Camp Life Guide

What the camp needs every night

When you sleep, the Morning Report runs one night for the whole camp. Everyone who lives with you counts as a mouth: your idle survivors, every survivor on a work team, and your prisoners and pit laborers. Mercenaries and Dr. Maya do not count.

Supplies are taken from your Storage first and from your pack second. The Morning Report shows exactly what was used, and warns you when tomorrow night will not be covered.

Cooks and the Field Kitchen

Raw meat, raw fish and berries go further once they are cooked. Put survivors on the Field Kitchen card in the Labor terminal and each one cooks a batch for you every night.

• The best recipe goes first: raw meat, then raw fish, then berries. Ingredients come from your Storage first and from your pack second.
• The cooking happens in the Morning Report, before the camp eats, so the new Food is on the table the same night.
• Cooks eat from the pots, so they take no Food from your stock. They still drink water and count for firewood.
• Your camp morale changes how many batches the cooks get through. The card shows how much raw meat, fish and berries you have, and the Morning Report says so when there is nothing to cook.

Camp morale

Morale is a number from 0 to 100 and starts at 50. You see it in the panel at the top of the Camp screen. It changes how much your camp produces:

The effect applies to everything your work teams produce in the Morning Report. Sick and wounded survivors cut it further: the larger share of your workers is unwell, the less the camp makes, down to half at the worst.

What raises and lowers morale

Only survivors forced to fight cost morale. Bandits, raiders and Reptilians are not people the camp feels sorry for, so selling or working them costs nothing. Grom marks which prisoners are which once he has questioned them.

Sickness and injuries

• Illness. Each survivor who lives free in the camp has about a 4% chance of falling ill every night. Water or firewood shortages and morale below 30 raise it by half. High morale lowers it.
• Treatment. One sick survivor costs 1 Medicine. With no Medicine, 2 Medical Herbs do the same. It happens automatically at night, from Storage first and from your pack second.
• Injuries. About 3% of survivors get hurt each night. Wall guards and hunters get hurt twice as often, and ammo workers one and a half times as often. One bandage costs 2 Cloth.
• Untreated. A sick or wounded survivor with nothing to treat them stays that way and costs morale every night. The more of them, the bigger the loss.

Why survivors leave

• Starving or thirsty. After two nights in a row without enough food, or without enough water, one survivor leaves, and every night after that costs you another.
• Sick and untreated. A survivor who has been sick for two nights with no medicine leaves so the others will not catch it.
• No morale. Below 15 morale there is a 50% chance each night that a survivor deserts.

Each survivor who deserts costs 5 more morale, and a sick survivor who leaves costs 6. The idle survivors go first, then the biggest work team. Pit laborers and prisoners do not desert.

Keeping the camp stable

1. Keep at least a few days of Food, Water and Wood in Storage before you travel. The pack counts, but Storage is safer.
2. Count your mouths before you capture prisoners: every one eats and drinks like a survivor.
3. Stock Medicine and Cloth before a storm or a long trip. Herbs are a cheap backup for illness.
4. Check the weather: a storm or a Rad-Storm doubles the wood the furnaces burn.
5. Do good deeds when morale is low. Saving a survivor or repelling a raid is worth more than one fed night.
6. If morale falls below 20, fix food, water and wood first. Output and desertion both depend on it.

See also the Base Building guide for the buildings that feed your camp and the Economy guide for every resource.

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