Director log

What each director test ran, on which server, game and Godot version, and what it showed, oldest first. The design is in the director design and the current state in the director.

What was verified

Everything below ran on 19 September 2026 against the Luanti 5.17.0 Flatpak (org.luanti.luanti, server only, no client) with the probe in tools/test/director-probe/, each on a fresh world on port 30561, stopped by the probe itself (core.request_shutdown) and checked gone by PID. No client connected, so no player existed. The GPU was in a faulted state, which is why no client was tried.

Run	Game	Mapgen	What it showed
1	Mineclonia 38561	v7	the whole sequence; mcl_mobs targeting; the removal hook
2	Mineclonia 38561	v7	biome at water surface and seabed; decorations per biome; a zombie lost to a bad teleport
3	Mineclonia 38561	its own level generator (singlenode, mcl_singlenode_mapgen = true)	engine biome disagrees in 9 of 9 columns; targeting
4	Mineclonia 38561	singlenode with the bundled Terrain Diffusion and the tdl-bay-1m-v2 tiles	engine biome disagrees in 9 of 9 columns; targeting
5	as run 4	as run 4	decorations explained by TDL's biome and not the engine's
6	Mineclonia 38561	v7 with run 2's seed	run 2's lost zombie, diagnosed as a deactivation
7	Mineclonia 38561	v7	freezing an mcl_mobs zombie; a kill reported as a deactivation
8	Minetest Game 38214, Mobs Redo 38115	v7	mobs_redo spawn rules as ABMs; a raider that picked its own target
9	as run 8	v7	a raider in water held its target and did not move
10	as run 8	v7	do_attack targeting; freezing a mobs_redo raider

Verified: core.get_biome_data and its y dependence and disagreement with Lua mapgens; decorations indexed by biome; mcl_mobs.registered_spawners per biome and spawning_possible; mobs_redo spawn ABMs; the item catalogue's size; objects_inside_radius, get_guid, objects_by_guid; add_entity, set_pos, set_yaw, nametags; the mcl_mobs targeting rule and mobs_redo do_attack; freezing by shadowing on_step; the on_deactivate removal hook and its deactivation case; mcl_mobs health against engine hp; mcl_weather.change_weather; forceload_block; HTTP POST and GET from the server; handle_async, ipc_set and mod storage costs.

Read in source, not run: mod channel relaying and limits (src/server.cpp, src/network/serverpackethandler.cpp, src/modchannels.cpp), chat command handling (builtin/game/chat.lua), get_biome_data (l_mapgen.cpp), mcl_beds counting players, creatura, 3d_armor, mcl_armor, VoxeLibre.

Not verified at all: any player callback, player inventory or HUD, chat delivery, the seat transport, Goanna under Godot's --headless, any quest, the pacing layer, and any language model driving any of it. Phase 1's test on 1 October 2026 has since covered player callbacks, inventory reads, chat delivery and the pacing layer, with connected players; see What the first test showed.

To run the probe again, copy it into a fresh world's worldmods and start a server with a config file inside the world, so the sandbox can see it and the player's own minetest.conf is left alone:

W=~/.var/app/org.luanti.luanti/.minetest/worlds/director_probe_example
mkdir -p "$W/worldmods"
cp -r tools/test/director-probe "$W/worldmods/director_probe"
printf 'mg_name = v7\nsecure.http_mods = director_probe\n' > "$W/probe.conf"
printf 'director_probe_url = http://127.0.0.1:30591\n' >> "$W/probe.conf"
python3 tools/test/director-probe/http_sink.py 30591 /tmp/sink.log &
flatpak run --command=luanti org.luanti.luanti --server --gameid mineclonia \
    --world "$W" --port 30561 --config "$W/probe.conf" --logfile "$W/server.log"

The server writes $W/director_probe.json and shuts itself down after about half a minute. Stop the sink by its PID afterwards. For Minetest Game, use --gameid minetest and copy Mobs Redo into worldmods as well.

