Holding a building

Standing order 4

“A hold is a building, not a room. Secure it as such.”

A building in Fenwick is a set of adjacent cells that share a name — its sections. A shopping mall might be six of them. And every single section carries its own barricade level, its own door, its own ransack state. There is no building-wide wall.

Claiming

Standing inside, Claim costs 5 AP and does all of this at once:

boards the section you are standing in to at least 4;
boards every other section of the building to at least 2;
shuts every door;
clears any ransacking in your room;
marks the place a safehouse — a revive point, a shared stash, and a draw for wandering survivors.

You may claim anywhere in Fenwick — all four districts are open. The only question is whether you can get back to it before dark.

Inside Ellery, a rain-dampened glass-roofed atrium stretches past shuttered shops, dead escalators and an abandoned fountain. — In game **The hold, and its section plan.** The grid at the top right is the building, one tile per section. Green is boarded; red is a way in. This one is 14 of 16.

In game The section you are standing in. Every section carries its own door, barricade and power. This one has all three against it.

The barricade ladder

Barricades run 0 to 8. Anyone can build to 4; going beyond that needs the Construction skill.

Level	Reads as
0	not barricaded
1	loosely barricaded
2	lightly barricaded
3	quite strongly barricaded
4	very strongly barricaded
5	heavily barricaded
6	very heavily barricaded
7	extremely heavily barricaded
8	barricaded to the max

That same level is the line for people: a survivor can climb into anything at 4 or below, 6 with Free Running. Above that they must knock — which is loud — and somebody alive must be inside to open up.

Why one strong room is a trap

This is the single most expensive lesson in the game, and it was learned the hard way: in a six-player test, three of six died on night one — not to the wave, which was two zombies, but to the district's own residents, who simply walked in through a section nobody had boarded.

Two rules make this happen. First, the dead only work on a cell that has living people inside it, and they have to breach each section from the street. Second, and this is the one that gets you: once you are inside any section, moving to another section of the same building never re-checks its barricade. You are already in.

A building is its rooms, and each one carries its own barricade. Claiming puts 2 under every room you are not standing in; boarding one room to 8 does not.

So a mall with one room at 8 and five at 0 is a mall with five open doors. Anything that gets into any section is standing in the same building as you. An afternoon spent shutting a place up means nailing every window you can reach and doing one properly — not doing one perfectly and leaving the rest.

That is exactly why Claim boards everything to 2 rather than boarding your room to 8. It is a floor, and the floor is the point.

Searching

Searching costs 1 AP and works indoors only. Yield depends on the building type and the district, multiplied by 1.4 if the building has power and halved if you search an unlit building at night. A generator and a can of fuel are worth more than they look.

In short

Claim costs 5 AP: 4 where you stand, 2 everywhere else in the building, doors shut, safehouse marked.
Every section has its own barricade. A building is only as strong as its weakest one.
Anyone can board to 4. Only Construction goes past it, to 8.
Boarding one room to the roof and ignoring the rest is how first runs die.

Claiming

Ellery Shopping Mall

The barricade ladder

Why one strong room is a trap

Searching