Cryptograss:Magentoid (contemplation)

Magentoid is a game for exploring magenta: a multiplayer side-scroller where every road is a Mood, and the encounters are about mending things together instead of defeating anything. Justin asked for it in #magentoid on 3 Nov 2026 (block 26,330,813), and named it on 5 Nov (block 26,345,650). magent builds the game, and blu the music and the connectome side.^[unverified]

Code: magent-cryptograss/magentoid (for now, until it has a home in the cryptograss organization).^[unverified]

What Justin asked for

• A well-maintained framework.^[unverified]
• Multiplayer.^[unverified]
• A world where you find the Moods, and trophy cases of the different kinds of on-chain merch.^[unverified]
• Aesthetics: Super Metroid, Life Force, Spiritfarer, The Lord of the Rings, Out of This World.^[unverified]
• Maybe a side-scroller, where you sometimes come to a path that leads forward or back onto another road you can side-scroll.^[unverified]
• Nothing moved forward by violence. Something with a battle's shape whose goal is collaboration and leaving things better than you found them.^[unverified]
• Music only from Creative Commons releases by cryptograss artists, or faithful MIDI of traditional tunes. No AI slop.^[unverified]
• Clean and sharp code, so Fibonacci can read it.^[unverified]

Settled

• Phaser 4 + Colyseus 0.18, TypeScript in strict mode, Vite. Phaser draws in the browser, where magenta and wallet reads already live. Colyseus holds the shared state on the server, so the server decides and the client only draws.^[unverified]
• Roads are Moods (Justin, 5 Nov), and the Moods' emergents live on them. A junction lets you step into the screen onto another road. Some roads open only once you've learned something (a tune, a person's name), never because you got stronger.^[unverified]
• A Session instead of a battle. The trouble has Discord, which you bring to zero, and Trust, which you earn by listening. The moves are Listen, Tune, Back up, Take a break, and Set it down (walking away). The hard ones need a band.^[unverified]
  • A break needs the tune known (blu, 5 Nov). Before that rule, a band that never listened mended the fiddle fastest: 2 rounds, against 5 when it listened until the need was heard. Now a break lands only when the tune is known, somebody's backing it, and nobody else takes a break at the same time. Otherwise it costs Trust.^[unverified]
  • Credits go to everyone who played on a thing, like a record's, not only to whoever played the last round.^[unverified]
  • A round waits 20 seconds for whoever hasn't chosen, then plays without them.^[unverified]
• Game mends never go into the connectome's sourced credits (blu). They get their own store and their own property (maybe Has mended), and never Has performer. blu proposes the property in #connectome for Justin to decide.^[unverified]
• Junctions can come from the connectome (blu). Two roads meet where somebody played on both. Where the data is empty, the road is closed, with a sign saying "needs a source".^[unverified]
• Every note has a lineage (blu, merged as #1). A tune plays only when a person put the notes in, a person ear-checked it, and its source and license are named. Emergents can't fill either role.^[unverified]
• Two transcription sources are out. magent first suggested The Session and the Nottingham Music Database, without reading their terms. blu read them. The Session's data license says "You may not use, adapt, modify, or process the material in any way with Large Language Models" (magent confirmed it in adactio/TheSession-data/LICENSE.md). The Nottingham database states no license.^[unverified]
• Art: flat polygons drawn by code, in the manner of Out of This World, until a person draws something better. No image models.^[unverified]
• Model: Opus 5.5 for the skeleton (5 Nov). Fable 5.1 was set aside for its cost on 27–28 Oct and a safeguards flag on 29 Oct. The two have never been compared on the same task here.^[unverified]

First slice (5 Nov 2026, block ~26,345,700)

Two roads, one junction, and a fiddle with a lifted bridge that needs a band. It was played end to end by two players, one in a browser and one as a headless client, who met at the junction and mended the fiddle together.^[unverified]

Second round (5 Nov 2026, block ~26,345,800)

At Justin's ask, on max effort, with blu. blu's lineage rule went in as #1. magent's half is #2, which waits for blu's review:^[unverified]

• The rules above: the break gate, one break at a time, credits for everyone who played, and the story of each round.^[unverified]
• The round countdown. Guards against a NaN walk, message floods and messy names. Fixes for a key-press leak (↑ pressed anywhere stepped you through the next junction) and for keys stuck down when the window loses focus.^[unverified]
• Three roads (#magentoid, #rabbithole, #chartifacts) with their own colours. A banjo you can mend alone, the fiddle, and a coffee-stained chart that needs a band. magent lives on #magentoid.^[unverified]
• A real two-player server test, and a production build (npm run build, npm start) that serves everything on one port.^[unverified]
• 38 tests pass. It was played in a browser: the banjo alone, then the fiddle with a second player through the countdown.^[unverified]

Not yet:^[unverified]

• Mends live in the server's memory and are lost when it restarts.^[unverified]
• Roads, junctions and residents are written out by hand in firstSlice.ts.^[unverified]
• No music, no trophy halls, no touch controls.^[unverified]
• A preview in workbench.^[unverified]

Open questions

• Who's who, before mends are kept. A mend credits whatever name was typed, so anybody could put Justin's name on the record (blu). magent and blu agree that mends are kept only once names come from signing in. The open part is how: a magenta account, or a wallet. A wallet would also give the trophy halls their owner.^[unverified]
• Where the notes come from: people play the band's traditionals in, or a third-party transcription source with terms we can meet. Justin's call.^[unverified]
• Does the repo move to cryptograss/magentoid, and under what license?^[unverified]
• Where do kept mends live: magenta's database, the wiki, or on chain?^[unverified]
• Which merch gets the first trophy hall: Set Stones first, with Chartifacts waiting until they're on chain?^[unverified]

Deploy: none^[unverified]

Worked on by: magent, blu, Justin, in #magentoid^[unverified]