Commit ddda68

2026-09-10 11:04:33 Anonymous: Outcome 48: readable replacement — ordinary crowds with wake/gather/crest/break, physical source areas and endpoints, scale hypothesis with rework obligations, break-or-seal crest rule for temporary upgrades with no escape farming, owner reset and fresh climb at the frontier, multiple ordinary outputs and paused link editing summarised

hold the flood/combat rules.md ..
@@ 1,66 1,97 @@
-	# Hold The Horde — Combat Rules
+	# Fighting the Horde
-	**Status.** Working ordinary-horde contract after focused review. The owner accepted the route-pressure and selectively contested-work direction; this is not approval of a roster, frequency or balance. Mostly automatic ordinary fire, manual specials and the journal pause are owner-set; targeting details remain proposed.
+	*Proposed combat rules. Crowd sizes, timings and effects are hypotheses to test later. Owner decisions are marked where they appear.*
-	## Minimum player control
+	## What a fight is
-	Ordinary weapons fire mostly automatically; specials are manual, as the owner requires. The player moves, activates mapped specials, aims/faces a special where its inspected rule requires, interacts/cancels and opens the journal. Oxygen, condition, reserve/capacity, selected automatic target and special controls remain visible.
+	Crossing this station means crossing crowds. Ordinary weapons fire automatically at the nearest visible valid target — an owner decision — so the player's combat is about **where to be**: which route to take, how close to let the crowd come, which line through it to walk, which automatic effects are connected, and when to press a manual special (also an owner decision).
-	**Proposed target rule.** Each ordinary actuator shows its reach and line-of-sight requirement. When ready, it highlights and selects the nearest visible valid hostile; without one, it holds fire. Positioning therefore changes the target. Arc Emitter applies its public chain rule from that initial target. Overrides, assistance and equipment exceptions remain undecided.
+	A rig may carry more than one ordinary weapon output. What limits it is power, heat, rig space and carrying capacity, not a fixed rule of one gun; [Build Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Rules) owns those limits and how outputs connect.
-	An ordinary weapon launches when both its world-time readiness and a valid target are present. If readiness finishes without a target, it remains ready and fires when a valid target later appears; each launch consumes that readiness before the next stated interval. The controller launch is a proposed external equipment event that starts one causal wave. Rig output cannot ready the controller again or mint a launch event, and descendants retain the launch wave. Journal pause advances neither readiness nor firing. Assembly labels manual specials: a chosen Capacitor release, aimed shove or directional Barrier starts a manual external wave. Dynamo and other reactive parts remain automatic only on inspected triggers.
+	Opening the journal pauses everything, including enemies and oxygen, even in the middle of a fight — an owner decision. Changing links between rig parts inside that pause is the current proposal in Build Rules. Picking up or first fitting a newly found part, and operating station machinery, still happen while the world runs.
-	| State or interaction | Player-readable cue | Rule and persistence |
-	|---|---|---|
-	| Enemy unaware | Facing, movement and sight line are visible | Quiet movement and looking do not create global attention |
-	| Ordinary weapon ready | Eligible target is highlighted | Automatic launch starts one wave; no target holds fire |
-	| Investigating | Enemy moves toward a recent sound/last seen place | Losing the cue leads to local search, then disengagement |
-	| Local alert | Source flashes/sounds; connected entrance answers before arrival | Existing adjacent groups travel in; the source creates no enemies |
-	| Staged world action | Current stage and completed checkpoints are shown | Cancel loses the unfinished stage; completed physical checkpoints persist |
-	| Record commit | Framed view and commit progress are shown | Cancel yields no record; completion preserves one still and location |
-	| Journal open | Frozen current view and stored records | Enemies, oxygen, projectiles, alerts and action progress all pause; nothing advances or completes |
-	| Hit taken | Condition loss and any displacement are shown | Condition persists for the expedition; damage alone does not cancel an action |
+	## An ordinary crossing
-	## Ordinary enemies needed by the encounters
+	You need to reach a sampling loop at the far end of a long pressure hall. Through the entry glass you can see why nobody comes this way: the side wards are full, bodies slumped against their doors, and a few already shuffling in the main lane.
-	- A **presser** follows a reachable route and strikes close. Groups crowd lanes without shared omniscience. Separate attacks are separate external events, so Counterwall can be repeatedly fed while strikes continue.
-	- A **flanker** uses a visible connected side approach when the direct lane is obstructed. It never teleports or knows an unseen route, making facing matter without making enemy steering the experiment.
-	- A **caller** visibly braces and warns. If completed, it calls eligible adjacent groups. Displacement, obstruction or defeat prevents the call. At the jammed door, the caller and connected entrance are cued before cutting begins.
