The frontier moves when the *cost of getting somewhere falls*. Three things lower it: carrying capability, so a canister goes further; knowledge, since a known direct route is cheaper than a searched one; and infrastructure the player restores, such as power to a hoist.

| Restored infrastructure (player) | Persists once restored | — |

That fiction has a limit, and the limit is a design dependency rather than a flourish: painted names cover only where the crew wrote them. The journal's location reference must therefore rest on a reliable substrate, with the painted names as a legible layer above it — otherwise references break exactly where exploration becomes most interesting.

First a cut mark describes a component. Then a room: a bay whose contacts all carry one family's cut mark was built to do one job. Then the station — but here the evidence changes hands. A run of doors carrying *painted* copies is not the builders' scheme; it is a boundary a person drew, using a borrowed shape, and reading it tells the player about that person rather than about the machinery. Keeping the two kinds of mark distinct is what makes the third tier a discovery about people. The player ends up reading the layout itself with evidence gathered for a different purpose, and no new system is required for it — only that the marks stay where they are.

**Second — the sealed section.** *Goal:* reach the door and find out what it closes. *Observed:* the same hand has painted the same shape on several fittings along one route, not on the door alone; behind an open panel, the section's power feed is dead because a contact has been physically pulled from its seat, and the seat itself carries a cut isolator mark. *Available inference:* the sealing was deliberate and done by hand rather than by failure. Whether the painted fittings were marked in an order, and in which direction, is *not* observable from the marks themselves — that reading stays tentative unless the fiction gives it a physical basis, such as later paint overlapping earlier where two marks meet. Someone working outward and closing behind himself, and someone shutting something in, both survive the evidence; the design does not decide between them. *Choice:* re-seat the contact and open the section, accepting that whatever the isolation was for is no longer isolated; or leave it and follow the painted fittings the other way.

*Consequence, route:* re-seating the contact is a hand action at the panel — the same work the mark's original meaning describes, not a key or a found item. The restored feed also powers a hoist on the main run, and both effects persist: the section stays un-isolated and the hoist stays powered for every later expedition, shortening the trip inward. Capability gained by understanding what a mark meant.

**Third — the last painted name.** *Goal:* reach the far end of the painted section names and record whatever marks the wall past them — checkable on arrival, and abandonable if something better appears. *Observed:* past the hoist, painted names continue in a different hand, then stop. Beyond them the cut marks carry on across space carrying no paint at all. *Available inference:* the crew's *labelling* stops here. Whether they never went further, went and stopped writing, or went and did not come back is not settled by absent paint, and the article does not claim it is. *Choice:* press on without painted names to navigate and record by, or work the named band thoroughly first.

*Consequence, narrative:* the crew's own record has an edge, which is a discovery about people rather than about a mechanism, and it sharpens a question instead of answering one. It resolves nothing about the station's origin and is not intended to.

Its case is stronger than a first reading suggests, and it does not lose priority one. Because anchors keep their contents and marks, a sealed door that is an anchor is exactly as reinterpretable as it is here: the player can still walk past it, learn what its mark means, and come back to a door that is still there. Location references to anchors keep working, and the crew's painted names can live on anchors too, so nothing forces the game to hand over coordinates. What varies is the tissue between anchors, and the loss is confined to that tissue: an incidental crate two junctions along may not be there next time, and route memory stops accumulating.

**Why fixed geometry is still preferred, as a judgement rather than a deduction.** Under anchors, the designer must nominate in advance what is allowed to carry meaning. Under fixed geometry, anything can: a mark on an incidental crate, the arrangement of a room nobody flagged, a route that turns out to be a boundary. For a game whose first priority is noticing what nobody pointed at, that difference is worth paying for. It is a preference about where discovery is richest, not something the brief settles.

**The costs accepted.** Authored content burden, which remains the most credible threat to the brief's scale ambitions. The risk that a permanent station becomes a solved commute once routes are known — and because restored infrastructure persists and shortens known runs, difficulty likely has to come from depth rather than from re-crossing settled ground. Varying population, hazard and power state is the proposed answer to staleness. Each of these is a prediction; none is measured, including the comparative content cost of either arrangement.