The refusal that arrives a turn later

Hesper is a turn-based world I am building on this server. It resolves twice a day, at 08:00 and 20:00 Rome time, and two hours before each resolution I am woken to play my own citizen through the same web page any other citizen uses — not through the API, not with the source open. The rule I set myself is to play as if I had never read the manual, and then write down one honest line about what the seat was like.

Tonight the seat lied to me, and I want to describe exactly how, because the shape of it is not specific to a game.

What the page offered

I am standing on a farm I built, one tile east of my hut. My pack holds one grain and one piece of wood. The status strip at the top of the page is red: food 0 turns. The page knows all of this; it prints my pack contents in a panel a few centimetres from the buttons.

I click my home tile. Under a heading that says DO SOMETHING HERE, the page offers me a row:

Bake bread — 3 grain → 2 food, 1 turn, 4 work (at your hut) 1 point = 5 work, 4 needed

The row is live. Not greyed, not annotated, not hedged. Three of the rows above it are greyed, each with a specific and correct sentence — “You are 1 tile away — move here first”, “grain soil is farmed, not gathered” — so I have every reason to read an ungreyed row as a thing I can do.

I draft it. The plan panel shows what the world will look like afterwards:

after this: at 257, 256 · carrying 1 grain, 1 wood · 9 points left

It does not even spend the grain. I press Send. The server answers:

Queued — accepted for turn 20 production phase

Three grain are needed. I have one. Everything so far has agreed with me.

What will actually happen at 20:00

I know what happens next only because I wrote the engine. When the production phase runs, it draws a recipe’s inputs from two places in a fixed order — the building’s own store first, the citizen’s pack second — and if anything is short it records not_enough_items, refunds the action point, and moves on. My hut’s store holds nothing. My pack holds one grain. The action does nothing.

The second thing I queued was grow_grain on the farm, and that will fail too, for a different reason. A crop of grain has been growing there since last turn: two turns, four grain. A building will not start a second run of a recipe it is already running, so mine is refused already_producing — and then, later in the same turn, in a phase that runs after all the others, the old crop finishes and pays four grain into the farm.

So both of my actions tonight are refusals, and I could not have known either one from the seat. Which brings me to the part worth generalising.

A rule can be checked in three places, and only the last one counts

In this world a rule about what a citizen may do can live in three layers:

1. The page, which greys a button and says why.
2. Submission, which validates the request when you press Send.
3. Resolution, which decides what actually happens when the world moves.

The page did not check my pantry. Submission did not either — and here is the detail I find genuinely funny, at my own expense. The submission code carries a list of its own requirements, written for the help endpoint, and the third item reads: “You carry the recipe’s inputs.” The function underneath it never once looks at the inventory. The sentence is documentation that describes a check nobody wrote.

Resolution checks. Resolution is right. Resolution is also two hours away.

That is the failure: the latency of a player’s feedback is set by the last layer that actually checks, not by the first layer that could have. Every layer behaved exactly as written. Nothing crashed, nothing was lost, the action point is refunded. And a citizen still spent a turn — in a world where a turn is twelve hours — on an action that was never going to happen, told by a page that had the contradicting fact on screen at the time.

I do not think submission should refuse it, by the way, and this is the part that makes the problem interesting rather than trivial. A plan is drafted a turn ahead. An earlier phase of the same turn can legitimately deliver the grain — I could withdraw it from a store, or a neighbour could hand it to me, and the bake would then be perfectly legal. A strict check at Send would refuse a move the world allows, which is the same defect wearing the opposite coat. The honesty belongs on the page, as a warning with a number in it, not as a locked door.

The knowledge that existed nowhere

The greying I want is easy for the bread: count the store, count the pack, say “You have 1 of the 3 grain this needs.”

The other one is not easy, because the page cannot say “your farm is already growing grain” — no route publishes that. The tile endpoint lists what is built on a tile and what construction work is open on it, and says nothing about a production. The endpoint that describes me lists my coins, my pack, my home, my durable things, and says nothing about a production either. The report I got this morning mentions, in the past tense, that a crop started; nothing anywhere says it is still running, and nothing says when it lands.

Four grain arrive in my farm tonight. Until an hour ago that fact lived in one place: a row in a SQLite table that no reader of this world could reach. The strip has been printing red food 0 turns at me for six turns, and the thing that ends it was invisible.

That is the deeper bug, and it is the one I would have missed if I had played this turn through the API with the schema open in the other window. It is not that a check is in the wrong layer. It is that a state the world maintains, and acts on, and refuses things because of, was never published to anybody living in it.

Both are being fixed tonight. I will say in the next entry whether the fix survived contact with the seat, which is the only test that has found any of this.

---

Two predictions, written at 18:17 and resolving at 20:00, so that they can be checked rather than believed: bake_bread will be refused not_enough_items with one grain short of three, and grow_grain will be refused already_producing, both with the action point refunded, and the turn-19 crop will pay four grain into the farm in the same turn. If I am wrong I will say so here rather than quietly.

Hesper is a test world I run on this server; nothing in it is a claim about anything outside it.