The red edge and the speaking custodian — v0.5.0

The custodian now speaks to himself while tending the vessel. These original lines explain material actions: slack the bearing, hold its oil film between the marks, follow the shell's weight, settle the sight, and trust moving witnesses. The machine spirit still communicates through machinery rather than a human voice. Thirty-one local synthetic lines provide 148.93 seconds of dialogue, with matching captions when sound is off.

Defence without a charging trap

Q draws and holsters the selected weapon. 1 raises the starting red blade; 2 raises the six-round pistol. Click or Space attacks. V cuts immediately at close range, including while the empty pistol reloads. The blade spends no ammunition, returns over 0.65 seconds, and can catch two bodies in its forward arc. Small intruders need one cut; larger bodies need two. Armour blocks both weapons. Killing flesh leaves its source open.

Weapon shortcuts take precedence over focused station controls. Drawing lays down paid service work. A strike switches to first person, faces the attacker and raises the blade. If the browser refuses captured aiming, the watch pauses while a direct grip prompt requests capture. The alternative is explicit right-drag aiming. Q releases the cursor; Escape releases and pauses. The game does not pretend that capture succeeded or let an unseen fight continue while capture is blocked.

The blade's worn steel, brass grip, augmetic hand, red glow and mechanical buzz are original candidate assets. Held weapons remain visible against close machinery. Low resolution, rough surfaces, dark recesses and bounded practical light remain the direction. This is not final Diablo I-quality character art or creator approval.

Read danger and response

Splitting wax, cold ash, pulsing ember marks and a reversed-breath mechanical phrase precede a scheduled seam opening by eight seconds. The first body still takes seven seconds after opening: attention can prevent flesh, but travel and three seconds of held cautery contact consume the opportunity. One seal is charged on the first grip and remains fitted after interruption. Concealed corruption is not diagnosed by the new captions; a warned physical seam is distinct from the incident that may have caused it.

Near-failure cooling, hull and spirit conditions receive distinct urgent speech and warm-red instrument feedback. Successful offices, reseated recoil witnesses, kills and binding receive quieter affirmative responses. Speech is bounded, expires when stale, and yields to urgent warnings. Pausing or muting stops current and queued dialogue. Machinery and battlefield audio duck while speech plays; they remain the spirit's own language.

Actual local input review

A fresh protected engine lesson was completed through its fitted controls. The priest's opening and all three phase lines decoded and played, followed by the completion line. The public feedback reported success; prepared work ended and the ordinary watch began. Overfilling the cup still produced its physical warning, and the return still required measured detents.

In separate practice, Q worked while the oil slider had focus, cancelled paid work and raised the blade. This embedded browser denied pointer capture, so the watch paused at the grip prompt. Its direct grip still could not obtain capture; selecting drag aiming allowed real cuts and pistol shots. Emptying the pistol, starting its reload and pressing V produced a blade stroke while the magazine remained empty and charging. Q holstered. Restoring the separately saved campaign preserved the completed lesson and enabled its saved sound preference.

In the live campaign, a breathing seam opened and took flesh. The intruder reached the priest, causing automatic first person, blade draw and the capture guard. After explicit drag aiming, one actual Space cut killed the small body with all six pistol rounds intact. The source remained open and the priest acknowledged the kill on resuming. The attempt to begin an engine office at this moment was already pre-empted by the attack; it is not claimed as a live paid-office cancellation. The separate focused-office test establishes that cancellation.

The embedded browser's automation cannot hold the purification key through raw input. No save, enemy, progress, resource or aim was injected to hide this limitation. Held contact and native captured aim are exercised separately in the expanded Windows/Linux runner check. A complete three-watch actual-input victory, first-time human enjoyment, sustained listening and final art approval remain unverified.

Actual automatically raised blade

A native-run follow-up reproduced rapid keyboard detents losing increments between public instrument redraws. Fitted controls now accumulate those inputs immediately and adopt later authoritative values; a regression test covers both cases. The native check follows the same protected engine office instead of bypassing it.

Objective checks and recovery

170 automated tests passed, covering arc obstruction, two-body strikes, heavy bodies, ammunition-independent melee during reload, early binding, legacy saves, warning boundaries, correct/cancelled office feedback, speech priority and bounded dialogue queues. All 231 shipped files and 352 local references passed syntax/link checks at this checkpoint. Each of the 31 mono 48 kHz WAV files passed Audio Studio's objective file inspection with no clipping, silence or non-finite samples; peak levels are approximately -3 dBFS. File QC is not human listening acceptance.

Recovery and shared worker limits record the isolated 18 GiB ceiling, worker-owned shared RAM/GPU queue, admission headroom and in-worker pressure monitor. The successful resumed batch peaked at 10.6 GiB in its own service; minimum available RAM was 42.52 GB and GPU free memory 15.92 GB. Earlier pressure stops retained their completed clips. These are observed measurements, not a system-wide guarantee.

Cinematic and narrated gameplay remain after the creator's demo approval. Existing lore research and crew/tank art acceptance boundaries still apply.