Hold the Flood — The Collector

CAM101 · r3 · 2026-09-06 · Campaign and District Designer · In review; proposal. Nothing here is an owner approval or tested behaviour. r3 answers PMR004 items 1, 2 and 4 and its dark-dispatch correction: §4 is repacked on D023's eight cells and no longer rewards leaving with charge — charge is earned and spent here, on two named local sinks, and how an empty rack reaches its first discharge is stated; §6 names the districts the outfall supplies, its one-surge buffer, when the buffer is consumed, what the withheld district's forecast shows and how long the quiet window actually is; §7 withdraws the claim that a dark bank position makes enemies unroutable; §9 states entry as physical access rather than a notebook flag and reconciles the failure case with §2's level thresholds. r2 reconciled §10 with CMB101; r1 and r2 are in page history.

District 5 of the seven recommended on Districts. The Collector is the World designer's example district (World and Mystery 7699de), placed and named in the lead's campaign (DES104 §2), and marked "Sketch — not designed" in that page's coverage table for its loadouts and encounters. This page writes it to the standard of DES104 §3. The World designer owns its clue logic and may rewrite §5; the lead owns any contradiction with DES104.

Sources: Campaign / DES104 r1 (§1 the rules in one paragraph, §2 the shape, §3.1 and §3.3 for the water and clock districts this one must not repeat, §4 the module and enemy roles used below, §5 the colony, §7 the coverage table) · Design Document ec1b6c §3–§4, §10 · World and Mystery 7699de W1–W4 and the WLD103 contribution rule · Design Review 80a882 REV104-2, REV104-3 · Expansion Brief cdc0c5. Neighbours: Districts · Pumping District · The Head-works · Design Index · Glossary.

1. The problem, and how it differs from the two water districts already designed

The Collector is where the Flood is kept between expeditions, and the only place the player can decide how much of it another district gets.

This campaign already has two districts made of water, and this one must not be a third version of either:

• The Lock Flight is water the player moves by hand, to make roads and complete circuits. Its lever is a lock lever.
• The Tidal Barrier is water on a clock the player cannot set. Its lever is a schedule they read.
• The Collector is water the player does not move at all. Its level is a consequence of what they hold: shut a gate and the Flood that drains in has nowhere to go, so the mass and its water both stay. The player never touches water here; they touch gates, and the water follows.

So the decision is not "where is the water" or "when is the water" but "how much of the Flood do I let through, and what do I do with what I keep" — and what is kept is a crowd standing in a basin, which is simultaneously the campaign's richest harvest and the worst thing to be standing next to.

2. The ground

   N ── HEAD RACE, up toward the Head-works  (walkable only when the basins are low; see §7)
        ||
   INTERCEPTOR MOUTHS  ══ the Flood drains in here between expeditions ══   INTAKE GAUGE
        ||
   ══════ UPPER WALKWAY ════════════════════════════════════════════  above every level
        ||                    ||                        ||
   [ BASIN 1 ] ── gate G1 ── [ BASIN 2 ] ── gate G2 ── [ BASIN 3 ] ── OUTFALL ── to the deep
        ~~                      ~~                        ~~
     wheel W1 + meter        wheel W2 + meter          wheel W3 + meter
        ||                      ||                        ||
   ──── LOWER GANTRY ───────────────────────────────────────  dry at levels 0–1, gone at 2+
        ||
   SLUICE (this district's own way in)     BEACON b1 (basin 1 rim)   BEACON b2 (outfall head)
        ||
   COLLECTOR DOCK (colony-held; a shelter, above every level)      PANEL: b1 / b2 / Off

• Three stepped basins joined by gates G1 and G2, closed at the bottom by the outfall. Each gate carries a wheel turned by whatever passes through it, driving a meter on the walkway above. All four are hand-worked from the walkway; none is powered, so none of them can be denied to the player by darkening the district.
• The intake gauge at the interceptor mouths logs what has come in. It is the redundant form of the Tidal Barrier's gate log, as DES104 §6 already pairs them; this page adopts that pairing rather than proposing a new one.
• Four levels, 0 to 3, and the level is derived: level 0 is everything open and draining; each shut gate raises the level above it by one step at each dispatch, because what drains in cannot leave. Nothing here rises on a clock. Leave every gate open and the district never floods — which is also the setting in which the player gets nothing from it.
• Shelters: the dock only. The upper walkway is above every level and is not safe from the Flood. That is this district's characteristic pressure — you can always get above the water and never away from the crowd.
• Two fixed beacons and a three-position panel, on the district's own circuit, permitted by the trunk like everywhere else.

