Hold The Horde — Save and Content State

Status. First-pass design contract, not an implementation, storage schema, owner-selected save policy, or proof that every station arrangement is valid. The continuity promises below preserve current owner decisions; the save/resume package is a provisional default offered for review. The death/transfer order has the explicitly conditional proposal below; selection of its protected safeguard, wider survivor loss and full-station behavior remain open. A living return selects no replacement population. The temporary stage-only reward model remains provisional pending the owner's choice between it and regular defeated-enemy growth plus larger milestone transformations.

What continuity promises the player

Within one loaded continuity, the same completed act remains true after return, death, quit, load, or a later shift unless its owning rule says it is temporary. Under the provisional single-line policy, ordinary loading does not roll it back; the disclosed recovery fallback and reloadable alternative are explicit exceptions, not owner-set prohibitions. One item cannot exist in two places and spent oxygen or material cannot reappear within the loaded history. Everything in the astronaut's carried property at death returns aboard, including each active rig part and each inactive or loose cargo item once. Something dropped, consumed, handed over, or installed in a station/ship fixture or another location outside that carried set does not.

Temporary combat upgrades and earned-but-unchosen offers end whenever the astronaut returns aboard, alive or revived, by owner decision. This reset changes expedition power, not physical property: carried parts and exact canister contents remain. Whether stored Capacitor charge survives a return remains unresolved and must not be silently answered by the upgrade reset. Loading and quitting cause no return, death, shift, delivery, completed work, new upgrade or new knowledge.

The game must distinguish world truth from astronaut knowledge. A room may have a current neighbour the astronaut has not observed; that fact belongs to world state but cannot fill the journal. A recorded route may remain useful evidence while becoming historical after a death shift. A persistent join, opened door, installed part, or completed fastener remains a known fact without revealing any unobserved adjacency.

Minimum identities and state ownership

Names below describe required distinctions, not field names or a technical format.

Identity or state	Minimum durable meaning	What must stay separate
Reusable room-module definition	Authored layout/behavior shared by possible uses	Not a placed room. Editing a definition cannot merge the histories of its instances.
Placed room instance	One actual playable room with a stable identity across shifts	Current neighbours, orientation, transient power/population, and durable internal work. A shift changes arrangement, not identity.
Arrangement generation	The current post-death arrangement plus stable identities for every older generation still referenced by evidence	Not a map reveal. It dates observations and prevents applying one death twice.
Threshold face and selected join	The two specific placed faces and a stable join identity; whether the persistent latch exists	Walking connection, mechanical latch, and diagnostic power remain separate. Unbound adjacency is transient.
Mechanism instance and checkpoint	The placed machine, each named completed stage, deliberate mode/disable state, and reset rule. Local commits include R26 selector/final detent separately from current diagnostic power; collar buffer/latch/clear; and bench vessel secure/clamp plus each exact fill increment.	Current animation/timer and enemy occupancy are transient unless that machine explicitly commits them. An R26 mode can commit without a powered pulse; R33's A→R behavior is fixed, while current pulse result still depends on power/input.
Object instance	One reusable part, canister, objective item, or loot object with one definition and exactly one current location/state	Astronaut-carried property contains active rig equipment and inactive/loose cargo as distinct substates, each counted once. Station/ship fixture, deposit/recipient, world source, and consumed are outside that set and mutually exclusive with it. “Collected” is a past event, not a current location. Exact canister O, exact Capacitor U, rig links, Fork output order and any home-fixture seat belong to the same instance.
Astronaut expedition state	Current place, carried manifest—including every active rig part and inactive/loose cargo item once—rig arrangement, exact suit O, condition, active life/expedition identity, earned temporary upgrades, any pending earned choice and temporary mode state	Temporary upgrades, offers and their modes reset on every return aboard. Physical equipment and exact canister contents remain separate. Ship oxygen is unlimited, but gas already breathed stays spent. Moving a part between rig and cargo changes operation, not return membership or carrying count. Ordinary condition restoration and temporary reset do not decide stored Capacitor charge.
Rig action state	Each automatic source/actuator identity, selected target and readiness commit; current causal-sequence identity; remaining finite route, body, rebound, fragment and bloom allowances; exact local heat and recovery; possible overlapping power demand; each parent reservation and ordinary/master slot through its last fragment; bank/terminal state; armed-but-uncommitted manual intent and remaining hold time; the launch/Barrier interlock state; and every committed effect still in flight	One actuator's refusal does not change a sibling's readiness. Thunderhead, Foundry Drop and Furnace Burst charging/discharge modes, temporary Inward Draft behavior and burst ancestry are expedition state; automatic restoration creates no readiness, event or charge. Arc's physical effect is not a signal output.
Evidence record	One committed capture, note revision, testimony, or instrument report with provenance, room instance, arrangement/life, and factual limit	Record existence, player annotation, attributed interpretation, and present truth. A historical mark never becomes current automatically.
Survivor	One authored person, last confirmed transfer state and source, and—once resolved—their actual location/state	Never cargo. Waiting, Prepared, In transfer, At abort refuge, and Sent are not interchangeable. Sent commits only when this same survivor has completed arrival aboard and the required ship airlock is closed; confirmation provenance remains separate from world state.
Population/transient hazard state	The current arrangement's physical source identities, committed arrivals, surviving creatures and exact hazard state needed to suspend the expedition	Living return and load create no replacement population. Current flow, temporary interruption and a completed physical seal are separate facts; earned world work follows its owning rule.
Reward-stage state — proposed	One separately authored finite stage tied to a physical source and arrangement generation; whether it is uncommitted, unresolved or spent; its pending offer if any	A closure before commitment prevents the release and creates no offer. After commitment, clear or source seal resolves the stage even before its peak; bodies already beyond the closure remain in population state. Withdrawal/re-entry creates no stage, and living return preserves spent state but removes the offer/upgrade. This remains provisional, not a decision against regular defeated-enemy growth.

