You are an astronaut whose broken ship forces an emergency landing at the nearest space station. The station is unofficial. Its emergency signal says **“stay away!”**, and it refuses to answer your hails. You have no choice but to dock.

1. **Oxygen limits exploration.** The station’s artificial atmosphere is broken. Away from your ship, you carry a limited supply of oxygen and can find additional canisters. The ship can produce unlimited oxygen, but your carrying capacity is limited. Running out kills you.

A survivorlike focused on exploration, experimentation and mystery. The owner’s priorities are **“I discovered something incredible,”** followed by **“I made a ridiculous build work.”** Fighting hordes and developing powerful combinations must be meaningful parts of the game.

Discoveries can reveal a larger world, change the meaning of something already seen, or expose history while the player searches for power. Deep secrets and personal note-taking are welcome. Revisits should offer a changed environment, enemies, understanding or ability to interact.

Equipment competing with salvage for inventory space is a desired tradeoff. Enemy manipulation can be useful, but should not be the main subject of experimentation.

The shipboard colony should grow into a home: an authored, non-procedural cast the player knows, helps and cares about. It provides upgrades and an emotional reason to explore and defend people. Its exact management systems remain undecided.

The player needs clear immediate goals and understandable controls and survival information. Mystery must not depend on bad UX. Encoded songs are rejected. The former city-depends-on-creatures twist is rejected.

**Journal pause — owner decision, 2026-09-07:** while the journal screen is open, the rest of the game pauses, including enemies and oxygen consumption, even during combat. The journal's detailed design remains open; see [Oxygen and Observation](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Oxygen%20and%20Observation) for the current proposal.

- **Selected connections persist, with a station-wide late puzzle.** From [the three shift proposals](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Shifting%20Station%20Options?revision=71a1fb), the owner chose Option 3: certain actions connect rooms into groups that stay connected through shifts. The owner added: “one of the deepest and latest puzzles of the game should be to connect this way the entire station.” This is a direction to develop, not approval of the comparison's particular binding mechanisms, rescue exception or puzzle solution. How links are discovered and made, how unconnected areas keep shifting, and what completing the station-wide connection does to later shifts remain to be designed.

- **Keep cooperative rescue short.** The owner accepted the cooperative rescue direction on the condition that it does not become a long escort quest. The detailed route, length and wider survivor-loss rules are not thereby approved.

**Second review, same day (owner decisions):** the view turns a quarter turn per press of Q (Shift+Q turns it back), keeping E for interaction and F for talk/signal after the owner found E on rotation confusing, and the wall nearest the camera drops to a kerb so the turned view is not blocked; fixture names show only within a few metres of the astronaut, while painted marks stay visible; a threshold with no neighbour in the current arrangement is a sealed, braced bulkhead, labelled unbound when near; the text-scale range widens to 0.8–2.0 and the overall scale never drops below 0.8, because the owner's Game view renders at 4K into a small pane. Closed as implementation gaps: unbound thresholds were open gaps the astronaut could fall through, and the floor light spill under the window, an implementer's stopgap, was removed.

**Third review, same day (owner decisions):** no text is drawn in the room except the one prompt at the fixture the astronaut is locked on, which carries the fixture's name and either its action or its state; alien inscriptions and crew paint are painted into the world on their plaques, and state words and sound subtitles live in the HUD box. A finished mechanism keeps a state word ("gantry hatch dropped; service run sealed"), so a completed seal is never silent on revisit, and the lock prefers a fixture with something to say over a bare pillar. Closed as implementation gaps: a module door the room does not map was an open gap (the Stair Vestibule's north side); the ward behind the Dock Mouth window is now built and lit behind real glass, as The Game describes it. The art pass (textured modules and props from the same CC0 kit) follows as its own step.