settled-reach/docs/sprints/sprint-25/joint.md

Sprint 25: Emerge — Joint

Confidence: 15%. This sprint is exploratory — we learn whether the approach works, not whether we can ship it. Declare what we learned, not victory.

Goal: Prove the generator can extrapolate from minimal input — a rural Van Maanen's Star area AND an industrial Van Maanen's Star zone from zone type and culture profile alone, no per-location spec. Two zone types, one culture, side-by-side comparison.

Pre-Sprint

Item	Owner	Blocks
Tyre shares example YAML schema from #611 with Miri	Tyre	#609, #610
Agree on file paths for zone spec and culture YAML	Tyre + Miri	#609, #610, #612

The critical coordination handoff: #611 defines the Rust structs and writes example YAML showing the schema. That YAML goes to Miri immediately. Copy fills the schema with real content. Server builds Phase 1 of #612 with hardcoded stubs in parallel — does not wait for copy.

Sprint Completion Proof — Throwaway Render

This is not a test suite. It is an eyeball test.

Commands:

cargo run --bin generator-spike -- --zone rural --seed 42
cargo run --bin generator-spike -- --zone industrial --seed 42
cargo run --bin generator-spike -- --zone rural --seed 43

Expected output per invocation:

• Zone type and summary (block count, social site list)
• NPC roster: name, role, 2-3 traits, one observable behavior
• Relationship pairs: "A knows B as [type] ([valence])"

Pass condition — three comparisons:

Cross-type (rural vs industrial, seed 42):

• Different output shape — social site mix, NPC role distribution, density all differ
• Both feel Van Maanen's Star — shared naming conventions and cultural markers
• Zone taxonomy does visible work (outputs distinguishable by zone type alone)

Intra-type (rural seed 42 vs rural seed 43):

• Both recognizably rural — same zone shape, similar role distribution
• Different people — different names, traits, relationship pairs
• Tests coherence within a type and variance across seeds

Culture (both zone types):

• Culture profile does visible work — output feels Van Maanen's Star, not generic space-village
• NPC relationships are readable from text — not inferred, read

Fail condition:

• Both outputs look the same with different labels (zone taxonomy not doing work)
• Neither feels Van Maanen's Star (culture profile not doing work)
• NPC traits unreadable from text (D-129 legibility gate not met)

This sprint discovers the right spec — it does not implement a known one. If the output is light and not fully deep, that is expected. The proof is in the pudding: run it, read it, judge it.

Tickets by Team

Team	#	Title
server	#611	NpcBlueprint struct design
copy	#609	Zone identity spec
copy	#610	Van Maanen's Star culture profile
server	#612	Template assembly generator (includes NPC pipeline + stdout output)

Dependency Chain

#611 (structs + schema) ──> #609 (zone spec YAML) ──┐
                       ──> #610 (culture YAML)    ──┴──> #612 Phase 2 (integrate real YAML)

#611 ──────────────────────────────────────────────────> #612 Phase 1 (hardcoded stubs, build in parallel)

#611 first. #609 and #610 in parallel after schema arrives. #612 builds in two phases — Phase 1 with stubs runs alongside copy, Phase 2 integrates real YAML.

Open Questions

ID	Question	Blocking
Q-WTF-033	AI templating: Claude API, local ollama, or manual for v0.2?	#623 (deferred)
Q-WTF-039	Character creation screen: portrait render or tile-scale preview?	Sprint 26+
Q-WTF-040	Do creation choices trace into the generated apartment?	Sprint 26+

Q-WTF-033 does not block this sprint. Design #612 so AI templating slots in later without a rewrite — the culture profile's speech markers are already the prompt constraint structure.

Deferred to Future Sprints

• Tycoon bookmark (#605, #614-617) — needs generator output proven first
• Character creation screen (#606, #618-620) — client work, post-generator
• NPC legibility systems (#607, #621-622) — downstream of generator
• AI content templating (#623) — Q-WTF-033 unresolved
• World feel systems (#608, #624-626) — downstream of everything
• Visual rendering of generated world — out of scope for this spike

What This Sprint Does NOT Do

• No client work (no rendering of generated content)
• No new content beyond the zone spec and culture profile YAML files
• No AI templating implementation (design for it, don't build it)
• No playable session from the generated world
• No ECS entity spawning into a running bevy world (#613 absorbed into #612 as stdout-only proof)