Theme vs Town

How Theme interacts with my town

As we discussed on the Themes page, each sector can be influenced by player actions and can change the Theme of the sector your camp/town is in. What I will cover here is how Theme and player action effects your town.

Two main areas you will see town functions change due to theme:

1) Missions/Jobs:

• Once a theme goes above or below certain thresholds (15%/30%/60%/80%), you will see missions/jobs appear or disappear. For instance, if you see the Kill Feral Dog mission, the sector that town is in is above 15% Wilderness. If you kill enough feral dogs, the theme will drop below 15% and you will no longer see the Kill Feral Dogs mission.
• To get rid of those last few percent with a level 1 camp you will either have to put in days of work killing hundreds of dogs without the benefit of the Mission (roughly 6 dogs killed = 1%) OR do a mission like Deliver Medicine (again 6 missions to lower Wilderness 1%) a few hundred times OR upgrade your town to level 3 and do the Bring Three Meat mission and be done in 30 minutes.

2) NPC Shacks and Farms: The most beneficial theme for a camp/town is Civilization (or CIV) as safety and stability will encourage survivors to move into the area.

• NPC Survivor Shacks-- Once you get the theme to 60%+ CIV you will see Survivor Shacks showing up in that sector. These Survivor Shacks provide +10 Housing for the town/camp in the same sector AND any town within 1 sector. You can get as many as 5 Survivor Shacks for free in each sector at CIV 90%+. Housing allows the town to get more employees to help build bigger towns. A level 5 town with good facilities will need around 80 employees. 5 shacks give 50 housing to help get you there.

• NPC Farms-- Once you get CIV to 80%+ you will see Farms showing up. These add +20 Food production each. You can get as many as 2 NPC farms per sector at CIV 90%+. You will need the extra 40 food production to feed a large town.

As you can see in the screenshot, this is a level 1 camp that has 248 residential rooms available, 182 current residents all ready to work and 160 food production per 8 hours coming in from farms around it! This is more than what a level 5 town needs and is only possible because all the sectors around it are 100 CIV and help each other.

Important notes:

• You will have to fight to keep CIV high or your farms and shacks will disappear. If CIV goes below 80% you will lose your farms, under 60% and your shacks will turn into ruins and all the benefits to your town will go with them. You will have to do work near daily to keep this up.
• The theme of the neighboring sectors bleeds over into your sector over time. If your sector is surrounded by 100% Anarchy sectors, you will have a hard time keeping your sector from turning red. It is wise to put up level 1 camps (I call them CIV Farms) around your town to get those sectors to 85% CIV at least to slow down the bleed.

Civilization:

Obviously from the above info, CIV is the fastest way to go if you want to build a level 5 town. You will have to do the work to keep CIV above 90% however to maintain it.

• If you build a Guard Barracks onto your town, it will automatically start pushing Anarchy out of the area protected by your town. This is helpful. The downside (in my opinion) is that you can't then kill people who annoy you in your own territory. The primary function of the Guard Barracks it to block all PVP in the sectors your town controls.

Anarchy:

1. The biggest benefit to having a town in a high Anarchy area is the missions. Neutralize Local Bandits, Destroy Bandit Camp and Kill Bandit Leader are the best xp and bc missions in game (aside from SCUM missions). You will only see these missions in high ANA areas with a level 3/4/5 camp or town.
2. Bandit bosses (like Wasteland Raiders and Exmilitary Rangers) will spawn in high anarchy areas and wreak havoc on theme and town defenses. They also give good xp and loot if you can kill them.
3. Side note for town builders:
   Bandits have an alternative to volunteer survivors working in their towns. A bandit gang (not a gang with bandits in it, a BANDIT gang with a GANG Reputation under 0) that owns a camp/town can buy slaves from the Slaver NPC Encounter, transport them to a camp they own and force them to work there. Each slave counts as an employee and only uses ¼ as much food. This makes it possible to build a permanent slave work force in an anarchy sector, but tracking down that many slaves can be a lot of work.

Wilderness:

Anywhere you find high wilderness sectors, you will find meat. If you find a sector that is both green on the Global Map for terrain (forest) and green on the Theme map (WILD), you will find wolves, bears and cannibals.

You could put a level 3 camp there and do the Bring Three Meat mission to make xp and bc, but, as you level and gain bc, you will be lowering the WILD theme and driving away the wolves and bears. Better to leave it wild and use the meat in other sectors.

Bloom:

Bloom sectors will spawn mutant wolves, bears, and dogs at a high frequency making them good meat farms as long as you don’t mind eating 3 eyed animals. If you decide to create a Bloom area, you will need at least one level 1 camp INSIDE the bloom area so you can do the Place Totem mission to increase/maintain BLOOM.

Special notes:

• A camp/town inside high bloom sectors cannot do any missions or jobs other than increasing bloom.
• A sector with near 100% Bloom may spawn The Ancient One. This boss is fairly strong and will often sneak up on you as you stumble thru the bloom haze hunting meat.