**What you should know before deciding.** This document has been reviewed by an independent critic and by PM, and revisions remain open; no review is evidence that it is fun, balanced or saleable, and nothing here claims so. Its central lever has two consistent versions; PM has confirmed the one written here and the other stays available (decision 3). If you would rather have a conventional level-up curve than the recommended charge-and-arc design, that is a change with a stated cost (decision 4). The enemy's name may collide with a famous game's faction (decision 7).

**Where to read.** Two honest ways. Straight through is the whole case, about twenty-one thousand words. The short path is sections 1 to 3 for the game; 12 and 13 for two written expeditions; 16 for what is unresolved; 17 for the recommendation and the decisions that are yours. Appendix A explains every term; Appendix B is bookkeeping; Appendix C holds the state table and the two expedition ledgers, for checking rather than reading.

You could instead take the tool on your back, a coil that stores a charge, wade into the channel wearing insulation, and discharge it. The water carries the current to the hatch and it opens for a few seconds: long enough to get through. The yard's beacon, on the same circuit, glows steady for those seconds, so any crowd that can reach it and has no nearer lit beacon starts toward it; but it never flashes, so the next surge still enters by the causeway. You have spent the charge you spent the last surge harvesting.

The rule is the same in all three. What differs is what you knew. The same three routes are tabulated as states, so they can be checked against section 4, in Appendix C.

One fixed district, revisited every expedition. Its layout never changes; what varies is which modules and salvage are where, and how big and when the surges are. The map below is the World and Mystery Designer's current one (their revision r10), adopted as drawn and not to be re-drawn here; it is a design aid, not a floor plan. North is the interior, the docks are south; `=` is raised and dry, `~` is shallow water, `-` is the culvert.

- **Causeway.** A raised dry road from the causeway dock into the district, signed as the evacuation route. Its beacon is at its far end, lit by default. The causeway has no door of its own: what lighting it buys is the road, and where the next surge enters. The **panel** stands at the near end, the causeway head, in the open, about eight seconds from the dock.

- **Sluice.** Beside the junction, a water gate with no beacon: the Flood's own way in when neither branch is lit. It opens onto the interior route.

- **Shelters.** The two docks when dry, and the junction platform. Repacking happens only in shelters.

**Controls (proposal).** Top-down 2D. Keyboard and mouse or gamepad. Move with the stick or keys. The cutter fires by itself. One button triggers the coil. One button interacts (panel, valve, hatch crank, deposit, inspectable prop). One button opens the notebook. One button plants or retrieves a beacon. The rack is rearranged by dragging, only in a shelter.

**Surges and the forecast.** The district's relay still runs on its old timer. At each scheduled tick, a **dispatch**, it sends a pulse down the line the panel has selected, the beacon on that line flashes, and a surge comes in there. Three dispatches per expedition, at roughly three, eight and twelve minutes, each surge larger. The **forecast** is the relay's own schedule, read from a board at the dock and shown as a countdown, a map marker at the next intake, a locked marker for a surge already dispatched, and each entered crowd's current target beacon. It exists because the district always had it; it is the Flood's timetable only because the Flood follows the pulse.

- **Shelter.** A dry dock or the junction platform is a hard stop: enemies neither enter nor spawn. You can repack and watch the district from it. The surge clock keeps running, so retreating to think costs time and position, never health.

3. **Attraction.** The district has two kinds of line: a **power cable** and a **signal cable**, both switched by the panel to the causeway, to the yard, or to neither. At a dispatch the relay's pulse travels the *signal* line only, the beacon on it flashes, and the surge enters there. **The panel alone decides the intake.** After entry, a surge moves toward the nearest lit beacon it can reach, re-evaluated continuously, and gathers around it when it arrives; with no lit beacon reachable it spreads along the branch it entered. Current you inject yourself (the coil, a planted beacon's battery) travels power, never signal: it can light a beacon steady and open a hatch, so it can draw a surge that is already inside, but it can never choose where the next surge enters. **The two cables are visible, or the rule is unfair.** At the panel each position has two cable heads, a thick power cable and a thin signal cable; the thin one runs beside the thick one to the top of its beacon; and at every dispatch the relay's pulse can be seen travelling the thin cable from the panel to the beacon before it flashes. A beacon you lit with the coil is steady but its thin cable never carries a travelling pulse, and at the next dispatch the player watches the pulse run down the other branch's cable instead. That is the observable cause; without it a player who lit the yard with the coil would conclude the rule is unreliable, which is the worst lesson a game about rules can teach.

