Manafold: archive
21 generations
TWENTY-ONE generations, newest first. Pass 25 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 26 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-26 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see Hasty before it was in a hurry — drifting across the frame with the ground, at a size that left its eyes unable to act. Pass 24 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 25 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-25 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see bolt avoidance still confined to three clips, the lightning still crossing the rods on the other nineteen, and Hover's back ball still fidgeting. Pass 23 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 24 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-24 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see the lightning still crossing the antenna rods on Crackle and Hover, and the eyes still holding one fixed attitude on the ordinary clips. Pass 22 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 23 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-23 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see the kneading press at its shallow setting on Drift, Damage, Death-drop and Death-gutter, where the lightning's answer is too faint to read. Pass 21 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 22 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-22 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see the mana dots at their close-up size on a distant creature, and the lightning not reacting to the knead. Pass 20 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 21 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-21 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see the antenna bending in the middle of its runs instead of at the balls, and the rear end flicking. Pass 19 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 20 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-20 encode; each clip appears exactly once, and it is the one to open to see the rear connection tear on Inspect and the loop with no kneading beat in it. Version 18 is the complete 22-clip generation pass 19 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before the pass-19 encode; each clip appears exactly once. Version 17 and its Mana menu/lab experiments are preserved together before version-18 work; the 22 non-menu clips and six menu clips each appear exactly once, while the ten lab clips retain their original experiment paths. Pass 16 is the complete 28-subject articulation/compositing generation preserved before Pass 17; Pass 15 is the eye, antenna and folded-lightning generation Pass 16 replaced. Pass 10 is the bank pass 11 replaced, and it is the one worth opening: it is where two honest gates agreed a value was right and the owner's eye said the opposite. Pass 9 is the bank pass 10 replaced, and it is the one worth opening: it is where the mist sits ON the creature. Pass 7 is the bank that was live while passes 8 and 9 were built. There is deliberately no pass 8: it was merged and never published, so its work reaches the page inside pass 9. PASSES 3 AND 4 ARE RECONSTRUCTED FROM GIT HISTORY — they were never archived when they were current, the habit only started at pass 5, and they survive only because the media happened to be committed before it was deleted. Both name their source commit in their own caption so a recovered generation is never mistaken for one preserved at the time. One pass-4 clip cannot be recovered at all: it was committed as a zero-byte file. Passes 6, 5, 2 and 1 are preserved byte-for-byte as they always were.
Pass 25 — 2026-09-22
The complete Manafold pass-25 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-26 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou f66d107c, renderer MD5 a0c0c80a2e9b02dc852c25c1ff1aa530, exact bank manifest 23cd615d25ceb27f29231c769f3e1a507e2d9cc2dcc74612da247b99fc3cef16, production-verified Upheaval main 7d2745a / Zhaozhou f66d107c. This is the last generation before Hasty was given its hurry — open Hasty here beside the live pass and the difference is the whole of pass 26: the creature and the ground slide across the frame together, because its traverse had been removed while the camera went on compensating for it, so nothing reads as speed. Its face is too small to act, too, which is why the expression could not be authored until the camera came in. Everything else on this page is byte-identical to the live pass. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 24 — 2026-09-22
The complete Manafold pass-24 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-25 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou 8e5a3ee3, renderer MD5 e90af7c043cd9670054eeb256abd5e95, exact bank manifest f9128e0821004dc49b19a280651db864e4556947b20d9267fbb84d5b9e58703b, production-verified Upheaval main 8e45d38b / Zhaozhou 09108284. This is the generation where bolt avoidance was an EXPERIMENT on three clips only — Crackle and Hover carry it, Inspect carries the rival depth-splitting approach, and the other nineteen clips still draw the lightning straight through the antenna rods. Open Drift or Death-drop here beside the live pass to see the difference the rollout made. It is also the generation before the eyes' ambient acting was strengthened, and the last one where Hover's rear jitters from frame to frame. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 23 — 2026-09-21
