Hold The Horde — Home And Colony Loop
Status. First-pass SMALL-band proposal, not owner-approved colony management, cast, final dialogue, economy, save policy, survivor mortality rule or implementation. The owner has selected an authored survivor colony that becomes a home, unlimited ship oxygen, shared expedition capacity, carried-property return on death, and tentatively the existing equipment-loan direction. The five people, three new projects, fiction, ship fixtures and benefits below remain replaceable proposals. This article reuses the accepted working scenes in Coming Home and Home Projects without reopening their review.
The return is a sequence of chosen acts
Home is the interval in which the astronaut can account for an expedition, spend time with people, use optional projects and deliberately prepare the next attempt. It is not a results screen that silently distributes discoveries or a management day that advances debts.
A living return
- Cross the ship airlock. The station does not shift merely because the astronaut returned alive. Every object still carried crosses once in its exact state: active rig parts remain in the rig; inactive cargo remains inactive; loot and canisters retain their object identities and fill states. Oxygen already breathed and material already consumed stay spent. An object left in a station fixture or deliberately dropped remains there.
- Acknowledge or postpone. Any person physically present may offer a visible greeting or immediate concern, but the player may answer, say “later,” or walk to storage. Postponement preserves the conversation. It causes no relationship deduction, hidden resentment, missed upgrade, unseen discussion or project decay. This article does not decide what happens to people after rescue; it changes no survivor state merely because the astronaut returned.
- Unload deliberately. Moving an object from the manifest to ship storage, a named home fixture or a person-linked project is an explicit one-instance transition. Nobody silently takes salvage or a reusable part. A project loan remains the same object at a displayed ship location and is no longer in the selected expedition manifest while seated there.
- Share an observation deliberately. The player chooses a committed record and a person. That person can respond only from what the record shows, what the player says and their own attributed experience. Nothing learned by one person becomes communal knowledge merely because both are aboard. No project writes, corrects or grades the player’s notes. Capturing a project result is a world-time recording action; opening the journal pauses the world and freezes project progress, after which the player may annotate the stored evidence themselves.
- Work, prepare or skip. Project operations occur in world time aboard. Exact duration is unchosen, and there is no passive timer, upkeep cycle or regeneration cost. Ordinary suit and canister refill uses the unlimited ship oxygen supply at no scarce-resource cost. The packing bench can instead create the distinct prepared-full canister state. Ship-side rig rearrangement is safe and reversible.
- Choose a departure manifest. The player selects one current rig and any inactive cargo, canisters and loot. Active rig parts use carrying capacity once plus active rig area; inactive cargo uses carrying capacity but no active area. A part still installed in a home project uses neither expedition figure and cannot also depart. Reclaiming it first is safe, returns that same instance and suspends the fixture. Capacity or area overflow refuses departure with the object still visible; nothing is dropped.
A death return
Death begins at step 1 aboard but is not a richer reward. Under the owner’s rule, every object in carried membership at death returns once, including active rig parts, inactive cargo, carried loot and canisters in their exact surviving states. The death itself shifts the station. Station-installed, dropped, handed-over and consumed things do not return; a reusable part already loaned to a ship project was already aboard and remains seated there without being duplicated. Existing ship storage is unchanged.
The next home actions are still acknowledge or postpone, unload, share, work and prepare. No forced death conversation occurs before the player regains control, and no conversation happens unseen. Ordinary condition restoration follows the current survival baseline, but canister refill, project work and rig choice remain separate acts. This article does not select single-line or reloadable saves and does not decide the result of death during an unresolved survivor transfer. It also establishes no rule that a rescued person is immortal, endangered or regenerated by the ship.
