plan

The pages people land on still do not say what $12 buys

Yesterday I added the fleet generator to seven pages that sell. Then I read where real visitors (RUM, last 7 days) actually arrive: /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/ (8, the page Reddit sent them to), the eleven /maps/ pages (about 20 between them) and /daily/ (11). None of those were in the seven. The map pages say the full version is "one HTML file with no watermark", which is also true of what a free visitor thinks they already have. The daily derelict is one ship out of the fleet generator, and the page never says so.

• Add one short fleet paragraph and the buy button to the map-page generator, the free-maps page and the daily page generator, so it survives rebuilds.
• Check at 390px, run the tests, link-graph and check-press, deploy.
• Verify on the live pages, not just in the build.

Done means: each of those pages names the fleet generator in plain words above the footer, and a nightly rebuild does not remove it.

The daily check at 5:37 runs today's derelict as usual.

The story a generated ship comes with is invisible

The front page is the most visited (24 of 92), and 59 of 92 visits are phones. Its pitch is "every generated ship comes with a story". On a phone, tapping Generate a derelict shows a map and a two-second toast; the story sits in the Room key box at the bottom of the side panel, which nobody scrolls to.

• After a generate, show the brief in a card over the map: the story, a "Read the room key" button, and in the demo one line that the full version makes 5, 10 or 20 of these at once, linking /go/buy/brief.
• Not in the Owlbear extension (it hides the fleet row there too).
• Test at 390px and on desktop, run tests and smoke, deploy.

Next: make a breach look like a breach

Every page promises "breaches in the hull" and every daily post is a derelict. In the generator a breach is 1 to 3 squares of a room set to empty space; the renderer walls it off like any other gap, so mid-room it reads as a pillar and at the edge as a notch in the outline. Nothing says "torn open to vacuum".

• Record breach cells on the deck (saved in the plan file, so edits keep them).
• Draw them as damage: a ragged edge instead of a clean wall, debris scattered into the room, the void tinted so it reads as space and not a column. Both blueprint and print styles, PNG and PDF.
• .dd2vtt: a breach is open to vacuum; decide from the importers whether its edge should be a wall at all (it should still block movement into nothing).
• Old plans without breach data must load and look as they do now.
• Tests for save/load round trip; eyeball a derelict of each size at 390px and full size before deploying. The daily run picks it up the next morning.

Next: one upload for the boss, not two

The boss hasn't uploaded 1.17.1 to itch yet. That zip predates the story card and the breaches. Plan: build 1.18.0 with both, run the paid-build checks on it (it opens offline, has no watermark, the fleet zip generates), and swap it into /press/ task 5 with a line saying it replaces 1.17.1. That way the boss's single upload carries everything. If they turn out to have uploaded 1.17.1 already, 1.18.0 simply becomes the next upload.

Next: reach, now that the click count is honest

No one has clicked buy yet, so the leak is people seeing the pitch at all. Tomorrow's daily derelict is the first to go out with torn breaches, and it posts to Bluesky on its own. I'll compare its likes and reposts, plus page loads on /daily/ the day after, against the last seven posts. That tells us whether a better-looking image moves anything before I spend more on visuals. In the meantime I'll go through the RUM referrers for where the real page loads come from, and put the next effort into whichever channel has sent an actual human.

Next: the Owlbear store listing, the one channel that sends people without the boss

Two visitors came from owlbear.rogue.pub. I'll read our listing as a stranger would, next to the top extensions in the same tags: first line, header image, screenshots, what it says it does. Then I'll fix what's weak. It's our own listing, so the fix needs nothing from the boss, apart from a store PR if the listing lives in their repo. I'll check how updates reach it before editing.

Next: read the two experiments, and put the pitch where the Owlbear visitor lands

On the 24th: the first Bluesky post with breaches, measured against the last seven posts. On the 26th: the Owlbear card, meaning click-throughs to /owlbear-rodeo-dd2vtt/ and loads of /obr against today's baseline. In between, I'll read /owlbear-rodeo-dd2vtt/ as someone arriving from that card would. It should say in its first screen how to add the extension (the manifest URL, copyable) and show a generated ship. Those clicks have sent two people there ever, and neither went further.

After the correction

The traffic premise changed: real loads are about 7 a day, not a Reddit wave. That makes the Owlbear Rogue Store card (3 referrals, one of them after today's new card) and the daily Bluesky post the only two channels running without the boss. Tomorrow: check the 5:37 daily run (status clear, torn breaches on the card), then compare the post's likes and any same-hour loads against the 1-like baseline. On the 26th, read the Owlbear card as planned. Until then, no more screenshots of the live site without the beacon blocked.

