TradeManager::Slot13RngCalleeA, entered 0 times in every measurement any lane
had taken, is entered 1x/turn once a player fleet is parked on a trade-sector
node, and OnAllCombatDone_Tail's RNG word delta goes 0 -> 1. Lane W3's open
risk is realised, not retired: the RNG ledger and the standalone's generator
model need extending by one draw site.
The gate is neither freighters nor a deployed spy. It is a fleet whose LocID
resolves to a node of kind 2 (TradeSector), positioned bit-equal to the
sector, whose owner's bit is set in the sector's tscr mask -- which the
CCC_ComRaid tech sets, taking tscr from 252 to 253 and setting ServerPlayer
CnRad. Before the tech the game refuses in as many words: 'Alpha Fleet cannot
raid trade sector.'
Control: same guest, same build, same shim.cfg.l3probe, one End Turn on lane
L3's turn-15 save -> all three inner callees 0, tail delta 0. Guest adoption:
ref-turn2 hooks=off reproduces the published determinism oracle exactly.
Corrects lane L3 §3.5 (the turn-15 save already had a freighter in service --
the AI's -- so 'freighters' was falsified before this lane started) and lane
V2's 'trade slot 13 is draw-free'. The spy half is decoded but NOT reached:
no AI system in that game has an asteroid belt, so a deploy was impossible,
and spies2 is therefore still untested and stays a rule-6 hypothesis.
Two new corpus saves; expect the coverage ratchet to break on CnRad,
tscr=253, three rt records and a fleet whose LocID is a TradeSector.
Three lanes could not build this workload. VM144 built both halves from a cold main
menu on a stock, unmodified install -- no data file touched, no save edited -- and the
answer to the question they were built to ask is no.
TRADE. The premise everyone carried, that trade needs station construction plus its
tech, is wrong about the station: StrategyVars.txt makes a trade station a +2-routes,
+25%-income bonus, and NumTradeRoutesSupported has a floor of 1 per owned system, so
the population thresholds scale the count and do not gate it. The gate is one tech,
CCC_FTLEcon, and Zuul cannot research it at all. 20 routes and 6 trade sectors by
turn 4; 21 by turn 13.
SPY. Lane W3: "no lane has identified which UI produces a spy-program entry." It is
the fleet panel's Special menu, and the reason nobody found it is that the ship a spy
docks with is the Cruiser REPAIR AND SALVAGE mission section -- nothing in the UI
calls it a tender or mentions spies. Prediction S1 holds: the container grows at Build
Spy while the craft is still docked (tdep=-1, atto=<tender>), so no enemy colony and no
asteroid belt are on the critical path, which is what every earlier cost model assumed.
THE MEASUREMENT. With 21 routes, 6 sectors and 1 spy craft live, lane H's eleven entry
probes report the four outer tail callees entered exactly once per turn, as always, and
SpyManager::Slot13RngCallee, TradeManager::Slot13RngCalleeA and CalleeB entered ZERO
times -- this turn and across all seven instrumented turns, every probe installed=true.
The RNG ledger and the standalone's generator model do NOT need extending on account of
either container being non-empty. The next condition is active contents, not present
contents: tsnumflt=0 on every sector and spyon=0 on the spy.
WHAT ELSE FELL OUT. The trade-route vector is torn down and rebuilt every turn inside
ServerTradeManagerImpl::vslot9 (lane V2's phase-23 call 5 of 8, previously "draw-free"
and unexplained) -- an agreement, dropped rather than re-minted, as is the AI2 growth
helper. Two addresses are minted, both trapped live and both `mapped` not `verified`
because ReVa was unreachable: ShipAction_BuildSpy 0x00789620, a sibling of lane B6's
stack-built-fptr-table entry 0x120 bytes away, which is why no call-graph sweep ever
found this writer; and ServerSpyManager_CreateSpyCraft 0x008383c0.
And a correction with teeth: `spies2` is 0 in all 28 systems of a save that DOES have a
spy. The natural reading of lane W's count-0-in-11-saves was "no save has ever had one".
That reading is dead; spies2 is not the spy list, or it only fills for a deployed spy.
The research click path is written down for the first time (§4): clicking a tech node is
a PREVIEW, the bottom-left button confirms, Esc leaves without confirming, and the tree
pans only on a right-drag of about 600 px. That, not the tech cost, is what stopped
three lanes.
Saves: human-turn{5,8}-traderoutes, human-turn11-spytechs, human-turn15-spyprogram --
all --strict clean, 0 errors, 0 warnings.
