Settlements & Projects

Hubs and Cities are collectively called Settlements. They still work differently as delivery destinations (see Site types), but they share the same activation, leveling, and project system described here.

A newly mapped Settlement is inactive. Before it starts consuming supply normally, it needs an initial delivery of a specific cargo — usually Food. The map and F10 show this requirement in place of the Settlement's normal stock while it's open.

Sources and Factories work the same way: a mapped but inactive one needs its own initial delivery before it starts producing. A Source starts producing as soon as that delivery lands — there is no second step to unlock it.

Unlike a project, this delivery is not paid from the Reserve. You fly the crates to the site and drop them there, one load at a time, and the site comes online when the last one lands.

What a site asks for follows two rules:

• A site never asks for anything downstream of itself. Commissioning an oil field or a refinery costs Steel and Building Materials, never the Industrial Parts made further along that same chain. A region can therefore always reach its next tier out of what it can already produce, instead of having to import from a region that got there first.
• It's a gate, not a decision. Activating a site is deliberately cheaper than the projects it opens up — roughly one project step's worth of cargo at the very top end, and a fraction of that for farms, forests and Settlements. Getting a site running should never be the expensive part.

Exact amounts are a balancing detail and may change; the site's own map entry and F10 always show what it currently needs.

Once active, a Settlement has a level, starting at 1. Higher levels raise how much Food the Settlement needs to stay supplied, and open up bigger jobs. Leveling up costs cargo beyond Food — typically Lumber for the first step, then Steel and Building Materials for the next. Exact amounts are a balancing detail and may change; check the F10 menu for current requirements.

Any non-Food cargo you deliver to a Settlement doesn't get consumed right away — it banks into that Settlement's Reserve. The Reserve is spent on projects (below), not on day-to-day supply.

A Reserve is storage, not a one-way drop box. F10 > Other > Tycoon > My Location > Withdraw from storage lists what the Settlement currently holds and hands it back as crates on the pad, one for one and without any loss, up to six per action.

That makes a misdelivery recoverable: eight Steel flown to the wrong Hub are no longer frozen there. What it does not do is move anything for you — the crates come out where they went in, and flying them to the Settlement that actually needs them is still your job.

Withdrawing only stages the crates. Place them with Spawn cargo as usual, then load them.

Open F10 > Other > Tycoon > Projects at the Settlement. The first line is the Settlement's slot ledger — 2/3 build sites used, and for a City its City Project sites and its Institution seat separately — followed by every project you can currently work toward, each requirement shown as reserve/required, with a Start action once you have enough in the Reserve. Starting a project spends the Reserve immediately and completes right away — there's no drip-feed progress bar to wait out.

A project you can't start yet stays in the list without the Start action, and opening it shows why in plain text: no free build site, already built in this region, or the exact requirement you're still short of and where this Settlement currently stands against it — Needs: Airspace Security 75% in this region (currently 45%). Nothing is hidden from you because it isn't reachable yet; the distance to it is the progress tree.

The Tycoon Map shows the same thing in a Settlement's detail panel, and draws the build slots as slots: one square per site, filled, free or still locked. Hover a filled one to see what stands there, which perks it is providing, and what its next level would cost.

A Settlement level doesn't just raise Food demand — it clears ground. Each level gives a Settlement one more build slot, and every building it puts up occupies one:

There are six Hub project types (below) for at most three slots, so a Hub at full level still leaves half the catalogue unbuilt. A City chooses two of three City Projects — a softer decision, but a visible one.

A City's two pools are separate. Its Institution seat at level 3 can't be spent on a third City Project, and a City Project can't take the Institution's place. That's deliberate: an Institution is a server-wide monument, and no City should have to trade its region's identity for it.

The Settlement level itself never takes a slot: it's what creates them, so it stays available no matter how full the Hub is. Raising a building you already have doesn't need a free slot either — the Survey Station standing in a slot grows from level 1 to 3 in the same slot. Only a new building needs one.

That makes the choice real. A Hub at level 1 can host a Survey Station or a Checkpoint, not both, until it levels up. A wrong first slot can be undone — see Demolition — but it costs the deepest cargo in the game, so treat it as a correction, not as a way to rotate buildings.

Hubs and Cities build from different catalogues. A Hub never sees the City Projects, a City never sees the Hub projects, and both keep the Settlement level itself, which never takes a slot from either.

Five of the six Hub projects are regional, not local: their effect lands on the whole region, not on the Hub that hosts them. A second one in the same region would therefore do nothing — so the Projects menu still lists it at your other Hubs, but won't let you start it. Pick which Hub hosts which, and use the other Hubs' slots for something else.

Upgrading is unaffected: whichever Hub already holds the region's Survey Station can take it all the way to level 3.

Only the Forward Airfield is local. It can stand at every Hub — and because it costs the same at each of them, it's also the most expensive thing a multi-Hub region can decide to build everywhere.

Six types compete for a Hub's build slots. A region has at most nine slots (three Hubs at level 3) and usually far fewer, so a Hub is a specialist rather than a complete base.

Some of them ask for more than cargo before you can start. The Projects menu spells every requirement out as a line of text with your current standing next to it, so an unbuildable project still shows you exactly how far away it is:

• Radar Post needs a Checkpoint at level 2 on the same Hub — the region has to be defended before it gets watched.
• Maintenance Works needs three commissioned Sources in the region; there has to be something to maintain.
• Dispatch Office needs Settlement level 2, 75 % regional Security and 60 % Trust. The Security bar is the demanding one: regions start at 20 %, and Checkpoints alone get you to 65 %. The rest has to be fought for — which is the first time surviving encounters pays off economically.
• Forward Airfield needs Settlement level 2.