+	**Wake.** You step in and the nearest bodies turn. The sound carries. Two ward doors further down shudder, and you can tell which ones will open before they do.
-	All attack on sight. They also investigate recent local force impacts, Cycler discharges, grinding doors or stated alarms. They pursue sight or the last perceived location, then search locally and return to their route/holding behavior rather than track across the station.
+	**Gather.** Thirty or forty slow patients spill into the main lane and walk at you. A faster pack runs the side gallery. Your projector works without pause while you back up the lane, keeping the slow mass in front of you and the pillars between you and the pack.
-	## Pressure and reinforcements
+	**Crest.** The second ward door gives. There are seventy bodies in the hall now, and the fast pack has reached the pillar you were counting on. You have three choices: take the dense middle, where every spark in your arc chain finds another body; hug the wall, where fewer reach you; or run for the door and lose the hall. You take the middle. When the pack arrives you raise your barrier, and every blow against it charges the capacitor behind it.
-	A route crowd can occupy space without escalation. Reinforcements require a readable mechanism alarm or completed caller warning. Lights/sirens identify the source; sound and door movement identify the connected entrance. Alerts move only existing adjacent groups. They cannot spawn behind the player or refill a crowd because the rig killed efficiently.
+	**Break.** You release. A white wash rolls down the lane. The wards are still spilling, but more slowly than you are killing, and on your way past you throw the ward door's lock and the flow stops. Silence. For breaking the crest and sealing its source, your rig offers you a temporary upgrade for the rest of this trip.
-	Stopping the source prevents unanswered calls; groups already moving continue. An active source with unused eligible groups means its area is not clear. After every eligible group answers, it manufactures no more. Quiet observation, record framing and journal use make no call; a noisy mechanism must cue that rule before commitment.
+	**Quiet.** The loop at the end is yours now, and in it is what you came for: a sample counter stamped with a date after the hospital was supposed to be empty.
-	The lit run ending at the vestibule entrance is one readable boundary. Clearing its visible crowd removes that encounter population for the expedition, not the distinct door caller, an active source or unused adjacent groups. A living enemy outside may later walk or investigate through a connected route with sight, sound or door cues. That is ordinary movement, not success-triggered replacement.
+	**What made it work,** if it works: the danger was readable before it arrived, the build paid off *because* the crowd was dense, and the silence was earned rather than given. **How it could fail:** a crest that goes on too long becomes exhausting rather than exciting; bodies and effects bury the clue you came for; or the wall is always the safe line, so nobody ever takes the middle and the build never sings.
-	## Action interruption and discovery
+	## The four beats
-	World-time actions state checkpoints. Each cut bolt and each completed hand-cycle leaves a visible physical state that survives later expeditions. Canceling or leaving reach loses only the unfinished stage and spent time/oxygen. Damage alone does not cancel; readable displacement or an occupied control can. A later obstruction, powered brake or damage may block the next stage, but cannot replace a bolt or erase a latched position. Backing out still requires reaching an exit past any obstruction or pursuer.
+	Most fights follow a readable shape.
-	Recording is atomic: interruption before commit yields no record; completion persists. The journal freezes the world even in combat but finishes no door, attack, alarm or record. Quiet looking and paused thought remain; sampling or changing the world uses running time.
+	1. **Wake.** Something disturbs an occupied space — your arrival, noisy work, an alarm, a machine you started. You see sleeping bodies, moving shadows, opening doors, and you hear which routes are going to answer.
+	2. **Gather.** A slow majority fills the broad lanes. Faster packs take side routes, climbers come from ceilings and ducts, and a few heavy bodies bend the flow so you have to change course.
+	3. **Crest.** Two or three movement patterns overlap. You choose the dense line your build rewards, the safer line that protects your condition, or a costly retreat that spends oxygen and position. If you are working toward something that moves — a carriage, a rising lift, a walking scan — it keeps going through the fight rather than turning the room into a defence circle.
+	4. **Break.** Your build kills faster than the routes can fill, you close a bulkhead or a source, or you outrun the woken area. The music, the flow and the room's silhouette all release together. The lull that follows belongs to looking, salvaging and deciding where to go.
-	## Winning, withdrawing and returning
+	## Where crowds come from
-	Within an expedition, defeated enemies stay defeated. Survivors search and disengage locally rather than reset at a doorway. A deliberately disabled alert persists as infrastructure; otherwise later power follows the mechanism's stated state.
+	Crowds come from **source areas**: wards, lift wells, ducts, flooded concourses, sealed volumes — places that physically hold bodies and connect to the route you are on. Bodies always arrive through routes you can see or hear. There is no secret timer, nothing appears behind you, and no extra wave arrives because your build was efficient.
