2026-09-08 13:08:58
Anonymous:
Owner decision 2026-09-08: carried equipment and loot return with the astronaut on death; cache and rollback withdrawn, spent and installed boundaries stated as non-penalties
hold the flood/death and persistence.md ..
@@ 1,67 1,55 @@
# Hold The Horde — Death and Persistence
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**Status.** PM provisionally integrated this written comparison after focused review and author response. The cache is the current working proposal, not an owner requirement or validated gameplay choice. Its minimum useful-expedition dependency remains open. 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. Damage and oxygen depletion both kill — that is fixed; oxygen quantities are not. 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.
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**Status.** The core rule here is an owner decision, recorded on 2026-09-08: everything the astronaut is carrying when they die comes home with them. 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. Damage and oxygen depletion both kill. Oxygen quantities, map structure, rescue logistics and colony systems remain undecided, and the proposals marked below are proposals.
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## Recommended rules: recoverable cache, retained record
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## The rule
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- Equipment and salvage carried at the moment of death remain as a cache at the place of death, contents unchanged.
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- A cache persists until recovered. A later death does not destroy an earlier one; caches coexist, and entity resets do not disturb them, a cache being the player's property rather than station state.
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- Journal records and discovered-location references persist through death.
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- Colony members already sent to the ship are unaffected by the astronaut's death.
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- A person rescued but not yet sent to the ship is not retroactively rescued by revival 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.
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- World changes are limited to location continuity. Enemies, traps and mechanisms may reset on their own terms.
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**Death returns the astronaut to the ship with everything they were carrying.** Equipment brought from home, salvage found that trip, records, a part still in the rig — all of it arrives aboard. There is no cache, no recovery trip, and nothing is confiscated or taxed to compensate.
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**What death threatens, stated plainly.** Nothing destroys a cache. Dying costs the use of everything carried until a journey retrieves it, leaves new salvage unbanked, and may demand capabilities no longer to hand. That is the whole stake; naming it is better than implying one the rules do not create. Decay or fragility would turn a recovery choice into a deadline and push toward the compulsory errand this arrangement exists to avoid, so none is proposed.
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Two boundaries keep this from duplicating anything, and neither is a penalty:
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## State table
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- **Resources already spent stay spent.** Oxygen breathed, salvage consumed by a rig, a canister emptied — these were gone before death and do not come back. Death returns what is *carried*, not what was used.
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- **Equipment deliberately left elsewhere stays there.** A relay seated in a station fixture, a part installed in a project aboard, a canister handed to someone — these were not in the pack. They are where the player put them, which is what they chose.
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| | Returning alive | Dying |
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|---|---|---|
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| Equipment brought from the ship | Returns with the astronaut, immediately reusable | Held in the cache; unavailable until recovered |
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| Equipment and salvage acquired during the expedition | Banked on arrival | Held in the cache; never banked by dying |
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| Stored clues | Retained | Retained |
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| Relevant world changes | Discovered locations persist; entity state may reset | Identical |
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| A person rescued during the expedition | Joins the colony only if actually sent to the ship | Remains in the colony if already sent; otherwise remains an unresolved station situation |
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## The next choice after each outcome
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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 retrieve the cache now, defer it, or write it off and spend the retained knowledge elsewhere. Where death interrupted a rescue, revisiting that person competes with retrieving the cache and with any other objective; which pull is stronger depends on the situation and is not fixed by these rules.
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**Discoveries are unaffected.** Journal records and discovered-location references persist through death, as they do through any return.
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## The alternative
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**People are not cargo.** A rescued person is a route-and-transfer outcome, not something that comes home in the pack. Someone already sent to the ship stays aboard. Someone rescued but not yet sent is not retroactively delivered by the astronaut's death, and remains where the rescue rules leave them. Whether a survivor can be permanently lost is undecided and is not settled here.
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**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.
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**World state.** Discovered locations persist. Enemies, traps and mechanisms may reset on their own terms, and deliberate infrastructure changes the player made persist as those rules describe.
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Rollback has real strengths. It protects an assembled build from confiscation, which serves expressive play directly, and it produces no gear-recovery errands and no compounding, because the player resumes with the capability they left home with.
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## What returning alive and dying each give
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**Why the cache is still recommended.** Both arrangements retain the inventory tradeoff: bringing more equipment leaves less space for salvage. Rollback removes the risk of losing access to equipment brought from the ship; the cache adds that risk to the same loadout choice. The cache is preferred here because choosing what to carry also determines which capabilities may become unavailable after death. That is an additional cost, not something the brief requires, and it may discourage the expressive builds the game also wants.
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**Deliberate death can be attractive under either arrangement.** Under either arrangement, a player who has recorded what they came for, whose pack holds little they need soon, and who is far from home on thin oxygen, may find dying preferable to walking back. Only the aftermath differs: rollback returns the gear and destroys new material, the cache keeps everything and charges a journey. Whether that behaviour is acceptable is untested and not settled here.
