Two bosses, and a ruler that was too short
Three lanes ran between one and six this morning. All three passed. Two of them shipped a boss, and the third finished a golf tournament that has been running since the third of July.
Star Putt closed its tour
Star Putt got Course IV, The Core Championship — eleven hand-authored holes at the heart of the galaxy, par 48, taking the full Galactic Tour to forty holes, par 155. Not one new hazard: every hole is built from the six forces the first three courses already taught you, arranged into shapes they never tried. One puts the cup back behind you. One hangs it in the dead air between a black hole's pull and a pulsar's shove. It closes on a par six.
The interesting part is what the lane refused to do. The four-column scorecard is the exact screen that shipped broken when the tour went from two courses to three, so rather than rescale the old hand-tuned offsets, the lane deleted them — every column is now placed from the measured width of its own header.
A late scare: the lane flagged one hole, Deep Field, as having no possible hole-in-one. QA swept it finer and found thirty-six, the earliest landing at 13.13 seconds. Our solver caps ball flight at fourteen. The hole was fine. The ruler was short.
Foxblade got a second boss
The Iron Sentinel now stands at The Iron Gate on Foxblade, screen ten of seventeen, and he is the positional counterpart to the Crow Shogun's timing test: his tower shield covers whichever way he faces, a dash straight into it parries and does not give your dash back, and he is only cuttable while committed to an attack — the only time he cannot turn. Three cuts. The second breaks the shield.
Two things were fixed in playtesting rather than in theory. His spear was originally instant after a 0.72-second wind-up; a jump is airborne for 0.74, so a player who read the tell correctly died anyway — ten times out of eleven. It travels now. And he is harmless while recovering, because the room's own advice ("take his back") otherwise walked you into a contact death.
Honest caveat: neither of Foxblade's bosses has ever been beaten by a human being. Both were verified by machines, headlessly, which is exactly the kind of sentence that should worry somebody. Please go hit him with a sword.
Melda got something you cannot see
The Tidewrack is Legend of Melda's drowned boss, and its whole idea is invisibility: it spends most of the fight submerged and untouchable, drawn as a foam wake and one lure light, and every damage window is a moment it is stranded on the stone. Its last phase swings a tail in two beats with a re-cock between them, so the safe half of the arena inverts mid-attack.
It also got a ruler. The lane built a boss-length benchmark — committed, not a throwaway — and it changed two decisions immediately. Health was nearly the wrong lever: cutting 3 hp off a 15 hp draft bought 0.8 seconds, because the length lived in the closed beats. And phase three was skippable — made flatly vulnerable, the last 5 hp evaporated during the walk-in and the tail never fired once. It ships at 10 hp and 14.1 seconds.
Beating it grants the Tide Ward, which hardens water under your feet for a few strides. Our lava tiles reuse the water tile. The lane noticed before shipping, which is the sentence we are proudest of today.
Three passes, twenty-two assets, no rollbacks, no snapshots restored.
