Tinyworld Ghost World Gen

Tiny World Ghost World Generation

makeGhostWorld(boardX, boardZ) produces the contents of a single non-editable ghost board. It must be:

• Deterministic. Same (boardX, boardZ) always yields the same cells. Cached in ghostBoardCells keyed by 'bx,bz'. Panning away and back must regenerate identically (we rely on this for the sticky-reveal jigsaw — if content shifted between regens the reveal cache would lie).
• Connection-aware. Paths and rivers must line up across board edges. The user should be able to walk a road from one ghost board into the next.

The seeded RNG

ghostHash(a, b, salt) is a tiny mulberry-style 32-bit mix used for all board-level decisions. Per-cell randomness goes through the older cellRand(x, z, salt) but always with global coords (boardX * GRID + x, boardZ * GRID + z, salt), never local coords. That guarantees a given world cell renders identically regardless of which board it was sourced from.

Connection rubric

• Horizontal path Z is a function of boardZ only (pathZForRow(boardZ)). Every board on that world row either has the path at the same Z or has no path on that row.
• Vertical path X is a function of boardX only (pathXForCol(boardX)). Every board in the column shares the same vertical-path X.
• Where horizontal and vertical paths coincide inside a board you get a crossroads "for free".
• Rivers are column-shared via riverXForCol(boardX) so they flow continuously down a column. A river that would collide with a vertical path is nudged one column over.
• Bridges: where a river crosses a horizontal path, drop a kind: 'bridge' tile so the path stays walkable.

Rough density knobs (tweak in the helpers themselves):

• ~30 % of world rows have no horizontal path ((h % 100) < 30 → -1).
• ~35 % of world cols have no vertical path.
• ~88 % of world cols have no river (so ~12 % do).

Cross-board neighbours

The visual tile renderer needs to know what's on the other side of a board edge — otherwise a path that exits east terminates with a stub end-piece. The neighbour helpers handle this:

• ghostCellAt(boardX, boardZ, x, z) resolves any local coord. If x / z are out of [0, GRID) it walks into the adjacent board and pulls from its makeGhostWorld(...) result. If the wrap lands on board (0, 0) it reads from the home world[][] instead so user edits on the home board's edges feed the ghost adjacency too.
• getGhostNeighbors(cells, x, z, prop, value, boardX, boardZ) and getGhostTerrainNeighbors(cells, x, z, boardX, boardZ) use ghostCellAt so an edge tile sees the real neighbour, not null.

Always pass boardX, boardZ when calling these from inside buildGhostBoard.

Cells layout

The cell schema must match the home board so setCell / renderCellObject work on ghost cells too. Always include the full shape:

{ terrain, kind, floors, buildingType, fenceSide, extras }

Omitting fields (especially extras: []) caused subtle bugs in the old generator when ghost data flowed through helpers that assumed the full shape.

Blank ghost boards

The Generate dialog can disable outside auto-fill. That path sets ghostBoardsBlank = true, clears existing ghost boards, and lets makeGhostWorld(...) return deterministic blank grass cells for every off-home board. Keep this as an early return inside makeGhostWorld so panning remains cheap and no generated scenery appears outside the current generated board.