Commit e972d0

2026-09-09 10:41:37 Anonymous: Outcome 34: 38-state main cue/action/refusal inventory with provenance and non-colour/non-audio forms, cue priority and one clutter cut, journal and manifest structure in prose, proposed controls/options/defaults, four paper walkthroughs

/dev/null .. hold the flood/player information and options.md
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+	# Hold The Horde — Player Information and Options
+
+	**Status.** First-pass inventory of the main player cues, actions and refusals, a prose structure for the journal and manifest, and a proposed controls/options set. It is not screens, art, an implementation, a usability or conformance claim, a complete string/glyph/dialogue inventory, or an owner selection of any pending question. Every binding, default and number is a first-pass choice, not a balanced or validated one.
+
+	Read live: Brief `4b0a3bcb…`, [Player Information](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Player%20Information) `34f8d4a0…` (accepted first-pass parent, not repeated here), [Survival and Loadout](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Survival%20And%20Loadout) `892afa4a…`, [Equipment Catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue) `737b3cfd…`, [Combat and Enemy Roster](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20And%20Enemy%20Roster) `f1fe0d9a…`, [Save and Content State](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Save%20And%20Content%20State) `438cdf35…`, [Station Room and Module Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Room%20And%20Module%20Inventory) `d4ef2497…`, [Home and Colony Loop](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Home%20And%20Colony%20Loop) `5bff3436…`, [Two Language Discovery Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Two%20Language%20Discovery%20Map) `df0f48f5…`, [Story and Ending Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Story%20And%20Ending%20Map) `03c9cb8e…`, [Cast and Short Rescue Map](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Cast%20And%20Short%20Rescue%20Map) `6456406b…`, [Equipment Acquisition and Rig Growth](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Acquisition%20And%20Rig%20Growth) `f5f6d768…`. [Encounter and Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory) `5c1a9ad6…` is used **conditionally** for hosted warning and withdrawal-reset needs; nothing here treats its placements as owner choice.
+
+	**Four prohibitions this layer accepts.** No unseen knowledge is made current. No alien script is translated automatically. No loot is unloaded, sold or absorbed without an explicit player transition. No cost is hidden behind an affirmative colour: any commit that spends, consumes, hands over, installs or puts an object out of reach for this trip states that in words on the preview itself, at the same weight as the confirming control.
+
+	## Cue priority and coexistence
+
+	Six bands, highest first. **Bands 1–4 may all be live at once and must never suppress, dim or overdraw one another**; they are separated by fixed position on the display, not by colour and not by taking turns.
+
+	1. **Body in jeopardy** — suit tank crossing the return margin; condition near death. Anchored, never suppressed by anything.
+	2. **Commitment in jeopardy** — a staged action, oxygen coupling or survivor transfer about to be lost to displacement or an occupied control.
+	3. **A locked threat with a direction** — a wind-up already committed at the astronaut: Boltspitter's final rail click, Clampcrawler's jaw-flash lock, Bellback's planted cone, a Caller's completing brace.
+	4. **What the player acts with** — ordinary readiness and its selected valid target; manual special availability and facing.
+	5. **Refusals** — shown at the moment of the attempt, never deferred and never silent.
+	6. **Persistent facts** — carried/installed labels, join state, roster counts, evidence provenance. Available on inspection or in the journal, not continuously.
+
+	**One cue in each band carries the direction marker.** When two band-3 threats are locked at once, both keep their own body cue, but only the nearer committed one takes the single peripheral direction marker; the other is still shown at its source. This is a deliberate choice against drawing two competing arrows, and it is the thing most likely to be wrong in play.
+
+	**The clutter cut.** During world time the field display does **not** carry the rig diagram — ports, links and which branch is blocked. It keeps only per-actuator readiness and selected target, the manual special's facing, and storage saturation as a state change rather than a running meter. The full diagram is one input away in the paused journal. **Sacrificed:** seeing at a glance why a branch did nothing. **Kept:** everything needed to act, and the evidence needed to work it out afterwards.
+
+	## The main cue and action inventory
+
+	Thirty-eight states in nine bands. "Non-colour" and "non-audio" name the form that must carry the same information when colour or sound is unavailable.