4. **Charge.** Organisms carry charge. A killed one drops a small **mote**; a mass stunned in water sheds large motes. Each organism sheds once per expedition and is visibly dimmer afterward. Motes fade in seconds; walking over one adds its charge to a battery in your rack, up to the battery's capacity; with no battery, or a full one, the charge is lost. Charge never leaves the district.

- **Switching the panel mid-surge moves the Flood, and that is its price.** Throwing the panel from causeway to yard darkens the causeway beacon and lights the yard's. Every crowd already inside walks to the new light: from the causeway's far end, across the junction beside the sluice, and along the channel to the yard beacon, so the junction and the interior route are the Flood's road while it crosses. Yard to causeway is the mirror, and the hatch closes behind anyone still in the hall. Off darkens both: every crowd spreads along its own branch, toward the docks as much as the interior, and the hatch closes. The forecast shows each entered crowd's new target the moment you switch, so the price is readable before the crowd moves. And the panel stands in the open at the causeway head. So a panic switch does buy something this surge, and it is meant to; what it costs is the route the crowd crosses, the door that shuts, and where the next surge lands.

- **Dock consequence.** A dry dock is never blocked; it is a hard stop. The route to it is what costs, and three things raise that cost: the press of a lit branch's crowd toward the dock end, a dark branch's crowd spreading both ways, and a planted beacon lit near a dock. The two docks have the same bypass, because the culvert joins both dock ends; the asymmetry is water, because the yard's crowd stands in a channel where the coil works and unprotected feet burn. So the held dock's branch must stay lit whenever a surge is in it, which is also what keeps that branch hot. Holding the causeway dock means the causeway is your safe default and the yard is where you send trouble. Holding the yard dock means the yard must stay lit through any surge you send there, so the hall's crowd stands between you and nothing, but off and causeway are both dangerous the moment a surge is in the yard. The colony's choice decides which branch you can never afford to darken.

**An alternative the owner should know about.** The world designer and I had converged on a stricter version of clause 3, in which a beacon pulls only within a visible glow and the two fixed beacons are out of each other's sight, so the panel could never move an arrived surge and only a carried beacon could. It keeps the panel a pure planning tool and removes the panic switch. PM confirmed the continuous rule after considering the alternative (Brief D016), for design reasons: one visible change has a direct consequence in an existing crowd, including a route crossed and a door shut, and it needs no glow or split rule. The alternative stays documented and can be argued again; the difference is whether the panel is a plan or a lever, and it is decision 3. The team is split on it and the owner should know: the World and Mystery Designer, who designed both models, prefers the sight-limited one (a planning-tool panel keeps the forecast marker always true, keeps the mystery's fairness independent of where a planted beacon stands, and needs no pricing of a panic switch), and says so on their page while complying with the baseline; the Independent Design Critic prefers the written one (a lever that works and costs is the genre's texture, and it needs fewer rules); this document recommends the written one because PM confirmed it and the reasons hold. Neither has been played.

- Charge has five states, and the ledgers in sections 12 and 13 track them: dropped (a mote on the ground), collected (walked over), stored (in a battery, up to ten), expired (a mote that faded, or charge collected with nowhere to go), spent (a discharge or a burst). A collected mote goes to the battery with the most room, linked or not, and to the battery placed earlier when rooms are equal; a full battery takes nothing; a battery that the arc is drawing takes nothing until the burst ends.

Six bundles. Play: leave the panel on causeway, take the culvert to the quiet, dark yard, gather, come back under the surge. Cost: carries no powered gear and harvests nothing, so the only door it can open is one the panel opens, at the price of lighting that branch; it has no answer to a surge except distance and the forecast. Counterplay: its own panel choice is its only lever, and a crowd on the road home is its only real threat. Best on the expedition after a discovery, when you know exactly where the salvage is and how to avoid the road.

