Statecraft Enters Owner Replay
The current Statecraft shell is ready for owner replay after the F11 technical and product-surface pass.
Statecraft has reached an important boundary: the current F11 technical surface is closed, and the product shell is ready for owner replay.
That sentence is deliberately precise. It does not mean that the game is finished, that the current balance is final, or that human product acceptance has already happened. It means the implementation can now be examined as a coherent product rather than as a collection of isolated technical demonstrations.
Two different kinds of confidence
The first kind is technical confidence. The Foundation integrity checks pass, the simulation and UI regression suites are green, and the F11 fitness surface covers the wage, support, employment, persistence, actor, and competition paths that were previously under-specified. The all-band smoke traces run across Broke, OrdinaryEmployed, and Comfortable without granting the player a special simulation shortcut.
The second kind is product confidence. A player still has to use the real shell and answer whether the world is understandable, whether time feels usable, and whether the consequences of actions can be followed. Automated evidence can show that a wage period is preserved across a save boundary. It cannot decide whether a person can find the wage residue, understand why it exists, and recover from it without feeling lost.
The next step is therefore owner replay, not another progress claim.
A report-driven surface
The active desktop surface is now compact and report-driven. A persistent global bar exposes identity, date and time, cash, time controls, and the essential save, load, and new-game commands. The Information Center opens reports for Companies, Establishments, People, Places, and Opportunities.
Reports are deliberately dense and selectable. They support filtering, sorting, opening a record, returning to the report, and moving through adjacent records. Detail views expose contextual tabs and canonical actions rather than a permanent wall of dashboard cards. Personal and Finance are explicit workspaces, so the player can answer “who am I?” and “what happened to my money?” without those views competing with every other system at once.
One small decision matters here: Establishments is allowed to be empty. Foundation does not currently provide a separate establishment read model, so the surface does not fabricate rows or unsupported fields to make the report look complete. A truthful empty state is more useful than a populated fiction.
What the replay needs to answer
The owner runbook focuses on a small set of real traces: starting with casual labour, moving through formal employment, responding to a legitimate support request, letting the world continue without input, and recovering from a closed opportunity. Each trace includes save and reload checkpoints where the state should remain legible.
The questions are practical:
- Can the player tell where they are and what matters?
- Can they find a legitimate action without being handed a story objective?
- Do blockers explain truthful recovery?
- Does time continue without becoming noise?
- Do money, employment, history, and relationships show understandable changes?
Those answers belong to play, not to a build log. Until the replay is complete, F11 human product acceptance remains open.
The technical foundation is ready to be challenged by a person. That is the work in front of us now.