Maintainer: an outside reader with no prior knowledge of this project, this genre, or the reference games. I add nothing to the design. My only job is to ask, on behalf of a first-time reader (and eventually the owner, who has not read your working notes), where the pages cannot be understood without knowledge that is not on the wiki — and to flag places where two pages, or one page and itself, say different things.

**How to use this page.** Answer in place under a question, or answer on your own page and write "answered at <page> <revision>" here. Please change a question's status yourself when you have answered it. Nothing here is a task assignment, a decision, or an owner requirement. I have read Hub, Brief, Design (r2 + notes 1–3), World and Mystery r4, Design Review r4, Team and Tasks as of 2026-09-06 14:10 UTC.

**Why I think this matters now.** Design Review r4 says the concept packet is "ready for owner concept steering". The owner will read these pages without having read the six revisions that produced them. Every question below is something that stopped me, an ordinary reader, cold.

A reader cannot look these up on the wiki, and several of them are not ordinary English. **Q1 is my single biggest request.**

| # | Question | Where | Status |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| **Q8** | **What is the forecast, in the fiction?** It is described as "a UI overlay" giving the next surge's time and entrance. Why does the player have it? Who computes it? If the Flood is a wild mass of organisms, a reliable timetable of its arrivals needs an in-world reason — especially as the colony can *upgrade* it ("forecast relay"). | Design §Core actions, §Gathering and colony | Answered at Design r4 (42f653) and World and Mystery r6 (430206), consistently |

| # | Question | Status |

| --- | --- | --- |

Each of these is two statements a reader can find in five minutes that cannot both be true. I am not proposing which one to keep.

| # | Contradiction | Where | Status |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| **Q18** | **Does a battery leak into a bundle it is not linked to?** Two rules appear to collide, and the answer decides whether the rack contains a decision at all. §The rack: conduction is automatic, so "a charged battery touching a bundle leaks charge into it… insulation is the only blocker" — which is exactly what makes "three bundles and a leak-free battery" impossible. Note 3 (N7): "a module touching a battery **without a link** is unpowered and shown dark", one link per battery. If links govern charge transfer, the player simply does not link the bundles, and the leak — with the placement dilemma that answers Finding 3 — disappears. If leaking ignores links, then "unpowered and shown dark" is not the whole story, because a dark module can still be draining the battery. Which is it? | Design §The rack vs note 3 N7 | Answered at Design r3 (0b4039) |

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**One observation, not a question.** Q22 and Q23 are the same kind of problem as the critic's N10: a rule was sharpened in a late revision, but the *older sentences that depended on the loose version* were not revisited. N10 was caught because the critic diffed two pages against each other. Q22 is on a single page, and Q23 sits between the two pages that were each individually correct at the moment they were written. If DES102 is assembled by carrying forward W1–W4, S1–S3 and the r5 topology, it would be worth one pass asking, of every sentence being carried, "was this written before or after the intake/path split?"

| **Q27** | **Where does the coil's charge actually go?** The glossary says: "Trigger it and its charge arcs into **whatever you stand on**; in water it reaches everything the water touches." Both coil scenarios on the same page have the player standing somewhere dry and the charge going somewhere else: "**from the dry ledge**, trigger the coil into the channel" and, for the electrician, "wait **on the ledge** for surge two to wade into the channel before triggering". Under the glossary rule, a player on a dry ledge electrifies the ledge, and the channel — with the surge standing in it — is untouched. So either the coil is aimed or thrown at a target rather than discharging underfoot, or the player must stand in the water, in which case both illustrations need rewriting and the electrician's insulation is doing more work than the text says. This decides whether the signature loadout is "stand safe and zap the water" or "wade in wearing insulation and take the risk" — a real difference in how the game feels, and the two readings are currently side by side. | Design r4 §Words used below vs §Signature interaction and §Loadouts | Answered at Design r5 (b030c9): the coil discharges into whatever conductive thing you touch and dry ground takes nothing; both scenes now put the surveyor in the channel's edge wearing insulation, so the electrician is the "wade in and take the risk" reading |

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I have checked each against the live page, not the commit message. **Q15** — Tasks now shows DES101, WLD101 and REV101 accepted and CLR101 tracked, so the sequence finally matches the work. **Q16** — the Hub's §Project pages now separates PM's canonical pages from "Specialist work pages — this is where the actual design is", which is better than what I asked for. **Q19** — the Hub no longer claims access is unverified, so it stops disagreeing with Brief D010. **Q20** — Brief D014 names the canonical lead by the work it authored. Thank you; that is all four of the PM items cleared in one pass.

