sow-tools/docs/command-surface.md

Crucible command surface

internal/dispatch.Registry is the single source of truth for Crucible's builders, visible commands, descriptions, help, and hidden compatibility aliases.

Visible commands

Builder	Command	Purpose
hak	build	Build configured HAK archives and their manifest.
hak	manifest	Apply a generated HAK list to module source.
module	build	Build the module and configured project outputs.
module	extract	Extract built archives into configured source trees.
module	validate	Validate project layout, config, and source inventory.
module	compare	Compare source content with built archives.
module	manifest	Apply a generated HAK list to module source.
topdata	validate	Validate topdata source and canonical JSON compatibility.
topdata	build	Compile topdata and refresh the configured package.
topdata	package	Package cached outputs into HAK and TLK files.
topdata	compare	Compare current output with a fresh native build.
topdata	convert	Convert between 2DA and native JSON/module formats.
wiki	build	Render wiki page drafts from compiled topdata.
wiki	deploy	Deploy generated wiki pages to NodeBB.
assets	compile	Compile ASCII .mdl models to binary in place.
assets	convert	Convert textures to/from NWN DDS (flips vertically).
assets	upscale	Upscale textures through an installed backend.
assets	check-mdl	Report uncompiled ASCII .mdl and model-name mismatches.
assets	fix-mdl	Lowercase .mdl names and rewrite model identity to match.
assets	check-dupes	Report runtime-name (basename) collisions across dirs.
assets	clean-dupes	Delete clean-tree files whose basename collides with primary.
depot	status	Report referenced-vs-present drift against a backend.
depot	push	Upload referenced-but-absent blobs from a local depot.
depot	verify	Existence sweep plus sampled download re-hash.
depot	get	Fetch one blob with sha re-verify.
depot	pull	Incremental verified pull of every referenced blob.
nwsync	emit	Explode one artifact into NWSync blobs plus its own NSYM manifest.
nwsync	assemble	Merge per-artifact NSYM manifests into one merged manifest.
nwsync	verify	Decompress and hash a published manifest's blobs through the pull zone.

depot status and depot get pick their backend either with --out DIR, a depot tree on disk, or with --target bunny|cdn, a remote backend. The two flags are mutually exclusive.

nwsync emit runs where an artifact is born (a .hak/.erf, or a loose file such as the TLK); nwsync assemble runs at module release and reads only the small per-artifact indexes. Both take depot keys: an artifact's index lives beside the artifact itself with the extension replaced, so emit and assemble agree on where it is without being told.

nwsync emit     [--as NAME] [--out DIR] [--jobs N] [--verify] <artifact-key> <file>
nwsync assemble --group-id N [--tlk-key KEY] [--out DIR] <artifact-key>...
nwsync verify   [--sample N] [--base URL] [--jobs N] <manifest-sha1>

emit is latency-bound, not CPU-bound: every blob costs an existence probe plus an upload, and a measured backfill spent 26 seconds of CPU across 9.5 minutes of wall clock. --jobs N (default 16) sets how many resources are in flight at once. The manifest is byte-identical at any value — the number of workers is never observable in the output. Peak memory is N times the per-resource limit of 15 MB plus its compressed copy, so raising N far past the default costs real memory for little gain: the transport keeps 16 idle connections per host, and past that a worker pays a fresh TLS handshake.

Both verbs upload by default; nothing bulky is ever written to the runner's disk. --out DIR writes a local repository tree instead, which is the conformance path against upstream nwn_nwsync_write. The zone comes from NWSYNC_STORAGE_ZONE and NWSYNC_STORAGE_PASSWORD, with the host from BUNNY_STORAGE_HOST — NWSync data is a separate zone from the asset depot.

assemble's artifact keys are in Mod_HakList order, highest priority first: a resref in more than one artifact resolves to the earliest one, the way the game resolves it. --tlk-key has its own slot because the TLK shadows nothing. --group-id is per channel — 1 is current, 2 is testing, and 0 leaves the field out of the sidecar.

nwsync verify is the only check on a published blob upstream of a player's client. It reads the pull zone, not the storage API, and needs no credential: what matters is the bytes a client is served, edge behaviour included. Every blob is decompressed and hashed, and the zstd frame is asserted to declare its content size. Neither half is optional — a Content-Length check passes a byte-correct-looking object whose contents are short, and a round-trip check alone passes a frame the game client cannot decode but Go's decoder can. Failures are reported per blob as missing, malformed framing, size mismatch or hash mismatch, and the exit code is 1.

