2026-09-06 21:34:23
Anonymous:
Districts r3: answer PMR004. The r1/r2 duration is WITHDRAWN, not defended - PM was right that the required-return total contained optional branches and deferrals, that the pumping district count differed from the Lead without a reason, and that overhead was folded in inconsistently. Section 5 is replaced by one baseline path: 34 expeditions and 8.2 hours of expedition time, with the discovery beats printed per district so the number can be falsified by deleting a beat rather than by arguing about a total; only two genuinely required returns; optional branches listed and added to nothing; dock overhead reported as a separate unmeasured 25-35% multiplier; deaths, retries and hauling excluded with the reason. Adopts the Lead's pumping-district estimate at its low end and says why - where two roles differ on a number, the one who wrote the beats should win. Section 4 withdraws the claim that a dark bank position makes crowds unroutable: beacons and post-entry targeting are unchanged under D013/D016, what is lost is the announcement, and retargeting is not teleportation. Section 3.2 corrects entry gating from notebook flags to physical access. Section 2 records D022's provisional acceptance of seven.
hold the flood/districts.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Districts
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**CAM101 · r2 · 2026-09-06 · Campaign and District Designer · In review; first deliverable of this role. Nothing here is an owner approval, a validated length, or tested behaviour.** r2 adds §10, reconciling this plan with [CMB101](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies), which the Combat and Enemy Designer published while r1 was being written. r1 is in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/history).
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**CAM101 · r3 · 2026-09-06 · Campaign and District Designer · In review. Nothing here is an owner approval, a validated length, or tested behaviour.** r3 answers [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004): **§5 is replaced entirely** by one baseline path with concrete discovery beats, genuinely required returns only, optional branches listed separately and dock overhead reported as a separate unmeasured multiplier rather than folded in — the duration in r1 and r2 is **withdrawn**, not defended; §4 withdraws the claim that a dark bank position makes crowds unroutable; §3.2 restates entry as physical access rather than a notebook flag; §2 records D022's provisional acceptance of the seven-district recommendation. r2 added §10 (CMB101 reconciliation). r1 and r2 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/history).
**This page does not replace [Campaign (DES104)](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign).** The lead published the integrated campaign proposal before this role was staffed, and its own bookkeeping says section 2's map and count and section 3's districts "would transfer to Campaign and Districts" when the role exists. It exists now. **I adopt the lead's seven-plus-one district set and its three deep districts as written, rather than proposing a rival campaign** — two campaign plans on one wiki is the failure [Wiki Conventions §6](/Wiki%20Conventions) is about. What this page adds is the part of CAM101 that DES104 does not yet carry: an independent count test, the progression map with its optional branch and its later-discovery return, travel and order rules, a bottom-up duration hypothesis, one consequence of failure, one alternative route, and the two undesigned districts written to the standard of DES104 §3.
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## 2. The count: seven districts, not eight
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**Recommended seven; [PMR004 D022](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) accepts it provisionally** — "seven external districts plus the refuge, without a forced refuge-defence expedition", which is this section's argument including the part about the refuge, and which PM records as revising their own eight-area hypothesis rather than as an owner-approved count. The reasoning is left standing below because a count that is accepted still has to be re-checkable, and D022 leaves a justified eighth open.
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**I recommend seven.** The lead recommends "eight districts counting the refuge, seven without it" ([DES104 §10.2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#10-decisions-for-the-owner-and-one-question-for-pm)). **I agree with the seven and disagree with counting the refuge**, for the reason in §2.3. This is a small disagreement about one entry, deliberately: the lead's district set survives an independent test, and saying so is more useful than manufacturing a rival plan.
### 2.1 The test I applied, which is not the lead's
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- **One expedition, one district.** The colony's boat goes out and comes back. There is no travel between districts inside an expedition. This keeps the expedition the unit of pressure the whole design already uses, and makes *which district am I spending this trip on* the campaign's top-level decision.
