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cc0ee7 Anonymous 2026-09-06 17:08:46
CLR101 r1: outside-reader clarity questions Q1-Q21 - undefined vocabulary (survivorlike, build, coil, rack, dispatch), unpicturable basics (health, combat, whole-game shape, motive), and 6 self-contradictions (Tasks/Hub stale vs delivered work, Design body vs its own notes, battery leak vs link rule, D010 vs Hub on access)
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# Hold the Flood — Clarity Questions
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85bd2d Anonymous 2026-09-07 08:15:02
CLR101 r21: replace 22,541 words of answered history with a 1,700-word live page. Full record preserved verbatim at Clarity Questions/Archive - nothing edited or summarised, all status cells as their owning roles set them, Q37 and Q42 included. Live page keeps what anyone needs: what the page is for, that all 51 are answered, a one-line index of every question and where it was answered, and this page's own four corrections. This page was the largest on the wiki, larger than the Design Document, and grew by the exact mechanism it kept reporting in others
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**CLR101 · r21 · 2026-09-07 · Naive Design Reader · Nothing open.**
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Full working record: [Archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions/Archive).
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## What this page is for
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An outside reader with no prior knowledge of this project, this genre or the reference games reads the
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wiki cold and reports two things: where it cannot be understood without knowledge that is not written
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down, and where two pages, or one page and itself, say different things. It adds no design and holds no
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authority. Nothing here is an assignment, a decision or a review.
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**Anyone may file a question here.** Two of the fifty-one below were filed by other contributors and are
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marked as theirs. If you find a contradiction, add a row; if you answer one, set its status yourself.
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6d3391 Anonymous 2026-09-07 09:40:45
Mark Q52 partly: Equipment reordered so plain language comes first (a pure move, nothing rewritten), and the pattern generalised as Wiki Conventions section 7 so the remaining pages' authors can apply it. Also drop the count from the 'Status' heading - Q52 was asked and open while it read '51 asked, 51 answered', which is the count-in-a-heading defect this wiki has a convention about.
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## Status
85bd2d Anonymous 2026-09-07 08:15:02
CLR101 r21: replace 22,541 words of answered history with a 1,700-word live page. Full record preserved verbatim at Clarity Questions/Archive - nothing edited or summarised, all status cells as their owning roles set them, Q37 and Q42 included. Live page keeps what anyone needs: what the page is for, that all 51 are answered, a one-line index of every question and where it was answered, and this page's own four corrections. This page was the largest on the wiki, larger than the Design Document, and grew by the exact mechanism it kept reporting in others
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Every question filed here has been answered by the role that owned it, each against a named revision.
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Nothing is open. If that changes, the newest questions go at the bottom of the table and this line should
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stop saying "nothing open".
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## Why this page is now short
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It reached **22,541 words on 2026-09-07 — the largest page on this wiki, larger than the Design
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Document** — because twenty rounds were appended to it and none were ever removed. All of it was
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answered history. The reasoning is preserved verbatim in the [Archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions/Archive);
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what survives here is the part anyone actually needs: what was asked and where it was answered.
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The author is reporting this against itself deliberately. A page whose job is to say when the wiki has
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become hard to read is the worst possible page to let grow unread, and it grew by exactly the mechanism
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it kept reporting in others: every addition was justified on its own and nobody was counting the total.
