“There's no blue dot, forget that. All you've got is what you drew yourself.”
In Level 0 there is no dot telling you where you are. Paper maps are how wanderers keep from getting completely lost. There is no minimap, and each survivor draws from memory what they have walked. When the world shifts (see Chunk Displacement), the sheets don't notice.
The five principles
- Nothing locates you; you recognize yourself if your map is good.
- What gets drawn is what you remember, not what exists, and only what you walked in the last 60 seconds.
- Everything costs something, whether paper, ink or seconds standing still and vulnerable.
- Sheets are objects. If you die, your map stays with your body, and what's pinned in the shelter stays there.
- Everyone uses the color and paper they have on them at that moment, and it isn't standardized.
How it’s drawn
Your memory is short: it keeps a sample every half second (120 in a minute) of where you were and what you saw, within about five meters around you. When drawing, the remembered cells are painted along with the walls that border them. A door you didn't go through is a wall opening onto nothing.
Freshness sets the line: from 0 to 20 seconds, firm, and from 20 to 60, shaky and full of gaps. Taking a hit interrupts the drawing. A sheet is one chunk of one floor. If you draw over an old sheet and the zone has already moved, the new line won't match the old one, and that warns you Displacement has passed through here.
Tools
Pen (blue, black or red), marker (thick and fast to use up), highlighter and pencil, the only one that can be erased. Ink is used up with each new wall drawn. A pen is good for about 500 m.
“Locate me”
It is an action that takes a few seconds, standing still. It compares your memory of the last 8 seconds with the walls drawn on each sheet you carry:
| Match | Result |
|---|---|
| 70% or more | small “you are here” circle and the notebook flips to that sheet |
| 40 to 70% | large, doubtful circle |
| Under 40% | nothing, you don't recognize this place |
Survivor tips
- Draw in a shelter or with your back to a wall. Whoever draws in a long corridor is the first not to hear what's coming.
- Carry more than one pen. Red runs out sooner than it seems.
- An old sheet works as a warning. Use it to measure how far the chunk moved.
What people report
- Some people pin the sheets to a corkboard and join them into a master plan of the base, with arrows at the edges where one zone links to the next.
- People also talk about projectors, antennas and clocks that would remember the route for you. Nobody has shown one.
- Others say a group could share the plan with its allies over the radio. No group has pulled it off in front of another.
See The Survivor’s Inventory and Backpacks and Weight to decide how much paper to take.