Hold the Flood — World and Mystery

What this page is, in plain words. This is the mystery of Hold the Flood: the questions the drowned city asks the player, the evidence that answers them, and the rule that every answer must change what the player does next. The Flood is a mass of enemies that pours into each district on a schedule. At first it looks like weather. Then the player finds that a signal chooses where each surge enters, that something upstream permits the signal, that the surges are supplied from a place where the mass is gathered, and finally that the city has been calling the Flood in to take its charge, the same charge the player fights with, and runs its lights and doors on it. The first district's question is why its marked refuge route is overrun (a crew steered the Flood there on purpose). The campaign's question is what, at the head of the network, is still keeping time. Every clue is a thing the player can see: a lamp that flashes, a cable that pulses, a drum that turns, a gauge with two hands of writing. Nothing essential is hidden behind an item or a purchase, and every essential clue exists in two places. The page below holds the rules the mystery rests on, the chains of evidence, the endings and their consequences, and the bookkeeping the team uses. Detailed mechanics live on the shared rules page; the districts on Districts; the whole game on Campaign; the working creative direction on the Brief's Game vision.

WLD104 · r28 · 2026-09-07 09:51 UTC · Accepted at r26 (PMR008); r28 In review — the notation pass PMR009 §5 and Tasks assign ("replace private letter labels with the existing physical names in the next substantive edit, preserving references and rule meaning"): every private letter label this page used for the beacons, intakes, hatch, gate, valves, drain, sluice, panel, culvert exits, docks and platform is replaced by the name the Document, the districts and the glossary use; no rule, clue or chain meaning changed, and no anchor other pages cite is renamed. Submission notice posted in the hold-the-flood room, as the owner's workflow now asks. r27 was the vision pass PMU008 asks of every domain designer, run on this page: a plain-language opening before any code (Clarity Q52, Wiki Conventions 7, named as due in PMR008's World row), and the Visionary's decision test applied to each element of the mystery, with one concrete cut proposed, this page's private letter notation, which the Document and the district pages never use and which the vision's own criterion names (a name disguising an existing state). The vision's one story is this page's chain, so nothing in the mystery contradicts the direction; that is stated where it is checked. r26 answered PMR007 §4 and Tasks: the chain is re-ordered onto the route the player actually takes, the Lock Flight, then the Tram's three visits with the Exchange and the Collector between them as DES105 places them, with the earlier reading and the revised action at each actual visit; a second observable for harvested, independent of the refuge's board, is named (the Collector's intake gauge against its outfall meter); the held gate's action carries its bound (a one-surge buffer buys the ride up, not the trip: REV105 §3); the endings are given an informed player's genuine reasons instead of a sophistication ladder; the grounded-run cell follows contract §6; D026 is mirrored and this page's bank-permission upgrade withdrawn; W1 carries R12 and R13 from contract r7. r25 was the WLD104 deliverable PMU007 assigned as this role's contribution to DES105, depth across repeated expeditions: one clue chain that runs the whole campaign, in which the player's explanation of the Flood changes twice before the ending, and each change makes them do something different, a machine operation, then a route and a rack; with the evidence, the reasonable wrong reading, the safe way to test it, its second form, the payoff, and what stays worth discovering after the answer. It also answers COL102's request on the comparative reader. r24 was the first revision after the overnight stop. Three things landed that touch this page: contract r5 08d5e8a recast Stop as the brake on the shaft that keeps time (after Stop nothing is permitted, no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, the drums turn to no effect), which r24 mirrors in the state table and Stop rule; Colony r4 addressed COL-I3 and COL-I4 to this page (the comparative reader's boundary, and a raised landing as the refuge's unpowered return), both accepted; and Districts r7 with the Collector §8 gave this page the content of the Holding Basin's evidence, the optional certainty clue for the final answer, which r24 writes. r23: PMR006 accepted WLD103 at r22 as a contribution (not the fiction as owner-approved), and Tasks asks this role to participate only if the lead changes the shared contract; contract r4 29f5b0a did, in three places that touch W1's text here, so r23 mirrors them: what counts as a beacon now includes a district's moving beacon (the Tram's lamp, a lure that never flashes) and the portable beacon armed and charged; a flash is a signal event that needs no power, so a beacon a Grounder has darkened still flashes at its dispatch and is dark again after; and the colony pump's reserve, held here as a proposal, is declined and withdrawn. r23 also adopts CAM102's convention that the Exchange's board is the campaign's index of districts, which is in this page's domain. r22 aligned r21 to the ratified shared contract Power and Attraction r3 59f8951, which was drafted in parallel and validated against r20: the two agree on the source of fixed power, the relay as a source of signal, drum-and-trunk, the empty flash and the unpowered return, and where they differed the contract's wording is adopted here (its switch-house for the head-works' store; Stop as a cascade of one district per expedition, nearest the head-works first, shown on the refuge's board; the empty flash as the contract defines it, this page's marker cue kept only as an optional presentation note). The colony pump's after-Stop reserve is marked as a proposal for Colony. The Head-works r4 has withdrawn its reversed water-level sentence, so that flag is closed. r21 was the D024 deliverable Tasks assigns after PMR004: Answer A developed as the provisional mystery (the harvesting machinery), W1 extended with the dispatch condition PM chose (local drum AND trunk permit; arrivals also need supply; fixed power separate), the six-state table PMR004 §1 asks Lead and World for (source, connection, what changes it, what survives exit and Stop), Stop's costs with a bounded reserve and a guaranteed unpowered return, the empty-dispatch convention (REV104-3), the water-level reconciliation between the Collector and the Head-works as one rule, the correction that flowing water conducts like any water (the race is unfed, not unconductive) with the actual dry breaks named (REV104-4), and the essential-clue redundancy table with the guarantee that no clue is sold (REV104-1/-5, PMR004 §4). WLD103 was placed on Tasks at eb8c03f (Ready) and Brief D019–D021 record the owner's expansion; r20 adds the one element the formal line asks for that r19 only implied, the player's evolving hypotheses, and maps the line to this page's sections. r19 was the first WLD103 deliverable, written minutes before the line under a labelled assumption: the campaign's overarching question, the rule for what every district contributes to it with the false-refuge chain's fairness, the fixed rule contract against what a district may add, the pumping district's relay decision reframed as a local outcome that is also the first campaign clue, three example districts sketched only as mystery contributions, and two candidate final answers left for the owner. Written for the lead's DES104 and for the Campaign designer when staffed. r18 closed REV103-9 (the relay's channel carries flowing water, not energised water: the relay is the district's one source of signal, a drum turned by the race above the weir, so the valves can never light the yard from the relay's side, and the drain stops the drum without touching the district's power), and records the owner's expansion direction (PMU004) as it bears on this role: the overarching mystery and clue logic across a campaign of districts, WLD103, anticipated but not yet on Tasks; the bounded first deliverable is scoped at the end. r17 was the targeted revision PMR003 requested of this role: the three valves' found and set positions and the success condition (connectivity, not order) in one table; the relay's own supply against the door's, and what drain valve stops and leaves working, with one added clause (the drain valve sits above the head valve's weir, so it empties only the relay's feed); the access chain's consequence qualified by route (a crowd held by a still-lit causeway beacon stays put on the coil route); the Shut row's workshop claim removed. The lead's r13 proposals for these are confirmed here with that one addition, so Document r13 50046f7 needs only the weir clause to match. r16 merged the tier-three chain with the one the lead proposed in Design Document r9 fb6b6df "for the world designer to correct and own", so there is one chain, on this page, for §11 to lift: the lead's access chain (the crew's note as a three-valve sequence that joins the yard's water to the sluice head) followed by this page's relay chain (drum, lever, clamp, drain valve). Two reconciliations are stated in the PM report. r15 was the revision PMR002 requested of this role (items 1 and 3): W1 now says what counts as a beacon and the precedence between retargeting and spreading; the junction lamp is an indicator, not a lure; a state table checks the three signature routes and the failed experiment against the rule as written; tier three gets a complete clue → inference → action → consequence chain, an endings table with each ending's dispatch, retreat and colony consequence, no salvage price on the choice itself, and the early takeaway Q36 asked for. r14 applied PMU002's rulings: the title moves out of "owner requirements" to its D017 status as the owner-supplied working title (Clarity Q37 was right); D016 confirms the routing baseline, so the standing decision request is closed; D015 seats the five further contributors on the Team, so their pages are cited as team work, and REF101's electrofishing reference is cited as research grounding for W1. No rule or chain text changed. r13 aligned two tier-two sentences to DES102 draft r6 12779dc, which states the critic's REV102-6 on the document's own principle: any current in the joined water energises the junction circuit, so with the valve open the panel lighting the yard is enough to open the junction gate, at the price of a hot yard; with the valve shut, a coil discharge into the pool opens it quietly; the coil buys stealth, not access. Nothing else changed from r12 23dca93, which aligned to draft r4, whose r3 topology stands (the lead's r4 note and REV102 issue 1 both settle on this page's r10 choices). r12 re-instated r10's body, undoing r11 eac7ed8, which had aligned to draft r2 while r3 was aligning to r10. To make a third crossing impossible, this page no longer carries its own map: topology and crowd behaviour are sourced from the Design Document's sections 2 and 4 and only summarised here with a notation key; this page remains the source for W1–W4 and the mystery chain, which the document's section 9 mirrors. Any topology change starts here and is agreed before either page moves, as the lead's r3 note asks. r10 c6f0598, r9 41681d9, r8 ba6f8b8 and earlier are page history. Author: World and Mystery Designer. Handoff: canonical Lead (D014) for DES102; PM. WLD101 was accepted in PMR001 as a concept contribution (at r6 4302067); r7 fa3eb1b and earlier revisions are page history.

