Recon Mode — player-elected casing, the heat economy, and DOSSIER keys

../gameplay-framework.md — gap C (this doc fills it)
../programs/enrichment-contract.md — gap D: recon runs against the cart’s simulated world; discoveries commit via the sanctioned dossier-commit path
../cartridges/authoring/verb-partition.md — gap B: the recon verbs (SCAN/PROBE/MAP/SNIFF) are CORE actions
../cartridges/design-bibles/mission-type-catalog.md — SURVEILLANCE is the recon type (OBSERVE)
currency-and-economy.md — knowledge as typed DOSSIER keys + the pay-to-skip lever
../cartridges/modules/ice-breaker.md — the trace mechanic recon-heat reconciles with
../cartridges/modules/the-vault.md — the heat-free research counterpart (knowledge_index)

Scope: this defines the recon mode — when it happens, what it costs, what it yields. What a discovered key is (its record shape) is the DOSSIER data-model pass (next). Exact heat numbers are tuning (§8).

1. What recon is

Recon is player-elected casing: dropping into a mode, from the Mission Runner, that runs the recon CORE verbs (SCAN / PROBE / MAP / SNIFF — gap B) against the cart’s simulated world (gap D) to surface authored facts and deposit them as DOSSIER keys. It is:

Optional — every mission is completable blind.
Repeatable & operator-paced — once big upfront, again between phases, a quick check mid-op, or never.
A mode, not a fixed phase — it has no reserved slot in the phase chain; the operator enters and leaves it at will.

It is the deck’s answer to “case the target before you hit it” — and whether you bother is the whole point (§2).

2. The strategic axis — rip-and-run vs. measured

The north star: both styles are viable, and the best operators read the context.

Rip-and-run — skip recon, jack in cold. Fast, low pre-heat, but blind: in-op surprises, locked doors you didn’t know about, no de-risking.
Measured — case first. Intel-rich, de-risked, hard gates pre-opened — but it costs time and, if done carelessly, heat (§4) that follows you into the op.

Neither dominates because the cost is contextual: a soft target rewards a quick rip; a hardened one punishes going in blind. Recon is the knob the operator turns to match their style to the target.

3. The passive ↔ active gradient

Recon actions sit on a gradient, and choosing where to play on it is the moment-to-moment recon decision:

	Verbs	Intel	Heat
Passive	SNIFF, SCAN, LISTEN	shallow / surface facts	≈ free
Active	PROBE, PING, INJECT-recon	deep / specific facts	raises heat

Passive recon reads what’s already on the wire; active recon pokes and risks being noticed. The deep, mission-gating keys generally live behind active recon — which is the brake against omniscience (§4).

4. The heat economy (the cost)

One shared heat meter. Recon and the operation feed the same number; this is what makes “without attracting attention or defender focus” mechanical.

Recon raises heat — passive ≈ free, active costs. Sit on passive and you stay cold; poke hard and you warm up.
Heat pre-loads the operation. The op starts at the heat recon left it: a higher baseline means denser ICE, a higher alert level, a trace offset at jack-in. Recon-heat and in-op trace are one timeline — recon-heat is the operation’s starting trace baseline (reconciling with ICE BREAKER’s existing trace mechanic). Case noisily and you breach into a hotter house.
Heat bites during casing, too. Thresholds escalate defender focus while you recon:
- low — safe; the defender is oblivious.
- mid — the defender notices; CIPHER warns (pattern. noticed.); intel gets costlier.
- high — active counter-recon: the casing can be burned (lose the session, the unsaved intel, or trip a lockout that pre-loads the op near-maximally).

The anti-omniscience brake: passive recon exhausts the shallow layer quickly — keep scanning and you stop learning. The valuable, gating keys require active recon (heat) or are time-gated (they decay / the window closes). So total knowledge is never free; you pay in heat or in time.

5. What recon yields

Recon deposits typed DOSSIER keys (via gap D’s sanctioned dossier-commit). Keys do two jobs in the economy:

Hard-gate — some operational goals are unfinishable without the right key (the door needs TANAKA-CREDENTIALS).
De-risk — keys soft-bias the op: pre-revealed topology, fewer nodes, lower starting difficulty (currency-and-economy.md).

And the cross-currency lever: credits can buy a key (pay-to-skip recon, gap D) — but bought access earns less mastery/knowledge than casing it yourself. Lazy works; it just doesn’t make you better.

(The record shape of a key — fields, links, how it’s organized — is the DOSSIER data-model pass, next.)

6. Where recon runs

Recon is the player-facing use of the recon programs, enriched per the enrichment contract:

bzbx — read the wire: scan the in-world network, surface hosts / ports / services / topology fragments.
CONDUIT — session-level probing once you have access: files seen, creds validated.
RIPSAW — org recon: people, accounts, ownership, shell links.
DOSSIER — where the keys land and are browsed.

Each surfaces the facts the cart authored as discoverable; surfacing one commits it.

7. Integration with the run

Within an op — recon mode is entered from the Mission Runner (run start / between phases / a mid-op check). Heat carries straight into the active op.
As its own contract — a standalone SURVEILLANCE mission (type catalog) is a pure recon job that banks keys for later operations. Recon goals (OBSERVE) in the objective graph reward intel.
vs. The Vault — The Vault is the at-leisure, heat-free research counterpart (raises knowledge_index, no defender, no clock). On-target recon is the heat-bearing counterpart: riskier, sharper, specific keys. The two together are the knowledge economy’s slow lane and fast lane.

8. Open / deferred

Exact heat numbers / curve — passive vs. active heat costs, the mid/high thresholds, how much heat pre-loads how much ICE. Pure tuning.
The DOSSIER key schema — what a key is (record fields, links, organization). The next pass; this doc only says recon earns keys.
Pre-accept board scouting — can the operator recon a contract before accepting it? Deferred (risks board-level omniscience; revisit with the DOSSIER pass).
knSALK / defense interaction (gap F) — when the operator’s own deck is being cased/traced, the defensive inverse of this mode.
Stale-intel model — how time-gated keys decay, and whether re-casing refreshes them.