- determinism oracle regenerated and byte-identical (bb4fd9ac / 978041ac)
- the four phase-23/33 draw-bearing tail callees run EVERY turn; the three inner
functions holding the draws run zero times -- the gate is inside each outer body
- CreateRaidEncounter is called (2 on one turn) and draws nothing: candidate list empty
- Zuul: 7 calls / 7 words per trade-raid Chance site, 14 not 16, as predicted
- EncounterDetect_Run receives an EMPTY record vector, so ProcessTeamRecord and
AssignContacts never run; the 2-word detection residual is in 0x007d5150's subtree
- a MinHook detour on 0x00893290 changes the game's output; bisected over six runs.
The un-instrumented game and lane Z's instrument agree, so lane Z's numbers stand
- lane AI1 insert: P2 held across two fresh processes, Rung B stays as written
findings/subsystems/output-term.md is the whole reading: the call chain with
real function boundaries, the formula, the closed list of nine values the data
files supply (down from an unbounded fear), the advance prediction with its
falsification table, and the live result.
Corrects strategic-turn-internals.md 3.3 in place. That block had the SHAPE
wrong, not just the detail: a system's output is a sum of three terms, and the
function it named as the population base-output term is the over-harvest
resource demand.
Live on VM140, two builds, two species, both hooks in compare mode:
GroupOutput 13,105 calls / 0 divergences, ComputeTotalOutput 11,252 / 1 (one
ulp), 0 undeclared writes in 24,357 guarded calls. Thirteen distinct system
states, and every unexercised branch is listed rather than counted as covered.
tools/max_income_predict.py is the other half: it computes lane Y's
bankruptcy-limit oracle from colony state and reports 6 of 25 player-records
matching exactly, with the misses all AI-owned and the single-system ones short
by exactly the 1.1 difficulty income multiplier.
Seven entry points detoured, each call keyed by __builtin_return_address(0)
with the word cost from left before/after. Three consecutive turns on
ref-turn2: site sums 19/18/20 against independently measured ProcessTurn totals
of 19/18/20, residual 0 every time. The 18-20 spread is now explained rather
than reported -- it is the two gated research draws.
The dominant consumer is FUN_00893290: two Chance calls per player across all
eight player-vector entries, 16 of every turn's 18-20 words, and it is NOT one
of lane I's 22 sites. Lane I said its closure covered direct edges only and
that indirect reachability was unsettled; this is that gap, measured. The
function is unidentified and is the highest-value target left.
Two bookkeeping corrections are in the report tool, not the shim: helper-
internal rows (Chance's own NextFloat) double-count, and 8 calls per turn are
on the StrategyClient's generator, not the strategic one. The first build did
not distinguish generators and reported 44 words against a bracket of 18 --
which is what caught it. A per-site ledger that cannot say which generator a
draw came from is not a ledger.
Predicted at turn 34 with the run in flight, from min_life falling by exactly
1 per turn: the first phase-11 draw on turn 64, exactly 1 word, tail total 1,
bracket = ProcessTurn + 1. The game was played to turn 64 and every clause
held. predict_words, computed before the original ran, said 1 and the
measurement said 1 -- a real check of the model, against 63 preceding turns
where 0 matched 0 and checked nothing.
So the defect lane K warned about is no longer latent: on that turn a
reimplementation modelling ProcessTurn perfectly would have written an autosave
one word out of step.
And the instrument's thinnest part ran live on the same turn -- ProcessTurn
crossed a block boundary (left 11 -> 615, one twist, 20 words) and the bracket
still reconciled to residual 0.
We consume 18-22 generator words per turn and model none of them as a count.
All of it is inside StrategyServer::ProcessTurn; OnAllCombatDone_Tail costs 0
on every turn observed; the residual outside the two drivers is exactly 0. The
generator does not move between turns at all, so the interval a standalone has
to reproduce is closed at both ends.
The instrument reads generator STATE, not calls, and that choice paid: the
image has four draw entry points, not three (NextUInt 0x004f7670 is in no
lane's primitive set) plus inlined draws in twelve functions, two reachable
from the turn roots. A primitive-counting hook would have undercounted
silently.
Checked against the save files independently: the turn-6 autosave pair gives
18 words read from the two Sim.RNG blobs, and with twists == 0 that number
never passes through a twist implementation -- so the two instruments do not
share the hidden assumption they could have.
