Blame
|
1 | # Hold The Horde — Death Shift And Rescue Continuity |
||||||
| 2 | ||||||||
|
3 | This page joins the persistence, shifting-station, short-rescue and whole-station-connection rules into one rule set. Owner decisions are recorded in the [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief). Two branches below — the protected retreat and the whole-station stabilization finish — are pending owner decision. |
||||||
|
4 | |||||||
|
5 | ## The rule in one paragraph |
||||||
|
6 | |||||||
|
7 | A placed room, threshold face, compact apparatus, persistent join, object, mechanism, evidence record and person keeps one stable identity. At death, all completed acts and actual locations seal; every still-carried astronaut object returns once; an eligible in-transfer survivor performs only a pre-prepared autonomous retreat to the named refuge during a hostile-free transaction window; then unanchored rigid groups change only their unbound adjacency/orientation while the R01 ship-rooted group remains fixed. The old route becomes historical. Living return changes no adjacency and does not replace defeated enemies. A wrong join stays walkable and can be released from a reachable network-side control. Under the stabilization branch, physically latching every reachable R01–R40 room into the ship-rooted group ends rearrangement; optional diagnostics and story choices neither complete nor block that physical result. |
||||||
|
8 | |||||||
|
9 | Outside the return transaction, oxygen use, equipment readiness, threats, mechanism motion and ordinary work all advance while the game runs under their owning rules. Opening the journal freezes all of them and cannot move a person, finish a stage, operate a latch or create evidence. Quit/load records or resumes state; it is not a death, shift, withdrawal, rescue action or discovery. |
||||||
|
10 | |||||||
| 11 | ## Physical truth, walking and knowledge |
|||||||
| 12 | ||||||||
|
13 | | Kind of state | World truth | What the astronaut may claim | |
||||||
|
14 | |---|---|---| |
||||||
|
15 | | **Placed room and face** | R01–R40 and each named face retain identity, internal fixtures, completed work and attached objects. R01 Dock Mouth remains directly outside the ship airlock; its outer unbound face may gain a different neighbour after death. Other unbound faces may gain a different neighbour/orientation. | A current observation proves only the present arrangement. An older route remains dated evidence, not present access. | |
||||||
|
16 | | **Ordinary walkability** | A currently open door or aligned unbound threshold can be walked this life. It is a physical passage, not necessarily a durable connection. | Personally walking it proves current traversal and supports a short-rescue check. It promises nothing after death. | |
||||||
| 17 | | **Persistent latch** | One completed latch joins two specific placed faces, opens a walkable seam and fixes their relative pose until deliberate release. Power and diagnostic signal are separate. | The player can know the seam remains joined after death without learning the group's new external neighbours. | |
|||||||
|
18 | | **Rigid group** | Rooms linked by persistent latches, plus each compact assembly, preserve one internal pose. An unanchored group may translate and rotate only as a whole; it may not reflect. The ship-rooted group containing R01 is anchored to the ship and neither translates nor rotates. Internal distances, passages, handedness and hard control conduits do not stretch, swap ends or teleport. | A walked internal path remains physically valid unless its own persistent door/iris state blocks it. External breadcrumbs may become historical. | |
||||||
| 19 | | **Object and mechanism** | Every part, canister, objective item and loot instance has exactly one location and exact owned state, including canister O, stored U and rig links. A mechanism remains attached to its stable room and retains local commits: checkpoints/mode, collar buffer/latch/clear, bench secure/clamp/fill, R26 selector/detent separately from diagnostic power, and R33's fixed A→R behavior. Temporary phase follows its reset rule. | A known installed Fork remains known at R02 even when the player does not know a current route to R02. A record never retrieves it. Exact current state does not reveal an unseen route. | |
|||||||
| 20 | | **Body and survivor** | After the transaction the playable astronaut body is aboard; no second lootable astronaut body remains at the death site. Each survivor has one actual location/state and moves only by a named physical transition. | A witnessed arrival plus closed ship airlock proves Sent. A plan, radio promise or old location does not. | |
|||||||
