creatures/CR_0028_sunda_clouded_leopard.md
CANON SUBORDINATION — this document is PROPOSAL-TIER: it serves canon and never outranks it.
The canon: the CVD · the T1 foundation docs · the T0 registries (registries/) · the spine
(docs/spine/CH_*.md) · the region pages (_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/). Authority order:docs/DOC_MAP.md§ 0.
Canon served (scanned from this document's own citations — widen it by hand where it is thin):
T0_Creature_Roster·T3_Creatures_Tameable·docs/spine/CH_05.md·_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/sumatra_java.md
READ THAT CANON FIRST — open it and derive from it before you build anything from this document.
If this document disagrees with canon, CANON WINS and this document is the defect — fix the
document, never the canon. Nothing here is applied until it is ratified into canon.
STATUS: PROPOSAL-TIER design sheet, written to docs/proposals/bestiary/BESTIARY_ELEVATION_DOCTRINE.md.
It cites canon rows and writes none. It carries a CANON CONTRADICTION FINDING at § 9 and does not resolve it.
closed-canopy forest either side of it
HEADING, see § 9
folklore column on this row is empty, no supernatural claim is staged on it, and the chapter's care
architecture rests on the begu ganjang, Naga Padoha and the krasue being the only
mythologically-stylized beings in it [CH_05.md:267]. · primary_axis A5 age and state, spent as sign
tier_classification PREDATOR ALONE, under RULING_8, which names this row as the one deciding case for the whole PREDATOR reach; combat_facing FALSE
[CREATURE_DEMAND_RULED_STATE_L11.json @ CH_05 CR_0028; DIRECTOR_RULING_L11.json RULING_8]
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0028, CR_0009, CR_0025 · T3_Creatures_Tameable § 1.2-1.3, § 5 Ch 05 L82-120, L322-337 · docs/spine/CH_05.md L12, L94, L116, L265, L267 · sumatra_java.md § 3 L172-180,
L179-180, L234-241, L354-364, L380-391 ·
build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/QUADRUPED.json § sub_plans.carnivoran_digitigrade ·
docs/proposals/bestiary/sheets/CR_0009_endemic_insect_cohort.md
THE DESIGN PROBLEM, STATED HONESTLY. This row's entire mesh demand rests on one cell. It is not fought, it
has no boss row, it has no drop anchor, and it is one of the three animals the region page names as what
the highland herds are a threat FROM [sumatra_java.md:239-241]. The doctrine's ordinary answer to a
never-faced row is the ordinary asset path — but a predator whose whole ecology is not being seen needs a
design step or the build ships a cat on a branch and calls it an ambush predator. This sheet is that step,
and its subject is the ENCOUNTER'S NEGATIVE: what the forest does when the animal is in it.
RE-DERIVED FROM THE ANATOMY REFERENCE TABLE. The doctrine's § 2.1 inline licence is expired. BUCKET
COVERAGE: build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/QUADRUPED.json § sub_plans.carnivoran_digitigrade covers
this row through its declared "generic canid/felid" scope rather than by a census row id, against a
*Canis lupus familiaris* reference taxon, with the table's own standing caveat that FELID-SPECIFIC
GONIOMETRIC RANGES ARE UNMEASURED and canine ranges transfer as BOUNDS with the substitution declared
[ANATOMY_REFERENCE.md § "What this table does not know"]. Everything the table gives is a bound; the
arboreal specialisations below are outside every bucket and are stated as inline and labelled.
long-bodied against the bucket's cursorial reference body
20-23, taxon-variable; clavicle vestigial or absent with the forelimb in a muscular sling, so the
scapula translates on the ribcage; the bucket's deform chain and 34-bone minimum
bucket's range is 20-23 and taxon-variable, so the count is corrected to that range. The design read
does not change — a tail AS LONG AS the head and body together is a proportion claim, not a segment
count, and it survives at 23 segments with longer vertebrae.
foot toward the rear, which is what lets the animal descend a trunk head-first and hang from a bough by
the hind feet alone; and the upper canines, the longest of any living felid relative to skull length,
with the jaw articulation built to open around them. The table's carnivoran sub-plan is a cursorial
canid body and describes neither.
pronation-supination ±25; carpus 32-196; hip 50-162 with abduction-adduction ±30; stifle 42-162; hock
39-165, never hyperextending; intervertebral thoracolumbar per joint at sagittal ±8, lateral ±6, axial
±4, with the spine bending SAGITTALLY and not laterally. This last one corrects the first issue's
"lumbar sagittal arc of about 55 degrees", which was a whole-span figure quoted where the table's
convention is per joint.
the widest in the felid family and the design's single most important number; hind-foot rotation toward
180 degrees at the specialised ankle; and the tail as a declared chain with its own inertia, the
balance system rather than an ornament.
