2026-09-15 19:03:53
Anonymous:
Replace historical issue list with current player-focused decision guide; preserve unresolved alternatives
hold the flood/open decisions.md ..
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# Hold The Horde — Open Decisions
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# Open Decisions
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This page tracks the questions raised by the outside review of 14 September 2026. Some need an owner choice; others are work for the design team. Each entry explains the problem and the alternatives. The expedition-renewal and combat-growth choices were answered on 15 September; their remaining design work is described below.
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You break a crowd with a machine you assembled, find something that changes the next expedition, and bring a person or a question home. The remaining design decisions should make that journey more compelling. A technically consistent rule is useful only if it supports something worth doing, noticing or caring about.
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The suggestions come from an outside review and are not decisions. When the owner answers, record the answer in the [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief), then update or remove the entry here.
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Start with [The Game](/Hold%20The%20Flood/The%20Game) or the [whole campaign](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Whole%20Game%20Outline). This guide carries forward the outside review of **14 September**, including its concern that controlled systems could crowd out discovery, ridiculous builds and human feeling. Its assessments are criticisms to examine, not owner decisions. Earlier wording remains in this page’s revision history.
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## How this list was made
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## What can be judged now
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The owner found the wiki hard to read and asked for an outside review. The review read all 73 pages and the project chat, then sorted each problem into one of three kinds:
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The current rescue comparison is [Rescue Under Pressure](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Rescue%20Under%20Pressure). Yeva chooses her moment to cross a short, cleared window in a horde fight. If the astronaut dies after she starts, **protected retreat** leaves her sheltered but unsent: the player must find her after the shift and prepare another attempt. **Protected completion** brings her aboard before the shift, removes that retry and gives the revival a human homecoming. Both suspend hostile interference during their death safeguard; neither is an ordinary unprotected escort. Completion simplifies the rescue but can reward dying to finish it. Retreat gives failure a lasting inconvenience but risks repeating preparation instead of deepening attachment. The recommendation is completion; the existing owner question remains unanswered.
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- **Text slop:** the document reads as machine-written. A player would never see it.
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- **Game slop:** if the game were built as written, a player would feel it was generated.
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- **Design weakness:** a real problem that a human team could equally have made.
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Other prepared comparisons can be read without selecting them: [different build controls](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison), [two core mysteries](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hospital%20Story%20Directions), [the final station connection](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Completing%20The%20Station) and [40 versus 36 rooms](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign%20Scope%20Choices). These are separate choices, not a package of approvals.
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Independent judges checked each finding, and separate reviewers tried to refute it; findings that did not survive were dropped. On 14 September the text slop was removed from 49 design pages without changing any rule, and each edit was checked against the original. What remains needs a decision.
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The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) establishes discovery first, expressive builds second and meaningful massed combat. New expeditions renew hordes; regular fighting grows temporary power, with larger transformations, and every return home resets that power. Carried property returns even through death. Permanent work and selected connections remain; death shifts unjoined areas. The journal fully pauses, ordinary fire is mostly automatic, specials are manual, and cooperative rescues must stay short. The opening direction is **one part used in both rig and station**. The hospital story remains revisable. Exact mechanisms, quantities, first survivor, corruption, ending and game size remain proposals.
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## Labels
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## Horde and build play
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- **Game slop:** a player would feel it as generated.
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- **Design:** a real problem, not slop.
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- **Latent:** becomes game slop if a deferred art or writing pass is skipped or done carelessly.
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- **Already asked:** the team has already put this question to the owner elsewhere in the wiki.
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### Make the next trip worth fighting
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## The decisions
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[Fighting the Horde](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20Rules) now places renewed crowds along a familiar route, including a version whose local sources are already sealed. Permanent victories remain useful. The remaining problem is repeated travel: fighting the same warm-up for a new clue can become a toll. Those worked routes do not cover every shifted arrangement or combination of closures.
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1. How an expedition ends
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2. How power grows during a trip
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3. What the build system is for
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4. What a horde is
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5. The ending and its price
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6. The astronaut, and what dying does to them
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7. The cast
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8. Rescue
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9. The place
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10. The alien languages
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11. How the game talks to the player
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12. How the station shifts
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13. How big the game is
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14. Contradictions that need one answer each
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The proposed growth rhythm awards a mark when roughly half an announced crowd band falls; three marks offer an ordinary upgrade. A major transformation arrives during a larger fight. This avoids hunting the last enemy, but the unpaid remainder may feel like waste and frequent journal choices may interrupt movement. Per-body progress is a credible alternative, with cleanup and farming risks. Early sealing currently buys safety, air and quiet while forgoing the prevented bands’ growth; any additional reward remains design work.
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## 1. How an expedition ends
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[Two Trips, Two Different Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Upgrade%20Choices) gives the same equipment different choices: longer electrical jumps sacrifice contacts, while a disc-and-arc hybrid combines two learned behaviors. Its four-offer pool can run out. A curated path chosen aboard is cheaper and easier to teach, but loses decisions made after seeing today’s crowd. The team still needs a broader range of worthwhile choices and different expedition goals, not just another completed example.
