Commit 0055b6

2026-09-15 15:09:32 Anonymous: Rewrite campaign overview around the player journey while preserving current rules and open choices
hold the flood/whole game outline.md ..
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# Hold The Horde — Whole Game Outline
- “Apparent,” “deeper” and “secret” below name layers of discovery rather than endings.
-
- ## The whole-game spine
-
- The recurring rhythm is: leave the ship with a deliberate rig and finite carried oxygen; enter a station whose useful connections may differ after death; observe a local system while surviving its horde; spend shared carrying capacity on tools, oxygen and findings; then return with parts, people or knowledge that changes what can be attempted next. Death returns all still-carried property to the ship and changes the station. Consumed resources remain spent; station/ship-fixture installations, dropped or handed-over things remain outside the carried return set without duplication. Rig-installed parts remain carried property. Home is a place to prepare with survivors.
-
- | Layer | Expedition goal and pressure | New player action | New interpretation earned |
- |---|---|---|---|
- | **Opening: one part, two machines** | Find the loose Fork Relay (the splitter) at Cargo Turn, then remove the isolation bridge at Collar Control and bring the bridge aboard. The Fork may be deployed so the service rack and patient-bay shutter remain powered, costing time and leaving the part installed; keeping it instead preserves the part but consumes carrying space. | Read trigger-to-payload causality, decide whether to deploy the loose part or keep it, survive the resulting shutter state, and learn which property returns after death. | Station infrastructure and combat equipment obey related rules; a “key” can also be a build component. This is the Option A opening. |
- | **Early expeditions** | Reach R-3, complete one short cooperative survivor rescue, recover an initial part set under the found-parts default, and test builder service marks against doors, air and power. | Reconfigure the four-space opening rig, decide what occupies pack capacity, complete one prepared crossing with the survivor, and record observations rather than receive a translation. | The hospital still has operational logic; people remember it incompletely; the journal preserves evidence, not truth. |
- | **Middle expeditions** | Pursue several regional objectives: stabilize a useful route, recover ship-repair assemblies, investigate patient transfers, and bring a small cast home. Hordes make stopping to observe costly. | Choose between competing viable builds, lend and reclaim parts aboard, use local language predictions, exploit persistent room-group connections, and—only under the voluntary-treatment default—decide whether to try treatment. | “Corruption” may be a deliberate change to the astronaut rather than a death tax. This is a question the player can investigate. |
- | **Apparent ending layer** | Under the departure assumptions (see Open questions), assemble enough recovered ship function to leave and explicitly preview that departure is irreversible and ends revival. | Depart and receive a coherent apparent close, or postpone departure and keep investigating. No secret counter or hidden death threshold removes either choice. | Escape solves the astronaut’s immediate problem but does not explain the hospital, its disappearances, or the source of revival. |
- | **Deeper layer** | Reach the hospital’s sealed central system through accumulated operational knowledge, survivor evidence and station connections. | Make an explicit, previewed choice about the central mechanism—for example, isolate a template process, restore a safer one, or leave it untouched—then accept a visible consequence for revival and the colony. | The player can distinguish some mechanisms and consequences without the game declaring the station’s ultimate metaphysics. |
- | **Optional secret layers** | Complete personal investigations, rare utterance interactions and the late whole-station connection puzzle. | Connect every placed playable room or bound group while preserving every selected local binding, test cross-language hypotheses, and revisit places for consequences. | The station itself becomes a manipulable historical object. The deepest discoveries may complicate every prior account without supplying a single omniscient answer. |
-
- Discovery must change play at every layer: a route sign predicts an operation; an operation opens or safely alters a path; the path yields a component, person or fact; and that result changes a later preparation or interpretation. Lore that supplies none of those consequences is optional texture, not spine content.
-
- Late expedition goals are represented by the deeper and optional-secret rows rather than a separate act: they turn accumulated regional work into central access, consequential action and the entire-station objective.
