Survival Guide - Dust Settles: Non-Consumable

Table of Contents:

Purpose:

In this game you have multiple types of resources. There are your basic resources that you will be to find and/or produce through different buildings and exchange through the Neutral Exchange Camp features. There are your people, which are one of your most powerful, necessary resources. Then you have CEP, the money for this post-apocalyptic world. Finally you have those "other" resources that are very important, but generally not tradable or obtainable through multiple means. These resources are varied and some are easily overlooked as a resource, yet each one is very important to help your camp grow and become more self-sufficient as you go along.

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Land:

Land is extremely important for your camp. In order to grow and expand beyond a few buildings, you will have to explore for more. Land also acts as a limiter for your recruiting and exploration returns, thus you must keep a decent amount as you grow to maximize your possible returns. Your land totals, both overall total and total available, can be seen on the top bar at the top of your game screen.

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Uses:

The only real use for land is for construction of buildings that your camp needs. If you do not have enough land, you cannot build the buildings that you want/need. You will get the land back when you demolish your buildings, but this will only provide so much if the buildings you want to build take more land than the ones you just demolished. You will also need plenty of land to maximize your exploration and recruiting returns since your people, no matter how many are sent, can only travel so far from the edges of your camp in a single day.

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Production:

The only way to "produce" land is through exploration. As you explore, you will gain some land, whether you are searching specifically for land or not. You will get better returns if you are searching specifically for land, though. If any of your nukes are destroyed by cruise missiles, the 500 units of land that the nuke was formerly sitting on will be unusable due to the radiation that will leak from the nuclear rocket.

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Deficits:

If you do not have enough land, you will not be able to build the buildings you want to. You will receive a warning when you attempt to put it in the queue that you are lacking either the needed building supplies or land required to build the buildings you just attempted to assign for production. If you receive this warning you can either assign that construction order later, or if the order is essential (say a few needed comm relays) you can cancel other construction orders in the queue or demolish a few buildings that aren't needed as desperately until you can explore for the extra land.

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Limiting Factors:

When you go out in search for land, your current amount of land will limit how much you can find. No matter how many people are sent out on any exploration mission, they will only be able to cover so much land in the assigned time. If you have more land for these people to start from, then they can spread out more and cover a larger area, thus allowing for more return. You must also watch your land totals to make sure that you are not approaching or exceeding your communications range. If your land total exceeds your comm range, then you will lose explorers and recruiters when you send them out.

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Shelter:

In order to keep people in your camp, you must have a place for them to sleep. Shelter is an important resource for helping your population to grow. You can send out as many recruiting missions as you want, but if you don't have at least some available shelter, you will be unable to bring any back. You can keep track of your total and available shelter on the top bar.

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Uses:

Shelters are used only to house your people and to provide them another place to hide in the event of an attack breaching your camp's defenses. If you do not have any extra shelter you cannot add more people to your camp. If there is even a single person in a shelter, you cannot demolish it. You will want to keep plenty of extra shelter space around your camp for both the people you bring back from recruiting missions and for the occasional random group of people who might wander into your camp if you can house them.

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Production:

You will construct new shelters for your people through the Construct page. At the beginning of the game the only building that you will start with is a single shelter level 1. Before you have the ability to produce your own disposables you will probably want to stick to shelter 1s and 2s to house the people in your camp. These are very to mildly flimsy shelters that will basically provide your people a place to sleep at night and get out of the elements. If you want something more substantial and can afford the daily costs, you will want to construct some shelter level 3s. Each increase in shelter level also has an associated space increase, thus shelter 2s hold more people than shelter 1s and shelter 3s hold more than both of the other two. As long as you have the land and building supplies required, you can build as many shelters as you want, just remember the daily disposable costs associated with shelter 3s and the winter building supply costs for all shelters.

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Improvements:

You can increase the number of people each shelter can hold by researching Housing. Each level of increase in your Housing research will provide you an increase in total shelter. Take for example the shelter 1 that you start with. Instead of starting with 5 total shelter, you actually start with 6 since your Housing research starts at 1. You can eventually double your shelter space and continue increasing it slightly until you achieve a mastery in Housing if you chose to. At mastery level, your shelter space will double again due to the fact that each of your shelters will have an underground shelter associated with it. This will also allow your people a better hiding place when an army attacks you, thus providing you an extra defense if the attacking army breaches your defenses. You will also be able to overcome the winter building supply costs by opening nuclear heating through your advanced research.