+
+	### Body and supply — 5
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Suit tank level | Worn instrument, direct reading | Filled bar with numeric level and a marked notch at the return margin | None; it is a reading |
+	| Return margin crossed | Worn instrument, computed from level only | Notch reached plus a persistent text state; no colour change alone | None forced; nothing auto-returns |
+	| Selected canister and fill | Manifest and coupling control; four states — ordinary-full, prepared-full, partial, empty | Four distinct labelled fills, not one gradient; prepared-full marked as its own state | Couple/decouple; coupling is world time. Uncoupled while out of reach |
+	| Coupling transfer in progress | The act itself, in world time | Incremental progress with amount already moved | Cancel keeps what transferred; damage alone does not cancel |
+	| Condition and displacement | Direct, on being hit | Condition step plus a distinct displacement mark | None; displacement can lose an unfinished stage |
+
+	### Equipment, capacity and rig — 6
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Carrying capacity used/free | Manifest; one shared total | Two numerals, used and free, never merged with area | Pickup, retrieval or departure over capacity **refuses before commitment**, item left visibly where it was |
+	| Active rig area used/free | Manifest; separate figure | Occupied spaces shown as spaces, not a percentage | Install refuses on full area; moving a part to inactive cargo frees area, not capacity |
+	| Carried vs installed vs dropped | Manifest sections; installed and dropped entries name their place | Section membership plus explicit "installed at / dropped at", no icon-only distinction | Reclaim by walking there; reclaim refuses on capacity, leaving it installed |
+	| Ordinary readiness and selected target | Per actuator, direct | Readiness as a discrete filled state; the selected target carries an outline marker, not a tint | Reposition to change the candidate. **No valid target holds fire, and shows no marker** |
+	| Manual special availability and facing | Per control, direct | Availability state plus a facing wedge drawn from the astronaut | Activate. A release with no acceptable receiver refuses **before** starting a wave or spending stored charge |
+	| Stored charge and saturation | Per storage part; detail on inspection | Saturation announced as a state change with text; running level in the journal | Configure the release trigger; manual release starts a new wave, rig-triggered release keeps the incoming wave |
+
+	### Paid rewire and controller eligibility — 3
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Field edit in progress | The act, in world time | Stage shown; the journal cannot finish it | Cancel commits nothing; the last completed arrangement stands |
+	| Direct-link validity | Preview between two accessible ports | Valid shows a directed connector with an arrowhead; invalid refuses with the reason named in words | Commit or abandon; an invalid link costs nothing |
+	| Controller eligibility | Inspection of the source and its downstream actuators | Text naming which ready actuator currently gates the event | None directly. A blocked branch neither buffers nor creates a second event, and this is stated where it is inspected |
+
+	### Work, commitment and withdrawal — 4
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Work stage and completed checkpoints | The mechanism, direct | Discrete completed marks, each one a separate mark | Continue, cancel, leave. Cancel loses only the unfinished stage |
+	| Commit preview with its actual spend | Before any consuming commit | The spend written in words beside the control, same weight as the confirm | Confirm or decline. Protected objectives refuse selection outright |
+	| Interruption | Cancel, displacement out of reach, occupied control | Names which of the three occurred, and what was preserved | Re-approach; damage alone never cancels |
+	| Withdrawal boundary and reset | Crossing a named physical host face | The face itself is the boundary; re-entry begins from the shown neutral warning | Cross to reset a temporary phase; completed work is never reset |
+
+	### Threat — 3
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Hostile present, aware or unaware | Sight, facing, movement | Posture and facing; awareness as a distinct silhouette state | Move, look, avoid. Looking and journal use raise no alarm |
+	| Locked wind-up aimed at the astronaut | The creature's own visible tell | The tell itself plus a peripheral edge marker at its bearing | Break line, place the barrier, displace, accept the hit |
+	| Alarm source, Caller brace, answering entrance | Source lights/motion; the entrance itself | Source mark plus a bearing marker for the entrance that will answer | Stop the source or the brace; a completed call moves only existing adjacent groups |
+
+	### Place and evidence — 5
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Current room and observed entrance | Direct, from where the astronaut stands | Named room plus the entrances actually seen | Walk through. Nothing lists an unobserved neighbour |