-
- ## One concrete later expedition: the pressure ledger
-
- This is a middle-game example. After Yeva is home, she recognizes the identifier on a photographed R-3 pressure log but cannot infer where its line now runs. The player seats a relay-family part in Dorn’s collar receiver, listens, retrieves the part, then prepares the expedition. This cooperative preparation costs time aboard; it does not create scarcity, consumption, upkeep or a choice between the reading and carrying the relay. Listening yields one pressure value and a suspect channel—not a route or proof.
-
- Inside the station, builder service marks let the player predict which of two valves performs “sample” and which performs “purge.” A visitor-language source/destination pair then predicts that the line was redirected through a decontamination ward. The player tests the prediction while the game runs, holds a horde at the valve, and—under the found-parts default—finds an **Impact Dynamo** installed in the abandoned sampling loop. Removing it ends that shortcut. The part adds local impact-to-charge behavior: clamped to a named Barrier frame or Projector physical-output feed, it can supply a compatible configured receiver, such as a Capacitor when one is owned. The full path and active-area cost follow the [Equipment Catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue); motion alone belongs to Stride's separately stated rule.
-
- The ward ledger shows only that a named transfer occurred after the time Yeva believed transfers had stopped. It does not say why, who survived or which witness was right. Back aboard, Yeva revises one accusation and asks the player to look for the destination ward; Dorn retains a different reading. Thus one expedition connects observation, two language tests, an earned expressive build change and a human consequence without converting evidence into authorial truth.
-
- ## Milestones that should advance together
-
- | Stage | Builds | Colony | Languages and journal |
- |---|---|---|---|
- | Opening | Two readable trigger/payload chains; first shared-use relay choice. | Empty ship and a visible reason to return to R-3. | First repeated service mark recorded with its observed result. |
- | Early | The early part family supports different legal arrangements under the four-space rig, including manual Barrier timing or the Sensor → Fork → Projector + Barrier reconfiguration. | First short rescue; survivor contributes a limited capability and personal lead. | Builder marks support one tested operation; visitor patterns are noticed but not translated. |
- | Middle | Several viable rigs trade safety, control, mobility and carrying capacity; a recovered part enables a new behavior. | A small cast creates preparations, disagreements and linked personal objectives. | Each language supports multiple predictions and at least one corrected hypothesis; historical routes are marked as possibly stale after shifts. |
- | Late/deep | Local build grammar may inform station-connection work without making one universal loadout. | Survivors react to central choices according to what they know and what the player shared. | Cross-language evidence opens or reframes a route; utterance interaction stays limited and never becomes an all-purpose oracle. |
-
- In this outline, builder operational marks are one alien language, while visitor source/destination pairs and later utterances are two registers of a second. The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) requires a minimum of two alien languages.
-
- ## Content bands
-
- A **region** is a coherent expedition territory. A reusable **room module** is a layout/encounter pattern; one module may produce multiple **placed playable room instances**, and the late whole-station objective concerns those actual instances, not the catalogue count. A **discovery chain** is a multi-step investigation with a gameplay consequence. A **major set-piece** is an exceptional encounter or sequence and may also host a chain, room or objective; cross-listed units are not additive workload.