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**Direction selected.** Combat areas refill with enemies for each new expedition, whether the previous return was alive or through revival. Permanent changes, including unlocked doors and joined rooms, remain. Physical carried property comes home, and temporary combat upgrades reset. The complete answers are in the [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief).
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### Let the machine become ridiculous
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**What this fixes.** Repeated trips no longer have to cross permanently spent encounters at starting power. Fresh opposition must also provide a fresh opportunity to grow before the next major challenge.
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The [twelve-part catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue) still makes all three developed climaxes store charge and release it manually. Different geometry helps, but the review’s concern survives: limited coverage and shared controls can make three machines feel like one with different effects.
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**Remaining team work.** Place renewed crowds around permanent changes without reopening completed seals or undoing discoveries. Show how the second and third expeditions differ in goals, routes, build choices and discoveries, rather than repeating the same opening fight. Explain the reasons to push onward or return with what the player has found.
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[Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison) proposes replacing Ricochet’s stored master disc with deliberately triggered disc endings, and Gravity’s battery with a movement rhythm that leaves temporary embers. Neither replacement governs the detailed equipment rules yet. They buy distinct decisions at the cost of new exceptions, feedback and balance work.
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**Separate open choice.** A way to request a station shift while alive remains a proposal for the late joining puzzle. It was not selected by the enemy-renewal answer. No new death penalty has been selected either.
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The review’s more radical alternatives also remain available: a much larger, roughly forty-part wiring toybox, including feedback loops, with physical overheating, misfires or self-harm instead of strict conservation; or twelve parts with stranger behaviors, such as a movement-only machine or a build that burns valuable loot. The first invites surprises and difficult exploits; the second remains a small, partly predesigned toybox. Replacing wiring with grid packing or fixed weapon evolutions would simplify it, but weaken the distinctive connection between combat equipment and station machinery. None is adopted here.
Within the selected [opening direction](/Hold%20The%20Flood/First%20Expedition%20Options), the current proposal makes Fork personally useful: replace manual Barrier timing with sensor-triggered attack and defence, then decide whether to lend that same part to the station. It adds control, not force or extra capacity, and may still feel modest. The body-lift opening remains the stranger physical alternative, with an extra landing and transport work. Later [equipment acquisition](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Progression%20Options) separately compares finding working objects with fabricating observed patterns: tangible surprise and irregular access versus targeting, material costs and possible shopping-list exploration.
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## 2. How power grows during a trip
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### Vary pressure without erasing victory
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**Direction selected.** Temporary combat power grows regularly through fighting, with larger transformations at major horde milestones. This replaces the stage-only award proposal; the choice is recorded in the [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief).
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The [moving scan](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Moving%20Scan%20Expedition) now has a location, rising crowd, build climax and optical discovery that opens a bridge. It costs a major mechanism and substantial geometry. The [enemy guide](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20And%20Enemy%20Roster) explains nine roles, but neither creature count nor ten encounter placements establishes enough variety for the campaign.
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**What this fixes.** Fighting a substantial crowd can change the build before the entire release is resolved. Each expedition can rise from an ordinary rig toward a spectacular combination, including on a familiar route.
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The review proposed making ordinary travel a regional flood, keeping finite stages mainly for setpieces. That makes pressure less like a wave counter but complicates earned quiet. Alternatively, retain finite stages and greatly expand their variety—chases, oxygen sieges, moving work and enterable wards. That costs content. More particular former patients could humanise the horde, but records, recognition and repeat-visit states cost more than names alone.
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**Remaining team work.** Design the growth meter or other reward presentation, choice frequency, transformation conditions and reward for avoiding a fight or sealing a source early. Show what the player notices and how each growth step changes the next decision. Avoid frequent menus breaking combat flow, or a familiar farming loop becoming more rewarding than discovery.
The [clinical room descriptions](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Room%20And%20Module%20Inventory#region-2-clinical-exchange-r11r20) now distinguish a refuge ward, pressure approach, treatment-comparison bay and sampling loop through care, danger and useful actions. That scoped improvement does not settle whether the station as a whole feels like a hospital rather than machinery with hospital labels.
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*Game slop · Design*
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The review’s broader option is still substantial: rebase more rooms around wards, theatre, mortuary, pharmacy and everyday staff life; combine rooms whose only purpose is a socket; give machinery a human use and include views beyond the hull. Distinct regional materials, scale and light could help recognition. Threshold wear could make shifting history visible. These require spatial and visual design; evocative prose does not make the assets or fit the mechanisms.
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**Where it stands.** Twelve parts connect like a sentence: one part starts an event, another splits or converts it, another delivers it. Three example builds exist: Storm Choir (chain lightning), Ricochet Foundry (bouncing discs) and Gravity Furnace (pulling pursuers into a heat burst). [Mechanical Interfaces And Opening Quantities](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Mechanical%20Interfaces%20And%20Opening%20Quantities) sets power, heat, hop and target limits so that no combination can feed itself. A Fork Relay that copies a signal instead of splitting it was considered and rejected because it "would be amplification".
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[Nadi’s encounter](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hospital%20Story%20Directions#one-person-inside-the-pressure-ward) now connects one ordinary Presser’s paired marks to a patient record and Ivo’s memory. A powerful build can defeat that body normally. The cheaper record-only version keeps her history but loses recognition inside the moving crowd. Neither proves consciousness remains or makes enjoying combat a wrong choice.