The complete Manafold pass-23 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-24 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou d6532cc1, renderer MD5 3e9104bae2777a3160da9bbe37bd0b9c, exact bank manifest 2f3cfb8175f4e4cad80ced5351591ca1fdaa6fc5ee3fa768f4449059ecdffb18, production-verified Upheaval main e965dc5c / Zhaozhou 1d449717. This is the last generation where the lightning still passed straight through the antenna rods — open Crackle or Hover beside the live clips and the blue figure here lies across the pink bands, where the live pass holds it clear of them. It is also the generation before the eyes picked up their small ambient drift on the ordinary clips, and the one that deepened the kneading press on Drift, Damage, Death-drop and Death-gutter. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 22 — 2026-09-21
The complete Manafold pass-22 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-23 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou 0a743562, renderer MD5 8a0aa4da7f35a24c8415848268a5cf98, exact bank manifest b188f2efa85649821bf5578bbfb1cea25511c214ea48040195d5a579b1777d6e, production-verified Upheaval main ca51e26d / Zhaozhou 0d796c4a. This is the generation where the kneading beat pressed too lightly on five clips to see the lightning answer it — open Drift, Damage, Death-drop or Death-gutter beside the live clips and the strand here barely moves as the top nodule comes down, while the live pass presses deeper and the lightning plainly turns and re-forms. It is the generation that first shrank the green and blue mana dots with distance, and that keeps the pass-21 ball-and-stick antenna rig. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 21 — 2026-09-21
The complete Manafold pass-21 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-22 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou bd29d4f9, renderer MD5 fe1bab84..., exact bank manifest 639c370cf32cb777e63896af064fc56a0d48f01edf354f2ee15d68e1ea395633, production-verified Upheaval main 76c6a3fb / Zhaozhou 806aecf7. This is the generation where the green and blue mana dots stayed the same size on screen however far away the creature was — open Drift or Hasty beside the live clips and the dots here are the fat pale balls that crowd the antenna and hide the green pocket, while the live pass shrinks them with distance. It is also the generation whose lightning held its shape through the kneading press instead of turning and re-forming. Its ball-and-stick antenna rig is the same one the live pass keeps. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 20 — 2026-09-20
The complete Manafold pass-20 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-21 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou e0447b1f, renderer MD5 e95faca916627d1bddb02892c5eb67e1, exact bank manifest a40b41549383246d7c9580c768c936f8919eb810dce7c0ecae24e3cdb1313b15, production-verified deploy 0cb48546. This is the generation whose antenna still bent in the middle of every run — the extra hinges the owner asked about — and whose rear end flicked about because the band into the body was bowed. Open it beside the live clips to see the difference: pass 20 has no straight runs and no visible joints, while pass 21 is four straight rods meeting at four round knuckles. Its kneading press is the same gesture the live pass keeps. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 19 — 2026-09-19
The complete Manafold pass-19 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-20 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou 10877707, renderer MD5 776d55758933d5284147b360ff2eda62, exact bank manifest f7edc1fbe25016970d6adc830fbea925954fb7d7282297478375c0690f036ed5, production-verified deploy 452e401c. This is the generation whose rear connection still tore and over-stretched on Inspect, and it has no kneading beat. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Version 18 — 2026-09-19
The complete Manafold version-18 presentation, all 22 clips and their posters, preserved byte-for-byte before pass-19 work overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou db2bcf0e, renderer MD5 0f082622d4ca0c58d012d1f0de555723, exact bank manifest bdaac548e5dc956b7aa4afac57dae73e265861b25e3160788a26cbd8aa0628bd, production-verified deploy 142475d3. This is the rear connection the owner called almost ripped off, and the mana lines that stayed close-up thick at a distance. It is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Version 17 + mana experiments — 2026-09-19
VERSION 17 MANA MENU — six completed mechanism experiments, archived after they answered their question.
Historical version-17 experiment evidence, not a current live tab. The six exact production-verified clips are preserved under immutable archive names before version-18 encoding.
Filled aquamarine bodies and the fold, with no frame-history smear.
Deeper teal-cyan fold, with no history-buffer trail.
Three large opaque-cored blue bodies in the pocket; no smear.
The sea-green alternate, with the same no-smear presentation.
The enlarged two-tone centre completes one smooth Blue/Violet colour revolution over 600 frames; geometry, brightness and palette all cross f0599→f0000 continuously.
Caged pulsar, strands and fold assembled without frame-history smear.
EXPERIMENTS FROM 2026-09-05, NOT THE SHIPPING LOOK, and four days older than the version-17 clips archived beside them. Ten mechanisms tried against one question: why has the folded mana never read as a nameable shape? The answer turned out not to be the drawing. ⚠ These panels render the PASS-5 creature — before the round body, the per-nodule antenna, the backdrop bloom's removal and the violet night. Read them as the record of a DECISION, not as a picture of the animal.
