Meter variant (default; M flips to the original unlimited toggle live):
a Freeze charge regenerates while the hand is closed and drains while
open. Level maps to bands — full/high: true pause; mid: thaw slow-mo
ramping back to realtime as it drains; low: realtime card draw; empty:
hand force-closes and will not reopen until regrown past the floor.
Opening with a full meter buys the whole ladder (full freeze before
thaw); empty-meter Space-spam cannot refreeze. Dim overlay depth
telegraphs the band wordlessly; HUD meter bar shows band boundaries
and fill colored by openable band. All rates/bands exported.
Meter runs on the wall clock (Time.get_ticks_msec) — process delta is
scaled by the very time_scale the hand animates, and pause zeroes
physics delta.
Design rationale (KB-grounded, pressure-tested 2026-08-07): prices the
freeze-scout dominant strategy, adds temporal triangularity to chains,
and yields a canon-safe difficulty/accessibility axis (meter size,
regen, thaw length). Playtest variant — canon ratification pending
operator verdict; CONCEPT.md entry lands in the advisor repo after.
Smoke gate extended: band ladder (thaw slow-mo in (0,1), realtime x1,
depletion force-close, empty-reopen refusal), regen while closed,
toggle-mode A/B still hard-freezes. 3/3 green on nh3-dev headless
4.7.1.
Hand (CanvasLayer, PROCESS_MODE_ALWAYS): Space toggles the hand, Q/E
play slot 1/2, charges accrue from auto-fire hits (4 hits/charge, cap
5). KINETIC card: radial shockwave shove + light damage. HEAT card:
paints heat status in a radius; heat accumulates, glows, detonates at
threshold (damage only, no knockback — tag purity). Freeze/dilate is
an exposed knob: [ and ] step dilation 0.0-0.3 live.
Freeze uses SceneTree.paused, not Engine.time_scale = 0: probed on
4.7 headless — time_scale 0 still steps physics with delta 0, so
delta-independent logic (heat thresholds, contact callbacks) kept
firing while nominally frozen. Dilation > 0 uses time_scale slow-mo.
Hand._exit_tree restores pause + time_scale so hull-zero reloads can
never strand a frozen world.
Smoke gate extended: charge accrual from build hits, pause-on-open at
knob 0, HEAT x2 spend + threshold, detonation on release. 3/3 green
on nh3-dev headless 4.7.1.
vh