The beacon and its battery are packed together; the insulation keeps the battery off the bundles. Three bundles. Play: carry the lit beacon into a surge's reach and plant it; the surge walks to it and stays while it is lit. Planting sets down the beacon and its battery as one piece and frees two slots; retrieving is walking over it with two slots free, and with fewer it stays put. Darken it (retrieve it, or let the battery run down) and the pull stops. Cost: the beacon draws the surge toward wherever it is, including you while you carry it; its battery runs down while planted; and it can pull only what is already inside, never choose an intake. Counterplay: a lit fixed beacon nearer the surge outcompetes it; a surge pulled off one route occupies another. Best for clearing the interior route for a run at a distant deposit, or for pulling a surge off the causeway so the hauler's road is clear.

The battery is linked to the coil below it, correctly. But it also touches the bundle to its right, which touches the next, which touches the one below: three connected bundles, three drips, three units a minute. The battery is empty in a little over three minutes, before the second surge, and the coil is dead when it is needed. The fix is visible in the rack: move the insulation between, or leave a slot empty, and carry less. There is also a cleverer fix with no insulation at all, which PM found: stand the coil vertically in the middle column, so its non-conducting housing walls the battery off from two of the three bundles.

**Two loadouts with the arc**, since the recommendation rests on it. Under the link rule the arc needs a battery of its own.

**Charge is finite by rule.** Each organism sheds once. A surge of forty stunned in water yields four large motes, twenty units, two full batteries, if you are standing where they fall before they fade. Stragglers yield one unit each. Discharging spends a whole battery. So the electrician's loop, harvest a surge to fund the next discharge, works only against a fresh surge standing in water, and never against the same crowd twice. With one battery it breaks even: a discharge spends ten, a stunned surge of forty sheds twenty, and a single battery can hold only ten of them before the rest fade. The electrician who wants a profit carries a second battery in place of a bundle, which is the rack tension that loadout is built on; the printed rack in section 5 is the break-even version. Drawn leak-free, with one more rule stated for it: a module accepts one link, so the second battery is storage until it is relinked to the coil in a shelter.

**The genre's payoff moment, and the module that supplies it.** Crowd games of this kind have one defining moment: the point where your power outpaces the spawn rate and you mow the crowd down. Charge alone does not reach that point, and an outside critic was right that shipping under the genre's tag without it would disappoint the audience the tag brings. So the recommended design includes it, on the same rule: the **arc**, a one-slot module that, while linked to a charged battery, makes the cutter's hits conduct from organism to organism through a dense crowd, draining a full battery in about ten seconds. In a thin crowd it does little; in a packed surge it is the mowing moment, funded by charge you harvested from the surge before. Its bound is not the battery but the surge: each organism sheds once, so a surge can fund at most its own size in charge, chained kills shed motes too but only from organisms that have not yet shed, and between surges there is nothing to chain. A forty-organism surge cannot fund more than a few ten-second spells however well it is played, and the drain rate is set above what the cutter alone can earn, so the arc is a spend, not an engine. Numbers are proposals. It is the same conduction clause, applied to bodies.

---

| Rack conduction, mirrored from the district | What you can pack |

| Infer | Power is both key and lure: the lit branch is where doors open and where the Flood is sent. The "refuge" sign marks where surges go, not where it is safe. Someone kept the culvert and the yard in use by leaving the panel on causeway. |

| The answer (spoiler) | Inside the pump hall, beside the hall's dead pump: a crew tally board, rows of marks per surge sent to the causeway, a last row with one mark to the yard and a line drawn under it; and a district plan with the refuge signs crossed out and a route inked through the culvert into the interior. The last crew fed the evacuation route to keep working the yard, turned the signs to mark their own way out, and left the panel on causeway for whoever came after. What they went in for is the next tier. |

- **Tier three, the relay (about eight to eleven).** The relay's timer, in a room at the sluice's head, is what calls the Flood. The chain below is the world designer's (their revision r17; r16 merged this document's access chain with their relay chain, and r17 tabled the three valves, the two supplies and what the drain stops); their page owns it and this section mirrors it. Prerequisites: the junction gate opened in tier two, and the crew's note from behind it, which has two sides: a three-valve order drawn against the inked plan, and the crew's own conclusion, "relay on the head channel; drain it and it stops; clamp it and it holds one line; we chose neither."

