The doctor
Commits to First Aid on day one. Reads every medical text the group finds, and does not share them. Runs the centrifuge. Without this person the campaign cannot finish.
KNOX COUNTY EMERGENCY BROADCAST — AUTOMATED RELAY
This is KNOX ACTUAL. This is a recorded transmission.
USAMRIID field team seven-one is not responding. Their work is still recoverable. Sample integrity window is seventy-two hours from collection.
The cold chain is the mission.
If you can read this you are inside the quarantine ring. Nobody is coming to lift it. Finish the work.
KNOX ACTUAL out.
The relay has been running on a loop since the team stopped logging. It does not answer, and it does not know you are listening. It only counts.
The objective
One working dose.
One working dose.
Into somebody's arm.
Not a vaccine — the vaccines are the rehearsal. The cure is the thing team seven-one was three steps away from when they stopped filing reports.
It is one recipe, and everything below exists because that one recipe is expensive. It runs at a centrifuge, takes a long uninterrupted session, and consumes the following every single time you attempt it.
Flasks
Test tubes
Per attempt · success or failure · read that again before you
break your first window
What it takes
The team left documentation scattered across the county. Recovered fragments describe the process below. You will not be able to perform any step until you find the manual that teaches it — so the campaign is, in practice, a hunt for five books.
-
Stand up a lab
Seven workstations, all of them built rather than found: workbench, centrifuge, chemistry set, microscope, chromatograph, spectrometer, muffle furnace. Plus power to run them and cold storage to feed them.
Gated by an equipment manual -
Draw the samples
Infected blood, collected in the field. Brains, extracted from skulls. Both are perishable and neither travels well. Sterile glassware and working syringes are a prerequisite, not a convenience.
Gated by a virology text -
Break the blood down
Spin whole blood into plasma and cells. Pull leukocytes out of the cells. Pull antibodies out of the leukocytes. Each step is its own procedure with its own skill floor, and each one loses you material.
Gated by a second virology text -
Run the chemistry
The cure needs purified water and sodium hypochlorite in quantity. Neither is loot. Both are made, from precursors somebody has to go and find.
Gated by a chemistry course -
Make your own glassware
The county holds a finite number of flasks and test tubes, and the cure eats twenty-two per attempt. A muffle furnace turns that hard ceiling into a supply line. Groups who work this out early stop being afraid of failed attempts.
Gated by a fabrication manual -
Hold the room
The final synthesis is long, loud and stationary. Somebody has to be at the centrifuge for the whole of it, which means everybody else is doing something other than helping.
First Aid level 8
The wall
The wall is First Aid 8. Nothing shortcuts it. Somebody has to commit to being the doctor on day one and stay committed for the length of the campaign, because the last step will not open for anyone else. Decide who that is before you start spending books on anything else.
Why it is called the cold chain
Blood degrades. It degrades with time, and it degrades with distance from where you drew it. A sample carried across the county arrives worthless — and you will not know it was worthless until you have already spent the glassware processing it.
The lab goes to the bodies, not the other way around.
Which means the lab has to be somewhere you would rather not live, and it means moving the lab later is a genuine operation rather than an afternoon.
Standing advisories
- 01
Nothing restocks. A building you have emptied is empty for good. The county is a fixed budget you are spending down.
- 02
Firearms are scarce by design. The ammunition is worth more than the gun. Plan around melee, and around not being seen.
- 03
Count your glassware before you attempt anything. A failed synthesis costs the same twenty-two pieces as a successful one.
- 04
The hostile-NPC mod changed on 22 September. Bandits is out, Project A-Life is in, and its encounters are switched off while we test it. Nothing should be shooting at you yet — if something does, it is a player or a zombie.
- 05
The relay is not a friend. It is a recording. It will keep broadcasting procedure at you long after the procedure stops being possible.
- 06
Weather is information. Pay attention to it. That is all the advisory says.
Split the work
Eight people cannot all do this job. Split early, and split along the chain rather than along whoever happens to be online.
The glassblower
Owns the furnace and the sand. Turns a hard ceiling on attempts into a mere inconvenience. Thoroughly undervalued right up until the first failed synthesis.
The collectors
Draw samples close to the lab and get them back fast. This is the dangerous job, and it is dangerous on purpose.
The quartermaster
Fuel, power, cold storage, and knowing which buildings are already spent. Keeps the map of what the county has left in it.
Not set up yet?
Everyone runs the same modset.
A mismatch gets you kicked at the door. Work through the setup guide first — especially the checker in step 3b.
Setup guide