|
21 | | **Evidence** | Captures, notes and testimony keep source, room, arrangement/life and factual limit. World truth can change without rewriting the record. | Persistent work/join facts stay current; unbound adjacency claims become historical. Diagnostic reach and story interpretation remain optional, fallible layers. | |
||||||
| 22 | ||||||||
| 23 | An installed object travels with its room/group, not with the astronaut. A dropped object stays at its placed location in that room. A canister handed to a survivor or deposited in R12/R24/R27/R06 has left carried property. A consumed sample or breathed gas has no location to return from. No category called “collected” overrides the current one-location fact. |
|||||||
| 24 | ||||||||
|
25 | This keeps Station Room and Module Inventory's fixed R01 ship threshold. Revival first exposes the familiar Dock Mouth interior. If R01's outer face is unbound, its far door exposes the newly adjacent station room; if that face is already persistently joined, the reveal moves to the nearest sensed free frontier of the fixed ship-rooted group without undoing the join. The airlock itself does not acquire a different direct station room. This preserves a stable ship interface and moves the changed-room reveal in First Expedition Options and Player Information outward from the airlock. |
||||||
|
26 | |||||||
|
27 | ## What a death may and may not change |
||||||
| 28 | ||||||||
|
29 | Every death advances one arrangement generation. Before full connection under the stabilization branch, the new generation may change only: |
||||||
|
30 | |||||||
|
31 | - adjacency of **unbound** external faces and the position/orientation of unanchored rigid groups; the R01 ship-rooted group stays fixed; |
||||||
|
32 | - current accessibility through those new unbound relations; |
||||||
| 33 | - transient power, hazard phase and mechanism warning/charge where the owning reset rule permits it; and |
|||||||
|
34 | - the next encounter population variant, selected at the death-shift boundary independently of the player's build, kill speed or reward. |
||||||
|
35 | |||||||
| 36 | It may not split a rigid group, move one room twice, duplicate or recall an object, undo a completed latch/door/cap/clamp/pin/capture, refill a spent input, alter a committed converter mode, turn an unknown route into journal knowledge, open a survivor refuge, or complete a rescue. R02–R03 always retain their glazed throat and hard board/rack conduit. R36–R40 always retain the R36-to-clamp passages and, once the iris is open, the actual return paths to R39/R40. R35 is only an external approach and may change; an absent R35 approach defers access without disassembling R36–R40. |
|||||||
| 37 | ||||||||
| 38 | ### Death transaction order |
|||||||
| 39 | ||||||||
|
40 | 1. **Seal the lethal instant.** Freeze the current action boundary. Commit only pickups, drops, installations, handovers, exact incremental gas transfers, stored-charge accepts/releases already past their commit boundary, spent material and local work checkpoints already completed. Interrupt the unfinished stage. Snapshot every object's actual location, exact O/U, fixture stage and the astronaut-carried membership once. No saveable gap exists before the transaction identity. |
||||||
|
41 | 2. **Return the astronaut and carried set once.** Move the playable astronaut body and every still-carried active rig part, inactive part, loose loot and canister aboard, preserving object identity, rig/cargo substate and canister O. Leave installed, dropped, deposited, handed-over and consumed items where step 1 put them. Restore ordinary condition for the next expedition; canister refill/repacking are later ship actions. This preserves Save And Content State's property-first order. The sealed membership cannot change during the remaining transaction, and the player receives no control aboard until step 6. |
||||||
| 42 | 3. **Resolve the survivor branch before geometry moves.** Waiting or Prepared people do not depart. A person already Sent remains aboard. Under the protected-retreat safeguard below, an eligible person In transfer executes the already armed autonomous retreat to the named abort refuge; no new astronaut action, combat clear, door unlock, power routing or resource appears. From the lethal seal until the abort door closes, creatures and active encounter hazards are frozen and cannot act, pursue, collide with, damage, tether, displace or physically block the retreating survivor. Their last old-expedition state is otherwise unchanged until step 4, and no player action can use this window. The resulting **At abort refuge, alive, unsent** world state commits. If this protection or the other eligibility conditions were not armed, transfer could not have begun. |
