Base building

Your home region is your own map: safe for the most part, fully saved, and the only place you can build, keep a stash and grow food. It can still be attacked at night (see raids on your base).

Building

• Press B for build mode and pick a piece from the menu. A ghost of the piece follows the cursor on the tile grid: green where it fits, red where it does not. R turns doors and pieces bigger than one tile.
• You need a Hammer in hand to place, repair or remove a piece. A piece goes up over a few swings.
• Pieces go within 6 tiles of you, never on the trail, the exit or yourself.
• Materials come from what you carry and from the stash.
• Removing an undamaged piece gives all its materials back; a damaged one gives half. A piece broken in a raid leaves a quarter of its materials as debris.
• A closed room with a floor counts as shelter: it keeps the weather off and holds your body temperature up. The open yard is as cold as outside.

Every piece, its cost and how it is learned: building pieces.

Power

A generator burns fuel and feeds the wires laid from it. Lamps, the air filter, the turret and the charger on that network share its output. Without fuel everything on it goes dark; the crystal generator, built from the far worlds’ materials, needs no fuel at all. If you plug in more than the generator supplies, its breaker trips: take some loads off and press E at the generator to reset it.

The stash

The stash is your storage at home, reachable only there. A new game’s stash is 10 × 10 cells. Two upgrades grow it by 10 rows each, to 10 × 30. Crates and lockers you build add more room.

Upgrade	Size after	Materials
Level 1	10 × 20	20 × Plank, 12 × Nails, 4 × Scrap Metal
Level 2	10 × 30	40 × Plank, 30 × Nails, 12 × Scrap Metal, 4 × Iron Ingot

Fires and light

Fires warm the air around them (up to 24 °C felt) and dry wet clothes faster. Put a fire out with E; its fuel is kept. Adding fuel uses wood and planks before coal and charcoal, so coal is saved for smelting.

Fire	Warmth	Reach	Light	One wood log lasts
Campfire	+14 °C	3 tiles	6.3 tiles	40 min game time
Stove	+12 °C	4 tiles	3 tiles	1.1 h game time
Wall torch	+3 °C	1.5 tiles	5.5 tiles	3.3 h game time

A campfire burns all the time it holds fuel; a wall torch only at night. A Campfire Kit lays a campfire anywhere in the open world; it burns for 4 h of game time and its ashes stay for 24 h.

Sleeping

	Bed (at home)	Bedroll (anywhere)
Wakes you at	7:00	7:00
Longest sleep	8 h	8 h
Hunger and thirst while asleep	50%	70%
Healing while asleep	× 3	× 1.5
Woken by enemies within	a horde at the base	8 tiles

Sleeping in a bed saves the game. A Bedroll can be laid out in the open world, but roaming zombies can wake you.

Water and food

• A water collector gathers 4 litres of clean water a day (up to 8 litres). Fill bottles and the canteen from it.
• Planters grow berries and mushrooms from seeds and spores; they need water and wither in polluted air. See pollution.
• Cook at a campfire or stove; see crafting.