What the first test showed

tools/test/test-director.py on 1 October 2026: the Luanti 5.17.0 Flatpak server, Mineclonia release 38561, mapgen v7, a fresh world; two Goanna clients (Godot 4.5.1 stable, the client library built from the main checkout at 01:18 that day) running headless in gamescope with software rendering (lavapipe), as the players alice and bob; the MCP service driven over stdio JSON-RPC by the script, as a model would. 61 checks passed:

• The mod created a 64 hex digit token, and the endpoint answered only with it. With no director connected a joining player was told nothing; when the MCP service started, the server reached it, alice got the notice, and her earlier join was in the event stream.
• director_player gave position, biome, gear and a ceiling of 5 bare handed, 10 with a diamond sword in the hotbar.
• Alice's biome (PaleGarden) has no monster fauna, so the theme was refused as no_fauna, and a named list was accepted: asked for 100, clamped to 10, two skeletons out of sight for 8 points. mcl_mobs took alice as their target and they closed from 10 to about 5 nodes.
• A second encounter past the hourly budget was refused as budget. With alice past the peak, when: "now" was refused as pacing, a small encounter was queued, and it landed, as a late result, at her next build up. Undo removed each encounter.
• A villager cast as Grimbold spoke to alice, and narration reached her; both read in her client as attributed. Her line Grimbold, where is the old tower? reached the model with his memory of her; a remembered line and disposition came back on her next address and through director_memory; a line over the cap was refused; ordinary chat was not read. A character named alice was refused.
• Alice killed Grimbold with her own client's punches. The model got entity_died with her as the killer, his memory kept was killed by alice, he could no longer speak, and the region counted the kill.
• Bob joined, was told, and opted out. His summary said only that; narration to him, an encounter near him and a memory of him were refused; narration to all reached alice and not his client; and his leaving was not reported.
• A restarted MCP service got a fresh hello and could query again.
• director_stop removed the character and refused everything until alice, the server's admin, typed /director start. /director and /director log answered in game. The audit log held every intent, and the server log had no director warnings or errors.

tools/test/test-director-logic.lua covers the ring, budgets, rate limits, pacing cycle, composition, gear score, memory caps and text cleaning.

Seen in passing: a fresh player in that world sometimes took damage at spawn (set_hp) and died before anything else happened. That is not the director's, but it shows why an intent carries based_on: one run's first encounter was refused as stale because the model had not yet read the death.

What was built and tested

Built and tested on 5 October 2026 against Mineclonia (Luanti 5.17 Flatpak server, a CPU rendered Goanna client as the player, the director driven through tools/goanna-director-cli): 46 checks, none failed.

• Files. director/catalogue.lua, director/rewards.lua and director/structures.lua are the cores; adapters/mcl_items.lua and adapters/mcl_structures.lua are Mineclonia's. init.lua now picks one adapter per kind (mobs, items, structures). The pure parts (search, item value, schematic parsing, build order) are in logic.lua with unit tests in tools/test/test-director-logic.lua.
• Catalogue. All three adapters matched. 3,184 nodes, 512 items, 207 tools, 81 creatures, 203 other entities, 39 enchantments, 57 structures and 219 mods; a repeated question came from the MCP service's cache.
• Rewards. A diamond sword named "Thornbite", with Sharpness III and a line of description, cost 12 points (9 for a diamond tier sword, 3 for the enchantment) and was dropped by the player; the player picked it up and their inventory showed the name, Sharpness III and the line in the game's own tooltip. Undo then left it with them. Sharpness V with Unbreaking III was refused as over the cap, and Sharpness on bread as cannot_enchant. Bread in a chest appeared on the player's client, and undo removed the untouched chest. A villager carried apples from 10 nodes away and dropped them in front of the player.
• Structures. A lava schematic was refused, and so was a hut on the player's own position. An authored 5 by 5 hut appeared on the player's client and undo took it away. The game's desert well was placed through mcl_structures.place_structure (99 nodes changed) and undone, and so was the igloo's top as a plain schematic (153 nodes). A witch hut was refused as not_flat on hilly ground, which is the site check working.
• Building. A villager walked to the site and laid a 3 by 3 by 5 cobble tower (41 nodes, at the default four a second), reported built, and undo took it down.
• Mineclonia's level generator. With it on (the default in this release), mcl_structures does not register the temples, huts, shipwrecks and ruins, because the level generator places them inside map generation, where nothing can call it at run time. The adapter offers their schematic files instead, as plain buildings without loot (loot: false in the catalogue). A desert temple placed this way stands on the ground with its base showing, since map generation sinks it 12 nodes.