|||||||
| 43 | 4. **Close the old expedition.** Defeated enemies remain defeated for that expedition and do not rise during the transaction. Retire its remaining live attack/warning/tether state. Creature bodies and surviving group members belong to that closing transient population state rather than becoming stable loot or room objects. Persistent encounter work remains. |
|||||||
| 44 | 5. **Shift once.** Keep the R01 ship-rooted group anchored and place each unanchored room or rigid group into one valid changed arrangement while preserving every persistent seam and compact boundary. A survivor at R12, for example, moves with R12's actual group unless that group is already ship-rooted. Then select one population list for the new arrangement. It may be a different disclosed variant, such as E03's later death-shift Presser state. Stable rewards, part sources and spent inputs do not regenerate with it. |
|||||||
|
45 | 6. **Reclassify knowledge and commit aboard.** Keep records, annotations, stable object locations and join facts. Mark prior unbound routes historical. Add only the death and carried-return facts; no refuge result is transmitted aboard. The astronaut retains the last witnessed transfer state and the fact that the safeguard was armed, but the person's present outcome remains unconfirmed knowledge until a later local observation at the refuge. Reveal no new neighbours. The next resumable state is aboard. Save/load resumes this committed sequence or its result and never creates another death, shift, delivery, work step or clue. |
||||||
|
46 | |||||||
| 47 | Deliberate death uses exactly this order. It can request a new arrangement, but it does not refund oxygen/material, retrieve installed property, manufacture enemies for reward or guarantee that any particular useful face appears next. |
|||||||
| 48 | ||||||||
| 49 | ## Living return and finite populations |
|||||||
| 50 | ||||||||
| 51 | A living return completes only when the astronaut physically reaches R01, enters the ship and closes the ship airlock. It causes no shift and preserves the current arrangement generation. Carried property remains carried until the player stores, installs or hands it over; ordinary refill, repair and repacking are separate aboard actions. Completed station work, dropped/installed objects and historical evidence remain unchanged. |
|||||||
| 52 | ||||||||
|
53 | The current arrangement's population membership also remains. Defeated creatures stay defeated; no replacement, elite or reduced reward reacts to the clean result. Surviving creatures retain their room/group membership. At a named physical withdrawal boundary, their active attacks, last-seen pursuit and mechanism occupancy may settle to a visible hold state reachable within the same current walkable encounter volume; they may not cross a sealed shutter, released seam or shifted route to reach it. If no such hold is reachable, their exact suspended location remains. Re-entry restarts ordinary perception/warnings, not population creation. A later **death shift**, not a living return, may select a new population variant as step 5 states. |
||||||
|
54 | |||||||
|
55 | Living scouting therefore differs from death-cycling: alive return preserves a partially cleared opportunity and current map, while death returns carried goods but spends inputs, retires that expedition's combat state and changes unbound geography. |
||||||
|
56 | |||||||
|
57 | ## Short-rescue state and the protected retreat |
||||||
|
58 | |||||||
|
59 | The following safeguard is pending owner decision. A quiet window, carried-property return or a short route does not by itself arm it. It protects one eligible transition, not all survivors from later harm. |
||||||
|
60 | |||||||
| 61 | | State | Physical requirements and death result | |
|||||||
| 62 | |---|---| |
|||||||
| 63 | | **Waiting** | The person is inside the named intact refuge. Death moves that refuge only with its room/group. No route or departure is inferred. | |
|||||||
|
64 | | **Prepared** | This life, the astronaut has personally walked ship→at most one exposed junction→counted abort refuge→survivor refuge; checked both-side controls; handed over travel air and received survivor flow confirmation; stocked the abort refuge; made the current encounter quiet; and armed a retreat path the survivor can operate without the astronaut. The travel canister must also read at or above that route's fixed **full-attempt return mark**: enough for the outward attempt plus the longest return from any committed segment, including the ship airlock before closure. The survivor confirms suit flow; the local preparation gauge confirms the marked fill. An under-supplied movement request refuses before the refuge door opens. Death before departure leaves the person in the original refuge. The shift invalidates the route check, so the state returns to **Waiting**, with committed supplies noted at their actual locations and no refund. | |