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**The problem.** The owner's second priority is "I made a ridiculous build work". Rules written to stop runaway combinations also stop ridiculous ones. All three builds share one core (Threat Sensor, Pulse Projector, Impact Dynamo, Capacitor), fill the same four-step store and spend it with one button; [Equipment Catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue) states "All three climaxes use Capacitor's built-in manual control." Each climax is capped at 42 or 48 bodies. A player would feel one build with three visual effects. In Noita, one of the owner's references, a poor wand still does something and a strong one can break the game.
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### People beyond their useful projects
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**Options.**
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[The cast](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map) now gives Mara an argument about preserving dangerous material and Ivo control over his own movement. Yet five people arranged as rescue, project and changed belief can still feel predictable. The review’s smaller alternative folds roles into three or four people, varies how many projects each has, and gives them wants no machine can satisfy, stubborn beliefs and disagreements that can cost goodwill. Keeping five preserves more rescues but needs more distinctive writing and relationships.
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- **A. Keep the wiring, drop the conservation rules, and add many more parts.** Around forty simple parts that combine freely. Loops are allowed, and their price is physical (parts overheat, misfire or hurt the astronaut) rather than a refusal. Close exploits after a prototype shows which ones matter. *Cost:* balance is harder, and some builds will be too strong for a while, which is part of the appeal.
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- **B. Keep twelve parts, but make the builds feel different to play.** For example, one with no button that grows stronger the longer the astronaut stays in a crowd; one that is a joke (all nozzles, the astronaut flies); one that burns the loot the player meant to bring home. Drop the shared fill-then-press climax. *Cost:* the toybox stays small, and absurd builds stay planned rather than discovered.
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- **C. Replace the wiring with a simpler known model.** For example, Backpack Hero's grid packing or Vampire Survivors' weapon evolutions. *Cost:* loses the idea that the same part runs both the rig and the station, which is the strongest idea in the design.
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[Yeva and Aster](/Hold%20The%20Flood/First%20Survivor) remain alternative first rescues: Yeva brings the memory of people lost; Aster brings distrust of the arrival and a costly request to close a route. Neither is selected. [Home](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Home%20And%20Colony%20Loop) still needs a settled management scope and post-rescue mortality policy. No management economy and permanent safety aboard remain credible simpler options, with fewer later pressures or losses.
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**Suggestion.** A. The link between rig parts and station machinery survives it. Do the build rework in B either way.
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Short transfer time alone does not make rescue satisfying. The review’s simpler preparation lets the survivor judge the canister and retreat to their own door, saving the refuge checklist but accepting less mechanical certainty. A refused or already failed rescue would cost a person aboard. Allowing death would change the survivor stakes further. These remain alternatives, not hidden additions to the current two-rule comparison. The survivor’s judgment and the relief at home must carry the scene.
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**Read:** [Build Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Rules), [Hordes and Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hordes%20and%20Builds), [Equipment Catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue), [Mechanical Interfaces And Opening Quantities](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Mechanical%20Interfaces%20And%20Opening%20Quantities).
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### Give the astronaut and the ending a personal stake
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## 4. What a horde is
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The astronaut now speaks in Nadi’s exchange, but a pre-docking wish, history and personal identity remain thin. Defining those could shape existing conversations without adding a dialogue system. [Resurrection and Corruption](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Resurrection%20And%20Corruption) compares safe ordinary revival, voluntary removable treatment and accumulating marks. The review also proposed permanent voluntary treatment. Involuntary marks make the threat personal but spend bodily agency; a cap or slow rate does not by itself prevent deliberate-death farming. Removable treatment preserves choice but can keep the horror external.
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*Design · Latent*
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The [core alternatives](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hospital%20Story%20Directions) present living tissue behind isolation or an empty template engine. The team prefers the captive; the colder engine loses that image and risks a settings-menu reveal. A reversible isolation control can still feel emotionally cheap even when its evidence is sound.
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**Where it stands.** Every crowd comes from a source: a ward wing, duct, loft or store that "the astronaut never enters". Noisy work near a source makes it release a finite, announced stage of enemies, which ends when the stage is cleared or its opening is sealed. [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory) places ten such encounters across forty rooms. Crowds always arrive by a visible route and never grow because a build is strong. Nine enemy roles exist, and the slow majority makes up most of every crowd.
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The review proposed a priced intervention—ending revival for the walk home or a survivor leaving over the choice—or stronger visible and conversational consequences while retaining reversibility. Ending revival would change the confirmed return rule; a survivor’s departure also needs an unselected policy. Both need an owner decision. Reversible consequences cost meaningful reaction states. The [story map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Story%20And%20Ending%20Map) already distinguishes lost live observations from retained captures, but that is not necessarily a climax the player cares about. Voluntary irreversible undocking is also still a proposed apparent ending. The team must make each competing history coherent before asking its clues to carry that weight.
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**The problem.** The owner defined the flood as massed enemies. As written, a horde works like a wave counter: trigger, pour, clear or seal, reward. Ten encounters cannot carry a thirty-hour survivorlike, and each follows the same routine of doing noisy work and closing an opening. The wards where the patients lived exist only to release bodies. The strongest encounter idea, a moving lamp carriage under a window that turns out to be a live map, still needs a room placement. The enemy roles resemble Left 4 Dead's (a slow majority, runners, a screamer, a spitter, a tether), and none is a particular former patient.
