Survival Guide - Dust Settles: Recruiting

Table of Contents:

Purpose:

This game is set on a day to day time scale. That means that even if survivors get pregnant and have children, there would be no time for them to grow and become workers. So except for the occasional random people wandering in the only way to expand your camp is to actively look for survivors. There are a lot, but the total number is not infinite. It is the end of the world, there are only so many you can find.

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Sending Recruiters:

You will send out groups of recruiters through the Recruit page. On this page you will see some basic messages about the total number of people you have available to be sent out at one time. You can only send out as many people as you have free at any given time. At the beginning of the game, you will want to stick to small numbers because you will pretty much always find at least one person if you send one person searching. As you progress, you will want to send out more people in order to better your chances. Returns from recruiting missions will always be random, but more people sent will generally mean more returns. There are limits, though, to how effective a search mission with a large number of people can be. Sending buses will help increase your returns.

In order to actually send out a group of recruiters, you will type in the number of people you want to send in the text box, select the number of days you want to send them searching, and then click "now." This will give the people in your camp their recruiting orders and will set it in a queue of things to be accomplished when you end the day by ending a turn.

Once you have set a group of recruiters to search, you can cancel that order and disband the search party at any time before you end the turn. If the group has been sent out for multiple days, you will only be able to cancel the search before ending the first turn.

After you have ended the turn, your results from the recruiting mission will be displayed with the End Turn results at the top of the page in yellow with more details in the orange box.

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Population Sent:

The number of people you send recruiting must be entered manually by typing the number in the text box (or accepting the maximum number that will be entered automatically) and clicking now. Once you have set up a group to search, you will receive a basic message telling you how many people you are sending out in that search. These people will be unavailable for any other task until you cancel the search or until the search is over.

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Number of Days:

At the beginning of the game you will only be able to send out your recruiters for a single day at a time. Later on in the game, you will be able to open the ability to send out your recruiters for up to five days at a time. You will select the number of days that you want to send the recruiters for from the drop-down menu beside the text box where you enter how many people you want to send.

You should be careful to make sure that you send out any recruiters for the same length of time that you send explorers once you begin to get large. You could end up with exploration returns on land that will set you over your communications coverage if you are not careful. If you send out recruiters for multiple days, the safest thing to do is send out explorers for the same number, if you want to send them at all, and then end all of those days at once. This will protect you from losing recruiters, even if your comm range is exceeded by the search. If you do not end all of the turns at once, you will not be protected from losing these people.

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Improvements:

Tracking is the primary research associated with recruiting, though Vehicle Transport will also help to improve your results when you send out a search party. Time Management allows for sending multiple-day search parties. You will also be able to send out buses to aid in your searches, though the number you can send will be limited by multiple factors. Advances in morale will allow you a higher chance of finding a survivor that will stay. You will also have better returns during the summer and winter, since the survivors are going to want to get out of the extreme heat/cold, and when the weather is sunny or cloudy. The milder temperatures of the spring and fall will cause a more placid attitude among the random survivors, causing your returns to be lower. Rainy/snowy or stormy weather will just make everything more difficult with survivors hiding from the poor conditions and your recruiters struggling through muck, mud, and nasty weather.

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Buses:

Once you have opened the ability to build garages, you will be able to send out busses with your recruiters. You will be limited to 1 bus for every 50 people sent out recruiting. Sending any more would be a waste of gas and could cause too much wear on the vehicles. You will also need to have enough gas to fuel your buses and enough staffed garages to fuel them (1 for every 4 buses). Finally your camp's overall size (total land, not just developed) and Vehicle Transport research will limit the number of buses that can be sent. Check the text below the assignment queues for the number that you can send.

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Limitations:

You will only ever be able to bring back people after a recruiting mission if you have enough shelter to house them. If you are getting low on shelter, you will see this message on your Recruit page above your normal choices. This is just to remind you that you will need to build more shelter soon, if not immediately if you want to bring back more people. At the beginning of the game this message isn't quite as important since you will be bringing back very small numbers, but later this will become much more important, especially once you can begin handling the survivors who will occasionally wander by your camp.

Your other major limiter will be communications coverage. At the beginning of the game when you have less than 5,000 land, you will be able to send out recruiters with little more than old maps, compasses, and maybe a couple of walkie-talkies and have them all come back safely. After this, though, your people will be wandering too far away on strange terrain (this is the apocalypse, the cataclysms would have changed the landscape a bit) to be able to always find their way back. This is where your communications coverage comes in. You will want to build enough comm relays to keep yourself covered. If you see the warning above, you are lacking the needed communications coverage and you will lose recruiters when they are sent out.

Your final limiter will be your camp radius.

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Camp Radius:

Each person can only really search so much land in a single day. After all you are sending these people out from the edges of your camp to go as far as they can that day and come back by nightfall. Even when you send out a search party for multiple days, half of that time will be used going out, while the other half will be used coming back. Your camp radius is used to determine how much land you could possibly expect your people to search at one time. This will provide a limiter for your population once you get large if you do not increase your camp size physically as well.

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