BASICS
Your Crawler
Your base is a vehicle. It is not a city fixed to a map tile, and almost every decision in the game comes back to where you have parked it.
Moving
You order a move and the Crawler drives there in real time. It is not a teleport and it is not instant. While it is moving it is genuinely somewhere on the line between where it left and where it is going, and the game treats that live position as the real one.
That matters more than it sounds. The moment your Crawler crosses out of the Frontier it becomes attackable, part way through the march rather than on arrival. The same clock runs the other way: cross back in and your unbanked haul banks at the border.
Boosting
Moving is free. You can spend Temporal Catalysts to shorten the trip, the same way you can shorten any other timer in the game.
Your hulls
The Default Crawler (Mark I) is free and always there. The Mark II and the Mark III are hulls you own, one of each, and you pick which one you drive in the Garage.
Reaching Barracks level 5 gives you one free Mark II, once per account. The Mark III is built in the Garage (Garage level 6). A destroyed hull is gone: rebuild it from its card in the Garage, and drive the Default Crawler until then.
- Mark II: 150,000 Metal, 150,000 Fuel, 10 Tech Cores and 5 Carapace Plates.
- Mark III: 500,000 Metal, 500,000 Fuel, 30 Tech Cores and 10 Ember Glands.
A build takes time and, like every other timer, catalysts shorten it. Carapace Plates drop from Sunder Basin monsters in the Wastes and Ember Glands from Glassfield monsters in the Deep Wastes, and both trade on the market.
Downed, then destroyed
A Crawler that loses a fight is first downed: it burns where it stopped and repairs itself in 60 seconds. Nothing is taken. While it is downed it cannot move, send squads out or swap hulls, but allies can still reinforce it. The defender who just lost is injured and cannot fight, so seat a healthy defender in the Barracks (you can while downed) or the next fight is undefended. Your hull cannot be swapped while an attack is on its way either.
A player who beats it again while it is downed destroys it. The Crawler respawns in the Frontier and the hull it was driving is lost. The attacker's plunder is left in the wreck for them to collect: the unbanked resources riding on it (all of them, unless Cargo Shielding research shields part), some of the unbanked items, plus a share of your banked resources, capped by your Barracks level (Hardened Vault research lowers that cap). Any unbanked haul the attacker did not take banks when you respawn.
After the repair the Crawler is weakened for 300 seconds. It can move and swap hulls again, but losing a fight to a player while weakened destroys it outright, with no second down.
The Hunter never destroys a Crawler. When it wins, it downs the Crawler and takes the unbanked haul, and no monster or Hunter attacks a Crawler that is already down.
Unbanked haul is what a fight mostly costs you. That is the whole risk model of the game, and it is why the bank step at the end of a run matters as much as the run.