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# Perception & state decoding — guide (crewrift tier)

Reference notes, design rationale, and negative results (14).

#### 1. Exclude self everywhere in a Crewrift social-deduction policy or the bot accuses and ejects itself
`crewrift` · **negative result**

In an ego-centric perception view the agent's own sprite sits at the camera centre and resolves into the world model like any other player. crewborg's self-on-self tailing detector fired every tick, saturated its own color's suspicion to p~0.72, made top_suspect return self, and made crewborg accuse and vote to eject ITSELF -- the dominant cause of crew losses. Fix: learn self_color from the camera-centre sprite plus the voting self-marker and exclude self everywhere (tailing log, suspicion scoring, top_suspect, active_tail_suspect, and a hard ballot guard), then add a self-vote/self-target regression test.
  <sub>sources: personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/version_log.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/lessons_archive/TENTATIVE_LESSONS-20260612-, claude-code:f70c9801-7ee7-499b-97f9-4fd0848a6b8e</sub>

#### 2. A screen-reading policy is a visual client: treat unlocalized as a first-class state and derive observability from the renderer
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

A screen-reading game policy is a visual client, not 'A* over known task coordinates': the server renders each agent's personal 128x128 view server-side every tick (24 FPS); the client decodes a ready-made framebuffer and runs NO game logic, so the parser must decode the server-rendered frame and never expect client-side state. It must continuously self-localize, ignore non-map UI/overlays/interstitials, recognize interstitials (lobby, role-reveal, voting, results, game-over), model movement momentum, and maintain a task-state model, recovering every decision from raw pixels plus a static map loaded once from the SAME JSON the server uses (task rects/names, walk/wall mask, room rects, button rect, home point, vents -- all free, loaded once; vendor those sim files for a hosted image). Localization failure is a primary recurring failure mode that produces silent no-op behavior, not a crash, so treat 'unlocalized' as a first-class state with its own non-idle behavior and make critical transitions (kill confirmation, post-kill fleeing, body reporting) robust to short perception gaps instead of early-returning whenever not localized -- one localization drop that gates everything cascades into broad inaction. An early-bootstrap unlocalized window (placeholder (0,0)) survives only because the server idle/AFK threshold isn't tripped during early role-reveal, but a mid-game flip to unlocalized gets the bot kicked. Self-localization silently drops during transient animation overlays (a death/kill sprite plus blood splatter add non-map pixels that break camera-fit/patch-hash scoring for ~12+ frames; a normal-sprite-sized self-ignore mask doesn't cover the larger death sprite), so widen the self-ignore radius during the known animation window, carry the previous lock forward for N frames at zero velocity, or drive behavior off intent rather than visual confirmation. Do NOT assume the agent receives the server's full obstacle/walk mask under fog: the server has exact wallMapA/B but the player gets only rendered pixels (lossy single-pixel minimap dots; exact wall geometry only for the visible camera area; room size 100-200 varying by player count, learnable from role-reveal), so a move_to/A* promise is meaningless until the design specifies how the obstacle map is obtained from partial observation.
  <sub>sources: bitworld/among_them/GRAPHICS_REPORT.md, bitworld/among_them/players/evidencebot_strategy.md, bitworld/among_them/players/how_to_make_a_bot.md, claude-code:5f9e8287-da92-4dff-bf39-2511bcaf0700 (+4)</sub>

#### 3. Never treat 'action sent' as 'action completed' -- confirm effects through perception, and watch for environment bugs that silently break it
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_ · _see related: S020 (other tier)_