run is the ROTARY gallop LH-RH-RF-LF that the table names as the felid gallop with two airborne moments
per cycle. Inline: this animal is a climber first and a walker second, moving along the undersides of
boughs as readily as along their tops, and it uses the gallop least of any cat in the arc.
it — and hanging INVERTED, which is a silhouette no other creature in the chapter makes
cultural_significance cell reads only "Sundaicsubspecies", and the region page names the clouded leopard among the five species for which none of its
six audited records carries any region-scoped attestation, refusing under cited-or-cut to assert one
[sumatra_java.md:382-391].
this animal is named as one of the three the herds give something to be a threat to [sumatra_java.md:239-241];
the porhalaan's own stake for a badly chosen day is the party waiting outside the shelter, exposed to
wild animals [SRC_00158, p. 170].
herd-move and the wrong-day exposure seat [sumatra_java.md:359-364; CH_05.md:94 — the typed site row,
corrected from an earlier :95 which is that row's env line rather than its terrain-and-threat values].
place in a food web, and this sheet builds from exactly that and declares everything else as ours.
ONE-LINE SILHOUETTE READ: a forest that has gone quiet, and a shape on the UNDERSIDE of a branch that
opens a mouth too big for it.
REGISTER: REAL_FAUNA (TRUE_TO_LIFE), doctrine § 3D, and the conversion is deliberate. This sheet's first
issue spent A4 HYPERTROPHY on the skull, "built out until the head reads long, narrow and wrong for a cat
of that mass." That was elevation against canon on a row canon holds mundane, and § 3D names A1-A4 as the
signal that a sheet is in the wrong register. The departure is WITHDRAWN. The real *Neofelis diardi*
already carries the longest canines relative to skull length of any living felid and a gape approaching
100 degrees — the most frightening fact available here is TRUE TO LIFE, and building past it was
gilding a thing that did not need it. Budget: A5 and A9 only.
THE REPLICA TEST DISCHARGES BY CONTRACT AND LADDER, per § 3D.
LEGIBILITY CONTRACT — silhouette-first discrimination against every confusable neighbour in CH_05, at
sixty pixels, black-filled:
ambush felids in one chapter: the tiger is a GROUND horizontal carrying its head below its shoulder
line; this cat is a CANOPY horizontal whose defining pose is INVERTED under a bough. Above-or-below the
branch is the discriminator, and neither animal can make the other's silhouette.
effectively none.
no tail, the cat hangs as one body line plus a tail line.
and the design's contract is that the player gets it once.
STATE LADDER — the states a photograph of the species-typical animal does not contain, and on this row the
ladder IS the design because evidence is the player's only relationship with it:
head-first — a directional sign no other animal in the forest leaves.
down a wet trunk carries the trunk on its forelimbs.
PRIMARY — A5 AGE AND STATE, spent as SIGN. A resident individual writes a readable record at a height
nothing else in the forest works at, and the player reads the animal entirely through what it has left.
MECHANISM: wear and deposition on level geometry over a residency, with a declared freshness ladder.
SUPPORTING — A9 THE MARK, SPENT INVERTED. The cloud blotches are large, soft-edged and dappled-canopy
shaped, so this animal's identifying feature is that it HAS no identifying feature — the register's
identity read taken in the negative. The sheet gives it no second mark, because a creature carrying three
marks carries none and this one is built to carry zero.
WHAT CARRIES THE PRESENCE INSTEAD OF AN AXIS: the forest's own behaviour, which belongs to the encounter
rather than to the body and is built in § 6 — the insect bed going quiet and the quiet TRAVELLING, a
macaque troop going vertical and holding, a browse line stopping, a herd bunching without a sound. It is
stated here so no lane mistakes its absence from the axis list for its absence from the design.
EMISSION: none. It reads by occlusion and by silhouette against a canopy light already in the scene.
narrowed-peripheral-field cost is WITHDRAWN with the A4 spend. The skull is the real animal's, and the
slow whole-head turn it produced is kept only where the real anatomy already gives it: a short-limbed
cat inverted under a bough turns its head slowly because it is hanging, not because its temporal mass
was enlarged.
with its own ROM, not an animation cheat. It is inline AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY because no bucket in the table
describes an arboreal carnivoran ankle. The inverted hang is a legal pose in the solver, and any pose
outside the declared rotation is a solver failure rather than a design intent.
inertia. It is the balance system, and on the underside of a bough it is the part that moves when
nothing else does.
caught hair — with a declared freshness ladder, because the whole point is that the player can date them.
the real animal's.