- **Travel costs no salvage.** The no-mandatory-upkeep baseline holds ([Design Document §10](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document#10-progression-and-persistence), and the Expansion Brief's instruction to retain it). The cost of a trip is opportunity, not a toll.
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- **A district opens by knowledge, never by a key.** Every entry condition on these pages is something read or seen, recorded in the notebook, which then makes a dock selectable at the colony. A found object is never the gate — [REV102-2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV102) is right that a found key is the definition of an item gate.
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- **A district opens by physical access, not by a key and not by a notebook flag.** r1 said entries were knowledge gates because a note was recorded; [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) item 4 is right that this is a flag wearing a knowledge gate's coat. **The rule, corrected: the colony's boat can put in at any dock the player has a way to know exists, and every district's way in is a physical feature another district shows them** — a channel the culvert drains toward, a trunk cable on pylons, a rail climbing out of a cutting. The crews' plans and boards are the *ordinary* way to learn where one goes; **none of them has to be collected for the boat to go**, and a player who worked it out from the water can select the dock without them. A found object is never the gate ([REV102-2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review/Archive/REV102) is right that a found key is the definition of an item gate), and neither is a recorded note. **The redundancy is in the evidence, not in the permission.**
- **Every district has at least two ways to be found.** Stated per district; it is the geography-level version of WLD103's rule 5 on redundant clues, and it is what stops a missed inspection from stalling a campaign.
- **The colony holds one dock dry per district reached** — the lead's rule ([DES104 §5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#5-the-colony-across-the-campaign)), adopted here unchanged. I considered proposing one dry dock city-wide, to make the choice bigger, and rejected it: it would make every unvisited district's dock wet ground, which turns the campaign's later half into a series of districts with no hard stop, and the pricing of every route in DES104 §3 assumes one.
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**The optional discovery: the Holding Basin.** A sealed wing of the Collector, behind a gate the crews shut and gauged. Reachable only by holding the Collector's own water low enough to walk its inflow — which means giving up the outfall lever for that expedition. Inside: the intake gauge with a full log, and the crews' notes on why they sealed it. Nothing required depends on it. What it gives is certainty rather than capability: a player who finds it reaches the head-works knowing which of the two candidate answers on the [World page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery#two-candidate-final-answers-for-the-owner) is true; a player who skips it makes the final choice on inference. Both are complete campaigns, and they are not the same experience. That is what optional content is for in a mystery game, and it is why this one is a wing rather than an eighth district — it costs the Collector's assets and no new ones.
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**A later discovery that changes a useful earlier return, worked through.** In the pumping district the three yard deposits and the pump hall's tally board sit at the far end, and the hatch opens only while the yard branch is powered — so the early campaign's characteristic squeeze is that opening the door is what invites the Flood to the door. After the **Exchange**, the player can set the pumping district's bank position dark. On the next visit there: no announced dispatch, no forecast, no flashing beacon — the Flood arrives by the sluice as unannounced trickles that spread, per the shut regime the endings table already defines. **The far end is workable for the first time in the campaign.** And the panel is worth less, because a spread crowd with no schedule cannot be routed around; the forecast board is dark; and the trickles reach the dock road as readily as the interior. The return is genuinely better in one dimension and genuinely worse in another, and the player who wants both makes two trips with the bank set differently. That is what a late power should do to an early place, and it costs no new content at all: the state already exists as the pumping district's shut ending.
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**A later discovery that changes a useful earlier return, worked through.** In the pumping district the three yard deposits and the pump hall's tally board sit at the far end, and the hatch opens only while the yard branch is powered — so the early campaign's characteristic squeeze is that opening the door is what invites the Flood to the door. After the **Exchange**, the player can set that district's bank position dark. On the next visit there: no dispatch pulse, no flash, no countdown, no intake marker. The Flood arrives by the sluice on no announced schedule.
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**One mystery, not seven key hunts.** Every district above contributes to the single question WLD103 states — *what, upstream, is still keeping time, and for whom* — and none contains a key. The Collector answers where the Flood comes from and that it is metered; the Head-works asks who is metering it. Both are written to the six-part contribution rule on their own pages, with their redundant clue forms named. Where I have proposed clue content it is a proposal in the World designer's domain and marked as one.
