Destruction

The city breaks the way the records' cities broke: around the people in them, rarely by them. A Tyrant comes through a wall. A sofa goes across a room. A building that a fight has been tearing at for five minutes comes down at the end of it. None of it is free destruction. No weapon a survivor carries makes a hole in a wall, a floor, or a ceiling, and no survivor brings a building down alone.

Why it is this way. Every other system leans on walls staying where they are.

• Hiding. Run First is the rule of every night (Survival), and running works only if a wall still stands between a survivor and what hunts them. A city that a rocket can open is a city with nowhere to hide.
• Locks. The R.P.D. is rebuilt with every lock it ever had (The Worlds), and puzzles open the map, the ways out, and the vaults (Objectives, Restrictions, and Events). A wall that can be blown through is a puzzle that can be skipped.
• The records. The places are rebuilt as the records hold them. The records hold walls that Tyrants came through and buildings that fell, and nothing else that breaks on that scale.
• One server. A hundred survivors share one night on one server (Presentation and Technology). Breakage that everyone must see the same way has to be breakage that was built in advance.

The Tiers

Everything in a map belongs to one tier, and the tier decides who can break it. A survivor can always tell the tiers apart by eye: glass and wood from plaster, and plaster from brick, concrete, and stone (Presentation and Technology, Readable by Everyone).

Tier	What it covers	Who breaks it	What it leaves
Fragile	Glass of every kind: windows, the panes in doors, display cases, windshields, mirrors, screens. Bulbs and lamps, bottles, crockery, light crates	Anyone and anything: a single round, a swing, a thrown thing, the dead walking into it	Shards on the floor, an open frame, and a darker room if it was a light
Light	Furniture: tables, sofas, shelves, cabinets, desks. Wooden doors that no key, code, or puzzle holds. Boarded windows and every barricade built inside the map, by survivors or by anyone before them. The barricades at the edge of a world are Never (below). Plank fences, heavy crates, market stalls	Survivors, with a few heavy swings, a burst of rounds, or one explosive. The dead, by battering, in time. The Mutated, faster. The Heavy, in one blow	Splinters and wreckage. A door that no longer closes
Sturdy	Interior walls of plaster, lath, and board. Reinforced and metal doors. Door frames, railings, shelving bolted to a wall	Only the Heavy (Survival, Run First)	A hole a body can pass through, and rubble
Structure	Exterior and load-bearing walls, floors, ceilings, stairs, facades, roofs, bridges	Only what was authored into the map: breaches and collapses (below)	Whatever the breach or the collapse was built to leave
Never	Safe rooms, their walls, door, and windows. Every door, lock, or mechanism that a key, a code, or a puzzle holds, and every vault door. The machinery of the ways out. The edges of a map: the barricades of the edge and the Army's barricade at the Checkpoint (The Worlds, The Edge of the World), the quarantine wall, the sea	No one and nothing, ever	—

• Explosives break only what the tiers allow. A grenade, a grenade round, or a rocket breaks everything Fragile and Light within its blast, and nothing Sturdy or Structure. It can set off a trap of the city (below), and that is all it can do to a building.
• Rounds pass through glass. Everything else stops them. Light cover breaks under enough of them: a survivor behind a sofa under fire is behind a sofa for a few seconds.
• Vehicles go through Fragile and Light. A car can take a shop window, a fence, a market stall, or a barricade with it (Survival, Vehicles). It stops against a wall.
• Fire burns what is Light. A barricade or a wooden door in a fire burns through in time. Fire that spreads beyond a room is ΜΝΗΜΗ's, never a survivor's (Collapses, below).
• Nothing a survivor needs is destroyed. What stood on a shelf that breaks falls to the floor. A stash stays a stash. The only exception is what a rule names, such as a pure strain's injector, which anyone who opens its case may smash (The Strains, Stealing a Strain).

What Breaking Changes

Everything broken stays broken for the rest of the night, for everyone. ΜΝΗΜΗ repairs nothing. The next night begins whole, except a Late Waking, whose damage is placed before the waking with everything else the seed left (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Late Wakings · A Variant).

