Settlements

Founding and growing

A settlement begins where a lander comes down or a team decides to stay — and it begins as an outpost: a Field Station is granted with it, a field base rather than a settlement proper. The station has a few beds, room for a couple of hundred people and a shelf of stock, and only field-grade modules — relays, power, stores, a depot, a laboratory, water and mining rigs — stand beside it. Extending the station raises all of that; promoting the outpost to a camp turns the station into a Habitat in place, and from then on everything else gets built. Construction runs through a single slot per settlement — one project at a time, upgrades included — so a build queue is a statement of priorities, not a shopping list.

Structures can be raised in tiers. Upgrading occupies the same construction slot and improves the standing building in place; deciding between a second structure and a better one is a recurring dilemma.

The ground decides where a settlement can begin, never how much it may build. A founding needs a seat with connected buildable land around it — a coast of cliffs and open water refuses the landing outright, even on the blind first descent. After that, room is never a refusal: the town spreads over whatever ground can bear it, and each tier of the settlement runs a certain built-up area and a certain population without friction. Grow past either and every building but the core works slower, until the settlement is promoted or its core upgraded — the standing reason to climb the ladder rather than sprawl on one rung.

Housing — where the colony sleeps

Roofs come in two currencies. The population at large lives in bulk housing — the founding Habitat shelters the first thousands, a Housing Dome buys real room to grow, and a cheap Mass Housing Block roofs many more for little. Named characters sleep in beds: the habitat keeps a few cabins for the founding command, a dome holds a handful, and dedicated quarters such as Crew Bunks add beds without adding population room. A character with no bed sleeps in a corridor — and knows it. Housing is also only one of two ceilings on a settlement: the other is how many people the place can feed and keep breathing over the whole day–night cycle, and the panel always names the one that currently binds.

Every roof has three qualities. Comfort is what a resident is glad about: it lifts or drags satisfaction around the standard dome, and for the population it is one of the brakes on births — families in cramped blocks put children off. Well-being is how well people rest there: stress drains faster under a good roof and slower under a poor one. Safety is passive shelter against the planet — heat, poison and radiation held off by the shell — which thins the environment's weight on the people housed there and, for the population, keeps toxicity off its health. Better roofs sit behind research; the cheap ones are available from the start.

Beds are assigned automatically every turn — office holders first, then by respect and seniority — and a better bed pulls a resident in the turn it opens. You can also pin a person to a building by hand from their card; a hand-picked bed holds against the automatic pass, and a building whose beds are all held by hand simply reads full. Characters posted afield keep their bed at home while they are away.

Standing and tiers

Settlements themselves advance through a ladder of tiers as they grow — and advancement is deliberate: the settlement's head proposes it, you decide. The ladder opens with the outpost and continues with the camp; higher standing changes what the settlement can carry, from services to the number of people it can meaningfully absorb.

Upkeep is one rule for every rung — a staffed maintenance crew and the materials the standing estate costs, or decay — and every settlement keeps itself first. What a building asks for each month follows from what it was built from: a metal dome asks for metal, a mineral wall for mineral, so keeping the colony standing pulls on the same production chains that raised it, and the storage panel reads the shelf as time — how many months of upkeep it covers, with the tightest item named. Coverage is proportional, not all-or-nothing: a shelf holding part of the bill keeps part of the estate, repairs scale with what was paid and decay with what was not. The outpost is no exception, it only raises no depot: the field station carries its own small upkeep post, staffed from the outpost's people, and pays parts from its own shelf. What the outpost alone has is a fallback: when it cannot keep itself — nobody left on the post, or a dry shelf — the nearest full settlement within reach steps in, pays the parts, repairs the station and tops up its shelf every month, and the outposts in a settlement's care show up in that settlement's maintenance overview and roster, station by station, with the workload they add. A crew stretched thin reaches fewer of them. An outpost never breeds — it grows only by the people you bring.

The climb is generational past the camp. A rung is filled by teams actually working in the settlement's region — larger crews fill it faster; the first step out of the outpost is short, but each later rung is a commitment of years of sustained presence, the last ones a working lifetime. Where you concentrate your teams is therefore one of the longest-term choices the game asks of you.