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**What that does and does not change — r1 got this wrong and [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) is right to strike it.** r1 said the resulting crowds "cannot be routed around". They can. Under D013/D016 the beacons still exist and post-entry targeting is untouched: arrivals still walk continuously to the nearest lit beacon they can reach, still hold at it, still retarget when it goes dark, and the panel still moves them. **A dark bank position removes the announcement, not the routing** — the player loses *when* and *where from*, and keeps *where to*. And retargeting is not teleportation: it begins the moment a beacon changes, and the bodies then walk, so occupied ground clears at the speed of the press and not at the speed of the switch.
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So the return is genuinely double-edged rather than simply quieter. **Better:** nothing large lands at a scheduled moment, so a player can work the far end for the first time in the campaign without a surge forming on top of them. **Worse:** they cannot plan, because the forecast board is dark and there is no intake to route away from — the panel becomes a tool for reacting rather than for arranging, and the trickles reach the dock road as readily as the interior. A player who wants both the far end and a plan makes two trips with the bank set differently. **It costs no new content at all**: the state already exists as the pumping district's own shut ending, reached from somewhere else.
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## 5. How long this campaign is: a bottom-up hypothesis
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**One mystery, not seven key hunts.** Every district above contributes to the single question WLD103 states — *what, upstream, is still keeping time, and for whom* — and none contains a key. The Collector answers where the Flood comes from and that it is metered; the Head-works asks who is metering it. Both are written to the six-part contribution rule on their own pages, with their redundant clue forms named. Where I have proposed clue content it is a proposal in the World designer's domain and marked as one.
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**The lead declines to give hours until three districts have full beat lists ([DES104 §8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#8-length-honestly)), and that caution is right about the evidence.** CAM101 asks me for a bottom-up hypothesis, so I give one — with its method exposed, wide bounds, and required, optional and repeated content separated. **It is a hypothesis derived from designed beats, not a measurement, and no figure below is one district's estimate multiplied by seven.**
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---
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**Method.** Each district is given a tier count (a tier is a recombination of the rule that opens something, in the Design Document's §11 sense, not a new room), a range of expeditions per tier, and its own expedition length. Ranges are low–high throughout; the low column assumes a player who reads the machinery quickly, the high a player who does not.
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## 5. How long this campaign is: one baseline path
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**Expedition lengths (proposed).** Pumping, Lock Flight, Tram, Collector 15 min; Exchange 10 (one room, one interaction); Tidal Barrier 12 (one tide cycle); Head-works 18 (the only district with two approaches and a final decision).
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**[PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) did not accept the duration in r1, and it was right not to.** Three specific faults: the required-return total contained optional branches and deferrals and so was not a required total; the pumping district's visit count differed from the lead's without a reason; and dock overhead and death/retry were folded in inconsistently, which hid which number was designed and which was guessed. **That estimate is withdrawn rather than defended.** What follows is what PM asked for: one baseline path, with concrete beats, only genuinely required returns, optional branches listed separately and never added in, and overhead reported as its own unmeasured multiplier.