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## Readable information
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**Options.**
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[Language and Journal](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Language%20And%20Journal) now explains capture, comparison and testing through two actual language uses. [The language map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Two%20Language%20Discovery%20Map) groups four registers into two languages; technical stamps do not count as another language. Survivors can explain workplace use without translating alien text.
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- **A. Make ordinary travel a flood.** In an occupied region, pressure rises until the astronaut leaves, seals the region or breaks the surge. Sources become geography rather than counters. Keep finite announced stages for set pieces. *Cost:* quiet rooms for discovery are harder to protect; needs a pressure model and tuning.
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- **B. Keep finite stages, but write many more and vary them.** Around thirty encounters instead of ten, with each region using a different kind of pressure: a chase, an oxygen siege, the moving carriage. Make at least half the wards rooms the astronaut can enter. *Cost:* content, which is where the hours go.
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- **C. Make the special creatures particular.** Whatever the horde model, make each special creature a specific patient or experiment with a record to find, and let a survivor have known one. Give each a name the survivors would use. *Cost:* writing; small.
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The remaining criticism is depth: practical pattern recognition may never feel like understanding meaningful speech. The [addressed reply](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Alien%20Utterance%20Discovery) is an interaction, but does not establish its speaker or precise meaning. Distinct visual writing systems and one consequential, intelligible sentence in each language remain credible developments. A slower physical alternative could preserve progress for a non-reader. These need actual language and evidence authoring; replacing the second script with spatial patterns would still need to satisfy the two-language requirement. A smaller two-chain version saves registers but loses wall-access interpretation and the act of replying.
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**Suggestion.** A for ordinary travel, B's variety for set pieces, and C regardless.
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The [information hierarchy](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Player%20Information%20And%20Options) puts urgent threats in play and detailed diagnostics in inspection. It can still overwhelm the spectacle. The review’s call to remove repetitive caveats survives; hiding uncertainty must not turn a guess into a guarantee. More physical tank and pack interactions could reduce arithmetic, but instant canister swaps would change the current live-transfer rule. Scaled weak shots or overheating consequences instead of refusals would likewise change equipment behavior. The journal’s alternative—personal notes without structured test outcomes—reduces clerical presentation but makes failed experiments harder to diagnose.
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**Read:** [Combat Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20Rules), [Combat And Enemy Roster](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20And%20Enemy%20Roster), [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory), [Hordes and Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hordes%20and%20Builds).
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## Practical scope
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## 5. The ending and its price
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[Joining the station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Connecting%20The%20Station) should turn disorientation into ownership. The [rigid-group proposal](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity) has not demonstrated a valid changed arrangement from every reachable state, or a complete forty-room network. Its fallback to unchanged geography conflicts with the every-death-shift requirement. A room-deck network could simplify arrangement while losing a consistent physical floor plan. A requested living shift remains unselected; repeatedly dying for one useful neighbour is still a failure risk.
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*Game slop · Already asked*
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[Completing the Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Completing%20The%20Station) compares securing a dependable home with taking the whole station away. Stability concludes the geographical puzzle but can leave errands; travel adds scale and an ending at significant new production and story cost. Neither makes full assembly a prerequisite for the core investigation.
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**Where it stands.** Two endings are sketched. The apparent ending repairs the ship and undocks, sketched as irreversible and ending revival. The deeper ending reaches the core, looks behind a sight baffle (living tissue in the leading story, an empty template in the alternative) and offers to cut the coupling that feeds the hospital machines. [Story And Ending Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Story%20And%20Ending%20Map) makes that act reversible: the control previews "disconnect mixed profile; ordinary revival unchanged; reversible here". Every survivor keeps helping whatever the player chooses: "None withdraws help if the player chooses differently." The team recommends the living-captive story and lists "two owner choices that genuinely require taste".
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[Campaign Scope Choices](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign%20Scope%20Choices) compares forty rooms with thirty-six denser rooms. The smaller version saves layouts but retains the headline systems and loses separate observation and recovery spaces. Neither size establishes the desired 30/90/100–200 hours. The review’s lower-duration ambition remains an alternative; replay and a larger build pool can extend play but may pull effort away from authored mystery. Later measured experience would be stronger evidence than dividing hours by objectives.
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**The problem.** After ninety hours the player reads a short preview, turns a control and risks nothing they care about. Both endings feel like difficulty settings. In the review, this was the only finding that every reviewer failed to refute: no art or writing pass turns a reversible switch into a discovery. Separately, the premise says the builders left "for an unknown reason", while the leading story gives a reason.
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[Production Scope](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Production%20Scope) also retains more aggressive room or staging cuts with unallocated losses. Its historical 350–590 role-hour documentation allowance predates the fourteenth mechanism and is no current production budget. [Development and validation](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Development%20And%20Validation%20Handoff) require a separately authorised scope; this guide starts no prototype, playtest or asset work.
