Raids and death

Raid sites are where the best loot is, and the most danger. A site stands in the open world as a group of fenced buildings. Walk up to one of its gates and go in: the inside is bigger than it looks from outside, and each gate lets you in on its own side of the site.

Site types

Every site on earth is one of nine types, the planet has two types of its own, the abandoned colony and the source, and the rift one, the lost expedition. The “share” is how many of a world’s sites are that type; the length factor scales the raid timer (see below). Which loot each type holds is on the loot page, and what the planet and the rift give that earth does not is under rift and planet materials.

Type	What it is	Share	Raid length
Town	A fenced compound of houses, a shop and a big central hall, with car wrecks and crate stacks for cover. About 3 × 3 chunks.	23.5%	1×
Industrial park	A few big warehouses on lots with yards between them: fewer, emptier buildings, full of materials and tools. About 4 × 4 chunks.	17.6%	1.2×
Police station	One corridor building with offices and cells and an armoury deep inside, a fenced car park and an outbuilding or two. About 2 × 2 chunks.	11.8%	0.75×
Hospital	Two wings of wards along a corridor, a pharmacy deep inside, a car park and small outbuildings. About 2 × 2 chunks.	11.8%	0.75×
Military bunker	A small fenced yard with a guard hut on the surface, and hatches down to dark concrete corridors cut into rock. Most loot is below, so you go down and must come back up. About 2 × 2 chunks on top, 3 × 3 below.	5.9%	1.2×
Lab	A fenced research campus: one corridor building of a reception, offices, labs and clean rooms, a car park, and a stairwell down to a dark containment level of sealed labs and specimen rooms, with the containment chamber deep inside, where most of the loot is, and beside it a block of numbered containment cells, some still sealed and some breached. A few sealed rooms break the rules, each with a warning plate by its door: one eats the light, one shifts its gravity, one has a door that leads into another room, one opens into a hall far bigger than its walls, one lets no sound in or out, one is so cold that no fire or heater warms you in it, one is upside down, its loot hanging overhead and your steps mirrored, in one the ghosts of earlier visitors walk their old paths again, your own among them, with something real hidden in their midst, and one is full of still figures whose heads turn to follow you while your mind slips. Benches and fume hoods fill the labs, specimen tanks and cryo pods stand below, and the Threshold Institute’s signs stand at the gates and in the reception. About 2 × 2 chunks on top, 3 × 3 below.	5.9%	1×
Space station / launch site	A fenced launch complex: a rocket on its launch pad beside the gantry on a big concrete apron, with the crawler parked nearby; radar dishes outside; mission control with its consoles, wall screens and crew quarters with suit racks; an assembly hangar with rocket stages, engines and cranes; fuel tank farms, and a road joining them, with long sight lines over the apron. About 4 × 4 chunks.	5.9%	1.2×
Airport	A fenced airfield held by the military: a runway and a taxiway with long sight lines, a concrete apron with aircraft wrecks and vehicles for cover, a terminal with its check-in hall, security, gate lounges and shops, one or two hangars, the control tower, and a checkpoint at the gate. Fuel trucks stand among the wrecks on the apron and a jet bridge by the terminal; check-in counters, baggage belts, scanners and rows of seats fill the terminal, and the military’s trucks stand in the hangars, its tents in the yard and its sandbagged checkpoint posts by the fence gaps. About 4 × 4 chunks.	11.8%	1.2×
Nuclear power plant	A fenced power plant: the reactor building with its thick walls and the containment hall deep inside, the turbine hall with its turbines in a row, the control building with the control room, offices, lockers and the decontamination room, two huge round cooling towers and the switchyard of transformers. Turbines and generators stand in turn along the turbine hall, the reactor vessel in the middle of the containment hall, control panels in the control room, lead-lined lockers and decontamination showers in the control building, transformers and pylons in the switchyard, a pump house beside each cooling tower, and waste barrels and radiation signs in the yard. About 4 × 4 chunks.	5.9%	1.2×
Abandoned colony	On the planet only: the outpost of the people who came here first, fenced on the dust. Two or three round domes stand in a row, joined by enclosed corridors; each dome has a hall in its middle with rooms above and below it, one sealed room that keeps its own air, and an airlock as its only door outside. One dome is the lab. Below the first dome stands the hangar, joined to it by a corridor, with workshops and store rooms at its far end and its big door onto a concrete landing pad. About 4 × 4 chunks.	on the planet only	1.2×
Lost expedition	In the rift only: the camp of the Threshold Institute’s own team, who went into the rift before containment broke and never came out, fenced on the rift’s pale soil. A broken copy of the lab’s building stands in the middle of the yard, its walls breached and its floors strewn with rubble, fallen roofs and beams, ringed by a path and by four or five of the team’s huts: the command post, the shelters where they slept, the supply depot and a field lab. The copy’s stairwell leads down to a deeper level, the lab’s sealed level copied and broken: sealed labs and specimen rooms off one corridor, some of which break the rules as the lab’s do, and at its far end, behind an anteroom, the last stand, the deepest room, where the team made its stand. The rift’s own creatures guard it: rift stalkers and brutes wait below with an echo, a shade and a growth, more stalkers at night, when stalkers also roam the camp; in many camps a warden, a mirror, cache mimics and shard swarms keep to the yard. A few of the team who turned are left among them. About 3 × 3 chunks on top, 3 × 3 below.	in the rift only	1.2×
The source	On the planet only, and only one: the place the pollution came from, a crater far out on the dust, as far from the landed rocket as it fits, where the colony’s survey crew found it. Their fenced dig camp stands on the crater’s regolith floor: four or five huts round the walled ring of the hive mouth, a survey office, bunk huts, a store hut and a sealed lab hut that keeps its air, the one place there to refill your oxygen. The descent through the mouth leads down into the hive: a tunnel from room to room, growth chambers and brood chambers off it, and at its far end the heart chamber, the deepest room, where the heart lies. The hardest roster in the game guards it: skitter packs, a spitter and burrowers in the crater by day, more skitters and two drifters at night, and skitter packs, spitters and a burrower or two in the hive, with a few of the survey crew who turned. The camp holds the colony’s tools and stores, the hive’s chambers its sample crates, and the heart chamber nothing. About 3 × 3 chunks on top, 3 × 3 below.	on the planet only, one	1.2×

