**Status.** First-pass planning scaffold, not owner-approved canon and not a promise of duration or production scope. The opening direction is selected; later mechanisms, story interpretations and ending actions below remain proposals. “Apparent,” “deeper” and “secret” describe layers of discovery, not confirmed endings. In particular, irreversible departure and revival being limited to the station field are optional story/gameplay assumptions, not established facts. The 30/90/100–200 hour figures are owner ambitions that this desk outline cannot validate.

The recurring rhythm is: leave the ship with a deliberate rig and finite carried oxygen; enter a station whose useful connections may differ after death; observe a local system while surviving its horde; spend shared carrying capacity on tools, oxygen and findings; then return with parts, people or knowledge that changes what can be attempted next. Death returns all still-carried property to the ship and changes the station. Consumed resources remain spent; station/ship-fixture installations, dropped or handed-over things remain outside the carried return set without duplication. Rig-installed parts remain carried property. Home is a place to prepare with authored survivors, not a passive upgrade menu.

| **Opening: one part, two machines** | Find the loose Fork Relay at Cargo Turn, then remove the isolation bridge at Collar Control and bring the bridge aboard. The Fork may be deployed so the service rack and patient-bay shutter remain powered, costing time and leaving the part installed; keeping it instead preserves the part but consumes carrying space. | Read trigger-to-payload causality, decide whether to deploy the loose part or keep it, survive the resulting shutter state, and learn which property returns after death. | Station infrastructure and combat equipment obey related rules; a “key” can also be a build component. This is the selected Option A direction, while exact rooms, timing and starting rig remain proposed. |

| **Middle expeditions** | Pursue several regional objectives: stabilize a useful route, recover proposed ship-repair assemblies, investigate patient transfers, and bring a small authored cast home. Hordes make stopping to observe costly. | Choose between competing viable builds, lend and reclaim parts aboard, use local language predictions, exploit persistent room-group connections, and—only under the replaceable voluntary-treatment default—decide whether to try treatment. | “Corruption” may be a deliberate change to the astronaut rather than a death tax. This is a question the player can investigate, not a settled explanation or a rule forbidding other personal consequences. |

| **Optional secret layers** | Complete personal investigations, rare utterance interactions and the late whole-station connection puzzle. | Connect every actually placed playable room or bound group while preserving every selected local binding, test cross-language hypotheses, and revisit places for consequences rather than checklist residue. The exact graph and joining mechanism remain proposals. | The station itself becomes a manipulable historical object. The deepest discoveries may complicate every prior account without supplying a single omniscient answer. Whether completion freezes the whole layout, and whether any secret is required for a “true ending,” are unresolved. |

Late expedition goals are represented by the deeper and optional-secret rows rather than a separate act: they turn accumulated regional work into central access, consequential action and the entire-station objective.

This is a replaceable middle-game example, not established fiction. After Yeva is home, she recognizes the identifier on a photographed R-3 pressure log but cannot infer where its line now runs. The player seats a relay-family part in Dorn’s collar receiver, listens, retrieves the part, then prepares the expedition. This cooperative preparation costs time aboard; it does **not** create scarcity, consumption, upkeep or a choice between the reading and carrying the relay. Listening yields one pressure value and a suspect channel—not a route or proof.

Inside the station, builder service marks let the player predict which of two valves performs “sample” and which performs “purge.” A visitor-language source/destination pair then predicts that the line was redirected through a decontamination ward. The player tests the prediction in world time, holds a horde at the valve, and—under the replaceable found-parts progression default—finds an **Impact Dynamo** installed in the abandoned sampling loop. Removing it ends that shortcut under this example's existing fixture proposal. The part adds local impact-to-charge behavior: clamped to a named Barrier frame or Projector physical-output feed, it can supply a compatible configured receiver, such as a Capacitor when one is owned. The full path and active-area cost follow the [Equipment Catalogue](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment%20Catalogue); motion alone belongs to Stride's separately stated rule.

| Early | The early part family supports different legal arrangements under the current four-space proposal, including manual Barrier timing or the Sensor → Fork → Projector + Barrier reconfiguration. | First short rescue; survivor contributes a bounded capability and personal lead. | Builder marks support one tested operation; visitor patterns are noticed but not translated. |

| Late/deep | As a candidate analogy only, local build grammar may inform station-connection work without making one universal loadout. | Survivors react to central choices according to what they know and what the player shared. | Cross-language evidence opens or reframes a route; utterance interaction remains bounded and never becomes an all-purpose oracle. |

These are comparable scoping proposals, not commitments, production forecasts or implied playtime. A **region** is a coherent expedition territory. A reusable **room module** is an authored layout/encounter pattern; one module may produce multiple **placed playable room instances**, and the late whole-station objective concerns those actual instances, not the catalogue count. A **discovery chain** is a multi-step investigation with a gameplay consequence. A **major set-piece** is an exceptional encounter or sequence and may also host a chain, room or objective; cross-listed units are not additive workload.

| Regions / reusable room modules / placed playable room instances | 4 / 24 / 40 | 7 / 45 / 80 | 10 / 70 / 130 |

| Authored scenes per survivor, including rescue and home follow-through | 3 | 5 | 7 |

| Trap or station-mechanism families / placed instances across both occupant eras | 5 / 13 | 9 / 24 | 14 / 40 |

| Special converter sites or authored connection challenges; mechanism TBD, not the total number of ordinary joins | 2 | 4 | 6 |

3. Should corruption be accessed mainly through voluntary treatment, or should death itself alter the astronaut? The replaceable default assumes voluntary access and adds no ordinary death penalty; it does not rule out other owner-chosen personal consequences.

5. Is voluntary departure the apparent-credit action; is it irreversible; does leaving end revival; and may the player postpone it indefinitely? The outline uses yes as one replaceable package, not as fact.

7. Can rescued people be lost after reaching the ship, and if so under what visible, non-arbitrary rule? The current outline assumes no answer.