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**Options.**
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## Open questions
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- **A. Put a price on the core act.** Re-sealing the core ends ship revival, so the walk home afterwards is the one trip in the game without a second chance, and at least one survivor leaves the ship over the choice. Undocking stays as the apparent ending. *Cost:* the owner dislikes punishing the player; this is a single, chosen, clearly shown price.
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- **B. Keep it reversible, but make the station react.** The station changes visibly around the choice: wards go dark, creatures change, the addressed lines stop or start. Survivors take sides and some conversations close. *Cost:* the player can still undo it, so the reaction must matter more than the undo.
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- **C. Choose the story and write its truth on one page.** Not what the player sees, but what actually happened. Check every evidence chain against it and define what each survivor knows. *Cost:* about an afternoon. Both other options need it.
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The existing rescue question, build-priority choice and optional experience reactions remain unanswered. Prepared story, corruption, cast, acquisition, completion and scope alternatives remain available; they do not require simultaneous answers before useful team work continues.
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**Suggestion.** C first, then A, with the living-captive story, which matches the owner's original image.
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The team still owes varied expeditions, readable supporting pages, coherent evidence and consequences, and credible geometry and scope. A few reference repairs remain: the captive story gives the builders an abandonment motive where the story map leaves it unknown; the [regional language note](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Regional%20Discovery%20Map) still calls a register relationship unsettled despite the dedicated map’s classification; and the catalogue’s warning about a self-starting Projector is stale against the current controller-led progression examples. The historical [shift-options link](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Shifting%20Station%20Options) also needs its original revision identified. These are alignment tasks, not reasons to invent owner answers.
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**Read:** [Story And Ending Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Story%20And%20Ending%20Map), [Hospital Story Directions](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hospital%20Story%20Directions).
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## 6. The astronaut, and what dying does to them
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*Game slop · Already asked*
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**Where it stands.** The astronaut has no name, wish, history or line of dialogue anywhere in the wiki. [Player Information And Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Player%20Information%20And%20Options) describes them through equipment: "Worn: integral tank, navigation, journal and emergency cutter". [Resurrection And Corruption](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Resurrection%20And%20Corruption) offers three options: revival never marks the astronaut; an optional alien treatment opens old controls and draws hostility from hospital machines, and can be removed aboard; or each revival changes the astronaut a little, up to a limit. The team recommends the first two together.
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**The problem.** The premise says repeated resurrection can turn people into creatures, yet the player can die many times without a mark, so the most personal threat in the story happens only to others. And a player who spends ninety hours as an unnamed set of equipment gives the survivors no one to talk to.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Write the astronaut on one page.** Who they are, why the ship broke, what they wanted before docking, and one thing a survivor wrongly believes about them. No dialogue system is needed; it shapes what survivors say and how the journal reads. *Cost:* small.
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- **B. Adopt the third corruption option.** Each revival leaves a visible mark, up to a limit, so the astronaut's own body becomes evidence the survivors can read. A limit and a slow rate stop deliberate death from becoming a way to farm it. *Cost:* some players will dislike a permanent change they did not choose; that is also the horror.
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- **C. Keep the voluntary treatment, but make it permanent.** The player can choose to be marked but cannot undo it. *Cost:* a middle ground; the involuntary version is the more distinctive one.
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**Suggestion.** A now. Then B for a game with a body in it, or C if the player should choose.
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**Read:** [Resurrection And Corruption](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Resurrection%20And%20Corruption), [Player Information And Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Player%20Information%20And%20Options), [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief).
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## 7. The cast
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*Game slop · Already asked*
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**Where it stands.** Five survivors: Yeva (pressure technician), Aster (supply clerk), Dorn (maintenance), Mara (sterile processing) and Ivo (rehabilitation). Each has a job, one belief about the collapse, a rescue with one choice, a project aboard that borrows a rig part, and a later scene where one belief changes. Yeva, Aster and Dorn have well-written moments. Mara and Ivo are built mainly around a part and a rule. Every survivor comes when asked, and a wary survivor's attitude changes "what she says, not access, help or friendship points". Whether a survivor can ever be lost, and who is rescued first, are still open.
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**The problem.** By the second survivor the player can predict the third. Home reads as a workshop with a person standing at each bench. The team's open questions (can survivors be lost after reaching the ship, is there colony management beyond the projects, who is rescued first) all depend on a larger one: are these people, or fixtures with names?
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**Options.**
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- **A. Cut to three or four survivors, each with a want no project can satisfy.** Give each one belief they never fully give up, one way to lose their goodwill, and one line of dialogue written before more scene planning. Let one have no project and another have two. Fold Mara's and Ivo's roles into Dorn and Aster. *Cost:* fewer rescues.
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- **B. Keep five, and rebuild Mara and Ivo around a loss or a deed.** For example, Ivo as the one changed patient aboard. *Cost:* more writing than A for a similar result.
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- **C. Answer the rules underneath.** Whether a survivor can be lost after reaching the ship; whether there is any colony management beyond the projects; who is rescued first. *Cost:* none; these are answers, not work.
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**Suggestion.** A, with C answered as: survivors cannot be lost once aboard, no management economy, and Yeva first, since her scene is the strongest.
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**Read:** [Cast And Short Rescue Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map), [Home And Colony Loop](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Home%20And%20Colony%20Loop), [First Survivor](/Hold%20The%20Flood/First%20Survivor).
