The Raid Loop¶
How a mission works, in fiction: why the clock runs, why death costs cargo instead of lives, why a wiped-out squad still redeploys, and how a colony that cannot lose its soldiers can still lose the war. This page is the canonical explanation of Landfall's core loop — deploy, salvage, hold the objective, get home before the link breaks.
[!quote] "We do not send them down. We lower them, on a thread we did not spin, into a house we do not own — and we haul them back up before the thread goes dark. Everything else is negotiable. The thread is not." — Administrator Idris Vale, on the first deployments
The ship that cannot land, and the gate it carries¶
Humanity builds nothing exotic; it salvages everything — and the raid loop is no exception. Two facts set it up.
The Odyssey is stuck in the sky. The generation ship was always far too vast to land; it crossed on the last of its fuel and now holds a slow orbit above Nandana, unable to descend or depart. It is grounded the way a fuel-dry aircraft is grounded — not on the ground, but going nowhere. That stranding is also its use: a fixed anchor, high above the whole world.
The colony's single greatest piece of loot rides inside it. In the opening days of Act 1 the colony salvaged a working Progenitor matter-gate — part of the machinery the Custodians used to move themselves and their cargo across the seed-world — and mounted it in the Odyssey's spine. The colony could not build such a thing in a thousand years; it can barely hold one and point it. The colonists named the gate Kurma — for the old myth of the tortoise that braced the churning of the ocean, when gods and demons hauled treasure up from the deep on a rope. The name is exactly the job: the ship is the pivot, the world is the ocean, and every raid is one more pull on the rope.
Why it's fragile — and why that's the whole game
The colony has one ship and one gate, and it does not understand the gate — it operates Kurma the way a survivor operates a machine whose language is lost, by rote, at the edge of failure. Every limit in the loop below is a limit of borrowed, half-understood tech carried by a stranded ship. As the colony plants ground relays and turns the Custodian grid, the loop loosens: longer windows, steadier links, cleaner recalls. The salvage curve isn't only your guns — it's your reach.
The Tether¶
Deployment is a teleport, and the teleport is a held link — the Tether — between the squad on the ground and Kurma aboard the Odyssey overhead. Hold the link and matter crosses it in both directions. Lose the link and nothing can.
The link only holds while the ship is overhead. The Odyssey has no fuel to loiter or steer — it falls where its orbit takes it — so as it slides toward the horizon the Tether frays, and when it drops out of range the link desyncs: it snaps, and the gate can no longer reach the ground.
That single fact is the mission clock, and it is set by orbital mechanics, not a stopwatch. Every ground operation is time-boxed to the ship's pass. The countdown a player watches is the Odyssey sinking toward the horizon.
| In fiction | On the board |
|---|---|
| The Odyssey's orbital pass | The mission timer |
| The Tether holding | You can still be recalled with your cargo |
| The Tether fraying | Warning phase — get to an exit |
| Desync | Window closed; forced snap-back, cargo lost |
[!note] Design note The clock is diegetic and non-negotiable — it is not an arbitrary "hurry up," it's an orbit. That makes it feel fair: the player can watch the ship, learn its rhythm, and gamble against a sky they understand. Ground relays and a turned grid are how you earn more time, which keeps the fantasy of growing mastery on the same axis as the story.
Two ways home¶
There are exactly two ways off the ground, and the difference between them is the entire economy of risk.
Finish the objective, reach an exit point, and cross back while the Tether still holds. A stable link has full fidelity: it takes you and everything you carry — salvage, samples, a stored harvester yield, that blade of light you pried off a downed Sentinel. This is the win. Everything you earned comes home.
The Odyssey's mind fires an emergency recall — a snap-back — the instant either of two things happens: an operator's vitals cross the fatal line ("you go down"), or the Tether desyncs with someone still on the ground.
Snap-back is a panic mode. It has bandwidth for one thing: the living body it already has on file from the medbay. It cannot resolve anything the operator is carrying. Every scrap of salvage, every sample, every un-bonded weapon falls out of the weave and stays on the ground. You arrive in the medbay alive — and empty-handed.
No permadeath — for the squad¶
The colony's handful of deployable operators are the player's characters, and they do not die on the ground. The moment an operator's vitals cross the threshold, the snap-back rescues the actual body — not a copy — a breath ahead of death, and the medbay patches it back together. This is a rescue, not a resurrection: there is no clone, no backup soul, nothing cheap about it. It is a very good ambulance running on a very short leash.
The leash matters. Snap-back only protects who is on the Tether — a deployed, linked operator inside the ship's window. That is why the squad is nearly unkillable and the colony is not (see Viable Population).
