Rules — the round

The clock, the harvest and the call at sundown. GameRoot calls init(anchor) once and update(dt) every frame; everything else here follows from that.

local Locust = require("locust.locustCore")
local rules = Locust.systems.rules      -- always guard for nil
if rules then
    local s = rules.summary()
    -- { tonnage, mass, rivals = {{name, tonnage, mass, alive}, ...}, leader,
    --   remaining, timeLeft, outcome, reason, exposure }
end

• Rules.startRound() — restand the farm, reset the swarm, put the rivals and the dusters back on the board, emit roundStart.
• Rules.endRound("won" | "lost") — emit roundEnd with the summary.
• Rules.summary() — everything the HUD and the end card need, in one table.

The round ends at C.ROUND_SECONDS, or the moment the swarm falls below C.SURVIVAL_MIN. Locust.state.outcomeReason says which of the four ways it went: harvest (you out-ate the farm), outeaten (the bell rang with a rival ahead), starved, sprayed. After C.POST_ROUND_SECONDS a new round starts.

The curve

Intake is geometric — the swarm eats the swath it sweeps, so a wider cloud takes more and eating makes the cloud wider. Burn is a flat fraction of mass per second and never stops: at C.BURN_PER_SEC a swarm that never eats falls from START_MASS through SURVIVAL_MIN in about ninety seconds. Feeding over standing crop returns roughly three times what burn takes.

Measured against four scripted pilots over a full 240 s round:

What else lives in this folder

• Rivals.module — the two rival hosts: field choice, travel, lane work, growth, and the dust column that makes them visible across the farm.
• Sprayers.module — the crop dusters, their spray trail, and the exposure field everything else asks about.
• Ledger.module — the shared survey of the thirty-six plots: what still stands, who has claimed it, and how hard it is being eaten right now.
• Marks.module — the meshes and materials those two put on the farm.