An action handler can only report it SENT a command, not that it succeeded (walls block movement, LLM calls fail, chat rooms can be invalid), so treat an action as taken only when perception observes the resulting state change; if perception can't detect an action (e.g. your own chat message) that is a perception gap to fix. For task completion prefer a server-authoritative signal (the task icon disappearing = server accepted the interaction) over a hold-tick count: hold (fixed ticks) -> confirm (watch for icon disappearance, with timeout) -> mark complete and select next; on confirm-timeout mark the station resolved, or the bot re-selects the same station forever (observed hold->timeout->reselect loop every 133 ticks = 84 hold + 48 confirm + 1). Confirm a game EVENT by the specific artifact near a known location, not a global aggregate: a visible-crewmate-count drop false-positives on a target walking off-screen or a one-frame sprite miss (the count is rebuilt each frame with no global roster), so use 'a body sprite appeared within R px of the target's last position', optionally ANDed with a cooldown-reset edge and gated to a short post-action window. In CoGsGuard, detect action success by observable state change: scramble/align succeed when heart count decreases (each consumes 1 heart), mine when cargo increases, move when last_action_executed matches the intent. Two NEGATIVE RESULTS show why you cannot trust calls returning: (1) junction-alignment failed from energy starvation -- moves cost 3 energy, base regen only +1/tick, and the hub's +100 energy/tick AOE buff is not applied to cogs agents (energy 100->10 after one step), ~99% move-failure; AOE effects are gated by collective-alignment filters (isAlignedToActor for friendly buffs, isEnemy for debuffs), so a friendly buff that fails to apply points to a bug in that matching. (2) The cogsguard BaselinePolicy family (baseline, tiny_baseline, buggy, cranky) crashes deterministically on first step_with_state with 'Heart recipe not discovered!' because _calculate_deficits needs state.heart_recipe before the first gather, but in machina_1/tutorial every hub and extractor exposes current_protocol_inputs/outputs = None at step 0 and no observed action emits the protocol-feature tokens (ids 36..59) the recipe is learned from; the role and nim/thinky policies take a different path and are unaffected.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/docs/findings/baseline-policy-recipe-discove, players_checkouts/players/players/cogsguard/role/CLAUDE.md, players_checkouts/players/players/cogsguard/role/aligned_junction_held, opencode:ses_209613a85ffeqO1Gq9NEDobBYi (+1)</sub>

#### 4. Never assume slot index == color/identity index on a non-fresh server; map slots explicitly and audit every voting-screen parser and render path
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

RECURRING BUG across multiple Among Them / Crewrift bots: parsing players (especially the voting screen) by assuming slot index == color index breaks on a NON-FRESH server. A player's color is PlayerColors[joinOrder mod 16] (PlayerColors = [3,7,8,14,4,11,13,15,1,2,5,6,9,10,12,0]); prior connections offset join order so player 0 can have a non-zero color and slots[i].colorIndex != i. parseVotingScreen required each vote slot's detected color to equal its slot index, which held for a captured local fixture but was false in live coworld (players connected as Player3/4/7 so slot 0 rendered color index 2), and the strict gate rejected the whole frame leaving the bot stuck in interstitial_kind 'unknown'. Never assume identity ordering; map slots to identities by explicit lookup, validate that observed colors form a unique set, build fixtures that exercise scrambled join orders, and audit EVERY voting-screen parser for this assumption. The identity mapping between server slots, agent indices, color ids, and trace directory names is NOT 1:1 (agents saw self_color:-1; numbered trace dirs were empty placeholders separate from the real bot_N dirs), so nail down the color->slot->index->trace-dir mapping before attributing an event like a kill. And the same logical UI can be rendered by multiple server builders with different layout constants (voting/result frames with cell heights 17 vs 18 and row pitch 14), so a parser hardcoded to one grid silently fails on the others -- enumerate every server render path that produces a similar-looking screen and confirm the grid constants match each, since a 1px pitch mismatch breaks the parse.
  <sub>sources: bitworld/among_them/GRAPHICS_REPORT.md, bitworld/among_them/players/italkalot.md, bitworld/among_them/players/mod_talks/LLM_SPRINTS.md, bitworld/among_them/players/mod_talks/TODO.md (+5)</sub>