3. Shared-rule diff

The one contract change this district requires is the W1 clause above. It is the lead's to make. Without it the withheld surge is an invisible number; with it, it is a moment the player watches happen in a different district on a later expedition, which is the best thing in this design.

4. Two loadouts that do different things, and what charge is for here

Rack notation on the eight cells PMR004 D023 adopts from EQP101 — fixed at eight from the outset, coil takes two. C coil, B battery, I insulation, K kit, L portable beacon, S salvage bundle.

Harvester (8 cells)          Sluicegate (8 cells)
C C B B                      B L I K
I S S K                      S S S S
link B1 -> C                 link B -> L

Charge is earned here and spent here. Nothing carries it out — clause 4 as the shared contract 69024c now words it, and PMR004 is right that r2's harvester read like a preparation farm for a later district. It is not one, and this section says what the charge is actually for.

How an empty rack reaches its first discharge. Charge resets every expedition (Design Document §10), so the harvester lands with two empty batteries and a coil it cannot fire. The first ten units are cut, not stunned: stragglers roaming the basins between dispatches, and the thin edge of the first surge, at one unit a kill. That is a designed beat and it is the district's opening five minutes — the player works the rim with the cutter while the first mass gathers, and the coil becomes available at roughly the moment there is something worth pointing it at. A player who mistimes it holds a full basin and has no way to stop it, which is this district's characteristic failure and is recoverable by leaving.

The two local sinks, both here, both on this map.

1. The outfall winch. The outfall's screen is silted, and the winch that lifts it is a powered device on the outfall head's line. Ten units discharged into the channel lifts it in about five seconds; unpowered, the same lift is a hand crank of about forty, at the outfall head, which is exactly where a held mass stands when b2 is lit. What charge buys is the ability to release a held mass on your schedule rather than on the overtopping's. That is the district's most valuable action and it costs a full battery.
2. The Holding Basin's inflow gate (§8). A powered gate, dead unless the intake channel is energised. One discharge opens it for the seconds it takes to walk through. What charge buys is the optional discovery, and it buys it with no key, no item and no flag.

So the two loadouts differ in what they do, not in what they take home. The harvester comes to use the mass: stun it, take the deposits it was standing on, lift the outfall on its own terms, and open the Holding Basin. It banks two bundles. The sluicegate comes to set ways-on and carry cargo — four bundles, a beacon to pull a held crowd off the walkway it needs, insulation for the crossing, a kit — and it has no coil, so it can never release a mass early and must plan around overtopping instead.

Neither is better. The harvester leaves with the smallest cargo in the campaign and everything this district can show you; the sluicegate leaves with the largest and has to take the district on the district's timing.

5. Discovery

Local question: why does the Flood come back every time? The pumping district answers where it enters and who aimed it. It never answers where it comes from, and a player who has shut a relay and watched the sluice keep delivering has the question sharply.

• Notice. The wheels turn when a surge passes through a gate, and the meters above them climb. The meters are graduated in the units the rack's battery readout uses.
• Compare. The player has watched their own battery fill from motes, one unit a kill. The needle here moves the same way, on a scale hundreds of times larger.
• Infer. The city is not producing the Flood; it is moving it, the way it moves water, and taking charge off it as it passes. The surges are cycled, not spawned — which is the World designer's stated contribution for this district.
• Experiment, free, on the first visit, no item required. Shut G2 and watch W3's wheel stop while W1 and W2 keep turning. The mass is being routed; the player is the one routing it.
• Consequence. The outfall, §6.
• Recovery if the clue is missed. The meters are on the walkway, which every route home crosses from level 2 upward, so the district shows them to a player who is only trying to leave.
• On replays. The meters are stable evidence under W3 and read true every visit. A player who knows what they mean uses them as a live reading of how much of the Flood is still upstream — which is the only such reading in the game.