The requirements are only checked when you start a project. If regional Security falls afterwards, your Dispatch Office keeps working — its transports just start getting intercepted.

A Dispatch Office moves goods inside its own region. AI transports only cross a region border once the Air Logistics Command exists, so until then every import is flown by a player.

Every region has exactly one City, and what it builds decides what its region is good at. Three types, two levels each, three slots' worth of ambition for two slots:

None of them asks for anything but cargo and a free slot — a City at level 1 has one slot, a City at level 2 has two, and that Food demand is the whole price of the choice. Costs are deliberately within a few crates of each other: the slot is what forces the decision, not the price tag.

The three read as one decision per domain:

• Civic Administration is worth most where you already deliver well, because it multiplies the recovery rate that rises with how full a stock is. It rewards keeping a region supplied; it will not rescue a neglected one.
• Civil Defense Office protects the region's healthy Settlements against a neighbour that has already fallen. It never damps what your own region spreads outward — it defends, it doesn't excuse.
• Regional Depot is throughput. Extra Source capacity works twice over, because crates left standing on the pad occupy storage too: a Source that keeps blocking on its own uncollected output is exactly what this buys off. It's also the one City project that pauses during unrest — a City in trouble stops enlarging warehouses, while the other two keep working.

The restart base stock is unaffected by a Regional Depot. The extra space is a buffer you fill by collecting on a good rhythm, never cargo handed out at the next restart.

A City that reaches level 3 gets one more seat, in a pool of its own: an Institution. There are eight of them, each exists once on the whole map, and each is a single build rather than a ladder — a monument either stands or it doesn't.

What makes them different from every other project is where the effect lands. An Institution works server-wide, for every player and every region, which is why the choice of host City doesn't matter mechanically and why every requirement they ask for is a world-wide count rather than a regional one. Sort out among yourselves which City builds which; the map won't care.

They cost between 116 and 160 crate-moves each — Building Materials and Industrial Parts, the two deepest goods in the game. That is the point: an Institution is what a server builds together over weeks, not what a single pilot funds on a good evening. A completion is announced to everyone online.

No Institution replaces a regional project. The Cartography Institute doesn't unlock rumor tiers — that stays the Survey Station's job. The Air Logistics Command requires Dispatch Offices. The Airspace Command adds to a region's Checkpoint floor rather than substituting for it. Nothing you spend a build slot on can be made pointless later by a monument somewhere else.

The one exception to “the place doesn't matter”: the Cathedral can only be built in Tbilisi, and only once five of the other seven Institutions stand. At 276 crate-moves it is the most expensive structure in the game, in the one City with no Hub, no Source and no Factory of its own — every single crate of it has to be flown in from another region.

It is the map's finish line. When it stands, the whole world recovers Trust faster and unrest spreads at half strength.

A Settlement in unrest doesn't lose anything it built. It stops growing: no new projects and no levels while Trust is down, and the perks of its growth buildings switch off until Trust recovers. The rest of its buildings keep working throughout.

The rule behind the table: unrest halts the build-up, never the rescue. Nothing that helps a region back on its feet — Security, production, AI supply, Trust recovery — is ever taken away at the moment it's needed most. On the map, a paused building's build site turns amber and carries a !, so a perk that went quiet is never a mystery.

A build slot is only a decision if the decision can be regretted, so anything standing in one can be torn down again: F10 > Other > Tycoon > Projects > Demolish. It lists what this Settlement currently has built, what removing it costs, and — because a demolition is not a click you want to make by accident — asks for a second, explicit CONFIRM before anything happens.

Demolition costs Industrial Parts, out of this Settlement's Reserve, scaled to the building's current level. That is deliberately the deepest cargo in the game: undoing a decision is meant to hurt more than making it.

What you get back is the build slot, empty and ready for something else. What you lose is everything the building did:

• The track drops back to level 0 — a rebuilt Survey Station starts again at level 1, and every level you had paid for is gone.
• Its perks stop immediately. A demolished Checkpoint takes its Security floor with it (and the Security it once granted comes back off the regional value), a demolished Survey Station takes the region's Tier 2 / Tier 3 rumor unlock with it unless another Survey Station still holds it, a demolished Dispatch Office ends AI supply in that region.
• The cargo is not refunded. Everything flown into that building is spent.

There is also a cooldown: one demolition per Settlement per four hours. A Settlement that just tore something down shows the remaining time in the menu instead of the action.

The Public Works Office changes all three: half the demolition cost, half the original material refunded into the Reserve, and no cooldown at all. Until one exists on the server, demolition is the expensive route.

Hubs can build a Survey Station, up to level 3, through the same Projects menu. Every level widens the range over which the region turns up new site rumors, and levels 2 and 3 additionally unlock Tier 2 and Tier 3 site rumors across the whole region — see Exploration. A Survey Station's level can never exceed the Hub's own Settlement level.

It takes one build slot, and only one Hub per region can host it.

Hubs can also build a Checkpoint to raise regional Security through the Projects menu. That track is covered in Security & Threats, since it's about defending the region rather than growing the Settlement. Like the Survey Station, it takes one build slot and only one Hub per region can host it.

Sources produce as soon as they are commissioned. They are not Settlements, have no level of their own, and take no build slot.

How fast a Source produces and how much it can hold are regional properties now: the region's Maintenance Works shortens every Source's production interval, its City's Regional Depot raises how much every Source can hold, and a Source that fills up stops producing until someone collects. Extra crates lying on the pad count against that limit too, so a Source blocked by its own uncollected output is a real thing.

Every mission restart tops each Source back up to a small base stock, so nobody arrives to an empty pad. That base is a floor, not a refund: whatever was stacked above it is gone.