Resources and logistics
There is no global stockpile. Everything you own sits somewhere, and moving it is the game.
No global pool
Every unit of stock the colony owns is bound to a concrete container — a settlement, the ship, a vehicle, a team in the field. Nothing exists "in general". Accounting becomes a spatial problem: it never just matters how much you have, it matters where it lies.
Ore stockpiled in a region you abandoned is not wealth, it is a memory. Supplies aboard the dying ship are a bet against the clock.
The one deliberate stretch of the rule is local and derived: containers standing together — a team docked at its settlement, buildings inside a footprint — count their stock together and balance consumption as one, and a settlement fully integrated into a neighbour's agglomeration over a continuous rail joins that shared supply zone. Even then every unit stays bound to its own container; there is still no warehouse "in general", only neighbours covering each other.
Stores follow the matter
A settlement has no single warehouse number. Solid, liquid and gaseous materials each live against their own ceiling, and that ceiling is built: the Habitat carries the central solid stock, a Materials Warehouse extends it, liquids demand a Liquid Storage Tank and gases a Gas Storage Tank. A phase you have no vessel for is refused outright — processing that changes a material's state of matter also changes where it can be kept.
People are not freight. The population lives in housing — the habitat shelters the founding crew and a Housing Dome buys real room to grow — and a colony with full stores but no free roofs simply stops growing. Overcrowding never kills; it stalls.
Moving stock is a gameplay layer
Because stock is local, transfers between containers are deliberate work: loading a vehicle, dispatching a team, routing between settlements. Distance, terrain and infrastructure decide what a route costs you in time and risk.
A field order is bounded by what the team carries: a crew can only be sent as far as its own hold will keep it alive, and an order beyond that endurance is refused outright — the map reads it as beyond reach before you commit. Reaching farther ground means loading the hold deliberately, or staging through settlements that refill the crew along the way. Walking home to resupply is always allowed.
Mobile holds split the same way: passengers ride against seats, freight against the cargo hold — and bulky matter costs more room on the road, a liquid more than a solid, a gas most of all. Built infrastructure raises the throughput of ground you use often. Investing in a corridor between two settlements is as much a strategic decision as founding either of them was.
Vehicles are not immortal freight either. A hull out with a unit, or parked at a settlement with no bay of its kind, wears in the weather — faster on a corrosive world, sharply in a storm, and at a pace set by what the hull is built of: a hard, inert material endures, a reactive one corrodes where the planet’s chemistry bites, a low-melting one softens on hot worlds — and its speed, payload, terrain handling and sealed cab fall with its condition until a wreck, on land, pins its unit where it stands — the crew abandons the dead machine and walks on, recovering nothing; on open water the hull still floats and carries them home. A Vehicle Garage shelters the wheeled fleet; a hull standing in a bay holds together, and while the Manufacturing Workshop is staffed it is mended there, drawing a share of what it is built of from the store. Every ride card and gear row says where the hull stands, and a settlement leaving vehicles outside is named in the attention queue.
The landscape offers one corridor for free: a navigable river. The strong stretch of a great river works as ready-made transport from the first day — no research, no construction, no upkeep — and outperforms anything you can build. The current sets the pace: the same route runs faster downstream than upstream, so which bank you settle and which way your goods flow becomes part of the plan. A navigable stretch carries real boats too — but only coastal, shallow-draft hulls: a workboat can sail a great river between an inland lake and the sea, while a deep-water ship never enters the river at all. Your crews never lay roads or rail along a navigable stretch; units simply take the river whenever it is the quicker way. The same principle holds across the built network: a build order only follows infrastructure it would ride for free, so a road crew plans as if a neighbouring rail were not there and lays its own direct line.