*Reaching the room.* Notice: the relay room's door, at the sluice's head on the interior route, is on the sluice's own circuit, dead like the junction's was, with a dark indicator lamp beside it. Compare: the junction valve, already known, joined the yard channel to the pool; the sluice's head sits one pool further along the same water, behind two more valves the player has walked past, and the note's three positions match those three valves against the plan. Infer: the note is the order that joins the yard's water all the way to the sluice's head, so current from a lit yard, or a discharge in the pool, reaches the door; the same rule as tier two, one pool further. Act: set the three valves as the note says, light the yard at the panel or discharge in the pool, and watch the sluice-head lamp light when the water is joined. Consequence: the door opens while the yard is lit, and the price is that the whole district's water is now one energised body, so on the panel route every crowd with a lit beacon to reach holds at the yard's, the yard is hot, and the sluice itself is the Flood's open way in behind the room; on the coil route, a discharge in the pool energises the joined water for seconds, and a crowd held by a lit causeway beacon stays where it is. The three valves, as the world page tables them: V, the junction valve (yard channel to junction pool), found shut and opened in tier two, set open; V2, the pool valve (junction pool to head pool), found shut, set open; V3, the head valve (head pool to the sluice-head channel that feeds the relay), found shut, set open. Only connectivity matters, not order, because the rule is conduction through joined water and the note's order is only the order the crew walked; the success condition is the sluice-head lamp, an indicator, lighting while the yard is lit or during a discharge in the pool, and any valve left shut leaves it dark.

*Inside the room.* Notice: on the relay's face a drum turns with three marks per cycle, and the forecast countdown on the surveyor's board ticks exactly with it; at a dispatch the drum's mark passes a contact and the thin signal cable leaving the room pulses. The forecast has been this drum all along. Compare: beside the drum, a lever with three positions, cabled to the panel at the causeway head, so the panel has been a remote for this lever; a clamp hangs beside it, unused; a drain valve, R, sits shut on the sluice-head channel that feeds the relay; the note names both and chose neither. Understand: the relay is a device under the power clause, working only while its channel carries current; the drum decides when, the lever decides where; nothing here is new, since a drain valve cuts a channel as the field pump did in the yard, a clamp fixes a lever, and the relay obeys the same rule as a hatch. Infer: three things can be done with what the player already knows, each persistent because it is done to the district and not to the player. Act: **shut**, open the drain valve R; **fix**, set the lever and clamp it; **hold**, leave the room as found and record the choice at the dock. Each is one interaction; none consumes salvage; the cost was reaching the room. Consequence: the district changes for good, the expedition still ends at extraction as usual, and the colony's board records which. Two supplies, stated once, confirmed on the world page at r17: the relay has always run on the sluice-head channel that feeds it, its own always-wet water, which is why the drum turns on every expedition while the door beside it is dead; the door is on the pool side's dead line and is fed only when V, V2 and V3 join that water to a lit yard or a discharge. Drain R sits on the relay's feed above V3's weir, so opening it empties only the relay's channel: the head pool, the junction pool and the yard channel keep their water, the drum stops, and nothing else changes; the panel's power positions, the beacons, the hatches and the junction gate are on the district's own circuit and keep working after shutdown. The weir clause is the world designer's addition; without it, opening R with the valves joined would drain the pools and the yard channel too. One point is open on both pages: REV103-9 asks whether the relay's channel is energised water or flowing water, because energised water joined by the three valves would light the yard from the relay's side. The lead's proposal, for the world designer to rule on first: the relay is hydraulic; its drum is turned by the water flowing in its feed, which carries no charge, so drain R stops the flow; the door beside it is the only electrical thing at the head, on the pool side's dead line. With that reading the valve table, the success condition and the drain's effect stand as written; this section mirrors the world page's answer.

*Each ending, next expedition.* **Shut:** no dispatches and a dark forecast board; the Flood arrives only by the sluice, on an unannounced timer, as trickles that grow over the expedition rather than announced surges, and with no lit beacon to reach they spread along the interior route and then both branches; beacons, hatches and the panel still work, so a lit beacon still draws whatever is inside; existing crowds keep their targets; the expedition still ends at fifteen minutes and the docks are still hard stops, so withdrawal is by the culvert as ever, with nothing to read but the crowd itself; the held-dock choice matters less, the forecast relay repair is spent and the workshop stays useful. **Fix, to causeway or yard:** every dispatch enters by the clamped branch, whose beacon flashes at every dispatch for good, and the other branch never receives a surge; the clamp fixes the signal cable only, so the panel's power positions still work, either branch can be lit or darkened at will, and no door is open or shut forever; the other branch's crowd can still be drawn there by a lit beacon or spread there when one goes dark, so its dock is safer, not safe, nothing beyond what the press bound promises; the choice is good only when the clamped branch is the one away from the held dock, and a colony that later switches its held dock has clamped the Flood onto its own road. **Hold:** unchanged, except that the colony knows the relay could have been stopped and was not, and the board records it. Reaching the room and choosing ends the game; nothing about the ending is paid in salvage. Free expeditions continue after any ending under that ending's rules.