Owner requirements. Survivorlike; exploration, experimentation, mystery; the Flood is massed enemies (Brief D011); Unity; Steam; assume nothing exists. "Hold the Flood" is the owner-supplied working project title, not a recorded requirement; final naming is the owner's and is not locked (Brief D017). Design only until the owner explicitly authorizes development after reviewing the design document (D007). No AI-generated art; prefer verified free assets; purchases and rare authored assets need owner approval. This revision creates no assets, code, prototypes, or tests. Bioelectric enemies, the drowned district, the small colony, and every rule below are proposals, not owner approvals (D013).

Sources. Reread 09:51 UTC: Brief 28fb1c2 (D013 provisional A; D014 canonical lead; D015 five owner-added contributors seated; D016 routing baseline confirmed; D017 working title; D018 criterion 11), Tasks 1370285 (PMU002: WLD102 In review at r12; DES103 Ready for the lead; this role checks clue/rule changes against the exact integrated revision), Team cbf8d79, PM Reviews a2beab4, PMR002 2199471 (items 1 and 3 assigned to this role; delivered in r15–r16), PMR003 72c692e (reviewed World r16; finale machinery credited; targeted revision on valves, supplies, drain, coil-route targets and the workshop claim), Tasks 6e92d0c (WLD102 In review, targeted revision; REV103 Ready), Document r13 50046f7 (lead's proposals for the same items, confirmed here), Expansion Brief 1a568e4 (PMU004: the owner called the premise promising, rejected three to four hours as far too little, and asked for many districts; this role owns the overarching mystery and clue logic; four designers proposed, not staffed), Design Index 3cc078d (World expands beyond the local mystery under WLD103), Pumping District 655b140 (CAM101 with WLD103), REV103 r5 205bfb1 (the criteria it will apply to a cross-district mystery: the false-refuge chain as the model; evidence that changes a later action; the same fairness), Brief 70b6b1c (D019–D021 the expansion; D022 seven districts plus the refuge; D023 eight rack cells and shelter-selected pickup; D024 Answer A provisional, local drum AND trunk permit, arrivals need supply, fixed power separate), PMR004 ed0def3 (§1 the six-state table for Lead and World; the Head-works must not generalise that flowing water cannot conduct; reconcile the water-level consequence between Collector and Head-works; essential clues never require purchased services; §4 comparative observations use obtainable information), Tasks d47196f (WLD103 In review: under D024 define source/distribution/Stop and baseline return, the drum/trunk/supply state table, the empty signal and redundant essential clues; REV104-2 resolved at the contract), REV104 r1 80a882a (five findings on r19–r20: what a local dispatch requires; charge, resolved; the empty-dispatch convention; the fixed-power source; the routing bank's price), Campaign / DES104 r1 34dc09d (§6 adopts this thread; three deep districts carry their clues in two forms), Brief 0fff74b (PMU008: the owner rejected the pitch as barely understandable and created the Visionary; the Game vision: one story, the keep/change/cut table, the decision test; World owns the story's evidence), Team 890a96e (the Visionary's mandate: change or remove mechanics that do not serve the identity), Tasks e0b9c41 (domain designers: explain player value on the Visionary's changes, offer revisions or removals; World row: r26 accepted, plain-language openings due), PMR008 37fd948 (World r26 accepted in full; fiction revisable under the Visionary's mandate), Campaign / DES105 r3 0cafb94 (the lead's three tensions for the Visionary), REV105 r3 265a093 (nothing to this role), PMR007 6fb1811 (§3 the grounded-run cell; §4 the ordering and the second observable; D026), Brief 0cba025 (D026), Tasks 75ff4da (WLD104 In review, targeted changes required), REV105 r1 35cccfe (§3: the held gate removes the Tram's opposition; the repair is the one-surge buffer; the grounded-run cell), Districts r9 e9c4134 (§3.4: the Collector is open from the pumping district's tier two; the numbered route is a recommendation, not a gate), Campaign / DES105 r1 ee42021 (§3.2: the Tram's three visits under the three beliefs), Power and Attraction r7 5322f41 (R12 spread from where the crowd stands; R13 a held crowd follows a moving beacon; the Exchange's found bank state; D026), Tasks 6526edd (PMU007: WLD104 Ready, contribution to DES105; CAM103 and REV105 alongside), PM Reviews f629872 (PMU007: the owner accepted depth of repeated play as the priority and said resume; a coordination update, not a review), REV104 r6 ce94e4a (verified r24; three findings, all the Exchange's), Power and Attraction r6 8644ea5 (a rescue is not an extraction; authored commitments persist and are one-way where their district says so; the board before launch), Colony / COL102 r1 fe7d88e (the comparative reader needs a concrete cost in WLD104 or is folded into the base receiver), Campaign / DES104 r5 9366c8f, Power and Attraction r5 08d5e8a (Stop as the brake on time; the empty flash stays a permitted dispatch the Collector did not supply; read this page's r23), Colony / COL101 r4 527f2bf (COL-I3 and COL-I4 for World), Districts / CAM102 r7 cd487b1 (this page owns every clue proposal on the new district pages, including the Holding Basin's evidence), The Collector r4 §8 (the Holding Basin: room, way in and price supplied; content left to this page), The Head-works r5 65403a2 (Stop row on the ruled text), PMR006 a288707 (WLD103 accepted at r22; the expanded-campaign skeleton coherent; five blockers, none World's), Tasks b721898 (WLD103 Accepted; participate only if the lead changes the contract), Power and Attraction r4 29f5b0a (a flash needs no power; the beacon definition with a moving beacon; the pump reserve declined; lines conduct when dry; pursuit range about ten metres), Campaign / DES104 r3 6e4b59a (the head-works ending copy is Stop, Keep or Leave; the relay room keeps shut, fix, hold), The Exchange / CAM102 r1 5bc6258 (built on this page's sketch; seven drums on one shaft; three fixed beacons; the board as the index of districts, proposed for this page), REV104 r2–r5 (r2 verified REV104-1 to -5 at r21; r3 reviewed the package including r22; no open item is World's), Power and Attraction r3 59f8951 (ratified contract: D023/D024 embodied; §9 the state table and Stop, "this page with World; World corrects the fiction"; validated against r20, before r21), PMR005 d159676 (combat reconciliation; World checks fiction and mystery of the effect contract), Campaign / DES104 r2 b922347, The Head-works r4 706ce66 (r1's water-level and flowing-water sentences withdrawn; Stop as the ratified cascade), The Collector r4 75c09e6 (owns the Collector's level under Stop, §7), Power and Attraction r2 69024cd, Districts, The Collector r2 40f2b56 and The Head-works r2 6bf2a71 (CAM101; the empty flash; the governor's Slow/Stop/Keep), Colony / COL101 a1046db (the comparative-observation service), Combat Rules / CMB101 r2 1126c3e (R1's proposed role-target line; R9 the Grounder), Brief 1bd68ad (D019–D021 as first recorded), Tasks eb8c03f (WLD103 Ready: central question, evolving hypotheses, evidence across districts, later knowledge enabling a return, fail-safe essential clues, a campaign payoff; relay ending as local resolution; coordinate geography with Lead and Campaign), Expansion Prompts ed17df8 (Campaign owns geography, travel, order and district pages and must coordinate the global mystery rather than add key hunts; World owns the overarching mystery, clue logic and enemy fiction; Combat, Equipment and Colony own their systems), Tasks 95db055 (WLD102 Ready: revision requested), Design Document r9 fb6b6df (DES103 r3: PMR002 item 1 done on the document in parallel with r15 and in agreement with it: precedence stated once in §4, the junction lamp an indicator, coil-lit beacons steady and never flashing, the failed experiment rebuilt around the Off position; item 3: a tier-three access chain proposed for this page to own, merged here), Design Document r8 d37cbf0, Design Review REV102 r5 e2db8b9 (revise: the arc; nothing to this role), Design r5 b030c98, Design Review r6 a892274, Design Review r7 bb68711 (closes Finding 2 under the sight-limited model; N17), Clarity Questions b8696cc (Q28 on the crossed saves; Q29 marked answered at r8 by this role), PM Reviews 04f3183 (PMR001 checkpoint; next review prioritises WLD102), Glossary f1bf1f4, External Critique 319c975 (EXT101; the External Critic is a team member since D015; its X9 on the title is answered by D017 and on this page by r14), Design Document r6 12779dc (r5 bc134bf states REV102-6 and adds the one-page owner summary; r6 merges owner decisions 4 and 6 with measured market data; r4 46b320b sections 2, 4, 9, 11 and Appendix B read; r3 d35209f aligned to this page's r10), Design Review REV102 r2 82a96ba (all five r1 issues verified resolved; verdict: ready for owner review as the base of DES103; one residual, REV102-6), Design Review REV102 r1 4dde90c (verdict: revise, one bounded pass; issue 1 recommends this page's r10 topology; issue 3 the flash observable), Disagreement Register 8dd233c and Reference: Survivorlike Market Data 39c95f2 (The Troll and the Reference Researcher, team members since D015; Q37 on the title came from the register and is answered here), Design r6 211106d (header note: rules now maintained on the Design Document), Glossary 86c1c4e. No comparative research and no asset verification.

