Hold the Flood — Cutter

PMU004 · r1 · 2026-09-06 · PM-seeded source summary; intended owner: Equipment and Build Designer (proposed); Lead interim; Combat owns shared attack rules · Awaiting author validation/transfer. Source: Design Document r13 / 50046f, section 3 and section 5. This records the existing proposal, not an accepted expansion design. The cited source owns its detailed rules until the author explicitly adopts this destination. Design Index · Expansion Brief.

Current weapon specification

The cutter is the starting handheld weapon. It automatically fires at the nearest organism within reach while the player moves; positioning supplies the player's aiming choice. It occupies no rack slot. The source proposes roughly two hits a second and about three hits to kill the basic organism. Those are design numbers, not tested balance.

Its stated role is to remove nearby stragglers and thin an edge or doorway. The same source describes a surge of roughly forty to one hundred and forty organisms over half a minute, so it deliberately gives the cutter limited crowd-clearing capacity. The arc module provides a separate stored-charge payoff in the current proposal.

Missing decisions for the larger game

• What choices develop basic combat from early to late campaign? The present cutter specification supplies no substantial weapon progression.
• Which targeting behavior, range tradeoff or interaction would make another weapon a different choice rather than a higher damage number?
• How do weapons support exploration or resource gathering while retaining readable crowd combat?
• What must remain automatic, and what meaningful action does the player control?

EQP101 + CMB101: describe the cutter's place among proposed weapon families, a reason to keep it, a reason to switch, and the acquisition/upgrade choices. Equipment owns this item's definition; Combat owns the common attack/status grammar. No new weapon family is implied to exist yet.