4. **Choose this expedition's support.** Once the assembly has been commissioned from the recovered crane parts, assign it, choose the baseline dock, set pickup priority and prepare the rack at the refuge. Before that milestone, the three base services and free basic departure still work, while advanced fittings display their missing assembly prerequisite. The departure preview shows actual occupied cells, empty batteries, route availability and which advanced services are inactive. All available choices are revisable until departure.

| Permanent investment | Player action and visible result | Changed expedition and competing choice |

| Support assembly commission | Extract the two unique Lock Flight crane parts, together or separately; see them installed into one reusable frame | Makes one purchased advanced fitting assignable per expedition. The recovery trip gives up one or two rack cells that could hold salvage/modules; failure loses only currently carried parts. No salvage price, recurring fee or essential-route gate |

| **Route builder** | Buy the outlet refit and choose a surveyed approach that suits the next investigation; keep basic Cutter/battery preparation | Recover the Lock Flight parts while opening the upper canal; after commissioning, buy forward fittings and support summit extraction while keeping the depot baseline | Assign that same assembly to an eligible extra retreat point for a consequential revisit; or release it to tooling after route knowledge makes a single exit sufficient | Gives up early known-module issue; carrying the parts gives up up to two cells on that Lock Flight return. Dock/assembly selection reverses freely at shelter. Rescue loses only carried parts, not banked parts, fittings or survey knowledge. After Stop, a powered berth works only until its district circuit dies; the guaranteed route does not depend on it |

**Illustrative sequence:** a failed workshop-first expedition loses its Coil find but retains the inspected recipe. The player can issue a Coil next time without another salvage run, then discover the upper-canal opportunity. Banking salvage later permits forward fittings; assigning them sacrifices advanced circuit preparation for a second extraction. After recording a district discrepancy, the player may instead use comparison on a revisit. These are written consequences of the proposal, not played results.

**COL-I1, position to Campaign:** one baseline held dock and an additional supported berth must be two explicit choices. Under [Campaign r4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Campaign?revision=7daf34), leaving L2 open at extraction connects the upper canal; the Tram summit must also have been physically reached/surveyed. Rescue alone must not falsely satisfy an extraction-conditioned canal commitment. Show canal state and summit eligibility before offering the choice.

With the canal available, the player can **select the summit as the ordinary one held dock**, giving up the depot as the held dock. This requires the ordinary reusable outlet refit, not advanced forward fittings. Alternatively, assign forward support to **keep depot as baseline and summit as one additional berth**. This is an explicit proposed exception to the shared contract's one-dock limit, not an inference that D023 approved two docks.

The latter lets a player enter below, tow a crowd using the Tram's own machinery, investigate above and extract at the summit without retracing that crowd. It costs the advanced assembly assignment that could have supplied tooling or observation. It does not power the rail, hold L2 open remotely, suppress enemies, transport a boat through a closed canal, or open Exchange access from a menu. Baseline arrival/return must remain possible without purchasing this option. Campaign owns the exact physical approach and return paths; the Colony preview cannot claim them complete on Campaign's behalf.

Why prefer optional additional extraction to a mandatory remote outpost upgrade? The player can knowingly choose a harder return to support a different experiment. A compulsory upgrade makes salvage a gate on exploration and erases that choice.

**COL-I2, response to [Build Paths r3](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Equipment/Build%20Paths?revision=7b7bf2):** I support its two first-visit packages because each enables a concrete combination while retaining field acquisition. Equipment owns item footprints, primary effects, adjacency and link legality; this page owns eligibility and persistence. All issued batteries are empty.

| Departure option | Colony eligibility and limits | Concrete occupied-cell example under the cited Equipment proposal |

These are footprint examples, not electrical-effect demonstrations. For the six-cell revisit example, a legal candidate 2×4 arrangement in the cited rules is top row **empty / Coil / Coil / Coil-linked battery**, bottom row **empty / Insulation / Arc / Arc-linked battery**. Each battery has a specified linked module; the two empty cells do not touch a battery. Item-rule reconciliation remains Equipment/Lead work.

**Recipe and record trigger:** personally inspecting an item retains its recipe even if it is lost later. At any shelter, including a field shelter, the player can record an actually assembled, legal arrangement of known items. The record survives losing those physical items. At the refuge it can be reissued only under the destination and issue limits above. An arbitrary unknown template grants nothing. The six-cell cap counts *every* issued occupied cell; the default battery is included in the arrangement, never silently added afterward. Cargo and charge are not recorded. A larger saved pattern must be edited to the cap before issue; do not silently delete a module. The remaining two cells are room, not reserved cargo, and can receive field items.

Patterns and recipes remain when tooling is unassigned; extra issue does not. This avoids free stockpiling while making a failed experiment repeatable. Full-rack issue on a first encounter is a credible convenience alternative, but consumes the discovery room before the player has met that district's problem; prefer these bounded packages.

**COL-I3, checked against [World r23](/Hold%20The%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=d108c1):** the comparative reader preserves two records of signals the player can otherwise see; it does not discover trunk permission, supply or a mystery answer remotely. At the selected relay’s fixed reader, choose, for example, a visible incoming permission pulse and a local drum event. This is a supported site, not an extra carried module or an unattended remote recorder. Recording occurs only while those instruments are actually observed. The notebook labels place, observed state and order; comparing with an earlier trip never asserts a simultaneous measurement.

The player can put those records side by side at the refuge and choose to inspect a local relay or Collector intake next. The cost is using observation support and spending attention reaching/reading instruments while exposed. The unaided player can perform the same comparison using ordinary notes. World r23's redundant essential evidence is the right boundary: buying this convenience must not create an essential clue that is absent in the field.

| State | Extraction | Rescue / unsuccessful investigation | Reconfiguration, later visit and Stop |

| Banked salvage and paid repairs/fittings | Retained; carried salvage banks on extraction | Previously banked progress retained; this trip's unbanked cargo lost | No upkeep, off-session decay or automatic spending, including after Stop |

| Ordinary equipment finds, charge and cargo | Knowledge retained; issue is governed by recipes, not a physical armory | Physical field finds lost; inspected recipes retained | No charge banking or conversion; departure batteries empty |

| Named district interventions | Persist only at the author-specified commitment event | A completed local commitment is not automatically undone by rescue; extraction-conditioned changes require extraction | Actual committed outcomes appear on the board; later reversal follows the district's explicit rules |

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

| COL-I6: refuge obligation | D022 selects no forced refuge defence; r1's objection no longer blocks Colony drafting | [Brief 70b6b1](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief?revision=70b6b1): Lead remove contradictory compulsory-defence summaries during integration |

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

**Deliberately superseded:** r1's conditional six-cell examples, discussion of purchasing a third rack row and still-pending first staffing acknowledgment; r2's immediate refuge shutdown; r3's assembly-provided-with-the-refuge sentence; and the historical PM seed's blanket statement that panel/field state resets. D023, PMR006, shared contract r5 and Campaign r4 replace those assumptions. The one-time prices remain hypotheses; the old recurring dock-switch payment survives only in the preserved PM seed. Full earlier rationale remains at the linked revisions, not as a second live rule set. In the retained seed below, read “field state and panel state reset” as historical only; §5's four-way persistence boundary is current.