Life support

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. How many people a place can carry is judged on what its production sustains across the whole day–night cycle, not on the balance of a single sunny hour — producers the grid cannot keep powered through the night feed no one, so a daytime surplus can still sit beside a lower carrying capacity.

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 Water 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.

The grid reads in watt-hours. Every producer states the energy it yields and every consumer the energy it draws over the turn you are about to play — a week, a month, a quarter or a year, and the label says which — so the two compare at a glance, and a colony is counted in thousands of people, which is why even its life support runs to megawatt-hours. A battery reads the energy it holds, the same figure in every era; when turns grow longer every flow steps up with them and the reserve stays what it was. How long a reserve lasts is told in game time.

The matter reads in real units too. Food, oxygen and every material are counted in tonnes, water in cubic meters, and every flow — what people consume, what a building yields, what a mine lifts — as what the running turn moves, so the figure on the tile is exactly what one press of End Turn does. The rates people consume at are real human rates, which is why a colony of thousands goes through tonnes of food a day: that many people do. Upkeep is charged the same way, turn by turn, never as a bill that lands once a month. A deposit reads on the very scale its mine draws on, so how long it will last is a division you can do in your head.

Growing food under lamps is by far the hungriest thing a settlement does — a Greenhouse out-draws every other life-support building. Where the ground lets you farm under the open sky, the same harvest costs a sliver of that power, and that difference is one of the things that makes two worlds play differently.

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 source states whether it renews: a renewable one never runs dry and only swings with its cycle or season, a finite one is drawn down for good, and its record reads the inflow the ground returns against the draw your rigs take, with how long a finite reserve lasts at that pace. 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.