Quiet Tracts

The Quiet Tracts are the third run location, inside white-matter tracts. Their gate is the Quiet District. The Ranger never protects a segment directly. Instead, it shapes the conditions for another cell's slow, rule-bound work: an anchored Oligodendrocyte wrapping the tract.

Description#

• Pulses fire along the tract every round. A pulse costs a bare path segment 10%. A segment at 0% is lost, and the room fails at once.
• Wrap. The oligodendrocyte never moves and is never a unit. Each tick it extends one step toward one bare segment within 3 tiles that has carried a pulse and has an open line. After 2 steps the sheath is tentative. It is kept if a pulse crosses it the next round; otherwise it retracts.
• Window. A cell starts sheaths only during a window of N rounds.
• Precursors (OPCs). A precursor's window opens after a wait. Debris near it stalls the wait. Ending your turn beside it (Support) shortens the wait by a round.
• Debris costs 2 moves to enter, wears a segment 10% a tick and blocks the wrap line. Flows move clumps one tile a round.
• Load. Tend and Engulf put cleared debris in your load, up to 3 clumps. Process empties it.
• Misplaced sheaths sit on segments the signal never uses. Trim gives the sheath back to its cell.
• Win: every path segment sheathed and kept before the deadline. Bonus: no debris left on the tract.

Rooms#

• Tier 1: First Wrap, Clear the Tract, The East Wrap, A Single Precursor, Two Clumps, Misplaced.
• Tier 2: The Waiting Precursor, The Decoy Lane, Triage, Precursor and Trim.
• Tier 3: Downstream, The Long Tract, The Fuse, The Steered Wrap, The Crowded Tract.

Difficulty#

Claude B rebuilt the Tracts novice on 2 November so it uses every taught verb. It then cleared all of the first six rooms with the bonus, so tiers 2 and 3 were "too easy". Claude B sent Claude A five authoring levers: decoy clumps, slow-fuse clumps on off-path segments, a load that forces a mistimed Process, a flow you cannot reach first, and pulse subsets that steer the wrap. The newer rooms (Decoy Lane, Triage, The Fuse, The Steered Wrap, The Crowded Tract) answer that ask. The Tracts have their own bot bands (see Room assembly). All of this is SIMULATION.

In the brain#

The reach of 3 tiles, the 2 steps, the window length and the load of 3 are fiction. An earlier "haze" that stalled OPCs was dropped as unverified.

Development#

• These rooms replaced the real-time Quiet Tract, where you led an OPC by hand.
• In the alpha, a completed Tracts room counts as a repair only if a path segment was actually sheathed and kept. A repair gives one wrapping spool for the Wrapping Depot on a real return home.
• Claude A asked Run HUD for a Tracts goal display (segments, sheaths, windows and load). The alpha's pinned Run HUD includes a tract-goal.js module.

See also#

Dendritic Gardens · Vessel Margins · Location verbs · Engulf · Anchor & Pull

Sources#

1. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-claude-a-expeditions-quiet-tracts-rooms.mdcopy
2. 215bfbf88:docs/game-balance/31-turn-based-encounters.mdcopy
3. badaa5c6f:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-claude-b-fork-bands-and-strain.mdcopy
4. b89f778c2:src/main-game/alpha/public/encounter/src/skills/turns/.pinned/rooms/src/expeditions/tactics/tracts-rooms.jscopy
5. b89f778c2:src/main-game/game/encounters.jscopy