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Deficits:

If you do not have enough shelter, you will not be able to add people to your camp, through any means. You will never be able to go negative in shelter, even if you want to demolish shelters. You cannot demolish any shelter that has even 1 person in it, thus you will have to demolish some other building if you need the land or supplies, or build other shelters if you are trying to replace the shelters you currently have. If you do not have the extra space available to house every single person in a group of wandering survivors, then none of those people will stay.

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Limiting Factors:

Your main limiting factor on shelters will be the ability to afford the costs associated with building and keeping them. This includes land and supplies needed for construction and the daily disposable costs associated with shelter 3s. In the winter, each shelter that you have will require 1 building supply to help keep your people warm. All of the supplies that you have in storage will be used to cover this cost if necessary. This means that until you can store more than enough to cover your shelter costs, you will be unable to build any more buildings, weapons, or run your supply dependent generators.

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Turns:

Your turns are an extremely important resource that you must use wisely. You will only have a limited number of extra turns in any round, and since turns are used to progress the game forward for your camp, you will want to make the most of each one. You will have the ability to store turns, but only to a certain extent. Overall the way you utilize each turn you have can make or break your game during any given round.

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Uses:

Turns are used to progress your game forward. Each time you set an exploration group, an attack, or a construction queue you will have to end a turn to have those orders completed. In order to complete anything in the game other than certain exchanges, an attack on your camp, or sending messages in-game, you will have to end turns and use them. If you do not use the turns that you have, you will lose anymore that you could gain.

At the beginning of the game you will only be able to end one turn at a time. Later on you will be able to end up to 5 at a time.

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Production:

You will gain a new turn in the game every 10 real-time minutes. If you already have 400 turns stored when the 10 minutes have passed, the extra turn will be lost, just as extra food would be lost if your food storage was at 100%. You will gain an extra 100 turns and a boost in your turn storage capacity if you master Time Management.

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Improvements:

You can increase your total turn storage space to 500 max. if you get a mastery in Time Management. You will also be given an extra 100 turns to take you closer to the 500 that you can store. You can also increase the number of turns that you can end at once by researching Time Management to at least 5.

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Deficits:

When you run out of turns, the only way you will be able to really build them back up is to allow time to pass. You can log out and log back in later to use the ones that have accumulated over that period or you can play around in the forums, chat, or mini-game to waste some time until you have stored a couple of extra turns. You will only get 6 new turns in an hour though, so it may take a good deal of time to rack those turns back up.

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Limiting Factors:

If at any time you have 400 stored turns, you will not be able to have any more added to your storage. If you happen to have a Time Management mastery your limit will be 500.

Unless you have done adequate research, you will be able to end only 1 turn at a time.

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Power:

As you progress through your research, you will eventually open the ability to begin producing power. Though you will start with only small generators that can power a single building. You will eventually be able to power multiple buildings with a single generator or even a nuclear reactor. You will be able to keep track of your power production/usage details on the main page in the lower left Infrastructure column or by looking on the Infrastructure page.

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Uses:

Power will be used to run many of the buildings that you will open later in the game including comm relays, classrooms, and advanced labs. These buildings cannot produce the benefit they would normally give your camp if they do not remain powered once built. Power will be used for everything from helping to produce building supplies to helping to keep your camp safe at night.

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Production:

The power your camp uses will be produced through your generators. You will start with small generators once you have completed the appropriate research. As you research more, you will open the ability to build large generators which will produce more power for your camp. These will be followed by gas generators, the most efficient of your primary resource using generators. Once you have completed enough advanced research you will open the ability to build nuclear reactors which will provide you the most power possible from a single source.

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Improvements:

You can improve the power output of your generators by researching Power Generation. You will open your small generators initially by researching Architecture and Ingenuity. The other generators will be opened by higher Power Generation research. You will open the ability to build nuclear reactors by researching the fission topics in your advanced labs. Once you can build them, you will set people to construct them through the Nuke Factory page.

If you or someone in your alliance masters Power Generation, you will have unlimited power.

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Deficits:

If you ever run into a power deficit, your buildings will begin to shut down as necessary starting with classrooms and light posts. If the deficit is high enough, your factories and comm relays may be affected. You will be unable to turn these buildings back on until you have enough power to run them. You will also not get any of the benefit that the buildings would normally produce if you do not have enough power to run them.

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Limiting Factors:

The main limitation you will run into with power is affording the construction costs and daily costs of keeping your generators running. You will have no other construction limitations on building generators.

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