Claiming a building

The grid is dead indoors as well as out. Walk into an empty building and its lights stay off. By day you get the gray light from the windows, and at night it's close to dark, so bring a flashlight. The places people still live run their own generators, so their rooms are lit.

Lighting a building

• Craft a Transfer Switch Kit at an electronics bench and set the switch down inside the building. Only one goes in each building.
• Set your generator down outside, then run a cable from it to the switch. An engine indoors fills the building with carbon monoxide, so you can't place one inside.
• Fuel the generator and pull the cord. While the switch has power, that building's own lights come on for everyone inside it, and only that building.
• A bigger building draws more: about 45 W a room, between 120 W and 900 W. A Small Generator carries most houses.
• Anything electric you set down inside draws through the walls, with no cable. Benches, lamps, a radio and a water pump all plug in. Throw the switch and they all go off.

Claiming it

• Set a Base Cupboard down inside and the building is your base. It uses the same list, permissions and upkeep as any other base.
• You can hold one claimed building, and a squad can hold one between all of you.
• To bolt one of its own doors, look at the door and pick Bolt this door into the base. You need the Doors permission, and a base can bolt six. After that the door takes a padlock and a keypad deadbolt like any door you built. See Storage and locks.
• Set your crates, beds and furniture down the way you would anywhere else.

Keeping it

• The cupboard's stock pays the upkeep, and the bolted doors and the switch go on the bill. Let it run dry and everything in the claim decays, the cupboard included. When the cupboard falls, the claim is gone and anyone can move in.
• The generator burns fuel for as long as the building draws power. When it runs dry, the lights go out.
• Nothing new turns up in a claimed building's cupboards. What you find when you move in is yours, and that's the end of it.
• A claimed building is raided like any base. Doors can be picked, cut or blown, the alarm and the Discord alert work the same, and a generator outside can be heard from a long way off.

You can't claim or wire a building in a safe zone or a Blackzone, in a place people already live, at a trader, at a boss's lair, or at a story site. If the cupboard or the switch won't go down, it will tell you why.