2026-09-06 23:31:05
Anonymous:
The Head-works r5: drop 'the empty flash everywhere' from the Stop row, which the shared contract Power and Attraction r5 instructs by name. Stop is now ruled as the brake on the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop no district is permitted at all - no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, drums turning on flow to no effect, and the Flood arriving by every sluice as the shut regime everywhere. r4's reading that the cadence would go on flashing over an empty supply is WITHDRAWN, and the reason the ruling is better is recorded: an empty flash is a dispatch that was permitted and not supplied, so it cannot also be the image of a world where nothing is permitted - conflating them would have cost the Collector's lever its meaning. Adds the refuge's ruled place in the cascade (fed with the pumping district's circuit, so it dies late, keeping its dry landing and manual bench and losing its powered forecast, berth and tooling) and records that the salvage-fed pump reserve was declined, so that cost is paid rather than bought off. Section 7's Answer A wording follows the ruled text.
hold the flood/districts/the head-works.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — The Head-works
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**CAM101 · r4 · 2026-09-06 · Campaign and District Designer · In review; proposal. Nothing here is an owner approval or tested behaviour.** r4 works against the ratified shared contract [Power and Attraction r3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction), which closes this page's open dependencies: REV104-1, -3 and -4 are now rules, D024's Answer A is the provisional mystery, and the contract specifies **Stop as a gradual failure** rather than the instant one r3 wrote, and puts a **switch-house** in this district. §2 adds the switch-house, §4's Stop row is rewritten to the ratified cascade, and §7's Answer A entry follows. The Collector's water level under Stop — assigned to this role by the contract — is answered on [The Collector r4 §7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector#7-what-the-campaign-later-does-to-this-district-and-what-this-district-enables) and summarised here. Walker naming adopted from [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005). r1–r3 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works/history).
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**CAM101 · r5 · 2026-09-06 · Campaign and District Designer · In review; proposal. Nothing here is an owner approval or tested behaviour.** **r5 drops "the empty flash everywhere" from §4's Stop row, as [Power and Attraction r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction) instructs by name.** The contract has ruled Stop as the brake on the shaft that *keeps time*, so after Stop no district is permitted at all: no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, the drums turning to no effect. r4's reading — that the cadence would go on flashing over an empty supply — is **withdrawn**; the empty flash keeps its narrower and better meaning, a permitted dispatch the Collector did not supply, which is the [Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector)'s lever and not Stop's image. r5 also records the refuge's place in the cascade and that its pump reserve was declined. r1–r4 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works/history).
District 7, the last, of the seven recommended on [Districts](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts). The Head-works is the World designer's example district ([World and Mystery 7699de](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de)), placed in the lead's campaign ([DES104 §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#2-the-campaigns-shape)) and marked **"Sketch — not designed"** in that page's coverage table. This page writes its ground, its approaches, its decision and its consequences to the standard of DES104 §3.
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| Position | The action | What it does, stated as a rule | What it costs |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Stop** | Set the brake on the shaft | **The harvest ends, and the city dies district by district rather than all at once** — this is the ratified rule in the shared contract [r3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction), and it is better than the instant version r3 of this page wrote: the store drains, and each district's circuit fails in turn, nearest the head-works first, roughly one per expedition, **shown on the refuge's board before the player launches**. Timing survives — the drums keep turning on flow — but **supply does not**, so every district's beacon goes on flashing on the cadence with nothing behind it. Stop is the empty flash everywhere, for good | The whole powered layer, lost on a visible schedule the player can watch approach and can spend expeditions ahead of: powered doors, hatches, lifts and the colony's pump go dormant. **What survives is everything that never needed power** — gravity drains, the culvert, dry docks, every hand-worked lock, gate and valve, the cutter, and the player's own coil and planted beacons — so every district and the refuge keep a dry way home and nothing banked is lost. At [the Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector#7-what-the-campaign-later-does-to-this-district-and-what-this-district-enables) the return lift dies while gravity does not, so that district drains to level 0 for good and the Flood piles up on its dry floor instead of being cycled out. **Its head race is then permanently walkable, which is the road back here** |
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| **Stop** | Set the brake on the shaft | **The brake stops the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop no district is permitted at all: no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, and the drums turn on flow to no effect.