FACTION_STANDING_WIRING_SPEC.md

systems/FACTION_STANDING_WIRING_SPEC.md

Faction standing — the wiring spec

Status: ACTIVE (2026-08-04). The engine-consumable half of the faction-standing mint. The

executable half is harness/emit_faction_registry.py and harness/apply_ladder_rewards.py; the data

is four tables. This doc is what an engine lane reads to wire readers and writers off real rows.

0. What this closes

The fun-gap wave-2 audit found the nine-band standing ladder ruled and its struct generated, and then

found nothing underneath it: the ladder registry held two rows with a blank reward reference, 160 of

164 cast rows carried 176 distinct free-text faction tokens with no table to point at, the two

worldstate rows named consumers that resolve to nothing, and **only the negative direction of

community memory was specced** — the corpus could record being hurt and could not record being

helped.

Josh's bar, verbatim: *"trades and skills and reputations and factions and exploration like World of

Warcraft."* A world that only remembers harm is not that world. So the grammar below carries both

signs, and the positive side is the larger one: twenty-four positive classes against sixteen harm

classes, every one of them lifted from a line canon had already written and nobody had wired.

1. Derivation (SUBAGENT_CONTRACT §1 clause 5)

DERIVED FROM:

• _source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/*.md § Section 8 "Politics Territories and Faction Relationships"

— the *Five-Factors faction table* on all twelve slice region pages. Every faction row is minted

from one bullet and cites its line: flores_island.md:L812-L821, bali.md:L1854-L1870,

sumatra_java.md:L1787-L1794, angkor_khmer.md:L622-L625, sri_lanka.md:L838-L858,

south_india.md:L713-L732, swahili_coast.md:L735-L755, ethiopia.md:L655-L672,

rift_valley.md:L576-L590, central_africa_congo.md:L939-L958, west_africa.md:L2162-L2193,

south_africa.md:L63,L67,L573.

• _source/01_Tier_1_Foundation/T1_Integrity_Paths_Worldstates_Master [ACTIVE v2.1].md §8.11.1 (the

nine ruled bands and the STANDING label list), §8.11.4 (write discipline: qualitative

class-and-direction tokens, never point values), §8.7 (faction standing never hard-gates

progression; relationships are locally real and not symmetrically modeled), §4.9 (accumulation),

L192 (a kill ripples through the community and is remembered).

• registries/T0_Character_Index [ACTIVE v1.1] — the faction-token census, script-emitted from the

live CSV on every run, never hand-typed.

• registries/T0_Festival_Registry [DRAFT v0.1] — the nine rows whose own hooks already say

*standing*: FST_0003, FST_0004, FST_0005, FST_0008, FST_0010, FST_0011, FST_0013, FST_0014,

FST_0016. Derived by reading the registry, with a positive control that fails the emit if the set

drifts from the routing table.

• docs/spine/CH_05.md L194/L196/L206, CH_08.md L131/L185, CH_12.md L190/L193, CH_13.md L267 —

the eight standing writes the slice already authored in prose.

• docs/proposals/systems/attackability-and-consequence-model.md § The five attackability tiers and

§ The engine — the harm side's

existing doctrine (witness, memory, community resilience, the escalation ladder), which the

negative half of the grammar references rather than re-invents.

NOT DERIVED (authored judgment, and why it had no canon home):

• The arrival-band derivation rule (§2.2). Region pages state arrival in prose ("wary-welcome",

"closed but courteous"); the nine bands are numeric. Something had to map one onto the other. The

rule is stated, deterministic, unit-tested, and every row carries the page's own phrase beside the

derived band so the mapping is auditable against source rather than trusted.

• The family → offer-class table (§4.2). Canon says what you earn from a community; it does not

enumerate reward classes. The table only re-expresses cited improve classes as offers and adds

nothing that no page named.

• The nine band reward packages (§4.1). The bands are ruled; what sits on each rung was empty.

2. T0_Faction_Registry — the table the 176 tokens now point at

67 rows, 22 columns. registries/T0_Faction_Registry [DRAFT v0.1]/Sheet1.csv.

2.1 Shape

2.2 The arrival-band derivation rule

Applied by derive_band(); unit-tested with must-fire and must-not-fire controls.

• R1 — an adversarial or hostile arrival → Banished (Hostile band).
• R2 — a reserve word with no warm word → Cooled (Cool band).
• R3 — a reserve word *and* a warm word, or a neutral/transactional/no-standing arrival →

Stranger (Neutral band).

• R4 — a warm word with no reserve word → Welcomed (Friendly band).
• R5 — canon says standing does not apply → NOT_APPLICABLE.

No region page states an arrival above Friendly, and the emitter asserts it: **Honored, Revered and

Exalted are earned, never granted.** That is the whole shape of the WoW ladder Josh named.