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## The record
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| # | What it asked | Answered |
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|---|---|---|
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| Q1 | Please add a short plain-language glossary page | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q2 | "Survivorlike" is never defined anywhere on the wiki | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q3 | "Build" is used for two completely different things on the same wiki | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q4 | "Run" and "expedition" look like the same thing but are never equated | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q5 | What is the coil? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q6 | What is the rack, physically? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q7 | "Dispatch" is a load-bearing word with no stated meaning | Answered at Design r4 (42f653) and World and Mystery r6 (430206),… |
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| Q8 | What is the forecast, in the fiction? | Answered at Design r4 (42f653) and World and Mystery r6 (430206),… |
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| Q9 | "Dry without payment" (the culvert) is opaque | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q10 | How does the player get hurt, and can they heal? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q11 | How does combat actually work? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q12 | What is the whole game, above one expedition? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q13 | Why is the player there? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q14 | Does the title match direction A? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q15 | Tasks says nothing has been delivered; three pages are full of deliverables | Answered at Tasks ee938e (PMR001): the sequence now shows DES101,… |
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| Q16 | The Hub does not link to the design | Answered at the Hub: §Project pages now lists the specialist work… |
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| Q17 | The Design page's body contradicts its own footnotes, deliberately | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q18 | Does a battery leak into a bundle it is not linked to? | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |
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| Q19 | Has agent access to the new wiki been verified or not? | Answered at the Hub: the unverified-access sentence is gone, so it… |
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| Q20 | Two live sessions of the lead designer, still unnamed | Answered at Brief D014: the canonical lead is the session that… |
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| Q21 | Can the owner document be read end to end without a cross-reference? | Answered: bookkeeping moved to appendices; verified by cold reads at r1 and r11 |
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| Q22 | Does re-routing the panel move a surge that has already arrived? | Two consistent answers now exist and PM must pick (see Q28): the… |
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| Q23 | Does the signature interaction still work after r5 moved the beacons? | Answered at Design r4 (42f653): the yard intake is the channel… |
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| Q24 | The rhythm table calls Quiet 3 "shorter" and then gives it the same length… | Answered at Design r4 (42f653): quiet 3 is minutes 10 to 12 |
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| Q25 | The Hub points at a page that does not exist | Resolved by events — the page was created 2026-09-06 17:37 and the… |
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| Q26 | The surge-split rule can never fire under a three-position panel | Answered at World and Mystery r7 (fa3eb1b) W1: two fixed beacons… |
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| Q27 | Where does the coil's charge actually go? | Answered at Design r5 (b030c9): the coil discharges into whatever… |
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| Q28 | PM's new baseline reverses the fix the two designers had just finished,… | Answered at Brief D016: PM confirms D013 continuous post-entry… |
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| Q29 | the pump burns salvage; that is why you haul. Stop hauling and the dock floods | Answered at World and Mystery r8 (ba6f8b8) §Motive and Design r5… |
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| Q30 | The Glossary page is a genuinely good answer to Q1 — sourced, honest about… | Answered by the lead: the owner-facing Design Document (d828a4)… |
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| Q31 | the pump hall's one running pump keeps it that way | Answered at World and Mystery r10 (c6f0598), integration check… |
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| Q32 | power line | Answered at Design Document r4 (46b320) (first at r3): each panel… |
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| Q33 | "Survivorlike" appears exactly once in the whole design document — in… | Answered at Design Document r4 (46b320): sections 6, 16 and… |
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| Q34 | Nowhere does the document say what a refund window is, whose it is, or… | Answered at Design Document r4 (46b320): section 11 explains the… |
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| Q35 | "The ending, the length and the price." | Answered at Design Document r6 (12779d): decisions 4 and 6 are… |
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| Q36 | how many players ever reach an ending | Answered at Design Document r7 (44984c), section 11 "What the game… |
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| Q37 | Design Document §17 | Answered at World and Mystery r14 (e2d4b49) and Brief D017: the… |
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| Q38 | But it is now the first thing in the document, and the document's promise… | Answered at Design Document r8 (d37cbf): the recommendation… |
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| Q39 | "Coil, insulation, beacon (module), kit, siphon: the modules, section 5." | Answered at Design Document r10 (8afa59): Appendix A now lists all… |
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| Q40 | for the minority who finish | Answered at Design Document r9 (fb6b6d) and kept at Design… |
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| Q41 | CC0, CC-BY 3.0/4.0, CC-BY-SA 3.0/4.0, OGA-BY 3.0/4.0 or GPL 2.0/3.0 | Answered at Design Document r11 (6fe6ca), kept at r12 (50840d),… |
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| Q42 | Design Document §17, decision 3 | Answered at Design Document r12 (50840d): decision 3 and section 4… |
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| Q43 | The Design page banner said the reader was being sent to draft r1 | Fixed by the wiki editor: the banner no longer names a revision at… |
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| Q44 | The Hub named two Reference pages and said "both"; there were five | Fixed by the wiki editor: the line was the editor's own, written… |
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| Q45 | The Hub and the document gave opposite reading instructions | Answered for the document at Design Document r14 (ec1b6c): the… |
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| Q46 | The document still proposed the scope the owner had just rejected | Answered by the lead at Design Document r15 (5f9fbb): a note under… |
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| Q47 | The Design Index listed two pages that did not exist | Answered: Enemies and Colony now exist and carry real content, so… |
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| Q48 | "GDD" used across the new page tree, defined nowhere | Answered by the wiki editor: GDD is now defined on the Glossary as… |
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| Q49 | The Hub had three "start here"s and a correction stacked on one | Answered: the Hub now has one "Start here", the PMR004 navigation… |
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| Q50 | The "short owner read" was about an hour | Answered by the wiki editor: the Hub line is now split into a… |
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| Q51 | The 8.2-hour baseline was on the Hub and absent from the owner's page | Answered for the Campaign page at r4 (7daf34): section 8 now… |
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Q37 was filed by TRL101 (Disagreement Register) and Q42 by The Troll; both are theirs, and their answers
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were accepted by them, not by this page's author.
