--- name: parked-wasteland-uplink-engine description: "PARKED — WASTELAND UPLINK: ONE ambient 'living-terminal' engine that several overlapping ambient ideas consolidate into. Owner-approved merge, day/night KEPT (owner reversed his earlier cut), and a HARD no-persistence / no-stat-mutation invariant that is the load-bearing safety property." metadata: node_type: project originSessionId: parked-wasteland-uplink-engine --- ## ⭐⭐ HARD INVARIANT — NON-NEGOTIABLE (owner 2026-06-30) **The engine writes NOTHING durable and NEVER touches stats or real game saves.** - No mutation of `state.rads` or any state field; no `saveState` / `pushToCloud` / `localStorage.setItem` / `setDoc`. - Ambient rad-storms drive ONLY the warning tint + geiger ambiance (cosmetic) — **never the real rad value**. - Ambient lines render via the **no-persist path** (visual only — no chatHistory or localStorage write). - The engine owns a **DISJOINT `ambient-*` CSS class namespace**. The real `rad-*`/hazard classes are re-derived on every math update and must not be reused. **Real hazards always outrank cosmetic ones.** - A permanent gate guard must **statically fail** if the ambient module ever gains a persistence or stat-mutation call. Why it is load-bearing: *"can't cause an outage, can't corrupt a save."* Everything else in this file is negotiable; this is not. ## THE CONSOLIDATION DECISION (owner 2026-06-30) **Merge the overlapping ambient items into ONE engine — WASTELAND UPLINK.** Owner: *"merge everything that goes into wasteland uplink together … fold the rest in."* The roadmap audit found these had been designed as separate systems but are really **one local data bank + one seeded-roll engine, many readers**: - **Pip-Boy Radio** — shares the same local bulletin bank. The radio is the PULL surface (user tunes in); the engine PUSHES the same content ambiently. - **World-map encounter rolls** — consume the engine's shared seeded-roll + event-table infra. Do NOT build a separate roller. - **INTERCEPT (AI generative-residue)** — the OPTIONAL online AI-augment layer on top of the deterministic static broadcast bank. Must follow the AI network rules (App Check + kill-switch + fail-safe fallback to the static bank; never blocks boot). - **Remote Transmissions** — the online PUSH layer of the same engine (owner-pushed holotapes/bulletins/events surface through the same UPLINK channel). Spec: `planning/WASTELAND_UPLINK_SPEC.md`. ## DAY/NIGHT — KEPT (owner REVERSED himself 2026-06-30) Owner first cut day/night over in-game-time accuracy concerns, then reversed: *"add back day and night."* **Keep it**, alongside rad-storm weather. Treat it as **TERMINAL-SIDE** ambient — driven by real elapsed/session time or logged ticks, framed clearly as terminal-side, **not** a claim to mirror exact in-game time. Engine emitters: broadcasts, rad-storm ambiance, day/night cycle, incoming-transmission nudges. This revives the immersion "Dusk/Dawn That Lands + Voice" idea — it had been dropped ONLY because day/night was cut, so the reversal makes it viable again (owner confirmed re-add). Toggleable, reduced-motion safe. *Corrected 2026-07-20: the `description:` field previously said day/night was REMOVED, contradicting the body. The body is right — the owner reversed the cut. Description fixed.* ## IN-GAME vs IN-TERMINAL CLARITY (owner 2026-06-30) — hard design constraint Applies to the INTERCEPT inbox and **every** ambient/broadcast feature: they must clearly read as **TERMINAL-side** happenings (RobCo transmissions, terminal chatter) and must NOT confuse the player into thinking a real in-GAME event occurred. The diegetic framing has to make that boundary obvious. ## DEV-BUILD TESTABILITY (owner 2026-06-30) Because these emitters are time- and probability-gated, they rarely fire on demand. The DEV/STAGING build **must** expose a way to trigger/force-fire each ambient feature, or they cannot actually be verified during development. ## BUILD POSTURE New global-scope ambient module (vanilla, no-build); free / BYO-key; game-agnostic; offline-first (the deterministic core needs no network — INTERCEPT and Remote Transmissions are optional online garnish with fallback). **Substrate-first phased order**: ship the world-clock/seeded-roll core **plus the no-write guard first**, then push, then rad-storm ambiance, then radio pull, then map encounters, then INTERCEPT/Transmissions. HIGH effort. **Analysis/spec only — do NOT build until the owner says go.** Cross-refs: [[parked-2-9-0-update]], [[parked-deferred-work-program]], [[parked-ai-feature-eval]] (INTERCEPT origin), [[parked-recreation-funprompt]] (where UPLINK originated as the MEGA idea), [[parked-roadmap-rebaseline]].