Every transition names the identity it mutates, its precondition, the point at which it commits, and what an interruption preserves. A collectible changes from source to carried in one commit; it is never copied and then deleted later. Incremental oxygen transfer moves exact O between the same two object states, stops at suit 12 O or vessel 0 O, and leaves untransferred gas in place. Capacitor acceptance/release records exact U and whether the first receiver accepted. Ordinary chosen release commits 2 U; temporary Thunderhead, Foundry Drop and Furnace Burst commands commit a full 4 U only at their stated first-receiver acceptance boundary after preflight. Cancellation, refusal or expiry of an uncommitted manual-ready opportunity retains charge and commits no burst heat; acceptance reserves the complete stated action heat and operating demand. Later refusal cannot reverse either committed release.

Provisional save and resume policy

Recommended default for review: one authoritative continuity line with suspend-anywhere resume. Durable commits are recorded after each completed atomic change, and quitting records a suspend point containing the current live state without advancing it. Loading resumes the newest verified point. A save records state; it is not a world action and cannot finish an action, consume time, trigger an alarm, return property, shift the station, resolve a reward stage or choose an upgrade. This does not decide whether any general menu pauses play; only the journal pause is owner-set.

An unfinished action remains unfinished at its recorded phase. Resume does not round it forward to a checkpoint or backward across a completed increment. Ordinary cancel, displacement, withdrawal, and death still apply their owning interruption rules. Quit does none of those things. Deliberate death is a gameplay choice and uses the same death transaction as any other death. Loading is not revival and creates no new arrangement.

The default offers no selectable earlier timeline. Its strength is one legible consequence chain: installed parts, consumed resources, discoveries, and shifts cannot be casually undone, and the state space for a long mystery is narrower. Its cost is less freedom to revisit an accidental choice and greater dependence on reliable recovery. If the newest record cannot be verified, the player may be offered the last verified compatible point with an explicit statement of what boundary would be rolled back; the game must never perform that rollback silently.

Credible alternative: manual named checkpoints plus autosave. Players could preserve and reload earlier branches. This supports experimentation, shared households, accessibility needs, and recovery from misunderstood commitments. It also lets a player search death shifts or undo installs, spends, and story choices; authoring and support must tolerate more divergent histories. If adopted, no in-fiction punishment, weakened reward, or “save-scumming” label is added. The owner must choose the policy and any slot/overwrite restrictions; this article recommends the single-line default provisionally, not as canon.

A living return aboard

A voluntary return commits the exact carried manifest and object substates aboard without advancing the arrangement generation. The current arrangement keeps its room identities, persistent joins and mechanism checkpoints, actual population, committed arrivals, source state and—under the provisional reward model—unresolved or spent stage state. Defeated creatures do not reappear merely because the astronaut returned.

At the aboard boundary, remove every temporary combat upgrade, earned-but-unchosen offer and temporary routing/mode state, including Thunderhead, Foundry Drop and Furnace Burst charging/discharge arrangements and Inward Draft behavior. This grants no new readiness and does not alter physical parts, dropped or installed objects, exact canister O, evidence or knowledge. Store exact Capacitor U long enough to apply the eventual retained-charge policy; do not silently keep or clear it. Ship-side refill, repacking and a later departure are separate actions.

One death-and-shift transaction

A lethal condition and a unique death-transaction identity are committed together. There is no saveable gap in which the astronaut is lethally dead but the transition does not exist.

