2026-09-10 11:50:23
Anonymous:
Keep reward resolution and quiet-space clarification adjacent to their own conditions
hold the flood/encounter and mechanism placement inventory.md ..
@@ 24,7 24,7 @@
Warnings remain visible independently when they overlap. **Every placement except E03's deliberately quiet first latch lesson is a crowd encounter fed by named source areas** — wards, lift wells, ducts or sealed volumes that physically hold bodies. Sources release their crowds through **feeding apertures** — grilles, hatches, ward doors, ducts, gantry mouths — shown before anything arrives. Feeding apertures are distinct from the walking passages a room needs for the ship, rescue, records, clamps or exploration, and sealing an aperture never closes a walking passage. A placement's first readable cue may be one creature, but the route to and through it carries a crowd, following [Combat Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20Rules). Nothing enters except through a shown aperture or route, no creature materializes without a physical approach, and no source reacts to build strength, kill speed or reward. A shown route can still carry creatures behind the player. Defeated creatures stay defeated for the expedition. A different finite population variant is selected only at a **death shift**, never on a living return and never on a load. A living return preserves this arrangement's population state entirely — resolved stages stay spent, occupied sources stay occupied, and nothing is replaced, escalated or reduced because the result was clean. E03's later variant remains restricted to a later death shift exactly as stated in its own row.
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**Stages and temporary upgrades (proposal).** A **stage** is a finite, announced pressure release from an identified physical source. Its peak — feeding apertures fully open, overlapping movement patterns, warning lights and music shifting — is what the player reads as the crest. While a stage is still feeding, killing faster than it arrives suppresses a lane but does not stop it. A stage **resolves** when the player clears all of its committed arrivals, or completes a physical seal that ends its access. A seal leaves already-arrived creatures active: reward resolution is separate from a safe quiet space, which also needs those threats cleared, bypassed or physically separated. Either earns the **same** single temporary upgrade choice in [Build Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Rules), and clearing or sealing early, before the peak, qualifies immediately. **Escaping resolves nothing:** leaving the pressure boundary saves the astronaut, who keeps carried property and knowledge, but earns no consolation choice, and re-entering resumes the same unresolved stage. Each stage pays once for the current arrangement: it stays spent across a living return, cannot be farmed by leaving and re-entering, and reopening the same seal does not create a new stage. Whether a seal stays closed follows its owning mechanism. Further machinery releases count as separate stages only where they are authored, announced and sourced; a deliberately woken larger stage may offer a transformation. Cleared travel earns nothing, earned-but-unchosen offers expire aboard with temporary power, and death itself pays nothing. Rescue eligibility is a separate question, stated below. Upgrade effects belong to Build Rules.
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**Stages and temporary upgrades (proposal).** A **stage** is a finite, announced pressure release from an identified physical source. Its peak — feeding apertures fully open, overlapping movement patterns, warning lights and music shifting — is what the player reads as the crest. While a stage is still feeding, killing faster than it arrives suppresses a lane but does not stop it. A stage **resolves** when the player clears all of its committed arrivals, or completes a physical seal that ends its access. Either earns the **same** single temporary upgrade choice in [Build Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Rules), and clearing or sealing early, before the peak, qualifies immediately. A seal leaves already-arrived creatures active: reward resolution is separate from a safe quiet space, which also needs those threats cleared, bypassed or physically separated. **Escaping resolves nothing:** leaving the pressure boundary saves the astronaut, who keeps carried property and knowledge, but earns no consolation choice, and re-entering resumes the same unresolved stage. Each stage pays once for the current arrangement: it stays spent across a living return, cannot be farmed by leaving and re-entering, and reopening the same seal does not create a new stage. Whether a seal stays closed follows its owning mechanism. Further machinery releases count as separate stages only where they are authored, announced and sourced; a deliberately woken larger stage may offer a transformation. Cleared travel earns nothing, earned-but-unchosen offers expire aboard with temporary power, and death itself pays nothing. Rescue eligibility is a separate question, stated below. Upgrade effects belong to Build Rules.
**Cadence and route support.** As an illustration, a sustained outing might offer three to five meaningful choices — a foundation, a branch, later refinements, and possibly a transformation from a larger optional stage — while a short trip can earn one. The ten placements alone supply only one or two stages each, so that rhythm depends on ordinary travel stages along the routes between them, which are **not yet authored or verified**. The PM's route check of representative Arrangement A found R25's major setpiece reachable directly from cleared R11 after a reset, with no ordinary stage between. Every major placement therefore keeps a baseline approach that needs no temporary upgrade, and route support for the climb is next-assignment room-layout work, not claimed here. If stages come too often the rhythm becomes a chore; too rarely and the build barely grows between climaxes.
