What shipped today Today closed the loop on the v1 foundation and then deliberately pushed upstream into the generator. The first theme of the day was contract and pipeline cleanup: the remaining v1 issue work landed on main, the canonical renderer/linter boundary was locked in, the release layout was simplified around release.yaml plus events/, and the Windows build/lint path stayed clean through each change. By the end of that pass, the supported v1 surface was explicit and stable: standalone, anomaly, and site are in; situation is out of the playable bar and tracked as phase 2.

The second theme was generator hardening. Instead of treating script 1 as a loose YAML emitter, the generator now behaves much more like a real filter. It defaults to the v1-supported kinds, generates standalone follow-ups as separate triggered-only files, fails honestly when child generators under-produce, retries invalid AI attempts inside a bounded budget, rejects candidates that violate outcome templates, and rejects candidates that trip the existing pure-upside or within-batch repetition checks. That matters because the project goal is not “we can hand-fix generated YAML until it works”; it is “the generator produces something worth rendering and testing on its own.”

The last theme was documentation and recovery. I wrote down the actual project state in STATUS.md, updated the README/contract/how-to/roadmap/decisions docs to match reality, and closed the now-complete v1 milestone. The repo now explains where we are without relying on chat memory: the renderer/linter side is stable, the generator is getting stricter, and the next honest step is a fresh end-to-end generated release playtest rather than more architectural churn.

Completed

• #140 Document Phantasmagoria namespace and ID allocation rules for monthly releases
• #141 Align source validation with the documented v1 YAML contract
• #142 Clarify or fix validate_outcomes.py release mode for the current events/ layout
• #144 Make script 1 generate only v1-supported YAML by default
• #146 Fix standalone generator follow-up output to use separate triggered-only files
• #148 Align release scaffolding with the v1 chapter-based YAML contract
• #149 Retire remaining legacy draft/published release-layout references
• #151 Update GitHub Actions workflow dependencies for Node 24 compatibility
• #154 Make batch generation fail when child generators under-produce
• #156 Retry invalid AI attempts before failing generation counts
• #158 Fail generation when new YAML violates outcome templates
• #160 Retry generated candidates that trip pure-upside or batch-diversity warnings
• Closed milestone v1 (15/15 issues closed)

Release progress

• v1.5: 0/1 closed
• v2: 0/2 closed

Carry-over

• Run the first real end-to-end playtest loop for a fresh generated release: create release, generate, source-lint, render Windows build, rendered-mod lint, then load it in Stellaris
• Assess whether the newly generated choices feel distinct and interesting in play, not just structurally valid
• If the first playtest still feels repetitive, create and implement the next generator issue around overlap with the existing release corpus on disk, not just the current batch
• Decide whether #136 should come next as a release-prep nicety or wait until after the first generator-produced playtest release

Risks

• The generator is now stricter, so failed batches may become more common before prompt quality catches up with the new guardrails
• Current repetition protection is batch-local; it does not yet strongly prevent overlap with already-existing events in a release
• Static quality gates can reject obviously weak output, but they still cannot prove actual in-game fun or narrative distinctness

Flags and watch-outs

• Windows is still the real smoke-test target even though development is happening on macOS
• situation remains experimental and is not part of the supported v1 playable bar
• The source of truth for “where are we?” is now the combination of STATUS.md, WORKING_MOD_CONTRACT.md, and the updated ROADMAP.md
• The project is using direct Python CLIs now; make is gone from the live workflow

Next session

1. Create a fresh throwaway release chapter with scripts/create_release.py
2. Run scripts/generate_release.py --release-code ... --execute
3. Run scripts/validate_release.py --release-code ... and scripts/validate_outcomes.py --release ...
4. Render a Windows build with stellaris_mod_renderer.py
5. Lint it with stellaris_mod_linter.py
6. Load that build in Stellaris and judge the actual event feel
7. If the content still overlaps too much with existing material, open and implement the next generator issue around corpus-level overlap detection