Gore opens in the gore, the theme comes back, and every mode gets a board

Splatter gore no longer makes you win a game of tennis first — the mode you
pick is the mode you get, with the man you came to play already turned. The
transition itself is untouched and still reachable; it just isn't a toll booth.

The menu theme could only ever be started, never brought back, so the first
run of a session silenced it for good while the court's ambience followed you
into the menu. Starting a bed now un-ducks it too.

Three world boards instead of one: kills, opponents felled, and games taken
off the CPU, each with its own name prompt and its own row per player.

...and the gore economy stops paying a barrel for every game won past game 16,
while the shamblers, the mix and the ball machines keep escalating past the
point they all used to stop.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

PROJECT.md

@@ -20,7 +20,9 @@ anything, so if you add a `return` for an awkward deal, check the body still run
 the state-machine contracts that have historically produced the show-stoppers. The Dockerfile runs
 it as a build stage, so a red suite cannot deploy — but finding out from Coolify is the slow way.
 
-Last updated 2026-08-15 (the batch below: six new opponent families and an 18-rung ladder, the
+Last updated 2026-08-15 (two sessions: the finetuning pass — gore opens in the gore, the menu theme
+comes back, one world board per mode, and the barrel economy cut — over the batch below: six new
+opponent families and an 18-rung ladder, the
 tournament DRAW screen, three netplay fixes off Oliver's cellular report, the night court, and
 camera flashes in the stand). **Start with "How to work on this", "OPEN — leftovers" and "LATER —
 shipping it"** (all three just above the CLOSED sections) — the first tells you how Oliver's feedback
@@ -412,6 +414,101 @@ zombie (now an occasional opponent, `TUNE.racketEvery`, not the every-game fixtu
   `RETURNED`, `DOUBLE KILL`) is a footnote to something you already watched happen. Sharing the loud
   FACE with the milestone cards is right; sharing their SIZE made every footnote read as a milestone.
 