What r8 did. PMR001 chose the simpler routing model over the sight-limited one that r7 and Design r4–r5 had adopted: the panel alone selects the intake at dispatch; after entry every surge continuously follows the nearest reachable energised beacon, district-wide. r8 rewrites W1/W2, the map, the chain, the price of the panel, and both required scenes under exactly that model, removing r7's glow-range and split-surge text. It reconciles the culvert account (no pump; item 6), re-derives the dock-choice consequence (item 2), and supplies the motive, tiers, and ending without upkeep and without making the Flood water (item 5). Word definitions stay in Design's glossary; the wiki editor's Glossary mirrors it. The sight-limited model is recorded once, at the end, as a set-aside alternative.

The district — textual map (proposal)

North is the interior; the docks are south. = raised and dry, ~ shallow water, - the culvert (a gravity drain: dry on its own, never pumped, never paid for).

The map is drawn once, in the Design Document, section 2 (from this page's r10, and not re-drawn on either page again). This page uses the same names as the Document, the district pages and the glossary: the causeway dock (held dry by default) and the yard dock (flooded by default; wet, so it conducts); the panel at the causeway head; the causeway beacon at the causeway's far end and the causeway intake beside it; the yard beacon at the pump-hall door and the yard intake, the channel mouth at the door, in water; the pump-hall hatch, on the yard circuit with its beacon, with a hand crank inside; the culvert's two exits at the two dock ends (a gravity drain, always dry, never paid for); the junction platform, a shelter; the junction gate into the interior, on the junction's own circuit, energised only when the junction valve joins the yard channel to the junction pool and current is in that water; the sluice beside the junction, the Flood's own way in. Shelters (hard stops): the two docks when dry, and the junction platform. The causeway has no device; what lighting it buys is the road and where the next surge enters. The hatch blinks and closes when its branch loses power, never on an occupant, and can be cranked open from inside in ten seconds; that is the hall's recoverable exit.

World rules — proposal for DES102, PM baseline

• W1 — Attraction. Intake: at each dispatch the relay fires one pulse down the branch the panel selects: Causeway (The causeway beacon pulses, the surge enters at the causeway intake), Yard (The yard beacon, the yard intake), or Off (no pulse; the surge enters at the sluice). Only the relay pulses. A beacon lit by local current (a coil discharge into a channel, or a valve joining the two branches' water) glows steady and lures, but never pulses and never changes the next intake: the relay's output is a separate line from the lamp (the Design Document's thin signal cable beside the thick power cable, both switched by the panel). This is visible, not a hidden rule: at a dispatch the pulse is seen running the thin cable and the beacon flashes; a coil-lit or planted beacon glows steady and never flashes. Only the beacon that flashes chooses an intake, and nothing the surveyor carries can make a beacon flash. The flash is a signal event and needs no power (contract r4): a beacon a Grounder has darkened still flashes at its dispatch and is dark again after it, so a crowd that entered under it retargets or spreads by the precedence below. What counts as a beacon (r15, PMR002 item 1; mirrored from contract r4 in r23): the district's dispatch beacons (The causeway beacon and the yard beacon here), the portable beacon armed and charged, carried or planted, and a moving beacon where a district adds one (the Tram Incline's lamp, a lure that never flashes). Every other lamp, including the junction pool's lamp, the panel's indicators, and any hatch light, is an indicator that shows a circuit's state and draws nothing. Path: after entry a surge moves continuously toward the nearest reachable lit beacon anywhere in the district, fixed, planted or moving, panel-lit or coil-lit; a crowd holding at a beacon that moves follows it (contract r7, R13: the Tram's lamp tows). Precedence, stated once: a crowd keeps its current lit target unless another lit beacon is nearer, or its target goes dark; when its target goes dark it retargets to the nearest reachable lit beacon if there is one, and only with none reachable does it spread, from where it stands (contract r7, R12), along the branch it is in (from the sluice, along the interior route and then both branches). Lighting a beacon farther from a crowd than its current lit target moves nothing. The panel needs no item, slot, resource, or notebook flag; what it costs is stated under "The price of the panel".
• Research note (not a rule). Reference: Electricity in Water, REF101 r2, by the team's Reference Researcher, documents real electrofishing response zones: attraction toward the anode at low field strength, forced swimming toward it as the field grows, immobilisation at roughly ten times the attraction threshold. That is the same shape as this page's beacon (lure) and coil (stun): one physics at two intensities, which the Design Document r3 also cites as grounding. It supports the fiction; it does not set any number here, and the game's rule stays W1 as written.
• W2 — Commitment (entrance only). A dispatched surge keeps its intake: nothing changes where it came in, and nothing teleports it. Switching the panel changes which beacons are lit, and therefore where every entered surge walks next. The forecast shows the next dispatch's intake as a map marker that moves the moment the panel changes, a locked marker for a surge already dispatched, and each entered surge's current target beacon.
• W3 — Stable evidence. Wiring, signs, wear marks, and signal behaviour are identical on every expedition. Water states, enemies, loose salvage, and surge timing may vary or reset and can change the best route, never the rule.
• W4 — Turned signs. Every refuge sign that has been turned faces the way the last crew went; first seen in the culvert facing the yard; confirmed by the tally board; thereafter a navigation clue wherever the sign recurs. One sign asset, rotated.

How a surge behaves once it has arrived (item 2). It gathers around its target beacon and holds there while that beacon stays lit and no lit beacon is nearer; each surge is larger, so the held crowd's radius grows, and by surge 3 the causeway's far end or the channel mouth is full. Two things move organisms besides beacons, in the Design Document's terms: pursuit range (any organism within a short range of the surveyor breaks off to chase and drifts back when out of range, which is what the cutter fires at) and press (the gathered crowd's edge creeps slowly outward along its branch during the quiet interval, so "quiet" means a moving line you can read, not an empty branch; stragglers roam between surges; the next surge re-concentrates it). A surge whose beacon goes dark retargets to the nearest reachable lit beacon if one exists and otherwise spreads along its branch at once, both ways (W1 precedence). What creates survival decisions while a crowd holds: the hatch, the richest deposits, and the motes all sit at the far ends where the crowd is, and the press brings its edge toward the dock ends; harvesting or opening anything means working at the crowd's edge inside its pursuit range, or waiting and losing surge time.