Archived mechanism evidence, not open work or a live presentation tab. Version 17 kept the nameable connected figures but replaced shipping switches with persistent identities, C2 topology/brightness handoffs and independently continuous motes. These Pass-5 panels remain the decision record, including the deliberately rejected snap experiment.
THE ONE THE LAB RECOMMENDS. The shape freezes in world space during the hold, so the travelling creature leaves it behind, and its outline is drawn. A crisp aqua ring hanging in mid-air — the first nameable mana shape this creature has produced.
The proof that the shape was never badly drawn. Same stencils, same mote count, same colours as the control — the ONLY change is that the shape stops travelling with the creature. A ring you cannot find in the control is obviously a ring here. SEPARATION is what makes it nameable.
The other half on its own, and the control for it: an outline WITHOUT separation reads as structure, not as a shape. THE EDGE is what makes it crisp; it cannot do the naming by itself.
Beats the control on both colour axes (35 near-white px against 185) and CANNOT whiten by construction, because it removes light instead of adding it. The escape hatch if the smear haze stays stubborn.
The look every other panel is measured against: this pass's shipping mana, unchanged.
Recorded as a REJECTED rung. Raising the count without raising the area reproduces the pass-5 regression exactly — 3.3x the density, saturation 143 down to 86. Count without area is just overlap. Breadth means a bigger AREA, not more dots.
The labelled failure, and it gives "don't go overboard" a sharp definition: too far is where the mana starts EATING THE ANIMAL. This one erases 30% of the body's own pink and collapses its measured width from 135 px to 100.
A genuinely different mechanism rather than a knob setting. Rejected: it reads as objects near the creature rather than as its mana.
Rejected. A longer hold does not buy legibility on its own — without separation there is still nowhere for the shape to be read.
Rejected. The snap reads as a glitch in the effect rather than as the creature kneading something.
The complete non-menu Manafold version-17 presentation, preserved byte-for-byte before version-18 work.
Source zhaozhou 18e1d993, renderer MD5 67DCAFF8ABC0AA2BA830C439A4CD98C7, exact bank manifest bc2d4d0bdce632815f42cca208763fb04bca62034e285ed1ef707c7f28d55d09. The six menu clips are preserved once in the archived Mana menu beside this collection; the Mana lab remains the experiment record.
Pass 16 — 2026-09-18
The complete 28-subject generation Pass 17 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before any encode overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou db9f4d5f, deployed site a2ec391, renderer MD5 1255A8F8DEE778F7E76DCC7759D678B0. This is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 15 — 2026-09-10
The complete 28-subject generation pass 16 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte before any encode overwrote the live files.
Source zhaozhou d7b5cceb, site f95c60cc, binary md5 prefix 53af528f. This is provenance, not an alternate live presentation.
Pass 11 — 2026-09-07
The generation pass 12 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte and verified to decode. Pass 11 is where the antenna stopped being a hose — the fold was a SKINNING fault, not an animation one, and a per-station blend table at 90 mm made the runs between knuckles read as straight segments. It is also where the green cloud came back under control by cutting the mist's MEMORY (persistence 930 → 420) rather than its opacity. Hold any clip here against its pass-12 twin and the difference is the BODY: pass 11's is the older, flatter form, on the old rear-hinge motion, and its nodules cannot move independently — in this bank a chain rotation drags every nodule downstream of it, which is exactly the fault pass 12 fixed.
Provenance, not an alternative. This bank had never been archived when it was current: the tabs on this card ran 10, 9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 while pass 11 sat live and unpreserved, so it was one publish away from being the second generation on this page to survive only by accident. Copied before the pass-12 encode overwrote the files in place, not after.
Pass 10 — 2026-09-06
The generation pass 11 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte and verified to decode. This is the bank the owner looked at and called the mana cloud “totally out of control” — the mist runs at the `rich` density with a persistence of 930, so the haze is a FIELD covering much of the frame rather than a trail, and it buries the particle figures the lightning draws. The outer shell is at kFogThicknessPm 4500, which is the “completely opaque” layer Direction 8 reverts. The antenna is pass 9's fold: the corners read and the spans between them bow, because the skinning blended every ring across ±165 mm of each station and left ten millimetres of rigid span between two of them.
