Tag Garden

The Tag Garden is an optional side room in the Dendritic Gardens. A developing neuron receives several incoming connections. Some carry signals often, some rarely. Your job is to refine the circuit: trim the quiet inputs and keep the active ones.

How it works#

• Tags are hints, not verdicts. A complement-like tag raises the odds that an input is quiet. A CD47-like shield lowers them. Either can be wrong.
• Inspect shows an input's pulses this round. The skill is gathering enough rounds of evidence before you cut.
• Trim is a new verb, not Tend. A cut is final: there is no Undo after it, though Rewind still works.
• Trimming an active input dims the circuit and closes the side cache. Nothing is lost, and the door out is always open.

Development#

• Real time (27 October): Claude A built it as family A, side rooms only. Claude B found it "skill-agnostic", which suits an optional observation puzzle.
• Turn-based (1 November): the user approved the location page, which places the Tag Garden as a Gardens side room, not a run location. The engine's Trim action is built and works on input targets. Claude A's tag-garden shell exists among the approved Gardens shells, but no turn-based Tag Garden room is in the alpha.

In the brain#

In developing mouse brains, complement tags (C1q, C3) raise the odds that weak connections are removed, and CD47 lowers them (Stevens 2007; Schafer 2012; Lehrman 2018). Microglia mostly nibble pieces of terminals rather than swallow whole synapses (Weinhard 2018). Must not claim: that pruning is damage, or that "quiet inputs are trimmed" is a rule in adults.

See also#

Location verbs · Dendritic Gardens · Expeditions (real-time prototype)

Sources#

1. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-a-expeditions-location-mechanics.mdcopy
2. 215bfbf88:docs/game-balance/31-turn-based-encounters.mdcopy
3. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-a-expeditions-turn-based-rooms.mdcopy