**What is different on expedition nine that was not on expedition six.** An outside critic put the hardest question well: once the map is memorised and the notes persist, what renews? The honest answer has three parts. First, the decision renews even when the knowledge does not: every dispatch is a fresh choice of where the Flood lands, and its right answer depends on this expedition's loadout, cargo target, held dock and which crowd is already where; the same three dispatches never pose the same problem twice. Second, the district is not fully known by expedition five, because tiers two and three open the gate, the gallery and the relay room, each of which changes what the rule can do rather than adding rooms to memorise. Third, the surges vary in size and timing within the schedule, and placements vary, so a route is a plan, not a script. What does not renew is discovery itself: once the three tiers are solved, the game is finished, and the design says so rather than pretending to be endless. If the owner wants more life after the ending, the extension with the best return is a second district under the same rule, and it is a scope decision.

**How long the game is, in hours, and whose number it is.** This count is the lead's, derived from the beats above and owned here. Counting what is designed, the minimum is about ten to twelve expeditions, three to four per tier; at about fifteen minutes each that is two and a half to three hours of expeditions, and roughly three to four hours with time at the dock, repacking and deaths, which is an assumption about overhead, not a measurement. Both figures are estimates from content, not validated lengths; a player who already knows the district can go faster, because nothing counts expeditions; the earlier figure of twelve to twenty expeditions was a guess and is withdrawn. The owner should know one commercial fact that follows, in plain words. The Steam store lets a buyer return a game "within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime" (Steam's own refund page, read on 2026-09-06). Two hours is about eight expeditions, which is most of the designed game: a player could finish two of the three tiers and return it. That is a pricing and scope constraint, not a design flaw, and section 17 puts it in front of the owner as a decision about length, price and extensions. The outside researcher's measured page mentioned in section 1 shows the owner's reference games in two price bands that do not overlap, crowd games below thirteen dollars and mystery games above fourteen; those are the prices of eleven chosen examples on one day, not rules for every game, but they are why section 17 treats length, price and shelf as one recommendation rather than three questions.

**What the game is for someone who stops early.** Tier one lands at expeditions one to three, so a player who plays four expeditions and stops has had a complete small thing: a question the place asked them, an answer they found in the pump hall, and a skill they did not have before, sending the Flood where they want it with a switch and knowing what that costs. That is a finished experience, not two thirds of a setup. The relay's ending is for those who go on; the design does not claim anything about how many will, and no achievement or playtime figure on this wiki can say.

**The title.** Hold the Flood is the owner-supplied working title (Brief D017); final naming is the owner's and is not locked. In this design the holding is done by deciding where the Flood goes: the colony holds the Flood off its refuge not by fighting it but by routing it, and the ending is about holding it for good. The Flood is the enemy mass, never the water; the water is what carries the current.

**3:30 to 7:30.** Quiet. The player crosses to the junction platform, a shelter, and watches the causeway crowd's edge press slowly down the road toward the dock end. Two stragglers wander into the yard; the cutter kills them; two motes; the player walks over them and the battery shows two units. On the platform the player arranges the rack for the first time: the coil across the top left, the battery beside it and linked to it, the two bundles below with a gap between them.

Expedition six, a harvest expedition: the player goes in for the interior and for charge, not for cargo. They have solved the false refuge, banked enough for the workshop, and choose the coil as the starting module. The causeway dock is still held dry. Times are approximate and proposed; the ledger at the end tracks every slot and every unit.

**1:30.** The yard cart: insulation and a battery, both there today. They go into empty slots as found.

**3:00.** Surge one, causeway. The player ignores it. Two stragglers, two motes. Both batteries are empty, so by the collection rule the first mote goes to the earlier-placed battery, the coil's, and the second to the other, which now has more room: one in each.

