MODDING.md calls base-and-overrides "a design constraint on the exporter today,
not a milestone to add later". Nothing read `data/mods/` at all -- the directory
has existed since the monorepo merge with a .gitkeep and no code path anywhere.
Eight milestones shipped past it.
ExportTree.resolve() now shadows by path, and every read goes through it:
screens, sprites, cues, the music bed, movies. MenuAudio was reading tree.root
directly and would otherwise have made audio the one asset kind a mod could not
touch, for no reason a modder could have guessed. No manifest, no registration
step -- the path IS the registration, which is the whole of the rule. One tree,
not a stack: layering needs a load order and nobody has asked for one, so
data/mods/README.md says that rather than inventing it.
Every shadowed file is printed as it is read. The first version summarised in
_ready, before any asset had been read, so it always said "nothing shadowed yet"
-- a report structurally incapable of reporting anything, which is worse than
none because it looks like an answer.
data/mods/ was NOT gitignored, and that is a hole in a hard rule: a mod is
usually an edited game asset, and this was the one directory a user is invited
to put modified sprites in and git would have taken them. Now excluded except
the README.
Gate: a synthetic 203x43 magenta PNG (nothing disc-derived) at
data/mods/sprites/title/main_menu/ptbtn01.png changes 8501 pixels in a bounding
box of exactly 203x43 at the button's position, and `check` still passes.
RAISED, NOT RESOLVED: MODDING.md says the tree is data/base/, PORT-MISSION.md §3
and the exporter and .gitignore say export/. Both are mission files and only the
human changes a mission.
REFUTATION on Q3's paint-order key: 2 of 16 screens did not match a stable sort
by layer key -- but that was my test. pgloading_eff00.prm carries NO layer key
(layer_source "none"): a primitive with no sprite header and no implied-name
fallback. I sorted keyless first; the decoders put it last, which is right,
since it is the full-screen black quad and HANDOFF's own sentence is that the
fade quad paints last. Completing the rule to "keyless last" gives 16 of 16.
SURVIVES. Recorded because the published claim does not say where a keyless
element goes and there is one in the archive. Separately the tie-break's reach
looks understated: 105 elements share a layer key across 12 of 16 screens, where
HANDOFF characterises the cost as "one element's blend on one screen".
WITHDRAWN, and it was mine: I filed "the runtime mix has no headroom" in red
twice, off a peak reading. Measured properly it is 43 samples at full scale in
5.9 s and 24 in 98.5 s, longest run 0.25 ms -- the disc's own confirm cue on a
transient, possibly only in the 16-bit save. Nothing changed, deliberately:
attenuating would be an unmeasured level decision of the kind I refused for the
loop point. A peak reading is not a clipping measurement.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WM5XL4HfrHuxz8RiMWdCMC
b37ad246ff