| Read or compare in station | Rest of game paused, including enemies and oxygen, even during combat | Stored stills and the already-visible frozen view only; no new angle, event progress or action completion |

Example: while the game runs, the player watches two mechanisms reverse flow and captures a post-reversal still at each, including the repeated mark and direction indicator. Paused comparison shows the common mark; it does not replay or discover motion. That suggests a detour, costing oxygen and return margin. Aboard ship, a survivor recognizes a human retrofit, informing the next route or loadout without translating the alien system.

This design’s real cost is tonal and strategic: a player can freeze a dangerous moment to think, interrupting immediate horde tension. The owner accepts that cost. Selective, framed records may discourage indiscriminate capture, but that safeguard should not become arbitrary friction. The system may also encourage “record everything, sort later,” shifting some discoveries away from the station despite allowing field inference.

**Field-study reserves at authored apparatus.** The player docks a carried canister into a work hood or console, creating a visible finite reserve for physical study without spending the active return supply. This produces a clear preparation tradeoff and supports manipulation that cannot be captured. Its strongest case is an earned observation window that preserves limited oxygen. Its cost is authored infrastructure: study points can advertise important clues, exclude mysteries elsewhere and turn exploration into “find socket, spend canister.” It is better kept as an exceptional affordance unless core mysteries repeatedly require it.

Pausing the journal separates reflection on available information from sampling new world information; positioning, watching, manipulation and capture stay in running time.

Revisit the record format or world-action boundary if planned core mysteries repeatedly need prolonged physical manipulation, or if later playtesting shows indiscriminate capture or abandoned clues. The journal pause itself is not reopened by those findings.

Recorded locations must remain findable after return. Stored records persist through death as knowledge, and all equipment and loot still carried return aboard with the astronaut. Depletion can therefore bring a discovery and the remaining carried load home; that can be useful and receives no substitute penalty. Oxygen already consumed remains spent, and a canister committed to a station fixture or survivor is not carried. World changes and survivor state follow their owning rules.