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docs/adr/0145-the-world-is-the-only-body.md

ADR 0145: The world is the only body

Status: accepted (James, 2026-08-30). Supersedes the local-body half of ADR 0129 and retires ADR 0039, ADR 0040, and ADR 0075. The identity boundary ADR 0129 drew — no process possesses Clankie — stands unchanged; what changes is that only one body remains to draw it around.

Context

Clankie has carried two Pokémon bodies. The local one booted an mGBA core in the service process; the hosted one is his separately credentialed seat in a PokeAgents world. ADR 0129 kept both deliberately, because the hosted world was young and a solo playthrough needed to work with nothing else running.

That reason has expired. PokeAgents now hosts real GBA cores server-side, ships three derived front doors — MCP, CLI, and a harness skill, all generated from WORLD_OPERATIONS — and runs a local world over a unix socket with one command. WORLD_PERSIST_PROGRESS=1 pairs the authenticated cartridge save with mGBA's exact volatile state, which is what the local checkpoint store was for.

The evidence says he agreed first. Every play journal carrying body provenance — all eleven, 2026-08-17 through 2026-08-19 — records body: "world". There is no journal of a local session in the provenance era. The local checkpoint store last wrote on 2026-08-15, and the service log holds no embodiment boot refused or environment_unavailable line, so the local body was not failing over. It was simply never chosen.

Two bodies were not free. @clankie/gba-emulator was half emulator and half play mind, so the hosted path imported a package named after the thing it does not use. Every play decision carried a venue that always resolved one way. The captain offered pokeagent_start_solo and pokeagent_join_mmo as a choice Clankie never had a reason to make, and the prompt told him about save states that the world does not give him and a console that "waits for you" — which a hosted world does not do.

Decision

Clankie plays in a hosted PokeAgents world, and nowhere else.

  • The local emulator is gone: integrations/gba-emulator loses its core (mGBA, FireRed RAM maps, adapter, driver, scenarios, checkpoints, boot) and becomes packages/play — the mind, journal, voice, story, and journey that never depended on where the body was.
  • apps/gba-mcp is gone. It offered coding harnesses a private emulator over MCP, which is what @pokeagents/world-mcp does properly, with real player identity and a real world behind it. PokeAgents ADR 0001 is right that no harness should get a private entrance, and that includes ours.
  • GbaDriverIo survives as packages/play/src/body-seam.ts: one interface the world's seat implements, with no transport and no core behind it.
  • The embodiment venue is gone from the live path. EmbodimentVenueSchema stays as the journal's record of which body ran, because journals on disk carry both values and must keep parsing.
  • The captain has one play tool, pokeagent_join_mmo, gated by one owner setting, pokeagentMmoEnabled.
  • Saving is the world's, through its own catalog and cartridge save. The loop holds no save, load, or restart action, and the prompt no longer offers them.

Consequences

  • Play needs a reachable world. A local one is pokeagents start plus a seat from pokeagents invite; WORLD_ADDRESS defaults to that world's unix socket. With no world, pokeagent_join_mmo refuses world_unreachable and says so out loud, which is the honest answer rather than a silent fallback.
  • He cannot pause the game or rewind to a save state, because a hosted world cannot be paused and does not rewind. His notes, objective, and journey continuity still cross a sitting; only the cartridge decides where the world resumes.
  • Agents that drove clankie-gba over MCP configure @pokeagents/world-mcp instead. They gain identity, multiplayer, travel, and watch links, and lose a private pause button.
  • Coverage moved rather than shrank: the local round-trip suite is superseded by the hosted one in apps/clankie/test/play-world.test.ts, which runs the whole loop against a fake world body.