**Status:** PM provisionally integrated this written design after focused review and author response; gameplay quality remains unvalidated. The Owner Brief requires expressive powerful combinations, meaningful horde combat, and equipment competing with salvage for inventory space. It does not settle the build system, starting equipment, oxygen quantities, progression or whether spare canisters share equipment space. Everything below except those requirements and the owner-confirmed journal pause is proposed.
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**Status:** PM provisionally integrated this written design after focused review and author response; gameplay quality remains unvalidated. The owner has accepted connected reusable-part builds and spare oxygen sharing carrying capacity with equipment and loot. The exact grammar, parts, capacities, starting equipment, quantities and progression below remain proposals. Mostly automatic ordinary fire, manual specials and the journal pause are owner decisions.
## Proposed core: a connected effect grammar
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The player carries one finite rig. Its spaces hold active equipment parts; ordinary salvage and inactive parts occupy the same overall carrying capacity. A part installed in the rig occupies capacity once, not once as cargo and again as equipment. Moving it to inactive cargo frees active rig area but not carrying capacity. The exact grid, shapes and capacity are open. A suit tank supplies limited portable oxygen; carrying additional canisters in general capacity is a proposal, not an owner requirement.
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The player carries one finite rig. Its spaces hold active equipment parts; ordinary salvage, inactive parts and spare oxygen canisters occupy the same overall carrying capacity, as the owner accepted. A part installed in the rig occupies capacity once, not once as cargo and again as equipment. Moving it to inactive cargo frees active rig area but not carrying capacity. The exact grid, shapes, capacities and canister quantities remain open. A suit tank supplies limited portable oxygen.
Parts use a public grammar rather than hidden recipes: a **trigger** notices an event; a **payload** carries charge, heat, force or fragments; a **modifier** transforms, stores or branches; an **actuator** produces a projectile, arc, barrier or shove. A packet contains a trigger and may carry a payload. Impact Dynamo, for example, emits a trigger carrying charge; Capacitor stores it and later emits a charged trigger, while Thermal Lens changes charge into heat without inventing another trigger.
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Hordes test space creation, sustained output and the oxygen-limited return while feeding dense-target chains and barrier impacts. A deliberately assembled build may erase ordinary hordes as payoff. Its real limits are causal shape, carried cost, acquisition and situations it does not address.
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On return, keep the rig and forgo salvage, leave or discard a part to carry a discovery, spend salvage through Cycler, or turn back. Moving a part into inactive cargo alone frees no carrying capacity. Separate spare-canister capacity would preserve equipment-versus-salvage while weakening its oxygen link.
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Capacity still forces choices before death or departure: keep the rig and leave salvage, leave or discard a part to carry a discovery, spend salvage through Cycler, or turn back. Moving a part into inactive cargo alone frees no capacity. Everything still carried at death, including new loot, returns aboard with the astronaut under the owner’s rule. Consumed Cycler material is already spent; a part deliberately dropped or left powering station infrastructure was not carried and remains where left.
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## Minimum useful expedition after a cached loadout
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## Proposed suit baseline
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Death may leave all carried gear in a cache under the current separate death proposal. Build Rules therefore depends on a minimum sortie that does not recreate the lost build for free. Proposed ship-issued suit baseline:
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The owner’s death rule removes the cached-loadout recovery dependency. A ship-issued baseline remains useful as a clear starting and minimum-control proposal rather than replacement gear:
- a refillable integral tank providing limited portable oxygen;
- navigation and the owner-required pausing journal;
- a low-output emergency projector/cutter for basic defence and common interactions.
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These baseline functions do not expose build ports and cannot join a cascade. The ship services one suit baseline after revival; it never becomes detachable, saleable cargo or another cached copy. It lets the player scout, record, follow the traversed-route breadcrumb, evade, take another objective or search for parts, but does not guarantee cache recovery. Additional canisters, build parts and tools still occupy whatever capacities later systems assign. This is an equipment-system dependency, not settled starting gear, a replacement economy or an explanation of revival.
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These baseline functions do not expose build ports and cannot join a cascade. The suit baseline remains worn rather than becoming detachable or saleable cargo. It supports navigation, basic defence and common interactions without replacing returned equipment or explaining revival. Additional canisters, build parts and tools occupy the shared capacity the owner accepted; exact starting gear remains proposed.
## Credible alternative: multi-tag synergies
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- **Infinite feedback:** descended effects retain their source wave; a returning path stops. Multiple qualifying impacts become one batched accumulator contribution. New enemy attacks may sustain new waves, but rig output alone cannot mint them.
- **One obvious upgrade:** Capacitor, Fork and Lens each have offensive, defensive and storage placements with different carried costs; no path is declared numerically superior.
- **Cycler consumes the entire tradeoff:** it cannot consume the protected objective accidentally, and spending ordinary salvage loses return value. Other paths remain effective without cargo fuel.
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- **All gear cached:** the suit baseline permits a useful expedition but not automatic cache recovery. The player can defer, abandon or seek new equipment elsewhere.
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- **Death duplication:** the astronaut and everything still carried return aboard once. Consumed resources stay consumed, and parts dropped or left installed in the station stay there; no second copy is created.
- **Paused rewiring exploit:** only the journal pause is owner-required. Field rig changes remain world actions and cannot be completed from its paused diagrams.
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Remaining dependency: the exact capacity model, part availability, cache rules and ship storage determine whether abandonment and recombination stay credible. No owner preference is currently required to keep this proposal provisional; none of these rules changes the design-only phase.
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Remaining dependency: the exact capacity model, part availability and ship storage determine whether abandonment and recombination stay credible under the accepted directions. None of these proposals changes the design-only phase.
