Last week’s notes ended with an admission. The bunker’s new lighting was still being tuned, and some stations read darker than intended. We spent this week finding out why. It was not the stations.

It was the concrete. Every mark of wear on the bunker walls — the spalled patches, the rust bleeding from a form tie, the soot — had been painted brighter than the wall it sat on. Freshly broken concrete is paler, which is why it was written that way and why it survived review. But a chipped hollow in a room heated by a coal stove collects damp and dust within a season. It goes darker. So does the rust stain, which had been glowing. The result was a bunker where the brightest thing in any room was bare wall, and the station you were standing in front of read as a dark shape against it. Thirteen stations, thirteen times the same defect — one error in the concrete, counted thirteen ways.

The ceiling and the floor carried it too. The floor had its walked path lightened, on the reasoning that polished concrete is lighter than concrete nobody treads on. In a sealed room heated by a coal stove and a generator, the walked path is where soot and mud get ground in. It is the dirtiest strip down there, not the cleanest. All three surfaces are repainted, all four upgrade tiers are relit, and the stations now carry their own light — so a workbench is lit as a workbench, and not by whatever the room happens to spill on it.

New

Stations light themselves. Each one now has its own light, anchored to the station rather than the room, so the thing you walked over to use is the thing you can see.
Room lamps at the top tier. The most expensive upgrade was lighting the corridors and leaving six rooms darker than the tier below them. Seventeen caged ceiling lamps now hang in the rooms, and the light steps from flame toward white — at that tier the bunker is running on its own generator, and it should look like it.
The first paid tiers vent. An open fire in the room the crew sleeps in had no flue of any kind, and the generator at the same tier had no exhaust at all. The fire gets a hooded canopy hung on chains, the generator a stack that discharges nearly three metres above the filtered intake.
The building has holes in it. Four stove flues, the ventilation intake, the generator exhaust and the extract duct all ran into unbroken concrete. The shell now has real openings cut through it, sleeved on the inside and cowled outside.
A drum stove. The improvised stove the bunker was always specified to have, with every flue sleeved where it leaves the wall.

Changes

The shell is repainted. Wall, ceiling and floor: wear darkens now instead of lifting. Chipped corners, the walked path and the soot line all read as damage.
The salt bloom on the walls stays pale — it is an active deposit, renewed by the same water that keeps leaking — but it is no longer the brightest feature on a surface with nothing above it.
The concrete stopped looking like wallpaper. One distinctive mark had been repeating eight times along a single wall.
You approach each station from the face that makes sense. The bookcase in particular had been asking you to stand behind it.
Wall sconces are oriented from the wall they are mounted on, and the candles burn down instead of standing full height forever.
The vault door’s dogging wheel is its own metal, so it reads as a handle rather than part of the leaf.

Fixes

Every sign in the bunker was mirrored. The lettering read backwards, and had for a long time.
The drum stove was upside down. That one error explains everything else that looked wrong about it.
The generator’s exhaust was venting into the intake that feeds it. It now goes up and over the roof.
Sconces meant for the rooms were all sitting on the corridor wall line, which is why one upgrade step used to read darker than the step before it.
The top tier made the bed shorter than the cot it replaced.
A bench plank three and a half metres long.
The latrine curtain hung shut, hiding the room behind it. It is half open.
Lamps at the top tier floated below the ceiling they were meant to hang from.
The fireplace firebox at one tier had nowhere to vent.
A kettle sat on the tip of a flue instead of on the stove plate.
Duplicate props removed, including a cable conduit that existed five times over and a blank cylinder standing in front of the vault door.
The sleeves and cowls that dress the wall openings were not touching their walls. Ten of twelve had never made contact.

Known issues

The generator station still reads dimmer than the rest of the bunker. It is the last one on the list.
A rebuilt Ardennes airfield is still under construction. It is laid out and walkable, but not in rotation yet.

New here? Blood of Rations is a WW2 extraction shooter — solo PvPvE raids in 1944 occupied Europe, Early Access on Steam 5 November 2026. If this is your kind of game, wishlist it on Steam. It is still the number that matters.