The Research Tree

Building past the crash site. Unlocks the Storage Room — the only structure you can raise as often as you like — and the Construction Materials it is built from, so expansion costs ingots, not luck. The same bench learns cloth: loomreed fiber into Fabric, Fabric into the Reinforced pack.

"'More room' is a technology. Ask anyone who has slept beside eighty kilograms of ore."

Copper-era research: the base's first passive power source. The Solar Panel pushes 600 W into the grid while everyone does something else — and the battery ceiling rises from four slots to six to bank the surplus.

"The sun is free. Everything required to catch it is not."

Busbars and contactors heavy enough to gang cells in walls. The Battery Room's ceiling jumps to twenty slots, and the field machines — Boris, the Brine Pump — take up to three bolt-on cradles each instead of one. Priced in copper wire, so an Extruder must already be turning.

"Thick wire is the difference between a battery room and a fireworks room."

The lithium chain opens. The moment it completes, every brine seep already inside scan range lights up on the map; the Brine Pump Kit stands at one and fills its hopper, and the Evaporation Pond dries the brine into lithium carbonate — the feedstock every cell is built around.

"The planet's battery acid, still in the ground's own bottle."

The chain's payoff, priced in the output of the tech before it — you must actually run a Pond before you can research cells. Then the Battery Room becomes a bench: a fresh 2 kWh Battery from carbonate, wire, and a machined part, charged from the grid as it is made.

"A pile of white dust that remembers being a lake, taught to remember a charge instead."

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.

"Does two jobs so you can do zero."

A salvaged Daedalus task-cortex learns to run a drill rig. The Auto-Miner Kit is Boris in a box: carry him to any deposit your survey has found, deploy, feed him charged cells, and come back with bags. The first time survivors bolt an AI sliver into something and call it labour.

"We asked the chip what it wanted. It printed the word ROCKS forty thousand times."

Boris learns to go DOWN. A dry patch becomes a Deep Vein — slower, hungrier, and beyond any hand drill's reach; only he can work it, and only once per deposit. A spent deep vein is spent for good.

"Two days of grinding and the hole is a promise. Keep feeding him."

The electric chain's first gate. The Extruder is a heated die block that draws copper ingots into wire on grid power — one ingot pulls into two spools, six ingots an hour at 800 W, no hands. Every motor, radio, and battery after this is wound from what it makes.

"The colony's future arrives one thin, gleaming metre at a time."

Magnets and motors — priced in wire, so an Extruder must already be turning before the coils can be studied. Five electric motors installed in a Crusher or Refinery wake its grid switch; until then the machines only know your hands. The same coils make a shock baton.

"Spin is the only language every machine speaks."

Wheels. Costs finished motors — the whole electric chain must turn before anyone reverse-engineers a Vespera DR-7 from wreck spars. Unlocks the Motor Pool, where a Dustrunner chassis is assembled, outfitted with addons that are ordinary items when unmounted, and backed onto the charge rails at night.

"The genuine article shipped with a ten-year warranty; yours shipped in pieces, on fire, from orbit."

Production without hands. The Factory aims at a recipe, pulls ingredients from the common stockpile, and delivers the product back on grid power — each line with its own cycle time and energy bill, and a six-hour retool when you change it. The only place a CPU, a Server, a drone, or a firearm is ever made.

"Nobody's hands, everybody's parts."

A CPU pays the cost of admission — same as the port itself. The Drone Port is four bays on the grid rails and the queue that runs them: post a job over the base RF link and the next idle, charged, right-shaped drone rolls out. The Mule hauls; the two specialists below are her siblings.

"We used to send a person. Now we send a Mule, and the person gets to keep both knees."

The repair specialization: a Tinker drone that answers MEND jobs on worn field machines and rigs, and the RESCUE priority for a downed survivor the port can reach.

"She carries a wrench she cannot hold and fixes things anyway."

The building specialization: a Mason drone with a materials bin instead of a cargo bin, taking orders straight off the planner — roads a segment at a time, power lines a pylon span at a time, until the line you drew on the Chart Table is standing in the dirt.

"Doesn't argue about the route. Just builds it."

Firearms and their rounds — the Factory's least neighbourly line. Combat is consent first: a blow only lands on a survivor who has raised the PvP flag, and the news of it travels the same data channels as everything else.

"The safest colony is the one nobody bothers to attack. The second safest has a rifle."

Copper electrodes in an iron shell rip tank water apart into breathable O₂ — 4 L an hour into 40 bars, drinking 600 W off the grid. Air stops depending on lime cartridges and hand cranks. Closes the chain: mine ice, Aquaforge it into water, split it into air; repeatable, so air scales with population.

"Lightning in a bottle, except the bottle is your lungs' next breath."

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 675 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.

"We voted. The vote was to stop voting during meals."

The colony finds its ear and its voice. The Echo Vault archives every member's sightings into one shared chart, cuts and reads Echoshards for the sneakernet between colonies, and hails what it can hear. The Field Whisper handset syncs from afield; antennas add a kilometre each to the reach; the Hollerpole Kit stands a radar anywhere and pulses the horizon forty kilometres out.

"Forty-seven years of distress calls taught us one thing: write it down and hand it to someone walking."

Money that exists as data. The Tradewind Exchange opens the colony's door to the wider world — stands stocked from the common stockpile, prices set by the Steward, admission by office lever — and the Factory learns its two dearest lines: the gold-bonded CPU and the Server that racks it, so a salvaged Icarus Core can be decrypted into bitgold for the treasury.

"Every colony calls it something different. We call it the winds of commerce, because something has to move for anyone to eat."