ZERO HOUR — Bureau of Shelters

DUTY TERMINAL // BRIEFING

YOUR SHIFT

The year is 1954. The Bureau of Shelters buried something under the country, and it is your shift. You and up to three other operators ride a rail car into a civil-defense installation that goes down forever. Each floor has a work order — then be standing on the platform when the car comes, because it leaves with or without you.

Your real voice is a game mechanic: proximity chat is always live, whisper and only the crewmate beside you hears it, shout and everything on the floor knows where you are. One of the things down there banks your words and says them back. The facility remembers where you walked last time. Every texture, model, and sound is generated by the game's own code — a hand-built 1954, all the way down.

WORK ORDER — IN ORDER

THE JOB · HOW TO WIN A FLOOR

The war-room chalkboard says it best: READ THE SITE BOARD — THE FLOOR DEALS A CARD. The card may reorder steps 1–3.

1 POWER
Find spare fuses (amber-beaconed pickups) and feed each sector's breaker panel. Dead breakers mean dead card readers.
2 PUNCH
Hold [E] on each of the three Bureau time clocks. Mid-punch the reader grinds — hold through it or the card jams, loudly. Every punched card pays +35 to the shift fund.
3 VENT
Hold the boiler valve wheel until pressure vents. On UNION floors a second crewmate holds the bleed lever — solo operators crank at about a third speed.
4 ARM
Cards + pressure bring the platform dispatch console live. Pressing it rings a real station bell and starts a 60-second alarm window (12 seconds on drills). Everything on the floor hears it.
5 RIDE
Be on the platform. Riding out wins the floor and banks the fund, salvage, and rank. Anyone left behind is lost.

The boiler valve: a hand wheel on a black boiler over hazard stripes, the vent prompt above it. — PLATE 01 — VALVE STATION 01. HOLD [E] TO VENT STEAM PRESSURE.

SEEDED DEAL — SAME CARD ON EVERY SCREEN

CHAIN CARDS

Every floor deals one card that rewires the order of the work. The PA announces it; the site board in the booth prints it.

CARD	WHAT IT DOES
STANDARD	The grammar as written.
COLD BOOT	Breakers refuse fuses until the boiler is vented — vent first, then power.
LEDGER RAID	One clock arrives already robbed and the Draftsman arrives instantly, carrying the card. Corner it to force a panic-drop; returning the card is the stamp.
FLOODED SHIFT	The natatorium brims to the deck lip; that sector's reader sits underwater until venting drains the pool.
DEAD LINE	The dispatch relay is burned out; a copper relay waits in the deepest room. The console takes the relay before it takes a press. "FIND IT OR NOBODY RIDES."

A dark pool room flooded to the deck lip, hide lockers along the wall. — PLATE 02 — THE NATATORIUM, BRIMMING. FLOODED SHIFT IN EFFECT.

ENTITY REPORT — DEFAULT: FULL ROSTER

WHAT WALKS THE FLOOR

First contact is shuffled per floor. The first minute is quiet. Grace shrinks with every level you descend.

THE CUSTODIAN

SOUND-HUNTER

Patrols, seeks, hunts. Opens one hide spot per sweep. Repelled by PX flares.

THE WEEPER

CRIER

Its sob is a siren — other hunters drift toward the sound. Shooing it triggers a shriek.

THE STOKER

FROM LEVEL 2

Deaf but sighted. Charges what it sees. Never opens lockers. Furnace-breath tells you it's close.

THE DRAFTSMAN

FROM LEVEL 2

Audits a punched clock for 12 seconds, then steals the card. Run it down; walk the card back to its own clock.

THE BROWNOUT

FROM LEVEL 3

A light-eating drift that moves toward noise but will not enter the work-light halos around objectives.

THE UNDERSTUDY

MIMIC

Learns your voice — and replays your own words, pitch-dropped, from the dark. Chatty crews earn it an extra arrival.

THE TENANT

ONE PER FLOOR

A hide locker that is already occupied. Door ajar. Breathing inside.

The reactor drum with its red band, hazard striping on the floor, a dark doorway beyond. — PLATE 03 — REACTOR ROOM, LEVEL 1. DO NOT LINGER.

EVERY THIRD SHIFT — POSTED ON THE FUND BOARD

THE CONTRACT · NAMED AUDITS

AUDIT	DEMAND
THE LEDGER	Deliver the quota of fund units by the deadline. Scales up each time you clear it.
PERFECT ATTENDANCE	Two consecutive extractions with the full crew aboard.
SILENT RUNNING	One shift under the noise line. Work quietly. Whisper.
FULL LEDGER	Extract owing no cards — every clock punched.

