Food

This is the page nobody reads until their walls have already come down once.

One unit of food is one person for one morning. Not tins, not calories — the number on the shelf is the number of breakfasts it will serve. Six units and three mouths is two days, and the game does that division for you on the hold's own label.

Every hold keeps its own shelf

Food lives in the stash of the building you claimed, alongside everything else anyone left there. It is not a district-wide pool. The people who slept in a building eat from that building's shelf at dawn — you, anyone holding with you, and every civilian sheltering inside — and from nowhere else.

Two consequences worth having straight. Someone else running out does not cost you anything. And holding together means one shelf and one supply run instead of four, which is the strongest argument there is for not scattering across the district.

You start with what you can carry

Every survivor arrives with 3 units in hand. That is the whole opening larder — nothing is stocked for you, because at the moment a run begins there is no building anybody has claimed to stock.

Food in your pockets does not feed the room. Only what is on the shelf gets eaten — but you never have to put it there yourself. Walk into a hold you have claimed and everything edible you are carrying goes onto its shelf, for nothing, the moment you are inside. The walk home is the whole price. Carrying food to somebody else's walls is still a deliberate act: that one you leave in their stash by hand.

Finding it

Search anywhere people kept food and you will turn up two or three units at a time. Only four kinds of building have any:

Everywhere else has none at all — hospitals, pharmacies, police stations, churches, garages, junkyards and the Vitalis labs. People were not eating in any of them.

You can only carry 5 units. Find more with your hands full and you are told so plainly: the food is real, it stays where it is, and you have to come back. That limit is the whole reason the run has a rhythm — a hold of four eats four a morning, and you can carry 5, so somebody is walking out every day or two for the rest of the week.

Run the food line is the bulk version: 14 AP, a barrow instead of pockets, eight units straight onto the shelf where you are standing — and half the street hears the wheels. It only works somewhere you have claimed, because a barrow needs somewhere to be tipped out.

Two of them change the arithmetic

Mara Venn, the retired cook, feeds her room on one unit a day fewer for as long as she is alive. Colin Hatch hoards, and a little of every day's food never reaches the shelf he is standing next to. Both only matter in the building they are actually in.

What going hungry does

Miss one morning and people go without; you are told which building and how many, and nothing else happens yet. Miss 2 and somebody in that hold cracks — a frightened person in a locked room with no food decides the street is the better bet, goes looking in the small hours, and does not put the barricade back.

That building loses 2 barricade levels, every hungry morning, until it is fed. Only that building. This is the mechanism that turns a food problem into a dead character two nights later, and because the two events are a day apart most people never connect them.

It is also why you cannot simply barricade one room to 8 and wait the week out. The food is somewhere else. Sitting still is the one strategy that is guaranteed to starve.

Where you can see it

Every claimed building carries its own food label on the holds strip — “3d food” — which is days at that building's current head count, not a raw unit count, because the raw number tells you nothing on its own. It turns amber at one day and red at none, and once a hold has gone short it says how many mornings it has been short for.

The morning report still gives you the district-wide line. The label on your own hold is the one to act on.