**4:00.** The player runs the culvert back, dashes the eight seconds to the panel, and throws it to yard. The yard lights and the hatch opens. Across the district, the crowd at the causeway's far end, its beacon now dark and the yard's the only lit one it can reach, starts across the junction. The forecast reads: second surge in four minutes, intake yard. The player returns through the culvert at a run.

**5:00.** The junction platform, a shelter, ahead of the crossing crowd: the arc is there. The player arranges the rack: the harvester, six slots of gear. Links: the first battery to the coil, the second to the arc. Nothing touches a bundle; nothing leaks.

**6:00.** The yard, then the hall, and the tally board read again for the inked route. Outside, the crowd from the causeway arrives at the yard beacon, into the channel at the door, and holds. The player is inside with the Flood at the door. This is the moment the design is built around.

Options, all readable: the hatch is powered and open, so the door is a chokepoint where organisms in pursuit range come in one at a time; the cutter can hold it for a while at a cost in health; each battery holds one unit and a discharge needs ten. The player holds the door with the cutter and kills seventeen, picking up motes between the bodies; by the collection rule each goes to the battery with more room, and to the coil's when rooms are equal, so the two fill turn and turn about: the coil's battery from one to ten, the arc's from one to nine.

**7:50.** Discharge. The twenty-three organisms still standing in the channel stop, stunned for eight seconds, and shed two large motes, ten units. The coil's battery, emptied by the discharge and now the one with the most room, takes them all back; the arc's stays at nine. The player is clear of the crowd before it moves.

**8:00.** The second dispatch, yard: eighty organisms begin entering the channel over the next half minute, where the first crowd is recovering from its stun. The player waits at the channel's edge in insulation.

**8:22.** With about sixty of them in the water, the second discharge: they stop, stunned for eight seconds; six large motes, thirty units, collected along the channel's edge during the stun, of which the coil's battery takes ten and the arc's takes one to reach full; nineteen expire on the ground. Both batteries full.

**8:30 to 8:40.** The stun ends; the crowd recovers and packs the doorway where the player stands. The burst: for ten seconds the cutter's hits jump body to body through the packed, recovering crowd, and the arc's battery runs from ten to nothing. These organisms have already shed, so the burst returns no motes; it is a pure spend, and it thins the doorway crowd by dozens as they come. The burst is spent on a recovering crowd, not a stunned one, because a stun lasts eight seconds and a burst ten; how many it kills is a proposal, not a demonstrated outcome. That is the genre's moment, bought with the surge before.

**8:40 to 11:30.** The player takes the causeway, now empty, to its far end and on to the junction platform, following the inked route. The junction gate is shut and its lamp dark: the gate is on the junction's own circuit, and nothing the panel does reaches it directly. Beside it, the valve, shut, and the inked plan shows it open. The player opens the valve: the pool's lamp lights, because the yard is lit and the water is now joined, and the gate opens. The player does not go in, because the coil's battery is the way home, and writes it down: the door to the interior wants current the panel cannot send it directly, and the valve is how the water carries it.

| Each entered crowd's current target | Small marker on the overlay per crowd | UI kit | Not yet selected | Text list |

| A beacon's reach (alternative model only) | Glow radius on the ground | Engine-drawn | None needed | Not needed under the baseline |

**Sources checked today, read-only.** OpenGameArt's published FAQ states that hosted assets are offered under one of CC0, CC-BY 3.0/4.0, CC-BY-SA 3.0/4.0, OGA-BY 3.0/4.0 or GPL 2.0/3.0, that each asset carries its own uploader-chosen licence, and that commercial use is allowed under those terms; no specific pack has been selected, and "free" is not one thing: a CC0 dedication imposes no conditions; a BY licence requires credit; a share-alike licence attaches its own terms to anything made from the asset; a no-derivatives licence forbids adapting it at all; and tinting or resizing a sprite, which is exactly what this section proposes for a humanoid Flood, is an adaptation, so each asset's own licence, not its host's general statement, decides whether that cheap route is allowed. The team's Reference Researcher has tabled these terms from the stewards' own texts on the wiki's asset-licences page, which also notes that a free-of-charge store item is a licence to use, not a public-domain dedication; the Brief's rule that every shortlisted asset is recorded with its source, creator, terms and intended use applies, and the intended use must say whether it is a derivative. Kenney's asset listing page does not state a licence on the listing itself, but the individual page for its "Top-down Shooter" pack states "Creative Commons CC0" and describes 580 files of 2D top-down sprites including tiles, furniture and zombie-style figures; that makes it a plausible candidate for tiles, props and a reworkable creature sprite, subject to a suitability check nobody has done yet. No asset has been downloaded, purchased or created.

