docs/website/EVENTS_PLAN.md

The Event System — phased implementation plan

Derived from EVENTS.md revision 5, which is the design of record. This document decides order: what lands in which pull request, what each one ships on its own merit, and how each is proved. It re-specifies nothing — where this and EVENTS.md disagree, EVENTS.md wins and this file is the one with the bug.

Seventeen phases, P0–P16. Every phase is independently shippable and leaves the site working. No phase is gated any more. P11 and P12 hung on EVENTS.md §N1 (the ADMIN_CONTROLS.md §8 amendment); §N1 and the other ten were answered by the org lead on 2026-09-01, which closes P0 and lifts the gate. They stay deliberately late all the same — they are the phases that reach into the world, and they belong after the ledger that makes them safe. Everything else — the engine, the scheduler, the calendar, the conditions, the caps, the module contract, the ledger, the first wave of UO actions, the integrations, the authoring UI, the public surface — needed no decision beyond P0. Those fourteen phases reach the game only to announce, over verbs the write plane already carries; nothing in them creates or changes a thing in the world.

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Before anything: three facts about the ground

1. edge is free, and it is stale. The engagement workstream is fully cut over as of 2026-09-01 — website main at 6331b36 (engagement Phase 14, retention), docs #205 merged, module-uo's ci/core-ref.json re-pinned to main. No pull request is open in any of the six repos bar an automated PROJECT_TREE.md sync.

But edge is 0 commits ahead of main and several behind it in website, docs and module-uo — the cutover merged edge into main and nothing moved edge afterwards. So the first act of P1 is to reset each edge to its main, not to branch off it as it stands; branching off a stale edge would silently revert the engagement retention work the moment this workstream cut over. Verify per repo before starting:

git rev-list --count origin/main..origin/edge   # must be 0
git rev-list --count origin/edge..origin/main   # if > 0, edge is stale — reset it

2. A MODULE_API_VERSION bump turns the integration kit red, on purpose. ci/core-ref.json pins a main sha and checkCoreApi.js asserts equality with what that sha declares. P7 bumps the contract to 1.10.0, so the kit goes red from P7 until the cutover re-pins it. That is the mechanism working — it forces someone to re-read the chapters — and it must be stated in P7's PR body so nobody "fixes" it. The same is true of module-uo's frozen-manifest check for the length of the edge window.

3. servuo-plugins has no CI build. The plugin compiles only inside ServUO, and the dynamic rebuild can silently reload a stale Scripts.dll — so "it booted clean" is not evidence the new code is live. Every plugin-touching phase (P11, P12) verifies against the local tree at C:\Users\colby\Desktop\ServUO with a build-offline-first step, and confirms new code is live rather than trusting a clean boot.

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Cross-cutting obligations, every phase

Not repeated per phase below. A PR that skips one of these is not done.

Obligation	Command / rule
docs/ updated in the same PR	CLAUDE.md: a code change is not complete until docs/ reflects it
Server tests	cd website/server && npm test
OpenAPI regenerated when a route changed	npm run swagger → committed swagger/swagger-output.json
Route manifest proves no URL moved	npm run routes:manifest, zero-line diff in the PR
No game vocabulary in core	npm run check:modules (website root)
module-uo, when touched	npm run check:imports, npm run check:swagger, npm run build --prefix client before npm run check:externals, then both test suites
Conventional Commits + AI disclosure	type(scope): summary; Co-Authored-By: trailer; tick the PR-template box
Branch	from an up-to-date edge, never a stale one

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Ordering rationale — why this shape

Three choices in the ordering are deliberate and worth stating, because the obvious alternative is wrong in each case.

A demoable surface lands at P3, not at P13. The rich authoring UI is late (P13) and a minimal admin surface is early (P3). Splitting the UI in two looks like duplicated work and is not: this project reviews in a browser — the org lead's own review stack exists for exactly that — and ten backend phases with nothing to click is ten phases without feedback. P3 is a list, a form, a start button and a run console. P13 is the timeline editor, the option-source dropdowns and the cap meter, built once the schemas they render actually exist.

The module contract (P7) comes after the engine, not before it. The temptation is to design the seam first. But registerEventActions is shaped by what the runner actually needs to hand an action and what it does with the answer, and both are unknown until P2 and P6 are built. Core registers its own core.announce / core.wait / core.cue through the same registry from P1 — exactly as registries.registerCore() already does for streams and triggers — so the seam is exercised on every boot long before a module uses it, and P7 is a generalisation of something working rather than a guess.

Caps (P6) come before the module contract, and before any world write. A cap is cheap to add to an empty system and expensive to retrofit onto a live one, and it is the single control that bounds the two failures scheduling makes worse: a typo and a compromised session. P6 is a small phase placed early on purpose.

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The phases

Phase 0 — Design of record (docs)

Complete, in two pull requests. The first introduced this file and EVENTS.md; the second recorded the eleven decisions and amended the two documents they reach into. All of §N1–N11 were answered by the org lead on 2026-09-01, before any code, so nothing below is gated.

Land docs/website/EVENTS.md, and answer §N1–N11. Two of those answers have consequences outside this document and should be written where they will be found:

• N1 is an amendment to ../link/ADMIN_CONTROLS.md §8, recorded there as an amendment with its date and reasoning — not a silent reversal. §8 is cited by name in four places; a decision that contradicts it and leaves it standing is worse than either decision.
• N3 (does the event runner become the kind: 'scheduled' evaluator) closes ENGAGEMENT.md §7.1 Q6, which currently reads "no evaluator yet". If the answer is yes, that row changes in the same PR.

Ships: the design of record, and two documents that stop contradicting each other. Verify: docs CI link check; every relative link resolves.

