Build Rules

Status: PM provisionally integrated this written design after focused review and author response; gameplay quality remains unvalidated. The Owner Brief requires expressive powerful combinations, meaningful horde combat, and equipment competing with salvage for inventory space. It does not settle the build system, starting equipment, oxygen quantities, progression or whether spare canisters share equipment space. Everything below except those requirements and the owner-confirmed journal pause is proposed.

Proposed core: a connected effect grammar

The player carries one finite rig. Its spaces hold active equipment parts; ordinary salvage and inactive parts occupy the same overall carrying capacity. A part installed in the rig occupies capacity once, not once as cargo and again as equipment. Moving it to inactive cargo frees active rig area but not carrying capacity. The exact grid, shapes and capacity are open. A suit tank supplies limited portable oxygen; carrying additional canisters in general capacity is a proposal, not an owner requirement.

Parts use a public grammar rather than hidden recipes: a trigger notices an event; a payload carries charge, heat, force or fragments; a modifier transforms, stores or branches; an actuator produces a projectile, arc, barrier or shove. A packet contains a trigger and may carry a payload. Impact Dynamo, for example, emits a trigger carrying charge; Capacitor stores it and later emits a charged trigger, while Thermal Lens changes charge into heat without inventing another trigger.

The player arranges parts and draws compatible directed links between visible ports. Multi-role parts reopen old arrangements. Rig-installed and inactive carried parts each consume capacity once; installation also consumes active area and enables use. Field swaps consume world time.

At the ship, rearrangement is safe. In the station, installing, removing or rewiring a part is a deliberate world action while oxygen and threats continue. The journal still pauses the rest of the game as the owner requires, but consulting a recorded diagram cannot complete a rig edit.

Resolution and readable limits

An ordinary actuator's automatic launch, manual special activation, a new enemy attack or an ambient hazard is an external event and starts a causal wave. Ordinary firing is mostly automatic and special abilities are manual under the owner's decision. Combat Rules supplies the proposed targeting/readiness contract: a ready controller launches when a valid target is available, spends readiness, and recovers through stated world time; rig output cannot reset it. Rig-created projectiles, fragments, arcs, barriers and contacts keep that wave identity rather than becoming new external events.

Within a wave, each part resolves once and a returning signal stops. Force projectiles, pressure bursts, fragments and external strikes against the player or Barrier Plate are impacts; arcs and heat are not unless explicitly converted. Impact Dynamo batches several same-wave impacts into one visible accumulator contribution and emits one downstream packet. Stored states persist across waves with saturation visible. Releasing stored charge requires a chosen trigger: a manual release starts a new wave, while a release caused by a rig-generated packet retains that packet's wave. Storage becoming ready does not itself create a new external event. Exact capacities and damage remain open.

A later external event begins another wave. Enemy attacks can repeatedly feed Counterwall until attacks stop, the barrier fails or storage saturates. That is an intended horde-fed engine, not recursive self-activation or a balance claim.

An incompatible link is visibly invalid before commitment. A saturating part holds, vents or passes overflow by its stated rule. Surprise should remain traceable, not depend on hidden exceptions.

Navigation, inspection and discovered families

The suit always shows oxygen, carried reserve/capacity, condition and controls. Its minimum return reference is a reverse breadcrumb through passages actually traversed to the last confirmed anchor, ultimately the ship. It promises neither safety nor continued access, exposes no unseen route and predicts no exact return cost. Unknown routes have local orientation only. A recorded location keeps captured evidence and its anchor-relative breadcrumb; a learned crew name labels the record without granting tracking.

A carried or accessible part shows individual behavior, controls and ports. Preview answers only whether the proposed direct link between accessible endpoints is valid; it does not calculate every combination. An unfamiliar fixture shows visible traits, ports and its original cut mark. Once learned, relay predicts packet transfer, sink absorption and isolator interruption. Human-painted copies remain contextual. Controls work without this discovery, and not every build requires it.

At an exposed isolator contact, the player may bypass it and seat a carried relay-family part—such as Fork Relay—in readable service ports. Knowing relays transfer packets tells the player what to pack; local preview only confirms the proposed link on arrival. The part stays seated to keep the section and hoist powered. It is lost to the rig but, once left behind, no longer occupies carrying capacity. This adopts Exploration Structure's persistence choice.

Illustrative parts

These eight parts demonstrate the grammar; they are not a final catalogue or starting loadout. A compact integrated weapon can combine several roles: the earlier Cargo-Cycler example remains possible, while Salvage Storm below shows a modular expansion.

Finding a Capacitor is therefore not a prescribed upgrade. The player can replace an immediate Arc connection with stored burst, bank Barrier energy, or route one Fork branch into storage while the other fires. Taking it occupies room that could carry salvage or an extra canister, whether installed or inactive. Installing it grants present use and commits active rig area and edit time; carrying it home inactive preserves later options without using it now.