-
- | Content unit | SMALL | TARGET | STRETCH |
- |---|---:|---:|---:|
- | Regions / reusable room modules / placed playable room instances | 4 / 24 / 40 | 7 / 45 / 80 | 10 / 70 / 130 |
- | Expedition objectives across all layers | 12 | 24 | 40 |
- | Ship-repair assemblies supporting the departure layer | 4 | 7 | 10 |
- | Survivors with rescue plus home follow-through | 5 | 9 | 14 |
- | Scenes per survivor, including rescue and home follow-through | 3 | 5 | 7 |
- | Distinct equipment parts | 12 | 24 | 36 |
- | Ordinary enemy roles / special roles / major set-pieces | 6 / 3 / 2 | 10 / 6 / 3 | 14 / 9 / 5 |
- | Trap or station-mechanism families / placed instances across both occupant eras | 5 / 14 | 9 / 24 | 14 / 40 |
- | Language discovery chains, split across at least two languages | 4 | 8 | 12 |
- | Colony projects with a person-specific consequence | 5 | 9 | 14 |
- | Major mystery or personal investigation chains | 4 | 7 | 11 |
- | Special converter sites or connection challenges | 2 | 4 | 6 |
-
- The current SMALL proposal includes **14 major mechanism instances**, including the cross-listed core isolation **P13** and moving scan/bridge **P14**, in [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory). [P14](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Moving%20Scan%20Expedition) adds R15 rail/scan-bay and bridge geometry, a transfer-void sightline, an R28 receiver and shared E05/E07 state within existing rooms and encounters. Its effect, and that of revised placement geometry, on the original [Production Scope](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Production%20Scope) allowance remains uncosted.
-
- The 2/4/6 connection count refers to special sites or challenges only. It is not a cap on ordinary joins or an estimate of total graph edges; all placed playable rooms remain within the eventual station-wide connection goal.
-
- Even the STRETCH column does not justify 30, 90 or 100–200 hours.
-
- ## Specification coverage
-
- These are the scope and completion criteria for each design area: what each must explain.
-
- | Design area | Scope and depth | Dependencies | Required behavior |
- |---|---|---|---|
- | Expedition/region topology and gates | SMALL; 4 regions/12 objectives, outline not room scripts | This outline; selected opening | Every layer has entry condition, return value, alternate route and explicit dependency; no circular gate |
- | Shift, latching and final station connection | All bands; rules only | Connecting the Station; owner’s full-station behavior answer | Death transition, permanent local bindings, joining limits and whole-station completion are one contradiction-free rule set |
- | Build acquisition and part catalogue | SMALL; 12 behavioral part briefs | Progression Options; Build Rules; band choice | Each part has source, reusable behavior, counter-cost and at least two candidate combinations; no generic stat ladder |
- | Horde encounter progression | SMALL; 4 regional pressure briefs, no balance tuning | Combat Rules; Horde Creature Proposals; topology | Each region has readable pressures, build interactions, retreat case and escalation purpose |
- | Survival economy and starting loadout | SMALL; paper rules and one opening loadout only | Oxygen and Observation; Build Rules; topology | Capacity model, canister behavior, loot competition, replenishment, survival readouts and starting kit are explicit |
- | Trap and station-mechanism progression | SMALL; 5 families/14 proposed major placed-instance briefs, in [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory) | Story direction; language map; topology | Both occupant eras have distinct readable logic, counterplay, reset/persistence behavior and at least one discovery consequence per family |
- | Apparent/deeper story path | SMALL; beat/evidence map, not scripts | Hospital Story Directions; owner story choice | Map supports departure and continued investigation without declaring an unchosen truth |
- | Corruption/treatment consequences | All bands; rules only | Resurrection and Corruption; owner corruption choice | Access, consent, benefits, hazards, reversibility and ending interaction are explicit |
- | Survivor cast and rescue/home arcs | SMALL; 5 cast arcs/3 scenes each, no final dialogue | First Survivor; Rescue Rules; Coming Home | Each has a distinct short rescue, contribution, relationship change and limited knowledge |
- | Two-language discovery map | SMALL; 4 chains, relationship of registers resolved | Language and Journal; Language Expedition; Utterance Discovery | Each chain records evidence, test, correction path and action unlocked; neither language becomes exposition |
- | UI and accessibility information contract | All bands; paper states/flows | Survival, combat, journal and language specifications | Immediate goal, oxygen, capacity, target, build causality, pause and journal-history states are specified with accessibility requirements and failure messaging |
- | Save/persistence and authoring constraints | All bands; technical-design discovery/spec only | Shift/persistence rules; topology; content schemas | Save authority, death transaction, persistent-world state, content identifiers and authoring constraints are testable on paper without implementing them |
- | Content feasibility pass | SMALL; dependency/cost roll-up | Owner chooses a band; preceding specifications | Reuse assumptions, authoring load, overlaps and duration claims are recorded for owner decision |
- | Development/validation handoff scope | All bands; plan only | Stable v1 specifications and owner phase decision | Required prototypes, technical spikes, usability/balance/performance checks, staffing and approval gates are named without performing them |
- | Whole-game coherence review | SMALL specification set; one focused review | Readable versions of selected specifications | Finds missing pillars, hidden dependencies, unsupported duration claims and contradictory player rules, or records no material objection |
-
- [Production Scope](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Production%20Scope) owns scope accounting and the detailed-campaign workload allowance. [Progress](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Progress) owns work status and forecasts.