2.3 Two things the table deliberately does not contain

• No Velheim-shaped row. The reveal firewall binds: nothing of the pattern surfaces before

Ch 38, and T0_Faction_Registry is read by slice surfaces. T0_Reputation_Ladder_Registry

FR_0002 is reveal_gated post-Ch-38 and its faction_ref is therefore **blank by the firewall,

not by omission** — the row says so on its own face.

• No antagonist-network column. The hostile apparatuses carry region and chapter and nothing

else; the cross-chapter join lives in the antagonist registries where the gating already exists.

3. T0_Standing_Event_Grammar — one vocabulary, both signs

40 rows, 12 columns: 24 positive, 16 negative.

registries/T0_Standing_Event_Grammar [DRAFT v0.1]/Sheet1.csv.

3.1 The positive side — what the world can finally notice

Every class below cites a clause canon had already written. Josh's four named examples are the first

four checked by the emitter's self-test, so they cannot silently rot out:

• defending — SE_0002 defended_the_ground (secure the violated edge / secure the biome),

SE_0003 freed_the_held (freeing the captives raises standing *because the community is the

refuge that receives them*), SE_0022 exposed_the_apparatus_cleanly.

• feeding — SE_0004 provisioned_the_feast (the nado mere precedence feast, the Nage buffalo

rite, the Batak sacrifice — the shared table as a standing surface).

• gifting — SE_0005 gave_a_gift, whose canonical home is the Vedda community, where *presents

and reciprocity matter in a way the ethnography is explicit about*.

• dancing / the festival — SE_0008 carried_a_festival_role and SE_0009 contested_in_the_ring

(the caci circuit, the kalari pit — climb for community standing, offered never forced).

And the ones the corpus had written and never wired: SE_0006 held_the_ward_through_the_night,

SE_0010 completed_the_work (a terrace block through a full cycle; a forge shift), `SE_0011

took_the_place_assigned (the net line and the division of the kill), SE_0013

returned_what_belongs_to_the_keepers, SE_0014 restrained_from_reaching` — the Baka Jengi gate,

where the region's most protected content is opened by not reaching for it, which is the single

best positive-standing mechanic already sitting in canon.

3.2 The negative side

The harm classes were already doctrine and are now rows on the same ladder rather than a separate

system: SE_0040 read_need_as_leverage, SE_0041 took_more_than_the_share, `SE_0043

stepped_the_line_for_a_private_take (the band's own documented offence), SE_0044

treated_knowledge_as_inventory, SE_0051 participated_in_the_extraction, SE_0052

killed_a_community_member, SE_0054 attempted_systematic_slaughter` — which routes to the escalation

ladder (settlement → region → hunted-across-the-world) and to the Nemesis band's display label,

Hunted. The culture endures and is never erasable; the player becomes the hunted party. That is

the ladder and the anti-genocide floor meeting at one row.

Two rows carry an empty degrade column *by canon, not by omission*: FAC_0059 (the Agojie — no degrade

path routes through violence, HL_0003) and FAC_0044/FAC_0049, where canon stages no beat at all.

4. T0_Standing_Reward_Band and the ladder

4.1 The nine rungs

9 rows. Rewards are classes, and every one is an OFFER: vendor access, escort, teaching, shelter,

festival roles, work contracts, introductions, kit and lore at Exalted. Every row carries the §8.7

no-dead-end clause in its own non_gating_clause column — **standing shapes what you are handed,

never what you can reach.** Nothing on this ladder gates a route; a closed opportunity re-routes to an

equivalent-class alternative.

4.2 T0_Reputation_Ladder_Registry, 2 rows → 52

• FR_0001 and FR_0002 are filled: exalted_reward_ref → SB_0009, plus faction_ref,

band_reward_ref, offer_classes, non_gating_note and notes. FR_0001's pre-faction-table

label ("Swahili coast trade-guild") now resolves onto the collective the region page itself names,

the ocean web (FAC_0037). Its trade_off_pair_partner and asymmetric_bridge_ref stay blank on

purpose and say why on the row: §8.7 rules faction relationships locally real and **not

symmetrically modeled**, and no Section 8 bullet declares an opposed pair — an authored one would

be invention.

• 50 rows minted, one per standing-bearing faction. tier_thresholds is **copied verbatim from

FR_0001 at runtime, never retyped**, so a per-faction override (a deliberate act under §8.11.4)

cannot happen by accident. offer_classes is derived from that faction's own cited improve

classes through the family → offer table: knowledge → teaching, labor → work_contract, trade →

vendor_access, festival/rite → festival_role, solidarity → escort, protection/healing → shelter,

gift/restraint/restitution → lore, record/bearing → introduction. A community offers what the

region page says you earn from it.

5. The slice writer roster — where standing is written, Prologue → Ch 13

This is the section an engine lane wires off. Left column is the beat or surface; right is the event

class that fires.

5.1 Already authored in the spine (8 writes, now pointing at real ids)

5.2 The nine festival rows — the first wired POSITIVE writers

These are already-authored, already-standing-bearing content that had nothing to write into. They are

the cheapest positive surface in the slice and they are all opt-in.