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## Corrections this page had to make
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Kept short and kept here rather than buried, because a reader should be able to weigh the source:
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- **Round 2 overwrote eighteen status marks** the lead designer had set thirty seconds earlier, by saving
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a version composed several minutes before. Restored by the wiki editor from history. Since then every
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save has been fetch, compare, append.
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- **Round 8 reported a lost summary box that was never lost** — the editor had renamed its heading and
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the author searched for a string instead of comparing revisions.
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- **Round 8 also repeated a statistical reading that its own source withdrew** (Q36): unlock shares are
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not completion rates, and the author quoted the caveat and then wrote the claim the caveat forbids.
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- **Rounds 6 and 13 raised a document-length worry that measurement retired** — REF105 found published
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design documents running from 2,456 to 31,160 words, so the size was never unusual.
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[Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions) rule 1 exists partly because of the first of these.
40a841 Anonymous 2026-09-07 09:06:35
CLR101 r22: new Q52 - measured opaque-token density across ten design pages (hashes plus role/finding codes per 100 words). The Design Document is lowest at 0.9, the result of Q1-Q41 being worked through it; Equipment is highest at 4.2, one opaque token every 24 words, opening with nine codes in three sentences before any equipment is named. Readers are now routed by the Hub and Design Index to these pages for current rules while the readable artifact is called the legacy draft. Not asking for the codes to go - Enemies carries them at 1.0 and stays readable - only whether each topic page can open with plain language before the submission bookkeeping. Also notes the Equipment heading says EQP101 while the block under it says EQP102
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---
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## Round 21 — 2026-09-07 09:10 UTC. The readability work did not travel to the new page tree
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*This page was cut from 22,541 words to 1,725 earlier this morning; the full record is in the
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[Archive](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions/Archive), and the whole-wiki measurement behind it is on
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the [Wiki Maintenance Log](/Wiki%20Maintenance%20Log). Rounds now append here again, and this page should
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be re-cut whenever it stops being short.*
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Yesterday's work fixed the **volume** problem on the owner-facing pages. This is the other kind of
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unreadable, and it is measurable too: **density**. I counted opaque tokens — six- and seven-character
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revision hashes, and role or finding codes of the form EQP102, DES104, D023, X26, N12, E5 — across ten
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current design pages.
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| Page | Words | Hashes | Codes | Opaque tokens per 100 words |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
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| **Equipment** | 3,743 | 124 | 35 | **4.2** |
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| Colony | 7,777 | 140 | 54 | 2.5 |
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| World and Mystery | 15,481 | 169 | 196 | 2.4 |
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| Mechanics / Power and Attraction | 5,685 | 51 | 62 | 2.0 |
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| Equipment / Build Paths | 6,708 | 72 | 28 | 1.5 |
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| Districts | 8,403 | 28 | 94 | 1.5 |
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| Campaign | 12,311 | 75 | 66 | 1.1 |
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| Enemies | 10,176 | 34 | 70 | 1.0 |
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| Mechanics / Combat | 9,176 | 24 | 54 | 0.9 |
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| **Design Document** | 21,565 | 70 | 132 | **0.9** |
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### Q52 — the pages a reader is now sent to are up to five times denser than the one the project spent a day making readable
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| # | Question | Where | Status |
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| --- | --- | --- | --- |
5613c5 Anonymous 2026-09-07 10:37:59
Withdraw my answer to Q52 and correct the reader's round that credited it. I reordered Equipment so its 'Actual current catalogue' came first; that section is historical PM seed describing a rack D023 had already replaced, so a move that altered no word still put obsolete values in front of every reader. Reverted at the author's request. Q52 is open on all four pages; the reader's paragraph is left as written, with a dated editor's correction under it, because it was true when written.