Property and operation states aboard
| State | Where the one instance is | Operates / persists | Departure consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active in chosen rig | Astronaut rig | Links may operate; exact rig state is retained until edited | Pays carrying cost once and active area |
| Inactive expedition cargo | Selected manifest, outside active rig | Cannot receive links or operate | Pays carrying cost, no active area |
| Ship storage | Named storage position | Object state, fill and records persist; no expedition operation | Not carried unless selected |
| Installed in home project | One named fixture seat | Only that fixture’s stated operation; continuous operation ends on removal | Not carried; reclaim and capacity check before departure |
| Station-installed or dropped | Named stable world object/location | Its owning world rule; old route may become historical after death | Does not appear aboard or depart |
| Completed product or record | Prepared canister, physical trace or committed evidence | Persists because work actually completed, not because its fixture stays powered | Carries only if its object is selected; knowledge is not cargo |
| Consumed input | No remaining object location | Stays spent after return, death and project reclamation | Cannot be selected or restored here |
| Survivor | A person in their last established state, never a manifest item | Only authored actions and conversations | Never cargo; this loop grants no delivery or mortality result |
Project availability, commissioning and participation
A person's motive explains the project; it neither creates the facility nor makes that person a permanent operator. Each project has four states:
- Role not aboard; setup absent: unavailable; no fixture or off-screen progress.
- Setup incomplete: inspect, perform the named world-time commissioning act, or postpone; no project output yet and no decay or relationship penalty.
- Commissioned: listed contributions are committed and controls are visible; setup persists without upkeep and accepts only stated inputs.
- Person not participating now: the commissioned fixture still supports the solo actions below. New personal testimony or setup changes wait; this state establishes no staffing, injury, absence or death rule.
Commissioning advances only through visible authored actions, not sleep, expeditions or returns. With exactly one first survivor, the player may greet/postpone, store/repack, refill ordinarily, rearrange the rig, share a chosen record and depart. Only that person's setup lead can be inspected. If Yeva is first, prepared cycles wait until Dorn's inherited service contribution is also established complete. If Aster is first, she may commission the ledger table with her physical ledger; the other four projects remain unavailable. Any other selected first survivor follows the same rule. Empty-ship equipment acquisition/configuration and ordinary refill never require these people.
Five person-linked project briefs
Names are convenient fiction labels, not a selected cast. Yeva and Aster are mutually compatible with either current first-survivor direction: if one is not chosen for R-3, that person may be rescued later or the project can move to the stated replaceable role. Each project is voluntary and remains usable later without deterioration.
| # | Person and want | Input, fixture and actual operation | Visible result and changed next action | Reclaim, postpone, revisit; bounded knowledge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — Collar receiver (reused) | Dorn, a replaceable station-maintenance worker, wants to know whether the section he sealed behaved as expected. | Loan the Fork Relay to the commissioned, addressed receiver while its bus is powered. Start one ship-supplied poll while world time runs; poll neutrality and a cleared display latch are separate branch readiness checks. | With both branches ready, the display shows one value drift and return. A poll-only acceptance places a sample in an unlatched buffer but shows only incomplete: the value is unreadable and uncapturable until a later cleared-display attempt, and clearing discards it. Attempts never combine samples. | Once a complete observation is made, reclaiming Fork stops monitoring but does not erase the witnessed value or Dorn’s attributed statement. Postponing yields neither. A later poll is a new dated reading, not proof that the section held, a route, direction, cause or safety verdict. |
