2026-09-07 21:44:08
Anonymous:
Author response to review 117: cache lifecycle and stake stated plainly; loadout-protection rationale replaces cheap-exit; four recovery states; depletion reach corrected; journal ranking removed; delivery conditioned on sending
hold the flood/death and persistence.md ..
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# Hold The Horde — Death and Persistence
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**Status.** A provisional comparison for review, not owner-approved. The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) requires that death returns the astronaut to the ship for a reason hidden in the station; that cause is not addressed here. Death losses, map structure, rescue logistics and colony systems remain undecided. Every claim below about how these rules would shape play is a prediction, not an observation.
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**Status.** A provisional comparison for review, not owner-approved. The [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief) requires that death returns the astronaut to the ship for a reason hidden in the station; that cause is not addressed here. Damage and oxygen depletion both kill — that is fixed; oxygen quantities are not. Map structure, rescue logistics and colony systems remain undecided. Every claim below about how these rules would shape play is a prediction, not an observation.
## Recommended rules: recoverable cache, retained record
- Equipment and salvage carried at the moment of death remain as a cache at the place of death, contents unchanged.
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- A cache persists until recovered. A later death does not destroy an earlier one; caches coexist, and entity resets do not disturb them, a cache being the player's property rather than station state.
- Journal records and discovered-location references persist through death.
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- Equipment left aboard the ship is untouched, so some expedition is always possible.
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- Colony members already delivered are unaffected by the astronaut's death.
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- A person under escort but not yet delivered is not retroactively rescued and remains an unresolved situation in the station. Whether such a person can be permanently lost is a separate rescue and colony decision, not settled here in either direction.
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- Colony members already sent to the ship are unaffected by the astronaut's death.
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- A person rescued but not yet sent to the ship is not retroactively rescued by revival and remains an unresolved situation in the station. Whether such a person can be permanently lost is a separate rescue and colony decision, not settled here in either direction.
- World changes are limited to location continuity. Enemies, traps and mechanisms may reset on their own terms.
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**What death threatens, stated plainly.** Nothing destroys a cache. Dying costs the use of everything carried until a journey retrieves it, leaves new salvage unbanked, and may demand capabilities no longer to hand. That is the whole stake; naming it is better than implying one the rules do not create. Decay or fragility would turn a recovery choice into a deadline and push toward the compulsory errand this arrangement exists to avoid, so none is proposed.
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## State table
| | Returning alive | Dying |
|---|---|---|
| Equipment brought from the ship | Returns with the astronaut, immediately reusable | Held in the cache; unavailable until recovered |
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| Equipment and salvage acquired during the expedition | Banked; available to the colony | Held in the cache; never banked by dying |
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| Equipment and salvage acquired during the expedition | Banked on arrival | Held in the cache; never banked by dying |
| Stored clues | Retained | Retained |
| Relevant world changes | Discovered locations persist; entity state may reset | Identical |
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| A person not yet delivered | Delivered and joins the colony | Not retroactively rescued; situation unresolved |
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| A person rescued during the expedition | Joins the colony only if actually sent to the ship | Not retroactively rescued; situation unresolved |
## The next choice after each outcome
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Returning alive asks what to do with what was banked: install it, hold it, or re-outfit for a deeper objective. Dying asks whether to mount a recovery with what remains aboard and accept a weaker loadout, or write the cache off and go elsewhere with the knowledge intact. These are different questions, not the same question at different severities.
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Returning alive asks what to do with what was banked: install it, hold it, or re-outfit for a deeper objective. Dying asks whether to retrieve the cache now, defer it, or write it off and spend the retained knowledge elsewhere. Where death interrupted a rescue, revisiting that person competes with retrieving the cache and with any other objective; which pull is stronger depends on the situation and is not fixed by these rules.
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## The alternative, and why it is not recommended
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## The alternative
**Expedition rollback.** Equipment held before departure returns with the astronaut; equipment and salvage acquired during the failed expedition are lost; records persist; rollback is limited to the objective's state rather than the whole station.
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Rollback protects an assembled build from confiscation, which directly serves expressive play. Its weakness is that material stakes rest entirely on newly acquired items while records and the pre-departure build both survive, so death after the important clue is recorded becomes a cheap exit rather than a failure. The recommended rules instead place the loss on the pack — the object the brief's required equipment-versus-salvage tradeoff already runs through — so death expresses that decision rather than adding a separate penalty.
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Rollback has real strengths. It protects an assembled build from confiscation, which serves expressive play directly, and it produces no gear-recovery errands and no compounding, because the player resumes with the capability they left home with.
