Hold The Horde — Death and Persistence
Status. The core rule here is an owner decision, recorded on 2026-09-08: everything the astronaut is carrying when they die comes home with them. The Owner Brief requires that death returns the astronaut to the ship for a reason hidden in the station; that cause is not addressed here. Damage and oxygen depletion both kill. Oxygen quantities, map structure, rescue logistics and colony systems remain undecided, and the proposals marked below are proposals.
The rule
Death returns the astronaut to the ship with everything they were carrying. Equipment brought from home, salvage found that trip, records, a part still in the rig — all of it arrives aboard. There is no cache, no recovery trip, and nothing is confiscated or taxed to compensate.
Two boundaries keep this from duplicating anything, and neither is a penalty:
- Resources already spent stay spent. Oxygen breathed, salvage consumed by a rig, a canister emptied — these were gone before death and do not come back. Death returns what is carried, not what was used.
- 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.
People are not cargo. A rescued person is a route-and-transfer outcome, not something that comes home in the pack. 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. Whether a survivor can be permanently lost is undecided and is not settled here.
World state. Discovered locations persist. Enemies, traps and mechanisms may reset on their own terms, and deliberate infrastructure changes the player made persist as those rules describe.
What returning alive and dying each give
| Returning alive | Dying | |
|---|---|---|
| Equipment brought from the ship | Comes home | Comes home |
| Salvage and equipment found that trip | Comes home | Comes home |
| Consumed oxygen, spent materials | Already spent | Already spent |
| Parts left installed in the station or aboard | Where they were left | Where they were left |
| Records and discovered locations | Retained | Retained |
| A person rescued that trip | Joins the colony if actually sent | Stays aboard if already sent; otherwise still in the station |
What death actually costs
Not property. 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.
- Progress inside a staged piece of work follows the ordinary rules: completed checkpoints persist, an unfinished stage is lost.
- Anything the player was going to do next, they now do on another trip.
That is a modest cost, and stating it plainly is better than implying a larger one. This rule makes death an interruption rather than a loss.
Designing around it
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, not a loophole to be closed, 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.
What this replaced
An earlier proposal here left carried equipment and salvage as a recoverable cache at the place of death, and compared that against an expedition rollback. The owner chose otherwise, and both the cache and its alternative are withdrawn rather than kept as live options. The dependency that arrangement created — a guaranteed minimum useful expedition after everything was cached — no longer exists, because nothing is left behind to strand the player.
Unresolved
Oxygen quantities; map generation and respawn rules; the full rescue and colony systems; whether an authored survivor can ever be permanently lost; and the cause of revival, which is untouched here and remains open across every candidate story.