Not tested: a world with goanna_director_structures off (the refusal is one line), a restart between placing and undoing (undo records last for the session only, as with every other undo), player_built refusals from a player's digging, and any game but Mineclonia. Goanna's launcher leaves structures off and rewrites the server's settings on every launch, so there is not yet a way to turn them on for a world started from Goanna's menu.

What was tested

tools/test/test-director.py --ruleset on 6 October 2026: the Luanti 5.17.0 Flatpak server (org.luanti.luanti), Mineclonia release 38561, mapgen v7, a fresh scratch world with a probe mod written by the test into its worldmods; the file transport; one Goanna client (Godot 4.5.1 stable, the client library as built in project/bin at 23:06 on 5 October) as the player alice, started with software in headless gamescope (which device gamescope itself chose was not checked); the MCP service driven over stdio JSON-RPC by the script. 44 checks passed:

• With goanna_director = false, the probe found no goanna_director table and loaded. With it true, a ruleset named director and an intent named speak were refused, and the probe's ruleset was registered.
• The service listed probe_mark, probe_ring and probe_tally after the hello, sent notifications/tools/list_changed, kept the 17 fixed tools, and gave probe_mark the ruleset's schema with reason added. The brief named the ruleset.
• probe_mark set a node near alice, cost 3 of the ruleset's 5 points, and returned the sequence number emit gave its event, which arrived with that number. A second was refused as budget; a forbidden label as rules with the ruleset's bad_label; a missing or too long argument as schema; a point 25000 nodes away as not_loaded. A query with a bad argument was refused as schema. A paced intent ran at once while alice was in a build up. director_undo put the node back.
• Warden, open the gate from alice's client reached the model as npc_addressed with the ruleset's data; wardens are boring stayed ordinary chat. The model spoke as the Warden, whose body was 1000 nodes away, and alice's client showed Warden of the Gate (NPC): ... with the escape sequence in the text stripped; a line with a figure the probe's check refused came back as rules / not_known; a speaker named after a player was refused as name_taken; a burst of the Warden's lines was cut off by the speech rate limit (rate).
• director_stop called on_stop, connected() read false until /director start, and a ruleset intent was refused as stopped meanwhile. pacing("alice") read build_up, and opted_out read false for alice and nil for a name never seen.
• The audit log held the ruleset's intents with outcome, refusal and undo record, and the server log had no director warnings or errors beyond the two deliberate refusals.

With no ruleset registered, the Phase 1 test (tools/test/test-director.py, same server and game) first ran with software rendered clients and passed its first 36 checks before it was stopped on request, to keep clients in gamescope off a machine where another session held the GPU. It was then run whole with --dummy, which starts each player as Godot --headless (the dummy renderer, no gamescope, no Vulkan device), on 6 October 2026: all 62 checks passed, including the kill, the opt out, the service restart and stop. One earlier --dummy run failed only the kill check, with alice's blows not landing on the villager at 2.1 nodes; the next run killed it, so that check is sensitive to aim, not to the renderer.

Not tried: a paced intent that had to wait in the queue (the player was in a build up throughout, so only the path that applies at once ran); stale and opted_out for a ruleset intent's subjects; a ruleset hook that raises an error; two rulesets claiming the same chat line; the HTTP transport with a ruleset (only the file transport ran); the voice and watcher roles' tool lists, which were checked offline only; an MCP client other than the test script receiving the list change notice; any language model; and DorfCraft or Kythen themselves, neither of which has a ruleset yet.