||||||
| 65 | | **In transfer** | The survivor has opened the refuge door and physically departed. If either party calls ordinary abort while the astronaut lives, the person visibly returns to the named refuge/abort place and the station does not shift. If the astronaut dies, the armed pre-shift safeguard uses the already reserved return margin and the hostile-free window; the survivor operates the actual doors to reach the named abort refuge before step 5. World truth becomes alive/unsent at that refuge. | |
|||||||
| 66 | | **At abort refuge** | The person waits in the actual counted R06, R12, R24 or R27 instance chosen by their scene. Travel margin used on retreat and the staged waiting supply are spent according to the rescue. After a death shift that room/group has a new external location; the old route is historical and a new rescue attempt needs fresh air, stocking and a personally walked current check. | |
|||||||
| 67 | | **Sent** | The same person has physically crossed aboard **and the ship airlock has closed before the lethal boundary**. Only that complete predicate commits Sent. Later astronaut death leaves them aboard. | |
|||||||
|
68 | |||||||
|
69 | A full-attempt return mark is set only for that short route and read against the actual handed-over canister; it does not calculate an unseen route or predict combat delay. If the route changes after death, the old mark and preparation are not current eligibility. |
||||||
|
70 | |||||||
|
71 | A person physically inside an **unclosed** ship airlock is not Sent. At step 1 the incomplete delivery freezes. Their full-attempt return margin and prepared final-segment abort control must let them cycle stationward and reach the counted last refuge without astronaut input; they do that inside the hostile-free window before the shift. They do not close the ship airlock after the player's death to finish the mission. The abort-side door leaves a mechanical closure tell on the **local refuge control only**. It is not transmitted to the ship. On revival the astronaut still has unconfirmed knowledge; only reaching that stable refuge identity again and directly observing its control/occupant supplies current proof, without revealing the route beforehand. If a final approach cannot provide this survivor-operated return, longest-return margin and local tell, it is not eligible to start; the person waits. |
||||||
|
72 | |||||||
|
73 | The safeguard's cost is real: each rescue variant needs an autonomous retreat line from every committed segment, two-sided or survivor-side controls, a locally marked full-attempt return margin, a separately stocked counted refuge, a local closure tell and a quiet precondition that remains valid long enough to arm the line. More consequentially, the visible creatures or hazards that may have just killed the astronaut are frozen and nonblocking for this survivor's retreat. That is an artificial protection convention and can reduce rescue danger; it is the tradeoff pending owner decision. Pressure can still force a living abort, spend supplies or delay departure before death commits, but cannot harm or obstruct this already-armed retreat during the transaction. |
||||||
|
74 | |||||||
| 75 | ### Strongest alternative: bind the entire short route first |
|||||||
| 76 | ||||||||
|
77 | Require every seam from the refuge through the abort room to the ship-rooted network to be persistently latched before departure. A death may then shift immediately because the whole retreat remains one rigid group. This follows the whole-station connection rule more directly and removes the special pre-shift hold, but it delays early rescue until the exact route faces have appeared, requires several latch/release operations and can turn a one-junction human scene into network preparation. It still needs travel air, survivor-operated controls and an explicit injury/loss rule; binding geometry alone does not make a person safe. If selected, the first-survivor timing and each rescue host need re-authoring. |
||||||
|
78 | |||||||
| 79 | ## Persistent joining and valid shifts |
|||||||
| 80 | ||||||||
|
81 | A compatible latch consumes no portable part and joins two specific adjacent faces only after its hand-cycle, performed while the game runs, commits. The connected rooms remain ordinary walkable space; the join is not a menu edge or teleport. A group can acquire more external faces as it grows, but its existing internal pose cannot change without releasing the seams that establish it. Converter modes may change diagnostic pulses while every walking seam remains intact. |