Campaign clue (proposal; the World designer's domain). The meters read charge — the same quantity the player's rack reads. Redundant form: the intake gauge against the Tidal Barrier's gate log, as DES104 §6 already pairs them.

On REV104-2, which the World page flagged against itself. Clause 4 says charge never leaves the district. The meters do not break it: they read this district's own throughput, on this district's own wheels, and nothing the player carries crosses the dock. My position is that clause 4 should read "charge never leaves the district with the player", and the clue should stand. Dropping it would remove the one observable connecting the player's own resource to the city's, which is the campaign's central inference. This is the lead's clause to word; I am saying which way I would word it, and this page is built on that reading.

6. Outward consequence: the outfall, the empty flash, and what holding costs

The lever. The outfall is not one gate but three marked ways on, side by side at the head, one per district this collector supplies: Pumping, Lock Flight and Tram Incline. Each is shut by hand from the lower gantry at levels 0–1, or from the upper walkway at any level, the long way round. Each is painted with its district's name and carries its own small gauge — the sign vocabulary the crews used everywhere.

What shutting one does, stated finitely. This is PMR004 item 2, and r2 left all of it vague.

• The target is named, not "a district downstream". The player picks which of the three.
• The buffer is one surge, and it is visible. Each way-on holds a single surge's worth in its own chamber, and the gauge beside it reads full or empty. Shut it and the chamber does not refill.
• When the benefit is consumed. At that district's first dispatch of the next expedition there: the drum turns, the trunk permits, the beacon flashes, the thin cable pulses, and nothing comes. The chamber then refills from the cycle, so the second dispatch is normal. One surge, once, and the gauge back here shows it spent.
• What the withheld district's forecast shows. Everything it always shows — the countdown, the intake marker, the locked marker at dispatch. The forecast is not wrong and nothing is hidden: it reports the dispatch, which does happen. What does not happen is the arrival. That is the whole point of the empty flash, and it is why the light convention needs its own row (REV104-3).
• How long the quiet actually lasts. Exactly the gap between that district's first and second dispatches, on its own schedule. In the pumping district's 3 / 8 / 12 that is five minutes, from 3:00 to 8:00 — not three, and not "the start of the expedition". A player who wants the yard's far end has one five-minute window and has to be standing there at 3:00 to use it.

Its price, four ways.

1. Here, next time. §9 states it exactly, against §2's thresholds.
2. The trip. The ways-on are only here. Buying a quiet window somewhere else costs an expedition spent in the district you are not opening.
3. What you are standing next to. Everything withheld is in the chamber and the basin above it, between the dock and the meters. Holding two surges' worth is the best harvest in the campaign and the largest single mass standing between the player and their route home.
4. Overtopping. Held past level 3, a basin spills into the one below over about twenty seconds, with a visible crest first, and everything it held goes with it — into the basin the player crossed on the way in. The warning is real and it is short. The outfall winch in §4 is the only way to choose the moment instead, which is what the harvester's charge is for.

Persistence and readability. The three ways-on, their gauges and the water level all persist between expeditions, and the refuge board shows them before launch — so the player launches knowing which Collector they are getting, and which district they have already paid for.