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## 8. Rescue
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*Game slop · Already asked*
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**Where it stands.** The owner accepted cooperative rescue on the condition that it never becomes a long escort. The crossing is short, one junction, but it is gated by a checklist: walk the route in this life, check the controls, pass a canister through a sleeve and wait for flow confirmation, reach a marked level on a gauge, stock a separate abort room with a spare canister, and arm a retreat line the survivor can use alone. "An under-supplied request refuses before the refuge door opens." If the astronaut dies mid-crossing, a safeguard pending owner decision freezes creatures and hazards while the survivor walks alone to the abort room, and the player learns the outcome only by returning there. [Death Shift And Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity) calls the freeze "an artificial protection convention".
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**The problem.** The emotional peak of the game, a person who has knocked on glass for a year finally walking out, arrives as a pre-flight checklist. The shared preparation checklist risks making the survivors' personal judgments feel secondary. [Rescue Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Rescue%20Rules) already gives Dorn readiness confirmation and the ability to call an abort, while [First Survivor](/Hold%20The%20Flood/First%20Survivor) has Yeva judge that her failing ward is more dangerous than leaving. The proposed protected death-abort removes risk during its special retreat window, but remains pending and does not settle all survivor safety.
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**Worked comparison.** [Rescue Under Pressure](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Rescue%20Under%20Pressure) shows Yeva’s short crossing and compares returning to shelter with reaching the ship after the astronaut dies. It makes the local safety exceptions and retry costs explicit. The first survivor, this crossing proposal and both failure approaches remain unselected.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Reduce the checklist to one moment where the survivor judges the air.** She looks at the canister and says whether she will go. Drop the abort room and the gauge mark; an abort means she runs back to her own door. *Cost:* less mechanical certainty; a poorly prepared crossing can fail.
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- **B. Decide what death mid-crossing means, and make it a story rather than a freeze.** Either she can die, or she always reaches the ship on her own, closes the airlock and tells the astronaut on waking. *Cost:* if she can die, decision 7 changes; if she always makes it, say so plainly.
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- **C. Let one rescue be refused or already failed.** One person who will not come, or a ward reached too late. *Cost:* one fewer person aboard.
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**Suggestion.** A and B (she always makes it home on her own and says so), plus C for one of the five.
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**Read:** [Rescue Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Rescue%20Rules), [Rescue And Home](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Rescue%20And%20Home), [Cast And Short Rescue Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map), [Death Shift And Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity).
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## 9. The place
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*Game slop · Latent*
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**Where it stands.** [The Game](/Hold%20The%20Flood/The%20Game) and [Connecting The Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Connecting%20The%20Station) describe corridors of former patients, a cracked observation window, a half-cleaned mural, bleach rings around thresholds, a Glass Theatre and a freight hall of hanging cargo. [Station Room And Module Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Room%20And%20Module%20Inventory) lists forty rooms named mostly for machinery: Pump Hall, Cable Junction, Regulator Gallery, Sampling Loop, Foundry Block, Archive Stack, Imaging Exchange. The player enters one ward. There is no operating theatre, morgue, pharmacy, staff mess or window onto space. After a death the rooms sit behind different doors, but nothing on the walls or floors shows that the station moved.
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**The problem.** The room list reads as a list of the machines the plot needs, each given a room. A player describing the station to a friend would say "an industrial plant with a hospital sign on the door". The Regulator Gallery, where a pry scar runs through an alien inscription, shows the level of detail the other rooms need.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Base half the rooms in a hospital.** Ward bays with beds, a theatre, a morgue, a pharmacy and a staff mess, with the pumps and regulators as the machinery that served them. Merge rooms whose only content is a socket. Give every room one detail unrelated to its machine. Put a few rooms on the hull with windows onto space and the ship. *Cost:* rework of the room list; some mechanisms move.
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- **B. Give each region its own fabric.** One visibly alien in scale, material and light, one plainly human and built over it, the core somewhere between. *Cost:* art-direction work, which a paper design can specify.
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- **C. Show the shift physically.** Bleach rings, seams and scraped paint layers on thresholds that accumulate over the campaign, so a door's history can be read before opening it. *Cost:* small; a rule and an art note.
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**Suggestion.** All three. A is the large one; B and C are cheap and make the shifting station readable.
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**Read:** [Station Room And Module Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Room%20And%20Module%20Inventory), [Connecting The Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Connecting%20The%20Station), [The Game](/Hold%20The%20Flood/The%20Game).
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## 10. The alien languages
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*Latent · Design*
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**Where it stands.** The builders' script is cut into the station; its word order shows which service main a room controls (`KETH SORAN VEL` against `SORAN KETH VEL`). A later hand labels the two ends of transfer lines (`OSH·a`, `OSH·b`) and eventually writes lines addressed to the ship's berth, which the player can answer by seating a plate. The journal never translates; it stores images, notes and whether a predicted route led where expected. The words are placeholders: [Language Expedition](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Language%20Expedition) says "no glyphs, alphabets, conlang or vocabulary catalogue are proposed". Every objective has a route that needs no language, so reading only saves time and oxygen.
