Supported ground

Supported ground is the area around a linked Astrocyte in a turn-based room. Standing on it helps you recover, and Care given there is stronger. It is the only recovery inside a room, apart from Settle.

How it works#

1. Each room authors one or more astrocyte sockets: floor tiles where an astrocyte process can come up.
2. Use Link at a socket within your reach. It is an action, or a bonus action for a Warden with Attune.
3. An opening appears in the floor, the astrocyte's process reaches up through it, and a sparkle spreads over the supported tiles.
4. The process stays up for the rest of the room, its tip gently moving.

Every tile within 3 king's moves of the socket becomes supported. Walls and holes still block it. A room with no socket has no recovery except Settle, and rooms decide how many sockets they have.

In the Gardens, a connection on supported ground counts as supported, so a strike there leaves nothing lingering. In Vessel Margins, linking an endfoot astrocyte quiets a reactive wall and can call on Vessa, the pericyte.

Numbers#

In the brain#

Astrocytes are anchored. They do not migrate to help in healthy adult tissue. Each one tiles its own territory, contacts many synapses, clears glutamate and buffers potassium (Bushong 2002; Halassa 2007). So a summoned astrocyte would be wrong. Going to where an astrocyte already supports the tissue is right. The body stays below the board and is never a unit. Crisp tile borders are a simplification: real territories overlap slightly.

Development#

• 1 Nov: the user removed the recovery parcel ("calming signals can't be bottled or packaged") and asked for a science-based rethink. Claude B compared a parcel, a summoned astrocyte and supported ground. The user approved supported ground with their own look: "an opening in the ground, an astrocyte tendril pokes out, vfx sparkles".
• The same visual effect serves the Apothecary's Calming visit. In a room the process stays up; at Hearth it withdraws.
• Claude A first reserved the surface as recovery, then renamed it supported so it is never confused with recovery Care.
• The rules are in the alpha engine and rooms. The Astro tendril effect (8ebe24cf3) is installed in the alpha's encounter host.

See also#

Link · Attune · Surfaces · Calming visit · Astrocyte

Sources#

1. 215bfbf88:docs/game-balance/31-turn-based-encounters.mdcopy
2. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-a-expeditions-turn-based-rooms.mdcopy
3. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-a-expeditions-location-mechanics.mdcopy