M4: Drowned Reach verification

Status: Implemented for alpha playtesting; human balance gate open · 8 September 2026

The approved pack adds an expanded Greyfen frontline, three connected Drowned Reach holdings, a supply convoy, the Sunken Bell encounter, three quests and a second crafted equipment tier. Sword and mace combat now include committed heavy attacks, sustained directional guards and ripostes.

Evidence gathered

• Shared, server and client typechecks pass.
• Existing campaign and frontier interaction suite: twenty passing checks after moving the map.
• Eighteen original Blender modules exported into a shared-material pack: 2,064,828 bytes, one material, each module below 4,000 triangles. tools/validate-environment-models.mjs checks GLB contents, UVs, triangle counts and draw batches.
• Full regression run: 72 tests passed, including 13 expedition checks and six arrival/progression checks. Coverage includes legacy migration exactly once, preserving previous ownership and wounds, six sequential captures and isolation, real proximity and interrupted channels, ward timing and finite phase waves, convoy movement/repair/loss/delivery, material conservation, reward replay, storage-failure rollback, and normal-height melee against the boss.
• Five-client network rehearsal: five independent accounts form a company, all observe the same moving wagon, two clients open the wheels, and all five see a heavy attack damage the exposed boss. The map counts them correctly and omits helper identities. Earlier nodes and character equipment are fixture-prepared; QA invulnerability is enabled. This is mechanics evidence, not difficulty validation.
• Account, banking, company membership and receipt replay survive a separate real server restart in the existing network harness.
• Browser inspection covers the guarded Greyfen gate, marsh landing, aqueduct, abbey and six-node map. The later browser pass also inspected Field Support, the revised map labels and both arrival choices. A fresh account received F2 equipment and reached Blackwater without tutorial completion. The short tutorial counted real weapon strikes and wolf kills; QA teleports and invulnerability shortened traversal and isolated the mechanics. Final frames and public deployment checks are recorded below.

Issues caught and fixed

• Removed scenery from defender and gathering approaches, moved a quest board and relic away from the full wagon width, and tested the complete route.
• Corrected hidden marsh water by matching the basin terrain and pool height.
• Separated Veyr’s displacement resistance from his visible hitbox scale. A real network melee attack now hits him.
• Delayed reward/quest announcements until the database commit; failed convoy or boss reward saves roll back and can retry without duplicate rewards.
• Cached raid paths instead of scanning the whole collision field every frame. Boundaries remain two cached meshes; repeated scenery is spatially instanced and distant foliage is culled.
• Rate-limited exhausted-attack feedback and reserved the controller bumper for heavy melee while sword or mace is equipped.

Acceptance still requiring people

Technical rehearsal does not establish five-player difficulty. M4’s full exit gate requires an equipped human group to clear the frontier through strategy, test failed attempts and recovery, and show useful newcomer participation. Physical controller handling, long M4 Pro frame pacing, high-latency play and a longer economy soak remain open.

The temporary public host runs on Alex’s Mac. This pack does not establish always-on hosting or a supported maximum population. M5–M8 remain future work.

Rendered play and frame delivery

The guarded Greyfen gate, Mirewatch approach and abbey encounter were inspected in the actual game. The mist palette changes gradually into the marsh; the mill wheel turns; Veyr’s visible ward follows his actor. Animated grass remains confined to nearby spatial cells.

Three frame samples each recorded 649 frames after warm-up, with fast camera turns, movement, heavy-attack and guard input, and nearby AI. At 1280 × 633 and pixel ratio 1 in headless Chromium on the M4 Pro, p95 was 16.7–16.8 ms, the 1% low was about 59.5 fps, and no sampled frame exceeded 25 ms. The browser presented at 60 Hz. This does not establish 120 Hz ProMotion, native Retina resolution, a long soak or remote-network smoothness. Input continued when stamina ran low; these are traversal and rendering samples, not a combat balance test.

Full automated test output · Five-client rehearsal

Arrival and equipment follow-up

Six additional automated scenarios pass: fresh F2 entry without old quests, automatic equipment-floor uplift and restart/regression persistence, stronger crafted gear preservation and bounded bonuses, unsafe rally fallback, failed deployment transaction rollback, and the two short tutorial quests with permanent respawning wolves. Repeated deployment does not refill supplies or repair crafted equipment. The wiki now defines this entry contract for each future frontier as well.

Arrival choice · Field Support · Expanded war map

The final browser character also accepted Sable’s first expedition quest through her dialogue and gathered bog iron through the server channel; the quest reached its ready state with the inventory saved.

Temporary online update

The M4 alpha build is served through the existing temporary public entry point. A pre-update SQLite backup was taken. All 23 stored characters, the existing account and previous holding ownership/capture counts were preserved when the world expanded from three to six holdings. Public verification confirmed game/map/wiki availability, two independent authenticated players seeing one another and forming a company, advancing snapshots, rejected unauthenticated connections, and disabled public development tools. Disposable verification accounts and their test company were removed.

The final arrival-build frame sample recorded another 649 frames at the same 60 Hz test setting: p95 16.7 ms, 1% low about 59.5 fps and zero frames above 25 ms after warm-up. This is not a native-resolution or long-session performance claim. The Mac-backed tunnel remains temporary.