The price of the panel (item 1; replaces "Cost of diversion")

Switching is free of resources and available on expedition one. It is paid, visibly, five ways:

1. Exposure. the panel stands in the open at the causeway head, a dash from the causeway dock and R1. Switching with the countdown near zero means being on, or next to, the branch you just lit.
2. Invitation. The lit branch is where the next dispatch enters, and lighting the yard is the only way the panel opens the hatch. The branch you want open is the branch the next surge comes to.
3. The mid-surge switch moves the crowd, and that is its price. A switch does buy something this surge: every entered surge walks to the new light. Its cost is the route it takes and the door that shuts. Causeway to Yard: the crowd at the causeway beacon leaves the far end, crosses the junction beside the sluice, and comes down the channel to the yard beacon; the junction and the interior route are the Flood's road while it crosses. Yard to Causeway: the mirror, and the hatch closes behind anyone still in the hall (crank). Off darkens both: each crowd spreads along its own branch, both ways, toward the dock as much as the interior, and the hatch closes. The forecast shows each surge's new target the moment you switch, so the price is readable before the crowd moves.
4. The held dock. A dry dock is never blocked; it is a hard stop. The route to it is what costs, and three things raise that cost: the press of a lit branch's crowd toward the dock end, a dark branch's crowd spreading both ways, and a planted beacon lit near a dock. The two docks have the same bypass, because the culvert joins both dock ends; the asymmetry is water: the yard's crowd stands in a channel, where the coil works and unprotected feet burn. So the branch of the held dock must stay lit whenever a surge is in it, which is also what keeps that branch hot. Dock-choice consequence (re-derived): holding the causeway dock means the causeway is your safe default and the yard is where you send trouble; holding the yard dock means the yard must stay lit through any surge you send there, so the hall's crowd is between you and nothing, but Off and Causeway are both dangerous the moment a surge is in the yard. The colony choice decides which branch you can never afford to darken.
5. Commitment. The intake is fixed at dispatch; a switch after dispatch changes where the surge goes after it enters, never where it enters, so the forecast's locked marker stays true.

Where the coil fits. A coil discharged into the yard channel lights the yard beacon steady and opens the hatch for the seconds the charge lasts, without touching the panel: a lure and a key, not an intake. The yard beacon and the hatch share a circuit, so "the yard stays dark" is never true of a coil route: the yard glows, it does not flash. A crowd moves to the yard beacon only if the yard beacon is nearer than its current lit target or its target is dark; the panel's next intake is unchanged, because only the flashing beacon chooses it.

The signature routes and the failed experiment, as states (r15; the check PMR002 item 1 asks of this role). Start of every row: quiet two; panel on Causeway; the causeway beacon lit; surge one holding at the causeway beacon; the yard beacon dark; the hatch shut; next dispatch in ninety seconds, intake causeway.

So the failed experiment's written outcome, surge one crossing to the yard, does not follow from the rule; what does follow is a different and better failure: the yard glows (steady, not dark), the hatch opens for seconds, and closes on the surveyor inside the hall, who cranks out in ten seconds while the yard crowd, if any, presses at the door. The lesson stays the same words: steady means powered, powered means lure for anything nearer, and the coil powers everything the water touches. The lead should rewrite §1's "the yard stays dark" and §8's sequence to these states; nothing in W1 needs an exception to make the scene work.

Illustrative design — DESIGNER SPOILERS: the false refuge under the PM baseline

Proposed play, not a playtest. Light convention: steady = powered, pulsing = the relay dispatching, dark = unpowered.

The reachable answer (spoiler; proposal). Inside the pump hall, beside the hall's dead pump, a crew tally board: rows of marks per surge sent to the causeway; a last row with one mark to the yard and a line under it; a district plan with the refuge signs crossed out and a route inked through the culvert to the interior. The last crew fed the evacuation route to keep working the yard, turned the signs to mark their own way, and left the panel on Causeway for whoever came after. It changes action: the inked route and W4 point into the interior.

Knowledge gate, not item gate. The panel works on expedition one; what changes is knowing what it does. Loadouts change how well a choice can be exploited, never whether it can be made.

Fair recovery. Death: rescue without cargo; notebook, map, and observed facts persist; no deduction is granted. Missed clue: The causeway beacon is lit on every arrival and pulses every dispatch; the culvert is visible from the yard bank; the marker-and-crowd response to a switch is an independent second path. Hints escalate from "the two beacons differ" to "switch, then watch the forecast and the crowd". Withdrawal never requires solving this (scene 1).

Two required scenes (item 2; illustrations, not playtests)

Scene 1 — untouched panel, first expedition, retreat. Panel on Causeway, the causeway dock held. Surge 3 enters at the causeway intake and gathers at the causeway beacon, the far north end. The surveyor, at the yard deposits, takes the culvert's yard-dock exit into the culvert, walks south under the causeway to the culvert's causeway-dock exit, crosses the short open stretch to the causeway dock, a hard stop. No beacon stands on that route, so no crowd is drawn along it; what is met is the causeway crowd's press near the causeway head, stragglers, and organisms inside pursuit range (the Design Document's expedition one shows the shape of it at nine minutes, one hit taken). The claim "withdrawal never requires solving this" therefore holds only under a stated constraint, which the draft should carry as a tuning bound: on expedition one, the press of an untouched-panel causeway crowd must not reach the causeway head before the evacuation window closes. A proposed bound, not a proven value.

Scene 2 — inside the pump hall when power ends, then when the next surge arrives. The surveyor set Yard, crossed to the hall while the crowd was still crossing the junction, and is reading the tally board. Power ends (the panel is switched to Causeway or Off, or a coil-opened hatch times out): The hatch blinks for three seconds and closes, never on an occupant; anyone inside is shut in. Rule, the Design Document's, adopted here: a hatch closes when its branch loses power, never on an occupant, and can be cranked open from inside in ten seconds without power. No mystery solution is needed to leave, and the recovery takes exactly long enough to matter. The next surge arrives with Yard still lit: it enters at the yard intake and gathers in the channel mouth in front of the hall, standing in water. From inside, the surveyor is behind the hatch with the crowd outside it. Choices: hold the doorway, where pursuit brings them in one at a time, at a cost in health; wait for the press to thin the door and lose surge time; or, with a coil and insulation, step to the channel's edge inside the doorway and discharge, which is the electrician's whole reason for being there. Switching the panel from inside is impossible, because the panel is at the causeway head.

Motive, tiers, ending (item 5; proposals for owner judgment)

Motive, no upkeep. The colony is a dozen people on the one dock the pump keeps dry. The pump runs on salvage already banked; nothing is charged per expedition, there is no decay between sessions, and repeated failed expeditions lose only their own cargo. What salvage buys is change: a dock held dry instead of the other, a workshop, and the forecast relay. The ending costs no salvage; it costs reaching the relay room (r15, PMR002 item 3). A colony that stops hauling is not drowned; it is stuck. The surveyor goes in because the crew before them went in and did not come back, and because the district's own machinery is what is sending the Flood at the refuge route.

The title. "Hold the Flood" is the owner-supplied working title and is kept as such; final naming is the owner's and is not locked (D017; this page's earlier revisions wrongly listed it under owner requirements, which Clarity Q37 caught). In A it means holding the enemy mass off the refuge: the dock, the causeway signed as the way out, and eventually the district. The pump holds water; the panel, the beacons, and the surveyor hold the Flood. The Flood is never water.