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**Why the cache is still recommended.** Under rollback, whatever was carried from the ship comes back intact, so the loadout decision carries no consequence at death and bringing more equipment is free. The brief's required tradeoff is equipment against salvage in one pack; rollback protects one side of it outright, while the cache makes that same decision the thing death acts on.
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**Deliberate death is not a point of difference.** Under either arrangement, a player who has recorded what they came for, whose pack holds little they need soon, and who is far from home on thin oxygen, may find dying preferable to walking back. Only the aftermath differs: rollback returns the gear and destroys new material, the cache keeps everything and charges a journey. Whether that behaviour is acceptable is untested and not settled here.
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A third arrangement, returning everything carried including newly acquired salvage, is not compared: it would make deliberate death a reliable way to bank salvage and extract for free.
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A third arrangement, returning everything carried including newly acquired salvage, is excluded: it banks new material for free, making deliberate death strictly better than returning.
## Accepted costs
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- **Failure can compound.** The expedition that killed the astronaut is the one that must be repeated with less.
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- **Confiscation risk may suppress experimentation.** An expressive build is a large investment of carried parts, and a rule that can withhold parts discourages exactly that investment. This is a predicted effect.
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- **Retained records do not protect discovery absolutely.** A lost record could hold evidence not yet understood, and a player cannot reliably re-capture what they did not recognise as important. Retention's value is therefore strongest for evidence already understood and weakest for evidence not yet read. Retention resolves a dependency left open by [Oxygen and Observation](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Oxygen%20and%20Observation); it does not make discovery riskless.
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- **Failure can compound.** The expedition that killed the astronaut may be the one that must be repeated with less.
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- **Confiscation risk may suppress experimentation.** An expressive build is a large investment of carried parts, and a rule that withholds parts discourages that investment. A predicted effect.
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- **Retained records do not guarantee discovery.** Retention has two distinct benefits and neither ranks above the other: it avoids recapturing evidence already understood, and it preserves evidence not yet read for a later inference. It resolves a dependency left open by [Oxygen and Observation](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Oxygen%20and%20Observation) without making discovery riskless.
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## Recovery, and when it is not available
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Recovery needs more than a place name: contents must persist as they were and the site stay locatable. Four situations are distinct and should not be collapsed.
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- **Available** — the cache can be reached, carried and returned with the capability now aboard. Retrieval is a genuine choice against other objectives.
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- **Deferred** — not reachable yet, but perhaps later as reach or capability grows. The cache waits; setting it aside costs nothing.
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- **Abandoned** — the player judges the contents not worth the trip. This must remain credible.
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- **Compulsory** — retrieval is possible but no reasonable alternative exists. This is the failure state, and the condition that would reopen the preference.
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## Minimum dependencies
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Dying of depletion does not by itself put a cache beyond reach. Depletion often reflects time spent searching, fighting or detouring rather than distance, and a direct informed route may comfortably reach what a wandering one could not; a lighter loadout can also carry more canisters. Where a cache genuinely cannot be reached, carried and returned within supply, recovery is deferred rather than forced.
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Recovery needs more than a place name. The cache's contents must persist as they were, its site must stay locatable, and a route to it must be survivable with a reduced loadout — otherwise abandonment is forced rather than chosen and recovery becomes compulsory. Equipment stored aboard must remain enough to mount some expedition, so one death cannot lock the player out. These are constraints on the equipment and station systems, not a replacement economy.
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**Equipment-system dependency.** The ship must be able to outfit a minimum useful expedition even when everything carried is cached, including a means of carrying oxygen. That is a requirement on the equipment system, not something established elsewhere: [Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison)'s basic-defence rule concerns two example builds holding the compressor head and does not establish an equipment-free floor.
## What would reopen this preference
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Recovery becoming a mandatory errand rather than a genuine choice; an equipment system in which replacements are scarce enough that abandoning a cache is never credible; or later owner-authorised observation showing that experimentation collapses under confiscation risk. Rollback would then be the more honest arrangement. No such evidence exists, and none can come from written comparison.
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Recovery becoming compulsory rather than a genuine choice; replacements scarce enough that abandoning a cache is never credible; or later owner-authorised observation showing experimentation collapsing under confiscation risk. Rollback would then be the more honest arrangement.
## Unresolved
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Oxygen quantities and the depletion threshold; map generation and respawn rules; the full rescue and colony systems; whether an authored survivor can ever be permanently lost; and the cause of revival, which remains untouched.
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Oxygen quantities; map generation and respawn rules; the full rescue and colony systems; whether an authored survivor can ever be permanently lost; whether deliberate death is an acceptable tactic; and the cause of revival, untouched.