The week-two pack

On the 27th, run node scripts/weekly-pack.mjs 2026-09-27 for the 21st to 27th. That gives the free-maps page, and whatever Reddit reply comes next, a new thing to link to instead of last week's zip. The 21st to 23rd have square notches, while the 24th on have torn breaches. The pack goes out as drawn, since the daily pages must match the posts.

After the r/traveller replies

1. Clues that connect. Each derelict should carry one thread, two or three notes that point at each other and at the hook (a name, an object, a door), instead of one unrelated fragment per room. Before it ships, read five generated ships as a GM would, room by room against the key.
2. Move the paywall line (the boss raised this today). The demo keeps generating, editing and a watermarked PNG. The .dd2vtt with walls and lights, the PDF and the fleet move to the $12 version. The daily and the free packs stay free as the sample.
3. Every draft in the boss's voice says in its first line that an AI agent made it.

The pages people land on now say what $12 buys

Real visits over the last seven days (RUM, my own headless runs excluded) land on / (24), /press/ (13, the boss), /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/ (8), /daily/ (6), and the eleven /maps/ pages (about 20 between them). Yesterday's seven pages were not where people land. The map pages said the full version was "one HTML file with no watermark", and the free-maps and daily pages said less.

Added the fleet generator in plain words, with a buy link, to:

• every /maps/ ship page (in map-pages.mjs, so rebuilds keep it),
• every /daily/ day page, under the GM key: "This is one ship. The full version makes a fleet." (in daily-derelict.mjs),
• the /daily/ archive, right under the intro,
• /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/, above the credits. The weekly pack script only patches that page in place, so it survives.

Rebuilt the daily pages from the existing 22nd, so today's derelict was not generated early; the 5:37 check does that as usual. Tests 23/23, link graph 31/31 reachable, check-press all ok, deployed. On the live site at 390px: no horizontal scroll on any of the four page types, the section sits above the footer on each, and /go/buy/free-maps, /map and /daily all return 302.

Visitor numbers are small (6 loads on the 22nd), so this is about the next wave from Reddit or search being told what they would be paying for. Clicks by source will show whether it did (npm run clicks), in a few days.

The story now shows up on the map

On a phone, tapping Generate a derelict on the front page showed a map and a two-second toast. The story, which is the whole pitch, sat in the Room key box at the bottom of the side panel. Most real visits are phones (59 of 92).

Now every generate (the intro buttons, Generate, and ?gen=derelict links from the other pages) opens a card over the map: the ship's name, the brief with its hook, "Read the room key" (scrolls to it), "Another one", and in the demo one line that the full version makes 5, 10 or 20 of these at once, linking /go/buy/brief. It closes on ×, on touching the map, or on loading the example. "Another one" asks before replacing only if you have edited the ship. Not shown in the Owlbear extension, same as the fleet row there.

The intro text also says what $12 buys now: no watermark and whole fleets.

The tests caught that obr.html needed the same elements; added. Tests 23/23, smoke 33/33 pages clean. Tried in a local preview at 390px and 1280px: card shows, Another one gives a new ship, Read the room key lands on the key, no page errors, no sideways scroll. Deployed and checked live at 390px; /go/buy/brief returns 302.

The paid build gets the card at the next release; that goes up by the boss's hand with task 5, so it is not a new ask.

Looked for somewhere to be useful on Reddit, found a reason instead

Read the newest week of r/mothershiprpg, r/traveller, r/FoundryVTT, r/battlemaps and r/rpg for anyone asking for ship or station maps. Nobody is; no reply to draft. But the r/mothershiprpg "New GM advice" thread tells new Wardens not to use detailed battle maps at all. Written up in LEARNED.md: for Mothership, lead with the story, not the VTT walls.

Also checked, nothing to change: the daily Bluesky post already carries #ttrpg #battlemap #maps #scifi #ttrpgcommunity. With six followers, the hour it goes out is not what limits it. Bing's site: search shows none of our pages yet; Google and DuckDuckGo refused the automated check.

The derelict page now shows a derelict

/derelict-ship-map-generator/ is the page a Mothership reader is most likely to land on, and it already led with the story. But it only described one: the single image on it was a clean print-style plan, not a derelict. Replaced that image with "One it made earlier": Vantage Station, the 22 September daily, its map, its brief, one hazard, two log fragments, the salvage and the hook, word for word from the generator, with links to the full key and to open it in the editor. That is the LEARNED note from this morning put to work.

Noticed while checking: the generator's hull breaches read as small notches on the map, not holes. At a glance neither Vantage deck looks wrecked. Not changing the generator on a hunch; noting it in case a GM says the same.

Deployed, 31/31 pages reachable, no sideways scroll at 390px.

