**Status.** Provisional contract for ordinary horde encounters, not owner canon, a full enemy roster or a balance claim. The brief requires hostile massed enemies, meaningful combat, powerful combinations, limited oxygen, clear controls and discovery first. Everything below is proposed except the owner-confirmed journal pause and requirements quoted from the brief.

Movement and aim are independent. The player can move, set an aim/facing direction, activate clearly mapped manual rig controls, interact or cancel, and open the journal. A manually activated projectile or shove follows the shown aim; a directional barrier uses the shown facing. The interface always exposes current oxygen, condition, carried reserve/capacity and available controls.

Assembly assigns each manual trigger to a visible control. A part acts automatically only when its inspected rule says so: Arc Emitter selects eligible nearby targets by its public chain rule, while Impact Dynamo reacts to qualifying impacts. There is no hidden global auto-fire or target selection beyond the visible encounter. Exact input bindings, fire cadence and aim assistance remain implementation questions.

| 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 |

| 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 only; completed stages remain if the mechanism is unchanged |

| 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 |

This milestone needs behaviors, not a catalogue of species.

- A **presser** moves along a reachable route toward the perceived astronaut and strikes at close range. Groups crowd a lane without sharing omniscient tracking. Their separate attacks are separate external events in the build grammar, so Counterwall can be repeatedly fed while strikes continue.

- A **flanker** takes a visible connected side approach when the direct lane is obstructed. It never teleports or knows an unseen route. This makes facing and movement matter without making enemy steering the experiment.

- A **caller** is an ordinary target that visibly braces and sounds a local warning. If allowed to complete it, the area's alert source calls eligible adjacent groups. Forcing it to move, blocking the act or defeating it first prevents that call.

All attack on sight when they see the astronaut. As a proposed extension, they investigate recent loud events in the same connected area: force impacts, Cycler discharges, a grinding pressure door or a stated mechanism alarm. They pursue a visible target or last perceived location. After losing both sight and fresh sound, they search locally and return to their authored route/holding behavior rather than tracking the astronaut across the station.

A route crowd can simply occupy space; it need not escalate. Reinforcements require a readable local source, either an authored mechanism alarm or a caller completing its warning. Lights or sirens identify the active source, then sound and moving doors identify the connected entrance before another group arrives. An alert draws only groups already assigned to adjacent connected spaces. It cannot spawn bodies, place them behind the player or refill a crowd because the rig killed efficiently.

Stopping the source prevents unanswered calls; a group already moving continues. An active source and groups already alerted remain so if the player withdraws within the same expedition. Once all eligible groups have answered, the source cannot manufacture more. Quiet observation, framing a record and journal use never call reinforcements by themselves. A particular mechanism may be noisy by authored rule, and its cue must be present before commitment.

World-time actions state their checkpoints. For the long pressure route, each visibly jammed bolt released with the baseline cutter is a checkpoint, followed by each completed hand-cycle step of the door. Canceling or moving out of reach discards only the current unfinished stage and still costs elapsed oxygen. Damage alone does not cancel. An enemy interrupts only through a readable physical consequence, such as forcing the astronaut away or occupying the control point. Returning can resume from the last completed checkpoint if power and mechanism state have not changed.

Recording is atomic rather than partly useful: interruption before commit produces no record, while a completed record persists under Oxygen and Observation. Opening the journal freezes the world even during combat, as the owner requires, but cannot finish the door, attack, alarm, record or any other action. This leaves quiet looking and paused thought available; only sampling or changing the world uses running time.

Within one expedition, defeated enemies stay defeated. Surviving pursuers search and then disengage locally; they do not reset merely because the player crossed a doorway. A disabled alert stays disabled when the disabling act is a completed persistent infrastructure change. Otherwise its later power follows that mechanism's stated state rather than a universal reset.

A decisive rig is allowed to decide the encounter. If Cascade clears the route crowd and every already-called group, the route remains clear for that expedition. If Counterwall holds the mechanism entrance while the player completes its stages, the player keeps the completed access or record. If Cycler spends valuable cargo to shove open a lane, that sacrifice is already its chosen cost. None causes a replacement elite, invisible escalation or reduced reward. The win buys access, time, oxygen margin and the chance to notice or manipulate what the horde occupied.

Withdrawal is also valid. The player keeps completed records and mechanism checkpoints, but leaves unfinished actions unfinished. A detour spends oxygen and may defer an objective; abandoning a noisy mechanism may leave its alert active. On a later expedition, authored evidence and deliberate persistent changes remain, while horde population, density and location may differ under Exploration Structure. The breadcrumb identifies the traversed return path without promising it is safe.

**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.

**Credible alternative: a visible continuous attention meter.** Loud combat and most world actions add attention; thresholds bring nearby groups. Its strength is a uniform systemic connection between action and pressure with fewer authored alarm sources. Its cost is turning recording, doors and experimentation into one repeated noise tax, potentially making harassment universal and encouraging players to optimize the meter instead of the mystery. It would also need exceptionally clear spatial provenance to avoid invisible punishment.

Prefer the limited local-source policy because the player can understand why pressure arrives and quiet discovery remains possible. Reopen it if local alerts are too sparse or easily neutralized for ordinary combat to matter, or if authoring sources makes encounters formulaic. No prose establishes frequency, readability, fun, balance, performance or campaign pacing.

Manual versus automatic aim, attack-wave ancestry, reinforcement sources, interruption and persistence are explicit. Successful power stays successful; avoidance retains opportunity costs without being declared failure. The proposal imports no attack-on-recording rule or global enemy reset. Exact enemy senses, population placement, controls, accessibility support and encounter frequency remain dependencies for later authorized work.