Corrections to combat-done-tail.md, in place:
* the node-line 0x20000-fleet check runs AFTER the Chance(0.5f) call and
cannot gate the draw; the expiry test is NodePath::RemainingLife 0x006e2130
and is now a formula rather than a description
* StrategyHost::Autosave is ret 8 and returns the std::string* in EAX
* SNMAllCombatDone IS delivered every End Turn (8 of 8) -- lane K's inference
was right; the stronger no-encounter reading is narrowed, not closed
* S+0x8 advances 12-14 times per turn, not twice
Node-line decay still has not fired. The hook reports the distance instead of
the absence: 51 of 53 lines are permanent, the mortal ones are dug ~1/turn by
the Zuul, each ~40 turns from expiry. It stays a labelled hypothesis.
Reads: TechTree::PrereqsMet 0x0057d8e0 (AND of ORs; zero groups TRUE, an empty
group FALSE), the prerequisite layout at TechDef+0x88/+0x98, the tail collector
0x00587cc3, and the head of OnTechResearched (RecordObservedTech unconditional;
the research-event roll gated on ResT == def && ResearchRollPending).
Live: 35 compared calls over three workloads, 0 divergences, tracecmp exit 0,
End-Turn oracle hashes unchanged. The EVENT_TECHS_UNLOCKED residual lane P
predicted and lane V measured is closed by running the cascade, not by posting
on completion.
12 new addresses in ghidra/addresses.d/lane-u.json (header 615 -> 627).
Lane P wrote the expected numbers into sots-engine docs/P-events-wiring.md §4 before
this run existed. Every one held.
First End Turn (ref-turn2 -> Launch -> End Turn, shim.cfg.recapb3 unchanged, build
eventlive-dd38117-20260908T0916Z, main dd38117 with no source change): 3 calls, 3
compared, 0 divergent, tracecmp exit 0 — where lane R's run exited 1 on
side.events.after.v.next_id orig=4 ours=3. Call 0 read turn=3,
events_turn_bucket_exists=true, events_next_id_in=3, events_in_turn_bucket=1,
events_dedup_risk=0, no events_scan_truncated, next_id 3->4 on both sides,
turns/turns_bytes 2/48 unchanged, node[144].progress 2879->5768, flag 1->2, rng
identical — the whole predicted list.
Five End Turns: exit 1 with 2 divergent calls instead of 3, each short by exactly 1
(next_id orig 7 ours 6, orig 12 ours 11) = the deliberately unmodelled
EVENT_TECHS_UNLOCKED. A 0-divergence result there would have been suspicious.
sizeof(Game::ObservedTech) = 44 measured live: observed_techs.bytes grew by exactly
44 on both completion calls (440->484, 484->528), confirming lane X's static pin
behaviourally. Non-researching players measured 880 = 20 x 44 and never moved.
One deviation from lane R, and it is a workload effect, not a defect: rng diverged on
call 9 because the completed tech had research_roll_pending set and the
OnTechResearched callback drew one word ours does not (left 374 vs 375). Lane R's
"RNG matched 15 of 15" was workload luck; the honest statement is that the rng region
matches on every call that does not complete a roll-triggering tech.
Zuul double roll CLOSED. No species-5 save existed, so this lane made one: a custom
game with only Zuul in the Available Species pool, 4 End Turns under the same compare
config. 8 calls, 8 compared, 0 divergent, exit 0; all four researching calls have
species=5 and advance the generator by two, not one (left 540->538, 522->520,
504->502, 485->483), and ours reproduced every post-state bit-for-bit. Save added as
verify/results/saves/zuul-turn5-species5.sav.
End-Turn oracle byte-identical to lane R's on the first turn, so none of this
perturbs the game. clean_room_check OK and host ctest 33/33, run as separate commands.
VM140 restored to the recap build at the main menu and released.
Five hooks recaptured, build recap-7584bad-20260908T0615Z, no source change.
- ProcessResearch: the over-budget event is now a compare divergence
(side.events.after.v.next_id orig=4 ours=3) instead of a 609 KB save diff.
15 calls over 5 turns, 3 diverged, RNG matched 15/15.
- ComputeBudget: 4284 compared, 0 diverged, guard quiet - but only 20 distinct
states and 13 of 22 slots always zero.
- MoveFleet: 8 of 45 calls diverge by 1 ULP of position. B4's clean verdict was
a one-sample verdict.
- First guarded captures for OnTechResearched (RollResearchEvent draw fired and
matched), the colony turn and MoveFleet.
- Guards mapped SetResearched live and found an undeclared ObservedTech append.
VM140 released at the main menu, hooks=trace.