The Third Brother, driven to the end

The run, step by step

Not written means there is no implementation yet, not a skipped test — the suite reports it rather than passing it, which is the difference between tracking the goal and flattering it. The two failures are expanded below; both are reported by the step that found them rather than asserted away.

What the quest is, and which step drives what

Before the failures: the shape of the thing. The quest is a five-stage store with a flame count, and a placement gate that decides who is standing in the room when it loads. Every step below is one question asked of that machine.

Natural is the third Composer Brother. He is in the graveyard at night, his lantern is out, and he asks Link to find the three flames that were taken out of it. They hang in hive sacs — two in the graveyard, one on the Kakariko ledge — and each one has to be cut open, its flock killed, and the loose flame chased down and caught. With three flames he plays a nine-second song that opens a grave, a Hive Queen comes out of it, and what is on the other side of her is a Piece of Heart and four pages of the only speech in the quest.

All of that is one store with two keys — a stage from 0 to 4 and a flame count from 0 to 3 — and the playtest steps hang off the transitions between them:

The gate is the part that surprises people, so it is worth drawing whole. It is asked only when a room loads. Writing the store from the console moves the numbers and stands nothing up; you have to walk out and back in. That rule has two directions and only the first gets tested by accident, which is why step 15 exists.

And an actor already standing does what it likes with the store. This run measured three different answers from three quest actors, none of them the gate: Natural re-reads the store every frame and starts the song when the stage moves to 2 under him; En_OpenGrave shuts itself the moment the stage leaves 2, with no doorway crossed; En_HiveRoost has no change detector at all and goes on hanging at a stage that would never have placed it.

The tear, at two heights

Step 9's failure, and the only one of the two that is the quest's own fault. The song opens a tear in the ground beside the Composer Brothers' grave. Whether it reads as a hole depends on a number that is right once and wrong once, in the same session, for the same actor.

docs/PLAYTEST.md names three ways the tear can be wrong — a stain (too flat), a lump (the collar too proud), or invisible (the alpha) — and asks a person to say which. This run found the first one, and found out why.

The tear is painted above the floor on purpose: a translucent throat below ground would be Z-rejected by the ground it is a hole in. main.lua's MAW_FLOOR is 181, the terrace's grass. But the Composer Brothers' grave has a stone apron — Bg_Spot02_Objects, dynapoly — that covers the tear's whole footprint, and the harness measured its surface at 192.45 by dropping Link on it from 400 units up. So the tear is 11.45 units under the ground it is torn in, and the opaque apron is drawn first.

So the quest shows two different pictures of one grave, and the broken one is the one every reload gives you. Walk out and back in, or die and take the Continue, and you get the stain. The fix is one number, in two places: the placement's y at examples/third_brother/main.lua:4798 and MAW_FLOOR itself.

What only a person can answer

docs/PLAYTEST.md collects six judgement calls, and says plainly that none of them has a right answer in the code. Two of them — #5 and #6 — had no picture beside them until this run, because nothing had ever driven the quest that far.

Judgement call #5

Is the four-page reward speech too long?

He has been silent for the whole fight, and this is the only speech in the quest.

The card suspects it is two pages too many and says FREED is the only thing to change. All four pages are filed — they are in the strip below — and Sharp renders in red on page 3 as it should.

But read the frame before answering the question. The line runs off the right edge of the screen. All four pages of this speech overflow their box, so the question “are four pages too many?” is being asked about a speech you cannot finish reading. That is step 20's subject, and it lands hardest here.

text id 0xE008 · 4 pages · 4 lines over the box's right edge by 82, 61, 34 and 35

Judgement call #6 — the gate holds

Handed a heart piece by walking into range

The right feel, or should he offer it mid-conversation?

Still a person's call, but the thing it is a question about is now proven. Step 12 takes the hand-over apart into two negatives and a positive: 120 frames at 25 units without ever speaking to him hands over nothing; 120 frames at 80 units after the conversation hands over nothing either; walking to 25 units and pressing nothing takes it on the next stepped frame, with input state read back through the hand-over as held: none | timed: none | stick: off.

So the choice really is between “he says the line and then holds it out” and “he thrusts it at anyone who walks past”. The third possibility — that the gate is already broken and it is the second one — is ruled out.

And the digit is not the counter. The kaleidoscope shows one quarter of four; it wraps, because the fourth piece becomes a heart container. The count that was asserted is the cumulative one, 36 → 37.

pause state 6 · 3 START presses and 4 turns of R · cumulative 36 → 37

Judgement call #1

Does the dark tint read as an unlit lantern?

