Unrest: what causes it, what holds it down
Unrest is a level on a scale of a hundred, not a running total. It drifts toward whatever your colony's pressures add up to, closing 35% of the gap each turn.
The four tiers
| Tier | From | Output | Growth | Building |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calm | 0 | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Restless | 25 | 85% | 60% | 100% |
| Disorder | 50 | 65% | 25% | 50% |
| Riot | 75 | 40% | 0% | 25% |
Energy is never touched by any of it. Everything else is: at Disorder a worker has a 35% chance each turn of simply walking off its tile, and at Riot that rises to 60% with sabotage on top.
What pushes it up
- Crowding. The first 5 people are free; after that 2 points each.
- Sealed living. 0.8 per head per point of severity above the first, anywhere pressurised — a hull, a dome, an airless moon.
- Hunger: 15. Overcrowding past the life support: 10. Life support failing: 8.
- Remoteness: 4 per warp jump from the capital, up to 16.
- A hostile fleet in the sector: 8. An attack leaves 12 that decays away.
- Conquest. A population taken by force starts at 55 and stays angry for a long time.
- The view out of the window. Towns are judged by what is around them: 2.5 per neighbouring nuisance, 1.5 relief per pleasant one, averaged across the world's towns.
What can be governed away — and what cannot
This is the rule that catches people out. Civic buildings and civic technology hold down the head-count pressure only: crowding and sealed living, and nothing else. They start by holding 50% of it, and each civic technology raises that ceiling — Civic Order to 60%, Rule of Law to 70%, Civic Networks to 80%.
Remoteness, a siege, a famine and the aftermath of an attack sit entirely outside that and cannot be governed away at all. No amount of civic building will calm a world that is hungry or blockaded. Fix the cause.
The Nemora Bloom begin holding 65% of head-count pressure before researching anything, which is most of what makes them pleasant to play.
Keep reading
What happens when you end a turn
The exact order a turn resolves in, and why it explains most of the surprises.
Power, and what shuts down first
The grid, the shutdown ladder in full, and why a brownout is a warning rather than a disaster.
Food, farms and going hungry
How a sector feeds itself, what a birth actually costs, and how long you have when it goes wrong.