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**The problem.** Both scripts pose the same puzzle: find two examples, notice what differs, pick one of two controls. A player would learn a few rules over ninety hours and never read an alien sentence with meaning. The most original idea in the design, the station writing to the player, still leaves the writer and precise meaning uncertain in [Alien Utterance Discovery](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Alien%20Utterance%20Discovery). Its berth-addressed line can be answered, deferred or ignored; "Recipient remains unknown" describes the historical hospital transfer in [Dorn's scene D3](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map). Chants of Sennaar confirms each guess so vocabulary builds up; Outer Wilds makes knowledge the only progression.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Design both scripts as visual systems first, then give them meaning.** Different materials, directions and word lengths, and no Latin letters. The second might not be writing at all, but a pattern in the shifts or the room layout. *Cost:* a real language pass of weeks, not days.
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- **B. Give each language one moment where the player reads a real sentence.** The inward-facing seals naming what they hold; the later hand's last line naming the berth and what it wants. Gate one thing on it, with a slow physical route around. *Cost:* bends the policy that no player gets stuck, for one gate.
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- **C. Settle how many languages there are.** [Two Language Discovery Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Two%20Language%20Discovery%20Map) says "two actual languages, not five"; [Clues And Help](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clues%20And%20Help) says wall strings "fulfil no whole-language requirement"; [Regional Discovery Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Regional%20Discovery%20Map) says the utterances are "not a third guaranteed language"; stamps are "technical notation, not counted as a language". *Cost:* none.
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**Suggestion.** B and C now, A when an artist joins. Make the reply exchange with the station, described in [Alien Utterance Discovery](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Alien%20Utterance%20Discovery), a headline feature.
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**Read:** [Two Language Discovery Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Two%20Language%20Discovery%20Map), [Alien Utterance Discovery](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Alien%20Utterance%20Discovery), [Language Expedition](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Language%20Expedition).
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## 11. How the game talks to the player
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*Game slop · Latent*
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**Where it stands.** [Player Information And Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Player%20Information%20And%20Options) requires an interface that repeatedly says what it cannot vouch for: the oxygen reserve mark "never becomes a return estimate"; the breadcrumb trail "promises no current safety and no oxygen cost"; instrument reports "give no distance, path, safety or remote diagnosis"; lookalike suggestions are "labelled software-generated"; each upgrade offer shows "one situation where the choice fails". Oxygen and carrying space are exact numbers with fill states, and pickups that do not fit are refused.
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**The problem.** The document's cautious voice has moved into the game's own voice. A player would feel the game hedging at them. Oxygen, the first survival pillar, reaches the player as arithmetic.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Remove the "never claims" rules from the interface.** A gauge is a gauge. If the reserve mark is not a return estimate, drop it; if a suggestion can be wrong, let the player learn that by being wrong. *Cost:* none; this deletes rules.
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- **B. Make oxygen a tank to feel and the pack a thing to see.** One-press canister swaps, and a pack that opens on pickup so the player drops something on the spot. *Cost:* some packing arithmetic goes.
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- **C. Replace refusals with consequences.** A special fires when pressed, scaled by stored charge; overheating glows and misfires instead of blocking. *Cost:* harder to balance; belongs with decision 3.
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**Suggestion.** A now; B and C with decision 3.
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**Read:** [Player Information And Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Player%20Information%20And%20Options), [Survival And Loadout](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Survival%20And%20Loadout).
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## 12. How the station shifts
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**Ready to compare:** [Completing The Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Completing%20The%20Station) presents two reviewed, unselected payoffs: secure the final group of a gradually stabilized station, or also gain an optional departure carrying the entire station and docked ship. Both show the next home visit and expedition, and identify their costs. Neither makes whole-station completion a prerequisite for investigating the core. The alternatives below remain earlier review recommendations, not owner decisions.
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*Design · Already asked*
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**Where it stands.** The owner chose a station whose rooms rearrange on death, with deliberate joins that persist, and made joining the whole station one of the deepest late puzzles. [Death Shift And Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity) models room groups as rigid blocks that "may translate and rotate as units" without mirroring, around a dock that never moves, with validity checks on each arrangement. It lists as open "whether every reachable pre-completion persistent-group state, across all forty-room states, has a valid changed arrangement", and its fallback "violates the rule that every death shifts the station". [Development And Validation Handoff](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Development%20And%20Validation%20Handoff) estimates 289–490 role-hours for a first prototype slice, with low confidence, and says "Do not build that experiment yet." What happens once the whole station is joined is still an owner question.
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**The problem.** The system may not be buildable as specified, and the design phase does not allow testing it. Blue Prince builds a changing house by drawing rooms from a deck; a simpler model of that kind may fit a small Unity team.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Draw rooms from a deck.** Each door opens onto a room drawn from its region's deck, and joined rooms always draw together. Joining the station becomes pinning every room. *Cost:* the station becomes a network of rooms rather than a consistent floor plan.
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- **B. Keep the rigid-block model, but prove it with a prototype.** Authorise the small slice the handoff describes, and fall back to A if it fails. *Cost:* weeks of engineering before other questions are answered.
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- **C. Answer the completion question.** Once every room is joined, does the station go still, or keep moving around the joins? The mechanism cannot close without this. *Cost:* none.
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**Suggestion.** A, with C answered as "it goes still", which could be what lets the player reach the core.
