Hold The Flood — Rooms

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."

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, Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory, First Expedition Options) describe an earlier design. They are not what the game contains.

Why

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

The room card

One card per room, in the manner of the owner's item card on The Pack.

Name and size.
Why the player goes there. One sentence.
Doors. Which rooms it joins.
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.
Items to find.
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.
What is different when the player leaves.

What already exists to build a room from

Anything outside this list is new code, which is fine; its size is stated before it is built.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

The station today

Empty. It has one room, which the game needs so that a trip can start at all. It is not a designed room and the first card may replace it.

Dock. 4 by 12 metres. Your ship's door at one end (press E: go home). A sealed doorway at the other end. Nothing else: no enemies, no jobs, no items.

The player starts with the owner's two items, the Oxygen Tank and the Service Gun. Ship storage is empty: the two spare tanks were there only for the old rescue.

Room cards

None yet.