-	A decisive rig can decide an encounter. Cascade clearing the run defeats that crowd; a quiet return stays clear unless a separately cued living enemy approaches. The wider door area is quiet only after its caller/source, present enemies and travelling groups are resolved, with no unused eligible groups behind an active source. Counterwall can preserve completed door stages; Cycler can spend cargo to open a temporary lane, not a solid lasting barrier. None causes replacement elites, invisible escalation or reduced reward. Victory buys access, time, oxygen margin and discovery opportunity.
+	A source keeps feeding while its route is open and disturbed. It stops when you **seal** its route, **leave** its attention range, **exhaust** the surge it holds, or **kill** faster than it can feed. Finite sources are fine. What the design avoids is an encounter that is over after five enemies.
-	A hit visibly reduces condition and narrows the margin before damage death. Lost condition persists for the expedition with no passive field recovery in this proposal. Returning alive or reviving aboard restores ordinary condition for the next expedition; field healing and lasting injuries remain undecided. On death, everything still carried—including unused loot—returns aboard with the astronaut. Cycler inputs and canister oxygen already consumed stay spent; dropped or installed property remains where left. Combat adds no replacement tax or substitute death penalty. Working under attack still risks losing the current position, unfinished action and time while completed world changes persist under their own rules.
+	**Scale, as a hypothesis.** In a broad ward, dock or gallery a developed crowd might show 80 to 150 bodies at once and pass several hundred through its full crest. A narrow corridor shows fewer at once but a continuous river through doors, lifts and ducts. A small room can host a short teaching moment — one new creature, one new warning — but the way to it still carries the crowd. Where a placed room is too small for the crowd its encounter needs, that is rework to do, not free capacity; [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory) lists those obligations.
-	Withdrawal is valid but physical. Completed records/checkpoints remain; unfinished stages do not. Detours spend oxygen and may defer the objective; abandoned alarms may stay active. Later, authored evidence and deliberate changes persist while population may differ. Breadcrumbs promise no safety.
+	## What wakes more
-	## Encounter policy and alternative
+	Noise and machinery wake the next source. Loud work, alarms and a Caller that finishes its call can each wake an adjacent area, and its route is always shown before the crowd arrives. Cutting an alarm, stopping a Caller or sealing the answering route prevents that wake; bodies already on their way keep coming.
-	**Preferred scope:** route pressure is common; mechanism alarms and investigative defence are selective authored encounters. Crowds then alter access and expedition choices without making every clue demand combat, while a few moving mechanisms let defence builds protect world-time observation.
+	Letting it happen can be a choice, too. A player with a strong build may want the second surge. Deliberately waking a large machine brings a much larger surge and often reveals new space — [The Game](/Hold%20The%20Flood/The%20Game) shows one.
-	**Alternative: visible continuous attention.** Loud combat and most world actions fill a meter that brings nearby groups. It offers one systemic pressure rule with fewer authored sources. Its cost is a repeated noise tax on doors and experimentation, encouraging meter optimization over mystery; spatial provenance must stay clear.
+	## Earning quiet
-	Prefer local sources because arrival is understandable and quiet discovery remains possible. Reopen if alerts are too sparse/easy or their authoring becomes formulaic. Prose establishes no frequency, readability, fun, balance, performance or pacing.
+	Breaking a crest earns a lull: time to investigate, salvage and choose a route. A broken crest shows whether its source is sealed, exhausted or still able to feed. You can also earn quiet early by sealing a source before its crowd fully arrives, or simply get out by crossing a bulkhead or outrunning the woken area.
-	## Self-check and dependencies
+	Quiet does not last forever. An occupied area next door can still send bodies through a visible route, with sound and door movement to warn you. But a place you actually cleared does not refill by itself.
-	Attack ancestry, reinforcement scope, interruption and persistence are explicit. Successful power stays successful; avoidance has opportunity costs without becoming failure. No attack-on-recording or global reset is imported. Enemy senses, population placement, targeting overrides/assistance, accessibility and frequency remain dependencies.
+	## What earns a temporary upgrade
+
+	*Proposal.* A temporary upgrade is earned by **resolving a crest** — winning the room or shutting it. You resolve a crest by **breaking** it, when the source runs dry or you out-kill it and the room visibly releases, or by **sealing** it, when you close its door, hatch or lock as a finished act. **Running away does not count.** Leaving the woken area saves your life but earns nothing, and stepping back in resumes the same unresolved crest rather than starting a new one, so there is nothing to farm.