7. What the campaign later does to this district, and what this district enables

• After the Exchange: this district's own bank position can be darkened. r2 said the resulting crowds "cannot be routed". That was wrong, and PMR004 is right to strike it. Under D013/D016 the beacons still exist and post-entry targeting is unchanged: arrivals still walk to the nearest lit beacon they can reach, and the panel still moves them. What a dark position takes away is the announcement, not the routing — no dispatch pulse, no flash, no countdown, no intake marker, so the player loses when and where from and keeps where to. In practice that makes a held mass harder to build deliberately, because bodies arrive continuously instead of in one body, and it makes setting ways-on easier, because nothing large lands while you are on the walkway. Retargeting begins the moment a beacon changes, but bodies still walk: ground a crowd is standing on does not clear instantly, and the press is what the player reads while it does.
• After the Tidal Barrier is shut: the Collector is starved, as DES104 already states. Fewer bodies are in circulation, so held masses thin and the water arriving with them drops — the district sits one level lower for the same settings, which is the reconciliation PMR004 §1 asks for between this page and the Head-works. It stops being a bank, which is a real cost of the Barrier's outcome and the campaign's clearest case of one district's persistent choice reaching another.
• What this district enables: the race route to the Head-works. The head race north is walkable only when the basins are held low — every way-on open, nothing accumulating. So the alternative approach to the finale is bought by giving up everything this district is for, on the expedition you use it. See Districts §7.

8. The Holding Basin — optional, and the campaign's sharpest evidence

A sealed wing behind basin 1: a fourth basin the crews gated off and gauged separately. Never required.

• How it is reached. Its inflow gate is a powered device, dead unless the intake channel is energised, so opening it costs one coil discharge earned here (§4). The walk to it is open only with the Collector held at level 0 — every gate open, the outfall open — which is the setting that gives up the delay lever for that expedition. No item, no key: a state the player already knows how to produce, used for something else.
• What is in it. The separate gauge, with a full log, and the crews' written reason for sealing it.
• What it gives. Certainty rather than capability. A player who reads it arrives at the head-works knowing which of the World designer's two candidate answers is true; a player who skips it makes the final choice on inference. Both are complete campaigns; they are not the same experience. The content of that evidence is the World designer's to write, not mine — this page supplies the room, the way in, and the price.
• Why a wing and not a district. It occupies no new lever cell (Districts §2), and it costs this district's assets and no new ones.

9. Entry, revisit, and one consequence of failure

Entry is physical, not a flag. PMR004 item 4 is right that "reading X unlocks Y" is a notebook gate wearing a knowledge gate's coat. The honest statement: the colony's boat can put in at any dock the player has a way to know exists, and this district's way in is its own outfall channel, which the pumping district's culvert visibly drains toward. A player who walks the culvert to its end has seen where the water goes and can select the dock on that alone. The crews' inked plan behind the junction gate is the ordinary way to learn it and the Exchange's routing bank carries the name as a third; none of the three is required, and no note has to be collected for the boat to go. The redundancy is in the evidence, not in the permission.

Revisit — three standing reasons. The basins hold the campaign's densest salvage, because the city's drains catch what everything upstream loses. The three ways-on are the only place another district's next first surge can be withheld. And a held mass is the campaign's best charge harvest, spent on the two sinks in §4 — which makes this the district a player comes to when they want what charge buys here, never to stock up for elsewhere.

Required return on the baseline path: one, after the Tidal Barrier, because shutting the barrier gates starves this district, and its level and gauges have to be re-read before the head-works run.

One consequence of failure, reconciled with §2's thresholds. If an expedition ends in rescue with a way-on shut, the state persists — the same rule that makes every district outcome mean something. The water does not reset to 0: the district starts the next visit one step below the level it was left at, seepage being the only thing that drains a shut collector overnight. So an expedition abandoned at level 3 opens the next one at level 2, which is exactly the threshold §2 gives for the lower gantry going under: the short crossing to basin 3 is gone and the ways-on are reachable only the long way round the walkway. An expedition abandoned at level 1 opens at 0 and costs nothing — which is correct, because failure should only bite when the player was holding something.

Nothing banked, noted or built is lost; the baseline holds. It is readable before launch on the refuge board, and it is recoverable by an action the player already knows, since the ways-on open from the upper walkway at any level. The recovery costs the long crossing and, for that visit, the withheld surge already paid for. Failure makes the world less convenient for one trip; it never makes the campaign longer or the player poorer.

10. Enemy and build pressure

Roles are the six the Combat and Enemy Designer defines in CMB101; shared combat rules are on Combat Rules. Campaign owns placement, Combat owns behaviour. Everything below works with the Drifter alone; the other roles sharpen it and are not required by it.

