Why
The story is about rescuing people, and the whole meta layer was built around that: the base, the foremen, the buildings. But in the run itself the rescued didn't take part at all — you pulled someone out of a shelter, and until the base they just rode in the locomotive. I wanted them to matter right away, not only in the base window.
Crew
Now the rescued work right in the run. A person climbs out of the shelter, takes a post along the locomotive and gets to work. Bring them to the end of the sector — they step off at the base and become a worker. Fail the run — they scatter with everyone else. There's no fixed number of posts: however many people are aboard, that's how many workers you have.
Four roles:
- Shooters each cover their own side — nobody shoots through the train, but a locomotive packed with people is covered all round.
- Repairers patch the most battered wagon back to full at a halt — for scrap. When the scrap runs out they stand idle, so you have to choose: repair now or haul the scrap home for upgrades.
- Scavengers extend the XP pickup radius: while you're stopped, XP flows in from everywhere you can shoot.
- Observers watch through the optics on the move and widen the minimap — shelters, bosses and survivor signals show up long before they enter the frame. The only role that never has to leave the train.
A person's look depends on the job, not the profession: you can tell from the silhouettes along the sides what the crew is doing.
Deploying
At a halt you can deploy the crew with Space — people jump off and work from the ground. When the train moves, they jump back into the nearest wagon on their own and walk to the head along the train. You can't leave without your people.
Salvageable objects
To give deploying a purpose, the maps now have vehicle wrecks, tanker cars, barrels and surviving terminals. Stop, deploy — the scavengers strip the object for resources. Salvaging is slow and speeds up with more hands, but never below two seconds — a stop stays a stop even with a full crew. Ramming gives nothing: drill through it and the resources die with the object, and a tanker explodes on top of that.
How to unlock
The crew isn't available from the first run. You need to rescue 30 survivors over the campaign — after a successful finish a delegation of the rescued will contact you, and a “CREW” tab appears at the base. Each role's room is offered by a named foreman of the matching profession: gunsmith, mechanic, engineer or radio operator. No matching specialist — the role can't be unlocked. Everyone's set of named specialists is different, so the order of unlocking roles will differ too: some get repairers first, some get shooters.
What's next
The mechanic works end to end: unlocking, rooms, four roles, deploying, salvaging. For now nobody shoots at the crew — enemies aim at the wagons. The next step is to let them target people and decide what happens when a rescued survivor dies. Then deploying will become genuinely risky.
Come in, try it, tell me what's wrong — I read every review. Wishlists and reviews help the project a lot.