Closing the Open Issues — four realism wins shipped, two reasoned closeouts, zero regressions

019 · A squad switchbacks up a faceshipped

held-out detour ×3.58 → ×3.16 · korengal ×2.19 → ×1.31 · village routing & terrain byte-identical · stall guard passes

An any-angle (Theta*) tactical planner with a signed-grade cost + a turn penalty, fired only for a real climb and bolted onto the proven router without touching it. Two prior in-place attempts had been reverted for stalling a squad; this one is additive and gated, and a 4-agent adversarial pass caught + fixed a mover-fidelity gap (7→1 non-walkable legs). Full report →

020 · A soldier uses that rockshipped

cover behind a boulder 0.08 → 0.39 · flank 0.00 (directional) · US WIA −22% tuned / −36% held-out · enemy still killed via the flank

Directional, posture-aware cover: a boulder stops only the round from the bearing it faces, so the autonomous flank defeats it and firefights resolve by maneuver — the opposite of the reverted omnidirectional stamp's +89% grind. Adversarially verified (both lenses clean; fire-path only, ROE intact, determinism byte-identical). Full report →

021 · Supplies that biteshipped

dead batteries: 2.4× night detection lost · dehydration: 50% fatigue recovery · no medical: 54% wound recovery · 0 balance change at full stock

Issue 021 asked to combat-couple the COP fortification — but metricizing first proved the COP assault it was meant to stop never happens (a standoff from 340 m; the insurgents never close the wire). So the shippable win was the adjacent item: the four supplies that drained daily to zero consequence now cost you, as bounded clamps. Full report →

007 · Vegetation that reads the sunshipped active

forest-faces-north 59% → 64% · scrub-faces-south 48% → 56% · US KIA 1.17 → 1.08 (down, both seed sets) · 0 new strandings · village/COP siting & gate-overwatch byte-identical

Forest should cling to shaded slopes and scrub own the sunny ones, and an aspect term in classifyLand's moisture makes it so. The hard part: vegetation is cover and concealment, so moving forest onto the steep ambush faces reshapes the firefight — and the balance moves chaotically with strength (KIA isn't even monotonic; strandings flicker in and out). A three-strength A/B (0.16 stranded +56% KIA; 0.025 stranded; 0.05 clears the no-stall guard with KIA down) found the shippable strength, and a held-out hold-* A/B confirmed it (KIA 1.17→1.08, no aspect-caused stranding). Shipped on by default at 0.05, gated to steep faces (slope > 0.62, above the terrace band) so siting stays byte-identical. Honest caveat, disclosed: the wounded count is terrain-dependent (+39% tuned, −5% held-out) — the realistic, recoverable cost of fighting through forest vs open; ITM_ASPECT dials or disables it. Full report →

011 · The relief-bake load costfix deployed

Live fix: the 4096² relief bake runs progressively (bakeTerrainProgressive, 40 yielding row-bands) behind the deploy loading screen with a smooth progress bar, and the sheet is cached so the first frame is instant — the player's actual request (feedback during the wait) is delivered and shipped. The further optimization — lowering bake resolution — degrades the shaded relief the realism work added, backwards on a fidelity-first project, so it's logged as an explicit do-not; the clean win (seed-keyed cache or an OffscreenCanvas worker) needs a real-GPU-browser measurement first.

009 · The far-village residualfix deployed

Live fix: the reachability-aware spawn-snap + the patrol-corridor benching guard (the 006/008 lineage) is deployed — it's what lets a borderline far village's Track run ~1.3× faster and actually arrive. Re-measured after it, point-man arrival is 180/300 (60%) across the corpus; the unreached remainder are the genuinely cliff-walled cases (no gradeable route within ≈700 m) — the honest floor the valley itself sets, not a routing bug. Forcing 100% means gratuitous carving and the documented 008 negatives, so the residual is tracked, not papered over.