** The Flood arrives by every district's own sluice as trickles that grow — the shut regime everywhere, permanently. **The harvest ends with it, and the city dies district by district rather than all at once**: the store drains and each district's circuit fails in turn, nearest the head-works first, roughly one per expedition, **shown on the refuge's board before the player launches**. All of this is the ruled text in [Power and Attraction r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction); r4 of this page said the cadence would go on flashing over an empty supply, and that reading is withdrawn — **Stop's image is dark boards and trickles, not the empty flash** | The whole powered and announced layer, lost on a visible schedule the player can watch approach and spend expeditions ahead of: powered doors, hatches, lifts and the colony's pump go dormant. **The refuge is not spared and is not first**: its circuit is fed with the pumping district's, whose dock it is, so it dies late in the cascade, keeping its dry landing and manual bench and losing its powered forecast, pumped berth and advanced tooling — and the salvage-fed pump reserve that would have softened this was declined (PMR006 4, Colony's recommendation), so the cost is paid rather than bought off. **What survives is everything that never needed power** — gravity drains, the culvert, dry docks, every hand-worked lock, gate and valve, the cutter, the coil and planted beacons — so every district and the refuge keep a dry way home and nothing banked is lost. At [the Collector](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector#7-what-the-campaign-later-does-to-this-district-and-what-this-district-enables) the wheels stop cycling because nothing is dispatched to pass through them and the powered return lift dies with the power, so that district drains to level 0 for good and the Flood piles up on its dry floor. **Its head race is then permanently walkable, which is the road back here** |
| **Keep** | Set the cadence lever and the district clutches yourself, and leave the shaft running | The player becomes the thing upstream that keeps time. Which districts the trunk permits, and how often, becomes a standing setting — **including winding the cadence back to fewer, larger dispatches everywhere, which is what Slow used to be** | **This is the one outcome that is not a single interaction**, and saying so is the honest answer to PMR004: setting a cadence and then setting clutches is several deliberate actions in a room whose door depends on a race the player chose in §3. It is also the only outcome that is *reversible*, and reversing it means coming back here. **There is no upkeep and no compulsory return**: the setting persists exactly as the pumping district's relay state does, nothing decays, and no expedition is ever required to maintain it. A return is a choice to change your mind, never a bill |
| **Leave** | Walk out of the gallery without touching the governor, and record it at the dock | Nothing changes anywhere. The network runs as it has, and the colony's board records that it could have been stopped and was not | The campaign's question is answered and its lever is declined. This is the *hold* row at city scale, and it is a real ending rather than a failure to finish |
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*Stated so that the decision in [DES104 §10.7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#10-decisions-for-the-owner-and-one-question-for-pm) can be made with its consequences visible. I do not recommend between them; that is the World designer's and the owner's.*
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- **Answer A, the machine.** Costs this district nothing new. The grease is the works' own automatic maintenance, the tally room's boards are printed by the machine, and **Stop** ends the harvest, so the store drains and the city goes dark district by district, the colony's pump included, as §4 now states in full on the contract's ratified cascade — which makes the finale's cost enormous and entirely mechanical. It also settles [REV104-4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review): the districts' circuits are fed by charge harvested from the Flood, which the Collector's meters have been telling the player for two districts.
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- **Answer A, the machine.** Costs this district nothing new. The grease is the works' own automatic maintenance, the tally room's boards are printed by the machine, and **Stop** brakes the shaft that keeps time and ends the harvest, so nothing is permitted anywhere and the city goes dark district by district, the colony's pump included, as §4 now states in full on the contract's ruled text — which makes the finale's cost enormous and entirely mechanical. It also settles [REV104-4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review): the districts' circuits are fed by charge harvested from the Flood, which the Collector's meters have been telling the player for two districts.
- **Answer B, the keepers.** Costs this district **one human presence and a reason** — an asset category this design has otherwise avoided completely, and the campaign's only character. It changes **Keep** from "the player takes the job" to "the player takes it from someone", which is a stronger scene and a different game. It leaves REV104-4 unanswered, so the grid's power source would need stating elsewhere.
**The one thing I will say as the district's designer:** whichever is chosen, the three governor positions in §4 stand unchanged. That is the property I built the district for.
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- **[COL101](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony).** **Keep** makes the governor a standing colony setting, which is a persistent-progression object in Colony's domain rather than mine. If Colony would rather it were not, **Keep** can remain a one-time setting with no return trips, and the district still works.
- **[CMB101](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies).** The Grounder placement in §8, and the floater question in §8's last bullet.
- **Withdrawn, and recorded as withdrawn.** r1 kept a third governor position, **Slow**, and flagged it as the one I would cut first. PMR004 cut it for a better reason than mine — it was reproducible by Keep — and I accept that; the reasoning is in §4 and the r1 wording is in page history. What I got right was the instinct; what I got wrong was keeping a position I could not defend.
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- **A second withdrawal, r5.** r4 wrote that Stop leaves every district's beacon flashing on the cadence over an empty supply — "the empty flash everywhere". The contract has ruled otherwise and named this page in doing so, and the ruling is better than what I wrote for a reason worth keeping: an empty flash is *a dispatch that was permitted and not supplied*, so it cannot also be the image of a world where nothing is permitted. Conflating the two would have cost the Collector's lever its meaning. Stop's image is dark boards and trickles.
- **Unresolved by me, honestly.** Whether **Keep** asks too much of a finale — it is the only outcome that is several interactions rather than one, in the campaign's most exposed room, and a player who wanted a clean ending may experience it as homework rather than as power. I do not know, and it is the first thing I would want watched if a play phase is ever authorised.