As answered, 2026-09-01. Nine of the eleven went the way EVENTS.md §N recommended. Two did not, and each changes a phase below.

• N2 — starting a run is admin only. A moderator gets live control of a run already in flight — cancel and abort — and nothing more. Starting commits the deployment to everything a definition contains, unattended; cancelling is incident response, and gating the stop button on the same role as the start button would behave badly in exactly the case moderators exist for. P3 and P6 carry this, and EVENTS.md §K's table is the normative statement of it.
• N4 — this deployment is single-instance, and not planned to change. P2 does not build the --scale app=2 test. Every claim path is built exactly as specified regardless: the unique index and the CAS equally protect a tick that overruns into the next one, and the lease and its reclaim recover a step whose process died mid-dispatch. The multi-instance property becomes true-by-construction rather than proved; EVENTS.md §E records what to build first if this deployment is ever scaled or acquires a rolling deploy.

N1 was taken in full, item grants included — a reversal of two separate lines in ADMIN_CONTROLS.md §8 rather than one, and the amendment at §8a says both out loud.

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Phase 1 — Schema, CRUD and the core action registry (website + docs)

Complete. edge in website and docs. Six tables, thirteen routes, the action registry with core as its first registrant, and 44 tests. Nothing dispatches — a run row is created and stays scheduled, which is this phase's correct answer and is rendered as such.

Four things the build settled that the plan had left open, each recorded in EVENTS.md:

• event_definitions gained a spec column. §D's column list does not name one, because §D describes what a published event is made of. But "editing a draft is free; no version exists yet" means the working copy has to live somewhere, and it cannot be an event_versions row: that table is immutable and a run pins one. Publishing copies the column into a version and leaves it as the next draft.
• The spec validator must accept its own output, and a test found it did not. validate() adds actionVersion and dormant, then refused them as unknown keys on the next call — which would have made the second save of any definition, and publish's own re-validation, impossible. Both are now accepted and recomputed rather than trusted.
• A param's example is required, on optional params too, matching registerEventTriggers. It is the authoring form's placeholder and there is no other source for one.
• Two routes the §API-surface table did not name: GET /admin/events/:id (the list serves a summary; the editor needs the tree) and GET /admin/events/series (a form cannot offer a value it cannot enumerate). Both are staff reads over data the list already exposes.

Two deliberate absences, both stated so a reviewer does not read them as gaps. The live run controls and verify are not stubbed — nothing is in flight until P2, and a control that answers 200 and does nothing is worse than one that is not there. And core's three perform() bodies answer { ok: false, retry: false } rather than { ok: true }: ok: true on an action that did nothing is a recorded world change that did not occur, which is the exact mistake §F's failure default exists to prevent.

registerEventActions is on the staging area and reachable only by registerCore() — the loader builds its own api facade and has no method that delegates to it, so no module can call it yet and MODULE_API_VERSION is untouched. P7 adds that facade and makes the bump.

The six tables that do not depend on the module contract: event_definitions, event_series, event_versions, event_runs, event_run_steps, event_run_log. Admin CRUD, publish (which snapshots a version), archive. router/v1/admin/events.router.js + events.controller.js, models as .model.js / .db.js pairs under model/events/.

The registry lands here, with core as its first registrant. modules/registries.js gains registerEventActions staging and commit, and registries.registerCore() registers three core-owned actions: core.announce (post to an announce leg / broadcast target), core.wait (a timed no-op) and core.cue (post an instruction and wait for a human). None of them execute yet — P2 is what runs a step — but the registry, the id grammar, the risk classes and the param validation are all live and exercised on every boot.

Ships: nothing user-visible; the site is unchanged. A run row can be created and stays scheduled forever, which is correct for this phase and must be visible as such rather than looking broken. Verify: npm test; the registry's collision and validation paths tested the way registries.js's existing members are; routes manifest and swagger regenerated.

Trap: register() must not touch the database (MODULE_API.md §2.2) — routeManifest.js and swagger.js both require app.js against a dead pool. Core's own action registration is subject to the same rule.

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Phase 2 — The runner (website)

Complete. edge in website. The eighth poller, the two CAS claims, the lease and its reclaim, the grace window, and the three core actions given real bodies. A published event started from the existing run route now announces, waits and completes on its own — the phase's shipped claim, and it adds no routes to do it.

Four things the org lead settled that the plan and §E had left open (2026-09-02), each written into EVENTS.md:

• A parked step is running with a NULL lease. event_run_steps.status has no state for "waiting on a human", and adding one would be a table ALTER that CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS never delivers to an existing deployment. So the reclaim was written to take back only a lease that is non-NULL and expired, and a NULL one means parked. A cue posted on Friday is still waiting on Monday.
• Two success-envelope members, not two special cases. { ok: true, await: 'human' } parks; { ok: true, holdFor: <seconds> } finishes and delays what follows. The runner never names an action id, and Phase 7 hands a module the same door.
• A run whose concurrency key is held stays scheduled and lets its own grace window decide, rather than failing at once or queueing indefinitely.
• n in §L's retry(n) is a runner constant — EVENT_STEP_MAX_ATTEMPTS, 3, with a flat 60s backoff — rather than a column or a spec field.