A full sweep of the live manifest is roughly 69,000 blobs and 15 GB, so --sample N exists to make verifying routine; the default is a full sweep. --base URL (or NWSYNC_PULL_BASE) overrides the public host.

emit --verify applies the same check where emit would otherwise skip. emit normally reads a blob's presence as proof of its contents, decided by a 1-byte range GET, so an object written truncated — or written by an emitter since found broken — is skipped by every later run forever and no backfill repairs it. With --verify the stored copy is read back, unwrapped, hashed against its own name, and replaced when it does not match. It costs a full GET per existing blob, so it is a repair pass, not the default.

After a repair, verify is what tells you which keys to purge. A repair is the one thing that makes a key serve different bytes than it did before, and the edge caches these objects for 30 days precisely because that normally cannot happen. The two commands look at different copies on purpose: emit --verify repairs the origin, verify reads the edge. So a verify run straight after a repair is not a verdict — it is a survey, and every blob it still calls bad is one the edge is serving stale. Purge exactly those, then re-run it; only that second run is the verdict.

Purging the keys verify names beats purging the zone, because the edge only ever cached what somebody actually fetched: the 2026-08-01 repair rewrote 2,603 blobs at the origin and left 8 stale at the edge. The purge belongs in the repair procedure rather than in emit, which reports how many blobs it wrote and never which ones — so it could not target one even with a CDN credential, which it deliberately does not hold (#89; the procedure itself is in sow-platform's NWSync runbook).

emit uploads blobs first and the index last, so the presence of an index is the publication marker: an artifact whose emit died halfway leaves real blobs in the zone and no index. Blob names are content hashes, so re-running skips whatever already landed, and assemble fails closed on an artifact with no index rather than publishing a manifest that is missing a hak.

What an emitted tree looks like

--out DIR produces the same tree emit would upload, which makes it the way to check a zone by hand without touching one:

<artifact-sha>.nsym          binary index
<artifact-sha>.nsym.json     the same index, readable
data/sha1/a7/4a/a74aa84a...  one blob per resource, two-level fanout

A blob's name is the SHA-1 of the resource's original bytes, but the file on disk is not those bytes: each blob is wrapped in NWCompressedBuffer framing, a 24-byte NSYC header followed by a zstd frame. Hashing the file directly will not match its name, which is the obvious first thing to try and the obvious first thing to be confused by. Strip the header first:

tail -c +25 <blob> | zstd -dc | sha1sum   # == the blob's filename

The header carries the uncompressed length as a little-endian uint32 at offset 12, so the decompressed size is checkable without decompressing. Compression is worth roughly a 4:1 saving on hak content: a 250 MB hak emitted 2296 blobs totalling 59 MB on disk against 249 MB of resources, as recorded in the sidecar's on_disk_bytes and total_bytes.

The zstd frame always declares its Frame_Content_Size. The game client sizes its output buffer from that field and cannot decode a frame without one, but the Go encoder omits it below 256 bytes, so emit re-headers those frames into the shape reference libzstd emits: Single_Segment_flag set, Window_Descriptor dropped, and a one-byte content size in its place. zstd -l <frame> must print a decompressed size; a blank column there is the fault, and it is invisible to any check that only decompresses, because both zstd -dc and Go's decoder stream such a frame happily. This is what the sidecar's emitter_version counts: version 1 omitted the field and no client could sync past such a blob, version 2 declares it. assemble refuses to merge indexes that disagree.

Hidden compatibility aliases

Existing scripts may continue using these names indefinitely. They are accepted but omitted from routine help and the interactive menu:

Builder	Hidden alias	Implementation
hak	build-haks	build-haks
hak	apply-hak-manifest	apply-hak-manifest
module	build-module	module-only build-module
module	apply-hak-manifest	apply-hak-manifest
topdata	validate-topdata	validate-topdata
topdata	build-topdata	build-topdata
topdata	build-top-package	build-top-package
topdata	compare-topdata	compare-topdata
topdata	convert-topdata	convert-topdata
depot	--target local	--out $DEPOT_DIR on status/get
wiki	build-wiki	build-wiki
wiki	deploy-wiki	deploy-wiki

module build-module deliberately retains its narrower module-only behavior; it is not redirected to the broader module build.

Global commands

crucible help | -h          usage + builder list
crucible version | -V       build version
crucible list               name<TAB>binary<TAB>summary
crucible config [args]      inspect and validate effective configuration
crucible changelog [args]   generate a release changelog

HAK build options

crucible hak build
  [--hak <hak-name> ...]
  [--archive <archive-name> ...]
  [--source-manifest <path>]
  [--content-addressed-root <path>]
  [--plan-only]
  [--quiet|--verbose|--debug]

When a source manifest contains asset_sources, pass --content-addressed-root <directory>. Crucible resolves each declared SHA-256 under sha256/<first-two>/<next-two>/<full-sha256> and verifies streamed bytes while writing selected HAK archives. Authored .bmu files are ordinary assets and require no conversion pipeline.