The Habitat climbs a ladder of its own that mirrors the settlement's, and it can never outgrow the settlement it anchors. Each rung turns it further from living quarters into a colony operations center: it demands a markedly larger crew and draws more power than it returns — no rung above the first pays for itself — but it buys central storage, a stronger comm link and the command backbone. The operations crew matters beyond the core: an undermanned or dark operations center drags down the output of every workplace in the settlement, and the people feel it.

Population is also the budget behind your named characters: the larger the colony, the more individuals step out of the crowd with names, skills and histories of their own. Who a given settlement can actually offer, though, is decided by its age structure rather than its head count — the working-age and school-age cohorts, not everyone under its roofs.

Agglomeration — the ground a settlement grows into

A full settlement assembles its agglomeration deliberately. Only its own outposts join by themselves; a settlement of a lower rung joins when the player assigns it from the centre's panel — the list offers only the settlements that may join — and an assigned member can be released again at once. Empty ground is never assigned by hand: it joins the moment something works it — a farmland designated on it, a mine aimed at a deposit there, a well or a plant built for its source. The reach that bounds what can be assigned grows with the settlement's rung and chains through the members: every assigned settlement extends the agglomeration's potential with its own reach, and the map draws that potential boundary around the selected centre. An assigned settlement climbs higher when the commute is short and the corridor holds: a continuous road makes it a suburb, a continuous rail integrates it. The network is the lever — a laid line is never decoration — and every region belongs to one agglomeration at most: the cheaper commute wins, and a camp is absorbed only when the town assigns it, never silently. Care stays with the reach either way: an outpost or a mast in reach is served whether or not it was assigned.

A suburb lends the centre a share of its idle working-age hands: they commute to the centre's positions, but home always hires first, they never leave with a team and never count as present heads. An integrated member goes further — its supply zone and the centre's become one, stock counted together and consumption balanced as one while every unit stays bound to its own container. That sharing is the one deliberate exception to the rule that nothing exists "in general"; disease, mood and command keep to the physical zone. Isolating a member's container by hand opts it out of everything above the hinterland.

Levels are soft in time: a join or a raise lands at once, a drop waits a month per step, so a storm-torn line does not flap the map. The settlement panel shows every member with the reason it is not one level higher, the logistics lens draws the body as a graded halo, and the selected settlement's agglomeration shows without the lens. The price is administration — every held region weighs on the centre's books at its level, districts (the member regions that carry something of the colony — a settlement, a worked deposit or source, a relay mast) merely name what the weight carries: how much a centre holds without strain follows its mayor's leadership, its rung and its assigned member settlements (their own administration widens the capacity) — past that the centre's own work slows, and the attention queue says so.

The ground pays back. Every member lends the centre a share of its region's buildable ground, and the deeper the integration, the larger the share — the gift counts on the land's side of the centre's build budget, the settlement core still caps it, and the panel reads what each member lends. A swamped administration brings less of that gift home, which is the other edge of growing wide: more ground means more build room only while the books still carry it.

The centre may also work finds beyond its own region: a well, a mine position or a geothermal plant standing at the centre binds to a discovered find anywhere on the agglomeration's ground, the yield lands straight in the centre's stock, and the one price is distance — output falls with the travel from the centre to the find, so a road or a rail out to it raises what it gives. The binding dies with the membership, a month after the reach is lost, and the worked find makes its region a district. It is a choice against an outpost, not a replacement: no people, housing, life support or hauling, but a yield cut by distance and no presence out there. A member region's ground also counts as the centre's own for what a site offers — a shore in a member region lets the centre build at the water as if it stood there — and a town that grows across a region border reads that region as a second home, never a member. A settlement holds only the ground it actually stands on, never a whole region at once, so settlements founded close to each other grow together and interleave — only the ground the neighbour built on and its designated farmland stay closed.

Food goes further still: the centre may designate any number of member regions as its farmlands. The open-land buildings are dealt across them automatically, each working its own region's ground — the wild cover is cut and cultivated out there, growing in open soil follows the fertility of the land it tills (at home too), and the map lays the field parcels in each designated region, joined to the centre by an internal track. Distance cuts each building's yield the same way it cuts remote extraction, every worked farmland is a district, and a region that loses its membership releases its own designation a month later — the others stand.