+	| Reverse breadcrumb this life | Passages actually traversed | A back-trail to the last anchor, marked "traversed this life" | Follow it; it promises no present safety and no oxygen cost |
+	| Historical route or adjacency | An earlier life's record, dated by arrangement | Marked historical in words and drawn in a different line weight | Read and plan; it never re-labels itself current |
+	| Unknown route | Nothing | Nothing drawn; absence is the honest answer | Go and look |
+	| Committed record and provenance | The capture; the record thereafter | Place, arrangement/life, source kind and factual limit on the record | Capture is world time and atomic — interrupted before commit yields nothing |
+
+	### Station joining — 5
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Face signature family A / B / R | Inspection of the face | The count is the form: one, two or three repeated marks, in three distinct outline shapes. Amber/blue/red are decoration on top | Attempt a join where a face is currently adjacent |
+	| Flow direction, and transform faces | The face; a local test pulse | Arrowheads into or out of the face; a transform face shows both its named sides | Run the local test; it reports present behaviour only |
+	| Join attempt result | The latch preview at the seam | Refusal draws the actual reason — for two outputs, two arrowheads meeting head to head | A mismatch refuses, spends no pulse, changes no existing join |
+	| Walking / latched / diagnostic | Three separate readings at the same place | Three separately labelled states, never one combined indicator | Walk, latch, release, re-power. Losing diagnostic power never un-latches |
+	| Roster counts | The gallery display, an instrument report | Three numerals: joined, discovered-unjoined, anonymous | None. It names no room, face, route or location |
+
+	### People and home — 5
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Rescue state | The witnessed physical fact behind it | One of five words — waiting, prepared, in transfer, aborted, Sent — with that fact named | Prepare, signal, hold, abort. **Either party may abort, and the display names who did** |
+	| Confirmation provenance | Whether the astronaut saw it or the survivor reported it | Stated on the state itself; a survivor's flow confirmation stays theirs | None; it is never promoted to direct observation |
+	| Unconfirmed outcome | Death during transfer | Last confirmed state kept, present location and outcome marked unconfirmed in words | Nothing asserted. Delivery, refuge, loss and safety are all withheld |
+	| Home project state | The fixture aboard | Four labelled states: unavailable, setup incomplete, commissioned, person not participating now | Inspect, commission in world time, postpone. Postponing costs nothing |
+	| Participant readiness | The person's own visible signal | Their signal, plus a subtitle when it is speech | The astronaut acts after it; nothing begins on their behalf |
+
+	### Story and late state — 2
+
+	| State | Where sensed, provenance | Non-colour / non-audio form | Action, and the refusal |
+	|---|---|---|---|
+	| Isolation coupling: live or isolated | The coupling's own tell, at the room | Tell present or dark, stated in words; historical story records stay dated and separate | Re-seat, leave, postpone — world-time work. No remote "safe" verdict appears |
+	| Departure readiness, pending owner choice | Ship functions actually installed | A list of actual functions, not a progress bar | Inspect. If the departure package is adopted, undocking carries an explicit irreversible preview |
+
+	## The journal and the manifest, in prose
+
+	**The pause.** Opening the journal freezes every world-time process — enemies, oxygen, readiness, projectiles, mechanisms, warnings and work stages — and completes none of them. Note editing is available there because it changes no world state. Capture, rig edits, oxygen transfer and any payload change stay in world time and cannot be finished from a paused page. **Whether any other screen pauses is a proposal here, not an owner requirement:** the proposed default is that the manifest pauses aboard and does not pause in the station, and that the options screen pauses everywhere. That default needs owner reaction.
+
+	**Journal sections — five.** *Records* holds committed captures, each carrying its place, its arrangement and life, its source kind and its factual limit. *Comparison* pins records side by side for zoom and hand-highlighting; every link says player-linked, and an on-request lookalike suggestion is labelled software-generated. *Notes* is freeform, revision-preserving and never parsed, graded or scored. *Testimony* holds attributed statements with speaker, stated basis and what is that person's interpretation. *Places* lists rooms actually entered, and for each: what was completed there, what is installed there, which joins are known, and the routes recorded to and from it — every route stamped with its arrangement.
+
+	*Places* is a list, not a map. It has no spatial layout, because a layout would draw geography the astronaut has not walked.