Breaches look like breaches

Done. A derelict's hull breaches used to be square notches cut out of rooms, which read as a drawing mistake. Now:

• The generator records which squares it tore open. They are saved in the plan file, so a ship you open and edit keeps them. If you paint a floor over a hole, the hole is forgotten.
• Each hole is drawn with a ragged edge, a few spikes of hull pointing out to space and some debris. This happens on screen, in the PNG and in the PDF.
• The .dd2vtt export is unchanged. The walls still close around the hole, so tokens can't walk through it, which is what a GM wants.
• Plans made before this have no breach data. They load and look exactly as they did. There is a test for that.
• There are five new tests: every size of derelict has breaches and all of them are open space, an intact ship has none, breaches survive a save and load, an old file loads, and painting over a hole forgets it. 28/28 pass.
• It is deployed and checked on the live site with ?gen=derelict. The ICV Sable showed three torn holes through crew, cargo and the galley corridor. Smoke: 33/33 pages clean.

Tomorrow's daily derelict (the 5:37 run) will be the first one drawn this way. The paid build doesn't have this or the story card yet. Both go into the next release zip, which the boss uploads.

One upload for the boss, not two

Done, but differently from the plan. I planned a 1.18.0 zip. Nothing has been published yet, though, and I already rebuilt the 1.17.1 zip three times under the same name, so I kept the name. Renaming now would only make task 5 on /press/ disagree with the devlog title and the notes you already have.

• The paid zip is rebuilt with the story card and the breaches. The paid check passes 11 of 11. I also opened the exact file offline with ?gen=derelict: the story card appears with the store link hidden (correct for a paid copy), the breaches are drawn, and there are no page errors.
• The devlog body on /press/ gained one paragraph describing both changes. A dated note in the change list tells the boss to copy it fresh.
• Deployed. The live zip is byte-identical to the local build, and the press page shows the new note.

The one buy click was a bot

Unplanned, found while reading npm run clicks. It showed 4 "real" clicks today, one of them from the new story card. I pulled the raw rows and none of them is real. Neither is the iPhone in Korea from the 21st, which I had reported to the boss on /press/ as the first click ever. Every one is a bare hit on the redirect with no page load before it, and the two that loaded anything fetched a .dd2vtt and an old redirect, not the page that holds the button. The details are in LEARNED.

• clicks.sh now requires an HTML page load from the same browser and country in that hour or the one before. Its result: 0 real clicks from 5 bare hits.
• Task 5 on /press/ now opens with a plain correction in place of the "something clicked buy" paragraph. Deployed.
• What changes: the funnel's leak is reach, not the store page. The next work goes into getting the pitch in front of people, not into polishing the listing.

Daily check, 06:07

The 5:37 run hadn't fired yet: status showed 4 of 15 failing, with no page, feed or post for today. I ran the day by hand. The FTV Sable Verge was posted to Bluesky, and status shows all 18 clear.

That run turned up a bug: today's card still had square notches. The day is drawn by store/bulkhead.html, a checked-in paid build that nothing refreshed, and it was two days old. daily-derelict.sh now rebuilds it from source at the start of every run and commits it along with the day. I test-rendered tomorrow's ship, the ISV Gallowglass Drift, and it has four torn breaches. The test render was discarded and never deployed.

Today's page stays as it was posted. Redrawing it from the same seed with the current code gives a different ship, because the generator has changed since the 21st, and the page must match the post. So "re-running regenerates the same ship" holds only while the code stays the same. A re-run of an existing day just prints "already generated", so the daily recovery path is unaffected.

Where the real visitors come from

From visits.sh since the 16th, 95 page loads (a floor). 74 of them were on the 21st, the day of the r/battlemaps reply, and every other day has had 3 to 6. Of the loads that carry a referrer, two came from the Reddit app and two from the Owlbear extension store (owlbear.rogue.pub, landing on our Owlbear page), plus one each from Bing and our own pages. 13 of the direct loads are /press/, which is the boss. Bluesky shows up as nothing, though the Bluesky app may strip referrers, so that isn't proof it sends no one. Tomorrow's post-vs-traffic comparison will tell.

So far the only thing that has moved real numbers is a reply on Reddit, and the boss has to post those. The one channel that brings people without the boss is the Owlbear store, and only barely. That is where I look next.

The Owlbear card nobody clicks

Carried out the plan above, with a correction to its premise. The official store PR #174 is untouched since the 15th, and recent merges there took 2 to 4 months. The two owlbear.rogue.pub visitors came from the unofficial Rogue Store instead, which already lists us (see LEARNED). What I didn't know is how much it shows us. Since the 21st Bulkhead has been the first card under "Latest Additions" on its front page and under the Fog tag. Our /obr/icon.png is fetched by real browsers in about 20 countries, some 100 times a day. Against that: 0 downloads on the card, 2 click-throughs to our Owlbear page, and 4 loads of the extension itself (/obr) ever, all on the 21st. So people see it and pass.

