Syplheed-Reborn/docs/re/mission-objectives-text.md

The mission script in plain English — and why phase 1 never completed

Status: ✅ the localised string tables are decoded and readable; ✅ the phase structure is confirmed narratively and by roster composition; 🟡 a concrete, testable reason the phase never advanced in any run.

✅ IXUD — the localised string container

language\*_local_string.tbl (the prefix is language\, a third convention after stage\ and message\) is not IDXD. Magic is IXUD, and its strings are UTF-16 big-endian. That is why every earlier ASCII-oriented dump of these files produced garbage.

Reading them is immediate once the encoding is known, and it makes the mission design directly legible instead of inferred.

✅ Stage 02's nine sub-objectives, in words

id	text
SUBOBJ_005	You rescued the ally destroyer!
SUBOBJ_006	You destroyed all enemy fighters!
SUBOBJ_007	You sunk all enemy warships!
SUBOBJ_008	You rescued the ally cruiser, Amalthea!
SUBOBJ_010	The ally cruiser CALIBAN took no damage!
SUBOBJ_011	You sunk the enemy destroyer targeting the ACROPOLIS!
SUBOBJ_013	You destroyed all enemy cruise missiles!
SUBOBJ_014	You destroyed all enemy missiles and units!

(SUBOBJ_009 has no text.) 91 objectives are defined across the game.

✅ The three phases, confirmed twice over

The guide script reads as three distinct acts, and each matches the per-phase roster composition found independently in mission-phase-deployment.md:

phase	script	roster
1	"The attackers with the orange markers, right?", "Protect the ACROPOLIS!"	turrets, attackers, fighters
2	"destroy the ship's engine", "destroy that ship's weapons", "take out the enemy's shield projector"	destroyers, frigates, cruisers
3	"start by taking out that missile", "Concentrate on destroying the missiles one by one"	UN_e201_ADAN_ISCMissile ×9

Phase 3's nine cruise missiles against SUBOBJ_013 "You destroyed all enemy cruise missiles!" is an exact match between two files decoded on different days by different routes.

🟡 Why phase 1 never advanced: the pilot killed the wrong things

The phase-1 objective is stated outright — destroy the marked attackers:

"Rhinos, prepare for combat. Are you all clear on your targets?" "The attackers with the orange markers, right? Roger that!" "Katana, those attackers are our targets!"

Those are UN_e010_ADAN_Attacker_S, of which phase 1 fields four squadrons.

The hunting pilot targeted turrets almost exclusively. Every loss line in the run logs reads UN_e007_ADAN_Turret, with UN_e010_ADAN_Attacker_S appearing only twice across all runs — unsurprising, since SYLPH_HUNT was built to make turrets targets and SYLPH_KEEPOUT was tuned for them. So 42 kills were overwhelmingly the wrong 42.

That gives a mundane explanation for the whole run of null results, and it does not require the frames reading or event-gating to be settled first.

Prediction: destroying the phase-1 UN_e010_ADAN_Attacker_S squadrons should advance the phase, which is directly observable as deployed jumping from 41 toward the phase-2 roster.

Test: a pilot that prioritises e010 over e007 — a target-preference knob, not new decoding — and the existing probe watching deployed.

This is 🟡, not ✅: the objective text is certain, but that this particular objective gates the phase advance is inference from the script's structure.

---

The target-preference knob works, and the blocker is now combat, not RE (2026-08-24)

✅ SYLPH_PREFER added and measured

pilot.py gained a target-preference knob: a unit-name substring whose matches get their target score multiplied by 0.05 and everything else by 4.0. With SYLPH_PREFER=e010, one clean 320 s run (witness: 0 stalls):

killed	count
UN_e007_ADAN_Turret	8
UN_e010_ADAN_Attacker_S	2

The preference is real — e010 kills went from about one across all previous runs to two in a single run — but it is weak: turrets still outnumber attackers 4:1 in the kill log. Target commitment (COMMIT_MAX, COMMIT_DROP) and simple proximity keep pulling the nose back to turrets, which are far more numerous.

deployed stayed at 41 throughout. No phase advance.

🚧 The blocker, quantified

Phase 1's roster, by craft rather than by squadron:

unit	members	craft (sum(n))
UN_e007_ADAN_Turret	12	108
UN_e106_ADAN_Destroyer	7	7
UN_f001_TCAF_DeltaSaber_T	7	7
UN_e010_ADAN_Attacker_S	4	16

Clearing the marked attackers means destroying 16 craft. At the measured rate of 2 per 320 s that is ~2560 s — roughly 43 minutes of continuous verified-live flight, across many chained attaches, with a freeze rate of about two runs in five.

This is no longer a reverse-engineering problem. Everything needed to observe the phase advance is built and validated: the roster link, the liveness read, the stall witness, chained attaches, the discard rule. What is missing is a pilot good enough to actually complete the mission objective, and that is game-playing work with an uncertain payoff.

The choice, which is the user's to make

1. Invest in the pilot — better target selection, missiles, using the marker/lock the script keeps referring to. Uncertain, potentially several iterations, and drifts away from RE.
2. Accept the static answer. The phase structure, per-phase rosters, route paths and objective texts are all decoded and cross-confirmed. Only the trigger is inferred rather than observed, and it is inferred from the game's own guide script naming the objective outright.
3. One very long run — 40+ minutes of chained attaches — betting against the freeze rate.

Recorded rather than chosen, because it is a question about how much effort this one confirmation is worth, not a technical unknown.