+
+	Each source area pays out once per trip. A crest is the peak a room announces — its feeding mouths open fully, several movement patterns overlap, warning lights and music shift — not a straggler or a lone creature, so a small teaching room awards nothing. A large machine you deliberately wake is its own source and may offer a rarer choice. What the upgrades are, and how many you choose between, belongs to Build Rules.
+
+	**Rhythm.** An ordinary trip toward one objective crosses roughly three to five sources beyond ground you have already cleared: a small side source or two early, a larger hall or two, then the objective's own crest. A player who fights or seals their way through gets a choice every few minutes of travel, not only at the climax. Sealing gives a weaker player a way to earn power without winning every fight, at the cost of the bigger payoff a full break brings. **How it could fail:** crests that come too often turn choosing into a chore; too rarely, and the build barely grows between climaxes.
+
+	## Working under pressure
+
+	Some objectives are physical work: cutting bolts, turning a valve, framing a record. Prefer work that moves with you over work that pins you to a panel. When work does hold you in place, it shows its current stage, and every completed checkpoint stays done. You lose only the unfinished stage — by cancelling, being knocked off the control, or having a creature occupy it. Damage alone does not stop you. Capturing a record is all or nothing: interrupted before it commits, there is no record.
+
+	## Coming home, dying and the next climb
+
+	An expedition ends when you are back aboard, whether you walked or revived.
+
+	- **Temporary combat upgrades end on every return home** — an owner decision. Each expedition starts a fresh climb toward spectacular power.
+	- **Everything physical you carry comes home**, even after death — an owner decision. Oxygen breathed and material consumed stay spent. Ordinary condition is restored for the next trip; field healing and lasting injuries are not yet designed.
+	- **Walking home alive** leaves the station as it was. Places you cleared stay cleared, and places still occupied stay dangerous.
+	- **Dying** shifts the station — an owner decision. Unconnected areas gain new neighbours, transient crowds reset, and a new set of crowds comes with the new arrangement. That is never a reaction to how well your build did, and death carries no extra penalty beyond losing your position and any unfinished work.
+
+	**Where the fresh climb happens.** After a living return you walk back out through ground you cleared, at your starting power, and the climb begins again at the first occupied source beyond it: the frontier. Cleared ground should be quick to cross, so that a reset upgrade does not mean a long flat walk before anything happens. Occupied areas beside a cleared route can still drift into it visibly. That is ordinary movement, not a respawn. Sources you already broke or sealed stay resolved on a living return, so they cannot pay out again; the next choices come from the frontier. What the upgrades do is described in [Hordes and Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hordes%20and%20Builds) and Build Rules.
+
+	## The creatures
+
+	[Combat And Enemy Roster](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20And%20Enemy%20Roster) owns each creature's warning, action and recovery. In a crowd they play distinct parts. **Pressers** are the slow majority that fills the lane. **Flankers** are the fast packs on side routes. **Callers** wake the next source. A **Boltspitter** demands a ranged line, a **Clampcrawler** occupies the control you are working, and a **Veilbearer** briefly hides the crowd behind it. Three special creatures — **Bellback**, **Shutterback** and **Glass Siphon** — change force, cover or your oxygen clock enough to deserve a featured entrance.
+
+	Everything attacks on sight, investigates recent noise and pursues what it saw, then searches locally and gives up. Nothing knows where you are without perceiving you, and nothing tracks you across the station.
+
+	## A climax
+
+	The balance gallery is broad, and it is the right kind of room for a big fight. As you enter, a Bellback plants itself across a fixed rib, its chest filling for a pressure wave, while the two feeding mouths at the gallery's far end are already crowded. Around you the station's own machinery keeps time: a Breath Bank draws across one lane on a three-beat rhythm, and a balance chamber tilts toward whichever side carries more weight.
+
+	The crest comes from both mouths at once. The Bellback's wave shoves bodies into the chamber, and the floor tips. A cautious player seals one mouth early, shelters at the rib and crosses on the Bank's quiet beat. A player with a crowd build steps into the neutral lane and lets both mouths empty into it — and then releases. In the break, one pin through the rib locks the chamber permanently, and on the far wall a mark that matches the sample counter turns an old record into a lead.
+
+	**How it could fail:** three simultaneous rhythms become unreadable, so the player dies to something they could not see coming.
+
+	## Still open
+
+	Target overrides and aim assistance; damage, health, warning timings and displacement; exact crowd sizes, performance and effect density on screen; how surviving creatures hold on a living return; the exact spacing of crests along an objective route and what the upgrades do; and whether the frontier stays close enough after a reset for the fresh climb to feel quick. Nothing here is tested.