A death can place two unbound thresholds physically **adjacent**. Adjacency only makes an attempt possible. A persistent join is **latch-compatible** when the visible service signatures at those two faces can exchange the required pulse. A mismatch refuses before the latch completes. A successful mechanical latch opens a walkable threshold and survives later deaths until deliberately released.
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A death can place two unbound thresholds physically **adjacent**. Adjacency only makes an attempt possible. **What moves is a rigid placement unit, not a loose room:** each authored compact assembly and each set of rooms already latched together preserves one internal pose, and an unanchored group may translate and rotate only as a whole, never reflect. The ship-rooted group containing R01 is anchored and neither moves nor turns, so a shift changes which unbound group meets its free outer frontier rather than which room touches the airlock. See [Death Shift and Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity) for the full placement obligations. A persistent join is **latch-compatible** when the visible service signatures at those two faces can exchange the required pulse. A mismatch refuses before the latch completes. A successful mechanical latch opens a walkable threshold and survives later deaths until deliberately released.
Power is an activation tool, not a global ordering rule. A source may charge seam A, be recovered without undoing A, then charge seam B. Both latches remain. Scarcity alone therefore adds travel, not depth.
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- **Persistent join state:** the mechanical latch survives power loss, mode changes, and death until deliberate release.
- **Diagnostic signal state:** the current pulse configuration may reach a region and show how its machinery transforms the pulse. Changing a mode can break or restore that local evidence without erasing the walkable latch.
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**Placement obligations that make a shift valid.** Every arrangement must place each room identity exactly once inside exactly one rigid group; preserve every latched seam and every fixed interior path and control conduit; pair only free external faces; keep every critical release reachable from the ship-rooted side or from a fully walkable island immediately after merge; and leave each unjoined region eligible for some later valid arrangement. A refuge door is not a join face, and latching a refuge never sends its occupant. **The honest failure case:** if no valid changed arrangement exists for a reachable persistent-group state, retaining the last valid arrangement is a recorded content failure and a blocker to shipping that content — not a hidden player rule and never a reason to break a join the player made.
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Thus a player may have every region physically joined even while part of the diagnostic signal is unpowered or misconfigured. Physical inclusion is the base objective; tuning the pulse is optional local evidence and troubleshooting unless a separate later proposal gives it a distinct payoff. A mode change never silently destroys permanent work or turns a joined region into a false “incomplete” result.
## Mistake and recovery with actual access
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## Conditional completion consequence
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The current candidate uses **rigid joins throughout**: connected rooms travel as one group, and their selected internal relationships do not rearrange. If every region enters one rigid group, the candidate consequently stabilises the station's connected layout as a proposed late exception to death-triggered shifting.
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The current candidate uses **rigid joins throughout**, consistent with the accepted continuity candidate: connected rooms travel as one group, and their selected internal relationships do not rearrange. If every region enters one rigid group, the candidate consequently stabilises the station's connected layout as a proposed late exception to death-triggered shifting.
The owner's answer about that payoff is pending. If the owner instead wants rooms to keep rearranging after full completion, this is not a cosmetic terminal variation. Rigid joining would have to be rejected or materially redesigned from the first bind—perhaps as flexible connections, though none is selected here—and the recommendation must be re-examined under that different physical rule. This page does not claim both behaviours work automatically.