Provenance, not an alternative — and the most instructive generation on this page. TWO HONEST GATES PASSED IT. The by-eye reviewer called the density “the right call” and QA confirmed the whitening stayed in band; every number sat inside every band we had. The owner looked at this page and the verdict was the opposite. The bands described the pixels, not the read. Put any clip here beside its pass-11 twin: the particles were always being drawn, and cutting the mist's MEMORY rather than its opacity is what let them be seen.
Pass 9 — 2026-09-06
The generation pass 10 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte. This is the bank in which THE MIST COMPOSITES OVER THE CREATURE: the antenna band measures a 115 degree hue rotation against the bare render on rest f200 (magenta 331 degrees becomes cyan 216, saturation 172 falls to 74), the ink contour dissolves under the haze, and on hover the loop is a ghost by frame 40. Everything structural underneath it is pass 9 and is still here in pass 10; what changed is that the gas came off the animal.
Provenance, not an alternative. Keep it for one comparison: put any clip here beside its pass-10 twin and the difference is entirely the creature own pixels -- the mist, the streak and the motes outside the silhouette are the same mechanism doing the same thing. That is the point of the fix and the reason the travelling clips were protected rather than retuned.
Pass 7 — 2026-09-06
The generation pass 9 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte: the four-point star on the deep-violet lens reading at native, fog that reads as gas, and the smear on every clip — but with the antenna a uniform strap with mitred corners, the mote cores 48.7% hue-neutral white, and no mist at all.
Provenance, not an alternative. This is the bank that was live on the site while passes 8 and 9 were built, so it is what the owner was looking at when he asked for the mist back and said the kneading joint was in the wrong place. Pass 8 was merged but never published, so no pass-8 generation exists on this site — its work reaches the page inside pass 9.
Pass 6 — 2026-09-06
The generation pass 7 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte: the rebuild from the concept sheets, but with the smear plane missing from twelve of the fifteen clips, the star at roughly half its drawn width, and black notches at both lens tips on every frame.
Provenance, not an alternative. This is the exact bank the pass-6 QA and by-eye reviews judged, so every fault they name can be found here and held against the live tab above.
Pass 5 — 2026-09-05
The generation pass 6 replaced, preserved byte-for-byte: the bead antenna, the teardrop eye with its white ring, the single sun per clip and the 240k camera.
Provenance, not an alternative. Kept so the pass-6 rebuild can be compared against exactly what it replaced.
Pass 4 — 2026-09-05
RECONSTRUCTED FROM GIT HISTORY, not archived at the time: recovered from commit b687e3b8c81da17ba9e40756cbc3095d7e387d49, the full re-encode that first carried the name Manafold. 23 of its 24 clips are here.
⚠ This generation was never archived when it was current — the habit only started at pass 5 — and it survives only because the media happened to be committed before it was deleted. It is presented as recovered, with its source commit named, so a reconstructed generation is never mistaken for one preserved at the time. ONE CLIP IS MISSING AND CANNOT BE RECOVERED: manafold-inspect.webm is ZERO BYTES in that commit. ffmpeg had failed silently and the encode shipped dead — the exact defect that checkmedia.py was later written to catch.
Pass 3 — 2026-09-05
RECONSTRUCTED FROM GIT HISTORY, not archived at the time: recovered from commit 75cd96d06383c8b6027e01508be8a610ff9eec63 — 20 clips under one sun, six filled mana variants and the headstand, back when the creature was still called unnamed02. 26 clips.
⚠ Never archived when it was current, and recovered only because the media was committed before it was deleted. Named as reconstructed so it is never mistaken for a generation preserved at the time. The files are the unnamed02-* bank of that commit — the creature had not yet been named Manafold, which is why the reconstruction notes that looked for u02-* or manafold-* files found only two.
Pass 2 — 2026-09-05
Pass 2 (2026-09-05): the four-light-everywhere presentation Direction 3 retired — kept byte-for-byte as provenance.
The moving rig on every clip, the marker dots, the pass-2 mana menu with the drip.
Pass 1 — 2026-09-04
PASS 1 — the first published creature 02, before Owner Direction 2
Preserved byte-for-byte on 2026-09-05, immediately before the second pass. This is the bank Direction 2 judged: the loop an angular wire with a floating dongle, the eyes two small pills in an inverted V, the ten-emitter mana the owner axed, the per-clip suns before the many-coloured rig became the standard. Immutable comparison evidence, not an alternate current creature.