Survival and Settlement

You do not begin with a settlement. You begin with what you can carry, what you can remember, and enough time to find somewhere to sleep.

Founding from nothing

Before a settlement can track food days or water days, you must choose a site and establish the first shelter. A good site has access to water, defensible ground, salvage or fuel, and room to grow. It will never have all four without a cost.

Once you choose a site, record its first shelter, immediate water source, food source, and boundary. These are not free improvements. They are the first promises you make to anyone who may join you. The settlement's population begins at one. Every new person must be met, persuaded, traded with, rescued, or otherwise given a reason to stay.

The daily pressure

Every settlement tracks food days and water days. Reduce the relevant total when the community consumes supplies. A number is not a promise: spoiled food, contamination, theft, weather, and population changes can alter it. When a reserve reaches 0, the settlement is in crisis.

At the start of each settlement turn, choose the most urgent pressure or use the settlement's current needs. Common pressures include shortage, exposure, illness, conflict, and opportunity. Use the current fiction rather than a random table whenever possible.

Projects

A project is a visible promise: safe water, a defensible room, a clinic, a workshop, a garden, or a road. Projects require labor and materials. Assign people, record labor spent, and describe what changes when the work is complete. A project may be paused, redirected, or abandoned; spent materials do not automatically return.

Projects are not upgrades on a menu. They change who can live here, what risks are acceptable, and which people gain influence. A fortified loading bay may keep raiders out while making the settlement look worth raiding.

Conditions and scarcity

Track what matters, not every mouthful. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, fear, injury, and illness should be recorded when they affect decisions. Give a condition a clear fictional consequence before applying a mechanical penalty. When the group lacks a tool, substitute time, labor, or ingenuity if that makes sense. Extreme survival is about tradeoffs, not forbidding creativity.