Events by impact (proposed)

Proposed: nothing on this page is built yet. Some of its ground is now covered by Irulan, Tyrell’s narrator (its page): a score from 0 to 1 for every beat of the log, words for every kind, a feed of what matters as it happens, and an opt-in story that keeps what matters beyond the log (config.storySize). Irulan scores whole beats when told (and stores nothing but the kept entries), where this design scores each entry as it’s written and keeps the log by band; building it should take Irulan’s weights and words rather than make a second set, and the story kept and the bands should become one. A view in Tycho’s development tools for watching what happens inside a running game: every event the simulation produces, each with an impact from 0 to 1, shown above a threshold you set. A death is near 1; two people chatting is near 0. Set the threshold to 0.6 and you see only the fights, the deaths, the weddings and the crimes, as they happen, on screen or off; drop it to 0 and you see everything. It’s for the people making the games; players never see it. Its questions are settled (what’s decided).

• What it shows
• Where the events come from
• Impact
• Keeping what matters
• The view
• Each game
• What’s decided
• The order to build it

What it shows

One list of events, newest first, each a line:

Day 3 · 23:50  0.95  momentous  Tomas died in his sleep, aged 91                      Tomas · home
Day 3 · 21:38  0.61  major      Dev and Sam's argument turned into a fight            Dev · Sam · bar
Day 3 · 19:05  0.44  notable    Ruth fell ill: the stew at the market was poisoned    Ruth · market
Day 3 · 18:12  0.31  notable    Kofi saw the player strip the till at the grocery     Kofi · grocery

Above it, the threshold (a number, and a slider), a few filters (who, where, what kind), and a button to stop the list moving while you read. Tap an event for its details: everything in it, and how its impact was worked out.

Where the events come from

• Tyrell’s log. Westmarch, Tyrell’s record of what happened, already writes an entry for nearly everything: arrivals, actions, feelings, deeds, crimes witnessed and reported, gossip told, couples, births, departures, the director’s events (its kinds). It saves and rewinds with the world. The view reads it. Anything a module emits but doesn’t log yet (Bree’s exchanges by how they came out, Morgul’s harms from the harm design) gets a log entry, so the log stays the one source.
• The game’s own events. A game with Tyrell writes its own with world.log(kind, who, data), which is already an input, so they rewind too: the White Dragon’s finished jobs, Merryfolk’s festivals.
• A game without Tyrell (Lodestar) writes to a small log in Tycho’s development tools, in the same shape: a boss felled, the Kindler falling, a piece of the core lost.

Every event comes to the view as { t, kind, who, place, impact, text, data }.

Impact

Each event’s impact is worked out as it’s written, from a table the game gives: a base by kind, then raised or lowered by what’s in the event and who’s in it. It’s saved with the event and rewinds with it.

A base by kind, for example:

Then the specifics, each a setting the game can weigh or turn off:

• How bad it was: the severity an event already carries (a crime’s, a harm’s), and how a conversation came out (a row counts for more than a warm chat).
• Who was in it: famous people (Fellowship’s standing), the player, and people the player knows count for more.
• How many saw it: something done in front of a crowd counts for more than the same thing alone.
• How rare it is: the first fight between two old friends counts for more than the tenth between rivals (a small count by kind and pair).
• How much it changed: a chat that made two strangers friends counts for more than one that left them as they were.

Impact is the world’s: how much this matters to the story of the place. How much it matters to one person is already their memory’s importance (Reverie), and the view can show that too, filtered to one person.

Bands name the ranges, so the threshold can be a word as well as a number: trivial (under 0.1), minor (0.1), notable (0.3), major (0.6), momentous (0.9). The game sets the cutoffs.

Scoring runs on every entry, so it’s a table lookup and a few multiplications. It reads only the world’s state and the entry, so it’s deterministic, and an impact is the same on a replay. It’s off unless the game gives a table: a world without one logs exactly as now, hash for hash. While you tune a table, the view can score the log again with a different one, without touching the world.

Keeping what matters

Today Westmarch keeps its last 1,000 entries and drops the oldest first. With impact on, it keeps by band instead: trivial entries for a few hours, minor ones for a couple of days, notable ones for a couple of weeks, and major and momentous ones for the whole game, up to a cap of their own. That’s a lasting history of the place for the price of a few hundred entries, and since the log is in every time-walk snapshot, dropping the trivial ones sooner makes time walk lighter too.

The view

Part of Tycho’s development tools (Tycho.dev, beside the dev switches), not a part of its own: the list, the threshold, the filters and the details. Its home is the dev drawer’s events (dev.md), which already merge a game’s notes with another log by time, filter by kind and find words, with room for an impact column and a least impact. The minds inspector (Tycho.inspect, the White Dragon’s Tyrell mode) carries it as a tab, and a game drawing it in its own dev drawer places it there; a game with no drawer (Lodestar) opens it as a panel of its own with ?dev in the address. From an event you can go straight to what it touched:

• Open the mind of anyone in it: what they’re doing, their needs and feelings, why they chose what they did.
• Go there: the dev drawer’s Go to, landing by them or at the place.
• Go back to it: time walk to a minute before it happened (world.seek), to watch it play out.

And for watching while you play:

• Alerts: anything at or above a second threshold (momentous, by default) pops up as a toast wherever you are, so you hear about a death across the city as it happens.
• Runs folded: “Ruth chatted 14 times” as one line that opens up, so the trivial doesn’t bury the rest when the threshold is low.
• Why this impact: the details show the sum: base 0.6 for a fight, × 1.4 for its severity, + 0.1 for the player knowing them, + 0.05 for three witnesses.
• Copy: an event, or the list as shown, as text, for a bug report.

The bridge turns Westmarch’s entries into the view’s events, with names and places from the game and a line of text from Westmarch’s own words for each kind (the ones its chronicles already use).

Each game

• The White Dragon: in its dev drawer, and as a tab in Tyrell mode. Its table weighs strips that were seen and reported, rows and feuds among the residents, and jobs finished and botched. Nobody dies there.
• Merryfolk: in its dev drawer. Births, weddings and deaths of old age weigh most, then quarrels and, with harm, scuffles and pranks.
• Lodestar: on the dev tools’ own log, in a panel opened with ?dev: bosses and elites felled, the Kindler falling, the core losing a piece.

What’s decided

Settled on 2026-10-28:

1. No name of its own: it’s a view in Tycho’s development tools, beside the dev switches and the minds inspector.
2. Impact is worked out as each event is written, saved with it, and rewinds with it; the view can score again with another table while one is being tuned.
3. The log keeps by impact, by band, instead of the last 1,000 entries.
4. Lodestar gets it too, on the dev tools’ own log.

The order to build it

1. Westmarch: impact from the game’s table, the bands, find by a least impact, keeping by band, and words for every kind; log entries for what modules emit but don’t log. Tests that a world without a table hashes as now, and that impacts are the same on a replay. After the harm work, which adds Morgul’s entries to the same log.
2. The view in Tycho.dev: the list, threshold, filters, details, alerts, folded runs and copy, and the small log for games without Tyrell, with tests and a section in the shell’s page. Begun: the dev drawer’s events (the list, filters by kind, a find box, pause and clear, another log merged in by time, an impact’s column and a least impact when events carry one) and Notes, the small log.
3. The bridge: Westmarch’s entries as the view’s events, and the inspector’s tab.
4. Each game: its table, and the view in its dev tools; Lodestar’s panel with ?dev.