Triage: always kill the body that would reach you first

The sequence drill tested nothing — the strip was always visible (no memory),
the batch was slow (no urgency), the aim was easy (no execution). A checklist
with gore, and Oliver said so: "not interesting enough to keep me playing".

Settled in discussion, he picked triage + streak. One rule: always kill the
body that would reach you first. Nothing is called, nothing shown — the court
is the puzzle. arrival = distance / speed down a held lane, and the roster's
speed spread means the answer is not the closest body: a runner at the far
baseline beats a roller at the service line. Court sense — and it trains the
exact target-priority read the gore mode rewards.

Wounds are free: only the kill is judged, so pre-softening a heavy while it
is third in line is legal and eventually necessary. The slack (0.9s) makes
near-ties legal both ways, or the rule is a coin flip. The streak is both
punishment and payout: x1..x5, a misread shows OUT OF TURN and resets it, and
nothing else happens — the queue keeps walking. Caught is the real setback.
Best score banks to localStorage; the world board can carry it if it ships.

drillMark draws a chevron over the queue head for playtest calibration. It
answers the exact question the mode asks, so it must be off in anything
shipped.

Deleted: the alphabet, the batch, the strip, the eaters. Shamblers are
first-class stream members with pts 20; a roller is 100.

30 tests, rewritten around arithmetic riggings (known speeds and distances)
instead of luck; 20 seeds clean.

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

src/config.js

@@ -345,42 +345,36 @@ export const TUNE = {
   barrelRoll: 2.6,  // m/s it trundles across the far court — fast enough to have to be led
   barrelHp: 1,      // anything pops it: ball, pellet, bomb, flame, swish. It is a target, not a body
   barrelH: 1.15,    // drawn height (a body is 1.8)
-  // ---- THE COACHING DRILL (src/drill.js) — the cognitive mode. THE SEQUENCE IS THE ZOMBIES
-  // THEMSELVES: a BATCH of distinct roster types is born on the far side and the combination is
-  // called off them at once, so everything the strip asks for is already in front of you. There are
-  // no colours, signs or markers anywhere — a brute does not look like a runner, and that is the
-  // whole point. The danger is a separate channel: plain shambler EATERS on their own clock, never
-  // in the alphabet, converging on you the way ordinary shamblers do.
-  drillBatch: 3,    // TYPES in a batch at the bottom of the ramp...
-  drillBatchMax: 6, // ...and at the top. Capped by DRILL_TYPES — one of each type on court at most
-  drillBatchDepth: 3.0, // m of depth a batch is staggered over. All of it still on the far side,
-                        // which is the promise: you see every colour before you are asked for it
+  // ---- THE TRIAGE DRILL (src/drill.js) — the cognitive mode, fourth design. ONE RULE: always
+  // kill the body that would reach you first. Nothing is called and nothing is shown — the court is
+  // the puzzle, and the skill is reading speeds against distances (a runner at the far baseline
+  // beats a roller at the service line). The streak multiplier is the hook; the score is what you
+  // come back to beat.
+  drillMaxOnCourt: 7, // bodies on court at once — the queue you are reading. Past ~7 it is noise
+  drillSeed: 4,     // bodies placed at the start so there is a queue to read from the first second
+  drillSeedGap: 2.6,// m of depth between those seeded bodies
   drillSpawnZ: 0.6, // z they enter at (the far baseline is 0)
+  drillNearZ: 9.0,  // spawn spacing is measured against bodies nearer than this
   drillSpread: 3.4, // m either side of the centre line the lanes fan across
-  drillSpeed: 0.80, // m/s a batch body walks at the bottom of the ramp (x its type's vMul)...
-  drillSpeedMax: 1.9,// ...and at the top. Stamped per body AT SPAWN, so the ramp shows up as new
-                     // arrivals outpacing the ones already walking, not the court accelerating
-  // The eaters are RARE on purpose. At every 7 s / 2.2 s they were a second crowd rather than an
-  // interruption, and the puzzle is the point of the mode — a threat you have to break off and deal
-  // with only works if breaking off is occasional. They also enter wide of the colour gang
-  // (spawnEater), because the one body out there that is neither the puzzle nor worth anything has
-  // no business standing in front of the puzzle.
-  drillEaterEvery: 12.0, // s between plain-shambler eaters at the bottom of the ramp...
-  drillEaterMin: 5.0,    // ...and at the top. Still THE difficulty dial, just a slower one
-  drillEaterMax: 0,      // eaters allowed on court at once. **0 = OFF, which is where it is now** —
-                         // Oliver: "remove the fake zombies for now", so the drill is currently the
-                         // pure puzzle with no second threat. The whole mechanism is intact
-                         // (spawnEater, the wide entry, the never-a-fault rule); this one number
-                         // brings it back. Past 3 the puzzle stops being readable.
-  drillEaterSpeed: 1.15,// they walk a touch faster than the batch: the batch is a list, this is a threat
+  drillSpeed: 0.85, // m/s at the bottom of the ramp (x the type's vMul)...
+  drillSpeedMax: 2.0,// ...and at the top. Stamped per body AT SPAWN — constant v is also what lets
+                     // arrival() be a plain division, so the queue is honest
+  drillSpawnEvery: 3.2, // s between arrivals at the bottom of the ramp...
+  drillSpawnMin: 1.1,   // ...and at the top. THE pressure dial: the queue outgrows your clearing rate
   drillRampT: 210,  // s to go from the bottom of every curve above to the top
-  // TESTING KNOB, and it is OFF again after one playtest: "one-shot is bad - way too easy - also
-  // we're losing all the nice gore animation sprites". Both halves matter and the second is the one
-  // that is easy to miss — a 1 hp body never passes through any of its WOUND STAGES, so every skin
-  // in ZWOUND (arm off, ribs out, still walking) is skipped entirely and the roster's best art never
-  // renders. The HP is also what makes the called ORDER matter: a roller is seven serves, so being
-  // told to take it third means starting on it first. Left here as a switch, not a default.
-  drillOneShot: 0,  // >= 0.5: batch bodies AND eaters all drop to 1 hp
+  // THE JUDGEMENT SLACK. Two bodies arriving within this of each other are BOTH legal kills —
+  // without it, near-simultaneous arrivals made the rule a coin flip and a fault read as theft.
+  // Tightening it is the real difficulty curve for good players; below ~0.4 it starts punishing
+  // reads the eye genuinely cannot separate.
+  drillSlack: 0.9,
+  drillMultEvery: 4, // correct kills per multiplier step...
+  drillMultCap: 5,   // ...capped: a deep streak should feel valuable, not become the whole score
+  drillMark: 1,      // >= 0.5 draws a chevron over the queue head — the CALIBRATION AID, so a
+                     // playtest can check the game's read against the player's. Off for the real
+                     // thing: the marker answers the exact question the mode exists to ask
+  drillOneShot: 0,  // >= 0.5: every drill body drops to 1 hp. OFF after one playtest: "way too easy"
+                    // AND a 1 hp body skips every ZWOUND stage, so the gore art never renders.
+                    // Also flattens triage — pre-softening a heavy IS the planning layer
   drillCaughtBack: 45, // s of ramp handed back when one reaches you. A real setback, not a reset
   fps: 60,          // frame cap — 30 halves battery/heat but Oliver felt it; smoothness wins (0 = uncapped)
   lowPower: 1,      // >= 0.5 caps RES at 3 (−44% of pixels painted per frame) — the battery saver,