not an idle clock: for anyone who has been
playing for a month it is a month old. So the first tick after restart
would read the entire server as idle-since-creation and march all of
them into a dungeon thirty minutes later, coins debited, including the
player who typed a command a minute before the deploy.
Seed the column once from last_active_at instead — the best "did
something recently" proxy that exists at deploy time, recent for the
regulars and stale for the lapsed. It stays unusable as the clock itself
(the autopilot bumps it), which is why this is a one-time seed and not a
fallback in the query. Re-running on every boot is a no-op, and it skips
rows that already have last_boredom_at set, so a restart mid-boredom
can't hand a bored character a fresh idle clock off its own autopilot
writes and un-bore it permanently.
Two smaller ones in the same clock:
- a pending prompt counted as an action regardless of ExpiresAt, and
nothing sweeps p.pending. One offered-and-ignored treasure prompt and
every idle remark that player ever made would read as tending their
adventurer, forever.
- the command test ran 50 IsCommand passes over the body on every
message the bot sees, in every room. One tokenise-and-look-up does the
same job.
A player who stops tending their adventurer doesn't stop having one. After
24h with no action against Adventure, the character gets restless and leaves
on an expedition by itself: the easiest zone its level band allows, the
cheapest supplies it can afford, and whatever gear was already on the rack.
Everything downstream of the start was already autonomous — the autopilot
walks rooms, drives elite and boss fights on the turn engine, camps, harvests
and picks forks. The only thing that ever needed a human was `!expedition
start`, so that's all this adds: a 30m ticker plus a clock.
It never buys or equips anything, and that is the whole mechanic: a neglected
adventurer grinds half-starved runs on rusting gear and comes home taxed. The
prodexercise killed an L4 mage four rooms in on its first run.
The clock is a new column. Every existing timestamp is unusable: last_active_at
is auto-bumped by saveAdvCharacter (the autopilot would refresh a bored
character's own idle clock), loadAdvDailyActivity counts the autopilot's own
expedition logs, and user_stats.updated_at is chat presence, not a game action.
last_player_action_at is written only by markPlayerAction, from a real player
action against Adventure — any interface, not just Matrix.
Raid zones (raidContentWarning: the party-tuned T5 bosses with a 0% solo clear)
are avoided while anything else is in band. At L13+ they're all that's left, and
the adventurer goes in anyway and loses. That's intended.
dnd_expedition.boredom + isBoredomDriven stop a run nobody asked for from
shielding an absent player from the idle reaper or holding their streak. A
manually-started expedition still holds it while the autopilot walks it.
Robbie visits and pays silently for idle players — he was going to file a daily
public bulletin about people who stopped playing weeks ago.
Note for anyone touching the time-scanning queries here: modernc.org/sqlite
rebuilds a time.Time from the column's declared type, and COALESCE()/MAX() erase
it. playerIsIdle fails open, so a broken scan there declares the whole server
idle. Both it and lastExpeditionByZone select declared columns and fold in Go,
and the tests seed real rows so the scan actually executes.
