Life support
Four axes keep a settlement alive. Miss one and people start dying — at different speeds.
Four axes, four clocks
Every settlement consumes along four axes each turn: oxygen, water, food and energy. Each axis fails at its own speed — running out of air is a different emergency than running out of rations, and the game treats them that way. Exactly how fast a shortage kills is mission data you will learn the hard way.
Consumption scales with the people you are keeping alive. Growth is therefore never free: every recruit and every newborn is a standing claim against your production.
Baseline and buildings
The founding Habitat is the settlement core: it carries the survival baseline, the founding storage compartments and the comm link — enough to hold a small crew steady, never enough to grow on. That baseline is run by the habitat's own operations crew and modulated by the site, and it is critical infrastructure now: an unstaffed core dims the whole settlement, a ruined one takes the baseline and its stores down with it. Production structures like the Greenhouse and Surface Intake add output above the baseline; each survival axis has its own dedicated store — the Food Silo, Water Tank, Oxygen Tank and Battery Bank — raising the ceiling on how much of that axis you can hold in reserve.
Energy behaves differently from the other three: it is not matter. It cannot be hauled in a crate, and when it runs short, powered structures shed load. A Solar Array earns nothing at night — the day–night cycle is part of your power budget.
Water follows the place
How a settlement gets water depends on the world and on the region it stands in. Open water — a river, a lake, a coast — is tapped at the level of the region: a colony anywhere in a region the water reaches can run a surface intake, while a dry region offers nothing to pump. A river's yield follows the river itself — a strong lower course crossing the region carries far more than a headwater, and a channel that merely clips a corner may be too little to build on. Other methods tap a discovered local source, or work almost anywhere at a higher energy price. A method that saves one colony is physically impossible on another archetype — part of surveying a world is learning which of its taps exist at all.
Having water and knowing what is in it are two different things. The colony drinks from day one — the lander's kit is a basic disinfection step that makes any water drinkable in small volume — but it removes nothing, and the water's actual character stays unknown: the dossier's badge says only whether treatment will be needed, never what for. What is in the water is something you learn the hard way: people start complaining about the taste and the smell, health follows if nothing changes, and a short water-analysis research project finally names every contamination class at once — rivers and lakes roll their character separately from the sea, and even the sea's salt is a roll, so a drinkable ocean exists. Once the analysis names the problem, targeted treatment research removes it — and a tank found to be holding suspect water can be handed to industry instead of people. Untreated water is banked as its own commodity, never lost.