+
+	**Navigation and the working flow.** One list, one detail, and every entry reachable from the place it concerns and back again. The flow is capture → note → comparison → revisit: the player commits a still in world time, annotates it in the pause, pins it against another record, and later returns and captures a **new** state beside the old one. A revisit never overwrites an earlier record; the earlier one becomes historical evidence rather than a corrected fact.
+
+	**Live versus stored.** A live reading exists only while the astronaut is at that instrument or face. It is drawn in its own band, it never files itself into Records without a capture, and it disappears on walking away. A stored reading never renders in the live band. This is the one rule that keeps a historical route from being read as a current one.
+
+	**Provenance and the player's own hand.** Every item says which of four things it is — direct observation, the player's own record, attributed testimony, or an instrument/software report — and carries that source's known limit. The player's annotation is visibly theirs and is never mixed into the evidence it sits beside.
+
+	**The manifest — four sections.** *Worn* sits outside both figures: tank, navigation, journal, cutter. *Active rig* charges one carrying unit and one rig space per part. *Inactive cargo* charges carrying capacity only. *Elsewhere* lists what is installed at a named place, dropped at a recorded place, or seated in a home project — **and shows no capacity at all, because it is not carried.** Each entry names what it is, where it came from, and what it costs of each figure. Used and free are shown for capacity and for area separately, never merged into one number.
+
+	**Refusal and commit preview.** Capacity or area overflow refuses before commitment and leaves the object visibly where it was; nothing is ever silently dropped or absorbed. Unloading is always an explicit one-instance transition the player performs. A commit that consumes, hands over, installs or puts something out of reach names that consequence in words on the preview.
+
+	## Proposed controls, options and defaults
+
+	Proposals. Bindings and values are first-pass choices, not balanced or validated, and nothing here is an accessibility certification.
+
+	| Option | Proposed default | Information and action rule it preserves | Presentation cost accepted | Owner reaction |
+	|---|---|---|---|---|
+	| Full remap; no required three-input combination | On | Every action stays reachable, so no cue is informative but unusable | More states to keep legible per control path | No |
+	| Hold or toggle for staged work and oxygen coupling | Hold | Same stages, same interruption rules either way | Toggle weakens the felt tension of holding under pressure | No |
+	| Text scale and contrast | Medium scale, high contrast available | No essential fact exists only as a small painted in-world label | Larger text crowds a compact suit display | No |
+	| Colour-independent A/B/R and flow forms | On, always | Family is carried by mark count and outline shape; direction by arrowheads | Busier faces; every new signature must be authored with a form | No |
+	| Subtitles for speech and named non-speech sounds | On | Survivor speech and warnings remain readable as attributed statements | Text volume during an encounter | No |
+	| Directional markers for essential audio | On | A locked wind-up and an answering entrance keep their bearing | Risks giving more spatial certainty than the sound does; tuned to match, not exceed | **Yes** |
+	| Flash, shake and effects intensity | Medium | The underlying state cues are unchanged at any setting | A damped build reads as less spectacular | **Yes** |
+	| Horde visual density damping | Off | Enemy count, behaviour and difficulty are untouched | Plausibly reduces the build payoff for players who need it | **Yes** |
+	| Persistent target marker vs on-inspection | Persistent | Which target the actuator selected stays answerable either way | Persistent markers add clutter in a crowd | No |
+	| Field display density (the clutter cut) | Reduced | Bands 1–5 always present; the rig diagram lives in the pause | At reduced density a blocked branch is diagnosed after, not during | **Yes** |
+
+	## Four paper walkthroughs
+
+	**1. The Fork, installed or carried, at the noisy stage.** At Cargo Turn the manifest shows 6 of 10 used and 4 rig spaces filled. Installing the Fork moves it to *Elsewhere*, freeing one carrying unit and powering both the rack and the patient-bay shutter; keeping it packed leaves the lane open. At the final fastener four things go live at once: the stage's completed marks, the Caller's brace, a Presser's locked strike, and the tank crossing its return notch. **The priority decision:** the return notch takes its anchored position and does not flash over anything; the locked strike takes the single direction marker because it alone has a bearing; the brace stays visible at its source without a second arrow. Nothing is suppressed and nothing is merged. With the display at reduced density the player cannot see that their Barrier branch is unready — that is the accepted cost, and the diagram is one pause away.
