Commit 0da3e5

2026-09-07 21:07:10 Anonymous: Death and Persistence: recoverable cache with retained records, compared against expedition rollback; state table, dependencies and reopening conditions

/dev/null .. hold the flood/death and persistence.md
@@ 0,0 1,52 @@
+	# Hold The Horde — Death and Persistence
+
+	**Status.** A provisional comparison for review, not owner-approved. The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) requires that death returns the astronaut to the ship for a reason hidden in the station; that cause is not addressed here. Death losses, map structure, rescue logistics and colony systems remain undecided. Every claim below about how these rules would shape play is a prediction, not an observation.
+
+	## Recommended rules: recoverable cache, retained record
+
+	- Equipment and salvage carried at the moment of death remain as a cache at the place of death, contents unchanged.
+	- Journal records and discovered-location references persist through death.
+	- Equipment left aboard the ship is untouched, so some expedition is always possible.
+	- Colony members already delivered are unaffected by the astronaut's death.
+	- A person under escort but not yet delivered is not retroactively rescued and remains an unresolved situation in the station. Whether such a person can be permanently lost is a separate rescue and colony decision, not settled here in either direction.
+	- World changes are limited to location continuity. Enemies, traps and mechanisms may reset on their own terms.
+
+	## State table
+
+	| | Returning alive | Dying |
+	|---|---|---|
+	| Equipment brought from the ship | Returns with the astronaut, immediately reusable | Held in the cache; unavailable until recovered |
+	| Equipment and salvage acquired during the expedition | Banked; available to the colony | Held in the cache; never banked by dying |
+	| Stored clues | Retained | Retained |
+	| Relevant world changes | Discovered locations persist; entity state may reset | Identical |
+	| A person not yet delivered | Delivered and joins the colony | Not retroactively rescued; situation unresolved |
+
+	## The next choice after each outcome
+
+	Returning alive asks what to do with what was banked: install it, hold it, or re-outfit for a deeper objective. Dying asks whether to mount a recovery with what remains aboard and accept a weaker loadout, or write the cache off and go elsewhere with the knowledge intact. These are different questions, not the same question at different severities.
+
+	## The alternative, and why it is not recommended
+
+	**Expedition rollback.** Equipment held before departure returns with the astronaut; equipment and salvage acquired during the failed expedition are lost; records persist; rollback is limited to the objective's state rather than the whole station.
+
+	Rollback protects an assembled build from confiscation, which directly serves expressive play. Its weakness is that material stakes rest entirely on newly acquired items while records and the pre-departure build both survive, so death after the important clue is recorded becomes a cheap exit rather than a failure. The recommended rules instead place the loss on the pack — the object the brief's required equipment-versus-salvage tradeoff already runs through — so death expresses that decision rather than adding a separate penalty.
+
+	A third arrangement, returning everything carried including newly acquired salvage, is not compared: it would make deliberate death a reliable way to bank salvage and extract for free.
+
+	## Accepted costs
+
+	- **Failure can compound.** The expedition that killed the astronaut is the one that must be repeated with less.
+	- **Confiscation risk may suppress experimentation.** An expressive build is a large investment of carried parts, and a rule that can withhold parts discourages exactly that investment. This is a predicted effect.
+	- **Retained records do not protect discovery absolutely.** A lost record could hold evidence not yet understood, and a player cannot reliably re-capture what they did not recognise as important. Retention's value is therefore strongest for evidence already understood and weakest for evidence not yet read. Retention resolves a dependency left open by [Oxygen and Observation](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Oxygen%20and%20Observation); it does not make discovery riskless.
+
+	## Minimum dependencies
+
+	Recovery needs more than a place name. The cache's contents must persist as they were, its site must stay locatable, and a route to it must be survivable with a reduced loadout — otherwise abandonment is forced rather than chosen and recovery becomes compulsory. Equipment stored aboard must remain enough to mount some expedition, so one death cannot lock the player out. These are constraints on the equipment and station systems, not a replacement economy.
+
+	## What would reopen this preference
+
+	Recovery becoming a mandatory errand rather than a genuine choice; an equipment system in which replacements are scarce enough that abandoning a cache is never credible; or later owner-authorised observation showing that experimentation collapses under confiscation risk. Rollback would then be the more honest arrangement. No such evidence exists, and none can come from written comparison.
+
+	## Unresolved
+
+	Oxygen quantities and the depletion threshold; map generation and respawn rules; the full rescue and colony systems; whether an authored survivor can ever be permanently lost; and the cause of revival, which remains untouched.