Cellular Automata with Conserved Transition Tokens: Exact Reduction and Mechanistic Construction of Parity-Locked Rule Field

Elementary cellular automata normally apply a fixed global rule. We study an extension in which lookup-table transitions are locally owned, species-wise conserved tokens. We classify exactly the ECA rules for which a state-backed token invariant yields an all-time state-plus-resource reduction: Rules 1, 33, 129 and 161. For Rule 167, targeted transfer constructs a frozen four-rule medium. A local one-shot depletion lemma explains its parity-locked bulk, and finite-horizon certificates verify causal-bulk coverage through 5,000 generations. Architecture-preserving controls isolate the parity scaffold, while defect-dose and one-sided interventions separate the roles of its sublattices. Removing Rule-165/normalized-Rule-90 content collapses late causal-cone damage density; the opposite removal leaves it essentially unchanged. Uniform normalized Rule 90 itself has sparse damage, whereas an ideal Rule-90/Rule-30 alternation is dense, showing that the effect is architecture-specific. Zlib is retained only as a coarse irregularity screen.