+
+	**2. A spend, then a refusal downstream.** The player selects conductive scrap for the Cycler through Fork into Arc Emitter and Capacitor. The commit preview states in words: *this consumes the selected scrap permanently; currently accepting receivers: Capacitor. Arc Emitter is not ready.* The confirm control is not coloured to suggest approval. If the player proceeds, the scrap is spent and Capacitor takes the usable payload; the blocked branch buffers nothing. The refusal is legible as **the receiver refused**, not as salvage vanishing — because the preview named the receiver state before the spend, not after.
+
+	**3. An old route, and a transformer that refuses.** After a death the arrangement advances. In *Places*, the route captured in the previous arrangement is drawn in historical weight and says so; the roster reports joined, discovered-unjoined and anonymous counts and names nothing. The player walks to a seam where two faces are now adjacent, and the latch preview draws two arrowheads meeting head to head: both are outputs. No pulse is spent and no existing join changes. Inspecting the reversible gallery shows its current mode and its two named sides as a **present** local reading, in the live band, which cannot be filed as evidence without a capture. The player may change the mode; walking joins are untouched, which the three separate readings state plainly.
+
+	**4. A crossing that ends unconfirmed, and a bench that is not ready.** The rescue reads *prepared* — travel air confirmed **by the survivor**, abort place stocked, route walked this life — and the display keeps that "by the survivor" attached. The door opens: *in transfer*. The astronaut dies mid-crossing. The display holds the last confirmed state and marks present location and outcome **unconfirmed**; it asserts no abort, no delivery, no loss and no reunion, because the ordering rule that would decide it is unresolved. Aboard, the packing bench shows *setup incomplete*: one contribution is complete and the other is not, so no prepared-full canister exists and none appears in the manifest. Postponing costs nothing and no state changes because time passed.
+
+	## Self-check, counts and gaps
+
+	**Counts.** 38 inventoried states in 9 bands (5 body/supply, 6 equipment/capacity/rig, 3 rewire/eligibility, 4 work/commitment/withdrawal, 3 threat, 5 place/evidence, 5 station joining, 5 people/home, 2 story/late); 5 journal sections; 4 manifest sections; 10 proposed options; 4 walkthroughs; 6 cue-priority bands.
+
+	**Checked.** Conservation: no cue implies one object in two places, and *Elsewhere* shows no capacity. Pause: nothing reachable in the journal completes a world-time process. Provenance: every state names its source and limit, and survivor confirmation is never promoted to direct observation. Actions: every row's action exists in a named source article rather than being invented here. Accessibility: every band 1–5 state has a stated non-colour and non-audio form.
+
+	**Strongest case.** The player can act under pressure from bands 1–4 without opening anything, and can reconstruct *why* afterwards from provenance that was never merged away. **Its cost:** a busy display with a hand-authored priority ladder, and a real risk that four simultaneous cues is three too many.
+
+	**One credible simpler alternative.** A single context line: show only the most relevant action and one state, chosen by context. It is far cheaper, has no ladder to author, and is calmer to read. Its cost is exactly the moment this design exists for — the return margin and a locked strike cannot co-present, so the player cannot weigh a survival cost against a threat while acting, and provenance collapses into a prompt. Worth adopting if the ladder proves unreadable, and I would want that observed rather than argued.
+
+	**Gaps, left open rather than invented.** Target override or reselection is unchosen. General menu pause is proposed only. Rescue-versus-shift ordering, survivor loss, save policy, the final joining mechanism and whole-station completion behaviour remain owner or design decisions; hosted warning and reset needs are used conditionally from a page still in disposition. Specific mapping deltas belong to the global-04 and placement alignments. A complete cast dialogue, glyph, string and full state-transition inventory is later work, not this article.
+
+	**Scope note.** This delivers part of the presentation inventory already estimated at 35–59 role-hours in the parent; it is not a new envelope, and it must be deduplicated against survival cue work rather than added. No implementation, prototype, simulation, playtest, asset, framework or platform decision is proposed or performed here, and nothing above establishes that any of it is legible, usable or enjoyable.