Three things the build settled on its own, all worth a look:

• All three on_failure dispositions write the STEP failed. The disposition governs the RUN. skipped is left for a human's skip control in Phase 3, because a status meaning both "nobody ran this" and "this failed and we moved on" makes the console's summary line unreadable.
• A live lease is not re-enterable, not even by the process that took it. The first draft of claimTick carried an OR claimed_by = ? escape for a tick re-entering its own claim — which is precisely the overrun this phase's CAS is meant to protect against, since setInterval fires whether or not the last callback returned. The clause is gone, a releaseClaim hands a still- in-flight run back at the end of a tick (without it every core.wait would become max(wait, leaseMs)), and an in-process ticking guard skips an interval that would overlap.
• A wait as the last step of a phase holds the NEXT phase. The first implementation set the following step's due_at and stopped there, so a trailing wait — "announce, wait five minutes, then phase 2" — silently meant nothing, because the next phase's steps are not materialised until the run enters it. The instant is now carried across the boundary. Found by writing the test, and the test was re-run against the unfixed code to confirm it fails.

What "materialise" meant in THIS phase. The spec validator accepted kind: 'manual' alone, so there is no recurrence to expand — this leg builds the half that is already real, the grace window, and Phase 4 adds the expansion above it.

Verify, as run. npm test — 1682 tests, 1638 pass, 43 skipped, 1 fail, and that one is engagementManifest.test.js, pre-existing and environmental (engagement-triggers.json is CRLF in a Windows tree under core.autocrlf=true while the generator writes LF; content identical, green on CI, confirmed still failing with this branch stashed). 39 new tests across eventRunner.test.js and eventRunnerSql.test.js; the Phase 1 test asserting core's placeholders refused is replaced rather than deleted, because half of what it proved still holds. routes:manifest and swagger regenerated to a zero-line diff — the runner has no surface. check:modules clean.

Trap for anyone running the suite on this machine: server/modules/uo is installed here, so the core suite and both generators need an empty MODULES_DIR. Without it routeManifest.test.js fails on a difference that is the module's, not the branch's.

utils/eventRunner.js, the eighth poller: same setInterval + unref() + stop() shape as the other seven, wired into server.js's start and shutdown beside engagementWorker.

Its tick, in order: materialise due occurrences (INSERT IGNORE against UNIQUE (definition_id, scope, scheduled_for)); advance runs (CAS scheduled → starting, running → ending, materialise the phase's steps); drain due steps (CAS pending → running with a lease, dispatch, classify, record). Executes the three core actions from P1.

Also here: missed and the grace window, the lease and its reclaim, concurrency_key rendered from run params, and health as a column separate from status.

Ships: a manually started event that broadcasts, waits, and completes. Demoable over curl. Verify: npm test. No two-instance test — §N4 settled this deployment as single-instance, so the --scale app=2 rig the engagement workstream used is not built here. The claim paths are still built exactly as EVENTS.md §E specifies, and they are still the point of the phase: they are what protects a tick that overruns into the next one, and what recovers a step whose process died mid-dispatch. Test both in-process. The decision is not licence to drop a CAS.

As built: the in-process half is eventRunner.test.js, and the statements themselves are proved against a real MariaDB in eventRunnerSql.test.js — which SKIPS when there is none, so CI stays green without a database. That second file exists because of what engagement Phase 4a found: a cooldown claim that was green against its stub and always allowed the send against a real server, because the connector defaults foundRows: true and a no-op UPDATE reports 1 rather than 0. A stub can only ever agree with whoever wrote it. Run it with:

DB_HOST=127.0.0.1 DB_PORT=3307 DB_USER=root DB_PASSWORD=… node --test test/eventRunnerSql.test.js

Two traps, both already paid for once in this codebase.

• A reclaim must not reset attempts. Engagement Phase 14's defect: a sweep that returned every stale row to its start state made MAX_ATTEMPTS unreachable, so the row cycled forever, never terminal, therefore never retention-eligible.
• The unique index, not the claim, is what prevents a double run. The claim decides who advances an occurrence; the index is what stops two existing.

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Phase 3 — The minimal admin surface (website)

Complete. edge in website. Three screens, a nav group and six live run controls — the routes Phase 1 left absent on purpose because nothing was in flight, and Phase 2 gave something to act on. An admin can now author, publish, schedule, start and watch an event that announces things and cues a human, and a moderator can stop one that is going wrong. This is the first phase with a demo.

Four decisions the org lead settled (2026-09-02), all as recommended:

• Six controls, not four and not eight. pause, resume, cancel on a run; confirm, skip, retry on a step. advance is not built — a phase today advances when its steps go terminal, and the per-step skip already does that one step at a time, so a force-advance now would silently change meaning under the operator when Phase 5 gives a phase an advance condition. cleanup needs Phase 8's ledger.
• Cancel takes { reason }, not { cleanup, reason }. The flag arrives with the thing it would act on. A cleanup: false that changes nothing is the "control that answers 200 and does nothing" Phases 1 and 2 both refused.
• Its own top-level nav group, staff-wide (admin, editor, moderator) — not admin-only like Engagement's. §K makes every read here staff, and the moderator's entire power over this feature is the run console; hiding it from them would leave the one role that exists for incident response unable to see the incident. The narrow gates are on the actions instead, and each button follows the route it calls.
• The params box is a raw JSON field with the action's declaration rendered beside it. Both are already in the catalog — name, type, required, description, example — so the placeholder is usable without reading source, and it is captioned as a placeholder so it does not read as Phase 13's schema-driven form.