-
- ## Open questions
-
- 1. **Whole-station behavior:** local room/group bindings already remain connected through shifts. After the *entire* station is connected, does the whole layout stabilize, or do rooms keep moving while every established connection survives? The station-wide mechanism depends on this answer.
- 2. Which hospital-story direction, if any, should lead: captive ascendant, departed being/template engine, or a revision? No exact explanation or ending is canon.
- 3. Should corruption be accessed mainly through voluntary treatment, or should death itself alter the astronaut? The current default assumes voluntary access and adds no ordinary death penalty; it does not rule out other owner-chosen personal consequences.
- 4. Should functioning found parts be the progression spine, with fabrication limited to repairs/adapters, or should observation-led fabrication dominate?
- 5. Is voluntary departure the apparent-credit action; is it irreversible; does leaving end revival; and may the player postpone it indefinitely? The outline assumes yes to all four. Credits timing and whether revival is limited to the station field are also undecided.
- 6. Must the whole-station connection unlock a deeper ending, or remain an optional secret whose reward is interpretation and access?
- 7. Can rescued people be lost after reaching the ship, and if so under what visible, non-arbitrary rule? The outline assumes no answer.
- 8. Is the colony only a home/preparation space, or does it also have management decisions? No resource upkeep, staffing economy or passive timer is assumed.
- 9. Which content band should be costed first? Choosing one authorizes planning around counts.
- 10. The opening’s exact rooms, timing and starting rig.
- 11. The exact whole-station graph and joining mechanism, including the mechanism of the special converter sites or connection challenges.
- 12. Whether the visitor fragments (source/destination pairs and utterances) are one language, two related languages or evidence of a third; the language map must settle the relationship while preserving the Brief’s minimum of two alien languages.
- 13. What would support the owner’s ambition of 30, 90 or 100–200 hours. Counts still missing: oxygen canister and carrying-capacity variants, starting loadout alternatives, resource sinks, objective reuse, branch scenes, clue permutations and technical state combinations. Measurements still missing: average expedition and revisit length; how often death creates a genuinely new route rather than repetition; clue discovery and correction rates; viable-build count after dominance testing; horde encounter variety; dialogue/state volume per survivor; gating and backtracking costs; accessibility pacing; and the proportion of players who pursue secrets.
- 14. TARGET/STRETCH content authoring and all implementation and validation effort are unestimated; per-unit work and reuse need to be established before extrapolating from SMALL.
-
- These rules are untested; numbers are proposals.
+ You are an astronaut stranded at an unofficial station whose only message says **stay away**. Your ship can keep you alive, but cannot leave. Beyond its airlock are limited oxygen, crowds of former patients and machines built by two vanished cultures. When you die, you wake aboard with everything physical you were still carrying. The unjoined station rearranges itself; doors you opened and room connections you deliberately made remain.
+
+ The campaign grows from immediate survival into a larger question: repair the ship, learn why this hospital restores the dead, decide what—if anything—to change at its core, and perhaps turn every shifting room into one place you built yourself. “Apparent,” “deeper” and “optional” are discovery layers, not a fixed hierarchy of endings.