The routing carries a positive control: the emitter re-derives the standing-bearing set from the

festival registry's own text on every run and refuses to emit if it no longer matches this table.

5.3 Where the slice is still silent, named rather than left implicit

Chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 and 11 author zero faction-standing writes today. Their factions,

improve classes and ladder rows now exist, so the writes are authorable rather than blocked — this is

a worklist for the quest and dialogue lanes, not a defect in this mint. The highest-value four, each

already sitting in canon and needing only a beat to fire from:

• CH_03 — FAC_0001 via SE_0001 at FORK_CH03_A (the community read the page already describes).
• CH_04 — FAC_0006 via SE_0010/SE_0017 at the subak allocation dispute; the terrace-block cycle

is a written mechanic with no write.

• CH_07 — FAC_0028 via SE_0009 at the kalari trials, where *the guru calls the count aloud*.
• CH_11 — FAC_0052 via SE_0014, the Jengi restraint gate.

6. The two worldstate rows now have consumers

Both cells were replaced under an old-value guard in harness/apply_ladder_rewards.py.

• WS_021 faction_standing_per_faction → T0_Faction_Registry.faction_id (the key domain),

T0_Standing_Event_Grammar (the write vocabulary, both signs), T0_Standing_Reward_Band (the read

side), T0_Reputation_Ladder_Registry.faction_ref, and §5 of this doc.

• WS_032 reputation_tier_per_faction → T0_Reputation_Ladder_Registry.band_reward_ref →

T0_Standing_Reward_Band.reward_band_id, and §5 of this doc.

7. What is declared open, and why nothing was guessed

docs/faction_token_map.csv carries all 176 tokens with a disposition and a reason. 87 tokens across

88 cast rows RESOLVED. The rest are declared:

• AMBIGUOUS (6) — each states what a guess would have *asserted*. Two are the same shape and are

a director call, not a lane guess: manggarai_adjacent_hunter_lineage_corrupted_individual and

batak_ritual_corrupted_lineage_pustaha_dark_practice both name a lineage *and* mark their bearer

as a corrupt departure from it, so resolving them seats a chapter antagonist inside a protected-host

community, and minting a corrupted-lineage faction asserts the lineage carries the corruption —

which sumatra_java.md:L1790 denies in terms ("the office is honored and the corrupt individual

does not define it"). Two are Ch-47/48 living-institution rows awaiting their region page and a

§17.1 care read. Two are fairy-realm rows the ruled slice order designs last.

• NOT_A_FACTION (8) — an individual documented figure is not a collective (Ibn Battuta, Dr.

Solange Diallo); south_india.md:L732 rules the Siddha tradition out by name; sri_lanka.md:L858

states the counterfeit "is not a community, has no faction, no summoner and no apparatus".

• PENDING_REGION_PAGE (75) — Ch 14-77 tokens whose region pages are unbuilt. Resolving

destination is named on every row: that region's page Section 8 faction table, at which point

re-running the emitter re-points them.

Magnitudes stay blank behind Phase-5M by rule, not by omission. The grammar names classes and

directions; the numbers are runtime clamps.

8. Rebuild

python harness/emit_faction_registry.py --selftest   # 23 checks incl. 3 negative controls
python harness/apply_ladder_rewards.py --selftest    # 7 checks
python harness/emit_faction_registry.py --apply
python harness/apply_ladder_rewards.py --apply       # idempotent; re-running is a no-op
python harness/registry_fidelity.py --reference _source/00_Tier_0_Master_Indices \
    --candidate registries --fk-spec docs/fk_spec.json \
    --baseline docs/fidelity_baseline.json --out harness/scorecard \
    --emit-baseline docs/fidelity_baseline.json
python harness/rag/index.py --scope canon     # the canon hash moved; index_freshness reads it
python harness/run_gates.py                   # UNPIPED

Idempotency is proven, not asserted. Re-running the emitter after the re-point has landed

produces a byte-identical docs/faction_token_map.csv. The first cut did not: the census read

the cells it had itself rewritten, saw 132 FAC_ ids where 176 tokens had been, and would have

rewritten the map to nonsense while reporting a clean run. The census now skips already-canonical

cells and merges the prior map — which is the only surviving record of what a re-pointed cell used

to say — and an accounting control fails loudly if a FAC_ cell exists that no RESOLVED row

claims.

Gate state at landing. 46 gates PASS. Two fail and neither is this lane's, both introduced

by commit 604a6624 and reproducible on an untouched checkout: scan reports a

lowercase_bullet at _source/01_Tier_1_Foundation/T1_Personal_Dimension_Spec [ACTIVE v1.1].md:277

in a file this lane never opened (git diff HEAD -- _source/ is empty), and pillar10_vocab names

harness/check_pillar10_vocab.py, which git cat-file -e HEAD:harness/check_pillar10_vocab.py

proves does not exist at HEAD — a committed gate config pointing at an uncommitted script.

Generated by harness/site/structure_site.py — the URL path is the repo path. review root