diff --git a/HANDOFF-MATCH.md b/HANDOFF-MATCH.md
index 04112cb..79e3bcf 100644
--- a/HANDOFF-MATCH.md
+++ b/HANDOFF-MATCH.md
@@ -197,6 +197,17 @@ he ran, where the ball died. That triple diagnosed every defect in the contact c
   fine (`check: 'same'`) can be rejected for not out-detailing a redraw; `'loose'` is the right bar
   for that job, and resetting the placeholder to the coarse original resets the bar.
 
+## The art pipeline
+
+Everything learned generating this mode's sprites is in **PROJECT.md, "THE ART PIPELINE, corrected"**
+— read it before touching `assets/_regen.py`, `_fine.py` or `_master.py`. The one-line version: the
+generator does identity and pose given REFERENCE IMAGES, the pipeline does exact colour with
+arithmetic, and the gates only catch layout accidents. A day was spent discovering that the middle
+one is not a prompting problem.
+
+The match opponent's own art is complete — 33 frames, three wound stages, the serve and the fall —
+and `assets/_master.py` turns that pose set into the master sheets a new opponent is restyled from.
+
 ## Do not
 
 - Re-add regicide to the match (killing the body with a smash) — removed deliberately; it made every
diff --git a/PROJECT.md b/PROJECT.md
index 24e2b45..e4fbc2a 100644
--- a/PROJECT.md
+++ b/PROJECT.md
@@ -1641,6 +1641,117 @@ Known generator quirks, all still true:
 - **Colour-match any regenerated frame** of an existing pair before shipping: fit a per-channel
   linear map onto the original's mean and sd, then verify with a mean-difference number.
 