Three things the build settled, and the first is a defect in shipped code:

• A pause pressed mid-tick did nothing for up to 24 more steps. advanceRun drains up to EVENT_STEPS_PER_TICK steps from one run inside a single tick and only checked the run's status at the top of it — so the whole value of a pause, that it takes effect now, was absent. The loop re-reads the status between steps (runsDb.statusOf, one indexed column by primary key). Found by writing the test; the test was re-run against the unfixed code to confirm it fails, and it does.
• The retry guard was reading the wrong end of the phase. The first draft asked for the lowest seq that is not settled, which looks equivalent to "the step the run is stopped at" and is not: nextOpenStep selects pending and running only, so the runner steps over a failed step. A phase whose second step failed-and-skipped and whose fifth then failed-and-paused would have offered retry on the second, re-queueing a row behind the runner's own cursor where it sits pending for ever. The rule is now MAX(seq) WHERE status <> 'pending' — the furthest the phase has reached — and the test that found it is the one that names the case.
• Retry and resume are one control, because there is no state in which you would want half of it. Retry is legal only from paused, and a paused run is paused at that step; re-queueing without resuming leaves the run exactly where it was with a second button to find. attempts returns to zero: the ceiling bounds what the runner does unattended, and a named person deciding once is the thing it is unattended from. That is not Engagement Phase 14's rule being broken — that rule is about automatic sweeps.

Two smaller ones, taken as assumptions rather than asked: the console polls every 5s while the run is non-terminal and stops the moment it is not (§N5, poll not SSE — a run changes on a fifteen-second tick and a console is a tab left open for two hours); and confirm takes an optional note saying what was actually done in-client, which is kept on the step and in the log.

A cue nobody notices is a run that never advances, and it looks perfectly healthy from the outside — running, nothing failed. So waitingSteps is on the run LIST as well as the console, as a derived count rather than a column, and the list leads with a banner naming every run that is waiting on a person.

Verify, as run. npm test — the pre-existing engagementManifest.test.js CRLF failure is the only red, exactly as in Phase 2. 42 new tests: eventRunControls.test.js (22, almost all of them refusals — a control that works from a status it should not have is a staff member changing a live world from a stale screen), 8 more in eventRunnerSql.test.js proving the four new statements against a real MariaDB, 2 more in eventRunner.test.js, and eventAuthoring.test.js (20) on the client. routes:manifest and swagger regenerated — six routes added, none moved. The client builds.

client/src/routes/admin/views/EventsAdmin.jsx, EventEditor.jsx, EventRun.jsx, plus the nav rows. A list with state and next occurrence; a create/edit form; publish; start now; cancel; and a run console showing the phase, the step list with status and attempts, and the log.

Publish and start now are admin only from this phase, not from P6 (§N2). Cancel is admin + moderator. The routes get their real gates here even though the switchboard they will eventually consult does not exist yet — a button that is admin-only later and open now is a gate nobody notices was missing.

As built, the control set is six: pause, resume, cancel on a run and confirm, skip, retry on a step, all admin + moderator. Every one of them is a compare-and-set on the status it may act from, never a read-then-write — the runner ticks every fifteen seconds, so a console rendered thirty seconds ago describes a run that has moved, and a control that checked in JavaScript and then wrote would race the tick it exists to interrupt. A refusal is a 409 naming the status the run is actually in, and the client models the same guards so a button the server will refuse is not offered in the first place.

The spec is edited as structured fields for the parts that exist (name, description, schedule, phases with their steps) and the step's params as a raw JSON field — a deliberate placeholder that P13 replaces with the schema-driven editor. Say so in the UI, so it does not read as the finished thing.

core.cue's confirm button lands here, which is what makes the GM cue usable.

Ships: an admin can author, schedule, start and watch an event that announces things and cues a human. This is the first phase with a demo, and it is the one to put in front of the org lead before building further. Verify: the client test suite; a browser walk on the local review stack.

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Phase 4 — Schedule, recurrence and the calendar (website + docs)

Complete. edge in website and docs. The closed recurrence shapes — once, weekly, monthly (nth weekday), manual — computed in the definition's IANA timezone and stored as UTC in scheduled_for; event_series is usable and managed inline on the calendar; an admin calendar (month + list) filtered by state, scope and series. An event now happens on its own. No schema change: Phase 1 built every column this needed.

The decisions the org lead settled (2026-09-02), all as recommended:

• A fourteen-day materialisation horizon, with projections beyond it. Inside it an occurrence is a real row an operator can see, cancel and reschedule one at a time; beyond it the calendar forecasts from the same arithmetic, so a monthly event is still visible three weeks out. Drawn differently on purpose — acting on a forecast as though it were a booking would be the UI's fault.
• Automatic expansion is at the EMPTY scope. A fan-out across named scopes needs a registry of what a scope is, which no phase owns yet; inventing one here would be a contract the modules were never asked about. The admin's own start route still takes any scope.
• DST: skip-forward, take-first. A local time the spring gap swallows moves forward to the first one that exists (02:30 becomes 03:00, not 03:30); an hour that happens twice takes the first. Both are recorded as detail.dstAdjusted. Neither rule ever drops an occurrence.
• nth is 1..4 plus -1 for "last". There is no fifth, so there is no absent-occurrence case to define — every month has a first through fourth of every weekday. -1 is not a synonym for 4.
• Publishing re-pins the occurrences that have not started. Asked mid-build, once the horizon made it real: on the day an editor fixes a typo there are already fourteen days of rows carrying the old spec. A pin makes a run that has run reproducible; one that has not begun has nothing to reproduce. The alternative was worse than doing nothing — cancelling a stale occurrence leaves its slot held in uq_evrun_occurrence, so it would not come back on the new version, it would vanish.

Three things the build settled:

• now - grace is the window start, not now. An occurrence nobody ever materialised is never invented retroactively — three days down must not manufacture three days of missed history no operator could have seen. It does not need to: rows exist a fortnight early, so a real outage finds them already there. The horizon is what makes the missed sweep mean anything for a recurrence.
• Publishing is the schedule switch; archiving turns it off. ready already means "a version has been published and the schedule is live", so a second enabled flag would be another answer to a question state answers. Expansion reads the published version's spec, never the working copy.
• Series writes are admin, editor. Naming an arc is authoring; §N2's narrow gate is about committing the deployment to a run.

