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e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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# Hold The Flood — Rooms
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**Owner decision, 2026-09-19.** After reading the inventory of the rooms as they were built, the owner found a pattern of things to interact with that gave the player no reason to care (the ward window photograph, the fault lamp, the bridge rack, and more), and said: "it seems like the best solution is for me to design each room manually." Asked how to begin, he answered: "let's start with an empty station and add the rooms as I design them", and "I will write them here. you will transfer them both to code and the wiki."
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So this page is the home of the station's rooms from now on. **Every room below is the owner's own card.** The implementer builds exactly what a card says, and asks where a card is silent instead of filling the gap. The older room pages of this wiki ([Station Room And Module Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Room%20And%20Module%20Inventory), [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory), [First Expedition Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/First%20Expedition%20Options)) describe an earlier design. They are not what the game contains.
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## Why
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The first slice built the set-ups of the old design and not the pay-offs that made them matter. The fault lamp was the sign of a power leak that cost the player nothing. The isolation bridge was the fix, and fitting it was meant to let the ship find the ward behind the window, which was meant to start the rescue; in the game it changed one line of text. The window photograph had no use even in the design. A thing the player can use, with no reason to use it and nothing visibly different afterwards, reads as a broken game. The record of the old rooms, in plain words, is here: https://claude.ai/artifact/YE2xxDvC7nCt2eNqCqboC5
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## The room card
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One card per room, in the manner of the owner's item card on [The Pack](/Hold%20The%20Flood/The%20Pack).
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- **Name and size.**
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- **Why the player goes there.** One sentence.
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- **Doors.** Which rooms it joins.
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- **Things in it.** For each: what it is; the key; how many seconds; what is needed first; what is different afterwards that the player can see; once, or every time.
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- **Items to find.**
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- **Enemies.** Kind; how many stand in the room; how many hide, and behind what; what lets them out; how fast they come; how to stop them.
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- **What is different when the player leaves.**
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## What already exists to build a room from
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Anything outside this list is new code, which is fine; its size is stated before it is built.
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5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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- **Rooms:** any size; doors on any wall; a raised floor with stairs; a window with a scene behind it; a doorway with no room behind it shows as a sealed doorway; a side that is a force field onto open space instead of a wall; a sign on a wall that is only there to be seen (it can blink).
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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- **Actions:** press E for something instant; hold E for a job of any number of steps, each with its seconds; a step can be loud. A job can need: an item in the pack, power from a control board, another job done first, free pack squares. A job can: lock an opening for ever, give or take an item, put a photograph in the journal, pass or leave an oxygen tank for a survivor, make a trigger harmless.
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- **Enemies:** three kinds (Presser: slow and strong; Flanker: fast and weak; Caller: stands and calls a hidden crowd). Bodies standing in the room, bodies hidden behind an opening, what lets them out (walking in, a loud job, a Caller's call, holding a job for some seconds), how many come per second, which job locks them in for ever. A crowd that is not locked is back at full strength on every new trip.
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- **Also:** a survivor who waits in a room and walks to the ship when the way is safe; items lying in a room; which rooms join which, in one layout or several.
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- **Rules that hold everywhere:** every press of E answers; the only text in a room is the prompt on the thing the astronaut is locked on, and the box on the left that says in plain words what it is and what can be done with it; every job shows a bright bar while E is held; every word the player reads is plain.
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## The station today
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5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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One room: the Dock (the owner's first card, below). Its three doorways are sealed, because no room has been designed behind them yet.
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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The player starts with the owner's two items, the Oxygen Tank and the Service Gun. Ship storage is empty.
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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## Room cards
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5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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### Dock
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**The owner's card, 2026-09-19, in his words:**
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> - we are going to make it very large square room, with doorways on the center of the north, east, and west walls.
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> - it's south wall should look like a force field blocking the way to empty space. this is where your spaceship came from.
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> - the dock contains your spaceship. it should generally look like a space shuttle (we'll probably change it's look later). it should be large enough to make sense to be a spaceship for the character, but small enough to allow free exploration of the room. pressing E while locked on the ship is the same effect as currently using the so called "ship airlock".
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> - On the north wall, to the right of the doorway, we are going to have a large neon sign with the text "Emergency Lockdown" blinking in red. This cannot be locked / interacted with.
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**As built.** Where the card gives no number, the number is the implementer's choice and is marked so; change any of them by saying so.
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- **Size:** 30 by 30 metres *(my choice for "very large")*. It is still the room every trip starts in, and the only room that never moves.
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- **Doorways:** one in the middle of the north wall, one in the middle of the east wall, one in the middle of the west wall, each 2 metres wide. With no room behind them yet, they show as sealed doorways.
9d9456 Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:00:46
Dock: one unbroken force field, and a neon sign made of bent tube (owner's two corrections)
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- **South side:** no wall. A force field instead: **one unbroken sheet** of faint blue light from end to end, as tall as a wall, between a glowing rail at the floor and a thin one overhead, with a post at each end. The light is brightest at the rails and a faint grain drifts up it, so it reads as energy and not as glass. It is solid: nobody walks through it. Beyond it there is nothing but stars. It is never lowered for the camera, because it is see-through. *(Owner, same day, on the first version, which had upright lines every three metres: "the force field should not be separated to panels. it should be one long force field.")*
5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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- **Your ship:** a small space shuttle, about 12 metres long and 8.4 metres across the wings, standing in the south middle of the room with its nose to the north and its tail 3 metres from the force field it came in through *(size and position are my choices)*. It is made of plain shapes for now. It is solid, and there is room to walk all the way round it.
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- **Press E** while locked on the ship, from any side of it: go home. The trip ends, you keep all you carry, your health and air are refilled, the game saves. Exactly what the old "ship airlock" did.
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- A trip starts with the astronaut standing beside the ship's hatch steps, on its left side.
9d9456 Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:00:46
Dock: one unbroken force field, and a neon sign made of bent tube (owner's two corrections)
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- **Neon sign:** on the north wall, to the right of the doorway as seen from inside the room, in the middle of that stretch of wall. It is made the way neon signs are made: every letter is red glass tube bent to shape, held a hand's width off a dark board on short posts. The words are set one to a line, **EMERGENCY** over **LOCKDOWN**, in capitals about 0.9 metres high, on a board about 6.5 by 3 metres that hangs with its foot against the wall and its head leaning out on two brackets, so it faces a viewer who looks down at it. The tubes glow, their light washes over the board behind them and falls red on the floor in front. It blinks like a struck tube: a stutter, a second of steady light, half a second dark. It cannot be locked on or used. It hangs on the wall, so it drops out of sight with that wall when the view is turned to look from the north. *(Owner, same day, on the first version, flat lettering in a plain frame: "I am sure you can make the neon sign look better. Give it a proper font, place it better on the wall, that kind of thing. right now it looks almost like a 16 bit game." The capitals and the two lines are the implementer's choices.)*
5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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- **Nothing else:** no enemies, no jobs, no items.
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9d9456 Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:00:46
Dock: one unbroken force field, and a neon sign made of bent tube (owner's two corrections)
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**New building blocks this card added:** a side of a room can be a force field instead of a wall (a side like that has no door); a wall can carry a neon sign of any words in capitals, that is only there to be seen; a large thing can be locked on from anywhere around its body, not only near its middle. **For the whole game:** light that is brighter than white now glows (neon tube, force field rails, lamps, stars) while ordinary lit surfaces stay as calm as they were, and edges are smoothed.