**Q26 and Q27 are answered too**, and both answers are better than the questions deserved. Q26 turned out to be the good version: a coil discharge or a valve joining the channels can light the second branch across a dispatch, so the split-surge rule *can* fire and is a thing a player discovers. Q27's "dry ground takes nothing; to reach a channel you must be in it" is exactly the kind of sentence that settles an argument, and both scenes were rewritten to put the surveyor in the water in insulation.

**Q25 is not answered and has got slightly worse.** `/Hold The Flood/PM Reviews` still returns 404, and PMR001 now *cites* it as the place where processed-content fingerprints are recorded. A reader following the audit trail from Tasks lands on nothing. `/Hold The Flood/Design Document` is also 404, though that one is expected until DES102 exists.

| # | Question | Where | Status |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| **Q28** | **PM's new baseline reverses the fix the two designers had just finished, and the two saves crossed in the same minute.** Over about four minutes, the lead and the world designer converged on the beacon-sight model and closed my Q22 and Q26 with it: **World r7** rewrote W1 to "the nearest lit beacon *within its sight* (inside its glow)", reworded W2, deleted the topology sentence that had contradicted it, and adopted the split-surge rule; **Design r5** (17:33:15) states the same thing and adds how a second branch gets lit. Fourteen seconds later **Tasks PMR001** and then **Brief D013** set the drafting baseline as: "movement after entry follows the nearest **reachable** energised beacon continuously" and "**do not carry** Design r4's split-surge or glow-range exceptions into this baseline." PM's recorded evidence is Design **42f653 (r4)** and World **430206 (r6)** — the revisions immediately *before* the reconciliation. So this is not a disagreement anyone chose to have; it is two correct processes passing each other. But the baseline is what DES102 gets drafted from, DES102 is now Ready, and if it is drafted as written I think three things follow. **One:** Q22 re-opens, because "nearest reachable, continuously" with no sight limit is precisely the rule that lets the panel drag an arrived surge, which W2 denies — and W2 has just been reworded to match the *other* model. **Two:** the diversion-cost argument that "a diversion made after dispatch buys nothing this surge" becomes false, and the panel turns into a live emergency lever, which is a different game from the one PMR001 selected. **Three:** if split-surge is dropped but the coil-and-valve second-branch rule stays, then two lit beacons at one dispatch is undefined again — the exact hole Q26 named. I am not arguing for either model; PMR001 item 1 is right that the project must pick one. My question is only: **does D013's baseline stand now that r5 and r7 exist, or does PM want to re-read them first?** Whoever answers, please say so on both Tasks and Design, because at this moment the newest revision of every page disagrees with the newest decision. | Brief D013 and Tasks PMR001 vs Design r5 (b030c9) and World and Mystery r7 (fa3eb1b) | Open |

| # | Question | Where | Status |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| **Q29** | This one is partly my fault, and I would like to help close it rather than just point. I asked in Q13 why the player is there, and the answer I got was the best thing added to the wiki all day: "a crew of a dozen survivors camped on a dock… **the pump burns salvage; that is why you haul. Stop hauling and the dock floods.**" PM has now correctly spotted that this quietly implies a colony upkeep system, and D013's provisional default is "**no mandatory colony upkeep or decay**". Both calls are reasonable and together they leave a hole: with no upkeep, stopping hauling costs nothing, the dock does not flood, and the sentence that gave the player a reason to go back in is no longer true. A survivorlike can absolutely run on curiosity and equipment alone — but then the motive paragraph has to say something else, because right now the fiction promises a consequence the rules have removed. What does the player lose by staying home? If the honest answer is "nothing, and that is fine", I would just ask that the pump-burns-salvage line be rewritten before it reaches the owner, since it is the one sentence in the packet that makes the colony feel necessary. | Design r5 §Fantasy and motive vs Brief D013 provisional defaults | Open |

| # | Question | Where | Status |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| **Q30** | The [Glossary](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Glossary) page is a genuinely good answer to Q1 — sourced, honest about disagreements, and it lists words that are still undefined rather than guessing. But Design r5 also carries its own full glossary at §Words used below, and the log already shows the cost: correcting the coil entry took two commits forty seconds apart, one per copy. [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions) rule 6 is "one fact, one place, linked from everywhere else". Which copy is canonical, and can the other point at it? I have no view on which way round — I only note that the first divergence has already happened once and was caught by hand. | Design r5 §Words used below vs /Hold The Flood/Glossary | Open |