• Sound. Breaking glass is a Clamor (The Dead and the Engineered). So is smashing furniture or battering down a door. A Heavy coming through a wall is Thunder, and a collapse is Thunder across the whole district. A broken window or a hole in a wall lets sound through as an open doorway does: a room that was muffled is no longer.
• Doors. A broken door can no longer be closed, locked, or barricaded. A room whose door is gone is no longer a place to hide from the dead.
• Windows. A broken window can be climbed through, by survivors and by the dead. Climbing through takes a few seconds and is a Clamor while glass is left in the frame. A broken window can be boarded up, as any barricade is made (Survival, Fighting and Fleeing).
• Glass on the floor. Walking over shards is a Murmur, even crouched. A survivor who breaks the glass behind them has left an alarm.
• Light. A lamp or a bulb shot out darkens what it lit. At night that is a choice: a survivor can buy darkness with a Clamor (The Worlds, Time and Weather).
• Rubble. Debris from Sturdy and Structure breaks is rough ground (The Survivors, Hardening), and large debris blocks as it was built to. Small debris is only seen, and never blocks anyone.
• Nothing seals the last road. No breakage, breach, or collapse ever closes the only road to an open way out, to a live puzzle's pieces, to a vault, to a safe room's door, or to anyone of the records still waiting to be found. A collapse that seals one route always leaves another, as a sealed puzzle does (Objectives, Restrictions, and Events, Puzzles).

The Heavy Indoors

A Heavy chasing a survivor into a building wrecks it on the way through. It does not stop for furniture, and it does not stop for doors.

• It goes through what is in its way. Furniture, doors, and barricades break as it reaches them (Presentation and Technology, Weight, in Practice), except what is held (below). A sofa kicked aside goes across the room.
• What it swings at breaks. A blow that misses a survivor lands on whatever was behind them. Plaster and board give way; brick, concrete, and stone do not.
• Thin walls are not cover. A Heavy that has heard a survivor behind a plaster wall can punch through it to reach them. A survivor hiding from one hides behind masonry, up a ladder, in a vent or a crawlspace, or in a safe room (Survival, How to Live Through One).
• It overruns into walls. A charge that misses goes on into whatever is behind its target. Into plaster, it goes through. Into masonry, it stops, staggers, and turns, and a group learns to stand in front of brick.
• It does not open what is held. A Heavy never breaks a door that a key, a code, or a puzzle holds. It goes another way, and that is often why it comes through a wall instead.
• The Turned too. A survivor who has risen in an Apex form breaks what the Heavy breaks and uses the breaches the Heavy uses (The Turned).

The lesser dead break only what is Fragile and Light. The common dead walk into glass and batter at doors and barricades until they give. The Mutated get through faster: a Hunter takes a barricade apart in seconds. In the Valley, hosts carry tools, and their axes and torches take doors and barricades apart faster than the dead do.

Breaches

A breach is a hole in a structural wall, floor, or ceiling that was built into the map before the night and opens only when a Heavy comes through it. It is how a Tyrant comes out of a building beside a street and onto the survivor walking past, as the records' Tyrants came through walls.

• Where. Every map holds breach points in walls that face streets, alleys, corridors, stairwells, and garages; in floors over basements and sewers; in ceilings under rooftops. The Raccoon City of 1998 holds a few dozen. Each kind of Heavy has the breaches built for it: a Tyrant or a Nemesis through a wall, a G-form up through a floor or down through a ceiling, El Gigante through the side of a barn.
• Armed at Assembly. Before the waking, ΜΝΗΜΗ arms some of a map's breach points, about a third, and never the same ones for a file two nights running (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, What She Can Do). An unarmed breach point is a wall that night, and nothing comes through it.
• Its own hunt sets it off. A Heavy uses an armed breach only when its own pursuit takes it there: it is hunting a sound, or following the thread its records gave it, and the breach is the shortest way. ΜΝΗΜΗ never times a breach for a survivor, and never puts a Heavy behind a wall to wait for one (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, The Laws). A Heavy is behind a breach only because it was released, walked its thread, or followed a noise there. The survivor who is struck by a breach has usually been heard: I was running, so it came through the wall.
• The tell. A breach never comes from nothing. Before it opens, the wall gives warning: steps behind it, a blow that shakes it, a crack running across it, dust, a picture falling. About a second and a half passes between the first blow and the break. That is enough for a survivor who is listening, and not enough for one who is not. Hardening decides how hard the break startles them (The Survivors, Hardening).
• The burst. The wall comes apart the way it was built to, and the Heavy comes through with its momentum. Debris staggers anyone it hits. The first survivor within reach takes the Heavy's first act, a throw: seized and flung across the street or the room. One blow puts a survivor Down (Survival, The Heavy), and the throw is that blow. Then the Heavy comes on. The throw is not the Heavy's grab: a grab is death unless another survivor sets off an explosion against it, and a breach never opens with one.
• After. The hole stays for the night. It is a new way between the building and the street, for survivors, for the dead, and for the Heavy. Sound passes through it, and its rubble lies outside it.
• Moments. A breach is an entrance, and the rules of Moments apply to it unchanged (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Moments). The survivor it reaches never gets one, because nothing is safe in reach of a Heavy. A survivor across the street whose safe window holds may get an Arrival Moment.

