Grid charge
Spend it to make things. Lose it by assuming it will always be there.
“Every bar begins with a working grid.”
A claim on a working machine
Charge describes the energy a settlement can draw for an allotted shift. It is not a metal and cannot be piled on a shelf. The dispatch board tracks allocations so the same turbine output is not promised to three furnaces at once.
Reserves do not run refineries
Precious metals survive an outage, but making another bar still needs power. This tension is central to Hashlands: accumulation matters, and so do the ordinary systems that make accumulation possible. The richest vault on a dead grid is still on a dead grid.
On the dispatch board
In a shift, charge is one bar across the top of the screen and every structure you place takes a bite out of it. Drills are cheap, furnaces are not, a compute hall will happily swallow the lot. Shedding load mid-rush is the closest thing Hashlands has to a panic button.