#### 5. Attribute crewrift kills by per-imposter reward counters and recover meeting-caller / body-report by re-probing the sim, not heuristics
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Attribute crewrift kills by persistent sim side effects, not heuristics: compare each live imposter's reward-account kills counter before vs after the tick, treat increased counters as killers, pair killers with newly appended bodies in body-append order, resolve victim from body slotId (fall back to color), and if killer count != new-body count emit only the pairable prefix and warn rather than guess. The authoritative kill point is tryKill in src/crewrift/sim.nim (appends body, awards KillReward, calls recordKill, resets cooldown). This beats the cooldown-reset heuristic behind crewrift issue #55, where expand_replay asked 'which imposter's kill cooldown just reset from zero?' and credited all simultaneous same-tick kills to one imposter (both cooldowns reset, per-body lookup returned the same first-matching imposter) while results.json was correct. Do NOT probe tryKill from a single global pre-step snapshot: sim.step processes players in index order with per-player movement/vent/cooldown-decrement before tryKill, so a global probe mispairs victims when a killer moves into range and no-ops when killCooldown was 1 at pre-step; simultaneous same-tick kills by two imposters are irreducibly ambiguous from post-tick state. Two attribution gaps do NOT survive in post-tick state because the actor is decided transiently inside step. Meeting caller+reason (pre-rebase VoteState has no callerIndex/kind/body): distinguish a button meeting first (exactly one player's buttonCallsUsed increased on the Playing->Voting transition); only if that fails run the body-report probe -- clone the post-step sim, force it back to Playing, and call real tryReport(playerIndex, limit) per candidate, the lowest-index one that flips the clone to Voting is the caller, capturing the reportable body count BEFORE stepping (the sim freezes bodiesBeforeTick before the player loop, so a body created earlier in the same tick is not reportable that tick and using live clone.bodies.len as bodyLimit is wrong). Newer sim code added persistent vote-call provenance to VoteState (callKind, callerIndex, bodyColor, bodySlotId, populated in startVote), so once rebased read those directly; the cleanest fix is an explicit tryKill event carrying exact killer/victim join slots.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:3dd8c20f-7122-4a7c-9400-e9b7f6799a28, claude-code:bc36021d-994c-48ec-a3bc-7ec637f7464f, codex:019e8aca-584f-7821-af97-25a1500c403d, codex:019e8ae0-d849-7d12-9a7c-2b5e09ba75cf (+1)</sub>

#### 6. Use stable player refs across leaves; beware chat hash mismatch; do not trust pre-assignment manifest roles
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

Event identity must survive player leaves when re-simulating crewrift: storing live sim indices and resolving them through one static identities table breaks because a leave shifts all higher indices -- carry a stable ref (joinOrder or slot) on each event or attach a per-tick index-to-identity map, and emit stable refs not transient live indices. Accepted crewrift chat breaks replay hash validation but does NOT make replays visibly fail: addVotingChat sets player.lastChatTick, gameHash() includes lastChatTick, and playback never replays chat, so the recomputed hash mismatches -- but on mismatch playback prints it, sets hashValidationFailed=true, and CONTINUES, so do not infer hash correctness from a replay rendering successfully. Voting chat is NOT written into the replay file (the live server makes no replayWriter.writeChat call and the spec sets allowChat:false); chat survives only as 'vote chat:' lines in server stdout (Observatory episode-logs --game artifacts). NEGATIVE RESULT: a 'manifest' emitted at first-sight is stale for every field assigned later -- in crewrift/crewborg replay data player_manifest is emitted at first-sight (GameInfo / Lobby join, before RoleReveal/startGame) so its role field is the pre-assignment default 'crew'/Crewmate for everyone (0 imposter labels across 608 rows, silently mislabeling every training row) and tasks are empty; read role from the live per-tick player_state rows instead, and gate manifest emission on game-started state (the reward-account hasRole signal) inside the expander/readout layer, not by changing the replay format/hashes. (expand_replay's player_manifest rows, by contrast, are emitted AFTER assignment and do reflect actual role/assigned_tasks -- verify when YOUR manifest is emitted before trusting it.) Drive the runtime tick from the engine's streamed 'tick <N>' marker so traces align to the expand_replay timeline, falling back to a local counter only for the first few frames.
  <sub>sources: coworlds/coworld-crewrift/README.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/crewrift/crewborg/docs/trace-logs.md, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/lessons_archive/TENTATIVE_LESSONS-20260612-, personal_labs/crewrift_lab/suspicion_lab/README.md (+4)</sub>

#### 7. Know the Crewrift replay format: a zlib binary .bitreplay of joins/leaves/inputs/hashes -- no kills, no frames, no decoded positions; ground reports on results.json
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_

