Camp and bases

A fire is where you catch your breath. Look at a lit fire and choose Sit by the fire. You heal slowly, your stamina comes back, and the camp panel opens: tend the fire, cook (see Fires and cooking), listen to the radio, plan a route, check the stores, or sit with a companion. Any movement key gets you up.

Sleep

Sleep in a bed, a sofa or a bedroll of your own or your squad's. You sleep better under a roof, when you're warm and dry, and inside your own base. Six hours of good sleep wakes you rested for an hour. See Sleep and exhaustion.

Planning a route

From the camp panel, choose up to five stops: places you know, your bases, radio intel you pinned, or a spot you mark on the map. You'll see the distance and time for each, and anything you heard on the radio near it. Set out draws one route with numbered pins.

Building

Use a building kit from your inventory to see a ghost of the piece, then place it. The controls, the house pieces and how they stand up to a raid are in Building a house, and power, doors and furniture in Power, doors and furniture. You can't build in or near safe zones or story areas.

Claiming a base

A Base Cupboard claims the ground around it, and only people on its list can build there. The list doesn't open your containers or doors: their locks do (see Storage and locks). Keep its stash stocked with materials and nothing in the claim decays. Frame pieces go from timber to stonework to sheet metal with a hammer, and each grade takes much more punishment (see Building on the frame).

Raids and hordes

• Other players can raid your base at any hour, even while everyone on its list is offline. Everyone on the list who is online is warned the moment a raid starts, and nobody can build in the claim or change the list until ten minutes after the last hit.
• A powered, switched-on Base Radio also messages everyone on the list on Discord, online or not: once when the raid starts, saying what's being hit, and once when it goes quiet, with what it cost. No power, no message. Turn your own alerts off or on at the cupboard, under Access.
• Pressure Mines go in the ground only inside a claim whose cupboard lists you, six to a claim. Your base's people see where they are; nobody else does. Anything that steps on one sets it off, including you and the dead, and so does a wheel. A Mine Probe finds them, and with Wire Cutters you can disarm one by feel: lean too hard and you press the plate.
• Factions may steal from your stores while you're away, but they never damage what you've built.
• Hordes come to bases that are big, loud and lit up at night. A powered Base Radio gives everyone a minute's warning.
• A Ward Chime keeps the dead from wandering up inside its range. It doesn't stop a horde.

Things go wrong

Generators stall and breakers trip, rain shorts the wiring, barrels leak, rats get into the food, something scratches at the weakest wall, and sometimes a stranger waits at the gate. The cupboard lists what needs doing and on which side of the base it is.