The choice is whether four extra places earn enough discovery and recovery pleasure to justify their added work. The **40-room reference** separates more actions from their later interpretation. The **36-room concentration** keeps the same headline campaign in fewer, busier spaces. It saves layouts and graph nodes, but asks individual rooms to communicate more at once. Both are credible SMALL planning options.

In the **40-room reference**, imagine returning to the Cable Junction because its moving light may reveal a route. A horde pours from visible service runs while the lamp rolls along its rail. The player keeps the track clear, grows the Storm Choir build through ordinary fighting, releases its thunder into the converging crowd, then earns quiet enough to recognise the “stars” as receiver fittings. The player releases a bridge toward the Regulator Gallery. Returning alive keeps it open, so the next expedition crosses the route already earned instead of repeating the scan.

There, the player pulls a regulator and sees its line change. A neighbouring **Reply Observation Niche** offers another protected angle for comparing the response. The essential test already works in the gallery; the niche adds reinterpretation by turning a familiar control-cell shape from an operating place into an observing place. Elsewhere, the Pace Calibration Bay teaches deliberate movement, while the separate Navigation Service Room makes recovering the ship’s coupler a later revisit. At the core, the first clamp has an East Clamp Refuge and the second a longer West Clamp Recovery Walk. Finishing one and withdrawing gives partial progress a physical place.

| Deepest joining payoff | Required: a valid all-40 network; not demonstrated | Required: a valid all-36 network; not demonstrated | A smaller physical achievement and graph, but still the entire chosen station. Neither option selects what completion does or an ending. |

**Moved, with a price.** Move R07’s navigation-coupler release to R05’s existing side service housing. The part and carrying choice survive, but the empty assembly-housing revisit does not. Move R30’s before/after capture angle into a protected recess in R28. The indispensable reply test already remains in R28; the move preserves that causal evidence but loses the further angle and the architectural reinterpretation of observing from another room. R28 must now separate racks, P09 Grid pressure, P14’s receiver landing and the observation cue. Move R33’s fixed A→R exchanger into a separately labelled channel in R34 beside its reversible A↔B mode. This retains the requirement that a complete 36-room network be possible, but neither the 36-room nor 40-room full graph has been demonstrated; the clean room-to-room transformation comparison becomes a crowded same-room comparison. Move R37’s first clamp into R36’s east wall while R38 keeps the second. Both physical alternatives remain, but one full withdrawal refuge disappears and setpiece B becomes denser.

The published 350–590 role-hours are a **historical allowance for further detailed-campaign documentation**, written when its 55–95-hour encounter/mechanism row covered thirteen major mechanisms. It extends the existing first-pass briefs into detailed variants, consequences and integration review; it does not count the first pass already on the wiki.

A numeric 36-room total is likewise unavailable. Four placements and two module definitions disappear, but all objectives, arrangements, mechanisms, clues, people, builds and encounters remain. The historical 90–150-hour rooms/objectives/arrangements stream is not linear by room; rehosting adds congestion and cross-state review. No like-for-like completed packages or recorded timings exist. Until representative mechanism-room, two-language-investigation and rescue/home packages are written and independently checked, use the old range only as an incomplete reference rather than claim current coverage or a proportional saving. The concentration legitimately reduces layouts, room briefs and graph nodes; exact hours and future production savings are unknown.