“Personnel are a finite resource. Expend them deliberately.”
You bank one action point every 10 minutes. Real minutes, on the real clock, whether or not the tab is open — Fenwick's clock is your clock and nothing here is sped up. Six an hour. A hundred and forty-four a day, if you had anywhere to put them.
You do not, because the tank holds 50. From empty, filling it takes about 8.3 hours. That is the whole rhythm of the game: you arrive with a tank, you spend it, and it is back by the next time you can reasonably look.
Three traits move it. Low Stamina takes ten off the cap. Iron Clock makes each point arrive 15% sooner; Bad Sleeper 25% later; Slow to Mend doubles the wait any time you are below half health.
What things cost
Almost every small verb costs 1 AP: a step, entering a building, searching, one swing, one level of barricade. Walking out of a building is free. The exceptions are worth memorising, because they are the ones that strand you:
| Action | AP | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Revive someone | 10 | 9 with the Stretcher-bearer passive. Needs a reagent syringe and Vitalis Clearance. |
| Stand up after dying | 6 | +5 if whoever put you down had Headshot. Ankle Grab drops it to 1, for zombies. |
| Claim a building · runs only | 5 | Also the cheapest barricade you will ever buy — see holding a building. |
| Repair a ransacked building | 5 | Needs Construction. |
| Ransack | 3 | Zombies only. |
| Devour a corpse | 2 | Zombies only. +5 HP. |
| Repair a door | 2 | |
| Recruit a civilian | 2 | Refused if they are below half health. Heal them first. |
Day work: the job board
The board opens with the light. During daylight you can take on 10 assignments. These are the expensive, deliberate things — the reason your day has a shape rather than being a hundred one-point clicks:
| Job | AP | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Drag the bodies clear | 3 | Quietens the district and stops a few of them rising again. |
| Work the radio | 4 | Finds someone alive out there, and names the building they are in. |
| Shore up the walls | 5 | Repairs the weakest section of your hold — to shoulder height, or the whole way with Construction. |
| Work the infirmary | 6 | Patches up the two most badly hurt people in the building. |
| Burn the pile | 6 | Clears the dead for good. Very loud for a day, then quieter than before. |
| Scout the approaches · out | 6 | Tonight's forecast becomes exact instead of a band. |
| Thin the yard · out | 8 | Puts down up to five loitering outside — three, without Axe Proficiency. They fight back. |
| Siphon the forecourt tanks · out | 8 | Three cans of fuel. Fuel burns bodies and runs the lights. |
| Run the food line · out | 14 | Eight units onto this hold's shelf if you get back clean. They will hear you go. |
| Stand the watch | 16 | Banks the whole watch as overwatch shots for tonight. |
They total 76 AP against a tank of 50, which is the point: a day cannot buy the board. Two or three of these is a day's work, and which two or three is the question the morning asks you.
The board sorts itself by what your hold is actually short of — an empty shelf, a wall at two, somebody hurt in the room, bodies where they fell — and a job that is wanted today says why on its own row rather than waiting for you to work it out. Anything marked out takes you into the street.
Jobs are day work only. Once night falls the board closes — “Jobs are day work. Tonight is for holding.”
Two things that behave like a tax
- Infection costs you 1 HP for every AP-spending action you take, until it is cured or it kills you.
- Noise is added to the district's attention every time you act. Attention is what decides where the dead drift. See fighting.
- One point every 10 real minutes, awake or not, playing or not.
- The tank holds 50. Empty to full is about 8.3 hours.
- Almost everything costs 1. Claiming costs 5, reviving 10, jobs 3–8.
- Regeneration past the cap is lost. Spend down before you log off.