Or as a model that failed to load?

This is him at zero flames, and it is the reading the first playtest gave: a flat navy silhouette with no face. It is also on purpose — the colours scale with the flame count, which is what keeps him a progress bar — so the real question is what happens next. It does: by one flame he has glowing eyes, a shaded robe and a Triforce sigil, and the strip below has all four.

The measurement does not settle it. The harness sampled a rectangle of his body at each flame count and got #181e27, #283133, #202b25, #242f28 — luminance 29.1, 46.4, 39.1, 42.7. That does not rise with the flames, so “he brightens as you make progress” is not what a body sample shows. The doc's claim is about his head — segment 0x08 reaches limb 10 and nothing else — and a body rectangle cannot see it. The pictures are the instrument here, not the number.

0 flames · body #181e27, luminance 29.1 · he is at (660, 181, 20)

Judgement call — step 16

Does the Queen pop behind a gravestone?

`draw_culling_disabled` is not a number, and a pixel count cannot tell a boss hidden behind a stone from a boss that stopped being drawn.

She has update_culling_disabled and draw_culling_disabled both set, which should make popping impossible — but “impossible” here means two flags in a Lua table. The update half is settled by measurement: she kept updating from all five stands, including from the graveyard entrance with a wall and a stairwell between her and Link.

The draw half is what the five frames are for. Read them knowing this: in two of the five she is not in shot at all, and in at least one of those — the stand in the open — she is a violet sliver in the top-right corner, off the side of the camera rather than absent from the world. Framing, not culling. Whether she ever pops is the part a person still has to watch for.

5 stands · she updated from all of them

Open

Is a boss designed in a test room worse in a graveyard?

The fight works as machinery. Does it work as a fight?

Steps 10, 11 and 16 assert the machinery and it holds: she stays above the terrace, she is not stuck, she survives the camera leaving her, dying to her is survivable, and six blows of four through her own damage path take her from 24 to 0. Her heart container then hovers at (570, ~220, 110), fixed in x and z over 120 frames and bobbing between 216.8 and 223.9 — 37 to 44 units above the terrace.

None of that is the question. This is the player's own view of the fight, and it is a sparse picture: one small shard creature, a lot of wet stone. A boss built in a test room is being asked to carry a real room, and no assertion in the suite can say whether it does.

stage 2 · 24 hp · she updated from every stand tried

The quest, in order

Five frames out of the forty-eight this run filed — the progress bar lighting up, the speech, the drop, and the morning after. Every frame the run took is listed at the foot of the page.

The other failure, and the frame that proves it

Step 20, and it is not the quest's fault — it is ship.text's. It also demonstrates the trap that this report is built to avoid.

Fourteen lines run out of their box

Nothing in the engine wraps a line and ship.text does not measure one, so what does not fit runs out of the box and off the screen. Fourteen lines of this quest do it. The worst ends at x=503 in a box that ends at x=290, on a virtual screen 320 wide — and this is that exact line, caught by step 5 on its way past: “Then listen for them. A flame that…” clipped at both edges, with the rest of the sentence simply not on the screen.

Note which frame this is. It is not step20_FAIL.png. That one is the runner's best-effort capture, taken after the step raised on whatever frame the game happened to be on — it shows Natural standing over Link in the rain with no text box on screen at all, and it would prove nothing. The frame that shows the failure was filed five steps earlier by a step that passed. A caption written from a filename gets this exactly backwards, which is why report.py refuses a featured frame with no alt text: you cannot describe a frame you have not opened.

What has still never run

Six of the twenty-three steps have no implementation, and they are no longer the end of the quest — they are the edges of it.

14, 23 — quest reset, and the abuse list. 19 — a placement landing inside geometry, which the tear above is arguably the first real instance of. 21 — dawn, and the u16 that wraps. 22 — the live-reload loop.

And 18, the side-car's round trip to disk, which is the one the quest itself keeps running into. Step 13 tries four ways of getting the world back — standing there, lua_reload, leaving to Kakariko and returning, and dying and taking the Continue — and he never offers a second Piece of Heart through any of them. What it cannot do is save, quit and relaunch: ./dev drive boots with DebugSaveFileMode=2 on save slot 255, ScriptedSave_SlotIsReal takes 0..SCRIPTED_SAVE_SLOT_MAX, so this game never flushes a side-car at all. The step asserts the slot rather than asserting a claim it did not make. A harness that boots into the file select is in progress as this page is written.