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| | Returning alive | Dying |
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|---|---|---|
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| Equipment brought from the ship | Comes home | Comes home |
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| Salvage and equipment found that trip | Comes home | Comes home |
| Parts left installed in the station or aboard | Where they were left | Where they were left |
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| Records and discovered locations | Retained | Retained |
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| A person rescued that trip | Joins the colony if actually sent | Stays aboard if already sent; otherwise still in the station |
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A third arrangement returns everything carried, including newly acquired salvage. It would bank new material on death and could make dying an attractive shortcut. This comparison instead favors requiring live return to bank new material; that is a design preference, not proof that deliberate death would always be better under the third arrangement.
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## What death actually costs
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## Accepted costs
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Not property. The costs are real but they are all time and position:
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- **Failure can compound.** The expedition that killed the astronaut may be the one that must be repeated with less.
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- **Confiscation risk may suppress experimentation.** An expressive build is a large investment of carried parts, and a rule that withholds parts discourages that investment. A predicted effect.
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- **Retained records do not guarantee discovery.** Retention has two distinct benefits and neither ranks above the other: it avoids recapturing evidence already understood, and it preserves evidence not yet read for a later inference. It resolves a dependency left open by [Oxygen and Observation](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Oxygen%20and%20Observation) without making discovery riskless.
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- The expedition ends *there*. Whatever the player was partway through — a route, a staged action, a rescue in progress — stops, and the next trip starts from the ship rather than from where they were.
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- Progress inside a staged piece of work follows the ordinary rules: completed checkpoints persist, an unfinished stage is lost.
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- Anything the player was going to do next, they now do on another trip.
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## Recovery, and when it is not available
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That is a modest cost, and stating it plainly is better than implying a larger one. This rule makes death an interruption rather than a loss.
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Recovery needs more than a place name: contents must persist as they were and the site stay locatable. Four situations are distinct and should not be collapsed.
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## Designing around it
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- **Available** — the cache can be reached, carried and returned with the capability now aboard. Retrieval is a genuine choice against other objectives.
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- **Deferred** — not reachable yet, but perhaps later as reach or capability grows. The cache waits without decay. Deferring avoids an immediate recovery trip, while its equipment remains unavailable and its salvage unbanked.
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- **Abandoned** — the player judges the contents not worth the trip. This must remain credible.
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- **Compulsory** — retrieval is possible but no reasonable alternative exists. This is the failure state, and the condition that would reopen the preference.
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Returning by death can be useful — a player far out, low on oxygen, with a full pack, can die and arrive home with everything. That is a consequence of the rule, not a loophole to be closed, and the design should treat it as a legitimate way to end a trip.
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Dying of depletion does not by itself put a cache beyond reach. Depletion often reflects time spent searching, fighting or detouring rather than distance, and a direct informed route may comfortably reach what a wandering one could not; a lighter loadout can also carry more canisters. Where a cache genuinely cannot be reached, carried and returned within supply, recovery is deferred rather than forced.
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What that asks of the rest of the design is that **going out be worth doing for reasons other than avoiding loss**. A trip is worth taking because of where it lets the player get to, what they can reach with the supply they carry, and what they want to be doing. Those hold regardless of how the trip ends. Nothing here should be balanced by inventing a penalty on the other side.
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**Equipment-system dependency.** The ship must be able to outfit a minimum useful expedition even when everything carried is cached, including a means of carrying oxygen. That is a requirement on the equipment system, not something established elsewhere: [Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison)'s basic-defence rule concerns two example builds holding the compressor head and does not establish an equipment-free floor.
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It also means the interesting pressure sits earlier: what to carry, how far to push, whether to spend a part on something in the station, and whether to commit to a rescue. Those choices all still bite, because capacity is still limited and what is spent or installed is still gone.
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## What would reopen this preference
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## What this replaced
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Recovery becoming compulsory rather than a genuine choice; replacements scarce enough that abandoning a cache is never credible; or later owner-authorised observation showing experimentation collapsing under confiscation risk. Rollback would then be the more honest arrangement.
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An earlier proposal here left carried equipment and salvage as a recoverable cache at the place of death, and compared that against an expedition rollback. The owner chose otherwise, and both the cache and its alternative are withdrawn rather than kept as live options. The dependency that arrangement created — a guaranteed minimum useful expedition after everything was cached — no longer exists, because nothing is left behind to strand the player.
## Unresolved
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Oxygen quantities; map generation and respawn rules; the full rescue and colony systems; whether an authored survivor can ever be permanently lost; whether deliberate death is an acceptable tactic; and the cause of revival, untouched.
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Oxygen quantities; 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 is untouched here and remains open across every candidate story.
