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, a shelf of stock and a handful of pads beside it, and only field-grade modules — relays, power, stores, a depot, a laboratory, water and mining rigs — stand on those pads. 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 itself sets a limit: the terrain around a settlement — flat land, slopes, water — decides how much can be built there at all, and every structure claims its share of that space. Cramped or rugged sites fill up sooner, and even a ruin keeps standing on its ground. As the settlement advances through its tiers its footprint widens, and the buildable space grows with it.

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 Habitation Dome buys real room to grow, and a cheap Habitation 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.

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.