The first nightly soak flipped one bit in a valid container and brought the process down inside the standard inflate: an integer underflow in its end-of-input bit peek that a truncated stream can arrange, reachable from any peer through every sync body. The decoder is now the tree's own copy of the standard one (Zig 0.16.0, MIT) with the comparison reordered so the stream ends, and its origin noted. With the crash gone the same bytes decoded to 58 bytes reported as good: the flip made a block final, and the zlib footer's Adler-32 was read but never checked, by the decoder or by us. The codec now requires a finished stream and verifies the footer against the output. The exact bytes are a fixed test. check-in: 46fcd75fc3 user: dmestas tags: trunk