Pressure Front (real-time)

Pressure Front was a real-time encounter family. A forecast brought stress "fronts" over a calm room of four tissue patches. Neurons sometimes became over-active (flickers), and resident microglia calmed them. The Ranger steadied the residents before a front and calmed the flickers they missed.

How it worked#

• Alert fronts stood for arousal: residents surveyed less far and calmed more slowly for a while.
• Tides stood for stress-hormone priming: alone they did nothing, but later flickers grew faster.
• A flicker that peaked during a severe front left an echo mark: that patch flared faster for a while.
• Mild fronts habituated when repeated; severe ones did not.
• A neuron driven to 0 was overloaded: it stopped signalling for now, which failed the room. The stress story models temporary overload, never neuron death.

What replaced it#

The 29 October story correction asked for a fresh stress encounter, and said the Pressure Front fragments were not accepted unchanged. Pressure & Aftermath became the Gardens encounter on 31 October. Its turn-based pressure front keeps the forecast idea. "High pressure narrows Survey" carries over the arousal finding.

In the brain#

The family's science line: in awake mice, arousal signals make microglia survey smaller and slower for a while (Liu 2019; Stowell 2019), and repeated severe stress can leave them more reactive for weeks (Wohleb 2014). The studies are in rodents, mostly males.

Development#

Claude A built the family on claude/expeditions (src/expeditions/front/), and Claude B measured the kit in it for kit v4. It was never in the alpha, and the code is kept as prototype history.

See also#

Pressure & Aftermath · Dendritic Gardens · Expeditions (real-time prototype)

Sources#

1. 215bfbf88:docs/game-balance/22-v4-reassessment.mdcopy
2. 215bfbf88:docs/game-balance/31-turn-based-encounters.mdcopy
3. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-10-30-claude-a-expeditions-story-fit.mdcopy
4. 1ded4c01c:AGENTS.mdcopy