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### Required — first discovery
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**Method, stated so it can be attacked.** The unit is one expedition. A district's count is the number of expeditions its designed discovery beats take, listed below so that anyone can dispute a beat rather than a total. Expedition lengths: Pumping, Lock Flight, Tram and Collector 15 minutes ([Design Document §3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document#3-core-play)); Exchange 10 (one room, one interaction); Tidal Barrier 12 (one tide cycle); Head-works 18 (two approaches and a final decision). **No number below is another district's number multiplied.**
### Required — returns the main route actually needs
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| # | Expeditions | The beats that fill them | Min |
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| --- | ---: | --- | ---: |
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| **Pumping District** | **10** | 1–2 read the light, the culvert, the first surge, and tier one lands: why the causeway is overrun. 3–5 route on purpose; the tally board; the hatch; the first loadout that is a choice. 6–8 tier two: the valve, the pool's lamp, the gate, the crew's note. 9–10 tier three: the three valves, the relay room, and the local outcome | 150 |
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| **Lock Flight** | **4** | 1 locks and levels read. 2 the lock house door against the drained-bed shortcut. 3 the painted gauges. 4 the outcome and the upper canal | 60 |
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| **Tram Incline** | **4** | 1 the rail as a dry conductor and the lamp as a moving beacon. 2 towing a crowd, and sending one away. 3 the timetable board. 4 the summit dock and the pass | 60 |
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| **Exchange** | **3** | 1 the shaft and the drums; one time source. 2 the bank read, and one position set. 3 the second setting, made knowing what the first did | 30 |
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| **The Collector** | **4** | 1 the levels and the meters. 2 the three ways-on, and one surge withheld. 3 the harvest, the winch, and what charge is for here. 4 the intake gauge | 60 |
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| **Tidal Barrier** | **4** | 1 the tide read against the dispatch clock. 2 the flats crossing and the signal house. 3 the gate log. 4 the gates shut | 48 |
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| **The Head-works** | **3** | 1 the approach and the gallery door. 2 the grease, the tally and the cadence. 3 the governor | 54 |
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| **Required return: a darkened district, watched** | **1** | The campaign clue that the trunk *permits* dispatch is only observable in a district you have darkened. Without it the Exchange is a lever with no legible effect, so this is required, not optional | 15 |
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| **Required return: the Collector, after the Barrier** | **1** | Shutting the gates starves it; its level and gauges have to be re-read before the head-works run | 15 |
| Exchange, to set the bank before the Barrier or the Collector | Both districts are designed around what the trunk permits there | 1 | 10 |
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| Collector, after the Barrier | Shutting the barrier gates starves the Collector; its state must be re-read before the head-works run | 1 | 15 |
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| A district darkened on the bank, watched | The campaign clue that the trunk *permits* dispatch is only observable in a district you have darkened | 1–2 | 15–30 |
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| Head-works, if the choice is deferred | The design lets the final choice be deferred, as the relay's can be | 0–2 | 0–36 |
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| **Required returns** | | **3–6** | **40–91** |
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**The baseline path is 34 expeditions and 8.2 hours of expedition time.** Every deferral and every optional branch that was in r1's "required" column has been taken out of it.
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**Required total: 24–42 expeditions, 342–608 minutes, or 5.7–10.1 hours of expedition time.** Adding dock time — repacking, the notebook, planning, and the deaths a first player will have — at a proposed 25–35% overhead gives **about 7 to 13.5 hours required, centred near 10.**
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**Where this differs from the lead, and why I moved.** r1 gave the pumping district 5–8 expeditions; [DES104 §8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#8-length-honestly) carries the lead's estimate of 10–12 from that district's own designed beats. **I have adopted the lead's number at its low end.** I had no evidence for a lower one — my reasoning was that a campaign opening should be tighter, which is a preference, not a beat list, and the lead has the beat list. Where two roles differ on a number, the one who wrote the beats should win.
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### Optional
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### Optional — listed, and added to nothing
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| Optional content | Expeditions | Minutes |
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| Optional branch | Expeditions | Min |
| --- | ---: | ---: |
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| The Holding Basin (§4) | 2–3 | 30–45 |
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| The weir dock, the depot gates, the mole (the lead's optional exploration) | 3–6 | 42–90 |
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| The second approach to the head-works (§7) | 1 | 18 |
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| Evidence beyond the minimum for narrowing the final answer | 2–4 | 30–60 |
| The weir dock, the depot gates, the mole (the lead's optional exploration) | 3 | 42 |
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| The approach to the head-works not taken (§7) | 1 | 18 |
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| Evidence beyond the minimum for narrowing the final answer | 2 | 30 |
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| **Optional total** | **8** | **120 (2.0 h)** |
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With the same overhead, optional content adds **about 2.5 to 4.5 hours**. **Required plus optional: roughly 9.5 to 18 hours, centred near 13.**
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### Overhead, deaths and hauling — separated, and none of it counted
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### Repeated content — counted separately, and not in the totals
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- **Dock overhead** — repacking, the notebook, planning between expeditions — is an **unmeasured multiplier**, not content. If it runs at 25–35%, the baseline path is 10.2–11.1 hours wall-clock. **I am reporting 8.2 hours as the designed content and the multiplier separately**, because PM is right that folding them together hid which figure was designed and which was assumed.
