Hold The Horde — Player Information

Status. A proposed information layer covering what the player is shown, what they may do about it, how the game confirms or refuses an action, and what the interface deliberately declines to work out for them. It follows the owner's selected opening, the owner-required journal pause and automatic-fire decision, and the current Build Rules, Combat Rules, Oxygen and Observation, Language and Journal and Rescue Rules. Layouts, wording, control schemes and the accessibility baseline below are proposals. Nothing here establishes that any of it is usable, readable or compliant with any standard; no observation of a player has occurred.

The one rule

The interface reports three things and nothing else: what the astronaut can presently sense, what the player personally committed to a record, and the mechanical state of a thing they are touching or inspecting. It never infers a conclusion from them.

Where all three are silent, the display is silent, and that silence is honest information: it means nobody has been there, looked, or written it down. The owner's requirement that mystery must not depend on bad UX is met by making current, sensed, mechanical state unambiguous — not by supplying answers the astronaut has no way to know.

Therefore the interface never: translates either alien script, or labels a sign with a meaning; marks a player note right, wrong, supported or solved; shows an unseen route or asserts that any route is safe; assembles a station map the player has not walked; or predicts what a build will do beyond the single link being previewed.

One expedition, six moments

The thread is the second expedition. The isolation bridge is aboard, so the ship can separate R-3's live pressure pulse from the collar fault, and the player is going to find the ward.

1. Preparing aboard

Sees. A manifest of everything carried, with used and free capacity as one shared figure — canisters, rig parts and empty loot space in the same total, as the owner required. Suit condition. Stored records from the first life, each marked with the arrangement it was taken in. One live indicator: R-3's pressure bearing, a direction from the collar with no distance and no path.

Action. Repack. Swap a canister for loot space, install or uninstall parts, decide whether the Fork Relay left in Cargo Turn is worth walking back for.

Confirmation / refusal. Ship-side editing is free and reversible; anything exceeding capacity is refused with the offending item still visible, never by silently dropping it. The Fork appears as installed in the station, not carried property, so the player can see why it will not come home if they die.

Cannot infer. Whether this loadout is enough. How much oxygen the trip will cost. Whether the route to the bearing exists at all.

2. Arranging the rig

Sees. Each part's own ports, its inspected individual behaviour, and the links already drawn. Nothing about the assembly as a whole — no damage figure, no rating, no name for the build.

Action. Draw or cut one directed link between two visible ports.

Confirmation / refusal. Preview answers exactly one question: is this proposed direct link between these two accessible endpoints valid? A valid link previews and can be committed; an invalid one visibly refuses before commitment, costing nothing. It does not evaluate the chain, warn of a bad idea or rank alternatives. Aboard this is instant; in the station the same edit is a world action with oxygen and threats running, and the journal's paused diagram cannot complete it.

Cannot infer. What the finished rig will do. That is the point: the player authored the causal path and finds out by firing it.

3. Moving, fighting and doing noisy work

Sees. Oxygen, condition and free capacity, continuously. For each ordinary actuator, its readiness and, when ready, the single highlighted target it has selected — the nearest visible valid hostile. For each manual special, whether it is available and which way it will face. A reverse breadcrumb along passages actually traversed this life, back to the last confirmed anchor and ultimately the ship.

At the jammed ward door the player cuts bolts. The interface shows the current stage, the bolts already released, and — before the first cut — the cue that this work is loud and which connected entrance will answer.

Action. Move, place the barrier, keep cutting, cancel, or leave.

Confirmation / refusal. Each completed bolt is a visible physical checkpoint that persists. Cancelling loses the unfinished stage and nothing else. An ordinary weapon with no valid target holds fire and says so by showing no highlight; it is not broken, and the fix is positioning.

Cannot infer. Whether the breadcrumb is still walkable, whether an unexplored passage is shorter, or how much oxygen the way home will take. The breadcrumb is a record of where the astronaut's feet went, and promises nothing else.

4. Capturing and comparing a clue

Sees. Above the three-way junction, KETH SORAN VEL, SORAN KETH VEL and TAAN. Framing a record shows the frame and the commit progress; the world keeps running while it completes.

Action. Frame and commit one still with its location. Then open the journal — at which point the rest of the game pauses: enemies, oxygen, projectiles, alerts, weapon readiness and action progress, even mid-combat, as the owner requires. Inside, pin the two records side by side, highlight the swapped group by hand, and write a note.

Confirmation / refusal. Capture is atomic: interrupted before commit, there is no record; completed, one still and one location persist through death as knowledge. An on-request visual suggestion may surface a lookalike among already captured records and is labelled software-generated. The note is stored with its revision history and is never parsed, graded or scored.

Cannot infer. What any token means. The journal will not tell the player that KETH is "pump", will not mark a hypothesis supported, and cannot reveal a new angle, advance the scene or finish anything — the pause buys thinking time, not world time.