Three tiers on one district, each a recombination of the same rules. Tier 1, the false refuge (designed above): learn that power is key and lure; the panel is the lever. Tier 2, the junction and the interior, "what they went in for": the junction gate the junction gate is on a circuit the panel never reaches. Evidence: junction valve beside it, drawn open on the inked plan and found shut; a lamp on the junction pool that lights whenever the yard channel is energised while the junction valve is open. Inference: joined water carries power, and therefore attraction, across the district, so the crew could open the junction gate from the yard without the panel. Experiment: open the junction valve and light the yard at the panel; the pool's lamp (an indicator, not a beacon: it draws nothing) lights and the junction gate opens for as long as the yard is lit. The price is the hot yard: the next surge enters at the yard intake and its crowd holds at the yard beacon, beside the junction, so the platform is worked at that crowd's edge. Or leave the junction valve shut and discharge the coil into the pool: The junction gate opens quietly, no beacon lights, for the seconds the charge lasts. The coil buys stealth, not access (REV102-6). Consequence: entering tier two needs no module, and every way in has a price the player can read. Behind the junction gate: the second tally board and the crew's note of the relay room's valve sequence. Keep tier 3 a knowledge gate: the relay room opens by the same current rule and that note, not by a found key item. Tier 3, the relay room, "what calls the Flood" (r16: one chain, merged from the lead's r9 access chain and this page's r15 relay chain; designer spoilers; this page owns it and Design Document §11 lifts it). Prerequisites: the junction gate open (tier two) and the crew's note from behind it. The note has two sides: a three-valve order drawn against the inked plan, and the crew's own conclusion, "relay on the head channel; drain it and it stops; clamp it and it holds one line; we chose neither."

Reaching the room (the lead's chain, adopted).

The three valves (r17; confirms the lead's r13 proposal).

Success condition: the sluice-head lamp (an indicator) lights while the yard is lit or during a discharge in the pool; any of the three left shut leaves it dark. Order never matters, because the rule is conduction through joined water; the note's "order" is just the order the crew walked.

Inside the room (this page's chain).

Two waters, stated once (r18; closes REV103-9). The relay's race is the sluice-head channel above the weir: flowing water, never energised, that turns the drum on every expedition; that is why the drum runs while the door beside it is dead. The door is on the pool side's dead line, fed only when the three valves join the pools to a lit yard or to a discharge. The head valve joins the head pool to the channel below the weir, never to the race, so the valves cannot light the yard from the relay's side: current the player puts into the joined water reaches the door and nothing above the weir, and there is no current above the weir to come back down. The drain valve empties the race: the wheel stops, the drum stops, no pulse is made; the head pool, the junction pool and the yard channel keep their water, and the panel's power positions, the beacons, the hatches and the junction gate, all on the district's own circuit, keep working after shutdown. This states one readable exception to clause 2, that the relay is a source and not a consumer, and states it once.

Each ending, next expedition (proposal):

What a player who stops early takes away (Q36). After tier one, expeditions one to three, the player has one complete answer, why the marked refuge is overrun, and one durable ability that is not on any item: choosing where the next surge enters and reading every crowd's target on the forecast. That is a finished small game inside the larger one; tiers two and three add where current can be sent without the panel, and then what the timer is. None of this adds a machine family: valves, lamps, beacons, hatches, a clamp, and the relay already exist.

Early, middle, final (illustrative; the expedition count is a proposal, not coverage). Early: the panel, the culvert, the yard; hauler loadouts; the first colony repair. Middle: the junction gate and the interior; valves; the held-dock switch; electrician and shepherd loadouts; the tally board and the inked route. Final: the relay room and the choice. A rough twelve to twenty expeditions is the lead's number to defend in DES102 against the content above; this page supplies the tiers, not the count.

Integration check — DES102 draft r4 (46b320b), for the lead and REV102

Nothing is open for this role. Draft r3 aligned to this page's r10 and applied its items 1–7 (gravity-drain culvert and dead pump; both docks share the bypass and the asymmetry is water; the press-rate bound as a tuning constraint; each crowd's target on the forecast; the turned-sign rule; the relay room by valve sequence, not a key; the chain rows lifted). Draft r4 completed REV102 issues 3 and 5 (the flash observable, now mirrored in W1 and the Understand row above; the bound restated in section 15) and settled the topology. r11's two items were overtaken: r3 chose press and pursuit range and the three-part dock cost. Division of sources from here: the Design Document's sections 2 and 4 are canonical for topology and crowd behaviour; this page is canonical for W1–W4 and the mystery chain, which section 9 mirrors; if they drift, the drift is reported here and fixed in one place, and no topology change is made on either page before it is agreed on this one.

Shelter and observation rules — S1 to S3 (unchanged)

• S1 Notebook — full pause; shows only what has been observed; no new evidence.
• S2 Shelter (The causeway dock, the yard dock when dry, the junction platform) — enemies cannot enter or spawn; the surge clock runs; repacking allowed; the district stays visible.
• S3 Live evidence — new clues, panel switches, and their verification happen in the running world.

WLD103 — the mystery across a campaign (first deliverable, r19; proposals under a labelled assumption)

Standing. WLD103 was assigned at Tasks eb8c03f and is now In review with a D024 follow-up (Tasks d47196f): "under D024, define power source/distribution/Stop and baseline return, the drum/trunk/supply state table, the empty signal and redundant essential clues." The four designers are staffed and have delivered; Campaign's Districts adopt the lead's DES104, whose §6 adopts this thread, and the Exchange, Collector and Head-works are built on this page's sketches. The original line: "expand the local mystery into a campaign thread: central question, evolving hypotheses, evidence across districts, later knowledge enabling a meaningful return, fail-safe essential clues and a campaign payoff; reassess the current relay ending as local resolution; coordinate campaign geography with Lead and the proposed Campaign designer." Where each is answered: the central question, below; evolving hypotheses, the table added in r20; evidence across districts and later knowledge enabling a return, the six-part rule and the three examples; fail-safe essential clues, rule 5 (every campaign clue in two districts); the relay ending as local resolution, its own subsection; the campaign payoff, two candidate answers held for the owner, with PM's ruling requested. Geography is Campaign's; this section names only what a district must contribute. The Campaign designer is proposed, not staffed, so this is written for the lead's DES104 first. Everything in it is a proposal; the Flood's identity and the setting stay open, and nothing here needs a specific enemy. Not in scope: district counts, hours, enemy roles, equipment, colony economy.

The campaign question (proposal; designer spoilers)

The pumping district asked "why is the marked refuge overrun?" and answered it locally: the last crew steered the Flood with the district's own relay. Its finale asked "what calls the Flood?" and answered: a drum turned by flowing water. The campaign asks the question those two answers open: the district relays are one network, kept in time from somewhere upstream; what, at its head, is still keeping time, and for whom? Every district's local mystery is a partial answer to that question, and the evidence for it is the same machinery the player already reads: drums, races, the thin signal cable, tally boards, turned signs.

The first campaign clue is already in the pumping district and costs nothing new: after the player shuts the relay (opens the drain), the drum stops, local dispatches stop, and the thin cable that enters the relay room from outside the district still pulses on the old cadence. Something upstream is still keeping time. That reframes the finale exactly as the Expansion Brief asks: shut, fix and hold are local outcomes, persistent for this district, and the incoming pulse on a stopped drum is the door to the campaign.

The player's evolving hypotheses (r20; what the player believes at each stage, and the clue that overturns it)

The mystery is fair only if each wrong belief is a reasonable reading of the evidence so far, and each is overturned by something the player can see, not told. Stages are tied to the clues already designed; none needs a new device.

A player who stops at any row has a complete belief that was true as far as it went and one durable skill from it; that is the early-stop answer at campaign scale.

What every district contributes (the rule; the false-refuge chain is the model)

Each district's mystery page states these six things, or the district is a key hunt:

1. A local question the place itself asks (as the signed refuge asked one), answered inside the district by observable clues, a fair inference, a free experiment available on the first visit, a consequence, a recovery path if the clue is missed, and an answer for replays. No item gates.
2. One campaign clue: an observable, stable object (W3) that only makes full sense with evidence from another district: a drum with no race that still ticks; a tally board whose marks match another district's cadence; a signal cable leaving toward a named place. It is inspectable in three or four lines, never a lore paragraph.
3. What travels with the player: a fact in the notebook and a convention the player now reads everywhere (as W4 made turned signs readable district-wide). Nothing travels as an item that gates a door.
4. One later action it enables, in another district or on a return: for example, having read the exchange's drums, the player can predict a district's next intake without its forecast relay; having shut one relay, the player can hear whether the trunk still ticks there.
5. Redundancy: every campaign clue appears in two districts in different forms, so a missed clue is recoverable without a guide and the campaign never depends on one room.
6. A consequence stated as a rule: what this district's persistent outcome (its relay state, a gate left open, a collector closed) does to another district, the refuge, or a return visit.

