Hold The Horde — V1 Readiness

Status. One bounded whole-v1 coherence and readiness assessment of the existing design record. It is an administrative document: it repairs nothing, owns no game rule, and selects no owner answer. Proposed repairs are listed with before/after wording and their owning article so the PM can transfer and integrate deliberately. It makes no claim about fun, balance, accessibility, performance or campaign duration, and it is not a phase, build or completion authorisation.

Sources. All 56 Hold The Flood/* pages were fetched and hashed from actual bytes in one pass; the point-in-time record is work/design-lead/coherence38/source-manifest.json, SHA-256 92ea3cf6bd1f90d86a45d92b6062ec81629bb7242f8f92ea0a92da2e99701299. Revisions cited below are abbreviated to twelve characters as abbreviations; the manifest holds the full values. Several sources moved during the Systems 528 alignment while this assessment was being prepared — the manifest is the revision each finding was checked against, and a later revision is not a defect merely for differing.

Exposure. The parallel Systems factual audit assigned in 552 had not been posted when these reads and checks were made, so nothing here consumes it. One finding below (D1) is the same item the PM routed to that audit; I found it independently and report it rather than assume it is covered. I previously authored or aligned several of the articles assessed here — the eleven global04 parents, Player Information, Player Information and Options, and the crosswalk — and I have marked findings that touch my own work.

1. Readiness matrix — fifteen domains

Checked means I read the owning text on both sides of an interface and compared the actual claims. Linked means the reference resolves and is consistent on its face, without a two-sided comparison.

2. The traced path

The selected opening, through both legal rig choices. Objective 1 runs R01 → R02 → R03; the fasteners are at R03 and the loose Fork at R02. Both choices are legal and neither is an upgrade. Deployed: the board's own source supplies power and the Fork passes one board pulse to both compatible outputs, holding the rack and the patient-bay shutter together; the part leaves carried property and does not return on death. Packed: the selector must hold rack power throughout, so that enemy lane stays open, and the Fork comes home. Checked on both sides against Mechanical35 and Survival: the manifest arithmetic agrees — four starters at 1 C each plus one 2 C canister is 6 of 10, and the freed bridge at 2 C fits the retrieval-ready packing but not the air-heavy one without dropping something.

Oxygen, world work and the journal. Capture, rig edits, oxygen coupling and staged work all run in world time. Opening the journal freezes enemies, oxygen, projectiles, alerts, readiness, mechanisms, warnings and work progress and completes none of them. Checked across four owning articles; no article grants the journal a world action, and none omits a freeze another asserts.

Living return and death. A living return needs the astronaut physically at R01, inside, with the airlock closed; it causes no shift and selects no new population, and defeated creatures stay defeated. Death commits the sealed instant, returns the carried set once, resolves the survivor branch, closes the expedition, shifts exactly once and reclassifies knowledge. Checked against Save and Encounter33: the population variant is attached to the death boundary on all three sides, and no article lets a load or a living return select one.

Shifted rediscovery. R01 stays directly outside the airlock. The reveal moves to R01's outer unbound face, or to the nearest free frontier of the fixed ship-rooted group if that face is already latched. Checked in First Expedition Options and Player Information, which agree. Player Information and Options does not state it — D4.

One language correction. After two transfer pairs a player may read the recurring token as source; the corrective third pair at R23 shows it at a receiving end. Checked in Language29 and Room32: R23 is the corrective third pair on both sides, the correction is physical and self-administered, and no interface grades it.

Short rescue and home. Prepared requires the route walked this life, the abort room stocked, an armed survivor-operable retreat and a canister at the route's authored full-attempt return mark. Sent commits only on that same person aboard with the ship airlock closed before the lethal boundary. Death mid-transfer: the armed conditional safeguard gives an alive/unsent world outcome at the named counted refuge, while the astronaut's knowledge stays unconfirmed because the closure tell is local. Checked in the continuity candidate, Rescue Rules, Cast31 and First Survivor, which agree. Two older rescue articles do not — D2, D3.

Late station connection and ending dependency. Objective 12 is physical completion under a joining rule that is not yet selected; it does not depend on objective 10, rescue, treatment or any ending, and completing it neither triggers nor blocks a departure. Checked in Regional25, Connecting the Station and Story30, which agree, and all three keep stabilisation conditional.

3. Defects

Four, none of them a missing first-pass obligation.