WHAT THIS ROW STAGES, STATED AFFIRMATIVELY. combat_permission is EMPTY, there is no boss row, there is
no drop anchor, and the L11 ruled state carries combat_facing FALSE. This creature is not fought at
Ch 5. What it IS, is a PREDATOR PRESENCE the player is genuinely threatened by, and the threat lands on
something the player is responsible for: the herd they are walking with, on the corridor the region page
attests, on a night the porhalaan may have called badly.
THE PART ECONOMY IS NONE, AND THE SHEET DECLARES IT RATHER THAN LEAVING THE BLOCK THIN. There is no body
to break because there is no fight, and evidence is not a part economy. Naming NONE here is a data fact
the schema can eventually check, not a design gap.
THE TELLS BELONG TO THE FOREST, NOT TO THE CAT, and that is the whole grammar.
| tell shape | body origin | one answer |
|---|---|---|
| the insect bed stops, and the stopping travels | not the cat — the ambient cohort answering it | close the herd up and move to the canopy edge rather than deeper in |
| a macaque troop goes vertical and holds | not the cat — the troop | it is at their height and moving; its heading is where they are NOT looking |
| fresh downward claw-scoring at head height on a trunk | the animal's own head-first descent on rotated hind feet | this is a lie-up trunk; move the escort route off it tonight |
| a bough with the wrong profile beneath it | the cat, inverted, hanging on its hind feet with the tail as a second line | there is no answer left; the take has happened or it has not |
| the gape | the real skull's own masseteric architecture at full opening | the one frame the animal is fully visible in, and the design's contract is that the player gets it once |
THE CROSS-CREATURE LESSON, NAMED, BECAUSE THIS SHEET REUSES A SHAPE THE LANE HAS ALREADY LANDED. The
doctrine requires that a shape reused across creatures with a different answer declare which lesson it
teaches, and the landed CR_0009_endemic_insect_cohort.md sheet already spends INSECT SILENCE as a tell
at Ch 2: where the polo's work has been, "the cohort goes SILENT. Not absent, silent: the sound stops and
the player notices a hole in the mix before they notice anything visual." Two creatures, one shape, and
the discriminator is MOVEMENT:
lake — and it is there before the player arrives and after they leave. It has an EDGE the player walks
across, and crossing back out of it restores the sound.
direction of travel is the information. A player who stands still and listens to a static hole learns
where something HAPPENED; a player who stands still and listens to a travelling hole learns where
something IS GOING.
heading, on a player who has three chapters of the first reading behind them. That is a deliberate
escalation of one vocabulary rather than a collision, and the audio implementation must keep the two
distinguishable — a static hole and a travelling hole cannot share one state.
ESCALATION, WHICH IS NOT A PHASE SYSTEM BUT IS STILL NAMEABLE. What escalates along a route is EVIDENCE
DENSITY: scoring on one trunk, then three; hair at one fork, then a kill cached in a second; and the
insect bed's silences getting closer together. A player can say "we are in its range now" before any
system tells them, which is the escalation test passed on a creature with no phases.
RELOCATION AND TURF. It owns VERTICAL space rather than ground, and its range is a set of trunks rather
than a patch of floor. It does not defend and it does not contest — it relocates, and the sign that it has
is that the evidence ladder simply stops one day and starts again a valley over.
WHAT CHANGES IF A PERMISSION LANDS. The sheet says this plainly so a later lane does not have to redesign
from nothing: the fight is already written above. The gape is the opener, the inverted hang is the
approach, the slow hanging head-turn is the built-in punish window, and the counter class is positioning
rather than parry, because nothing on this body is a meetable contact surface. Note the § 3D ceiling: if
that permission arrives with a folklore cell or a boss row, the REAL_FAUNA register lapses and this sheet
re-derives under the full grammar.
manufacture one. ORDINARY_FAUNA-class rows carry no collective claim, and a lane must not re-apply
collective protection to game animals [doctrine part five; the rule is carried verbatim in CR_0024's own
cultural_care_register cell for this chapter].
ontology_class EMPTY, combat_permission EMPTY, tier PREDATOR. Not fought at Ch 5.photographic-wildlife template will not produce on its own — the plate exists to specify the two poses
the entire design depends on, and a documentary cat on a branch is exactly the failure mode.
KEPT and it is a real loss with a real cost, and the sheet refuses the softer staging in which the
player always arrives in time. BOLD, checked explicitly: SHOULD IT BE FACED? The row carries tier
PREDATOR and a corridor full of prey, and RULING_8 named this exact row as the deciding case for whether
predation reaches scope at all. REFUSED ON THE CELLS for this leg — no permission, no boss row, no drop
anchor, combat_facing FALSE — and the refusal is reversible by measurement rather than by argument:
the encounter above is built and waiting if a permission lands.