The card shows only the icon, the name and our manifest's one-line description. That line was a feature list that never mentioned the generator. It now reads: "One click makes a whole starship or derelict, story included. Or draw your own deck plans. Saves as a scene with walls, doors and lights set for Dynamic Fog." It's the same in store.md. I checked it is true inside Owlbear: generate works there, and intact ships get a story too. Deployed; status shows 18 clear. The Rogue Store re-indexes at least daily; its last index was 6:37 today.

Baseline to compare against in three days: about 100 icon loads a day, 0 or 1 click-throughs a day to /owlbear-rodeo-dd2vtt/, and 0 loads of /obr since the 21st. Our spot will slide down the list as new extensions arrive, so a flat result may mean less exposure rather than a bad line. I'll look at the icon counts too.

The icon, too. The card's other half was an abstract white rectangle with a cross in it, which at thumbnail size could be any app. The new /obr/icon.png is a top-down ship: engines, a pointed bow, four coloured rooms with doors, and a torn breach through the hull with debris. I checked it at 512px and 64px, and it still reads as a ship at 64. The source SVG is in store/obr-store-icon.svg. The in-Owlbear toolbar icon (icon.svg) is unchanged, because it has to stay a simple mark. Deployed, the live file matches, and status shows 18 clear.

I changed two things at once, so a rise in click-throughs can't be credited to either one. I accepted that: the baseline is about zero, and there's no way to split traffic on someone else's page.

The page the Owlbear card links to

The Rogue Store's "learn more" link goes to /owlbear-rodeo-dd2vtt/, a page about importing .dd2vtt files, with the extension as a shortcut section. That section now:

• opens by saying what the extension does in one click: a whole ship or derelict with its story, landing in the room as a scene with walls and lights, free
• has a Copy button next to the manifest URL, which used to be plain text to select by hand on a phone

store.md's learn-more now links to #extension, so visitors from the card land on that section rather than on the import steps. Deployed; status is 18 clear, smoke 34/34, and no overflow at 390px. The boss also asked whether anyone had bought. itch's API says 0 purchases, 0 downloads and 9 lifetime views on the paid page.

Bluesky: the baseline, and one hashtag

Baseline for tomorrow: the six daily posts (18th to 23rd) got 1, 1, 2, 1, 1 and 1 likes, no reposts and no replies. The account has 6 followers and 16 posts. With that few followers, posts reach nobody except through hashtag and topic feeds.

I searched Bluesky (read-only) for what those tags carry. In the last month, the top "#scifi battlemap" posts are ours: the niche is empty, not crowded. #maps covers real-world cartography, not game maps. #osr is busy: 100 posts in a week, and top posts that week have a median of 11 likes. It is also the audience that uses system-neutral derelicts with a GM key. So in the daily post and the weekly pack post, #maps became #osr. #mothershiprpg is active too, but I left it out: Bulkhead is not to be marketed as a Mothership product, and a hashtag is more than a mention in a list.

Tomorrow's post changes the image (breaches) and one tag at once. With a baseline of 1 like, only a big jump will mean anything.

The hook was missing too. The post builder keeps the hook ("the salvage claim on this hull was filed two days ago by someone who has not been here") only if the first sentence and the hook both fit alongside the fixed ending. Five of the six posts went out without one. The ending is now shorter ("Free map, CC0: PNG, .dd2vtt with walls, GM key."). When the two still don't fit, the post uses the ship's name and the hook and drops the first sentence, which the linked page and image carry anyway. Replayed over the last six days: every one now carries a hook, and all are between 238 and 268 characters. That makes three changes on tomorrow's post. I accept that it's no longer a clean test. Getting it right matters more than measuring each part.

On a phone, the story card hid the ship

46 of our 95 page loads are iPhone Safari, and most of them come from the Reddit app. On a 390px screen, after Generate, the story card covered most of the short stage. The ship behind it was mostly hidden at 36% zoom. On a phone, the view now fits the ship into the space between the deck tabs and the card, and refits to the whole stage when the card is closed. On a phone the card is also capped at 45% of the stage, with slightly smaller text. Desktop is unchanged. Checked at 390px locally and live, with no page errors. Tests pass 28/28 and smoke 34/34. The paid zip on /press/ is rebuilt (11 of 11, live file byte-identical), with a line in the change list.

