Date: 2026-06-03 Status: USER VISION AUTHORITY / STATIC DOC / RUNTIME PROOF NOT IMPLIED Evidence class: STATIC_DOC
This file records user-level product decisions that resolve ambiguous points across the route bibles.
If a root bible sounds stricter, narrower, or more austere than these locks, use the lock here and update the affected bible instead of forcing the project back into the older interpretation.
This file does not prove runtime behavior, art quality, build health, profiler state, localization quality, or release readiness.
Product ambition does not override runtime law. Any implementation that serves these locks must preserve owner-local truth, zero-GC hot paths, cached dependencies, typed packets/signals where used, pure read accessors, and continuous GlobalQualityWeight.
Presentation-only systems may sell beauty, dread, comfort, impact, haptics, UI drama, or cinematic staging. They must not own gameplay truth: oxygen, pressure, damage, input, movement, save state, inventory, construction networks, physics force, AI threat state, route unlocks, or sensor facts.
The first-20 route must be spectacular through authored visual quality, readable systems, and real player decisions, not by hiding missing owners behind post effects, UI claims, darkness, haptics, VFX, or loading-screen fiction.
HECTON-8 is a broad AA/AAA underwater survival game, not a narrow technical proof demo.
The project still requires proof artifacts, but production may proceed broadly across visuals, lore, world, tools, vehicles, platforms, modding, XR, SDK groundwork, and route systems while the first playable route is being proven.
The first route must be spectacular enough to sell the product identity. A boring Copper Wire-only proof route is not acceptable as the product-facing V0.
- Start: semi-open.
- First exit: bright, beautiful, readable, and alien, with something uneasy or threatening in the composition.
- First 20 minutes: more spectacular than a simple resource proof route.
- The player may die immediately if they ignore oxygen, go too far, or approach an aggressive creature.
- The game may give the player real calm time to look around when oxygen and local safety allow it.
- Scenic rest is allowed. It is not filler if it helps the player love the world before the descent punishes them.
- Subnautica-level visual and content density is the floor for surface, photic shallows, and medium-depth hero routes.
- The target is more detailed, more beautiful, and more premium than that floor.
GlobalQualityWeight = 0.0is not an ugly mode.- Surface, coast, exposed rock, ocean skin, sky, Aegir, moons, and photic shallows must remain readable and attractive on every hardware lane.
- Cinematic realism is the main visual mode: believable PBR/material truth plus controlled cinematic color, composition, contrast, and atmosphere.
- Correct references include Subnautica for water/beauty floor plus SOMA, Alien Isolation, The Expanse, Pacific Drive, and similar references for pressure, machinery, hard-sci-fi texture, and vehicle/shelter vulnerability.
Low/Middle/High/Ultra are continuous planning labels on the same GlobalQualityWeight curve, not binary switches:
- Low: minimum-survival hardware still gets premium composition, readable water/sky/route cues, stable gameplay truth, and no ugly mode.
- Middle: expected player lane; must look genuinely good with rich material identity, route density, stable controls, and first-20 spectacle.
- High: saved CPU/GPU budget buys richer shaders, lighting, scatter, VFX, animation, haptics, and UI polish around unchanged authority routes.
- Ultra: visual overkill, dense presentation, deeper diagnostics, and capture-grade staging without changing gameplay truth, save identity, DTO layout, or hot-path ownership.
- 0-100 m: mostly bright, beautiful, colorful, and readable.
- Deep caves may be dim or dark even inside the shallow band.
- 200-400 m: progressively more subdued and twilight-like.
- 400-500 m and below: true darkness/murk becomes normal, but it must still preserve route structure, silhouettes, evidence, and instruments.
- Darkness is not allowed as a method to hide bad terrain, weak textures, empty water, or unfinished celestial art.
- Shallows are colorful and alien.
- Coral and unusual biota are welcome.
- Industrial/technogenic remnants should be present in places: old colony traces, wreck fragments, route hardware, pipes, stations, cables, salvage cuts, or other signs that people and machines were here.
