Hold The Horde — Expedition Proposal

What this is. One representative sortie from the ship into the station and back, written to show that a clear immediate goal, ordinary horde pressure, a discovery that changes understanding and a purposeful return can be one trip rather than four activities. It is a comparison scenario, not an opening mission and not settled design. Requirements come from the Owner Brief; everything else is a proposal, and revival and the ending stay open. Build rules: Build Comparison. Scope: Design Plan.

Leaving the ship

The colony wants a compressor head: station gear that packs a canister denser than the ship can alone. The ship makes unlimited oxygen (owner requirement); what it cannot make is reach. That is why a successful trip pays out in exploration rather than damage.

Yeva Kolb — a station pressure-tech the player rescued on an earlier trip — names the workshop where the head can be found. The immediate goal is to bring it aboard, by returning alive or dying while carrying it.

The loadout is the first real decision. Equipment competes with salvage for space (owner requirement), and spare canisters compete with both under the owner's shared-capacity decision. The head reserves its full space from the moment it is lifted, held or stowed alike, so a full pack has to make room before the head can be freed at all. Reserving that room at the ship means going in lighter than the player would like; going in heavy means giving something up on the spot, or a second trip, or an abandoned objective. None of it is hidden — carried supply, remaining time and free space stay readable at a glance. Mystery belongs in the station, never in the interface.

The way in

The route runs down a service spine. The horde here is ordinary — no set piece — and it does what ordinary hordes should do: it forces route commitment. A chokepoint can be fought, sealed or avoided, and each option spends something different: equipment, time and therefore oxygen, or distance.

The player passes things without stopping. A mark cut into a crate. Another beside a pressure door two junctions later — the same unfamiliar script, but hand-painted and irregular where the first was exact. The difference is plainly visible and means nothing yet. Both are scenery, and the player is right to treat them that way.

The rack

The head sits in a powered rack whose state is legible: it holds until unpowered, and unpowering it is a deliberate act the player has to protect. Retrieval is a commitment, not a pickup, and finding the head does not complete the objective; only arriving with it does.

The shutdown is also the first thing the player watches a mark do. The power trace is visible as it goes: through a junction bearing one stamp, into a buffer bearing a second where it drains away, and stopping dead at a contact bearing a third. Nothing is named and no term appears. The player has simply watched three marks behave differently, once.

What the player notices

The service bay behind the workshop finishes the job the rack started. There the player watched three marks behave differently, once. Here the same shapes recur across components that plainly do different jobs, each staying consistent within its group. One observation becomes a pattern, and a player who compares them can conclude, unprompted, that the marks name families — relay, sink, isolator — rather than individual parts. Evidence first, generalisation second, and the inference is never handed over.

Observed, not unlocked. Every mark was physically visible the first time the player walked past it; nothing is revealed here. No solve button, no survivor who translates. The notebook preserves a facsimile and location of a mark the player chooses to capture in world time. Under the Player Information contract, frozen-view inspection, record comparison and free personal notes happen with the whole game paused. Knowing three families is not knowing a language.
Legible. A player who does not care can take the head and leave unpenalised; a player who looks gets the discovery.
Paid for in oxygen. In running world time, standing in that bay is time, and time is supply. This does not dissolve the brief's tension between pressure and curiosity. The intent is that the payment feels worth making; whether it does is exactly the kind of thing writing cannot settle.

The way out

The return trip is the point of the whole design. The corridor is the same corridor. The player is not.

In hand the head leaves only basic defence: the build they spent capacity on is unusable while they are holding it. Stowing it returns the build through a deliberate, exposed transfer, and it still occupies full space. In-hand carriage is brief by design — once stowing is safe the player takes it, and no threat is invented to keep them holding it. The honest recurring decision homeward is stowed against dropped, and dropping frees space and handling at once while leaving the objective on the floor behind them.

The marks they walked past have also stopped being scenery. The crate's cut mark reads as a sink now, making it the trip's last capacity question: make room, or leave it knowing what they are leaving.

The door reads differently again. Its paint is irregular where the cutting was exact — a copy, made by a human hand from a shape the crew did not understand and used as a label of their own. It identifies nothing mechanical and does not pretend to. What it says is that someone deliberately sealed that section, and wanted others to know.

Home

The return is purposeful three times over. The head is installed and the colony's canisters reach further. The knowledge outlives the trip. And Yeva can recognise the paint — but only if she is shown it.

That is the proposed channel, and it earns its keep: showing a facsimile to a survivor is what the notebook is for, and it is the reason to record an irregular scrawl that means nothing at the time. Survivors read handwriting, not language. The consequence is therefore missable rather than automatic — a deliberate cost, since a player who recorded nothing gets no scene — but missable is not lost: the mark stays on the door and Yeva reacts whenever she is shown it.

Shown it, she says it is Dorn's — her work partner, whom she has not named before now. That is the human consequence, and deliberately not a resolution. She does not know whether he sealed the section to keep something out or to keep himself in; neither does the player, and she wants to know. Her contribution is human context — whose hand, which crew practice — while the pattern-finding stayed with the player. She is a person, not an upgrade dispenser.

What the player can now do differently

A named place to go back to. The sealed door is an objective the player chose, not one handed out.
A reading that travels. Cut marks recur station-wide, so the families change which components are worth carry space later; painted copies of the same shapes carry crew context and no mechanical claim. Two kinds of information in one script, told apart by how the mark was made. What the families feed into is Build Comparison's to state, and it rests on the rack observation below.
More reach. The installed head reopens places the player had to turn back from.

Provisional mechanics and dependencies

Illustrative details remain proposals; the owner-settled capacity and death rules below are constraints.

The rack observation. The visible power trace through relay-, sink- and isolator-stamped parts is the only observed evidence the family inference rests on, and it is what keeps the reading from being asserted. Reconciled with Systems; a proposed benefit on both sides, not an owner requirement.
Carry rules. Systems': the head reserves full capacity from the moment it is lifted, held or stowed alike, so the loadout cost above is real; in hand is a transient release, transfer and emergency state rather than a long-haul strategy, and it suppresses either build equally. No magnitude asserted. See Build Comparison.
Shared carry interface. Equipment, salvage and spare canisters share carrying capacity under the owner's decision. Exact capacity, shapes and quantities remain proposed.
Notebook. The current Player Information contract governs world-time capture, stored records, frozen inspection and personal notes. Showing a captured facsimile to a survivor is one proposed use that makes recording worth doing.
Findability across trips. The sealed door must remain identifiable for a later search if this consequence is to be revisited. The station shifts after each death; its earlier recorded location is historical, not a guaranteed current route. The scene therefore needs authored recognition and current-access/recovery conditions, not a fixed-map rule.
Death. Settled by the owner: dying returns the astronaut to the ship with everything carried, the head included. The return leg's tension is therefore about time, oxygen and the crossing itself rather than about losing the object. See Death and Persistence.
Salvage magnitude. How much reach the head adds, and whether it is unique or one of a class, are not mine to set.

What this does not establish

That this is fun; that oxygen pressure tunes to a level rewarding care rather than punishing it; or that horde combat and unhurried observation coexist in the same minute of play. Those are the real risks and a written scene cannot settle them. One narrower claim holds: this discovery reuses signage, corridors and a mechanism that already exist, so its cost is authored meaning rather than new geometry — a reason to prefer this kind of discovery, not evidence about the 30 / 90 / 100–200 hour ambitions, which remain unvalidated.