A defect this phase introduced into the test harness, and fixed. Putting the expansion leg in front of tick() made eventRunner.test.js reach the dead-port pool on every tick — the file passed and took minutes. Stubbing findSchedulable there returned it to 0.45s. Worth naming because a suite that is merely slow reads as a suite that is fine.

Verified: npm test — 1768 tests, 1711 pass, 56 skipped, 1 fail, that one the pre-existing engagementManifest.test.js CRLF failure (edge before this branch: 1714/1662/51/1). 54 new tests, of which eventRecurrence.test.js (17) is the DST fixture set this plan asked for, and 5 in eventRunnerSql.test.js prove findSchedulable, listInWindow and repinScheduled against a real MariaDB (32/32 with a database, skipped without). Client: 354 pass. Four routes added, none moved; check:modules and check:hosts clean; the client builds.

Ships: recurring and scheduled events, and the calendar that replaces the thing this feature exists to replace. Verify: npm test with DST-crossing cases as explicit fixtures — a Friday 20:00 event in Europe/Berlin computed across the March and October transitions, and one in a zone with no DST at all.

Trap: the temptation is a cron string. There is no cron parser in the server dependency tree, the only precedent is in the bot (a different process), and a cron expression is the one field an operator cannot proofread. Closed shapes render as a form. Held: events/recurrence.js inverts Intl.DateTimeFormat rather than adding a date library, since Node already ships the tzdata one would vendor.

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Phase 5 — Conditions and phase advancement (website + docs)

Complete. edge in website and docs. Phase advance on { after: '30m' } and on { on: '<triggerId>', where: <conditions>, count: n }, reusing engagement/conditions.js unchanged — its grammar, its type checking against the declaration, its depth and list bounds, and its operator labels. event_run_log gained phase.gate, condition.evaluated (written for both outcomes) and phase.advanced. The diagnosis panel is the phase's real deliverable, and POST /admin/events/runs/:runId/advance — absent since Phase 3 for want of a meaning — arrived beside it. One new table, event_run_phase_gates.

The decisions the org lead settled (2026-09-02), all as recommended:

• A new table, not a query over the log. The tally, the entry time and the last related firing are a row with an atomic conditional increment, the protection §E gives caps. Deriving them from event_run_log would have been a JSON predicate no index supports, and it would have made the retention sweep load-bearing for whether a phase advances.
• A gate that never opens is HELD, and the run goes stalled. No automatic advance, ever, and no authored timeout: "what should happen when the world did not cooperate" is a decision an operator makes live, not one an author guesses at months earlier. What the engine owes is visibility — EVENT_PHASE_STALL_MS (1h) takes health to §E's third value, the first thing in this system ever to write it, logged once. It has to be loud: a held run keeps its concurrency key, so every later occurrence of that definition goes missed behind it.
• Force-advance ships here, not in Phase 6. A gate without an override is a panel that explains a problem nobody can act on, and §K already had the gate written (admin + moderator).
• The clock and the tally start at phase ENTRY, not when the steps finish. after: '30m' means thirty minutes from the moment the phase began whatever its dispatches took, and a firing during the announce counts. Both make a gate predictable from the authored spec alone.

Three things the build settled:

• A gate is an ADDITIONAL condition, never a replacement. A phase whose steps are still running is not advanced by a boss that spawned early, and force-advance refuses a phase held by a step — that phase is held by the step, and skip is its control, one step at a time. A force that swept past pending steps would be a cancel of half a phase under a button labelled advance.
• The emit path writes, the tick reads. A gate waiting on three spawns counts things that happen between two ticks; fifteen seconds later there is nothing left for a poller to see, and a tally in a process's memory is one a restart silently zeroes. So observe() sits beside engine.dispatch in ctx.events.emit — a second subscriber rather than a leg of dispatch, because a rules lookup that throws must not lose the count and a gate write that throws must not lose the mail.
• The panel's sentence is rendered on the SERVER. Everywhere else this feature serves the client a vocabulary; here it serves text. The labels live in engagement/conditions.js, and a renderer in the browser would be a second implementation of a grammar the server owns. Only the variables the condition names are stored on the gate row — the row is read onto an admin screen, and a copy of a whole game event's payload would be a second copy of what engagement_sends is careful not to keep.

The defect only a real database found, and it was the phase's own statement. The conditional increment was written SET tally = tally + 1, … satisfied_at = CASE WHEN tally + 1 >= needed …, which is wrong on MariaDB: an UPDATE's SET assignments are evaluated left to right, each seeing the values already assigned, so the CASE read the incremented tally and a gate needing two firings closed on the first. Every stub agreed with the intent rather than with the server, exactly as engagement's cooldown claim did over foundRows: true. The increment now comes last and the order of that SET list is load-bearing; eventRunnerSql.test.js is what catches a reorder.

Two things that had to change underneath. setHealth is now escalation-only — health has always been a high-water mark here, and without a rank a retry after a stall would demote stalled back to degraded. And the catalog route serves triggers: /admin/engagement/triggers is adminOnly while a definition is authored by admin and editor, so pointing the editor at it would have left an editor typing a trigger id from memory into a field the save path refuses.

A leg a stubbing file did not know about, for the third time. runs.detail() gained the gate read, and eventsAdmin.test.js does not stub eventPhaseGates.db — so the run-console test hung ten seconds against the dead-port pool and failed with ECONNREFUSED, saying nothing whatever about the route it was testing. Phase 4's expansion leg did the same to eventRunner.test.js, where it only made the file slow. When the runner or a model gains a leg, every file that stubs the layer under it needs the stub — and the symptom is a ten-second test, whether it then fails or merely passes.

