A story's "scene data" can live in its actors' AI plans

What to know

2026-10-24, crates/plot, Hardwar's plot_scenes.py, plot.md.

The story's trigger (plot_trigger 0x46de5c) takes a code, and nothing in the story calls it with a constant. The callers were found by scanning every call to it in the program (capstone over bodies.tsv, then the nearest constant loads into EAX and EDX): one of them is the pilots' plan executor, which calls it with word 1 of the pilot's current plan. The story writes those plans itself when it builds a scene: "pick up the wreck, then plan 0x1d with code 2, then deliver, then go home". So the scene data is the sequence of plans, and each code fires when an actor reaches that point of its errand. Look for this whenever a trigger has no visible caller: an AI's plan or script executor with one case that calls back into the story.

Other lessons from the same work:

• Name unnamed plan types from their routines. PilPlanName answered "Unknown" for the story's types, but each type's routine logs a debug error with its own name ("DoPcBuzzShip", "DoRescueVh"). The routines are found by following the executor's compare tree to each case.
• rng_range(n) gives 0 to n. A table picked with rng_range(4) has five entries; the port first indexed past a four-entry table. Read the table's length from the draw, then check the data.
• A scene writes its plans from one stack buffer. Later plans carry the words earlier plans left (a 16-bit store into word 1 keeps the high half). Port the buffer, not each plan.
• Junk register arguments. Several call sites pass leftover EDX values (or a stack address) to building_find, which overwrites EDX at once. Check whether a callee reads a register before comparing it in a replay test; compare only what it reads.
• A tail jump into another story function (plot_fought ends with je plot_crash_scene) runs that function natively: its callees must be hooked too (Isolated(..., extra=...) with the helper's call targets).
• The answer may sit in another system. The ending's unarmed test is not in any story function: it is in the buildings' docking check (0x41fd2c), under a test of the building's kind (0xf, the Abandoned Terminal). When a rule is "only X may enter", read the admission routine of the place, not the story. Likewise two story flags have their meaning in the economy's readers (food made four at a time; fusion goods ordered).
• Measure coverage of the original, not only equality. A hook on every instruction of the functions under test showed the generator never reached Psycho Bob's later chapters; a wider range for four fields brought every non-debug instruction in.

Candidate for GameFrame's isolate.py notes (the extra targets of natively-run helpers, the coverage hook).