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**Read:** [Death Shift And Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity), [Connecting The Station](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Connecting%20The%20Station), [Station Assembly Example](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Assembly%20Example), [Development And Validation Handoff](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Development%20And%20Validation%20Handoff).
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## 13. How big the game is
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**Ready to compare:** [Campaign Scope Choices](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign%20Scope%20Choices) compares the current 40-room planning reference with a 36-room concentration, naming the moved content, lost spatial pleasures and retained work. Neither size is selected. The historical 350–590-hour documentation allowance predates the added moving scan and is not a current remaining-work estimate or a production budget.
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*Design · Already asked*
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**Where it stands.** The owner's ambition is about 30 hours to the apparent credits, 90 to the real ending and 100–200 for the deepest secrets. The smallest costed content set is 4 regions, 40 rooms, 12 objectives, 12 parts and 5 survivors with 3 scenes each. [Whole Game Outline](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Whole%20Game%20Outline) states: "Even the STRETCH column does not justify 30, 90 or 100–200 hours." For comparison, [Survivorlike Market Data](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data) records a median of 22 hours at review for Vampire Survivors, and [Length And Price Audit](/Reference/Length%20And%20Price%20Audit) records 26 hours to finish Noita's main story. The team asked which content band to cost first.
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**The problem.** Ninety hours across twelve objectives is seven and a half hours per objective. Either the hours or the content must change, and nothing yet argues for either. Estimates also depend on decisions 1 to 4, which change what an encounter and an expedition are.
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**Options.**
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- **A. Lower the ambition to what the genre supports.** For example, 10–15 hours to the apparent credits and about 30 to the real ending, with secrets beyond. *Cost:* a smaller promise, and an honest one.
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- **B. Keep the ambition and change the content model.** Survivorlike hours come from replayable runs, not hand-built rooms. Renewed expeditions are now selected (decision 1). A larger part pool (decision 3, option A) could support replay, but neither change establishes ninety hours of worthwhile play. *Cost:* the game moves toward roguelite and away from authored mystery.
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- **C. Measure before deciding.** Build one region, time ten expeditions and scale up. *Cost:* no reliable estimate until the prototype exists.
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**Suggestion.** A as a working figure and C for the real answer. Pick a content band only after decisions 1 to 4.
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**Read:** [Whole Game Outline](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Whole%20Game%20Outline), [Production Scope](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Production%20Scope).
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## 14. Contradictions that need one answer each
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These are places where pages disagree, or leave a small choice open, and the cleanup did not choose because the choice is a design call.
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- **Who is rescued first.** [Home And Colony Loop](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Home%20And%20Colony%20Loop) opens with Yeva's rescue but lists who is rescued first as open; [Cast And Short Rescue Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map) keeps both Yeva-first and Aster-first branches. *Suggestion:* Yeva.
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- **What Dorn says on arrival.** [Home And Colony Loop](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Home%20And%20Colony%20Loop) says he "heard a transfer cycle he still cannot explain, and then sealed the section"; in [Cast And Short Rescue Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map) hearing the cycle is a later revelation that replaces his claim that nobody crossed. *Suggestion:* keep it as the later revelation.
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- **Whether room groups rotate.** [Death Shift And Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity) lets groups "translate and rotate as units"; [Station Assembly Example](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Assembly%20Example) has regions "retain orientation", possibly only to simplify its example. *Suggestion:* groups rotate.
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- **Climbing creatures.** [Hordes and Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hordes%20and%20Builds) describes "climbing creatures" arriving from ceiling or maintenance routes; no creature in [Combat And Enemy Roster](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20And%20Enemy%20Roster) climbs. *Suggestion:* give one existing role a ceiling route, or remove the line.
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- **What made the monsters.** The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) says repeated resurrection can turn people into the creatures; [Resurrection And Corruption](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Resurrection%20And%20Corruption) says "Hospital intervention—not resurrection count alone—made at least this monster class." *Suggestion:* state that both causes exist, if that is intended.
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- **Whether survivors help with the languages.** The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) says survivors can help the player understand what they find; [Two Language Discovery Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Two%20Language%20Discovery%20Map) says "neither reads an alien language". Both hold if survivors know the station as a workplace but cannot read alien script. *Suggestion:* state that once.
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- **The shift options the owner chose from.** The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) records a choice of Option 3 from three proposals, but [Shifting Station Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Shifting%20Station%20Options) no longer describes Options 1 and 2. *Suggestion:* link the Brief to the page revision that had all three.
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- **The rescue safeguard.** The enemy freeze during a survivor's retreat is pending owner decision (decision 8), yet [Rescue And Home](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Rescue%20And%20Home) already requires "a retreat line Dorn can operate" before a crossing counts as prepared. *Suggestion:* settle decision 8, then align that page.
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- **Starting equipment.** [Survival And Loadout](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Survival%20And%20Loadout) starts the astronaut with four parts from the ship; [Progression Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Progression%20Options) offers alternatives where the Pulse Projector and Barrier Plate are found in the station. *Suggestion:* start with the ship kit, so the first expedition is about the Fork Relay.
+
The proposals remain untested. Written examples and completed editorial passes do not establish fun, balance, accessibility, feasibility or campaign duration.
