**Status.** PM provisionally integrated this written comparison after focused review and author response. The cache is the current working proposal, not an owner requirement or validated gameplay choice. Its minimum useful-expedition dependency remains open. 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 — that is fixed; oxygen quantities are not. Map structure, rescue logistics and colony systems remain undecided. Every claim below about how these rules would shape play is a prediction, not an observation.

- A cache persists until recovered. A later death does not destroy an earlier one; caches coexist, and entity resets do not disturb them, a cache being the player's property rather than station state.

- Colony members already sent to the ship are unaffected by the astronaut's death.

**What death threatens, stated plainly.** Nothing destroys a cache. Dying costs the use of everything carried until a journey retrieves it, leaves new salvage unbanked, and may demand capabilities no longer to hand. That is the whole stake; naming it is better than implying one the rules do not create. Decay or fragility would turn a recovery choice into a deadline and push toward the compulsory errand this arrangement exists to avoid, so none is proposed.

| Equipment and salvage acquired during the expedition | Banked on arrival | Held in the cache; never banked by dying |

| A person rescued during the expedition | Joins the colony only if actually sent to the ship | Remains in the colony if already sent; otherwise remains an unresolved station situation |

Returning alive asks what to do with what was banked: install it, hold it, or re-outfit for a deeper objective. Dying asks whether to retrieve the cache now, defer it, or write it off and spend the retained knowledge elsewhere. Where death interrupted a rescue, revisiting that person competes with retrieving the cache and with any other objective; which pull is stronger depends on the situation and is not fixed by these rules.

Rollback has real strengths. It protects an assembled build from confiscation, which serves expressive play directly, and it produces no gear-recovery errands and no compounding, because the player resumes with the capability they left home with.

- **Deferred** — not reachable yet, but perhaps later as reach or capability grows. The cache waits without decay. Deferring avoids an immediate recovery trip, while its equipment remains unavailable and its salvage unbanked.