- Aegir's current texture/color direction is acceptable. Its blue/purple/methane-rich look is not automatically wrong if the texture quality is premium and believable.
- Storm behavior remains open for design work. Storms may create danger and temporary darkness, but must not turn normal surface art into permanent mud.
Bioluminescence can be both beauty and system information.
It may:
- help navigation;
- indicate ecology, contamination, danger, route, or evidence;
- attract or repel creatures;
- exist as visual wonder in selected safe views.
It must not become random glowing noise everywhere.
Bases and safe rooms may be cozy.
The core identity remains industrial, pressure-rated, and maintained, but the player is allowed to build or find spaces that feel safe, warm, beautiful, and worth protecting.
Subnautica-like base decoration and beauty are allowed, especially after survival infrastructure is solved. Industrial logic stays underneath the comfort.
- Oxygen behaves broadly like Subnautica: the player has a reserve, upgrades it, plans trips around it, and can still die quickly from neglect.
- Longer expeditions may use upgraded tanks, hoses/tethers from a ship or base, and other physical oxygen-extension routes.
- Early survival focuses on oxygen and pressure first; thermal, gas, contamination, radiation, and complex channel pressure can arrive later.
- Death should respawn the player at a base or safe anchor.
- Dropped resources are acceptable, similar to Minecraft/Subnautica-style loss.
- Core tools should remain with the player after death unless a special scripted event says otherwise.
- Inventory should be cell/grid-limited. Existing inventory work should be inspected before redesign.
- Resource balance is a design task, not a fixed number here.
- Resources must remain physically credible and not become abstract colored currency.
- Small creatures can be fought and killed with appropriate weapons/tools.
- Larger creatures are not simple combat targets. Escape, distraction, avoidance, baiting, route choice, and system knowledge should often be better than fighting.
- Killing is allowed, but the game should not become a generic hunting/action game.
- Jump scares are allowed when built correctly, with evidence, sound, staging, and systemic follow-through. Random cheap scares remain rejected.
Map and sonar usability may be closer to Subnautica than to a pure hostile-instrument simulation.
They should be useful enough that the player can play, plan, and love exploration. They still should not become an omniscient debug map with perfect hidden truth, creature state, or free objective certainty.
- Submarines and vehicles may feel safer near the surface and early depths.
- The deeper the submarine goes, the more unsafe, costly, noisy, fragile, and pressure-exposed it becomes.
- Friendly helper drones are not a current design direction.
- Underwater drones from the source/ship/old systems can be neutral or hostile.
- Deeper drone encounters should trend more hostile or more dangerous.
- The protagonist may be former Deep Reach and current Marauder.
- The opening motive is Marauder work: contract, salvage, debt, payout, dead claim, professional procedure. No family-revenge or missing-relative hook.
- Personal weight may emerge through professional recognition, recovered workers, procedures, guilt, and Deep Reach language, not through family melodrama.
- Deep Reach stays clean, defensible, legalistic, and lethal through procedure. No cartoon villainy.
- Atlas-6 may feel intimate and frightening through misclassification, but it remains damaged repair/classification logic, not a melodramatic villain.
- Diaries and logs should vary: dry procedure, human fear, practical notes, corporate language, and emotional fragments all have a place when the source supports them.
- False endings remain a design space. They should be real outcomes, not obvious fake fail screens. No single clean moral ending is currently locked.
- Replay may preserve knowledge, endings, rumors, contract context, and suspicion. It must not become power-roguelite inheritance.
- In-world content should be prepared for all 15 supported languages immediately.
- Translation status must be honest: native-final cannot be claimed without proof.
- Public website/wiki content is required and should be spoiler-safe by default, with spoiler/archive lanes where needed.
- The project proceeds broadly, not only through the first route.
- Visuals, lore, world, platforms, modding, XR, SDK groundwork, and other foundations may move in parallel when they preserve root standards.
- Co-op is not locked as production, but its architectural foundation may be prepared cautiously.
- Procedural/offline generated assets are accepted only if they look authored and premium.
