- **Equipment deliberately left elsewhere stays there.** A relay seated in a station fixture, a part installed in a project aboard, a canister handed to someone — these were not in the pack. They are where the player put them, which is what they chose.

**Discoveries are unaffected.** Journal records and discovered-location references persist through death, as they do through any return.

**Rescued people.** A rescued person is a route-and-transfer outcome. Someone already sent to the ship stays aboard. Someone rescued but not yet sent is not retroactively delivered by the astronaut's death, and remains where the rescue rules leave them. Under the protected-retreat safeguard (pending owner decision), a person already in transfer with an armed autonomous retreat reaches their named abort refuge alive and unsent before the shift; this is a world outcome the astronaut does not learn aboard, and the person's present state stays unconfirmed until the player observes that refuge again in person.

**World state.** A discovered room keeps its **identity** and everything durable in it — completed work, installed objects, latched seams. What does not persist is its **current adjacency**: after a shift the route there is historical, and the place may be reached differently or not yet at all. Traps and mechanisms retain their own reset rules, and deliberate infrastructure changes the player made (the owner's example is unlocked doors) persist as those rules describe. Combat areas refill for every new expedition after a living return or revival. A living return keeps the current room arrangement; death shifts unjoined rooms. Permanent doors, joins, source seals and completed work stay changed, so renewed populations must fit the available sources and routes. [Combat Rules](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20Rules) owns that renewal and the regular fighting growth with larger horde milestones.

| | Returning alive | Dying |

| A person rescued that trip | Joins the colony if actually sent | Stays aboard if already sent; otherwise still in the station |

The costs are real, but they are all time and position:

- The expedition ends *there*. Whatever the player was partway through — a route, a staged action, a rescue in progress — stops, and the next trip starts from the ship rather than from where they were.

That is a modest cost: death is an interruption rather than a loss.

Returning by death can be useful — a player far out, low on oxygen, with a full pack, can die and arrive home with everything. That is a consequence of the rule, and the design should treat it as a legitimate way to end a trip.

What that asks of the rest of the design is that **going out be worth doing for reasons other than avoiding loss**. A trip is worth taking because of where it lets the player get to, what they can reach with the supply they carry, and what they want to be doing. Those hold regardless of how the trip ends. Nothing here should be balanced by inventing a penalty on the other side.

It also means the interesting pressure sits earlier: what to carry, how far to push, whether to spend a part on something in the station, and whether to commit to a rescue. Those choices all still bite, because capacity is still limited and what is spent or installed is still gone.

Because nothing **carried** is left behind, the player cannot be stranded by a death. Objects the player deliberately installed, dropped or handed over are a different case: they stay where they were put, at a room whose current route may now be historical, and retrieving one is ordinary later work rather than a loss. There is no need for a rule guaranteeing a minimum useful expedition after a loss.

- Oxygen quantities.