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Quest Thread - Survival and Settlement

Identity​

Survival and Settlement is the cross-act Quest Thread that carries the continuous concern of making the world safe, sustaining people, and growing the settlement footprint. It begins in Act 0 with bare survival around the starting pocket and continues through Act 3, when the first Outpost grows into stable settlement-scale play. Survival and Settlement is the lane through which the bulk of grounded survival, shelter, food, water, settlement infrastructure, district capacity, and labor pressure surfaces as playable content.

Scope​

Survival and Settlement owns the campaign-spanning identity of the survival-to-settlement lane. It declares which world-state surfaces feed the lane and which act docs provide its per-act mission entry points.

Survival and Settlement does NOT own:

  • Per-act mission ladders. Mission ladder authoring for this lane is deferred to later per-act content waves.
  • The cosmological reveal arc. That belongs to the Core and Truth lane.
  • Late-saga reclamation. The Reclamation / Crown lane carries the saga's final reclamation surface; this lane stops at Act 3.

Inputs From World Pressure​

The world-state sources from ../systems/gd-dynamic-quest-pressure-model.md that primarily feed this lane:

  • Feature transitions — water, food, shelter, foraging, and building-site Feature transitions that drive grounded survival mission candidates.
  • Settlement shortages and labor pressure — population needs, resource shortages, district capacity gaps, labor allocation deficits. This lane is the primary consumer of those signals.
  • Site state — Site discovery and securement of supply, shelter, Outpost-tier, and infrastructure Sites.
  • Route safety — short-range Routes between the start pocket, the Camp, and the first Outpost; severance and escort signals feed the lane.
  • Authored story gates — explicit story beats that gate the Camp, Outpost, and Settlement-tier advances.

Coexistence With Act-Scoped Thread Owners​

Survival and Settlement is a cross-act lane. It coexists with Act-scoped thread owners without subsuming them. Per-act mission entry points are provided by the act docs and by the existing Act-scoped thread owners; the cross-act lane owner declares the campaign-spanning identity of the survival-to-settlement arc.

The overlapping Act 0 thread owners are:

Those Act 0 threads remain the canonical Act 0 entry points into the Survival and Settlement lane. They are not retired or rewritten by this cross-act owner.

Cross-References​