The Reddit spike was me

I set out to make the free-maps page better for phone visitors from Reddit, because this morning's log says Reddit is what moved the numbers: 74 of 95 loads on the 21st. Before touching the page I broke those loads down by hour, browser and OS. 42 of them came in one hour, 18:00 UTC on the 21st, all "MobileSafari, iOS, US". That hour is 13:00 to 14:00 here, the exact hour I wrote phone-shot.mjs and ran it over twelve pages (commit at 13:40, "the phone path: a nav on twelve pages"). That script is headless Chromium dressed as an iPhone. visits.sh only drops "ChromeHeadless", so every screenshot I took counted as a visitor. Today's run of iPhone-looking loads (06, 09, 13, 15 and 16 UTC) matches my own screenshot runs too.

Corrected: since the 16th, about 59 real loads, not 101. The 21st had about 32, not 74, spread over the day: desktop Chrome on Mac and Windows overnight, and six Android loads at 19:00. The r/battlemaps reply still produced the only Reddit-app referrals (2), but "Reddit is the one thing that moved the numbers" was mostly my own screenshots. The other channel that brings a stranger without the boss is still the Owlbear Rogue Store: a third referral came in at 15:00 today (Canada, desktop), after the new card went up this morning. One visit is not a result; I'll read it on the 26th as planned.

Fix: phone-shot.mjs now aborts every request to the analytics host, so it can't be counted. I checked that the beacon requests fail (0 finished, 2 aborted). The same rule is in memory for any one-off script. The earlier numbers can't be cleaned after the fact, so from now on I will read visits.sh knowing that hour on the 21st is mine. I did not tell the boss "74 from Reddit" on /press/, so nothing there needs correcting.

I did not change the free-maps page. Viewed at phone width it already leads with the right thing (a browse button above the zip, a daily derelict, open-in-editor links), and nothing I saw there was broken.

Daily check, 17:07 UTC

npm run status: all 18 clear. The 23rd was posted at 11:07 UTC with the map and link, and the feed and Owlbear checks are green. Nothing was run by hand.

What a stranger on itch sees (17:10)

The itch API says the page is published, with 9 views, 0 downloads and 0 purchases. The listing still serves bulkhead-1.17.zip. Searching itch for "bulkhead" returns six other people's pages and not ours, and the creator page lists nothing. So the page is still out of itch search and browse, as reported on the 21st. The cause is the first-seller review queue or the Unlisted box, and both are in task 5 at the top of /press/, which already says this. I added nothing there, since a longer list makes the one thing that matters harder to find. Bulkhead's only devlog is the 1.14 one, so the 1.17.1 devlog in task 5 would be the second.

index-status.mjs no longer measures anything. Bing ignores site: for this domain and returns other sites, DuckDuckGo returns an error page, and Google serves its unusual-traffic wall. I've stopped trusting it; search coverage has to come from the crawler hits in the HTTP log instead.

I looked at the Owlbear popover with the analytics beacon blocked. It shows the full intro, including "Full version — $12". I'm leaving it as the store reviewed it while PR #174 is open.

Do search engines read us at all? (17:30)

The site: scrape is dead, so I used the HTTP log instead: crawler requests to the bulkhead host since the 16th. Every one got a 200, so nothing is blocking them.

• Googlebot fetched robots.txt 51 times and the sitemap 10 times, but only 8 pages: /, /about/, /guide/, /foundry-dd2vtt/ and two dailies, plus five deck PNGs.
• bingbot fetched one page, /derelict-ship-map-generator/, 10 times, and nothing else. That's despite IndexNow answering "200 accepted" for every daily push, which I re-tested just now. "Accepted" means Bing has the URL, not that it will crawl it.
• Also crawling: YandexBot has read 7 pages, including two dailies. GPTBot has read 6 and ClaudeBot 4.

This is the normal crawl pace for a domain a week old with almost no inbound links. The lever that remains is an owner-verified console, which is task 7 on /press/ and needs the boss. That makes this the baseline: 8 Google pages and 1 Bing page. I'll read it again on the 30th.

The GitHub "awesome list" channel is closed

I looked for curated GitHub lists as a backlink that needs no boss. The only live, sizeable one that isn't limited to open-source games is flamableconcrete/awesome-dnd (299 stars). It has 10 open "add my tool" PRs dating back to July, with no merge since, and its map tools are all fantasy. The Foundry lists haven't been pushed since 2020. I sent nothing.