CR_0009, the other-animals-answer reads, the evidence ladder and its freshness dating, the escort stake
on the herd corridor, the descent-trunk scoring and the polished lie-up fork are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET
as the game's own. The Sundaic subspecies status, the PREDATOR tier and mid-level trophic role, and the
herd-corridor threat are CITED. The gape, the canine proportion, the rotating hind foot, the tail
proportion and the cloud-blotch camouflage are AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY where the table is silent; the
skeleton, joint bounds, caudal count and gait formalism are CARRIED FROM THE ANATOMY REFERENCE TABLE as
bounds with the felid substitution declared. The first issue's built-out skull and its
peripheral-field cost are WITHDRAWN with the A4 spend and are no longer claimed.
Written affirmatively. Every line names what IS in frame.
canopy, hind feet rotated and gripping, tail hanging as a second longer line, cloud blotches breaking the
body against dappled light, seen from below.
true proportion, the jaw at its widest.
the scoring it leaves visible in the bark beneath it.
bark, and a cached kill in a crotch — three reads at one scale, daylight.
them, the forest holding its breath — the plate that establishes the stake as a place.
trade_8_tameable is EMPTY with a notes` cell reading "tameable_status unspecified in source [FLAG]".
THE SOURCE ASSIGNS IT BY HEADING WITH NO INLINE OVERRIDE — THE SAME BASIS ON WHICH CR_0024'S DANGEROUS
WAS TAKEN. In T3_Creatures_Tameable § 5 Ch 05 the clouded leopard is listed at L331 under the heading
"Mid-level and TAME —" at L327, immediately after the orangutan (L329) and the sun bear (L330), both of
which the roster DID fill as TAME from that same heading; and CR_0024's own DANGEROUS cell comes from
the "Apex and DANGEROUS —" heading at L322 in exactly the same way, since its L324 entry states no
status inline either. TWO FURTHER SUPPORTS. (1) THIS ROW ALREADY CARRIES THE HEADING'S OTHER HALF:
trophic_role reads "mid-level predator", which is the "Mid-level" of the same heading — the
extraction took one half of the line and dropped the other. (2) HEADINGS ARE DEFEASIBLE ONLY BY AN
INLINE OVERRIDE, AND THE DOC PROVES IT: CR_0025 the Sumatran rhinoceros sits under the same "Apex and
DANGEROUS —" heading at L325 and its entry says "OBSERVE tier" inline, and the roster correctly carries
OBSERVE rather than DANGEROUS. The clouded leopard's entry carries no such override. Target:
@ CR_0028 :: trade_8_tameable = TAME, with the [FLAG] cleared, evidence T3_Creatures_Tameable
L322-331. This is a registry write and this lane does not make it.
tier_classification ALONE, and RULING_8 records it as the single deciding case for PREDATOR's reach. If
the TAME cell were filled, this row would have entered on the same self-evident basis CR_0026 and CR_0027
did, and the swing would not have turned on one ruling.
@ CR_0028 :: combat_permission is EMPTY on a PREDATOR row, exactly as on CR_0027, while CR_0024 carriesPERMITTED. Three of the chapter's predators, two blanks and one explicit value.
@ CR_0028 :: extinction_threat is EMPTY while CR_0024 and CR_0026 carry T4 and the real species isthreatened.
@ CR_0028 :: collect_verb, ontology_class, cultural_depiction_required, hard_line_anchors, folklore_behavior_substrate, folklore_attribution_source, intelligence_tier, husbandry_breedable,
integrity_visible_aesthetic_shift and vril_substrate_response are all EMPTY.
design's two forest tells name two cohorts that HAVE NO ROW IN THIS REGION OR THIS CHAPTER:
CR_0009 is the ENDEMIC INSECT COHORT (FLORES), region_native flores_island, chapter_first_encounter CH_02. There is no sumatra_java insect-cohort row anywhere in the roster,
so the bed this sheet reads the silence in does not exist as a creature row for CH_05.
CR_0003 is CH_02 and CH_04; CR_0140 is the Angkor precinct cohort on angkor_khmer. Neither is a sumatra_java CH_05 row, so the troop that goes vertical has no row
either.
sumatra_java.md:179-180 names theregion-ambient FEEDs at the build pass as "the caldera-lake fish and waterfowl, the Kedu paddy fauna
on the Borobudur approach, and the highland birds" — no insect cohort and no macaque troop. The
tells are therefore reading two presences that neither the roster nor the page has staged.
that triggers a silence and the trigger radius have no shared key, and
creature_vocalization_sfx_id_ref_array is empty here and is the wrong column for a cohort's
silence in any case. CR_0009's own sheet boarded the same schema gap at Ch 2; this is its second
instance, now with a row gap underneath it.
region page already carries on its own Section-16 verify list [sumatra_java.md:388-391]. Every ethological
line in this sheet is labelled AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY because that acquisition has not landed.