• The coil is central here and situational elsewhere. A held mass standing in a basin is the largest stun target in the campaign, and the district's economy is built on it. That is a real build swing, not a stat: a rack that was correct on the pumping district's dry causeway is under-equipped here.
• Insulation stops being optional from level 1, because the ground the deposits are on is energised whenever anything discharges into it — including the player's own coil.
• The held mass is its own charge source, so nothing here depends on a particular role. A basin holding two surges' worth, stunned in water, sheds far more than one battery can take; the harvester rack in §4 exists because of the mass, not because of any one body in it. That is deliberate: this district should not be hostage to a roster decision that is Combat's to make.
• Crusts are what stop the harvest being free. They stand unstunned inside a stunned crowd, so a held basin is not a cleared floor — exactly the lesson CMB101's Encounter A teaches in the pumping district's yard, at this district's scale. Placement proposal for Combat: Crusts should be present in a held mass in proportion to how long it has been held, so that the player who holds longest meets the most bodies the coil never stopped. That prices holding without adding a number to anything.
• Carriers make the harvester rack dangerous in the right way. A player crossing this district with two full batteries, in the one district whose whole point is stored charge, is exactly what a Carrier walks to. The counterplay is the district's own: spend the charge, or plant a beacon's battery as a decoy on the far walkway.
• Anchors belong here more than anywhere. They stand in the lowest wet ground and are unmoved by any routing — which in a district of three stepped basins means the low basin always has a standing hazard the panel cannot clear, and the field pump or the long way round are the answers.
• Grounders are the one role that can take this district's plan away. They ground a powered cable run and darken the beacon on it: darken b2 while a mass is held at the outfall and the mass spreads through the basins, which is precisely the state in which it cannot be harvested. The gates are hand-worked and unpowered, so a Grounder can never take the lever away — only the harvest.
• What this district asks of Combat: nothing new. It pays off four of the six roles already proposed, which is a better argument for that roster than another district would be.

11. Asset reuse and gaps

Reused, no new category: water planes and wet/dry ground tinting, gates and valves, cable, indicator lamps, beacons, a three-position panel, walkway and gantry props, boards and gauges, signs, dock props, the humanoid mass. This is the pumping district's vocabulary throughout.

Genuine gaps, marked and not filled. No free asset has been located, checked or licensed for any of these, and nothing here authorises creating one (Brief D009).

• Turning wheels with readable meters — visible rotation tied to throughput, and a needle readable from a walkway at a distance.
• A stepped-basin drainage set — three basins in a stair with hand-worked gates. The closest thing in the design is the pumping district's yard channel and sluice; whether a free set covers this is unknown and unchecked.
• The held mass — a crowd standing still, in water, in numbers larger than one surge. This is as much a crowd-rendering and readability question as an art one, and it is the largest single unknown on this page.

A cheaper alternative, recorded now rather than after it is expensive. If the held mass proves illegible or costly at survivorlike density, cap what a basin holds at one surge's worth and make the harvest smaller and the overtopping quicker. The district keeps its lever, its discovery, its outward consequence and its failure case; it loses the "bank of Flood" feeling that is its best idea. I would try the full version first.

12. Open questions and dependencies

• REV104-3 (Lead). The W1 clause and the light-convention row for the empty flash. §6 is unreadable without it and this is the one contract change this district needs.
• REV104-2 (Lead, with World). Clause 4's wording, per §5. My position is stated there and this page is built on it.
• World (WLD103). The campaign clue in §5, the evidence in the Holding Basin (§8), and whether the intake-gauge pairing in DES104 §6 stands as this district's redundant form.
• Lead (DES104). Whether this page's account of the Collector contradicts anything in the campaign page; if it does, the campaign page wins until we have agreed otherwise.
• CMB101. The Crust-density placement proposal in §10, and whether a held mass is a legitimate composition under Combat Rules's composition budget — it is larger than any surge that page prices.
• Unresolved by me, honestly. Whether a held mass is legible at crowd density (§11 has the fallback). Whether three quiet minutes elsewhere are worth an expedition here — a balance question with no evidence, designed to be cheap to weaken and expensive to remove.