| 2 — Packing bench (reused) | Yeva, a replaceable pressure technician, wants the compressor routing she installed—and Dorn serviced—to make an expedition materially different. | Secure and clamp one eligible vessel, seat Fork, and deliberately run a witnessed cycle using fixed ship power and unlimited ship oxygen. The valve accepts below 12 O; the compressor accepts only when the vessel begins that wave at 8–11 O. | Starting at 0–7 O, valve alone fills incrementally to at most ordinary-full 8 O. A later wave beginning at 8–11 O lets both branches accept and fills exactly to 12 O prepared-full, still at proposed 2 C. Fork supplies no gas or power. | Reclaiming Fork ends further preparation; already prepared gas remains in completed canisters. Postponement leaves ordinary refill available. Returning later resumes from the vessel's last exact committed amount, without decay. The result says what the bench did, not how much oxygen an unknown route will require. |
| 3 — Ledger comparison table (new) | Aster, or a replaceable supply clerk, wants to test whether a dated movement in her ledger corresponds to something the astronaut actually recorded rather than treating her memory as a map. | The player chooses two already committed records tied to known room instances or generations and one dated ledger entry. At a fixed illuminated table, player and clerk align only visible anchors; recording the resulting overlay is a separate world-time capture. No portable part is required. | A physical overlay exposes one bounded match or contradiction—for example, the same cabinet mark but a different threshold face. The player chooses whether to revisit that known room, compare a named fixture, or ignore the lead in favor of another expedition. | The table can be left at any stage and nothing is lost. Completed overlays remain aboard; they are not automatic journal annotations. Aster’s conclusion stays attributed and historical. It cannot reveal a present neighbour, current contents, walkable route, translation or which witness is right. |
| 4 — Material response tray (new) | Mara Venn, a replaceable sterile-processing/reclamation worker, wants to stop calling visibly different station scrap “the same rubbish.” | The player may loan an owned Salvage Cycler to a fixed catch cradle and select one unprotected salvage sample. A ship fixture supplies the deliberate activation trigger and catches the output while the player watches. Once activation commits, the selected sample is consumed under the Cycler’s existing rule. | The catch box visibly contains the sample’s inspected conductive, pressure or brittle response, and a world-time capture can preserve that result. The player may pack a matching expendable sample and Cycler for a chosen cargo-spending rig, or keep the carrying space/value and use a non-consumption build. | Reclaiming Cycler ends testing and returns the same part; the recorded response remains, but no ammunition, recipe or new part remains in the tray. Postponement consumes nothing. Revisiting with another sample is a new voluntary spend. Mara can compare observations, but equipment discovery, use and the same source-fixture evidence remain available without her. |
| 5 — Evacuation gait rail (new) | Ivo Hale, a replaceable rehabilitation worker, wants the ship’s abandoned evacuation rail to distinguish deliberate movement from being carried—the distinction that mattered in their old work. | Loan an owned Stride Switch to the fixed rail. In world time, the astronaut personally performs a voluntary grounded stop/start crossing, then personally stands without walking while the slow maintenance carrier moves them through the same marked span. The ship powers the rail’s lamps. | Lamps and a paper trace record those two actually performed tests: the voluntary crossing emitted when the Switch's shown condition was met; the carrier pass did not. A rolling weight may be an additional fixture check but cannot establish the same-astronaut distinction by itself. The player can decide to try Stride as a movement-conditioned rig source next trip or retain their current manual/sensor control. No stat or mastery bonus is awarded. | Reclaiming Stride darkens the rail and returns that instance; a completed trace remains as a record of only those performed tests. Postponement has no penalty. A revisit can test another deliberate pattern. Ivo knows this fixture and witnessed movement only; the trace predicts neither station terrain, enemy motion, safe timing nor the full behavior of a future rig. |
The Cycler and Stride projects do not gate their parts. Their station sources, inspection, removal and rig use remain available to an empty ship under Equipment Acquisition And Rig Growth. Likewise, no person here translates alien writing, fabricates an intact catalogue part, grants active area, selects the station-wide connection mechanism, knows an unseen route or unlocks an unchosen ending.
