Landing pads, carved rather than looked for

A random walk does not leave flat ground and a lander wants some. Four
pads are cut into the moon after it is generated, each four columns
levelled to whatever height its first column happened to have - so they
sit in the landscape rather than on a shelf above it. The moon decides
where they are; this only decides that they are flat.

Searching for flat spots was the alternative and it can fail, which means
a fallback that carves anyway - the carving, plus a search nobody needed.

They are marked by an ATTRIBUTE and not a tile of their own, which costs
no art at all: a nibble is added to every index in a tile, so one solid
block is grey moon or a cyan pad depending on the byte beside it.

Which columns are pads is an array, because asking has to be one lookup.
Four comparisons per column per row is 12,800 of them for one screen, and
the landing verdict asks the same question again.

THE LANDER STARTS ABOVE ONE, because that is where a porter's day begins.
Starting in the middle of nowhere meant a straight descent landed in the
middle of nowhere, which is a fine thing to be able to do and a poor thing
to have to.

That change cost the crash test its teeth, and the way it did is worth
keeping. It held nothing at all and let the lander fall - and a short drop
onto the high ground of the base you started above is survivable, which is
correct, and left the test saying nothing. It holds Right now: lateral
speed has no limit and nothing slows it, so a slide always ends badly
however the rest is tuned.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW

Programs/CosmOS/README.md

@@ -727,7 +727,7 @@ from every assembly file in it. Several are old programs written for the bare ma
 | Grid | The first program to use the screen as a screen. Redefines a tile above the font, fills all 128 map rows, and scrolls it diagonally a pixel at a time. |
 | Sprite | Moves a ball across the shell's own text, writing not one byte of the map to do it. It leaves the sprite in the table on the way out, because clearing them is the system's job - see below. |
 | Pad | Says what the controllers are doing, printing a line whenever one changes. It tells apart the three things that look identical from inside a game that is not responding: a pad nobody noticed, a pad mapped to nothing, and a mapping that is wrong. |
-| Lander | Lunar Porter, rung one: a lander over a moon that wraps. Flown with a controller if there is one - a held thruster burns every tick it is held for - and with the arrow keys if there is not, where one press is one burn and that is the most the console can say. A bar at the bottom is the sideways drift, drawn as a sprite stretched to the speed - a moon has no air, so a drift never stops by itself and stopping one means cancelling it exactly, which is hard to do blind. It lands or crashes on arrival, and what decides is the speed at the moment it touches: gentler than three quarters of a pixel a frame downwards and half of one sideways, or it is a lander on its side. A fuel gauge sits in the window layer, where the moon turning underneath cannot scroll it away, and every thruster costs a unit of fuel every tick it fires. An empty tank is not an ending: it is a lander still flying that can no longer do anything about where. |
+| Lander | Lunar Porter, rung one: a lander over a moon that wraps. Flown with a controller if there is one - a held thruster burns every tick it is held for - and with the arrow keys if there is not, where one press is one burn and that is the most the console can say. A bar at the bottom is the sideways drift, drawn as a sprite stretched to the speed - a moon has no air, so a drift never stops by itself and stopping one means cancelling it exactly, which is hard to do blind. It lands or crashes on arrival, and what decides is the speed at the moment it touches: gentler than three quarters of a pixel a frame downwards and half of one sideways, or it is a lander on its side. A fuel gauge sits in the window layer, where the moon turning underneath cannot scroll it away, and every thruster costs a unit of fuel every tick it fires. An empty tank is not an ending: it is a lander still flying that can no longer do anything about where. Four landing pads are carved into the moon after it is generated, levelled to whatever height their first column happened to have, and marked in cyan by an attribute rather than a tile of their own. The lander starts above one, because that is where a porter's day begins. |
 | Depth | Four pillars at four distances and a ball walking past them, behind the near ones and in front of the far ones. The ball is sprite nought and every pillar is numbered after it, so table order puts it in front of all four - what actually decides is the depth buffer, asked a column at a time. |
 | Flip | Draws a whole screen into the bank that is not being shown, waits, and then shows it in one byte out of one port. It writes nothing else at all - not a tile, not a colour - so it does not ask for the screen to be saved, and the line it printed is still there when it comes back. It deliberately does not put the displayed screen back either, because that is the system's to restore: a program that faulted while flipped could not have. |
 | Edit | A line editor. |