Ghostlight/notes/ghostlight-verse-target.md

Ghostlight Verse: Target

Date: 2026-10-09. Campaign ghostlight-verse in the Eureka mind. Operator direction: ruling ghostlight-verse:ruling:verse-cast-crossmedia (her words). Evidence for the starting state: F:\Projects\ghostlight-state-2026-10-09.md (Eyes, 2026-10-09) and F:\Projects\aetheria-story-sifting-prior-art.md Part 2.

Why

Aetheria needs a public narrative hook. Ghostlight is meant to be the machine that produces it: load the Aetheria verse, let a persistent cast of characters live in it, and harvest what happens. Three products are wanted from the same simulated world:

1. Storylets for the game (ruling aetheria-release:ruling:storylets-simulate-sift-lift-weave).
2. A serialized cast an audience can follow through episodes.
3. A cheap cinematic pipeline that turns episodes into a video stream, so the characters and conflicts people follow on the channel later turn up in the game.

This campaign builds the foundation the three share: a Ghostlight that runs, says truthfully what it is, and can hold the verse with a persistent cast. The stream pipeline and the in-game crossover are later campaigns that consume it.

Phases

1. Honest and running. The docs describe the live machine. main deploys on Yggdrasil through Idunn and stays up. The six open play-session findings and the owed Soul pass close. A human can play a session end to end.
2. A world that can hold factions and a cast. Relations, factions as actors, places and persistent characters enter the ontology, designed from prior art and ruled by the operator.
3. The verse loaded. A genesis built from AetheriaLore and Aetheria's typed Faction records. Facts the lore does not state are proposed and reviewed, never invented silently.

Invariants

• honest-docs: README, maps and handoffs describe the machine on main; history lives in history.
• main-runs: the deployed unit on Yggdrasil is built from main and stays up; Idunn owns its lifecycle.
• kernel-decides: the kernel owns world state through its closed operation set; models propose, the kernel admits or refuses.
• verse-provenance: every world fact loaded from the verse names its source page or record; a fact with no source is a proposal until reviewed.
• canon-one-way: simulation output never writes back into AetheriaLore or Aetheria's catalog without operator review.
• cast-persists: a character keeps identity, memory and commitments across sessions, so episodes can follow them.
• every-event-renderable: every event the kernel admits maps to exactly one render path: ship action filmed in Aetheria, or a social verb staged as an Aetheria conversation (portraits and choices; docked face to face, undocked radio over the ship). Summary captions are the only exception (ruling verse-verbs-two-render-paths).
• typed-state: world state and its exchange are CultCache/CultNet documents; JSON only for schema publication and xenos boundaries.

Not in scope

• The video/stream pipeline (StreamPixels and its renderers) and episode editing.
• Storylet weaving in the Aetheria runtime, and any Aetheria code.
• Restoring the deleted autonomous tick driver as it was; unattended simulation, if wanted, is designed in phase 2.
• The failed idunn-odin-* and idunn-streampixels-* units on Yggdrasil (not Ghostlight's).