Landmark blending review — October 10, 2026

The user screenshots exposed opaque source ground and hard hex edges around Region landmarks, especially the orange caravanserai on the pale desert. Hex exploration reused the full plate over a dark panel. The October 7 individual-file approval did not adequately verify composition in the game; this review supersedes its landmark placement decisions.

Corrected rendering

The shared landmark-contact-1 compositor retains each reviewed subject and a narrow smooth contact apron. It changes alpha only; it preserves full-resolution source painting colors and detail. A 64-by-64 alpha field is interpolated by native canvas, avoiding a full-resolution JavaScript pixel loop. Region overlays the sprite on the existing terrain. Hex uses the same sprite on continuous approved biome ground, with procedural geography where no ground painting is approved. The opaque hex crop, floating shadow, decorative halo and dark backdrop are removed. Contact sprites use an 8 MiB cache. No raster source or saved world is rewritten.

Approval decisions

All 15 previously approved landmark sources were reconsidered. Eleven are retained for composed use only. Ten are restricted to fields, and the caravanserai to desert. The sacred spring loses forest/wetland permission and the observatory loses mountain permission. Forest shrine, lumber camp, iron mine and stone quarry lose approval because available procedural ground does not support satisfactory composition. The five already withheld landmarks remain withheld. The current approved set contains 27 files: 16 terrain paintings and 11 landmark sources.

The decision ledger landmark-blending-decisions-20261010.json records exact hashes, allowed profiles and reasons. The whitelist includes the required composition and permitted profiles. Selection checks the actual cell biome; rendering also checks the required composition. There is no production-status exception and no implicit source/derivative substitution. Native source files remain accessible in the library for review; they are not approved as opaque replacement terrain tiles.

Verification

Compared every retained landmark with its previous opaque crop on the approved terrain painting at desktop size. Directly reviewed the resulting contact silhouettes, including palm crowns, tower roofs, walls, farm plots and approach details. Checked actual Region and Hex rendering at a 390-by-844 mobile viewport. The Region scene completed, the Hex used approved fields material and the shared contact sprite, and no image errors were recorded. The slowest first-time composition in the final 11-landmark comparison was 4.8 ms in this browser; this is scoped evidence, not a whole-game performance guarantee.

Focused validation covers source approval and hashes, alpha masks, preserved source resolution, rejected landmarks, actual biome restrictions, navigation, metadata overlays and settings. All 31 cases pass. Wiki source guidance, tutorials and generated pages are synchronized. Founding, staffing, food, timing, order checks, geography, seed and saved simulation remain unchanged. Screenshots are retained with the task's local QA artifacts for the all-landmark comparison and mobile Region/Hex views.

Follow-up: canonical location identity

The repeated caravanserai screenshots exposed a separate selection defect: Hex terrain fallback requested a building even for open desert and substituted it when the actual feature had no approved art. Both views now select by the canonical feature, reviewed biome and required composition. Broad terrain and catalog category fallbacks are removed. Natural oases remain terrain, resource deposits cannot become markets, and villages cannot become farm estates. Cities, towns, farmsteads, farmland and ruins use separate illustration pools. A location's generated name remains distinct from the shared illustration title in More map options.

All 36 focused approval, composition, location-identity, navigation, metadata and settings tests pass, including sampled real production-seed desert cells covering empty ground, dunes, palms and rare sites. Five wiki synchronization checks also pass. Direct local mobile review at 390 by 844 confirms distinct farmstead, windmill, city and ruined-temple selection; villages, resource deposits, open desert and natural oases retain terrain without substituted buildings. These views use a local fixture selecting real canonical cells through test buttons. Live deployment verification is recorded in the task response. No new painting is approved and no simulation state is reset.