Bing's one page now leads somewhere

The one page bingbot keeps reading, /derelict-ship-map-generator/, didn't link to any of our five free derelict map pages. Its second button sent people to an itch page that itch doesn't index, and called it "four" derelicts. It now has a "Five ready-made derelicts" section linking each /maps/derelict-* page, with a line per ship taken from that page's own text. The button now jumps to that section. Every one of those pages has the PNG, the .dd2vtt and a print PDF (checked). Deployed, live shows 5 links, smoke 34/34, and the page was re-pushed to IndexNow (200). Crawlers that reach it now have five more pages to follow, and a person searching "derelict ship map" gets free maps without leaving the site.

The demo now says what visitors do in it

Until now I could count page loads and buy clicks and nothing in between. So when 30 people loaded the demo and nobody bought, I couldn't tell whether they generated a ship, exported one, or left from the first screen. That gap decides whether the next hour goes into reach or into the demo.

count() in src/main.ts sends one bare GET to /e/<what>, with no cookie, no id and nothing from the plan. _redirects answers every /e/* path with an empty e.txt (checked live: 200, 0 bytes). It fires on:

• generate: generate-intact and generate-derelict, plus link-derelict and link-ship for the ?gen= links our pages use.
• exports: export-png, export-vtt, export-pdf and export-key.
• the locked fleet button: fleet-locked, which tells me whether anyone reaches for the paid feature.

Inside Owlbear the same events come through prefixed obr-. Only the hosted demo on our own host sends them: the paid file and local builds never do. scripts/events.sh reads the counts from the zone log, drops headless runs, and looks the zone up by name. A live check from Playwright saw link-derelict and export-vtt answer 200. Tests pass 28/28, and it's deployed.

I'll read it with the Owlbear experiment on the 26th. If people generate and export but never touch the fleet button, the pitch for the paid version is what's missing. If they don't generate at all, the first screen is.

The demo's first screen leads with the button

At phone width the demo opened on nine lines of text before "Generate a derelict", the one button that shows what the product does. The panel is now a two-sentence lead ("draws starship & station deck plans, VTT-ready. One click makes a whole ship, and every generated ship comes with a story."), then the buttons, then the same detail as before in smaller muted text. No wording was dropped. The primary button moves from about 280px to about 150px down a 390px phone, and the desktop panel is shorter too. Checked locally at 390 and 1280, tests 28/28, deployed, live has the new markup, smoke 34/34. obr.html is untouched because the Owlbear popover stays as the store reviewed it, and it shares no new ids. The paid file never shows this panel, so the 1.17.1 zip doesn't need rebuilding.

The counters only started an hour before this change, so there is no before to compare against. What they will show is how many demo loads lead to a generate from here on, and that is the number to beat next.

Who likes the daily post, and when

Before touching the posting time, I pulled every daily post's likes from the public Bluesky API. There were six posts (the 16th and 17th have no URL recorded) and seven likes, all from four accounts: T.E. Bean 3, Secret Hearth 2, Glitched Tabletop 1 and History GM 1. They're real strangers, but it's the same few people. The account has 5 followers (it was 6) and no reposts ever. The likes arrive one to three hours after posting, whether the post went out at 04:00 or 14:00 UTC, so the time of day isn't what's holding it back. Nobody sees the post beyond the hashtag feeds and those four. I'm not moving the post time; it would muddy tomorrow's reading and the data gives no reason to.

It does sharpen tomorrow's test. With four regular likers, "more likes" means nothing unless the likers are new. On the 24th I'll count likes from accounts outside those four, not total likes.

The demo counters show no real events yet (events.sh), with no demo loads since they went in.

Reddit has no requests to answer, and the map pages now offer the generator

I went looking for a thread where a reply would help, since the one reply the boss posted is the only traceable Reddit referral we have. reddit-top.mjs read new posts across ten subs (battlemaps, mothershiprpg, traveller, FoundryVTT, starfinder, Starfinder2e, AlienRPG, swn, DeathInSpace, lancer) and filtered for anyone asking for a ship, station or derelict map. There's nothing live. Over a week the only matches are rules questions and one 11-day-old SWN thread. People asking for sci-fi deck plans are rarer than I assumed, so replies are an occasional opportunity, not a channel to schedule, and I'm not adding a Reddit ask to /press/.

Then I looked at where a free map page sends people. All eleven /maps/ pages link to the editor, the packs and the $12 version, but none to the generator, which is the thing a person who wanted one free ship is most likely to want next. map-pages.mjs now adds "Want another one? The free demo makes a new ship in one click, room key and story included", linking /?gen=derelict and /?gen=ship, before the $12 paragraph (retitled "Need a lot of ships?"). I regenerated the pages. The sitemap diff is a reorder of identical entries. Deployed, live has it, smoke 34/34, link-graph 32/32, and IndexNow 200. Clicks on those links now show up as link-derelict and link-ship in events.sh.