Verified: npm test — 1810 tests, 1746 pass, 63 skipped, 1 fail, that one still the pre-existing engagementManifest.test.js CRLF failure (confirmed by stashing this branch's changes and watching it fail unchanged; edge before: 1768/1711/56/1). +42 is exactly the tests added, and the +7 skipped are the new SQL cases skipping without a database. eventGates.test.js (14) covers the renderer against the grammar's own labels and the observer's near-miss branch; 10 in eventRunner.test.js, 5 in eventRunControls.test.js, 6 in eventSpec.test.js, and 7 in eventRunnerSql.test.js against a real MariaDB (39/39 with a database, skipped without) — one of which is the left-to-right defect above. Client: 361 pass, 7 new. One route added, none moved; the client builds.

The live walk, on the local review stack. A three-phase Yew Champion Muster — an on gate needing two uo.champ.boss_up firings where location contains "Yew", then an after: '10m' gate, then an ungated wind-down — authored, published and started as navadmin, with firings sent through the real ctx.events.emit seam:

• The save-time refusals named the variable, live: "regoin" is not a variable of "uo.champ.boss_up", "gt" cannot be applied to a string, and 1h30m refused with the grammar spelled out. That is the phase's Trap, held on a running server.
• A near miss was recorded and did not count. A boss up in Britain left the tally at 0 of 2 and put did not count (location: "Britain (10, 20, 0)") on the panel — and only location, the one variable the condition names. spawnName, bossName and spawnSerial were in the payload and never touched the row.
• Two matching firings advanced the phase, and the next phase opened its own after gate with a dueAt ten minutes out. The log reads: three condition.evaluated lines (0 of 2, 1 of 2, 2 of 2), phase.advanced, phase.completed, phase.gate, phase.entered.
• A second run went stalled with EVENT_PHASE_STALL_MS=45000 — degraded first from a failing announce, then escalated to stalled and logged once, which is the escalation-only guard working live.
• The panel said exactly what §Observability asked for: "Phase muster has not started — STALLED / waiting on uo.champ.boss_up where location contains "Yew" / seen so far 0 of 2 / since 9:56:58 PM (6 min) / last related event …".
• §N2's split held: navmod pressed Advance phase and got 200; the refusals answered 409 naming what was actually happening — waiting on step 0 (core.announce), not on its advance condition — and a second force said already past its advance condition.

The walk found three defects, all fixed here:

1. validate refused its own output. The normalised gate carries dormant, and the input check did not allow it — so a gated definition saved and then failed to publish over a field the validator itself wrote. The rule was already on the page for a step's actionVersion and dormant; the gate just had to follow it. validate(validate(x)) === validate(x) is now a test.
2. A forced advance was logged twice — once by the control with the actor and the reason, then again by the tick that acted on the satisfied gate, the less informative one last. phase.advanced is now written by whoever made the decision, and the tick skips forced.
3. A satisfied gate's clock kept running. elapsedSeconds measured to read time, so the panel said 139s beside a logged waitedSeconds of 121. It now stops at satisfied_at: live it answers "how long has this been waiting", afterwards "how long did it wait".

Ships: multi-phase events that advance on what happens in the game rather than only on a clock. Verify: npm test; a rig run where a phase legitimately does not advance, confirming the panel explains why without a server log.

Trap: a condition is validated at save against the trigger's declaration, with the offending variable named — not at evaluation. A predicate that silently reads undefined is a phase that silently never advances, and the day you find out is the night of the event. Held: spec.js calls conditions.validate(declaration, where) at save and re-roots the grammar's own errors at the phase, so an author fixing five clauses at once can tell which phase each belongs to. A gate naming a trigger nothing registers is dormant on the rule a step's unregistered action already follows — it saves, and it will not publish.

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Phase 6 — Enablement, caps and mayInvoke (website + docs)

event_action_settings (one row per registered action, everything above notify disabled by default) and event_run_budget with the conditional increment:

UPDATE event_run_budget SET consumed = consumed + ?
 WHERE run_id = ? AND dimension = ? AND consumed + ? <= cap

A breach is refused — the step does not run, does not retry, and is surfaced to the author with the dimension and the numbers, because "you asked for 40 and this deployment allows 30" is an authoring error, not an outage.

The whole authorisation decision moves behind one function, mayInvoke(user, action, run): role, enablement, cap, and the shard's own switch. Not for tidiness — it is what keeps an EM-style delegation model a later option rather than a redesign.

The role split from EVENTS.md §K is applied to the routes here — completing what P3 started, and including §N2's departure from the module-uo shape: publishing and starting are admin only, while cancelling and aborting a run in flight are admin + moderator. Start and stop are deliberately not the same gate. (advance took that same gate in Phase 5, which is when it first named a state an operator could be in.)

Ships: an admin switchboard, and a system that cannot be made to do an unbounded amount of anything. Verify: npm test, including two concurrent steps against one cap proving neither over-spends; a 403 walk across all four roles on every route.

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Phase 7 — The module contract (website + docs + a throwaway test module)

Generalise P1's registry into the public contract: registerEventActions with cost, risk, reversible, budgetMs, params and perform / revert; registerEventBudgets; registerEventLeases; and param option sources. MODULE_API_VERSION → 1.10.0, with §2.4 and §1.1 written the way every other member is.

