Station condition
Every manufactured station (Laboratory, Radar, Generator, Water Tanks, Shelter, and so on) tracks its own 0 to 100 Condition gauge. The gauge drops each time workers use the station and drops a little more every night. Unlike attrition it never refills on its own: you have to spend raw materials on a Repair action to bring it back up. When the gauge falls below certain thresholds, workers assigned to that station take extra state penalties on every use.
Threshold tiers
The same tiers apply to every manufactured station. Falling into a lower tier applies a worker state penalty (Fatigue, Stress, and so on) to that station specifically; it does not affect the other stations.
| Gauge range | In-game label | Worker penalty |
|---|---|---|
| 76 to 100 | Pristine | none |
| 51 to 75 | Dented | extra state gain per use |
Two additional threshold tiers exist below Dented but have not been directly observed yet.
Drain and repair on Normal difficulty
Most manufactured stations use two drain sources. The Shelter is a special case: workers do not use it directly during the day, so it only has a nightly drain, but that nightly drain is larger than a normal station's.
| Station category | Drain per use | Drain per night |
|---|---|---|
| Laboratory, Radar, Generator, Water Tanks, ... | -6 gauge points | -2 gauge points |
| Shelter | (never used directly) | -6 gauge points |
Repair is a separate action: you click Repair on the station card, spend a fixed amount of raw material (Ore, Carbon, or Polymers depending on the station), and the gauge gains +20 Condition. Liu's signature Material Caregiver trait changes this: when Liu works at a non-Shelter station that is Dented or worse, he repairs it by +20 through normal work instead of draining it, so he acts as a mobile repair mechanic without spending materials.
On Normal the ratios work out to about 3 uses worth of drain per 1 repair click. In practice most stations can take 3 to 4 uses in a row before you need to repair them to bring them back to Pristine. The Shelter only needs a repair every few nights depending on how aggressively you let it slide.
How difficulty and Guardian level change these numbers
Difficulty mode shifts the per-use drain, the nightly drain, and the repair reward by a few points in each direction. See the Difficulty page for the exact Easy / Hard / Very Hard values.
Guardian's Influence raises the station repair material cost per Guardian level on top of the difficulty shifts. At max Guardian level on Very Hard, every repair action costs more materials than baseline.
What you can do about it
The two practical levers are:
- Repair early. Once a station drops below 76, its workers already take state penalties on every use until you pay the repair cost.
- Assign Liu to any non-Shelter station that is about to dip. His Material Caregiver trait saves the repair materials entirely.