Seal the death instant. Commit gas actually transferred or breathed, material already consumed, completed pickups/drops/installs and completed work checkpoints. Mark the current incomplete stage interrupted; do not complete it.
Partition property once and apply the aboard reset. Snapshot the astronaut-carried membership by object identity: every active rig part plus every inactive/loose cargo item, each once. Move those same instances aboard, preserving rig-versus-cargo substate and each canister's exact O. Leave station/ship-fixture installations, deposits, handovers, world-source objects, and consumed resources outside the return set in their actual states. Remove temporary combat upgrades, pending offers and temporary routing/mode state at this return boundary. For example, an active Sensor and Projector, an inactive loose Fork, and a carried partial canister return once each; a different Fork in a station fixture and scrap already consumed by a Cycler do not. Restore ordinary condition for the next expedition under the current rule; ship-side refilling remains separate. Retained Capacitor charge across death is unresolved: preserve the sealed exact pre-death U as state needed for the eventual decision, but do not silently keep or clear it in the playable aboard result. The property-first order is preserved, and the playable astronaut body has one location: aboard. The sealed membership cannot change during the rest of the transaction, and the player receives no control aboard until the final step.
Resolve the survivor branch before geometry moves. A person already Sent remains aboard; Waiting and Prepared people do not depart. If death occurs during transfer, the accepted conditional candidate in Death Shift and Rescue Continuity resolves it here, before the shift: an eligible survivor runs the retreat line already armed at Prepared, inside a bounded window in which creatures and hazards cannot act on or block them, needing no new astronaut action or resource, and the world state at abort refuge, alive, unsent commits. A person inside an unclosed ship airlock is not Sent; they cycle stationward on their own reserved margin and do not close the airlock themselves to finish the delivery. That safeguard is pending owner reaction—if it is not selected, this step returns to recording last confirmed state with the outcome unresolved rather than inventing one. Either way the astronaut's knowledge is unchanged: no result is transmitted aboard, so persistence stores world outcome and unconfirmed knowledge separately.
Shift exactly once. Advance the arrangement generation once. Preserve selected joins and their bound groups, stable room identities, completed mechanism/checkpoint states, and objects attached to their room/fixture identities. Recompute only the unbound arrangement under the eventual shift rules. The new arrangement may select a different finite authored population and begins its own source/stage state; the previous arrangement's records remain history. Each physical seal keeps the persistence rule named by its owning mechanism. A new reward opportunity cannot silently undo persistent work. This arrangement boundary is separate from the owner-set temporary reset on every return. Do not use a rescue or installed object as an unchosen joining exception.
Reclassify knowledge. Retain records and notes. Mark prior-life route and adjacency claims historical; keep completed work and join facts known. Reveal only what can currently be sensed from the ship/airlock or another valid instrument.
Commit the aboard result. The next resumable gameplay state is aboard with the returned manifest and one new arrangement. A later refill, repack, or departure is not part of death itself.

Before, during, and after recovery. A suspend committed before any lethal boundary resumes the same living state and causes no death or shift. Once the lethal boundary/transaction identity exists, any interruption resumes that transaction at its last completed phase rather than returning to play. Completed phases are idempotent: an item already moved is not moved again and an advanced shift is not advanced again. After the aboard result commits, every load resumes post-death; it cannot replay delivery, work, carried return, temporary reset, or the shift.

Five state walkthroughs

Case	Before / interruption	Resume, withdrawal, or death result
1. Interrupted canister handover	A carried canister is entering the equipment sleeve. Before the handover commit it remains carried. Any separately completed incremental gas transfer has already changed the two fill amounts.	Quit/load resumes the unfinished handover without completing it. Cancel, displacement, or death before commit leaves the canister carried, so death returns it. After commit it has one sleeve/recipient location, leaves the manifest, and does not return on death.
2. Installed reusable part through a shift	Fork Relay installation in a named fixture is complete; its current power may be transient.	Death returns other carried items, not this Fork. The room instance keeps the installed object through the shift even if its neighbours change. The journal may show “installed at [known room]” while the old walking route becomes historical; load neither clones nor retrieves it.
3. Partly completed mechanism	Bolt A is cut; Bolt B is halfway through its current stage.	Suspend/load resumes Bolt B at that unfinished phase. Withdrawal or death loses only Bolt B's unfinished stage; Bolt A remains cut. A later obstruction may block the next attempt but cannot restore Bolt A.
4. Journal and history	A committed still and note identify a room and route in arrangement 12. Quit and load occur before death.	Both retain their recorded time, place, source, and claim on resume; unchanged arrangement does not verify their interpretation or present truth. Any resumed live reading is separately observed. After death creates arrangement 13, the records persist, route/adjacency claims become historical, and a known installed part or cut bolt remains a durable fact. No unseen route, translation, or corrected conclusion appears.
5. Rescue near delivery	The named survivor is In transfer and the ship airlock has not closed. A quit suspends that exact state; it does not send them.	Loading after quit resumes In transfer. Sent commits only if that same survivor completes arrival aboard and the ship airlock closes before the lethal boundary; an empty closure, or one with them outside, does nothing. If death commits before that complete predicate, the transaction records last confirmed In transfer as the astronaut's knowledge. Under the accepted conditional candidate the stored world outcome is at abort refuge, alive and unsent, reached by the armed retreat; the abort door leaves a closure tell on that refuge's local control only, nothing reaches the ship, and the astronaut's knowledge stays unconfirmed until a later direct observation there. Storage must keep those two facts distinct and must still invent no delivery, loss or safety.