Participant and lasting-facility matrix
| Project | Commissioning act that requires the person | What remains and who can operate it afterward |
|---|---|---|
| Collar receiver | Dorn installs the tap, fixes its one known panel address and states his expected historical condition. A new channel or comparison requires him. | Tap/address/controls remain. Alone, the player may seat Fork, poll that channel, capture the limited value and reclaim Fork; no new Dorn testimony appears. |
| Packing bench | Inherited fact: Yeva completes installation/routing; Dorn's pressure service is complete, and he operates it in the Coming Home scene. Both contributions commission it. | New general-operation proposal: after that demonstrated cycle, the player may run later eligible cycles alone. New routing/service needs its contributor; their presence adds response, not prepared fill. |
| Ledger table | Aster/the clerk brings the ledger, registers one dated entry and agrees on visible anchor/provenance fields. New entries or recollection require her. | Table, registered entries and fields remain. Alone, the player may align committed records and capture a bounded overlay; nobody supplies an absent conclusion. |
| Material tray | Mara/the reclamation worker installs catch shields, visible protected-item refusal and the cradle. Her comparison/account requires her. | The player may seat Cycler, choose unprotected salvage, commit/cancel consumption, capture the response and reclaim it alone. No recipe or part is granted. |
| Gait rail | Ivo/the rehabilitation worker repairs the carrier, marks the safe span and commissions lamps/recorder. His context/response requires him. | Alone, the player may perform both astronaut passes, capture only those outcomes and reclaim Stride. An object-only run cannot substitute. |
Scoped Fork interface clarification
The older home pages called the borrowed object a generic “relay-family part” and sometimes used “powered” as shorthand. Under the current twelve-part catalogue, propose that the exact loan is the existing Fork Relay, and that each home project contains a fixed, visibly wired service seat. This adds no thirteenth portable part and no general adapter recipe.
The ship provides each fixture’s power and physical medium: the receiver has ship power plus its existing docking-collar monitoring bus; the bench has ship power plus unlimited oxygen and its installed compressor head. Mechanical Interfaces And Opening Quantities owns their accepted first-pass branch tables. At the collar, commissioning, the fixed address, seated Fork and bus power are shared prerequisites; poll neutrality and display-cleared are independent branch readiness. Poll-only acceptance leaves one unreadable, uncapturable sample in the unlatched buffer; clearing discards it, and no later attempt combines with it. At the bench, the vessel must be eligible, secured and clamped and Fork seated. Valve accepts below 12 O; compressor accepts only if the vessel begins the wave at 8–11 O. A vessel beginning at 0–7 O reaches at most 8 O by valve alone; a later 8–11 O wave can reach 12 O prepared-full. Fork preserves/copies the bare trigger but supplies no energy, gas, sensor value, translation or payload, and only one fixture can hold the one object at a time.
Local causal trace and manifest. This is one legal commissioned, ready happy path, not a promise that every proposed chain will accept. The astronaut returns carrying Fork. They store other cargo, remove Fork from the chosen rig, and seat it at the receiver: fixed ship poll control → Fork input → poll gate + display latch. With both fixture receivers ready, one limited value is observed and captured; Fork is reclaimed, ending monitoring. They move that same instance to the secured bench vessel: fixed ship packing control → Fork input → oxygen-valve control + compressor-cycle control. An 8 O ordinary-full vessel lets both branches accept and reaches 12 O prepared-full; a 0–7 O vessel first needs a valve-only wave to reach at most 8 O. Fork is reclaimed, ending preparation. At departure the manifest contains exactly one Fork—active in the chosen rig or inactive cargo—plus the selected vessels at exact fill and normal proposed 2 C size. The receiver and bench are dark. The pressure record and completed canister states persist as produced results. No object, gas or signal was duplicated, and the only material loss was any oxygen later breathed or separately authored consumed input; listening, packing and reclaiming themselves cost only chosen world time aboard.
This is a scoped clarification for these two legacy fixtures. Their first-pass readiness/branch behavior is now finite but remains proposed rather than owner-selected or validated; detailed presentation remains interface work. Changing the portable Fork’s catalogue behavior is not proposed.
Two complete return examples
A richer later return
This later example begins only after the receiver, bench, ledger table and material tray have been visibly commissioned in earlier interactions. The astronaut returns alive with one partial prepared canister, Fork active in a combat rig, Cycler inactive in cargo, one expendable metal sample and two records from different arrangement generations. Aster asks whether one photograph is the ward shipment she remembers. The player may answer now or unload first; either way she remains available and no warmth is gated behind the choice.