Dispatch through the envelope: a rejected promise, a throw, a timeout, a non-object and a missing ok are all read as { ok: false, retry: true } — the inverse of registerTeamProvider's default, because here the expensive mistake is recording a world change that did not happen.

verify: true — dry run — is a required parameter a module must honour, with the test in the kit.

Prove it with a throwaway module, not with module-uo. A contract validated only against the module it was carved out of has not been validated, and P9 should be the second consumer of this seam.

Ships: the seam. Core still does everything it did before. Verify: npm test; the throwaway module exercising every failure shape; check:modules green.

This phase turns the integration kit red and that is the mechanism, not a bug. checkCoreApi.js asserts equality against the pinned main sha; it stays red until the cutover re-pins it. Say so in the PR body.

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Phase 8 — The resource ledger, leases and cleanup (website + docs)

event_run_resources with lease_until, the drifted status, and UNIQUE (owner_module, kind, ref) among non-reverted rows — which is what makes two events unable to lease one target, and produces a refused step at authoring time rather than a corrupted baseline at runtime.

Record before confirm. The step writes a pending row, dispatches, and promotes it on the answer. Recording afterwards makes every object whose acknowledgement was lost invisible to cleanup forever — so reverting a resource that does not exist must be a success.

Cleanup steps are generated from the ledger at teardown, on every terminal path — completion, cancellation and abort alike. cleanup_status is its own column: a run reaches completed with cleanup_status = 'incomplete' and stays on the admin screen, rather than being held running.

Reconcile-on-reconnect: the runner asks each ledgered resource's module what is still in force.

Ships: the safety property the whole world-write half depends on. Also useful on its own — the platform gains a durable record of what it changed. Verify: npm test; a rig run that kills the process mid-run and confirms cleanup completes on restart; a run whose revert fails and stays visible.

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Phase 9 — UO wave 1: the actions that need no protocol change (module-uo + docs)

module-uo registers its first event actions over the write plane that already exists: uo.broadcast, uo.towncrier.post, uo.news.post. Option sources answered from the spawn atlas — uo.options.regions, uo.options.landmarks, uo.options.creatures — which cost nothing new and work with the shard down.

Ships: the first end-to-end event against a real shard: scheduled, announced in-game and on the site, cued to a GM, completed, recorded. Verify: the whole rig — ServUO + sidecar + website — running a real two-phase event.

Trap worth writing into the action declarations. These three verbs have different idempotency. towncrier and news are keyed by id and re-posting replaces, so a retry is safe. broadcast is not — a retry is a second announcement to everyone online — and there is no idempotency key on the wire until P11. So uo.broadcast ships with on_failure: 'skip' rather than a retry, and the declaration says why.

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Phase 10 — Integrations (website + docs)

Core registers its own event. triggers — run.scheduled, run.started, phase.changed, run.ending, run.completed, run.cancelled, and run.failed at ceiling: 'admin' — with seeded templates through the mechanism registerEngagementSeeds already provides. Events owns none of the delivery.

event_run_participants, results publication, and the core.announce.post action that links an existing post to a run and enqueues it through announce_jobs — so the in-game town crier and Discord both come free as already-registered legs with retry and classification.

ENGAGEMENT.md §8.6's row — "a scheduled event is starting · ❌ needs a manual/scheduled trigger type" — is resolved in this PR.

Ships: every announcement channel the platform has, for every event, per user preference. Verify: npm test; a mail-catcher rig confirming an event announcement reaches email, in-app and push; the ceiling on run.failed proved to exclude a moderator.

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Phase 11 — Protocol: idempotency, lease deadlines, participation (servuo-plugins + link + module-uo + installer + docs)

§N1 answered 2026-09-01 — no longer gated. A five-repo protocol bump, and the shape TEAMS Phase 1 already walked.

• Plugin: an idempotency key on every inbound command with a bounded recent-key set that answers a repeat with the original result; a lease deadline timer that restores baseline without being asked; a run-scoped participation ledger; champ.boss.killed as a first-class kind.
• overlay.toml protocol version bumped in this PR — the installer refuses to pair a sidecar and an overlay that disagree, so a bump in a later PR means the next bundle silently fails to compose.
• Sidecar: PROTOCOL_VERSION bumped, the new fields carried, the new kind stored and served.
• installer: joins the phase because of the pairing above.
• docs: a new docs/link/v6.md as the spec of record, plus INTEGRATION.md.

Ships: the game side can refuse a duplicate command and can put the world back on its own. Both are safety properties, not features. Verify: against the local ServUO tree with a build-offline-first step and confirmation the new code is live; a deliberate duplicate command; a lease whose website is killed before it expires, proving baseline returns anyway.

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Phase 12 — UO wave 2: the world verbs (servuo-plugins + link + module-uo + docs)

§N1 answered 2026-09-01 — no longer gated, and taken in full, so the item grant row below stands. The capability set the two UO programs demonstrate, each cap-bounded, ledgered, and either owned or borrowed:

Verb	Owned or borrowed	Cap dimension
Named, hued creatures from the atlas's ~800 constructible types	owned — deleted by serial	uo.creatures
"Simple" boss variants, as event-owned creature templates	owned	uo.bosses
Oracle NPCs with scripted dialogue	owned	uo.npcs
Temporary gates	owned, with a deadline	uo.gate.minutes
Temporary decoration lockdown	owned	uo.decor
A live config value	borrowed — a lease	—
A property on an existing object	borrowed — a lease	—
Seasonal-event toggle	borrowed	—
World save	neither — a one-shot	—
Item grant	owned, reversible: 'none'	uo.rewards

The lease allowlist ships with a boot-time self-check. 258 Config.Get call sites in ServUO split between live reads and values cached at type initialisation, and a lease on the second kind applies cleanly and does nothing. Each key sets, reads back and restores at boot, and drops itself from the advertised catalog if it does not take — a capability that disappears loudly beats one that lies.