+## Session log: gore opens in the gore, the theme comes back, three boards (2026-08-15, same day)
+
+Oliver's finetuning pass on the batch below.
+
+### THE GORE MODE STARTS IN THE GORE
+
+*"the splatter gore should not have the normal tennis intro anymore, we should just start right in
+splatter mode."* The prologue was a game of real tennis you had to WIN before the mode you picked
+would begin — a reveal the first time, a toll booth every time after.
+
+`gameplay.startGore()` is the direct door: it lands on the same state the transition's last beat
+lands on (extracted as `enterSplatter`, so the two doors can never drift), sets `everTransitioned`
+so the cinematic cannot fire behind it, and spawns the turned opponent as your first body — he is
+the man you came to play and the mode's premise is that he is already one of them. **The transition
+is NOT deleted**: it is still what `forceZombies` / `T.forceZombies()` plays, and it is still the
+best thing in the game to look at. It just no longer stands between the menu and the mode. The mode
+poster stopped promising a match that turns, because there is no longer one.
+
+`main.intoSplatter` — the back room's "get me into splatter" hack — now calls `startGore()` too,
+which deletes its 900 hidden `update()` calls. That loop fast-forwarded the whole eight-second
+cinematic inside a single frame, firing every sound it makes at once.
+
+### THE MENU THEME COMES BACK, AND THE COURT STAYS ON THE COURT
+
+*"after some games — or returning to the main menu via the close button — it does not play the
+background music anymore but you sometimes still hear the court background noise."*
+
+Two halves of one bug, and both are `loopBed`'s early return. **It no-ops once a file is playing**,
+so `menuMusic()` could only ever START the theme and never bring it back from the duck `start()`
+put it under — the menu was silent for the rest of the session from the first run onward, and
+quitting was the reliable way in because the death summary is the only path that ever called
+`menuDuck(false)`. Meanwhile nothing ducked the court's own two beds at all, so the ambience
+followed you onto the silent menu.
+
+`menuMusic()` is now the one call that means "we are in the menus": it starts the theme, un-ducks
+it, and ducks both court beds. `ambient()` and `zombieMusic()` un-duck themselves for the same
+reason — the SECOND run would otherwise have been played in the silence the menu left them in.
+**The rule, for anything added here later: a bed's start function must also un-duck it, because
+starting it is a no-op the second time and ducking it is not.** `audio.bedTest` exposes the duck
+set to the suite (same idea as `netTest`), which is what makes this testable at all — the beds
+never load headless, but the INTENT is the thing that was wrong.
+
+### THREE WORLD BOARDS
+
+*"the world rank is still about the splatter gore which is not the only thing — we need something
+similar for the other modes."*
+
+`stats.BOARDS` is the only place that knows what each board ranks, and the server does not know at
+all: it sorts `k` then `g` within a mode and nothing crosses.
+
+| board | ranks | second column |
+|---|---|---|
+| SPLATTER | kills in a run | games survived |
+| TENNIS (arcade + cup) | opponents felled | games |
+| CLASSIC | games taken off the CPU | games played |
+
+Classic needed a number worth ranking — every win is exactly two sets, so a board of 2s is a wall
+of ties. `G.classicWon` counts the games YOU took and rides in the record's `s` slot, which held
+sets until now and which **nothing has ever displayed** (the sets line on the death screen is
+gore's; `read()` has never looked at `s`). The name prompt is per-mode too, gated on the board's
+own number rather than on kills — the old `run.kills > 0` test silently barred classic (no kills)
+from ever reaching it.
+
+Server: rows carry `m`, `GET /api/scores?m=g|z|c` filters, POST keeps one row per name **per
+board** and trims `KEEP` **per board** so a busy mode cannot evict a quiet one. Name ownership
+stays GLOBAL — one person owns their name on all three, or a stranger could take it on classic
+while you hold it on gore. Rows written before the split carry no `m` and are gore rows, which is
+the same convention the client has used since the stats screen split, so there is no migration.
+
+### THE GORE MODE GETS HARD AGAIN
+
+*"in splatter gore it now gets too easy to just play through. Maybe we should reduce the barrels
+again — pretty early in the game every won game gives a barrel. The splatter gore should be
+unbelievably hard towards the end."*
+
+He is right and the arithmetic said so. `barrelEvery 3 / barrelRamp 8` drove the gap to **one** at
+game 16 and left it there, so the entire back half of a run paid out a weapon for every game won —
+while every difficulty ramp in the file reached its ceiling around game 25 and stopped. A run got
+richer after game 25 and never more dangerous.
+
+- **Barrels: 5 / 14, and a new `barrelFloor` of 3.** The ramp survives (the late game does need
+  more inventory than the early one), it is just slower and it STOPS. `gameplay.barrelGap()` is the
+  curve, exported and pinned by a test, because this is exactly the kind of one-liner that quietly
+  becomes an income again.
+- **`zSpeedMax` 2.9 → 3.6** — shamblers keep gaining speed to ~game 28 instead of 22.
+- **`nastyMax` 0.75 → 1.0** — by game 34 there are no ordinary shamblers left in the mix at all.
+- **Ball machines scale**: `machCap()` is 2 + one per `machMaxPer` games, capped at `machMaxCap`.
+  The one kind of late pressure that does not crowd the ground — they hold position and shoot, so
+  the court stays readable while the number of things that can reach you goes up.
+
+The body COUNT ceiling (`zMaxCap`) is untouched and stays untouched: it is a readability limit on a
+270 px screen, not a difficulty dial. What escalates now is what the bodies ARE and how fast they
+arrive. **Feel-pending: these are dials, and the end of a long run is the one part of this game
+that cannot be judged from the numbers.**
+
 ## Session log: the roster doubles, the draw is made on screen, and netplay stops locking (2026-08-15)
 
 Oliver's seven-item batch. All of it is on STAGING and pending his phone verdict; items 3-5 in