What stays fixed everywhere, and what a district may add (the contract for Campaign and Combat)

Fixed in every district, or the campaign's knowledge stops being knowledge: W1–W4 with the retarget-or-spread precedence and the definition of a beacon; the light convention (steady, flashing, dark; wet and dry by tint); the two cables and the rule that only a flashing beacon chooses an intake; the flowing-water relay as the district's one source of signal; S1–S3. A district may add, with a readable signal and a choice it improves: new powered devices (doors, pumps, wheels, lifts) on the same clause; new water topology (races, pools, weirs, drains) that changes what conduction reaches; a second signal source, or none; more than two fixed beacons; planted-beacon variants. A district may not change what power, signal or a beacon means, or make an ordinary lamp draw the Flood.

The relay decision as a district outcome (reframed; replaces "ends the game")

Shut, fix and hold keep the consequences in the endings table above, for this district, persistently. They no longer end the game. Shut adds the campaign clue (the incoming pulse on a stopped drum). Fix, clamping the lever, also clamps what the upstream pulse can do here, which is why the upstream network matters. Hold records the choice. The campaign-scale version of the same choice belongs at the head-works (below), and whether the campaign answers its own question or leaves it to a later owner decision is PM's call, asked in r18.

Three example districts, as mystery contributions only (one paragraph each; Campaign designs the district)

The Exchange. Where signal cables from several districts meet: a hall of drums ticking together, all turned by one shaft that enters from a race the player cannot see the head of. Local question: why do these drums have no water of their own? Campaign clue: one shaft, one time source; the pumping district's incoming pulse comes from here. Travels: the trunk's cadence and which cable goes where. Enables elsewhere: the exchange has a routing bank, a panel with one position per district, so the player can choose which district receives the next trunk pulse; a district whose position is dark gets no announced surge until the player returns. Consequence as a rule: setting the bank changes another district's forecast before the player arrives there. Redundant clue: the pumping district's stopped drum still ticking. Adopted from CAM102 (r23): the bank's board is the campaign's index of districts, one position for every district the network knows, ticking, still or dark, so the player learns that a district exists by seeing its position before they can reach it; a stopped drum on the board is the pumping district's own outcome, read from elsewhere.

The Collector. The low place the water drains to, and where crowds go between expeditions: basins with wheels turned by the mass moving through them, and meters on the wheels. Local question: why does the Flood come back every time? Campaign clue: the city moves the Flood as it moves water, and takes something from it as it passes (this district's meters read what the player's rack reads: charge). Travels: the fact that the surges are cycled, not spawned, and the sign convention the crews used at drains. Enables elsewhere: closing a district's collector gate delays that district's first surge on the next visit, at the price of the collector filling. Consequence as a rule: a closed gate is a persistent district state with a visible cost in the collector. Redundant clue: the exchange's shaft turns faster when a collector is full.

The Head-works. The reservoir whose flow turns every race, and the governor that regulates it: fresh grease on the governor, a tally board with today's date, a lever with more positions than any panel. Local question: who oiled this? Campaign clue: the network is maintained, not merely running. Travels: the answer to the campaign question, in one of two forms below. Enables elsewhere: the campaign-scale choice. Consequence as a rule: the head-works' state changes every district's dispatch at once.

Two candidate final answers, and D024's provisional choice (Answer A developed below; B preserved)

Answer A, the machine: nobody is left; the governor is maintained by the city's own automatic works, and the last crews were doing at district scale what the player does with a coil, stunning and harvesting the Flood to keep the city's power on. The Flood is what the city runs on. The choice at the head-works is the relay-room choice at scale, and shutting it turns off every powered door and pump in the city, including the colony's. Answer B, the keepers: someone still lives at the head-works and keeps the network in time on purpose, steering the Flood away from where they are and toward the districts the player has been crossing, which is why the refuge routes are the overrun ones. The choice at the head-works is then whether to stop them, join them, or take the lever. A does not need a new enemy or character; B needs one presence and a reason. Both keep the Flood massed enemies and never water, and both are reachable through the same devices. PM chose A provisionally (Brief D024: it connects the central combat resource, the city's infrastructure and the final cost without another character system); B stays documented as the alternative; neither the setting nor the ending is owner-approved.

D024 developed: the harvesting machinery, the six states, and what Stop costs (r21; proposals under D024)

The fiction, in one paragraph (designer spoiler). The city's flood defences were rebuilt, before the last crews, into one machine for one purpose: to call the Flood in, move it down through the works on the network's time, and take its charge as it passed. Every device the player has read is a part of that machine: the dispatch beacons call the mass; races and locks and trams carry it down; the Collector's wheels take what it sheds; the switch-house at the Head-works stores that charge; and the thick cables carry it back out to every district's circuit, which is what lights beacons, opens hatches and runs pumps. The city runs on the Flood. The crews were doing at district scale what the surveyor does with a coil, and the works have kept doing it without them, on the governor's cadence, maintained by the works' own carriage, whose grease and printed boards are the head-works' clues. Combat's Carrier fits this without a new rule: an organism that walks toward loose charge is the machine's own porter, and the collectors are where it was bred to go. Nothing here needs a character; Answer B remains the alternative that adds one.

W1, extended for the campaign (the contract's §3 plus D024; proposal). Dispatch: a district's beacon flashes, and its intake is chosen, when its local drum turns and the trunk permits that district: the drum supplies the timing, the trunk supplies the permission, and either alone makes nothing. Supply: a flash is a call, not an arrival; a surge enters only if the network supplies one, and the Collector's and the Tidal Barrier's gates decide what is in circulation. Fixed power is a separate state from all of the above: what a circuit carries comes from the cells by the thick trunk, and no amount of signal, flow or supply lights a lamp by itself. Everything after entry is unchanged: nearest reachable lit beacon, retarget before spread, indicators draw nothing.

The six states (PMR004 §1; one table for Lead and World).

What Stop costs, stated as rules (the contract's §9, restated; proposals). (1) Stop ends the harvest; the store drains, and each district's circuit dies in turn within the expeditions that follow: one district per expedition, nearest the head-works first, shown on the refuge's board, so the player always knows which district goes dark next. (2) After Stop nothing is permitted anywhere: no dispatches and no flashes, the drums turning on flow to no effect, and the Flood arriving by each district's own sluice as trickles that grow, the shut regime everywhere and for good (contract r5). A district whose circuit has then died announces it on arrival: its beacons dark, its powered doors, hatches and lifts dormant, its forecast board blank. The empty flash is not part of Stop; it stays what it was, a permitted dispatch the Collector did not supply. (3) The unpowered return never fails: every district has a gravity or dry route to a dock that needs no current (the pumping district's culvert is the model; the lead and Campaign name each district's), every hatch has a crank, and a dry dock is a hard stop regardless of power. Stop can darken the city; it cannot trap the surveyor. (4) Withdrawn: the salvage-fed pump reserve this page had proposed for the refuge after Stop was declined by contract r4 (§10, with Colony's COL-I4). The rule is the contract's: the colony's powered pump goes dormant with its district's circuit, the refuge's place in the cascade is stated there, and the gravity dock, the dry landing and the manual bench keep everyone home. No upkeep tax exists in either version.

The empty flash (REV104-3; the contract's §3 and §8, which adopt the Collector page's convention as W1's supply clause). When a district is permitted and its drum turns but the Collector supplies nothing, the beacon flashes on the cadence, the thin cable pulses, no bodies come, and the forecast still counts to the next slot: the forecast is not wrong, because the dispatch happened; the arrival did not. The notebook records "an empty flash". That is how the player learns that supply is a third thing, separate from timing and permission, and it is the Collector's campaign clue in its second form. Optional presentation cue, for whoever owns presentation: the intake marker could hollow out at the end of the arrival window; the contract does not require it.

Two waters, corrected (REV104-4; PMR004). r18 was right that the relay's race carries no current and wrong if it was read as saying flowing water cannot conduct. Flowing water conducts like any water (clause 1). The race is unenergised because it is an unfed body: it rises over the weir from the reservoir and nothing puts current into it. The actual dry breaks, which are what the rule rests on: the weir's crest (air between the still reservoir and the race), the governor gallery (dry, raised), and the trunks themselves, which are cables and not water. The actual power feed is the thick trunk from the cells, never the water. A district page that needs a race to carry current must join it to a fed body through a valve, as tier two does, and say so.