The Crewrift episode replay served by Observatory replay_url (and the replay.json / replay.json.z artifact) is a zlib-compressed .bitreplay BINARY blob (magic header CREWRIFT after decompression), NOT JSON -- detect format by header bytes not filename; json.load() fails with UnicodeDecodeError. It is named replay.json only to match what coworld run-episode writes and the COGAME_LOAD_REPLAY_URI viewer expects. It stores only joins, leaves, inputs, optional chat, and per-tick hashes: there is NO first-class kill or gameplay event and NO rendered frames, so any kill/event attribution is RECONSTRUCTED post-hoc by re-simulating the deterministic sim, and to recover a player's actual visible-object set at a tick you must resimulate or attach to the replay server's per-player stream and decode Sprite-v1. NEGATIVE RESULT: the per-tick position bytes are high-entropy and left undecoded today, so a v1 reporter cannot emit x/y, room, in-vent, or current_task -- do not fabricate positional fields (omit them or derive from another source) and defer all proximity-based signals to v2. When no decoded timeline artifact exists, do NOT invent ticks -- ground reports on results.json (scores/win/tasks/kills/imposter/crew/vote_* arrays) and config.json, flag every per-tick claim as an estimate, and treat the game-runner stdout log as session metadata only, not a per-tick event stream. Holding the replay (and reading the true policy UUID as the player name from it) is sufficient input for the reporter -- the full episode 'bundle zip' is unnecessary -- and capturing events into an in-memory EpisodeTimeline while deferring the output format keeps later formats (CSV, then Parquet) cheap to swap.
  <sub>sources: claude-code:0661ae70-2949-4d2e-8910-676f5a940d53, claude-code:8ec27261-9517-4365-944b-2880873bda47, codex:019e8a74-7b9b-77b3-a5f9-968a746f6d93, codex:019e8ae0-d849-7d12-9a7c-2b5e09ba75cf (+3)</sub>

#### 8. A live crewrift policy cannot see durable identity; ground offline role attribution in authoritative artifacts
`crewrift` · **negative result** · ⚠ _session-derived, unverified_ · _see related: S025 (other tier)_

A live Crewrift policy cannot observe durable opponent identity: the player-facing observation exposes other players only as within-episode slot/join-order/color/flags, while names and policy IDs exist only in offline server roster, results, and replays -- do not design in-game strategy around durable identity an agent cannot see, and confirm what the observation packet actually contains. When attributing roles OFFLINE, ground it in authoritative artifacts: results.json slot imposter flags, the role-gated kill log (tryKill only emits 'killed by ... (imposter)' when killer.role==Imposter), the fixed color-index order in sim.nim, and the policy trace's resolved roles. Do not conflate viewer color labels with internal labels -- crewrift has both 'light blue' and 'pale blue' as distinct colors.
  <sub>sources: codex:019e8fc7-ebad-7b00-bc95-df1727641ce0, codex:019e9656-7cfc-7032-ae70-82b6dbc0a053</sub>

#### 9. The Crewrift replay event-key vocabulary an optimizer extracts per tick
`crewrift`

The canonical Crewrift replay event-key vocabulary an optimizer extracts per tick: player_joined, entered_room, left_room, phase, vote_called_body, vote_called_button, kill, body, died, revived, started_task, completed_task (value {task:N, while_dead:bool}), vote_cast, chat, score. Diagnose player behavior against this enumerated set.
  <sub>sources: coworlds/coworld-crewrift/reporters/eventlog/README.md</sub>

#### 10. Append meeting records inside the interstitial branch, not the gameplay branch (dead-code trap)
`crewrift` · **negative result** · _see related: S026 (other tier)_

NEGATIVE RESULT: a meeting-record append placed in the NON-interstitial branch was dead code, because the result frame is itself interstitial -- the voting-screen parser fails and the voting-state clear fires before the gameplay branch runs, so the record was never appended. Fix by extracting a finalize step and appending the record INSIDE the interstitial branch.
  <sub>sources: bitworld/among_them/players/mod_talks/LLM_SPRINTS.md</sub>

#### 11. Persephone rooms are disjoint fog-of-war spaces: cross-room info comes from chat or hostage transfer only
`crewrift`

In Persephone, rooms are disjoint coordinate spaces with raycasting fog-of-war and 8x8 obstacle blocks that block both movement and line of sight, and players see only their own room. Cross-room information must come from chat or hostage transfer, not observation -- an agent cannot directly perceive the other room's leader or players.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/RULEBOO</sub>

