Horizontal challenges

Stay with the reservoir

Start above the build and steer through the landing. In horizontal hole, ↑ goes shallower; ↓ goes deeper. Hold a steering key or button. ← slows drilling; → speeds drilling. Pause / Resume is isolated at the upper right of the gameplay. Space also pauses. In the prairie turn challenges, the live view automatically changes to north-up overhead for the azimuth section: ← / → turn left / right, and ↓ / ↑ slow / speed up. The same two steering buttons stay below the plot and change their labels to Turn LEFT / RIGHT. + / − always change pace. Release held controls and explicitly resume after a view change. The dashed cyan programme stays fixed; the actual bore moves only by drilling. After the turn, the section view and Build INC / Drop INC controls return. Fit section shows the whole structure and retained bores. Drag / pinch the plot or use zoom buttons. 1:1 scale removes display exaggeration; the current VE is shown. Camera review pauses footage. Resume returns to the bit; it never moves the bore.

Each choice now shows its actual immediate model outcome before you explicitly resume or finish. Chained operations keep the next real issue visible with the preceding outcome expandable. Decision log pauses drilling and reconstructs original issues, evidence, actions and subsequent work from the current journal, including any unsynced browser progress; inspect a decision's original surveyed station without changing the well. Watch reservoir contacts, GR, gas and formation pressure. The Alberta subcrop lab has older inclined beds cut off by a gold dashed erosional boundary below younger cover. It is not a fault or a pinchout: erased sand stays absent. Correlate surviving deeper rock and actually drill the transfer. The seal hold identifies actual younger-cover readings; conditioning does not recover lost contact. The Leduc-inspired reef adds tight limestone, porous dolomite, synthetic porosity / resistivity tracks, a water leg and actual fracture losses. Low GR or high Rt alone is not pay; manually follow the porous gas interval. Buff stippled rock is dolomite, blue fill / cyan boundary marks wet rock / fluid contact, and amber centre / edge lines mark a non-offsetting fracture corridor. Selective water isolation, blanket sealing and uncontrolled losses retain different cost / damage / production outcomes. The Viking exercise has thin sands, silty margins and a muddy interruption rather than faults or blanket coals. A deeper-target choice changes only the target; drill the descent manually. Gas is an immediate synthetic formation index, not lag-corrected surface mud gas. North Sea tilted-block exercises use normal-fault omission and separate pressure segments, not thrust repeats. Drilling pauses for the crew's evidence and a decision. The north-up plan inset uses equal E/N scales and retains every branch, plug and actual heel/junction; it also marks the viewed section extent. Use Correlate to tie two acquired stations and apply a bounded, widening purple hypothesis band. It never samples future geology or steers for you. Existing evidence at issue is separated from new drilling when checking the interpretation. Re-tie after a hinge, fault, facies change or branch change; exhausted lookahead is not extended automatically. Interpretations are retained only in this browser, separately from online well results. Open Branch logs to inspect any drilled station, its own geological section and synthetic GR / gas responses, plus carbonate porosity / Rt where available. Dashed bores in the main section are off-plane projections, not evidence of contact there.

Acquired only pauses and switches both the main plot and Branch logs to station evidence. Material-coloured dots occur only at retained non-cased surveys in the displayed N slice; gaps and undrilled rock stay unknown. At most720 markers are drawn across branches, with endpoints retained; every original station remains available in Branch logs. Existing cased bores keep their surveyed path but do not receive new geological readings on the plot. Fit route uses actual surveys and the disclosed original programme, not reservoir windows. Purple is your interpretation; cyan is the original plan, neither is an observed contact. Automatic fold-hinge narration is withheld in this view. The full Structure view remains available by switching Acquired only off, including for post-well comparison. This is an optional display filter, not a blind test: live target / pressure telemetry, guided holds and scenario descriptions remain simulation aids. It does not model measurement noise, sensor offset or acquisition lag. New instructions are written-only; matching recording unavailable / narration review pending.

Save status stays beside the observation text. After an uncertain save, the game pauses and reads the online journal. An exact match confirms the acknowledgement without another write. If online is a prefix of your browser route, explicitly retry the remaining commands against its current revision. Divergent journals are never merged or force-written. Before choosing a different online route, the game must verify a separate browser recovery copy; quota/storage failure blocks that replacement. Browser copies and downloads are archival journals, not independently resumable online attempts. A newer-revision browser draft is offered only when exact identity and command-prefix checks permit recovery. Keep this tab open when no durable copy is available.

The beds and sloping fault planes shown here use the same versioned geometric model as the bit's rock contact checks. Depths and operating values are training approximations.