The Neural Highway is a long white-matter tract that runs above Threadway. Its axon hangs inside a tinted glass tunnel, and microglia are meant to walk along the tunnel floor beneath it. The plan is to use it as a fast-travel network between places you have already found.
Description#
- The axon is sheathed in myelin, with a node every 12 units and a pylon every 24. Its myelin uses the three tones of the Oligodendrocyte myelin sprite.
- The tunnel spans the whole street (x −3 to 124.6). Its floor is at z 20.75, with 2.4 units of clearance under the myelin.
- The entrance is a porthole in the tunnel wall at node 9, with a brass bezel and a cyan lamp. The upper station deck, reached by the Pneumatic tube, is level with it.
- A pulse animation runs along the axon from west to east.
How it works#
The user's direction (1 November): the highway is a white-matter tract, the cells travel in the tunnel and not on the axon, and each fast-travel point gets a stop. Most stops are just a porthole; only Threadway has a full station. Environment art built a modular kit for this, so the track can appear in the background of every location.
Claude B's services catalog keeps an older "Node station" entry: free, instant travel between discovered landmarks, never during an outing or a home disturbance. It lists four stops: Hearth Grove, Threadway, Starwell and Quiet District. The approved Hearth plan, however, says there is no Node station at Hearth. These two sources have not been reconciled.
In the brain#
White-matter tracts are bundles of myelinated axons that carry signals between distant brain regions. Myelin speeds conduction, which suits a fast-travel network. The tunnel and portholes are fiction.
Development#
- Art: the tract tunnel, porthole and booster arrows are in the user's working P24 scene (environment art report, 2 November). The ambient pulse loop is user-approved. A review of the tract in the live scene is still listed as waiting on the user.
- Not built: treating the tunnel as a walkable corridor and the porthole as a boarding point is a proposal. Neither the lead's Threadway work nor the alpha implements fast travel.
- Open question: whether the tunnel is tall enough for cast-scale microglia.
See also#
Threadway · Pneumatic tube · Travel and movement · Oligodendrocyte
Sources#
5ed726064:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-environment-art-threadway-live-scene.md69c7b5470:src/main-game/game/vendor/services/catalog.js- docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-10-31-claude-codex-todo.md, sections C5, C6 and D (working copy, not in Git)
- docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-workstreams-todo.md, "Waiting on the user" item 5 (working copy, not in Git)
- docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-threadway-final-camera-interactions.md (working copy, not in Git)
- .GAME_PLAN/ARBORWAKE_THE_LONG_WAKE_COMPLETE_GAME_PLAN_v0.5.md, §5 (working copy, not in Git)