- Bad placeholders below the visual floor may exist only as clearly isolated dev-only material; they must not contaminate production routes or agent examples.
- The minimum hardware lane remains compact class, but the main expected player hardware is middle-tier. Middle-tier must look genuinely good, not merely acceptable.
Never sacrifice these to optimization:
- readable and beautiful ocean color;
- surface and shallow-water clarity;
- Aegir/sky/moon readability and texture quality;
- wet rock material breakup;
- terrain silhouettes and route landmarks;
- waterline/foam/specular response where visible;
- premium material identity on hero assets;
- instrument/HUD legibility;
- route cues and return-path readability;
- creature silhouettes and encounter readability;
- compact-tier composition that still feels intentional and premium.
- If an agent is given an explicit ID, it writes concise Status/Rationale/LOG artifacts for controller review.
- Ordinary non-ID work must not invent IDs, hunt old logs, or write bureaucratic reports.
- Large 20-30 task prompts are allowed and preferred for heavy agent waves when the user is distributing serious work.
- Logs must be useful to a controller model, not padded for token consumption.
No public-facing claim may say release-ready, AAA, optimized, platform-ready, VR-ready, modding-ready, or comparable claims without matching proof artifacts.
- Deep Space System & Orbital Relay Lock: Planet Hecton-8 is physically isolated in deep space (light-years from colonies). NO live corporate personnel on site. All corporate debt/salvage interaction is processed through an automated, drifting Orbital Hub / Drop-Pod Relay via laser pulses and unguided atmospheric drop-pods.
- Open-Ocean Subnautica Gameplay Lock: Gameplay is centered on open ocean swimming, diving, and deep trench exploration (not corridor FPS horror). Biome depths scale: Photic Shallows (0-100m) -> Twilight Reefs (100-400m) -> Abyssal Trenches (400-1000m+).
- Atlas-6 Infrastructure AI & Drone Lock: Atlas-6 is a corrupted, automated habitat management AI, not a melodrama stalker. Drone encounters are episodic and perimeter-based around submerged industrial structures.
- Hydroacoustic Stealth & Creature Baiting: Drones react to acoustic noise and light. The player neutralizes or bypasses them via EMP/sonar jamming, stealth diving, or baiting abyssal predators against noisy drones.
- Hybrid Base System: Players can claim abandoned Deep Reach undersea research/drill stations by repairing pumps/reactors, and build custom pressure-rated modular hulls (Hull Pressure Integrity) attached to or around them.
- Visor HUD & Wrist PDA Lock: Visor helmet glass HUD displays ONLY minimalist critical survival metrics (Oxygen, Depth/Pressure, Hazard Warnings). 3D Sonar, inventory, map, and technical diagnostics live on the Wrist PDA (КПКТ-планшет) and vehicle dashboards.
- Tri-Branch Endgame & Relic Mystery Lock: At 1000m+ ("Ultra-Deep-8"), the catastrophe is revealed to be triggered by an ancient geothermal mechanism beneath the crust. Endings: 1) Archive upload to Orbital Relay for evac, 2) Reprogram Atlas-6 to claim Hecton-8 as an autonomous citadel, 3) Meltdown/flood reactor core to erase evidence forever.
- Ion Surface Storms Lock: Surface storms raise 5m waves, block Orbital Relay laser uplinks (disabling Drop-Pod launches), and reduce 0-30m surface visibility through plankton/silt suspension.
- Suit Breach & Thermal Mechanics: Structural suit breaches require Plasma Welder repair; micro-punctures are auto-sealed by gel cartridges; abyssal freezing vs boiling vents require active suit heater/cooler units.
- Subnautica Death & Salvage Crate Lock: Respawn occurs at nearest base/sub. Tools remain with player; raw salvage drops at death point inside a beacon-marked Salvage Recovery Crate.
- Singleplayer Supremacy & Co-Op Duo Protocol: Core game is 100% singleplayer Marauder experience, but Data Vault DTOs and SignalBus contracts are strictly decoupled (no singleton lock) to support future 2-player Co-Op (Submarine Console Operator + Deep Trench Diver).