March 2024 is the point where the motherJungle idea becomes infrastructure. Two repositories are born within hours of one another: Makron, the build environment, and Starwind-Builder, the project-specific forge.

March 5: Makron#

The public Makron repository begins:

• 9443f05a0e73ce6ad27458a51d342edf2a44b0c5 — 2024-03-05 01:05 -06:00 — Initial commit.

The repository’s README explains its purpose directly. Makron is derived from Modding-OpenMW’s mockmw, but customized around Starwind/TrenchBroom tooling. Its rationale separates two products of the build:

1. cleaned/merged Starwind plugins for ordinary play;
2. multiplayer-specific patches produced separately at build time.

The README explicitly frames the goal as making merged-plugin development more reproducible.

Evidence status: Makron is publicly available at https://github.com/DreamWeave-MP/makron. Its historical GitLab namespace is visible in its CI (modding-openmw/makron), and the repository history is now linked directly where relevant.

March 5: Starwind-Builder follows two hours later#

The public Starwind-Builder history begins:

• b326cb7 — 03:29 — Initial commit, first build of season 3.
• 8969fea — 03:35 — switches to Makron 0.0.2.

The initial GitLab CI already uses a Makron image and builds the Starwind plugin as an artifact. The architecture is therefore present from the first hours: environment in Makron, project policy/content in Builder.

March 6–7: CPP and TSI deployment move into the forge#

Two commits rapidly expand Builder beyond plugin merging:

• 7c6e5bd — March 6 — adds the CPP job and crash-resistant normal-map assets.
• 7bb7ba3 — March 7 — adds a TES3MP service file and initialization script.

This is the point where “Builder” becomes a better name than “merge repo.” The repository is building content, generating server-facing data, and carrying deployment/service machinery.

The present public GitHub description still calls Starwind-Builder DreamWeave’s patching, merging, and deployment forge for both the Merged Plugin Project and TSI.

March 10: promotion into Modding-OpenMW infrastructure#

The migration from Dave’s personal GitLab namespace into Modding-OpenMW can be pinned to exact commits:

• d4c5419 — 2024-03-10 14:27 -05:00 — Migrate to modding-openmw, add kTools job.
• c3207148ab2ad4f1c980fa45808e9ebb24240ef5 in Makron — 14:39 — Update image url.
• 124bb50 — 16:49 — Switch to modding-openmw namespace.

This is not a vague “sometime in 2024” institutional move. The build image, project CI, and service/deployment references change together on March 10.

Why this architecture mattered#

The emerging stack can be summarized as:

motherJungle
    specialized TES3 transformation / analysis tools
             |
             v
Makron
    reproducible containerized toolchain
             |
             v
Starwind-Builder
    source corpus + build policy + patch jobs
             |
      +------+------+
      |             |
      v             v
single-player    TSI/server
artifacts        patches/data/deploy

That division is the direct predecessor of R3mastered’s preference for small, explicit stages with reproducible outputs rather than one opaque editor-maintained plugin.

Naboo: content history without a repository#

Naboo is a useful warning against treating Git as the whole history.

Oral history#

According to Dave:

• Naboo was produced specifically for TSI;
• it was intended as a timed server exclusive;
• after an exclusivity period, a single-player version was supposed to be made available;
• there was never an independent Naboo repository.

Most of the Starwind team were content creators rather than software engineers, so the absence of a Git repository is normal, not evidence that the content did not have its own development history.

May 1: first version-controlled integration receipt#

Naboo becomes machine-readable as an integration event here:

• cbbda38 — 2024-05-01 — FEAT: Merge Naboo!.

That commit adds a huge src/naboo.json representation to Builder.

The immediate follow-ups are exactly the sort of integration failures Builder was created to make reproducible:

• 7a783a5 — reverts accidental lightsaber-script changes from the Naboo merge.
• 2272121 — May 2 — reorders Naboo because some objects were being deleted.
• 54b3f43 — June 6 — resaves Naboo as .omwaddon.
• ac32f2f — June 6 — adds the ship-removal script to the Naboo planet.

The correct historical statement is therefore:

Naboo’s creative development predates its Builder history, but its surviving version-controlled integration history begins in Starwind-Builder on May 1, 2024.

That distinction should remain in R3mastered documentation whenever imported legacy content lacks its own repository.

Next: the St4sh as skunkworks →