Ships: the invasion. Verify: the whole rig, running a real multi-phase event with spawns, a lease, and a full teardown back to baseline — plus a deliberate mid-event GM edit of a leased property, confirming drifted rather than a silent revert of their change.

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Phase 13 — The authoring UI proper (website)

Replaces P3's placeholders. The phase timeline (not a node graph — the condition grammar has no branching and a canvas would advertise power the engine does not have); the step editor rendering each action's declared params, with option-source dropdowns; the live cap meter; dry run; rehearsal.

Ships: an administrator can build the invasion without touching JSON, which is the acceptance criterion the whole feature was asked for. Verify: the client suite; a browser walk authoring a multi-phase event end to end with no raw JSON at any point.

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Phase 14 — Public, player and mobile (website + android-app + docs)

GET /public/events, /public/events/:slug, /public/events/series/:slug, /player/events/history, and an events capability string.

One prerequisite fix, in this phase and not after it. The Android app hardcodes api/v1/public/shard/stream — a module path — and reads /public/modules nowhere, so it cannot render a site whose module it has never heard of. That is a small fix and it blocks the app seeing events at all.

Ships: the public calendar, event pages with their storyline and results, participation history, and the app. Verify: the client and app suites; an emulator walk.

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Phase 15 — Integration Kit chapter 5 (integration-kit)

An event-capable module. Teach and link out; re-specify nothing — EVENTS.md and MODULE_API.md stay normative.

The four things a second module's author will get wrong, one paragraph each, all invisible until an outage: the envelope's failure default, the idempotency passthrough, recording a resource before confirming it, and under-declaring cost.

Like Teams Phase 11, this cannot merge until the cutover exists — the kit is pinned to a main sha, and the contract it teaches is not on main until then.

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Phase 16 — Acceptance walk and cutover

The walk first, against released artefacts, not a working tree. The whole rig — ServUO, sidecar, website, emulator — running a real multi-phase event, including three deliberate failures:

1. a mid-run process restart, proving the run resumes and no step double-executes;
2. a sidecar kill mid-phase, proving the run degrades rather than failing and world writes park;
3. a cap breach, proving refused and an author who is told why.

Then edge → main, in the order every previous cutover used: the protocol side first, the module, core, docs, then the kit's re-pin and runicgateway.com.

Two documents that are cutover-window work by construction.

• runicgateway.com — checkFacts reads main, so any claim about events is unverifiable until the cutover lands. Same 12a/12b split the engagement workstream needed.
• .profile — the org landing page is updated when the shape of the project changes, which a new subsystem is.

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What this plan does not do

Stated so the omissions are choices rather than oversights.

• No node-graph editor (P13). The engine has no branching.
• No delegation, grants or proposal queue. Permissions gate on the existing admin roles. P6's mayInvoke keeps it a cheap later option.
• No points. No core points system exists and no write path to any loyalty board exists.
• No event invoking another event. It already works by composition — a second event's condition can be event.run.completed — and a direct edge would need cycle detection and a story about cancelling a parent.
• No core SSE. The run console polls. Adding a live channel to core is a larger change than this feature needs, and if it is ever built it should be core infrastructure with module-uo's two streams migrating onto it.
• No mutation of shard-owned content without a baseline. Loot tables and arbitrary [set / [get / [add stay excluded.

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Dependency summary

flowchart TD
    P0["P0 · design of record"] --> P1["P1 · schema + registry"]
    P1 --> P2["P2 · the runner"]
    P2 --> P3["P3 · minimal admin UI<br/><b>first demo</b>"]
    P3 --> P4["P4 · schedule + calendar"]
    P2 --> P5["P5 · conditions + diagnosis"]
    P2 --> P6["P6 · enablement + caps"]
    P6 --> P7["P7 · module contract<br/>MODULE_API 1.10.0"]
    P7 --> P8["P8 · ledger + leases + cleanup"]
    P8 --> P9["P9 · UO wave 1<br/>no protocol change"]
    P5 --> P10["P10 · integrations"]
    P9 --> P10
    P0 -.->|"§N1 answered"| P11["P11 · protocol bump"]
    P8 --> P11
    P11 --> P12["P12 · UO world verbs"]
    P7 --> P13["P13 · authoring UI"]
    P4 --> P13
    P10 --> P14["P14 · public + mobile"]
    P13 --> P16["P16 · walk + cutover"]
    P12 --> P16
    P14 --> P16
    P7 --> P15["P15 · kit chapter 5"]
    P15 --> P16

The critical path is P0 → P1 → P2 → P6 → P7 → P8 → P11 → P12 → P16. Everything else can run beside it. P3, P4, P5 and P10 are the phases that could be picked up by a second pair of hands without blocking the spine.

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If only part of this gets built

Three defensible stopping points, in case scope has to shrink.

Stop after P5 — a scheduled, multi-phase, condition-advanced event engine that announces through core's own actions and cues a human for anything in-world. No module contract, no ledger, no protocol change. This is a real product and it is roughly a third of the work.

Stop after P10 — everything above plus the module seam, the ledger, the first UO actions and every notification channel. The website orchestrates and announces; a GM does the target-driven parts in-client, exactly as ADMIN_CONTROLS.md §8 argued they should. This is the recommended minimum viable scope, and it was the scope that required no answer to §N1 at all. §N1 has since been answered in full, so this is now a scope choice rather than a way around an open decision.

Stop after P14 — everything, including the world verbs and the public calendar. P15 and P16 are not optional if anything ships to main; they are the cost of the edge discipline.