Four systems went into the tap-to-command prototype in quick succession — world, placement, shelter, then power and food. Three of them only worked after something in the design broke first. Those breaks are the interesting part, so here they are.
The hatch, or: a room you can enter is a room that cannot be warm
Shelter is modelled honestly. A room is sealed only if a flood fill from inside never reaches open sky. That rule is what makes walls matter — and the first build of it was unplayable, because it also meant that the moment you cut a doorway or a ladder shaft up to the surface, the room could never be warm again. Every space the crew could actually walk into was permanently freezing. The system was correct and the game was pointless.
The fix is a piece, not a special case: the Hatch is non-solid to the crew, who walk and climb straight through it, but it seals for the room fill and blocks light like a wall. Ladder shaft, hatch at the top, liveable room. Any future door or airlock has to keep both of those properties, or the same hole opens up again.
The pathfinder could not step off a ladder
With the hatch in, the crew still refused to go into the finished shelter. The pathfinder handled walking, climbing and stepping up, but had no move for "you are at the bottom of a ladder, there is air below you, fall to the floor". So a shaft ending in open air was a dead end and the room was unreachable. It can now drop up to six tiles.
Worth noting how both bugs were found: not by unit-style probes of the shelter maths, which all passed, but by one unattended run that dug a pocket and built a real base in it. Every system now ends its round with that kind of run.
Power had to be visible when it failed
Making machines depend on a fuelled generator is easy. Making the failure legible is the design work. An unpowered lamp or heater does not quietly stop contributing — it is drawn dark and cold, drops out of the light field, and stops counting toward the room’s insulation, all in the same tick the fuel runs out. When the power assignment changes, the room cache is invalidated and the light field is rebuilt, so a base going dark is something you watch happen rather than something you deduce from a temperature readout.
Capacity is deliberately tight: four machines per generator, assigned nearest-first, which is exactly enough for a heater, a lamp, a planter and a galley. The second room needs a second generator.
Nothing kills the crew
Cold and hunger both bite — they cost speed and dig rate, and cold eventually takes the crew off orders entirely. Neither ends a run. A freezing suit retreats to shelter or huddles; a starving one keeps working badly and complains. The drone can always dig you out of whatever you have done to yourself. For a semi-idle game you leave running on a phone, a failure state you can walk back from is worth more than a death screen.
Live: orbit2d.co.
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