Cast Adrift · Research Lab Ledger

The Research Tree

Six branches, as the Lab presents them: what your cohort already knows from the crash, what still costs materials and patience, and what each unlock actually buys you.

How the Lab Works

Read before spending the stockpile.

Five root techs are known from the crash — always unlocked, never researched. Everything else is unlocked at the Research Lab, per base: what one settlement researches, every survivor there shares, and the base next valley over starts from scratch.

Starting a research draws its materials from the common stockpile, all at once, up front. Then someone stands at the Lab and does the work — the times below are for unskilled hands; Engineering experience shortens them. Chains walk downward: a tech’s prerequisite must be unlocked first.

And note what isn’t here: the everyday survival stack — Oxygen, Water and Fuel Tanks, the Kitchen, Grow Rooms, “Wheezy Bessie”, the MoonBeam Still, the Aquaforge, the Inferno Scrapburner — needs no lab time at all. Just materials, and somewhere dry to put it.

“Research is the art of paying iron today to stop paying blood tomorrow.” — Lab plaque, hand-engraved

Construction

Roofs, rooms, and load-bearing optimism.

Basic Construction

Known from the crash

Every cohort climbs out of the pod knowing how to bolt a roof together. This is also the branch the Research Lab itself hangs from — raise the Lab, and the rest of this page stops being theoretical.

Buildings
Research Lab
"The first thing we built was a wall. The second was a place to argue about the wall."

Structural Engineering

Research Lab
6× Electronic parts 4× Machined parts 90 s base

Building past the crash site. Unlocks the Storage Room — the only structure you can raise more than once — and the Construction Materials it is built from, so expansion costs ingots, not luck.

Buildings
Storage Room (repeatable)
Recipes
Construction materials — 5 iron ingots
"'More room' is a technology. Ask anyone who has slept beside eighty kilograms of ore."

Energy

Watts in, warmth out.

Basic Energy

Known from the crash

Storage and sweat: the Battery Room holds the colony's charge (two slots stock, Battery connectors extend it to four), and the ScrapCore Dynamo turns an idle survivor into a power source. Nobody said the future was glamorous.

Buildings
Battery Room ScrapCore Dynamo
"Power is stored sweat. The dynamo just makes the accounting honest."

Renewable Energy

Research Lab
6× Electronic parts 4× Copper ingots 120 s base

Copper-era research: the base's first passive power source. The Solar Panel charges the grid while everyone does something else — and the battery ceiling rises from four slots to six to bank the surplus.

Buildings
Solar Panel
Effects
Battery slot cap 4 → 6
"The sun is free. Everything required to catch it is not."

Mining

The planet owes you iron.

Basic Mining

Known from the crash

The whole ore chain, from the crash: drill rock into rubble, crush rubble into concentrate, refine concentrate into ingots. Plus the Geo Scanner to find the good rock and the Ore Bag to haul it home without weeping.

Buildings
Crusher Refinery
Recipes
Mining drill — 2 iron ingots + 1 machined part Geo scanner — 1 iron ingot + 1 electronic part Ore bag — 1 iron ingot + 1 machined part
"Everything runs on ingots. Including, indirectly, you."

Ore Filtering

Research Lab
5× Electronic parts 3× Machined parts 60 s base

Mining bootstraps its own efficiency. The Drill Filter bolts onto a basic drill (consuming it) to make the Filtered Drill, which mines concentrate directly — the crusher step, skipped, forever.

Recipes
Drill filter — 4 iron ingots + 2 copper ingots Filtered drill — 1 mining drill + 1 drill filter
Effects
Filtered drill skips the Crusher
"Does two jobs so you can do zero."

Fabrication

Scrap goes in. Civilization comes out.

Salvage Machining

Known from the crash

The Workshop, and the two currencies every other recipe on this page is priced in: Machined parts (three scraps each, or one iron ingot for two once the refinery runs) and Electronic parts (a copper ingot and a machined part become two clean boards).

Also home to the Battery connector — ten copper ingots that permanently add a slot to the Battery Room, up to whatever your energy research allows.

Buildings
Workshop
Recipes
Machined parts — 3 metal scraps, or 1 iron ingot → 2 Electronic parts — 1 copper ingot + 1 machined part → 2 Battery connector — 10 copper ingots
"Ninety percent of a colony is scrap with opinions about what it wants to become."

Survival

Techniques for staying warm, wet, and breathing.

Field Survival

Known from the crash

Everything that keeps a survivor alive away from a wall socket. The Heating Element is the keystone tool — never consumed, always required: press it into scraps and 250 Wh of suit battery for a field-smelted iron ingot, or into two ice chunks for drinking water, anywhere on the map.

Back home it feeds the survival economy: lime cartridges for the O2 scrubber, Spudshine fuel out of the MoonBeam Still, and rations from the Kitchen — three spuds and a hot plate.

Recipes
Heating element — 1 iron ingot + 1 electronic part Electronic part (hand-sorted) — 5 electronic scraps, anywhere Iron ingot (field-smelted) — 4 metal scraps + 250 Wh, anywhere Water bottle — 2 ice chunks + 250 Wh, anywhere Lime cartridge — iron + copper ingot + limestone Spudshine fuel — 10 potatoes + yeast + 20 L water → 10 Food rations — 3 potatoes + 120 Wh
"Check your oxygen first. Everything else is a luxury with paperwork."

Society

The rarest resource: decisions.

Basic Governance

Research Lab
6× Electronic parts 5× Machined parts 120 s base Settlement gate: 250 lifetime Influence minted at the base

The only research with no prerequisite tech — and the only one with a maturity gate: the Lab won't offer it until the base has minted 250 lifetime Influence between its survivors. Young camps get tools; established settlements get politics.

Unlocks the Steward: an elected office with real base powers, a recall vote to remove them, and a banish vote for survivors the colony is done with. Every vote is weighed by the voter's current Influence — contribution is the franchise.

Effects
Steward elections (Influence-weighted) Recall votes Banish votes
"We voted. The vote was to stop voting during meals."

Further Reading

The trees keep growing.

Every item, tool, and building named above has its own entry in the Field Guide — weights, capacities, and the warranty disclaimers nobody honoured. New to all of this? Start with the orientation briefing instead.