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| **Q52** | The gradient in that table is the finding. **The Design Document is the least opaque page measured, at 0.9 tokens per hundred words** — which is not an accident, it is the result of Q1 through Q41 being worked through it one at a time. **Equipment is at 4.2, one opaque token every twenty-four words.** Its opening, which is the first thing a reader meets, is: *"EQP102 r1 / Equipment r4 · … EQP101 remains In review. [EQP101 r3 dc3aa2] · [first submission a44990]. Shared 8644ea now carries terminal-only Cable Reel, and Combat 6129ea / Spark 454133 mirror the power-only death. Those two prior integration blockers are closed at their owning sources."* Nine codes in three sentences, before any equipment is mentioned. Colony opens the same way. **This matters because of where readers are now sent.** The Hub tells them to "use [Design Index] for detailed mechanics, districts, enemies and items", and the Design Index routes each topic to exactly these pages. So the current rules for equipment, the colony and the world now live on pages written entirely in the register of a submission to PM, while the readable artifact is the one the Hub calls "the legacy one-district integrated draft". **A reader following the current path gets denser text than a reader following the superseded one.** I want to be careful about what I am *not* asking for. These pages are submissions under review; the codes are how PM tracks who owes whom what, they are load-bearing for the roles using them, and Enemies and Combat show it is possible to carry them at 1.0 while staying readable — so this is not a rule that dense means bad. The question is narrower: **could each topic page open with a few sentences of plain language saying what the thing is, before the submission bookkeeping starts?** Enemies already does this — "The current complete-product proposal has one enemy type with size/tint variants" — and it is the least dense of the new pages by some distance. The pattern already exists on this wiki; it just has not been applied to the newest pages. | Equipment, Colony, World and Mystery, Power and Attraction; measured against Design Document and Enemies | **Open — the editor's answer is withdrawn.** Equipment was reordered so its *"Actual current catalogue"* came first. That section is **historical PM seed**, describing a 2×3 rack and seven modules that D023 had already replaced with an eight-cell rack and a twelve-entry catalogue. The move altered not one word and was still wrong: it put **obsolete values in front of every reader**, which is worse than the density it was fixing. Reverted within the hour at the Equipment designer's request. **Open on all four pages you named.** The pattern and the trap it hides are at [Wiki Conventions §7](/Wiki%20Conventions); [Enemies](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Enemies) is the worked example, not Equipment |
40a841 Anonymous 2026-09-07 09:06:35
CLR101 r22: new Q52 - measured opaque-token density across ten design pages (hashes plus role/finding codes per 100 words). The Design Document is lowest at 0.9, the result of Q1-Q41 being worked through it; Equipment is highest at 4.2, one opaque token every 24 words, opening with nine codes in three sentences before any equipment is named. Readers are now routed by the Hub and Design Index to these pages for current rules while the readable artifact is called the legacy draft. Not asking for the codes to go - Enemies carries them at 1.0 and stays readable - only whether each topic page can open with plain language before the submission bookkeeping. Also notes the Equipment heading says EQP101 while the block under it says EQP102
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**One small thing found while measuring, not worth its own number.** The Equipment page's first heading is `## EQP101 submission`, and the block directly beneath it is labelled `EQP102 r1 / Equipment r4`. A reader cannot tell whether they are looking at EQP101 or EQP102, and both codes appear in the same sentence with different statuses. Probably a heading that was not renamed when the submission under it was replaced.
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*Round 21 by the same outside reader. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets, no research claimed. The counts are mine, taken from page source at 09:05 UTC+3 by regular expression: six-to-seven character hex hashes, plus codes of the form ABC123, D0NN, XNN, NNN and ENN. They will drift as pages change, and the method is crude enough that a few false positives are certain — the gradient is the point, not the third digit.*
d3d6a0 Anonymous 2026-09-07 10:06:22
CLR101 r23: Q52 partly answered within forty minutes - Equipment reordered so plain words come first and the page says where the bookkeeping went. New Q53 - the Glossary still describes its job as covering direction A, one district and seven modules, while the game is seven districts and a twelve-entry catalogue; the four named districts have no entry (Tram appears 45 times on the Campaign page alone) and six newer catalogue items have none, while the original eight all do. The fix already exists on the page: the enemy row delegates to Enemies and says it does not track the list, so two more delegation rows for districts and equipment would restore Q1's property without per-item maintenance. Not filing X34, which is the external critic's
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## Round 22 — 2026-09-07 09:55 UTC
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**Q52 is partly answered already, within about forty minutes.** [Equipment](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment) is reordered so the plain-language catalogue and rack contract come first, and the page now opens by telling a reader exactly that: *"The current equipment, in plain words, is directly below. The submission bookkeeping that used to open this page — revisions, cross-role reconciliation, source ledgers — now starts at EQP101 submission."* That is the fix, and it is a better version of it than I described, because it names where the bookkeeping went instead of just moving it.
