Stash

Stash rooms are special rooms you find while exploring — Supply Caches in common territory, Ice Vaults in the mountains. They work like chests: walk in, put items in, take items out.

When your faction owns more than one stash room, you can link them into a stash network — one shared inventory reachable from any connected node.

Stash Rooms

Storage is common as furniture, rare as treasure: a sector holds hundreds of these rooms, so you are seldom far from somewhere to leave things — but only a handful hold anything when you arrive.

Stash rooms on neutral (unclaimed) tiles are shared world loot — anyone can open them. Stash rooms on faction-owned tiles are exclusive to that faction.

What's Already Inside

Some stash rooms hold something when you first reach them. Most do not — expect to clear several before one pays out.

• Binding Salt turns up in caches as a bonus find. It is what fusing shards is spent on, and monsters drop it too — the cache is not the main supply.
• Essence shards are the usual find, and they scale with distance from the centre: a cache far out holds what a monster out there would have dropped.
• Starter gear — cloth cap, vest, leggings, wraps, sandals, a walking stick — turns up only in the first two sectors. Past that you are expected to have better, and it stops appearing entirely.
• Starter gear carries no stats of its own. It exists to hold a shard, nothing more, and any real drop beats it in the same slot.

A cache is rolled once. Empty it and it stays empty — coming back later, or leaving and re-entering, finds the same room you left. What you find is fixed to the room itself, so it is the same for whoever gets there first.

Anything found this way is ordinary local contents: free to pick up, and not on any network until someone deposits it there.

Local Storage (Free)

Depositing an item into the stash room you're standing in costs nothing. Picking up an item from the room you're standing in costs nothing.

This is just chest storage — simple, free, no currency involved.

Raidable

Every item sitting in a stash room is raidable. If the tile flips — captured by another faction through the normal raid pipeline — the room's contents go with the tile. If you want an item you're nervous about, either retrieve it to your inventory, or pay to put it on the network.

The Stash Network

When your faction owns two or more stash rooms, you can link them. A linked network is one shared inventory: any faction member can reach any item from any connected node.

An item in the network physically lives at one node — the room it was first deposited into. It is never duplicated. Pulling it to you is transport, not teleportation; the node "hums" briefly as the item transits.

Putting an Item on the Network

Walk into a stash room your faction owns, deposit the item, and the system automatically tries to link it onto your network.

• Cost: DENSITY eco shards — the currency kind, not the essence shards that socket into gear — pulled from your faction's HQ reserve.
• Rate: one DENSITY shard per 1000g of item weight.
• The fee is charged the instant the item links. The cost is sunk — it never refunds.

If the reserve can't cover the item's upkeep, the item fails to link. It's not destroyed — it sits at the node as ordinary local storage, free to pick up, but it's not on the network. It's just chest loot, raidable like anything else.

Reject-the-Newcomer

A careless deposit only ever fails to help itself. A too-large or wasteful deposit never bumps your faction's longest-standing, most valuable gear off the network.

Once an item links, it stays linked until it is retrieved, captured, or the faction dies. The system rejects the newcomer, never evicts the oldest.

If the reserve recovers later (a factionmate donates more DENSITY shards, or some heavy item gets pulled off and frees headroom), the system automatically re-evaluates rejected items and links what now fits. You can also trigger this manually with the Relink action on a stash node.

Pulling Items Across the Network

When a networked item is physically at another stash room — not the one you're standing in — you can still retrieve it. You pull the item through the network to your current node.

• Cost: KINETIC eco shards from your personal inventory (not the faction reserve).
• Formula: ceil(item weight × tile distance / 1000) shards.
• Distance: Manhattan (grid-walking) distance from the item's origin node to your current node.
• Local pickup (distance 0) is free.

A heavy weapon hauled a long way costs a lot more than a light widget nudged one room over. Pulling removes the item from the network onto your person — no copy was ever created and no copy remains.

The HQ Reserve

Your HQ holds a reserve of DENSITY shards. It's the fuel your network burns: every linked item draws against this reserve at deposit time.

• Anyone in the faction can donate DENSITY shards from the Reserve tab.
• The reserve is deposit-only. Members can put shards in, but nothing can be pulled out. Its only exit is being spent by the network or destroyed on faction death.
• Anyone can see it. The reserve balance and headroom are visible to all members at all times.
• Donations are voluntary. No rule forces anyone to give. The reserve's health is a mirror of your faction's generosity, not a guaranteed mechanic.

Participation Ledger

Every DENSITY shard your character donates to the reserve is recorded on the participation ledger — a lifetime honor roll of who chipped in how much.

• Display-only — no mechanical effect, no perks, no governance teeth.
• Stays attached to your character even after you leave, are kicked, or die.
• Destroyed with the faction on disband or total destruction.

When Territory Changes Hands

A stash room is just a room. Nothing marks it as belonging to anyone: who may open it is simply whoever holds the tile it sits on, right now. Capturing one therefore takes no special action — take the tile and the room comes with it.

When a tile flips through the normal raid pipeline, all items physically located in that room transfer with it.

• The capturer owes the same DENSITY upkeep on captured items — no discount.
• Items auto-link onto the capturer's reserve using reject-the-newcomer; too-heavy items stay local-only in the captured room.
• The loser's reserve bill drops by the weight of linked items that just left.

The same holds in reverse: lose the tile and you lose the room, with no bookkeeping to unwind.

Faction Death

When your faction disbands or is wiped out:

• The HQ reserve is destroyed. All DENSITY shards in it are gone — no recovery, no transfer, no picking through the rubble. Even the faction that killed you doesn't get them.
• Every networked flag collapses. The network ceases to exist; items are no longer linked.
• Non-contested stash tiles become neutral commons, contents intact as world-shared loot available to anyone who reaches the room.
• Contested tiles resolve through the ordinary raid pipeline — killer's faction first on the death tile, oldest-contested-flag on collateral.

Neutral Stash Rooms

Stash rooms on neutral (unclaimed) tiles are shared world loot pools.

• Any player can open them and take or leave anything inside.
• Taking is not theft — no prior claim exists. Call it scavenging.
• You can also deposit into a neutral stash — items become local chest contents, available to whoever else reaches the room.
• When a faction claims the tile through neutral growth, the stash becomes exclusive to that faction going forward. Existing contents stay local — no auto-link, no inheritance.

TL;DR

• Deposit and retrieve at your own standing node: free.
• Deposit tries to link automatically — costs DENSITY shards from the HQ reserve.
• Pull cross-network: costs KINETIC shards from your pack, weight × distance.
• Careless deposits never break your faction's gear — rejected stays local, oldest stays linked.
• Faction dies? Reserve destroyed, contested tiles flip via raid, everything else becomes world-shared loot.
• Neutral rooms are shared: take, don't "steal."
• A few rooms per sector hold loot already. Empty one and it stays empty.

It is no longer the only way to reach another player

The faction stash used to be the only route an object had to another living player short of the ground or a corpse. The market is the second, and the first that does not require a faction at all.