**Coverage gaps, honestly.** The enemy sprite is the likely custom-art request as the enemy is currently proposed, and the reason is the proposal, not the market: the one free pack checked (Kenney's "Top-down Shooter", CC0, whose page describes zombie figures among its 580 files; PM confirmed the terms and commercial use on 2026-09-06, without approving suitability) supplies humanoid zombies, and the bioelectric organisms proposed here are not humanoid. Zombies are among the owner's own examples of the Flood. So the cheapest route is a design lever, not an art request: if the Flood were a humanoid mass, tinted and size-varied from a free pack whose licence permits adaptation (CC0 does; a no-derivatives licence would not), the enemy would be covered at no cost and the rule would not change, since what conducts is bodies standing in water either way. That option is put to the owner as part of decision 2; nobody has inspected the pack's sprites in the engine, and this document does not claim they fit. Everything else in the table can be carried by generic top-down tiles, a UI kit, engine particles and text, at the cost of some atmosphere. Sound is not designed here.

**Minimum complete experience.** One district (two docks, causeway, culvert, yard with pump hall, the junction platform with its gate, pool and valve, the sluice, the interior and the relay room), three mystery tiers, seven module types including the arc, one enemy type with size and tint variants, three surges per expedition, three colony decisions, an ending. About ten to twelve expeditions, three to four hours.

**Optional extensions, in order of value.** A second district using the same rule with different geography. A second enemy variant that conducts differently. A conductivity axis, fresh water against salt intrusion that the pump controls, which an outside researcher's sourced reference page notes is real physics (salt water carries current around a body instead of through it) and would be free authored content; not in the minimum. More module types. A larger colony.

**Complexity drivers.** Crowd behaviour with holding, press and pursuit (the one real engineering risk). One tuning bound the fairness claim depends on, restated from section 16: on a first expedition with the panel untouched, the causeway crowd's press must not reach the causeway head before the evacuation window closes. Readable energised water. The rack UI. The forecast overlay.

**Cheap alternatives if needed.** Press as a fixed radius that grows on a timer rather than simulated crowding. A single fixed pursuit range. Text inspection for every clue prop. Flat tints for water states.

**Resolved in this draft.** One routing model, written out and priced (section 4), on the world designer's map as of their revision r10, adopted verbatim so the two pages stop trading choices. The yard intake is in the water. Modules do not conduct; wet salvage does, and passes it on. Charge is finite by rule. No colony upkeep. The culvert is a gravity drain and costs the player nothing. The hatch has a stated closing rule and a crank exit. The relay's signal cable is visible, so the coil's limit is learnable.

2. **Enemy and setting.** Bioelectric organisms in a drowned pumping district are proposals. If you want zombies, aliens or another Flood, the rule survives; the fiction changes. One consequence worth knowing: a humanoid Flood, which zombies are, is the one enemy a free pack already checked could plausibly supply, so it would remove the only custom-art request this document expects (section 14).

4. **Combat, length and shelf: the recommendation and its alternatives.** Recommended: charge as the only combat yield, the arc in the minimum scope for the mowing moment with the fuel policy in section 6, no experience curve, growth by composition capped at six slots (sections 5 and 6); the designed length above; the positioning hypothesis above, with the price left uncommitted. The intended player, named once: someone who plays crowd games and wants a reason to think; mystery players are the second audience, not the first. What is observed, with its limits: an outside researcher measured the reference games' list prices on 2026-09-06 (crowd games about five to thirteen dollars, mystery games about fifteen to thirty) and reviewers' playtime at the moment they reviewed (medians of roughly nine to forty-six hours); reviewers play more than buyers, and playtime at review is not completion length, so these figures cannot set a minimum length for this game, and the price of eleven chosen examples is not a rule for every game. Steam's refund terms are two weeks and under two hours of play; that is a fact about the store, not a prediction of refunds. What is predicted, and testable only later: that a three-to-four-hour authored crowd-routing game holds its price on that shelf. The alternatives, each a change with a cost: a conventional experience curve with level-up choices, which pulls the player toward the biggest crowd and away from the district, the thing this design is for; a longer game by adding a second district under the same rule, the extension with the best return, which no evidence here requires; or selling it as a mystery on the other shelf, which departs from the genre you asked for. Nothing here is a viability claim, and content is not to be added merely to sit beyond a refund threshold.