Content-authoring requirements

A later authoring tool must represent these facts without prescribing a storage technology:

Stable, never-reused identities for definitions, placed rooms, faces, joins, mechanisms/checkpoints, objects, evidence, survivors, physical crowd sources, reward stages, authored objectives/scenes, and arrangement generations. References name an identity, not a display name or current coordinate.
For every action, an explicit precondition, commit boundary, interruption result, persistence class, and owning article/rule. Temporary state must name its reset boundary; persistent state must name any deliberate reversal.
Placement constraints for required entrances, compatible faces, control access from the necessary sides, safe recovery from reversible mistakes, mechanism clearance, short-rescue geometry, and objects attached to stable room/fixture identities. A constraint declaration is not proof that all generated arrangements satisfy it.
Explicit allowed destinations for each object and survivor transition. Collection, installation, consumption, deposit, handover, and return must conserve one instance. Critical controls cannot be authored only on a side made unreachable by their own persistent state.
Exact proposed mechanical amounts and local commits from Mechanical Interfaces And Opening Quantities: suit/canister O, Capacitor U, Fork output order/allocation result, each actuator's source/target/readiness commitment, causal-sequence identity and remaining finite route/body/rebound/fragment/bloom allowances, exact local heat and recovery, visible concurrent power state, launch/Barrier interlock, parent reservations and ordinary/master slots through final fragments, bank/terminal state, armed manual intent and remaining hold time, in-flight effects, Thunderhead/Foundry/Furnace modes, Inward Draft behavior and burst ancestry, collar buffer/latch/clear, bench secure/clamp/fill, R26 selector/detent/power and R33 fixed A→R/current power. Recording these facts does not select tuning or decide retained charge.
Under the provisional stage-only model: physical source/stage identity, uncommitted/unresolved/spent state, committed arrivals, break or seal resolution, pending offer and aboard expiry. This representation must not pre-empt the owner's alternative growth-rhythm choice.
Separate author facts from discoverable facts and player records. A condition may test real state, but its presentation may expose only authorized observation, testimony, or instrument output.
Content version and compatibility requirements. Removed or changed content needs an authored compatibility/migration decision later. An unknown identity, invalid reference, impossible placement, or contradictory lifecycle must produce an inspectable authoring/load error; it must not silently substitute a similarly named room, drop an item, reset a checkpoint, or invent a survivor result.

Before content is admitted, a paper/static check must find no duplicate object location, rolled-back completed work, repeated death shift, orphaned persistent join, unreachable required recovery control, current label on historical geography, survivor state stronger than its confirmation, fresh reward from load/return, or temporary upgrade surviving an aboard boundary. These are design checks, not executed tests or proof of runtime correctness.

Scope and open decisions

Remaining detailed work includes the transition and commit catalogue, placement and reference matrix, conditional survivor and shift branches, compatibility policy and authoring-tool requirements. Production Scope owns workload estimates.

Population and reward boundary. A death shift may select a different finite authored population and begins the new arrangement's transient source/reward state. A living return selects no replacement population: defeated creatures stay defeated and resolved stages stay spent for that arrangement, while survivors retain their actual room membership. Temporary combat upgrades nevertheless reset aboard on either kind of return. New arrivals along a cleared route must come from an actual occupied source under Combat Rules, not a reset caused by returning or loading. Persistent seals, joins and other completed work remain governed by their owning rules. Quit/load resumes the stored source, stage and reward facts; it creates no award or fresh stage.

Open owner/design decisions are: stage-only temporary upgrades versus regular defeated-enemy growth plus larger milestones; single-line versus reloadable saves and exact slot behavior; save availability and non-journal menu pause behavior; retained Capacitor charge across return/death; the protected-retreat safeguard itself and survivor loss eligibility; the final shift mechanism and whole-station completion behavior; exact transient hold/reset representation within the stated no-replacement living-return rule; and the player-facing recovery policy for incompatible or damaged saves. No answer is inferred from silence.