| ID | Location | Present claim | Counter-source | Player impact | Smallest repair | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | D1 | Combat and Enemy Roster bb15ab8dce45…, placement-allocation paragraph | "It provisionally allocates ten of the twelve SMALL placed-mechanism slots" | Encounter33 4b40819edce9… and Production Scope both carry thirteen major mechanisms; Design Coverage's finish map states thirteen | None directly; a stale denominator can propagate into scope arithmetic and mislead a later allocation | Replace "ten of the twelve" with "ten of the thirteen", or "ten placed-mechanism slots against the accepted thirteen". Owner: Combat and Enemy Roster. (Same item routed to the 552 audit; found here independently.) | | D2 | Rescue and Home a7f1e300f1e6…, transfer-outcome paragraph | "Interruption during transfer sends him to that segment's designated abort refuge, still unsent" — unconditional, and ambiguous as to whether it covers astronaut death | Rescue Rules, Cast31 and First Survivor all now mark the death case conditional on a safeguard pending owner reaction, with aboard knowledge unconfirmed | A reader could take a pending owner branch for a settled rule, and could read the outcome as known to the astronaut | After "still unsent", add: "This describes an ordinary living abort. If the astronaut dies mid-transfer, the outcome follows the conditional candidate in Death Shift and Rescue Continuity and is not confirmed aboard." Owner: Rescue and Home. | | D3 | Rescue Shift Proposal fc5c68818b48…, status line and dependency table | Presents itself present-tense as resolving the rescue/shift boundary, and describes Rescue Rules as promising a refuge outcome while marking ordering unresolved, and Player Information as needing a defined physical outcome | Both descriptions were true before the 514 alignment and are now stale: Rescue Rules marks the Dorn row a local intention with the conditional added, and Player Information states the reason for its limit | A live-looking rival to an accepted candidate, resting on two out-of-date characterisations | Add to the status line: "Superseded as a live proposal by the accepted conditional candidate in Death Shift and Rescue Continuity; retained as historical comparison. Its dependency table describes parent revisions predating the 514 alignment." Owner: Rescue Shift Proposal. | | D4 | Player Information and Options 9ca194c21bb7…, place-and-evidence rows | No row states what is beyond the airlock after a death | First Expedition Options and Player Information both carry the fixed-R01 reveal; the accepted candidate makes it a global rule | Low. It is an omission, not a contradiction — but the current interface contract is silent on an accepted rule its own predecessor states | Add one row: "After a shift, first view | R01 Dock Mouth, unchanged, then the changed free frontier beyond it | Named room and the entrances actually seen | Walk out and look. The airlock never acquires a different direct neighbour." Owner: Player Information and Options. |

Two accurate-but-incomplete statements, reported as not defects. Room32's R13 row and Regional25's objective-4 row each say transfer death "remains unresolved". At the owner-decision level that is still true — the safeguard is pending owner reaction — so neither is a false current claim. Each would read better with a link to the conditional candidate, and neither warrants an edit on its own.

4. Decision register

Owner-selected requirements (not reopenable by any article): oxygen-limited exploration with unlimited ship supply; hostile station; revival aboard after death with the cause hidden; survivors forming a colony; at least two alien languages; the full journal pause including enemies and oxygen in combat; mostly automatic ordinary fire with manual specials; connected reusable-part builds; shared carrying capacity; all carried property returning on death with no cache; the station shifting after each death; selected connections persisting with whole-station connection as a deepest late puzzle; the Option A opening; and cooperative rescue staying short.

Reversible provisional defaults (team choices, each with a named alternative): the single-line save policy; families-and-bridges versus simple matching for joining; the protected-retreat safeguard versus the bind-first alternative; found-parts versus fabrication acquisition; the evidence-only corruption rule with voluntary treatment; the ten-unit / four-space opening quantities; and the cue-priority ladder with its reduced-density default.

The five unanswered owner questions, and what each actually blocks:

No answer is inferred from silence or from availability messages. Question 5 is the only one with a genuine M2 consequence, and even there both branches are explicit, so it constrains the wording of a baseline rather than preventing one.

5. Dispositions

M2 — a coherent conditional baseline: READY. Every owner-selected requirement has an owning article with a current, non-contradictory rule; the traced path from the opening through death, rediscovery, a language correction, a short rescue and the late connection holds on both sides of every interface I checked. The four defects are local wording and one count; none removes a rule or breaks a path. Where an owner question is open, both branches are written and labelled, which is what a conditional baseline requires.

M3 — a documented first-pass proposal: READY WITH FOUR BOUNDED REPAIRS. D1–D4 above, each a single-passage edit with its wording supplied. Together they are well under an hour of authoring plus transfer overhead. No domain is missing a first-pass obligation, and no repair depends on an owner answer.

What remains after the repairs, and it is not small: everything explicitly deferred to M4 — full scripts, every string and glyph occurrence, exhaustive state and layout permutations, the admissible-arrangement evidence for all forty rooms, and all implementation. Those are visible, owned and out of M3 scope by prior decision, not gaps discovered here.

Rough effort and calendar recommendation, scope-based. The four repairs are roughly 1–3 role-hours including transfers and readback. The reviewer critique and one consolidated response on this assessment are roughly 3–6 more. On that basis the M3 date is not work-constrained: the remaining M3 work is a handful of single-passage edits plus this review cycle, so M3 could be dispositioned as early as 10 September rather than the 14th, if the PM wants it sooner. M2 needs nothing further from this assessment. I am recommending scope, not changing the forecast — F1.14 dates remain the PM's call.

6. What was not checked

Six domains were verified by resolved link and internal consistency rather than a two-sided comparison: equipment/acquisition, colony and home, production scope, development handoff, traps, and the older superseded layers as a class. I did not re-review any closed domain's design merit, re-derive counts from first principles, or examine every permitted arrangement. The Systems 552 audit was unavailable at read time and is not incorporated. Nothing here establishes that any of this is discoverable, usable, balanced or enjoyable; those need later owner-authorised implementation and observation, and none has occurred.