+
+ ## The rhythm of an expedition
+
+ At home, choose a connected equipment rig and decide how much pack space to give oxygen instead of tools or findings. In the station, ordinary weapons fire mostly automatically; the player’s attention stays on movement, routes, crowd shape and manually timed special abilities. Fighting regularly grows temporary power, and major horde moments can transform the rig into something ridiculous before the fight is over.
+
+ Discovery happens inside that pressure. Photographing a mark, fitting a new part and operating a machine all happen while enemies and oxygen remain live. Opening the journal pauses the entire world, including enemies and oxygen, so the player can compare records and write their own interpretation without a reflex test. The journal preserves evidence, not truth or current routes.
+
+ Every return home ends the temporary power climb and prepares eligible combat areas for fresh hordes. A living return keeps the station’s arrangement; death also shifts its unjoined parts. In either case, physical equipment, components and loot still carried come aboard. Breathed oxygen and consumed materials remain spent; installed, dropped or handed-over objects stay where they are. Permanent work, seals and selected joins persist. The next trip should offer two reasons to leave: try a changed machine and follow the last discovery.
+
+ ## Opening — one part, two machines
+
+ The first goal is brutally practical: stop the broken ship from damaging itself. From the dock, the astronaut reaches Cargo Turn and finds a loose **Fork Relay**, a component that can split one trigger between two compatible receivers. In the adjacent Collar Control space, the isolation bridge needed by the ship is still fixed in place. Removing it is noisy work, and a patient-bay shutter can release a crowd into the route home.
+
+ The Fork can serve the rig or the station board. Leave it in the board and the rack and shutter can remain powered together, buying a safer extraction but leaving the part behind. Keep it and the player carries the first flexible build component home, at the cost of pack space and a more exposed fight. A simpler selector still allows the bridge to be removed, so progression does not require the “correct” loadout.
+
+ The intended pleasure is the first conceptual surprise: a “key” and a combat part obey the same connected-machine grammar. The player returns with a real ship repair and an idea they can experiment with. **This phase could fall flat if** it reads as a wiring tutorial with enemies waiting politely, rather than a dangerous decision about what to carry and what to leave operating. Option A is selected as the opening direction; exact timing, quantities and final room presentation remain design work.
+
+ ## Early expeditions — a person, a language and a place worth remembering
+
+ The astronaut next wants a dependable foothold and proof that somebody else survived. Oxygen makes every detour compete with the return. A short current route to R-3 can support one cooperative rescue: the player walks and prepares the route, supplies travel air and holds a single contested junction while the survivor moves under their own power. It must not become a long escort. Which person is first, and whether a death during the crossing ends at shelter or aboard the ship, remain open choices.
+
+ The rescued person changes home through a practical contribution, a personal lead and an imperfect account of the hospital. They do not become a translation device. A survivor responds only to evidence the player actually shares, may remember a crew use or nickname, and can disagree with another person without withholding the main game. Preparing oxygen, changing equipment links and deciding what testimony to pursue now happen in a growing home rather than an empty loadout screen.
+
+ The player also begins recording two genuinely different alien languages. Builder marks recur on facilities and possible access panels; a later visitor hand marks transfer relationships and responsive work lines. The current SMALL map contains **four language discovery chains across those two languages**. Four separate story or personal investigations reuse some of the same records, making eight chains in the campaign crosswalk—not eight languages or eight disjoint routes. Each useful reading predicts an action that can be tested physically; no required objective depends on receiving a translation.
+
+ Death makes an old corridor record historical, but the pictured room, mark and completed work remain worth recognising when that room appears among different neighbours. **This phase could fall flat if** rescue becomes a preparation checklist, survivors feel like upgrade benches, or the scripts reduce to matching symbols to highlighted buttons.