||||||
|
82 | |||||||
| 83 | ### Minimum placement obligations |
|||||||
| 84 | ||||||||
| 85 | Every permitted pre-completion arrangement must satisfy all of these visible physical obligations: |
|||||||
| 86 | ||||||||
| 87 | 1. Place every stable R01–R40 room identity exactly once, contained in exactly one rigid group; place each survivor, object and mechanism with its owning room/fixture exactly once. |
|||||||
|
88 | 2. Preserve every persistent face-to-face latch and all fixed interior paths/control conduits. Do not reflect, stretch, reorder or overlap a rigid group. Unanchored groups may translate and rotate as units; the R01 ship-rooted group stays fixed in position and orientation, so a shift changes which unbound group meets its free outer frontier rather than which room touches the airlock. |
||||||
|
89 | 3. Preserve R02–R03 as a two-room compact group and R36–R40 as a five-room compact group even before either is latched externally. External faces may change; internal throats do not. R39/R40 count as physically included only after the R36 iris/path makes them actually reachable. |
||||||
| 90 | 4. Pair only free external faces for current unbound adjacency. A current ordinary passage must have compatible physical openings, clear volume and a usable return; adjacency never completes a latch or diagnostic state. |
|||||||
| 91 | 5. Keep every critical release reachable from the ship-rooted side of its join or from a fully walkable island immediately after merge. A refuge door is separate from a join face; latching R13/R19/R22/R18/R26/R05 never sends its occupant. |
|||||||
|
92 | 6. Leave every not-yet-joined playable room/group eligible for at least one later valid arrangement and give the current layout at least one real exploration frontier. |
||||||
| 93 | 7. Place only one population at each active encounter, with warning routes that exist in that arrangement. Never repair an invalid layout with a creature, survivor, object teleport or invisible conduit. |
|||||||
|
94 | |||||||
|
95 | An arrangement is invalid if any identity duplicates, a persistent seam separates, a fixed conduit bends, a release is buried, an interior room becomes unreachable, or an unbound passage intersects solid geometry. |
||||||
|
96 | |||||||
|
97 | **Fallback.** Content must provide a different valid arrangement for every reachable pre-completion persistent-group state. If arrangement selection cannot find one, it may try another existing valid placement; it may not break a join or promise a desired face. If none exists, the safe continuity fallback is to retain the last valid physical arrangement and return the carried set without a shift, while clearly recording an invalid-content failure. That preserves access and conservation but violates the rule that every death shifts the station; it is a blocker to shipping that content state. The repair is to change face/clearance authoring or disallow the impossible content before release—not to roll back the player's join. |
||||||
|
98 | |||||||
| 99 | ## Mistaken joins and recovery |
|||||||
| 100 | ||||||||
| 101 | Persistent work must be reversible where it can occupy a face needed later. Suppose the ship-rooted network latches R33 Imaging Exchange's R-output to an irrelevant compatible R-input branch, occupying the face eventually useful to R32's R-input. |
|||||||
| 102 | ||||||||
|
103 | - **Before death:** the player walks through the completed seam to R33's network-side release and opens that one latch while the game runs. The two faces remain physically adjacent and ordinarily walkable for the rest of the current arrangement, so the player may inspect or relatch. Other joins, R33's fixed A→R behavior and R34's mode do not change. |
||||||
|
104 | - **After death while still joined:** R33 and the irrelevant branch move as one rigid group, so the release remains reachable. The player can release the same seam on a later visit. They do not need an item, story clue or exact new neighbour. The unlatched rooms remain adjacent until the next death; only then may their external relation change. |
||||||
| 105 | - **After release, then death:** the next arrangement may separate them and expose different free faces. It does not guarantee R32, refund travel air or announce the correct construction. |
|||||||
| 106 | ||||||||
| 107 | Recovery costs current-route discovery, oxygen, exposure and a completed release action, followed perhaps by ordinary play through several shifts. It never erases unrelated latches or requires a terminal stranded behind the join it controls. |
