Confirmed, and your read of it was exactly right — including the detail that it was partially working, which is what cracked it. Numbered sequences were gated because each names the one before it directly. Cross-chain prerequisites were not, and here is why: our importer DROPPED a prerequisite whenever the quest it pointed at was one we had not imported. A chain in the original data is one unbroken spine, so every gap in our import left the next quest with no gate at all and its giver handed out several segments at once. The Temple of Time was the worst case — the Temple Keeper was offering four separate chain openings side by side. The importer now walks THROUGH a missing quest to the nearest one we do ship, so nothing is invented and the order is restored. 51 quests were re-gated. Leaving IN PROGRESS until you have re-checked a few givers, and the Temple Keeper first.

Your note says the Temple Keeper still offers "Breaking the Force Field" when it should require the others first. I dug into that specific quest and want to give you what I found rather than guess.

There are TWO quests with that exact title from that NPC. Both are gated: one needs two earlier quests done, the other needs its own predecessor, and all of those prerequisite quests do exist in our data. I also read the offer path and it does enforce prerequisites. So on a fresh character neither should appear.

One thing that WOULD explain it: the first of the two is a DAILY REPEATABLE. Once you have completed it, it legitimately comes back 24 hours later, and it will sit in his list next to chain openings you have not done. That is authentic, not a bug.

So before I change anything: when you saw it offered, had you already completed that chain on that character? If it was genuinely a fresh character with nothing done, that is a real bug and I will chase it.

Closing this one - Mark's v54 test pass confirmed it in-world: the Temple Keeper now offers ONE quest at a time instead of four chain-openings at once, and the other quest givers behave the same way, in order.

Root cause, and your instinct that it was "partially working" was right. The offer path ran through a giver-agnostic acceptance check whose whole job was to skip ONE thing - the npc entry in Quest.wz Check.img/<qid>/0 - so the Rare Quest Dispenser could stand in for a giver we have not placed yet. It was skipping the ENTIRE requirement set instead. The prerequisite-quest rows were therefore never evaluated at all, and the start, middle and far end of a chain could be taken in any order, exactly as your screenshot showed. Cosmic evaluates the whole set before a quest may start (Quest.canStart walks startReqs; only forceStartQuest bypasses it, Quest.java:317), and that is what we do now - the npc entry is dropped, everything else is enforced.

The chains that DID behave were the ones whose steps happened to also gate on an item or a level, which is why it looked half-broken rather than fully broken. Your "Memory Lane 1 but not 2" detail is what pinned that down.

LIVE on the published build.