5. Returning alive

Sees. What came home and what did not: oxygen spent, the Fork still listed as installed in Cargo Turn, new salvage on the manifest. The captured records join the board marked with the arrangement they were taken in.

Action. Show a record to a survivor. Yeva's answer is recorded as her statement, her stated basis, and what is her interpretation — attributed testimony, not a system ruling.

Confirmation / refusal. If the player linked a route to a predicted destination and walked it, the journal attaches one of three factual outcomes: arrived at linked destination, arrived elsewhere (with the place), or attempt incomplete (with the interruption). None of these says the reading was right.

Cannot infer. Whether Yeva is correct, or whether one confirmed arrival generalises to any other inscription.

6. Reviving after a shift

Sees. Everything still carried at death is aboard — the owner's rule, shown as an ordinary arrival rather than an event screen. Every walked route from the previous life is restyled as historical: still readable, still located relative to its anchor, explicitly no longer a claim about the present. Persistent things stay listed as facts: doors unlocked, bolts released, parts installed, latched connections.

Action. Go out again and find out where things are.

Confirmation / refusal. The ship shows the live R-3 bearing again — a current direction, never a path. A historical record and a live bearing are drawn differently and are never merged into one map.

Cannot infer. Anything about the new arrangement that has not been walked. There is no revealed neighbour list, no partial map filled in off-screen, and no hint that a particular direction is now correct.

Decision and state table

The short rescue, with its open question marked

Rescue state is shown as one of five words with the physical condition that established it, so the player always knows what is true and what is merely arranged: Waiting (in a supported refuge), Prepared (travel air connected and confirmed, next segment traversed, abort refuge stocked), In transfer, At abort refuge, Sent (aboard, airlock closed). A request, a radio confirmation or a crossing in progress is never shown as Sent.

Unresolved, and labelled as such rather than papered over: the ordering of a death-triggered shift against an in-progress transfer, and whether shifts can occur mid-life at all, are not settled. The interface consequence is real — if a shift can interrupt a transfer, the display must be able to say this survivor is at a refuge whose current position is unknown, which is a state the present articles do not define. This article proposes the five states and flags that sixth possibility as pending an owner decision; it does not invent an answer.

A proposed accessibility baseline

Offered as design proposals with their costs, not as demonstrated usability and not as a claim of conformance with any standard.

• Full remapping and input alternatives. Every action rebindable; no action requiring a simultaneous three-input combination; hold actions available as toggles; the staged work actions completable without repeated rapid input. Cost: the "hold to keep cutting" tension is weakened where a toggle replaces it, and every added control path multiplies the states that must stay readable.
• Readable text. Scalable interface text with a minimum size, adjustable contrast behind it, and no essential information carried only by a small in-world painted label. Cost: larger text crowds the compact suit display, and some diegetic charm is lost when a value must also exist as plain text.
• Colour-independent status and cues. Every state that matters — readiness, valid target, valid versus refused link, carried versus installed, live versus historical — carries shape, position, pattern or text in addition to colour. Cost: authoring discipline on every new cue, and a busier display; the service signatures in the station-wide puzzle would need a non-colour distinguishing form designed in from the start rather than added later.
• Alternatives to essential audio. The caller's brace, the door grind, the connected entrance answering, and alert sources all need a visible equivalent, including a direction. Cost: visualising directional sound risks handing over spatial information that hearing players must infer, so these need tuning to match the audio cue rather than exceed it.
• Presentation-intensity controls. Reduced camera shake and flash, a cap on simultaneous full-screen effects, and an option to damp the visual density of a large horde without changing enemy numbers or difficulty. Cost: a spectacular build's payoff is partly its spectacle, and damping it reduces the owner's second priority for the players who need the option.

None of these is free, and none is proven. They are listed now because two of them — colour-independent signatures and non-audio directional cues — become materially more expensive if they are retrofitted after the puzzle and encounter content is authored.

Effort, and what would have to be validated

Rough design-only range, excluding all engineering, art and any playable build: roughly 8–14 design working days to take this from a stance to a specifiable layer — a complete state inventory, a cue-by-cue list with its non-colour and non-audio equivalents, the journal's screen-level structure, and the accessibility option list with defaults. Add 3–5 days if the pending shift-timing question is answered in a way that adds survivor and route states. This is an estimate of writing and reviewing, made with no implementation experience of this project, and it is not a schedule.

What a desk cannot settle. Whether the suit display is legible under horde pressure; whether players read a live bearing as a route despite the distinct treatment; whether the historical marking actually stops them trusting a stale map; whether the direct-link preview teaches the grammar or merely gates it; whether the journal pause is used for thought or for safety; and whether any accessibility option here helps the players it is meant for. Each needs later owner-authorised implementation and observation with real players, including players who use these options by necessity. None has occurred.