+## THE ART PIPELINE, corrected — what a day of chasing the generator taught (2026-08-12)
+
+A whole day went into sprite consistency and most of it was spent solving the problem in the wrong
+place. Read this before touching `assets/_regen.py`, `_fine.py` or `_master.py`; it will save the
+same day.
+
+### The boundary that everything else follows
+
+| what it is good at | who does it |
+|---|---|
+| identity, pose, composition | the generator, **given reference images** |
+| exact colour values | the pipeline, **deterministically** |
+| layout accidents — clipped limbs, grids, merged frames, wrong frame count | the gates |
+
+Six gates were built in one day trying to make a generator do arithmetic. It cannot. The proof is
+unambiguous: the brute's serve sheet came back with his build, his garments and his DARK TONES
+pixel-identical to the reference — `(56,56,32)` in both — and his big pale shirt two shades
+brighter, `(200,200,184)` against `(176,176,152)`. The model was looking straight at the character.
+Every call re-renders, and re-rendering re-lights. **No prompt fixes that; `match_to_anchor()` does,
+in one pass, retroactively, on art already on disk.**
+
+### A REFERENCE BEATS A DESCRIPTION. Every time, at every level.
+
+This is the single highest-value rule here, and every failure of the day was a violation of it:
+
+- The racket zombie's play sheet was generated from `[z_c1, o_idle1, o_run1, o_swing1]` — the
+  character as an IMAGE, the poses as IMAGES — and landed first time.
+- The brute's three sheets each restyled from the master with the character in **words**, so each
+  one re-derived "pale grey-green work shirt" from the same paragraph and the game got three
+  different brutes.
+- Wound stages only started accumulating damage when stage 2 referenced stage 1's SHEET instead of
+  being told in prose that the arm was still missing. The arm kept coming back because the reference
+  picture had two arms in it, and a picture beats a paragraph — including when the picture is wrong.
+
+Corollary: every corrective sentence in a prompt is compensating for a reference you did not supply.
+When a prompt grows a third "do NOT" clause, add an image instead.
+
+### CORRECT, THEN CHECK
+
+`match_to_anchor()` runs before the palette gate, so the gate is a safety net for what arithmetic
+could not fix rather than a tripwire for what it can. It pairs each of a frame's dominant colours
+with its nearest anchor colour, fits one gain+offset per channel, and applies it to every pixel.
+Pairs further apart than `NEW_COLOUR` are dropped from the FIT — those are colours the anchor
+genuinely has not got, i.e. blood on a fresh wound — but they still RECEIVE the transform, so a
+wound stays the right red relative to the body it is on.
+
+### CALIBRATE BEFORE YOU GATE
+
+The discipline that was missing all day. Every threshold in `_regen.py` was picked by measuring
+frames known to be right against drifts that were visibly wrong, and rejecting the formulations that
+overlapped. Three formulations were tried for the palette gate; two overlapped and were thrown away.
+Do not add a gate without printing that table first.
+
+The gates, and the numbers they were calibrated on:
+
+- **stride** — is a walk cycle ONE DRAWING WITH THE LEGS MOVED? Height ratio, upper-body delta, leg
+  delta on a feet-aligned overlay. Good pairs: brute lurch `1.00/0.000/0.638`, shambler
+  `1.00/0.070/0.520`. Failures sat at upper 0.47-0.85 (two unrelated illustrations) or legs 0.09
+  (the same picture twice). Opt-in per batch, because a four-frame RUN legitimately swings the arms.
+- **palette** — are the big colour areas the anchor's colours? TOP SIX by area, proportions ignored
+  so a pose change is invisible, and blood is never in the top six so a fresh wound cannot look like
+  drift. Right frames 0.0-8.5, visible drifts 12.0-15.9, threshold 10. **This one number replaced
+  four hand-picked features** (`kit`'s shirt redness, shorts brightness, shorts hue, near-white
+  fraction), every one of which a different character broke — the brute's shirt has no red in it at
+  all, two of the four move with POSE, and none of them ever measured SKIN.
+- **changed** — did the wound actually happen? A copy scores 0.02-0.05, an amputation 0.12-0.38, a
+  decapitation 0.27-0.75. Measured whole-body OR above-the-hip, whichever moved more, because an arm
+  is a body-relative amount of silhouette: 12-38% of a lean man, 9% of a brute.
+- **no grids** — asked of each cut PIECE, not of the sheet. A body is vertically continuous, so a
+  full-width empty band inside one piece means the cut caught two of them.
+- plus the older ones: frame count, magenta background, nothing touching a canvas edge, inner-edge
+  density.
+
+### Traps, each of which shipped something silently before it was caught
+
+- **A rescue that turns a loud failure into a quiet one is worse than no rescue.** `_fine.py` gained
+  a valley-cut fallback so a sheet whose figures touch is not thrown away — and it happily sliced a
+  2x2 GRID into four frames of a torso above someone else's boots. It installed cleanly and read in
+  the log exactly like a success.
+- **A failed stage must block the stages drawn from it.** The brute's headless sheet installed off an
+  arm-off stage that never landed: three perfect frames of a two-armed corpse. Running was worse than
+  failing, because it SUCCEEDED. `_regen.py` now skips a batch whose `ref_only` is in a failed
+  batch's outputs.
+- **A placeholder is a stand-in for art that does not exist yet, and nothing else.** Re-running
+  `--variant` to rewrite a spec re-seeded EVERY placeholder from the master and silently replaced a
+  finished brute's serve and fall sheets with copies of the lean man they were posed from. Three
+  passes were then spent regenerating sheets that already existed. `variant()` never overwrites now.
+- **The detail bar RATCHETS against the file being replaced**, so a chained stage measured against a
+  copy of the master has to out-detail art two steps better than the stage it follows. Chained
+  placeholders are seeded at RUN time, from whatever the reference has become by then.
+- **`_fine.py` keyed every magenta pixel, not just the background** — and the generator paints racket
+  strings in the backdrop colour more often than not, so sheet after sheet installed a body holding
+  an empty hoop. Background is the region connected to the border; magenta left INSIDE a body is
+  repainted pale grey. (`Image.fromarray` images are READ-ONLY and PIL's `floodfill` swallows the
+  write error, so the first version of that fix was a silent no-op.)
+- **Put the background rule FIRST in the prompt.** Six rejections in eleven rolls were the generator
+  painting the zombies on a tennis court, because the magenta instruction sat behind three hundred
+  words of "keep everything exactly as the reference".
+
+### Still open
+
+- **`changed` does not know WHAT changed.** It passed a "headless" brute that still had its head,
+  because something moved. It measures that a frame differs from its reference, not that it differs
+  in the right way, and no cheap measure of "the head is gone" has been found.
+- **A variant is reliable for its play sheet and a gamble for its wound stages.** The brute's healthy
+  eleven are good; its arm-off fall frames are standing figures of the wrong build and its headless
+  row is not headless. `--variant <key>` and `_master.py`'s master sheets are the right shape; the
+  wound half needs the reference discipline applied harder than prose currently applies it.
+- The brute is PARKED, not deleted: `config.ZFAMS` is one entry away from making it live, its 31
+  frames are on disk, and its nine batches are in `_regen_batches.json`.
+
 ## Session log: Oliver's playtest of the barrel weapons (2026-08-03, same day)
 
 Everything below is a fix to what shipped that morning. All four notes were real defects, which is