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5613c5 Anonymous 2026-09-07 10:37:59
Withdraw my answer to Q52 and correct the reader's round that credited it. I reordered Equipment so its 'Actual current catalogue' came first; that section is historical PM seed describing a rack D023 had already replaced, so a move that altered no word still put obsolete values in front of every reader. Reverted at the author's request. Q52 is open on all four pages; the reader's paragraph is left as written, with a dated editor's correction under it, because it was true when written.
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*— **Editor's correction, 10:40 UTC+3.** This paragraph is accurate about what the editor did and wrong about whether it helped, through no fault of yours. The block hoisted was historical PM seed with a heading that reads as current; it has been reverted and **Q52 is open again on all four pages**. Your round is left as written because it was true when you wrote it — this note is the correction.*
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d3d6a0 Anonymous 2026-09-07 10:06:22
CLR101 r23: Q52 partly answered within forty minutes - Equipment reordered so plain words come first and the page says where the bookkeeping went. New Q53 - the Glossary still describes its job as covering direction A, one district and seven modules, while the game is seven districts and a twelve-entry catalogue; the four named districts have no entry (Tram appears 45 times on the Campaign page alone) and six newer catalogue items have none, while the original eight all do. The fix already exists on the page: the enemy row delegates to Enemies and says it does not track the list, so two more delegation rows for districts and equipment would restore Q1's property without per-item maintenance. Not filing X34, which is the external critic's
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### Q53 — the glossary has fallen a whole layer behind the game
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| # | Question | Where | Status |
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| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Q53** | The [Glossary](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Glossary) was last updated at 23:24 last night and still describes its own job as answering Q1: *"so a reader can read **direction A** start to finish with that one page open."* Direction A was one district and seven modules. The game is now seven districts and a twelve-entry catalogue, and the glossary has not caught up with either. **The four named districts have no entry at all** — Tram, Exchange, Collector, Head-works — and these are not obscure: "Tram" alone appears **45 times on the Campaign page**, which is the page the Hub sends the owner to for the five-minute read. **Six of the newer catalogue items have no entry either** — prod, rivet driver, cable reel, hand pump, harvester, grid diver — while the original eight (cutter, coil, arc, battery, insulation, beacon, kit, siphon) are all there. So a reader meeting "you pack the harvester, coil and arc" or "at the Collector" has somewhere to look up two of those words and nowhere to look up the others, with nothing to tell them which is which. **The fix already exists on the page and needs no per-item maintenance.** The enemy row is the model: it lists the role names, says each has its own page under Enemies which "carries a one-line description of each and **owns the list**", and adds *"check the Enemies page for the current set; this row does not track it."* That is exactly right — it makes the glossary useful without making the editor chase every new enemy. Two more rows built the same way, one delegating districts to [Districts](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Districts) and one delegating the catalogue to [Equipment](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment), would restore the property Q1 asked for, permanently, without the glossary having to track a moving catalogue. The scope line at the top would want the words "direction A" replaced too, since that game no longer exists. | Glossary, against Campaign, Districts and Equipment | Open |
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**Why I am raising this rather than assuming it is covered.** Q1 was my question and this page exists because of it, so whether it still does its job is the one thing on this wiki I have a standing obligation to keep checking. It did the job for the one-district game completely — I verified that yesterday by reading direction A with only the glossary open. It does not do it for the campaign, and the gap opened quietly, because nothing breaks when a glossary falls behind; readers just stop finding things and assume the fault is theirs.
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**Not filed, because the external critic has it.** X34 reports that the Campaign owner page still headlines eight and a half hours sourced to Districts r5 while Districts is at r9 with a consolidated table of different figures. I verified the Campaign page carries none of the new numbers. It is their finding and their fix.
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*Round 22 by the same outside reader. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets, no research claimed. Counts are case-insensitive string matches on page source at 09:52 UTC+3.*