|||||||
| 108 | ||||||||
| 109 | ## Four compact paper cases |
|||||||
| 110 | ||||||||
| 111 | ### 1. Ordinary death: property and a compact apparatus |
|||||||
| 112 | ||||||||
|
113 | At R03, the isolation bridge has been released and is carried; the one Fork is installed in R02's board; two fasteners and P01's alarm cut are committed; a Cycler sample spent earlier at R23 is already consumed. Death seals those facts. The bridge and other carried rig/cargo return once with the astronaut. Fork stays installed in R02, the sample stays spent, and the fasteners/alarm cut persist. R02–R03 move together with their throat and conduit intact; only their unbound external neighbours may change. The old R01→R02 route becomes historical. Revival still opens onto R01 Dock Mouth; crossing to its outer threshold reveals the new frontier room. A new placement-1 population may be selected for the new arrangement, but it cannot restore the sample, bridge source or completed work. |
||||||
|
114 | |||||||
| 115 | ### 2. R-3 rescue: before departure, after departure and at the airlock |
|||||||
| 116 | ||||||||
|
117 | The current route R01→R11→R12→R13 has been walked; R12 is stocked; the R13 occupant has flow-confirmed travel air at or above the route's full-attempt return mark. If the astronaut dies **before** the refuge door opens, the survivor stays at R13. R12's reserve and the handed-over canister stay placed; after the shift, Prepared becomes **Waiting**, with those committed supplies still noted, because the route check is historical. |
||||||
|
118 | |||||||
|
119 | If death occurs after departure in R11, the safeguard freezes hostile action/contact, spends the reserved return margin and lets the survivor operate the return controls into R12 before the shift. R12 then moves with its actual group; world truth is alive, unsent, at R12, while the astronaut aboard knows only the last witnessed state and armed plan. If death occurs while the survivor is inside the ship airlock but before closure, the result is the same: no Sent flag, no postmortem closure, actual retreat to R12 through the pre-armed return. The local R12 control/occupant confirms that result only when revisited. If the airlock closes first, Sent commits and later death leaves the person aboard. An ordinary living abort to R12 causes none of these shifts. |
||||||
|
120 | |||||||
| 121 | ### 3. Wrong connection before and after death |
|||||||
| 122 | ||||||||
| 123 | R33's R-output is latched to an irrelevant branch while R32's R-input remains unjoined. Releasing at R33 before death frees the face but keeps the rooms adjacent this life. If the player dies first, the wrong join remains a traversable seam inside one rigid group and R33's network-side release remains reachable. Releasing it later changes only that join; the following death may separate the faces. The journal retains “R33 fixed A→R” and the released join record, but any old route to R32 is historical. A diagnostic pulse is useful troubleshooting, not the physical release or completion condition. |
|||||||
| 124 | ||||||||
| 125 | ### 4. Partial network to the whole station, stabilization branch |
|||||||
| 126 | ||||||||
| 127 | Assume thirty-five rooms are already one ship-rooted rigid network and the last unjoined group is the compact R36–R40 assembly. Its iris is physically open, so R39 and R40 are actually reachable from R36; a roster count cannot substitute for that. In a current arrangement, R36's external A face meets a visibly compatible free counterpart presented at R34's network edge. The player inspects and latches those actual faces. Walking from R01 through the seam and through R36 to R37, R38, R39 and R40 establishes physical inclusion. The R34 roster may now report 40/40 joined identities, including previously anonymous rooms, but it neither performs the latch nor reveals what those rooms contained. |
|||||||
| 128 | ||||||||
|
129 | Under the stabilization branch, all forty rooms are now one rigid group. A later death still performs carried return, rescue resolution, transient reset and knowledge bookkeeping, but there is no unbound room adjacency left to rearrange; the station remains physically stable. Diagnostic A/B/R reach may still fail because a converter mode is wrong, and R39 evidence or R40 isolation may remain untouched. Neither blocks physical completion or becomes an ending. If the owner chooses continued rearrangement after 40/40, this rigid-group result cannot stand: the physical meaning of every earlier bind must be reopened, not patched only at the finale. |
||||||
|
130 | |||||||