The player deliberately shares both records and her ledger entry, then performs the table alignment outside the paused journal. The visible cabinet mark agrees while the photographed threshold does not. Aster says this may be a moved threshold or her wrong shipment entry; the record proves neither. The player captures the overlay, then opens the paused journal to write their own hypothesis. They choose the already known cabinet room as one possible revisit rather than receiving a current route.
Next, the player loans Fork to Dorn’s receiver, observes one dated drift and reclaims it; then loans the same Fork to the packing bench, completes the partial canister’s new prepared cycle and reclaims it. Finally they choose whether to sacrifice the metal sample at Mara’s tray. If they commit, the sample is consumed and a visible conductive response is recorded; if they decline, both sample and Cycler remain available. Dorn can disagree with Aster’s emphasis without either account becoming truth, and Yeva’s response depends only on what the player actually tells her. The player leaves with one chosen rig, a deliberate oxygen/equipment/loot balance and one of several existing leads. All work happened in world time; opening the journal froze it rather than completing it.
A valid skip/postpone return
The astronaut returns, postpones every greeting, unloads nothing they want to keep selected, uses ordinary free ship refill rather than the packing bench, safely rearranges the rig and departs. No project advances unseen; no conversation is lost; no person becomes less helpful; no bench, receiver, overlay, tray or rail decays; no resource or relationship is charged. The manifest still refuses excess capacity or active area honestly. This route preserves the immediate expedition rhythm and prevents five optional projects from becoming compulsory chores.
Content accounting and the smaller alternative
This article contains exactly five project briefs: two reused (collar receiver and packing bench) and three new (ledger table, material tray and gait rail). The three new projects add three proposed fixed ship fixtures, three project-operation state sets and their visible outputs. The Fork clarification adds two fixed control interfaces to the already-counted receiver/bench, not a portable part. Content states required across the five are relevant role not aboard/setup absent, setup incomplete, commissioned, person not participating now, input selected, operation active, interrupted/postponed, completed output, loan seated, and reclaimed/dark; each instance needs only the states its action uses.
For the proposed SMALL ledger, the projects can overlap one home-follow-through scene for each of five people: Yeva/pressure technician, Dorn/maintenance worker, Aster/supply clerk, Mara/reclamation worker and Ivo/rehabilitation worker. The shared Yeva/Dorn return can remain one cross-linked scene while still recording which person’s arc it serves; materially different branches require authored variations. These briefs do not select the final five people, choose the R-3 survivor, provide each person’s short rescue, allocate all fifteen scenes, write final dialogue, settle relationships, or close their personal investigations. That remains for the bounded cast/home map, which must assign rescue plus home follow-through and count any extra scene rather than hiding it.
Strongest smaller viable alternative. Keep only the existing receiver and bench as operable projects and let later survivors contribute conversations around player-carried records. This preserves return, refill, rig preparation, the tentative loan direction and a human place to revisit with no new fixtures. What it loses is not claimed labor or playtime: three of the SMALL sample’s five people would lack an action-linked home follow-through; home would exercise pressure evidence and oxygen preparation but not route-record comparison, voluntary salvage commitment or movement-source rehearsal; and the player would have fewer inspectable reasons to choose time with different people before a departure. Choose it if the three new operations do not earn their repetition or make home feel like an errand board.
Open work and evidence
Still open are the final cast and first survivor; exact scene allocation; project staging and accessibility cues; fixed controller readiness; any management layer; alive-return population behavior; post-rescue danger; save policy; true capacity/rig quantities; found parts versus fabrication; exact operation durations; and every final story or ending consequence. Later owner-authorised implementation and observation with players must determine whether returns feel like time among people rather than chores, whether the Fork trace is understandable, whether postponement feels genuinely safe, and whether any project changes the next expedition without becoming mandatory. This paper contract demonstrates none of those outcomes.