“Recovered where they fell. The file stays open.”
When your health reaches zero you do not restart. Your body stays on the map, in the room it fell in, and the game records what killed you, where, and when. You go on regenerating action points — you simply cannot spend them on anything except getting up.
Getting up human
A survivor cannot just stand. Something has to bring you back first, and there are exactly two things that do:
- A reagent syringe, administered by a player with Vitalis Clearance. Costs them 10 AP.
- Being found. Every half hour, surviving NPCs in your district sweep for bodies — about an 8% chance indoors, 4% on the street. They will move you somewhere else, which costs you your position but does mean you are not lying in the open.
Once revived, standing up costs 6 AP and puts you on your feet at 30 health. If whoever killed you had the Headshot skill, it costs 5 more.
Getting up hungry
The other door is always open. For the same 6 AP you can stand up as a zombie, at full health, permanently. There is no coming back from it in the same character — but the dead have their own game, and it is a real one: claws and a bite that heals you, doors to smash, barricades to tear, corpses to devour, the wounded to smell through walls, and a feeding groan that pulls every feral within four blocks to your position.
Zombies act at +10 to hit at night, and Ankle Grab drops standing up from 6 AP to 1. Skills you bought as a survivor stay on your sheet but do nothing on this side.
The memorial wall
Retiring a fallen character writes them an epitaph — how many days they lasted, what they put down, where they fell and what did it — and closes their file for good.
In exchange, 25% of their lifetime experience is banked for the world. That is held XP plus the listed cost of every skill they had, including the free ones their class came with. The next survivor you create takes the entire bank. The convoy on the eighth morning grades the run rather than banking anything — what carries forward always comes from retiring.
Which is the point: a run is 7 nights, first characters are supposed to die, and the district remembers the ones who came before you.
- Your corpse stays on the map. You keep banking AP; you just cannot spend it.
- A survivor cannot simply stand — that needs a reagent, or a stranger finding you.
- Standing up as a zombie costs 6 AP and is permanent.
- Retiring the dead banks 25% of their lifetime XP for whoever you send in next.