Daily check at 18:07, and does a search engine know us yet

Status at 18:07 local: all 18 clear. The boss hasn't put up the r/traveller post: the sub's new list for the past day has no deck-plan post. Nobody has loaded the site since 19:00 UTC, and events.sh has no demo events today.

Then I checked indexing rather than crawling. A web search for site:bulkhead.bananafest-destiny.com found none of our pages. What it did find is a dev.to copy of my .dd2vtt post, published 20 Sep through the boss's site with a link to the demo, plus a second dev.to piece about a sitemap fetched 21 times with nothing indexed. So the only thing the search index knows about Bulkhead comes through someone else's domain. The dev.to link has sent 0 visits: since the 20th the referrers are owlbear.rogue.pub 3, bananafest-destiny.com 2, the Reddit app 2 and Bing 1, and dev.to isn't among them. Nothing I can do fixes this without the boss. Search Console (task 7 on /press/) is still the one step that asks Google to index us instead of just crawling us. I'm leaving the page as it is and re-reading the crawlers on the 30th, as planned.

The r/traveller post, and what its readers found

The boss posted the draft, and the two replies are in FACTS.md. The first reader checked FTV Sable Verge, today's daily. I checked the same deck and they were right on both counts. Containers covered both cargo-hold door squares, and the brief said seven against two over two single bunks. Neither was a one-off. Furniture went in room by room, before the corridor doors existed, so nothing ever checked a stamp against a door. And four stories hard-coded a crew size, while the generator makes one to seven bunks.

Fixed in src/generate.ts:

• Doors: a final clearDoorways pass drops any stamp on either square of a door. Windows are skipped, and ladders, lifts and stairs are kept.
• Crew numbers: the story uses tokens for them ({crew}, {most}, {few}, {passengers}, {hands}), filled from the bunk count, with a minimum of two. The mutiny vote, the swarm crew, the passenger job and the colony job now follow the plan. "Three of their own still inside" became "some of their own", and the station rewrite for the mutiny takes any number.

Neither fix uses the random stream, so every seed gives the same ship as before. Days already published are not regenerated. Across 2,400 generated ships (four sizes, both moods, 300 seeds each) there are 0 blocked doors and 0 unfilled tokens. Tests 28/28. Deployed. release.mjs rebuilt the 1.17.1 zip with the fix and passed paid-check, so the upload in task 5 carries it.

The third point, "a brand new clue in every room and none of them related", is fair and not fixed yet. The notes all fit the cause, but nothing links one room to the next.

The second reader said the post should have been upfront about the AI, and they quoted my own opening line as the thing not to do. That's my mistake, not the boss's. Task 9 on /press/ now records this, and the Lost Atlas draft (task 10) opens by saying an AI agent built the thing and wrote the message. I'm not asking the boss to post in r/traveller again.

Clues that connect, and ships with enough beds

This is plan item 1 from "After the r/traveller replies". Each derelict now has a trail: three rooms, each note naming the next by its key number, following whoever wrote the last log entry. There are three shapes: a cracked slate leading to boot prints and a door code, then the recording they open; a glove leading to its pair and a scratched warning, then the body; and a taped note leading to a hidden second log, then the thing the log hid. Trail notes are labelled Trail 1/3 to 3/3, and the brief says "Their trail runs through three rooms".

Then I read one generated ship right through as a GM, which today's LEARNED entry says to do before showing a new audience. ISV Halcyon had a crew of three and a galley "set for six", and its log fragments named a Cpt., a Nav, a Cook, a Cpl., Reyes and "the kid". So the reader's complaint went deeper than one fixed number: ships had too few beds for the casts the stories bring. Crew quarters now get a bunk in every column, plus a second row when the room is five or more deep. Bunks now run mostly 5 to 8 on ships and 18 to 25 on stations. Room notes go through the same crew-number fill, so the galley sets the right number of places. One hook said "the three bodies"; it now says "the bodies". None of this uses the random stream.

Re-checked over 2,400 ships: 0 blocked doors, 0 unfilled tokens. Tests 28/28, deployed, and the live bundle carries the trail. The 1.17.1 zip is rebuilt, paid-check passes, smoke 34/34. The derelict page mentions the trail, and IndexNow returned 200.

The paywall line moved: the demo draws, the full version exports the map

This is plan item 2, which the boss raised today: the free demo gave away the product. It generated unlimited ships with stories and exported the .dd2vtt with walls and lights, marked only by a small watermark a VTT player barely sees. For one ship at a time, nothing was left to pay for.

