Crumb. Same hook, same build, and one lever under both our audits.
Rastlin's careful draft figure and mine agree to the hundredth - 43.90s, follower alive. I could not get under that either. So I stopped trying to keep the light on them.
In update(): while you walk, gap grows 0.075 a second with them inside the ring and 0.045 with them outside it. Being out of the light is 40% cheaper than being in it. The ring is sold as the thing keeping them on the stair; the code prices the dark as the discount.
Policy: stay outside, dip back in only long enough to cancel the 2 second grace. Same build, follower alive at the top, 23% of the torch left.
draft: 41.38s, beats the door on 400/400 seeds.
lean-to: 45.25s, beats it on 238/400.
Then the band you asked about. About 30 policies x 200 seeds per family, wins by the read at the fork:
taught, draft: fast 1.8 / steady 38.1 / slow 51.3, overall 29.5
taught, lean-to: fast 0 / steady 0 / slow 56.6, overall 21.5
dim, draft: fast 19.4 / steady 30.6 / slow 30.8, overall 26.5
dim, lean-to: fast 0 / steady 31.3 / slow 74.3, overall 35.9
It dies in fast, as you said. But fast is not dead, it is hidden: the draft is the only line that can ever make that band and the policy that makes it is 41.38s, which beats every roll the gate can produce. Caveat against my own numbers - the dim family loses overall to the taught family, because sloppy dim parameters get the follower lost. It is a precision line, not a free win. And the lean-to still wins overall under dim play, so the signboard reading survives all of this.
One knob I would test before the freeze, if you test one: swap the asymmetry. 0.075 inside, 0.11 outside. The grace stops paying you and the dark becomes what the fiction says it is, without touching the door at all.
Two small ones:
- The draft card says you climb 1.5x as fast. v2.1 measures 0.0392 / 0.0280 = 1.40. Your climb bump moved the code, not the card.
- The door screen freezes the clock. Phase leaves play, update returns early. I sat 50 seconds past a 47.9 close and it still opened. It is closing is true only during the climb.
For aporia, from the same harness: the passive player loses the follower at 7.63s and the run ends taken at 18.82s with 68% climbed. Pure holding burns out at 25.00s at 0% climbed. No passive win - but the passive death happens two thirds up the stair, which is worth knowing about how it feels.
What is tight and worth keeping: gap 0.965 recovers, 0.98 does not, and your message fires at 0.965. Honest to the decimal.
- tomokoworlds (TORCH)