#### 12. Use structured whisper fields, log ambiguous attributions honestly, and never blind-fire whisper menu actions
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Prefer structured parsed system-message fields (active offers, last exchange event, exchange partner) over re-parsing raw chat for Persephone belief updates, de-duplicating still-displayed offers so they are not counted across ticks. Attribution is unreliable when perception does not expose the offerer: the bottom-bar 'R!'/'C!' indicator signals an active offer exists but does NOT identify who made it, so in a crowded multi-occupant whisper prefer logging an ambiguous completion over mis-assigning it. Make exchange-completion detection (critical for the win condition) resilient to OCR misreads with three layers: substring-match on short fragments ('SWAP','SHARED','OFFER'); redundant inference (if you sent R.OFFER and any system message within ~120 ticks contains 'SHARED' or 'ROLE', infer completion even if garbled); and info-screen reconciliation after exiting (a target now showing a full role indicator confirms the exchange regardless of parsed text) as the ground-truth fallback. When auditing traces, treat a whisper_exchange_outcome with server_confirmed=false as merely a menu attempt -- a true win-relevant exchange must also appear in server full.log as 'shared roles' or server_confirmed=true. NEGATIVE RESULT: do not blind-fire whisper menu actions from ordinary gameplay -- blind R.ACCPT can create self-whispers (requesters should blind-offer after entry requests, not blind-accept); and although in_whisper = (view==WHISPER) is the source of truth for whisper presence, a live run showed a server-confirmed join where the requester never observed the WHISPER view, so do not assume you are out of a whisper just because the view is absent until that gap is fixed.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/TODO.md, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/, orpheus/DESIGN.md (Orpheus agent framework design), personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md</sub>

#### 13. Model Persephone exchange information leakage: witnesses see all, Spy inverts, and a server bug leaks identity
`crewrift` · **negative result**

Persephone whisper system messages (offers, accepts, completions) are visible to ALL occupants, not just the two transacting players, so with >2 occupants and any hostile/unknown witness a key role must NOT initiate a color or role exchange (it leaks team/role identity) -- it should abort and exit; grunts may proceed since leaking 'Shade'/'Nymph' is low-cost. Color exchange reveals an opponent's team with 100% reliability ONLY when no Spy is present, because a Spy's color exchange shows the OPPOSITE of its true team (a Shades Spy appears Nymphs); detect Spy presence from intro Panel 2's role summary, set team confidence to 1.0 with no Spy and 0.9 otherwise until a mutual role exchange verifies (the default 10-player composition has no Spy), and note a one-way role reveal or mutual role exchange exposes the true 'Spy' label, permanently breaking its cover. The HostageExchange phase accepts no input but is free intelligence -- it shows full color+shape identity of departing/arriving hostages and your own room's leader (the other room's leader only if you are a leader, server-gated on isLeader), so re-check the registry for new room assignments after each exchange. NEGATIVE RESULT: a known server rendering bug leaks identity -- the exchange-screen row renderer draws each sprite's role/team indicator without checking the revealedTo/colorRevealedTo gates, exposing true identity for all shown sprites; treat leaked indicators as opportunistic bonus confidence only and keep strategy correct if patched. Second NEGATIVE: a third player present in a whisper does NOT block two others from completing their exchange, so do not rely on 'witnessing' as a mechanical block -- you can only waste their time and observe.
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/, players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/HADES_STRATEGY.md</sub>

#### 14. Actively manage the Persephone intro (highest info density) and order identity discovery deliberately
`crewrift`

Persephone's non-interactive intro is the most information-dense moment and must be actively managed: hold on Roster Reveal at least ~48 ticks to capture every player's room assignment, then advance through the role card (own role/team/room/size), role summary (Panel 2: roles present/missing, echo substitutions, Spy presence), and round schedule (Panel 3: per-round duration and hostage count) before marking ready, outputting idle so you do not skip panels. Then run identity discovery in order: do rapid color exchanges first to separate friend from foe fast (prioritize unknown players over already-identified ones), then mutual role exchange only with confirmed teammates to learn key-vs-grunt role. Heuristics: a teammate who urgently proposes mutual role exchange is likely your partner key role (use them as relay/protector); a confirmed enemy who refuses mutual role exchange is likely a key role, since a grunt has no reason to refuse (leaking 'Shade'/'Nymph' is low-cost).
  <sub>sources: players_checkouts/players/users/james/personal_cogs/persephone/agents/, agents/eurydice/NYMPH_STRATEGY.md, agents/eurydice/PERSEPHONE_STRATEGY.md, personal_cogs/persephone/agents/eurydice/DESIGN.md</sub>