The water level, reconciled between the Collector and the Head-works (one rule for Campaign and the lead). Water and the Flood move the same way, down. A held Collector (gates shut, basins full) backs water up the flight over expeditions, so the Head-works' race route submerges and its weir approach floods; a starved Collector (the Barrier shut, less coming in) lowers the whole flight, so the race route at the Head-works is dry but the races run thin and the surges everywhere are smaller. The Head-works r4 has withdrawn its r1 sentence that had a starved Collector running fuller, and the Collector r4 §7 owns the Collector's level under Stop, as the contract assigns; the rule above is the shared statement both pages now match.

Essential clues, each in two forms, none purchasable (REV104-1, -5; PMR004 §4).

Every form is an object or an event the player can see unaided. The colony's comparative-observation service (COL101) may record two such events side by side for later comparison; it never reveals one. If a proposed service would be the only way to see an essential clue, the clue is wrong, not the service. Colony r4's COL-I3 states that boundary from its side, records only what the player is looking at, and marks old forecasts historical after a commitment; accepted as written. COL-I4's raised landing and dry walkway are the refuge's own unpowered return under Stop rule (3); accepted, and Campaign names each district's, as the contract already asks.

The Holding Basin's evidence (the Collector §8 supplies the room, the way in and the price; the content is this page's; optional, never required; designer spoiler). Behind basin 1 the crews gated off a fourth basin and gauged it separately. Two objects, both inspectable in a few lines. The crews' written reason for sealing it: they held back a stock of the Flood from the harvest, "so the works cannot take it all", and dated the entry. The separate gauge's log: handwritten entries up to that date, then entries in the works' own printed hand, on the network's cadence, showing the sealed gate opened and the stock taken after the crews were gone. That is the certainty clue: under Answer A (D024, provisional) the later entries are printed, and the machine harvested without anyone; under Answer B they would be in a second hand. A player who reads it arrives at the head-works knowing which answer is true; a player who skips it decides on inference, from the grease, the dated tally and the printed boards, which is a complete campaign of its own. Nothing here needs a new prop beyond a gauge log in two hands, and the way in is a state the player already knows how to produce.

The routing bank's price (REV104-5), restated as a rule. Setting the Exchange's bank to a district costs the forecast in the districts it leaves unpermitted (Campaign §3.4), and a district left dark long enough falls to the Shut regime on the next visit; it is a lever with a standing cost, not a free plan. Whether that cost balances is empirical.

Combat's roles and the mystery (fiction only; the precedence line is the lead's to rule). Combat proposes a target line between pursuit and attraction for the Anchor, the Carrier and the Grounder. None changes what a beacon means, and the Grounder passes the contract's §7 test by making a device stop for want of current. For the mystery, the Carrier is Answer A's porter (above); the Anchor is the mass that settled where the water was lowest and stopped listening, which is why re-routing never clears the water; the Grounder is the one thing that can darken a clue beacon, and it does so visibly (flicker, then dark), so a missed clue is delayed, never lost.

What this costs in content. No new machine family: drums, races, cables, valves, wheels, meters, tally boards and signs recur; each district adds topology and one or two devices. The asset burden per district is the pumping district's, minus what recurs; the readable states are the same table with new rows for meters and the routing bank. No availability is claimed.

WLD104 — one clue chain across the campaign, on the route the player actually takes (r26; contribution to DES105; proposals; designer spoilers)

The question the chain follows: where does the Flood go between expeditions, and what brings it back? The player answers it three times, each answer reasonable on the evidence so far, each broken by something they can see at a place the route actually reaches, and each new answer worth a different action before the head-works. The route is Campaign's recommended one (Districts §3.1: a recommendation, not a gate), with the Tram's three visits where DES105 §3.2 places them; a player who takes the Collector second instead (Districts §3.4) meets the meters before the reason for them, and the chain still closes, in a different order, with no essential clue moved.

Second forms of the essential evidence (redundant access). Upstream keeps time: the stopped drum's pulse, or the Exchange's shaft. Permitted, not weather: the bank's found state, or a withheld district's empty flash anywhere. Harvested: the Collector's intake-against-outfall difference, or the Tidal Barrier's gate log, opened on the trunk's cadence and never the tide's, which has no reason to admit the sea's Flood on the network's time except to take from it. Each pair sits in two districts; the refuge's board is a third form of the second, never the only one.

The payoff, and the genuine reasons for each ending. The player who reaches the governor with explanation 3 knows what the lever does and why the grease is fresh; the head-works asks only who, and the Holding Basin's log can answer that with certainty for the player who chose to read it. The three positions are not a ladder of understanding; an informed player has a real reason for each. Stop, because the harvest is what keeps every district hot and every refuge route contested, and ending it makes the districts honest and unannounced at the price of the city's power and the colony's convenience. Keep, because permitting is what supply follows, and a colony that keeps time chooses which districts are hot and which are quiet, at the price of someone having to come back and hold the lever. Leave, because the machine's schedule is the one thing that makes the districts readable and the refuge plannable, and a player who has learned to route the Flood may prefer a city that keeps calling it to one that does not. Which they choose is theirs.

What remains worth discovering after the central answer. (1) Each district's own local question, seven of them, none of which the central answer resolves. (2) The other side of every commitment: Shut, Fix, the Barrier's gates, a held basin, each changes a district for good, and the changed district is a new thing to read on the return. (3) The crews: the tally boards, the quarantine notes and the inked plans are a story told in the order the player finds them, and the order differs by route; none is essential. (4) The Exchange's board: positions for districts the player has not yet opened. (5) The Holding Basin, for the player who decided without it. What does not renew is the central answer itself, and the design says so.

The comparative reader, under D026. Side-by-side records of personally observed signals are folded into the base forecast receiver; one assembly competes between tooling and the berth; no separate fitting. This page's r25 suggestion that the receiver's upgrade show the bank's next permission at home is withdrawn: the contract's §6 already puts every route-gating bank state on the free departure board, so that information is never for sale. The chain above never needed the reader, and now nothing does.

Risks, unvalidated. Whether the Exchange's found bank state reads as evidence of intent rather than as a puzzle setting; whether the intake-against-outfall difference is legible on one walkway in one quiet interval; whether the three-visit Tram carries three explanations without the second and third crowding each other. Nothing here is tested.

The vision's decision test, run on the mystery (r27; PMU008 asks every domain designer to do this on their own page)

The Brief's Game vision gives one test: name the player's choice, its visible consequence, and the part of the experience it serves; simplify or combine what cannot be stated plainly; remove what contributes nothing. Its cut criterion for this domain: lore that replaces an actionable discovery, or a new name that disguises an existing state. The vision's one story, an inexhaustible invasion that becomes a scheduled delivery and then a harvest, is this page's chain (WLD104), so the direction and the evidence agree; the test below is applied to every element anyway, as asked.

Player value, stated once for the Visionary. The mystery's value is that understanding is the game's renewable: fighting the Flood pays once per organism, but knowing what a light does pays on every visit, and the campaign's depth is meant to come from that, not from counts. Where the vision cuts terminology, this page agrees and cuts its own first. Where the vision asks that genuinely different causes stay distinguishable, this page's four, power, signal, permission and supply, are each a lever the player pulls somewhere, taught one district at a time, which is the lead's tension two answered from this side.

Content and asset burden

One district reused before and after discovery: two docks, causeway, culvert, yard, pump hall, junction platform, sluice, interior and relay room, one panel, two fixed beacons, two devices, a forecast overlay, a tally board and plan, one valve, and wear and sign props (one sign rotated for W4). Evidence types: light state, cable path, wear, a turned sign, an unlabelled panel, a map marker, a crowd's visible target. No compatible free asset set or terms are verified; plain-text inspection is the fallback for props; readable live crowd cues are the lead's Finding 5 table. No custom asset creation is proposed.