Containers are filled anew on every visit, and the zombies are back. Deeper rooms (further from the doors) pay better. The site only remembers what you left there: your bodies, caches and dropped items.

The raid timer

Each visit rolls a raid type, which sets how long you have. The site type stretches or shortens it:

Raid type	Chance	Town	Industrial park	Police station	Hospital	Military bunker	Lab	Space station / launch site	Airport	Nuclear power plant	Abandoned colony	Lost expedition	The source
Scavenge run	50%	15 min	18 min	11 min 15 s	11 min 15 s	18 min	15 min	18 min	18 min	18 min	18 min	18 min	18 min
Quick raid	33.3%	8 min	9 min 36 s	6 min	6 min	9 min 36 s	8 min	9 min 36 s	9 min 36 s	9 min 36 s	9 min 36 s	9 min 36 s	9 min 36 s
Deep raid	16.7%	25 min	30 min	18 min 45 s	18 min 45 s	30 min	25 min	30 min	30 min	30 min	30 min	30 min	30 min

The timer is in real minutes.

Extraction

You can leave whenever you like, but only through an extraction point. Stand in one for 5 seconds to get out with everything you carry. You come out at the gate on that side of the site. Once you have used an extraction, the site’s map remembers it; a Site Plan shows them all (see the map).

Missing in action

If the timer runs out you are missing in action: everything you carried is left in a cache where you stood, and you are back home without it. Quitting in the middle of a raid counts the same, with a cache at the spot where you came in holding what you brought.

Enemies

Zombies stand at spawn points around the site; the numbers below are per spawn point, rising from the day number to the night number as night falls. Underground in a bunker it is always night. Soldiers come in squads. See wounds and armour for what their armour means.

Site	Zombies per spot (day)	Zombies per spot (night)	Most zombies	Armoured zombies	Soldiers
Town	0–1	1–3	16	No	Raiders: 0–1 squads by day, 1–2 squads at night, 2–3 each (rifleman or close quarters); at most 6
Industrial park	0–1	1–3	22	No	Raiders: 1 squad by day, 1–2 squads at night, 2–3 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 8
Police station	0–1	1–3	10	No	Military: 1–2 squads by day, 1 squad at night, 2–3 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 8
Hospital	0–1	1–3	12	No	Raiders: 0–1 squads by day, 0–1 squads at night, 2 each (rifleman or close quarters); at most 2
Military bunker	2–3	3–5	32	100% wear Helmet and Body Armour	Military: 1–2 squads by day, 1–2 squads at night, 2–4 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 10
Lab	0–1	1–2	14	No	Raiders: 0–1 squads by day, 0–1 squads at night, 2–3 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 8
Space station / launch site	0–1	1–2	12	No	Raiders: 0–1 squads by day, 0–1 squads at night, 2–3 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 8
Airport	2–3	3–5	20	No	Military: 3 squads by day, 3–4 squads at night, 2–4 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 14
Nuclear power plant	0–1	1–2	12	No	Raiders: 0–1 squads by day, 0–1 squads at night, 2–3 each (rifleman, close quarters or heavy); at most 8
Abandoned colony	0–1	0–1	6	No	None
Lost expedition	0–1	0–1	6	No	None
The source	0–1	0–1	4	No	None

Calling the helicopter

To go home from the open world, throw a Smoke Grenade (up to 10 tiles away) or stand on an unlocked landing pad and press Interact, which is free. The helicopter arrives after 60 seconds, and the wait is loud:

• The smoke can be heard 18.8 tiles away from the moment it lands.
• Over the last 15 seconds the rotor can be heard 50 tiles away, so zombies trickle in and then come in a wave.
• Once landed it waits 30 seconds. If you are not aboard by then it leaves, and you need another smoke or a pad.

The helicopter cannot land inside a raid site: walk out through an extraction first.

Death

Dying loses everything you carry, but nothing is deleted: your body stays where you fell, holding all of it, and you wake up at home. Go back and take it.

Where you die	You wake	Your body decays
In a raid site	At home	One stage per raid you run anywhere
In the open world	At home at 06:00 the next morning, at least 6 in-game hours later	One stage per in-game day
At sea in a boat	At home, like the open world	Your items go into the boat’s hold; see travel

• A body goes Fresh → Decaying → Rotten → gone. The stage shows on the body and on the map. The items stay whole until it is gone, so in a raid site a body lasts three raids.
• Several bodies can exist at once. The map marks the sites and places that hold your bodies and caches, but inside a site you must remember where you fell.
• People can loot your body. Between visits a body may be picked over (a chance each in-game day out in the world, each raid at a site): someone has taken the most valuable things that fit in their pack and left the rest, and the body’s name says so.
• Items you drop on purpose never decay, at home, in the world or at a site, so you can build up caches.