**Current owner direction — 2026-09-08.** The station now shifts after each death by owner decision. Retaining a discovered location means retaining its historical record, not a guarantee of unchanged position or connectivity. Selected changes, including the owner's example of unlocked doors, remain permanent. Installed objects and shift timing are now provisionally specified by the accepted conditional candidate in [Death Shift and Rescue Continuity](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Death%20Shift%20And%20Rescue%20Continuity): an installed object keeps one location and travels with its room, never with the astronaut, and the shift advances once per death after the carried set has returned. Survivor loss and the cause of revival remain unresolved; do not infer item destruction or duplication. Everything still carried returns aboard as required. [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief).

**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](/Hold%20The%20Flood/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.

**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.

**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. Under the accepted **conditional** candidate, a person already in transfer with an armed autonomous retreat reaches their named abort refuge alive and unsent before the shift — a proposed world outcome, **not** something the astronaut learns aboard: their present state stays unconfirmed knowledge until the player observes that refuge again in person. Whether a survivor can be permanently lost is undecided and is not settled here.

**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. Enemies, traps and mechanisms may reset on their own terms, and deliberate infrastructure changes the player made persist as those rules describe. A living return changes no adjacency and does not replace the creatures already defeated in that arrangement; only a death shift selects a new finite population.

| | Returning alive | Dying |

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.

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.

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.

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, and other articles should not carry one on this account.

Oxygen quantities; 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. The protected-retreat safeguard and the layout-stabilisation branch are **pending owner reaction**, not adopted rules; nothing here presents either as an owner requirement.