What death costs
Because the operator lives, loss is measured in cargo, not corpses. A disastrous mission is one you walk away from with nothing — no salvage, no objective, and a long climb back to the gear you dropped. This is the deliberate shape of the loop: high stakes, low body-count. The fear is not will I die, it's will I lose everything I came up with.
Getting wiped, and the Reserve¶
Lose a whole run — drop every piece of salvaged kit and snap back with nothing — and you are not softlocked. The colony issues a floor of gear that cannot be taken from you, because it is neither exotic nor scarce. The Odyssey's fabricators print crude, human-made kinetic equipment from ship-hull feedstock: a scrap carbine, patched armour, a mining charge. Administrator Vale calls it the Reserve; the troops call it driftwood — washed-up, ugly, but it floats.
The Reserve is deliberately the bottom of the salvage curve — pure kinetic scrap, the same tier you started the campaign with. That's the point:
- You can always deploy again. There is no dead end; the fabricator floor guarantees a next mission.
- Losing your salvage still hurts. Coming back to driftwood after fielding a salvaged blaster and a cloak is a real fall. The mercy is that you survive it, not that it doesn't sting.
[!quote] "Hope is a supply like any other. I ration it. This —" (the scrap carbine) "— is the ration. It will not save you. It will let you go back for what will." — Idris Vale, issuing the Reserve
Design note — the mercy loadout, justified
Roguelite-adjacent loops need a floor so a bad run can't brick the campaign, but a floor that's too generous erases the loss. The Reserve threads it: crude human tech is infinite; salvaged Progenitor tech is not. The rule that governs the whole arsenal — nothing exotic is human-made — is the same rule that makes the mercy loadout make sense. Kinetic scrap is the one thing the colony can always print, and precisely the thing you outgrew.
What you go down for¶
A raid is never only a shopping trip. Every mission carries one or more main objectives that sit above the salvage — and every mission is failable, objective and all.
| Objective type (Act 1) | In fiction |
|---|---|
| Clear the ground | Break the local Custodian line so a colony site can be founded |
| Establish a foothold | Plant and protect the beacon that grows into a new settlement |
| Install infrastructure | Deploy harvester nodes and other standing machinery |
| Seize / repair | Take a Choir-node, recover an archive, hold a ruin |
Salvage funds the war; the objective is the war. A run where you grab a fortune in salvage but let the colony beacon burn is still a loss — you simply lost it with full pockets.
Harvesters: salvage that keeps working after you leave¶
Some missions install harvester nodes — deployable machines that mine and store resources on-site over time. They turn a single raid into a standing claim: plant one, and it accrues yield between visits.
But a harvester only stores. To bank the yield you have to come back, pull it, and carry it home through a clean extraction — which means the stored resources are exposed to exactly the same risk as anything else in your hands. Snap back under fire and the run's yield stays on the ground with everything else. Harvesters make the map a set of accounts you must physically go collect, under the clock, past whatever has moved in since.
The thing that can actually be lost¶
If operators don't die, what does the campaign fear? The colony.
The Tether protects who's on it. No one else is on it. The colonists at home — the farmers, engineers, medics, and children who are the actual civilization — live and die by ordinary rules. They are lost to Mara raids on the settlements, to failed defenses, to cold and hunger when the salvage runs come back empty. The colony tracks its living, working, breeding number as Viable Population, and it is the true life-bar of the whole game.
Viable Population falls through:
- Attrition — bad salvage runs that leave the colony short of feedstock, power, and food; the number ticks down between missions.
- Failed defenses — when the Mara or Custodians strike a settlement and you cannot hold it, colonists die, permanently.
- Failed population objectives — evacuations not made, rescues not reached.
…and it grows through founding and holding new colonies, keeping the colony supplied, standing up the infrastructure that lets a people recover, and waking the crew — thawing the colonists who crossed in cold sleep, one chosen candidate at a time.
If Viable Population falls below the Minimum Viable Population (MVP) — the floor beneath which the gene pool and the labour force can no longer sustain themselves — the colony is doomed even if a squad is still standing on some hillside. That is the campaign loss condition. Not a mission failed. The species no longer viable.
The one real death in Landfall
Design the whole loop around this inversion: the individual cannot die, but the people can. Every safe, cargo-only mission failure still costs the campaign something — resources not gathered, a settlement not defended — and those costs accrue in one number that does not come back. It reframes the stakes from the man to mankind, which is the game's entire subject. Losing Nandana is extinction (see Nandana); MVP is the meter that measures how close you are.
[!note] Design note — where this sits in the campaign The loop above is described at Act 1 strength: one gate, tight windows, salvage-poor, human-vs-machine. Act 2 adds the Mara pressing the strategic layer (raids that drain Viable Population directly) while you raid the tactical one. By Act 3 a turned grid and the Seed-Heart have loosened the Tether's every constraint. The raid loop is a dial the story turns.