swarm — what comes down out of the cloud

The THREATS slice of ANVIL CROWN. Registers the threats system with game.anvil (order 30) the moment it is required; the world entrypoint requires every /source/game/<slice>/<name>.module at load, so dropping this folder in is the whole of joining the game.

local A = require("game.anvil")
A.threats.damageAt(x, y, radius, amount)   -- the cannon killed something
A.threats.list()                           -- every live threat, as plain data

The five reads

Everything is a silhouette first. In a storm you often get one lightning flash to look at a shape, so what a thing does has to be legible from its outline before it is close enough to do it.

The one with no hot accent is the one your gun does nothing to. That is the read, and it is why the hail is the only wholly dark archetype: rounds strike a pale spark off it and it keeps coming.

Escalation

The wave director keys off state.bandIndex and A.rules.progress(). The gap between waves is 1.05 s ÷ (band.threat × (1 + progress × 0.55)), so SHELF runs about one wave every 1.7 s and ANVIL about one every 0.5 s. What spawns changes with the band too:

Mites arrive as an arc of 3 + bandIndex; from CORE up a sleet is aimed at where you are rather than at a lane, and in ANVIL it arrives as a volley of three. Spitters fire two-round bursts in CORE and three in ANVIL. At most 26 threats are alive at once, so the shaft escalates in pressure rather than in sheer count.

How the runner's cannon kills things

The flight slice owns the rounds. It reports a hit with

A.threats.damageAt(x, y, radius, amount) -> hits

Until something calls that, this slice keeps shadow rounds: it listens for the fire event, integrates a round from the muzzle along the nose at K.GUN.muzzleSpeed out to K.GUN.range, and resolves the hits itself. The first damageAt call stands the shadow rounds down for three seconds and each call renews it, so the two paths never both count a kill — and the shaft is dangerous and killable whether or not the flight slice is loaded.

The same self-standing-down applies to damage: this slice emits hit and lets flight own the hull, but if nothing is listening to hit it calls A.rules.applyDamage itself, so a run can be lost on its own.

What it owns

Writes state.threatsAlive, state.kills, state.score. Fires hit (contact and threat rounds), kill, and shake. Reads runnerX / runnerY / alive from flight, airMul / wind / gust from storm, bandIndex / phase from the director. Sets A.claims.threats.

Threats spawn during climb. During title and opening a thinner, harmless trickle falls through the shaft so the screen behind a menu is alive; nothing in it can shoot or hurt you. During crown the existing threats fall out and no new wave starts — the fight at the top is the crown slice's.

The public surface

How it is built

Every threat is one entity per material tier, parented to the scene's Threats anchor, pooled and recycled — never spawned and despawned per wave, because attaching a Model costs about thirty times what creating the entity does. Pool entities are setTemporary(true) (so they never bake into scene.json) and setSynced(false) (so each pilot's shaft is their own).

The meshes are built at runtime by game.threats.geo: a 2D outline extruded toward the camera with a chamfered front face. In a 2.5D game seen from one station, the outline is the read, and the chamfer is what stops a shape looking like a flat card when the lightning catches it.

A rebuild — a scene reload, an edit↔play flip, a hot reload of this module — clears every Threat… entity off the anchor before it allocates a new pool, so a reload never stacks a fresh pool on an abandoned one.