Three materially different paths

Cascade lance. An automatically launched Pulse Projector shot starts a wave; its impact lets Dynamo send a charged trigger through Fork. One branch activates Arc Emitter, the other stores charge. A later manual Capacitor release starts a new wave; Thermal Lens converts its stored charge into a heat payload that Projector launches. Sparse targets reduce Arc branching and later impact opportunities, not the basic sequence. Packed hordes may be overwhelmed.

Counterwall reactor. A manual trigger raises Barrier Plate. Each later enemy strike starts a wave through Dynamo into Capacitor. Stored charge can trigger Barrier or Arc Emitter. The wall becomes protection and engine while a horde attacks; it stops when strikes stop, bypass its facing or break the barrier.

Salvage storm. Cycler emits a trigger carrying a material response: conductive scrap activates Arc, pressure passes through Projector as force, brittle material fragments. Their impacts let Dynamo make one batched charge packet, split by Fork between Arc and Capacitor. Those fragments cannot start fresh waves. The path spends colony-bound salvage; hoarding starves it and firing destroys return value. Equipment/material composition, not enemy control, is the experiment.

All three reuse parts while asking whether to sustain a chain, power defence or consume cargo. A found Fork, Lens or Capacitor changes several paths because ports describe possibilities, not archetype membership.

Acquisition, commitment and return

Found equipment is readable individually. The player may install it, carry it inactive, leave it or discard something else. Taking a new part consumes carrying capacity; installing an already-carried part adds active-area use and field-edit time, not another carrying charge. Returned salvage has no currency or automatic upgrade value defined here.

Hordes test space creation, sustained output and the oxygen-limited return while feeding dense-target chains and barrier impacts. A deliberately assembled build may erase ordinary hordes as payoff. Its real limits are causal shape, carried cost, acquisition and situations it does not address.

On return, keep the rig and forgo salvage, leave or discard a part to carry a discovery, spend salvage through Cycler, or turn back. Moving a part into inactive cargo alone frees no carrying capacity. Separate spare-canister capacity would preserve equipment-versus-salvage while weakening its oxygen link.

Minimum useful expedition after a cached loadout

Death may leave all carried gear in a cache under the current separate death proposal. Build Rules therefore depends on a minimum sortie that does not recreate the lost build for free. Proposed ship-issued suit baseline:

• a refillable integral tank providing limited portable oxygen;
• navigation and the owner-required pausing journal;
• a low-output emergency projector/cutter for basic defence and common interactions.

These baseline functions do not expose build ports and cannot join a cascade. The ship services one suit baseline after revival; it never becomes detachable, saleable cargo or another cached copy. It lets the player scout, record, follow the traversed-route breadcrumb, evade, take another objective or search for parts, but does not guarantee cache recovery. Additional canisters, build parts and tools still occupy whatever capacities later systems assign. This is an equipment-system dependency, not settled starting gear, a replacement economy or an explanation of revival.

Credible alternative: multi-tag synergies

Instead of directed links, each part could carry semantic tags such as heat, impact, branching and barrier. Compatible pairs or sets would activate authored effects automatically; arrangement would mostly manage carrying space. This is easier to explain and bounds the authored interaction list. Multi-tag parts can support cross-combinations, and their authored rules would still need to exclude or contain any feedback loops.

Its cost is prescription. Once combinations are listed, a found part tends to complete an intended set rather than transform several existing machines. The connected grammar is preferred because the player authors the causal path and can understand why a ridiculous outcome occurred. That preference accepts higher interface, authoring and consistency burdens.

Reopen it if a representative catalogue cannot keep three-step chains readable without solving them for the player, if legal connections repeatedly create dominant or incoherent outcomes despite the once-per-wave rule, or if supporting cross-part interactions makes each new part too expensive to author and verify. Written design cannot establish readability, balance, fun or production feasibility.

Counterexample and consistency check

• Infinite feedback: descended effects retain their source wave; a returning path stops. Multiple qualifying impacts become one batched accumulator contribution. New enemy attacks may sustain new waves, but rig output alone cannot mint them.
• One obvious upgrade: Capacitor, Fork and Lens each have offensive, defensive and storage placements with different carried costs; no path is declared numerically superior.
• Cycler consumes the entire tradeoff: it cannot consume the protected objective accidentally, and spending ordinary salvage loses return value. Other paths remain effective without cargo fuel.
• All gear cached: the suit baseline permits a useful expedition but not automatic cache recovery. The player can defer, abandon or seek new equipment elsewhere.
• Paused rewiring exploit: only the journal pause is owner-required. Field rig changes remain world actions and cannot be completed from its paused diagrams.

Remaining dependency: the exact capacity model, part availability, cache rules and ship storage determine whether abandonment and recombination stay credible. No owner preference is currently required to keep this proposal provisional; none of these rules changes the design-only phase.