Collapses

A collapse is a part of a building, or a whole building, coming down. Every collapse was built into the map, has a cause that can be seen, and gives warning before it falls. No survivor sets one off alone.

Kind	What it is	What sets it off	How big
Traps of the city	Walkways, scaffolds, shutters, signs, water tanks, fuel tanks, gas mains: things already hanging by little, and marked for anyone who looks, by a frayed cable, a cracked support, a warning sign	A survivor: a shot at the support, a pulled lever, an explosive set against it. Each works once a night, and whoever stands beneath it is Down	A few meters. Never a building. They are what Survival means when it calls the city the best weapon
Event collapses	ΜΝΗΜΗ's COLLAPSE (Objectives, Restrictions, and Events), and a way out moved by a rooftop collapsing or a tunnel caving in (The Extraction)	ΜΝΗΜΗ, through a cause already burning in the world: a fire that has spread for minutes, a gas main breached, a building a fight has already wounded	A street front, a stairwell, a tunnel, a roof. It falls on a place, never on a survivor picked out, after at least ten seconds of warning, and the world says so (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, Fifth Law)
Encounter collapses	The great collapses: a building brought down at the end of a fight with the Heavy	The fight itself, in a collapse site (below)	A whole building, or most of one

Collapse sites. A few buildings on each map are built to fall. They are places the city has already wounded: burning, cracked, shelled, leaning. A collapse site comes down only during a fight with the Heavy in it or on it, and only through stages:

Stage	What happens	What moves it to the next
Wounded	The site as it stands at the waking. Cracks, smoke, a lean	The Heavy fighting in it, or on it
Failing	Floors sag, the facade sheds, beams fall. Dust everywhere, a groan that does not stop. Every survivor in it hears and feels it	The fight going on: the Heavy's charges, its falls, every explosion against it
Falling	At least ten seconds of the building's last warning, then it comes down	Nothing: once it is falling, it falls

• The Heavy drives it. Explosions and the Heavy's own weight move a site from stage to stage. Survivors' explosives count only while the Heavy is in the site. A site with no Heavy in it is a building, and no survivor can bring it down.
• Always a way off. Every site is built with a way off for each floor that can be fought on: a fire escape, a neighboring roof, a stairwell that holds, a window over an awning. A survivor who moves at the start of the Falling warning reaches one.
• The fall. Anyone still inside the footprint of a site or of an event collapse when it comes down is Lost. A Heavy that is not named and is caught in it is put down for good. A named creature or an Apex rises from the wreckage, as their records say they rise from everything (The Extraction), and can still be killed only as Survival says (The Heavy).
• Where they never are. No collapse site stands where a beat happens, where a way out waits, where a safe room is, or on the only road to any of them. The places the records need stand until the end the records gave them.
• Moments. The fall of a site is the peak of an encounter. Survivors outside its footprint whose safe window holds may get a Grand Moment of it (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Moments).

The three greatest collapses in the game are not collapse sites. They are the ends of nights: the missile that falls on Raccoon City (The People of Raccoon City, 1998, The Last Morning), the blast that takes the island (The People of the Valley, 2004, The Island's End), and the fall of ARK, which takes the ruins above it (The People of the Ruins, 2026, ARK Falls). Nothing else in a night is as large.

By Map

• Raccoon City, 1998. A city still standing. Most of it is whole at the waking, and most breakage in a night is what the night itself does. Its breach points face the streets of every district, and its collapse sites are buildings the outbreak has already set burning.
• Raccoon City, Ruins, 2026. Twenty-eight years of rot. More of the city is Light, many of its doors are already gone, and its glass is mostly broken already. Its floors include weak floors, built into the map, that give way under a Heavy and drop it a storey, with any survivor standing beside it, who lands Down. Its collapse sites are many, because so much of it is already leaning.
• The Valley, 2004. Stone houses, barns, and a castle. The village is wood and stone. The plank walls of its barns and sheds are Sturdy, and its stone is Structure. The castle's walls are Structure throughout, and its breaches are few.

In the Night

ΜΝΗΜΗ runs only what she can check. She has watched walls break in the records thousands of times: a Tyrant through a garage wall, a creature through a floor, a building that came down on what was fighting in it. She rebuilds those exactly. A wall that breaks in some way no record holds would be a guess, and she does not guess. So her walls break only in the ways the records' walls broke, and only where she has built them to. The sleepers never notice that the walls are choosy. They only notice that something came through one.