| 131 | ## Naive policy that fails |
|||||||
| 132 | ||||||||
| 133 | “Shuffle every room independently, then restore the saved joins” breaks both access and conservation. After death at R03 it could place R02 elsewhere, stretch the fixed board/rack conduit across space, and later snap the rooms together around occupied geometry. The same policy could strand R39 beyond an R36 iris with no actual passage while counting it joined. Restoring only labels would turn a physical seam into teleportation and make network-side releases meaningless. |
|||||||
| 134 | ||||||||
|
135 | The repair is to treat compact assemblies and latched components as rigid placement units **before** arranging any unbound faces, then reject any placement that cannot preserve their volume, returns and controls. The cost is fewer degrees of shuffle as the network grows, harder content validation and eventual stabilization under this branch. That shrinking possibility space is the physical price of the player's permanent construction. |
||||||
|
136 | |||||||
| 137 | ## Credible smaller rule |
|||||||
| 138 | ||||||||
|
139 | The bind-entire-short-route-first alternative is the smaller continuity rule: remove protected pre-shift retreat entirely and allow rescue movement only once refuge, abort room and ship-rooted route are one persistent group. Death then uses ordinary rigid-group preservation; an in-transfer survivor can physically abort without a special pre-shift ordering convention. It is easier to explain and gives connections immediate human value. Its cost is substantial: first rescue may wait for several exact latch opportunities, each later rescue repeats network chores, and a short emotional crossing risks becoming a late construction reward. Choose it if the special safeguard proves harder to understand than the delay it avoids. |
||||||
|
140 | |||||||
|
141 | ## Strongest case and accepted costs |
||||||
|
142 | |||||||
|
143 | **Strongest case.** The rule makes permanent construction physically readable while preserving discovery: the player can trust completed joins, installed objects and survivor locations without trusting an old route. Death still changes the unexplored frontier, while living return preserves a deliberately cleared opportunity. A failed rescue has a real, costly continuation state rather than a knowledge placeholder or teleport. |
||||||
|
144 | |||||||
|
145 | **Accepted costs.** Rigid groups reduce shuffle freedom with every join and can make valid arrangements increasingly difficult. Anchoring the growing R01 group reduces it further. A death-shift population refresh can incentivize or punish deliberate death unless rewards and encounter variants are authored carefully. Protected retreat adds fixed controls, full-attempt air margins, local closure tells and an explicit hostile-free/nonblocking transaction window, lowering danger at the exact moment the astronaut dies. The 40/40 roster reveals the existence/count of hidden rooms. |
||||||
|
146 | |||||||
|
147 | ## Open questions |
||||||
|
148 | |||||||
|
149 | - Whether full physical connection (40/40) stabilizes the station or rearrangement continues. |
||||||
| 150 | - Whether Yeva or Aster is first. |
|||||||
| 151 | - Working-part discovery versus fabrication. |
|||||||
| 152 | - Apparent credits continuing before departure versus a permanent save ending. |
|||||||
| 153 | - Protected alive/unsent rescue retreat before the shift versus concrete injury/loss stakes or the bind-first alternative. |
|||||||
| 154 | - Whether a Capacitor's sealed charge is retained or cleared by death; the exact pre-death U is recorded either way. |
|||||||
| 155 | - Post-Sent mortality, and an explicit injury/loss rule for survivors, including outside a bound corridor. |
|||||||
| 156 | - Whether the living-return population rule (no replacement on living return; a new variant only at a death shift) is adopted, and the exact next-generation population lists and reward consequences. |
|||||||
| 157 | - The in-fiction explanation for the astronaut's revival and for the closing expedition's creature bodies. |
|||||||
| 158 | - Whether every reachable pre-completion persistent-group state, across all forty-room states, has a valid changed arrangement; an admissible arrangement catalogue or equivalent evidence is still needed. |
|||||||
| 159 | - Exact rigid clearances, face orientations, population variants, offscreen surviving-enemy holds, rescue return timing, air consumption, and compatibility with every story/object state. |
|||||||
| 160 | - Exact UI/cue forms and accessibility equivalents for the return-mark and closure-tell presentation. |
|||||||
| 161 | - These rules are untested; numbers are proposals. |
|||||||