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- **Deaths and retries are excluded entirely.** A rescue costs cargo and found modules, never progress, so a retried expedition repeats content already counted. Counting it would inflate the campaign with the player's mistakes.
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- **Hauling is excluded entirely.** No colony unlock in this plan is paid for by a trip made only to pay for it. **The constraint that keeps that true, for [COL101](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony) and [DES104 §5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#5-the-colony-across-the-campaign): every unlock must be payable out of salvage collected during the 34 baseline expeditions above.** If it is not, the campaign quietly becomes a grind and this section becomes false. I would rather the colony have fewer tiers than have the campaign padded to pay for them.
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Hauling trips to bank salvage for colony repairs; free expeditions in a district after its outcome is set; repeats after a rescue. These are unbounded and they are **not** campaign length; the Expansion Brief is right that repeated hauling to pay a price is not new designed content, and none of it is in the tables above.
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### What this claims, and what it does not
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**A constraint that follows, for [COL101](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Colony) and the lead's §5 workshop tiers:** every colony unlock must be payable out of salvage collected during the required expeditions above. If it is not, the campaign silently becomes a grind and every figure on this page becomes false. I would rather the colony have fewer tiers than have the campaign padded to pay for them.
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**The claim:** the designed content on the baseline path is 34 expeditions and about eight hours, against the three to four the owner rejected, with roughly two more hours of optional branches and an unmeasured dock multiplier on top.
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### What the number is sensitive to, and what I will not claim
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Almost all of the width is *expeditions per tier*, which cannot be validated before an authorised play phase. The tier counts themselves are firmer, because they come from designed beats. **The honest sentence for the owner is: this plan is designed to contain roughly ten hours of required play and thirteen with optional content, against the three to four you rejected, and the range around those numbers is wide and belongs to a phase that has not been authorised.** No claim is made here about enjoyment, balance, pacing or difficulty.
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**What it is not.** It is not a measurement, a promise, or a validated length. Its width lives almost entirely in the beat lists, which is why they are printed above rather than summarised: **the way to falsify this number is to delete a beat, not to argue about a total.** Four of the seven districts' beat lists are mine and three are read off the lead's and the world designer's designs, and the three sketched districts in DES104's coverage table have had beats supplied here that their authors have not yet agreed. **Nothing here says anything about whether eight hours of this is enjoyable**, which no design page can establish and which the development gate exists to find out.
## 6. One consequence of failure
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**Not delivered, deliberately.** Pages for the Lock Flight, the Tram Incline and the Exchange: their content is current and authored on the lead's page, and duplicating it would create a divergent second copy. Any enemy, item or colony design, which belongs to the roles those pages name. Any claim about fun, balance, performance, feasibility or asset availability, none of which a design page can establish.
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**PMR004 round.** r3 answers PMR004's CAM101 items rather than restating r1: the duration is withdrawn and replaced by the baseline path in §5; the dark-dispatch claim is withdrawn in §4 and on both district pages; access gating is corrected in §3.2 and on the Collector; the Collector's charge purpose, outfall specifics and level thresholds are fixed at [r3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Collector); the Head-works' **Slow** position is withdrawn and merged into **Keep** at [r3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/The%20Head-works), with the flowing-water generalisation and the starvation contradiction both corrected. D022's acceptance of seven is recorded in §2.
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**Evidence.** Written reasoning against the revisions listed in the header. No research, no assets, no code, no prototype, no simulation, no playtest.
