The entrance that wasn't
written 2026-09-05Ruins on the board used to be one shape, tinted by theme. They are now 4 themes at 3 tiers of decay each, plus a marker for the ones nobody has found yet — 13 generated assets in total, and the same rule chapter four's tower broke turned up again, in the one shape whose whole job is to look tall.
A ruin on the board is not scenery the way a tree or a rock is — it is a dungeon entrance, and the whole point of the shape is to read as an opening someone would walk into. The ticket that ordered these said so as a number rather than a description: whatever the theme, the finished shape's height has to be at least 0.8 times its own widest footprint, or it does not ship. Not "looks tall enough" — a ratio, checked against the delivered file, every time this project's tests run.
6 of the 13 cleared that on the first attempt. 2 more needed a second attempt for a reason that had nothing to do with shape — the service they were ordered from stopped answering mid-job, twice, and came back with an unrelated model. The remaining 5 failed the actual bar, and one of those took three tries to fix.
Anything set like 0.0665 was measured by a machine and generated into this page from the committed results. Everything else was written by a person.
Five ruins read as mounds, not doorways
A cave mouth described as a boulder, an entrance framed as a mound of earth, a doorway asked for as a bank — each is a perfectly ordinary way to describe that kind of feature in words, and each is also, read literally by something turning words into a shape, an instruction to build something wider than it is tall. Three tiers of one theme all failed the ratio this way, measuring 0.273, 0.627 and 0.577 against a floor of 0.8 — shapes closer to a speed bump than a doorway.
The fix in every one of those four cases was the same, and it was cheap: stop describing the feature by the shape of the ground around it, and say what its height should be instead. All four passed on the very next attempt.
The fifth one took three attempts, and the second made it worse
One tier of one theme — a cave mouth breaking through the face of a rock spire — failed the same way first, at 0.312. The obvious next move looked like the one that had just worked four times over: say plainly what the shape should not do. Don't read as a boulder. Don't recede backward into a tunnel.
It came back measuring 0.440 — worse than the attempt it was meant to replace. The picture beside the file still looked like a plausible narrow spire, camera angle and all. The file itself was not: 0.399 wide, 0.879 tall, 0.440 deep — a thin blade of a shape, stretched almost entirely in the one direction the picture's own angle happened to hide.
This project has hit that exact split once before, on a building rather than a ruin: a shape that measures nothing like its own reference picture, because the picture's camera angle was never going to show the axis that was wrong. Naming what to avoid had not suppressed the wrong shape at all — if anything, it had made the model lean into the very thing it was told not to do. The fix that actually worked was to stop naming the mistake and say what the correct shape looked like instead: a footprint that reads as roughly square from above, with the extra size going into height rather than depth. That, on the third attempt, is what shipped — 2.533 against a floor of 0.8.
One archway missed by a hair
A grand vault archway came back at 0.775 — under the 0.8 floor, but only just, and nothing about the picture beside it looked wrong at that scale. The fix was the smallest of the batch: ask for a narrower, more emphatically tall opening, nothing else changed. It shipped at 1.435.
The distance between a pass and a fail here was small enough that it is worth saying plainly: this was not a shape that was obviously wrong to look at. It was wrong by a number, on a bar that exists precisely because "looks about right" is not a bar a ruin's opening can be trusted to actually clear.
The record
Every quantity on this page was read out of the committed files by a script and written into the page's data, so it cannot drift from the file it came from — a test regenerates it and fails on any difference. The prose around them is written by hand, which is exactly why it can be wrong in ways a test cannot catch.
The temple and the boats that share this ticket shipped without a story of their own — a few variants each, so a map does not read as one temple copied onto every mystic site. Nothing about ordering them went wrong.