+
+ ## Middle expeditions — fight your way to a revelation
+
+ The middle campaign opens several priorities at once: repair more ship functions, recover new equipment, bring a small cast home, investigate patient transfers and preserve useful room connections. The player can follow build opportunities before language, use language to shorten a dangerous operation, or postpone a rescue until its current route is genuinely short. No single survivor, translation or death roll is a universal gate.
+
+ One current expedition shows how the promises meet. In the **Cable Junction**, points of light above a dark void move when a parked rail lamp twitches. A folded bridge aims into the darkness. The player releases the lamp carriage and discovers that its motion wakes visible service runs behind and beside them. Bodies descending the Pump Hall gantry and pushing through the junction’s duct can stall the rail. Automatic fire keeps working while the player runs ahead, circles for an angle, clears the track or pulls the brake and retreats.
+
+ With the **Storm Choir** rig, gun impacts feed electrical arcs and charge a store. Breaking ordinary pressure during the moving fight offers a temporary **Echoing Arc** choice; answering the Veilbearer and keeping the scan moving can ready the larger **Thunderhead** transformation. At the crest, crowds from the connected approaches converge. The player risks the dense centre, manually releases the storm through the packed bodies and opens enough space for the lamp to finish. Neither upgrade is a key: ordinary fire, the cutter and retreat remain valid.
+
+ When the noise finally drops, the apparent stars resolve into receiver fittings seen from three positions. One aligns with a collar at the Regulator Gallery. The player releases and walks a bridge across the void. With little oxygen left, they can cross immediately or return with the record and prepare. A living return preserves the aligned bridge as a shortcut; a death-shifted arrangement makes the old samples historical and requires a visible rewind before a new scan. Combat has bought quiet, the observation has become a route, and the next expedition starts from a changed question.
+
+ A different middle trip gives discovery a human consequence. Builder marks and visitor transfer pairs can predict which pressure control to try while a horde contests the valve. The player may recover an Impact Dynamo that changes later builds and a regulator component needed by the ship. A ledger proves only that one transfer happened later than a survivor believed. Back home, Yeva may revise one accusation while Dorn keeps another interpretation. The game changes a machine, a route and a relationship without declaring who was right about the station.
+
+ The current Storm Choir, Ricochet Foundry and Gravity Furnace rules live in the [Equipment Catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue). [Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison) offers different Ricochet and Gravity fantasies, but those proposals have not replaced the shared equipment rules. **This phase could fall flat if** renewed hordes make familiar travel feel like compulsory warm-up, the moving lamp becomes escort duty, or combat warnings and machine cues crowd out the revelation.
+
+ ## An apparent way out — leave, or keep asking
+
+ Four recovered ship assemblies can produce a visible readiness report. This gives the astronaut a credible practical achievement without requiring a language solution, a survivor or the core. The important player question is emotional as well as mechanical: is repairing the original escape enough, or has the station become something they cannot leave unexplained?
+
+ One proposed apparent ending makes undocking an explicit, irreversible choice that ends revival and station exploration. The player can preview that price, depart for a coherent close, or postpone indefinitely. The alternative keeps readiness as a repair milestone without selecting departure or credits yet. Neither is owner canon. **This layer could fall flat if** readiness is only a checklist and leaving has no human or mysterious cost worth considering.
+
+ ## Deeper investigation — act without possessing the whole truth
+
+ Operational knowledge, physical alternatives and evidence from people can eventually bring the astronaut through the core’s pressure iris. Two alien languages may make the correct control predictable, but gauges and a slower two-clamp route keep the action physical and available without translation. Behind it, the hospital story remains deliberately revisable.
+
+ The leading proposal places living tissue behind the isolation boundary; the strongest alternative leaves an empty template engine. In one branch, re-seating isolation may disconnect a harmful mixed profile while leaving ordinary revival intact. In the other, the question concerns which repair profile a machine should use. These are team proposals, not settled history or endings. The owner has not decided whether corruption ever changes the astronaut, whether voluntary treatment is used, or what the core ultimately contains.