6. **The rack's size.** Six slots and seven modules, as proposed, or a real item game at twenty to thirty modules, which changes the content budget.

- **Press:** the slow outward creep of a gathered crowd's edge along its branch during a quiet interval.

- **Rack:** the six-slot frame on the surveyor's back; the whole inventory apart from the cutter.

- **Cutter:** the handheld tool that fires by itself. Needs no slot.

**What r3 changes.** The world designer's r10 and my r2 crossed and each adopted the other's earlier choices, so r3 aligns to r10 verbatim and stops the exchange: the junction platform as the shelter, the junction gate on its own circuit with its valve and pool as tier two, the crank as the hatch's exit, press and pursuit range as the crowd terms, and the map as drawn there. Their integration items 1 to 7 are all applied: gravity-drain culvert and dead pump; both docks share the bypass and the asymmetry is water; the press-rate bound is stated as a tuning constraint (section 16); the forecast shows each crowd's target (section 3); the turned-sign rule is stated (section 7); the relay room opens by a valve sequence, not a key (section 11); the chain rows are lifted from r10, with the Understand row rewritten for the visible signal cable. The reader's Q32 is answered by making the signal cable observable (section 4, section 9, section 14). The outside critique's X9, X13 and X14 are answered on this page: the title is the owner's working name and not a requirement; expedition twenty-one is a courtesy and the retention argument is spent by two endings, said plainly; the length is owned here. One sentence cites the outside researcher's sourced electrofishing reference as grounding for beacon and coil being one device at two intensities.

**What r2 changed.** Integrates WLD102 r8 as delivered: the world designer's map (interior gate on the causeway circuit, two ledges, culvert exits, the ladder from the hall to the yard ledge as the unpowered exit), the gravity-drain culvert, the crowd vocabulary (holding, proximity, thinning), the re-derived dock consequence, the mid-surge price by route and door, the mystery's revised rows, and the shut / fix / hold ending with the valve gallery as tier two. Answers the outside critique where it is design: the differentiator (section 1), the rack as a small scope (section 5), the optional arc module for the genre's payoff (section 6), the renewable and the length in hours with the refund-window fact (section 11), and three new owner decisions (section 17). The routing baseline is unchanged from r1 and from D013; the world designer's r9 asks PM to confirm or reverse it, and this document is written so that either answer changes section 4 and the scenes, not the rest.

2. Extraction and dock consequence: section 2 diagram; section 4 surge behaviour (press, pursuit, dispersal by reset), dock consequence, no blocked dock; section 12 untouched-panel retreat; section 13 pump-hall moment with hatch closing rule and the crank exit; the yard intake in water carried into the topology.

**Changes from the concept packet (DES101 r5).** The glow-range and split-surge rules are withdrawn from the baseline and kept as the labelled alternative. Power and signal cables are new, to give PM's "coil cannot select intake" a physical reason; the world designer reached the same separation independently. Holding, press and pursuit range are the shared crowd terms, settled at the world designer's revision r10. The siphon and the optional arc modules are new. Numbers are proposed throughout.

**Open handoffs.** The Independent Design Critic's REV103 r5 on this exact revision. The World and Mystery Designer's ruling on REV103-9 (energised or flowing water in the relay's feed) and a drift check of section 11 against their r17. PM's next review. The owner's decisions in section 17. Nothing else is open from this document's side; routing, the title, criterion 11 and the team roster are settled in Brief D015 to D018.

**Criterion 11, where it is answered.** The owner page's recommendation paragraph; section 1's audience paragraph; section 6's payoff design and tradeoff; section 11's length, early-stop and ending paragraphs; section 17's recommendation and decision 4, with the observed data, its limits and the prediction separated.

| 8:30 | burst on the recovering crowd | 0 | 0 | 10 / 0 | | 10 |