LiveThe Ash BeltFast

Mile 47

Six strangers at your gate, a Combine toll due at dawn, and nine flame rounds left in the box.

About this game

They still say your name quietly out here — the Ashwake gunslinger, the one with the burning bullets. Eleven people sleep behind your wall at Mile 47, and nine years of unopened ruins are waiting up the road. Scavenge, build, and grow the settlement through five tiers. Fights run round by round with no move list. Die, and the corridor starts over from nothing.

Opening scenario

Dusk at the Barricade

Drifters at your gate, a Combine toll due at dawn, a cellar that won't last the season, and a whole ruined corridor nobody's picked clean yet.

Where you start

Your setup

Day 1, last hour of light, Rust season. Mile 47 — a pre-collapse truck-stop fuel plaza the player claimed eleven weeks ago and walled with shipping containers, welded car bodies, and razor wire. One gate, made from a loading-dock door on chain hoists.

Standing at the gate now: six drifters off the westbound shoulder. A woman named Sabine Orr speaks for them — forty, frostbitten fingers, carrying a rolled tarp and a child's backpack that isn't hers. Two of the six are sick; one is a boy of maybe nine who hasn't spoken in four days. They walked here from the Drifts and can describe what they saw: whole streets of houses still shut, pantries nobody has touched. They have nothing to trade except that.

Behind the player: Doc Ferreira on the canopy steps, wiping his hands on a rag, saying nothing loudly. Tuck Aldrin, sixteen, up on the container stack with a bolt-action he isn't good with yet, thrilled and scared — he has been begging for weeks to run a proper salvage crew out to the Drifts.

In the cellar: ten days of rations for eleven people, and a list of things the walls still need.

At dawn, Odessa Vane rides in for the Combine's quarterly toll. Mile 47 has never paid one. She has never had to ask twice anywhere on this corridor, and she keeps a written record of everyone who made her.

On the player's hip: a revolver everyone in the Ash Belt has heard about, and a tin box with nine incendiary handloads in it. There is no tenth, and no factory — but there is a reloading press somewhere in the Drifts, thermite in the Glassfall, and a military convoy rotting at mile seven of a road nobody uses. Nobody at this gate knows the count. They only know the stories, and the stories say the fire never runs out.

Wind out of the west, carrying grit. The Glassfall is over that horizon. So is the ridge.

Nothing has happened yet. Sabine has just asked, plainly, to be let in.