Wet, then set, then cracking. And fired by a resting practice.
Craftee · rebuilt on Davi's notes · 2026-07-12 22:20 WEDT · now
Serve others to get the binder. Do the work to earn the pieces. Rest to make it permanent. Three different kinds of effort, and none of them substitutes for another.
1 · The surface was dead until you spread. You were right — the bed was drawn almost black-on-black, so there was nothing to look at and nothing to aim for. Now the vertex is there from the first frame: the key coin's face, the five bays around the centre, and a bright vertex point you are working toward.
2 · The tile's tip meets the vertex. Also right, and it changes the gesture entirely. A tile doesn't get dropped in the middle of a blank space — it is placed so its point lands exactly on the vertex centre, shoulder to shoulder with its neighbours. So the seat now flies the tile in along its own axis, tip-first, and it settles into the bay. Five of them close a vertex.
That's not a cosmetic fix. The vertex is the thing you're building toward, and if the surface doesn't show it, the player has no idea what "seating a tile" even means.
Wet — it glistens and slumps. The tile presses into something soft; the mortar squeezes up around its edges. Placing a tile should feel like a small physical commitment, because it is.
Set — the sheen dies. It's holding, but it's green, and it knows it.
⚠️ Deteriorating — from day 21, not from day one. Hairline cracks creep and branch. The tile gets a millimetre of play, then lifts and sits proud of its bed. You will have watched it loosen for nine days before it lets go.
Fired — hard, matte, permanent. The glisten never returns and neither do the cracks.
Nobody may lose a tile they didn't watch loosen. If a person is ever surprised by a loss, the material has lied to them — and the mechanic stops being a craft and becomes a punishment.
The ruled numbers, and why they're bound together. Cure is 30 days (the clock resets on every new seat, so an active mosaic never decays). Cracks begin at 0.7 of that window — day 21 — leaving 9 days of loud, visible warning. Those two numbers live next to each other in config, and the crack time is always fraction × cure window. That was deliberate: if the decay is ever tuned faster, the warning arrives proportionally earlier. A one-line config change must never be able to quietly convert a fair warning into an ambush. Bound in data, not in good intentions.
(This demo used to draw cracks from the first moment of decay — which was a kinder lie, but still a lie. It showed a warning window that doesn't exist. Now it shows the real one: 21 quiet days, then 9 loud ones.)