Fail the audit and the contract is TERMINATED: fund seized, gear repossessed, run reset. Rank survives — and seeds a service rider so veterans restart with a cushion. Rank is worth something down there: quieter boots, a stronger wrist on the valve, a faster hand pulling a crewmate off the floor.

The facility remembers, too — sectors that burn stay sealed ("THE BUREAU DOES NOT REOPEN GRAVES"), wreckage waits where it fell, and if you return to a depth on record, the hunt starts already knowing your habits. You can shred the file. The foreman decides.

BUREAU OF SHELTERS — FORM 12-A

COUNTERSIGN

AUDIO MONITORING ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This installation uses a live microphone. You will countersign this form on first boot.

Your voice carries to nearby crew, always — unless you set push-to-talk in Settings.
The things below hear it too. So does the Understudy: short phrases may be held in server memory during play and echoed back.
Nothing your microphone captures is ever written to disk or sent outside your session.

A microphone and headphones are strongly recommended. The game is built around them.

OPERATOR INDUCTION — SHEET 1 OF 2

ADMIT

JOINING A SHIFT

Run ZeroHour.exe. No install. Allow it through Windows Firewall on first launch, read Form 12-A, press ENTER.
You start in the Ready Room. Walk to the terminal and press E.
Open JOIN SHIFT. In the EXCHANGE row, type the address your host gave you. It is remembered after the first time.
QUERY lists running lobbies — double-click one to join. Or HOST NEW to raise a fresh deck; first player in becomes FOREMAN and controls the mission settings and the red departure lever.
Coded shift? Type the 4-digit code into the SHIFT CODE box first.

Crashed or dropped mid-shift? Rejoin the same lobby — the car runs you down alone onto the working floor. Fresh body at the rail platform; anything you were carrying stayed with the old one.

The muster-deck war room: THE PLAN chalkboard and the glowing SHIFT MANIFEST board. — PLATE 05 — THE WAR ROOM. READ THE PLAN. READ THE MANIFEST.

DUTY MANUAL — CONTROLS

CONTROLS

WASD  move        SHIFT sprint      CTRL crouch
SPACE jump / hold breath (while hiding)
E     interact — HOLD it for clocks, valves, rescues
F     torch      G flare (PX kit)  1-5 hotbar
ESC   menu       V push-to-talk (only if PTT is on)

The mic is open by default. Rebind movement and interact keys in ESC → SETTINGS → CONTROLS. A REDUCE FLASHES toggle lives under ACCESSIBILITY, next to field-of-view, brightness, and view-bob controls. Per-crewmate voice volume is under AUDIO → CREW VOICES.

Going down: caught operators drop. A crewmate holds E ~2 s on the body to pull them up; un-pinned downs stand on their own in fifteen seconds. Stoker pins need a rescue.
Dead is a role: SPACE cycles through crew eyes; once per floor, E spends your haunt — gutter a lamp or rattle a locker. Help your crew or bait the floor.
The booth: someone should live in the glass overwatch booth — live site board, four radio calls, and the dispatcher verbs: BOLT, POWER, SWEEP, and one good LIE per floor.
Salvage pays only if it rides home — or goes up the pneumatic tube, loudly. Spend the fund at the PX: felt-soled boots, high-drain torch cells, flares, the coffee urn lease.

A facility hall: the glass overwatch booth, the brass pneumatic tube, lockers with HIDE prompts. — PLATE 04 — OVERWATCH BOOTH, PNEUMATIC TUBE, HIDE LOCKERS.

SPARE-DEVICE ORDER — SHEET 2 OF 2

ISSUE

HOSTING (ONE FRIEND DOES THIS)

One executable does every job. Only the spare device ever port-forwards; nobody who plays does.

Copy the game folder to the spare device.
Router forwards to it: TCP 7770 (the exchange) and UDP 7777-7786 (the decks).
Double-click start_exchange.bat. That is the whole job. Players HOST NEW and QUERY through it. start_deck.bat runs one always-on lobby instead.
Give friends your public IP for the EXCHANGE box.

Sanity check: QUERY answering "NO DECKS UP" means the line works. If QUERY says NO ANSWER — firewall or forward on TCP 7770. If lobbies list but joining hangs — the UDP range. Full detail rides with the game in SERVER_SETUP.md.

MAINTENANCE REQUEST

REPORT A FAULT

Something broke? That's the job. Report it with three things:

Your build number — in the window title and on the terminal HOME page ("FIELD BUILD 0.5.0").
What happened and what you expected — a sentence or two, plus a screenshot if it's visual.
Your log file, grabbed right after:
%APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Zero Hour\logs\godot.log

Most wanted right now: how the voice feels at distance, whether the mimic ever said your words back, downs and rescues, whether the booth is worth living in, and anything that made you say "wait, what?" — write that down, it's gold.