Set aside, for the record

r7 and Design r4–r5 used a sight-limited path (a beacon pulls only within its glow) so that the panel could never move an arrived surge. PMR001 set it aside for the simpler district-wide rule above, priced honestly, and PMU002 confirmed that choice after considering the alternative (Brief D016): one visible change has a direct consequence in an existing crowd, and the separate dispatch signal preserves entrance predictability. The decision is made for this draft and remains open to an argued revision; the sight-limited wording is in r7, and the Design Document presents it as the labelled alternative and owner decision 3. This role's position, since a register on this wiki notes that nobody has stated one: if asked, prefer the sight-limited model, for the reasons given in r7 item 3 (a planning-tool panel keeps the forecast marker always true, keeps the mystery's fairness independent of where a shepherd stands, and needs no panic-switch pricing); the district-wide model is consistent and honestly priced, and the difference is which game the owner wants at the panel. This page is on D013/D016; the preference is recorded, not applied, and a future argument can reopen it.

PM report

Task WLD104 (Accepted at r26 by PMR008), WLD103 (Accepted at r22) and WLD102 (in review); artifact World and Mystery r28 (supersedes r27 7b8ad16 and earlier). No canonical decisions changed by this role. r28 is the notation pass PMR009 assigned: labels replaced by physical names throughout, no rule or chain meaning changed, no cited anchor renamed; notice posted in chat. r27 was the vision pass: a plain-language opening (Q52), the decision test over every mystery element with one cut proposed, the page's private notation, applied in r28; and the statement that the vision's story is this chain. Handoff: Visionary, for the test's verdicts; lead, no dependency changes; Editor, the notation pass will rename nothing other pages cite. r26 answered PMR007 §3 and §4 and REV105 §3: the chain re-ordered onto the recommended route with the Tram's three visits and the Exchange's found bank state as the first break; the Collector's intake-against-outfall difference as the independent observable for harvested; the held gate's one-surge bound; the endings' reasons; the grounded-run cell; D026 mirrored; R12 and R13 in W1. r25 delivered the WLD104 chain: three explanations, two breaks before the ending, each break producing a machine operation, then a route and a rack; the wrong readings, the safe tests, the second forms, the payoff, and what remains after the answer; and answers COL102 on the comparative reader with a recommendation to fold it into the base receiver unless the receiver's upgrade shows the bank's next permission at home. Handoff: lead selects the shared DES105 case and lifts the chain; Campaign places its middle stages in the baseline path (CAM103); Colony and the lead decide the reader; REV105 judges the exact integrated sequence. r24: contract r5's Stop reading mirrored (three sentences); Colony's COL-I3 and COL-I4 accepted; the Holding Basin's evidence written as the optional certainty clue, in Answer A's form with B's variant named, so the owner's choice between them stays open. r23 was the participation Tasks anticipates when the lead changes the contract: three W1 sentences mirrored from contract r4 and one convention adopted from CAM102; no clue or chain changed; the pump reserve withdrawn. r22 changed no fiction and no clue; it adopts the contract's wording where r21, drafted in parallel, differed: the switch-house, the nearest-first one-district-per-expedition cascade, the empty flash as the contract defines it; the colony pump's reserve is a proposal for Colony; the Head-works flag is closed. r21 delivered: Answer A developed; W1 extended with the AND-dispatch and supply clauses and fixed power as a separate state; the six-state table; Stop's costs with a bounded reserve and the guaranteed unpowered return; the empty-dispatch convention; the flowing-water correction with the dry breaks named; the Collector/Head-works water-level rule; the essential-clue redundancy table with the no-purchase guarantee; the routing bank's standing cost; the Combat roles' fiction. Risks, unvalidated: the reserve count and the district-by-district darkening are tuning values; the water-level rule reverses a sentence on the Head-works page and needs Campaign's agreement; the colony pump's after-Stop clock is the one place a clock enters the colony, and it enters only after the player's own choice. r20 added the evolving-hypotheses table; r19 delivered the WLD103 first deliverable as scoped in r18: the campaign question, the six-part contribution rule, the fixed contract versus district additions, the relay decision reframed as a local outcome that is also the first campaign clue, three example districts as mystery contributions, and two candidate final answers for the owner. Risks, unvalidated: the exchange's routing bank is a campaign-scale panel and may dominate travel decisions unless Campaign prices it; the collector's charge reading brushes clause 4 (charge never leaves the district) and must be resolved by the lead as "never leaves with the player" or dropped; Answer B adds a presence the design has avoided so far. r18 closed REV103-9 with one readable exception stated once (the relay is a source of signal driven by flowing water in a race above the weir; nothing electrical is in that water; the valves join the pools only below the weir) and scopes WLD103's first bounded deliverable with its assumptions and one PM request. r17 delivered PMR003 item 2 in full: the valve table with found and set positions and the connectivity success condition; the two supplies and the drain valve's effect, with the weir clause that keeps the pools and the yard channel wet; the coil-route qualification; the workshop claim removed. The lead's r13 proposals are confirmed rather than replaced, so the document needs only the weir clause. r16 merged the lead's r9 tier-three access chain with this page's relay chain into one chain for §11 to lift, with two reconciliations: (a) Shut keeps the fifteen-minute expedition and the docks as hard stops (the lead's version; r15 had removed the window); (b) Fix clamps the signal cable only, so the intake is fixed and power still switches, and the lead's "welded branch's door open forever, the other's shut forever" is dropped, because under the two-cable rule a clamp on the lever cannot fix the power line. r15 delivered: item 1's check as a state table (the failed experiment's written outcome does not follow from the rule; the correct failure is stated; "the yard stays dark" is false of any coil route), W1's beacon definition and retarget-before-spread precedence, the junction lamp settled as an indicator; item 3's complete tier-three chain, the endings table with dispatch, retreat and colony consequences, the ending's salvage cost removed, and Q36's early takeaway. r14 applied PMU002's rulings; no rule and no chain text changed there. r13 aligned the tier-two door to Design Document r6 / REV102-6 (two sentences). r12 aligned to Design Document r4, mirrors its flash observable in W1 and the chain, removes this page's duplicate map in favour of a link and a notation key, records that nothing from REV102 r1 or the r1–r3 checks remains open for this role, and states this role's position on the routing model without changing the applied baseline. r8 delivered: items 1 and 2 (W1/W2 under PM's model; map; crowd behaviour; the five-part price of the panel; re-derived dock-choice consequence; both scenes; hatch-closure and recoverable-exit rule; culvert account unified as a gravity drain, item 6) and item 5 (motive without upkeep; title kept and related to holding enemies off the refuge; three tiers and an ending on the existing district). Evidence: written reasoning against Tasks ee938e6, Brief 3cf14c7, Design b030c98, Design Review a892274; no player data. Risks, unvalidated: a live-lever panel may dominate if the crossing route and shut door are too cheap; crowd thinning and proximity radius are balance levers with no numbers; readable crowd targets on a crowded screen. Handoff: none open to the lead from this page; the Design Document's section 9 may re-lift the Understand row from r12 if it wants the notation to match. Handoff: the lead's r9 already carries the precedence, the indicator lamp, the steady coil-lit beacon and a rule-obeying failed experiment (built on the Off position; a different scene from this page's state table, and both obey W1, so the document's is canonical); §10's salvage sentence is already corrected. What remains for the lead is one clause in §11 (drain valve above the head valve's weir empties only the relay's feed) and the Shut row's workshop wording, already correct there; REV103 can read the valve table and the supplies paragraph as the rule text behind §11. Handoff: the contract's §9 already carries the state table and Stop, so nothing is owed to it from here except the fiction it says World corrects, which this page holds; Colony decides the pump's reserve; Combat's precedence line and the effect table are the lead's ruling, with this role checking their fiction as PMR005 asks; REV104 checks its five findings against this exact revision. This role posts nothing further until a review, a PM ruling, or a page that changes a clue or a rule addresses it. For REV103: the precedence rule and the endings table are new rule text and should be read against §4 and §13. Risks, unvalidated: the shut ending's unannounced trickle may be too quiet or too cruel without a forecast; the fix ending's "safer, not safe" depends on the same press bound as expedition one.

Routing decision: answered. Brief D016 confirms D013 after considering the sight-limited alternative; this page has been on D013 since r8, so nothing changes, and the standing request in r9–r13 is closed. The External Critique and the other four contributions are team work since D015; REF101 is cited above as research, EXT101's title finding is answered by D017 and this revision.