+
+ The player may inspect, intervene, leave the mechanism alone or return with better evidence. People aboard react only from what they know and what the player shares. A mechanical response does not prove a speaker, living tissue does not prove personhood, and an empty cell does not explain every event. **This layer could fall flat if** one dramatic image answers the mystery for the player, or a reversible control feels like a settings switch with no consequence they care about.
+
+ ## Deepest optional play — make the station one place
+
+ Early persistent joins are useful: keep a strange machine near a known route, preserve two rooms whose evidence belongs together, or create a safer return. After death, joined rooms remain together while their unbound outer neighbours may change. The player gradually realises that these local acts form one of the deepest puzzles: connect every playable room in the chosen scope into one continuous station rooted at the ship.
+
+ This is meant to turn disorientation into recognition, competence and finally ownership. The player must recognise rooms, test compatible opportunities and preserve a route they chose; an old journal record never grants current access. Deliberate death may expose a new arrangement, but the design must offer several useful leads and must not require grinding one exact adjacency.
+
+ What the final join does is still open. One proposal makes the completed station a dependable place whose internal geography no longer changes. Another adds the option to move and eventually depart with the whole station and docked ship, at substantial new story and production cost. Both preserve continued hordes and a fresh temporary climb until any separately chosen departure. **This layer could fall flat if** joining becomes a long checklist, the complete graph cannot be assembled fairly, or stability removes geographical surprise without leaving strong investigations to finish.
+
+ ## Current scope reference
+
+ The current detailed planning reference is SMALL: **four regions, 24 reusable room modules, 40 placed rooms, 12 expedition objectives, five people with 15 primary scenes, 12 equipment definitions, ten encounter placements including two setpieces, five mechanism families and 14 proposed major placed mechanisms**. It also carries the four language chains and four story/personal chains described above.
+
+ This is a reference, not an owner-selected game size. The reviewed [Campaign Scope Choices](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign%20Scope%20Choices) keeps a credible 36-room/22-module concentration open; it removes spatial variety while retaining the headline campaign. Larger TARGET and STRETCH bands remain ambitions, not commitments. None of these counts demonstrates 30, 90 or 100–200 hours of worthwhile play.
+
+ The historical **350–590 role-hour** allowance covers further detailed-campaign documentation for an earlier 13-mechanism basis. It excludes the existing first pass, implementation, assets and testing. The fourteenth mechanism—the moving scan and bridge—and its revised placement geometry remain uncosted, so the old range is not a current total, remaining-work estimate or ceiling. A room cut does not justify a proportional effort reduction.
+
+ ## Choices that remain open
+
+ - The hospital truth: living captive, empty template engine or another revision; every causal detail remains revisable.
+ - Whether ship readiness leads to an irreversible apparent departure, and what any deeper or “real” ending means.
+ - Whether and how corruption affects the astronaut; no death counter, forced transformation or treatment choice is selected.
+ - The first survivor, rescue failure outcome, post-rescue mortality and exact colony-management scope.
+ - The final joining mechanism, a valid full layout and what completion does to later shifts.
+ - The content band, exact combat-growth cadence, acquisition model, oxygen quantities and final equipment rules.
+
+ [Open Decisions](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Open%20Decisions) keeps the current decision list. Detailed ownership sits in [Hordes and Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hordes%20and%20Builds), [Fighting the Horde](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20Rules), [Two Language Discovery Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Two%20Language%20Discovery%20Map), [Story And Ending Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Story%20And%20Ending%20Map), [Discovery in a Changing Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Connecting%20The%20Station), [Completing The Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Completing%20The%20Station), [Production Scope](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Production%20Scope) and [Campaign Scope Choices](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign%20Scope%20Choices).
+
+ This outline describes intended experiences and design hypotheses. It does not establish fun, readability, balance, feasibility or campaign duration.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9