NEW EARTH is playable

The bug that was actually dark matter

The session started with a red gate. G2 — light deflection — was failing at 30.7% error against the textbook weak-field formula 4GM/c²b. Everything else was green. The obvious move is to hunt for a solver bug.

There was no solver bug. Two things were true instead. First, this world is deliberately strong-field: ψ at the ray's closest approach is ~0.15, and the bend angle is 17.5 degrees. The textbook formula is a linearization that assumes tiny angles; it was being asked a question outside its domain. Second — and this is the good part — the engine world sits in DFD's μ-transition regime. The field gradients here are only ~5–20× the a★ scale, which means μ(x) = x/(1+x) < 1, which means the field decays slower than 2GM/c²r. The planet carries an emergent dark halo. That's not a rendering feature. That's the same mechanism DFD uses to explain galactic rotation curves without cold dark matter, running live in a game engine.

So the fix wasn't to change the solver — it was to make the gate expect what the theory actually predicts. We trace the identical eikonal integrator through the exact spherical solution of the nonlinear field equation (closed form: g = [s + √(s² + 4s·a★)]/2, integrated radially) and compare that against the trace through the solver's grid. Same step size, same gradient stencil, so every discretization bias cancels and the gate measures exactly one thing: solver fidelity.

Result: 0.10% error, at a tolerance we tightened from 20% to 10%. The solver reproduces the theory's strong-field, dark-halo lensing to one part in a thousand. All four gates green.

Finding the real frame time

The bench harness we added this session (camera sweeps 360° over 300 timed frames, prints percentiles) told an ugly story at first: 26 ms median with p95 spikes over a full second. The spikes turned out to be measurement contamination — the ψ solver's post-load catch-up sweeps were running inside the timing window. With honest warmup, the worst frame of the run is 22 ms. The one-second-stall class is dead.

The median was real work though, and the profile was surprising. Shading, shadows, AO: ~1 ms combined. The march itself was the cost — and inside the fine bubble, every ray was crawling at ≤1 m steps through clear air, paying a 49-cell analytic tree scan per step.

The fix is the kind the engine's own discipline demands: no parallel data structures, everything derives from ρ. So we built a coarse distance mip of ρ itself — the 512³ fine bubble reduced to 2 m blocks, trees stamped in from the same hash the shader uses, and a Chebyshev distance transform baked over it. In clear air the shader now reads a single value that says "nothing within N meters" and steps that far. One load replaces 56 buffer fetches and a 25-cell scan. Sky rays stopped burning their entire 100-step budget too: above the solid shell, the remaining atmosphere integral is finished analytically in 6 samples and the ray exits.

Median frame: 29.8 ms → 17.6 ms, measured on the worst case we have (night forest, full scene). Average frame including the old stalls: 85 ms → 18 ms.

It's a game now

Until today you could walk on New Earth and reshape it. Now you can play it. The build opens on a character-select screen: Wanderer (fast), Shaper (bends more of the field per stroke), Warden (iron constitution). Trolls, ogres, and outlaw raiders wander the spawn valley with aggro radii, chase you across the curved surface, and hit hard enough to kill — death sends you back to your bind point, EverQuest-style. Sword swings crit, kills pay XP, levels heal and add vitality. A dwarf named Foreman Duri stands near spawn with a job for you, and the world is carved into eleven named zones that announce themselves as you cross their borders. Every creature walks on the same ρ iso-surface the player does — there is still no second physics system.

The Shaper

The engine now has a resident. Every couple of minutes, The Shaper — an autonomous world-builder running inside the engine — picks a spot near you and raises something out of the density field: a basalt spire, a stone circle, a ruined wall, a watchtower with a hollow interior and a doorway, a cairn field, a half-buried gate. It builds through the exact same CSG edit pipeline as the player's brush, a couple of primitives per frame so nothing ever hitches, and its work persists in the same store as yours. A banner tells you what went up and in which compass direction; walk over and it's simply there, part of the world, diggable like everything else.

This is the seed of the vision: a world that accretes history alongside its players. Today the Shaper is procedural. The architecture it builds through — plan, queue, primitive edits, persistence — is exactly the interface a smarter mind plugs into next.

Play it

The alpha build exists — macOS on Apple Silicon, single-player. The public play button will go live when the game is done; follow the devlog for the moment it lands. Multiplayer is the next milestone, and it's an infrastructure problem, not an engine one.

Engine version v0.10.140. All four physics gates green. One session, one post — that's the rhythm.