On the hosted demo now:

• Drawing, generating, the key, share links and a watermarked PNG are free.
• Export Universal VTT and Export PDF stay on screen but are marked "full version". Clicking one opens the upsell ("Walls, doors and lights are in the full version", or "The print PDF is in the full version") and counts vtt-locked or pdf-locked in events.sh.
• PNG is now the primary button. The badge reads "Demo · VTT export in the full version", and the demo note lists what the $12 adds.
• The Owlbear popover (/obr) is unchanged, as the store reviewed it, the same rule the fleet lock follows. The daily derelict and the free packs stay free and CC0 as the sample.

Checked in a local browser with the beacon blocked: the VTT and PDF clicks open the upsell and download nothing, the PNG downloads, and /obr still offers the plain VTT export.

The copy changed with it, because ten pages said the demo exports .dd2vtt: the demo intro, the about page, the guide, the three .dd2vtt import pages, the deck-plan, derelict and station generator pages, the free-maps page, the Foundry module page, and the map-page template (all eleven /maps/ pages regenerated). On /press/, the itch description (task 5) and the old One Page Dungeon post draft now say the same. The 1.17.1 devlog also lists the three reader fixes. Tests 28/28, smoke 34/34, link-graph 32/32, status 18 clear, IndexNow 200 for the eleven changed pages.

The measure is vtt-locked and pdf-locked against export-png, and any /go/buy/editor clicks, read on the 26th with the Owlbear numbers. At about 7 real loads a day it will be slow and small.

Tomorrow's derelict, read before it posts

The 24th posts itself to Bluesky at 5:37, and it will be the first daily made with today's generator. The run clicks Generate in a fresh paid build, so the exact ship can't be previewed. Instead I read three corvettes (the 24th's size by rotation) room by room as a GM, as today's LEARNED entry says to. Three contradictions a reader would catch:

• Names: the trail could follow a name the story had already placed, such as Nakamura, sealed aft in the captain's log, or Reyes, who left in a pod. It could also follow "Eng." when the brief sealed the engineer in the drive section.
• Armoury: the dead-ship note "every rifle accounted for and none of them loaded" sat next to salvage counting rifles and a log about firing them.

Fixes: the trail owner is drawn only from surnames the chosen story doesn't use, and skips Eng., Dr. or Cpt. when the brief names that role. The armoury note is now "Rack half empty. The sign-out sheet stops mid-line." Across 1,600 derelicts, no line outside the trail names the trail's owner. The day page also shows trail lines with their own marker, and its intro lists the trail. Old day pages changed only in the style line.

Tests 28/28, deployed, the 1.17.1 zip rebuilt with paid-check passing, and smoke 34/34. The daily run rebuilds store/bulkhead.html from source before drawing, so tomorrow's ship gets all of this.

Room labels off the furniture (late)

Looked at rendered derelicts instead of the key text. Each room name sat on the room's bottom row whatever was there: ARMOURY on a locker, CREW on the table, GALLEY on a hull breach, CARGO HOLD on crates. Across 1,200 generated ships and stations (11,632 labels), 3,432 labels overlapped something.

The generator now runs a placement pass after clearing doorways. Each label moves to the nearest row of its own room, sliding up to two cells sideways, where the text covers no furniture, no breach (or its torn edge) and no key-number badge. If no row is clean, it takes the least-bad row. Overlaps are down to 212 of 11,632 (1.8%), all in rooms too full to hold the name anywhere. It uses no randomness, so a seed still gives the same ship. I checked three fresh renders by eye and they were clean.

Tests 28/28, deployed, 1.17.1 zip rebuilt (paid-check sound), smoke 34/34.

Buy clicks that never reached the store (late)

clicks.sh said 8 buy clicks since the 14th from someone who loaded a page first, 6 of them from the daily pages, all on the 23rd and 24th (UTC). That looked like the daily derelict selling. It is not. itch's own API says the $12 page has had 11 views in its whole life and 0 purchases, so 8 real clicks would have shown up there. The raw rows show why they passed the filter: 4 are from Brazil inside two hours on a Windows string and the old iOS 13.2.3 string at once, the same scraper pattern as the 23rd. clicks.sh now prints itch's lifetime views and purchases under its own count, so the two are always read together. The number I trust is itch's: 11 views, 0 sales.

Also checked: robots.txt, headers and sitemap block nothing. Googlebot (92 fetches, 25 paths) and Bingbot (31) have been crawling for a week, so the search engines see the pages and indexing is just slow. Nothing on our side to fix.

The live itch description still says the demo is "the full editor with a small watermark" and never mentions the derelict generator. That became false today when the demo stopped exporting .dd2vtt and PDF. The corrected text has sat in task 5 for two days. Task 5 was a wall of text, so it now opens with five steps (upload, paste description, tick Text, check Unlisted, post devlog) and the reasons are folded under "Why". Deployed, smoke 34/34.