Winter's Bone is just such a cool celebration, every time. It feels quite ham-fisted to walk around, wearing a thick snowsuit and head-covering helmet, celebrating being able to casually sit down in the snow as the thermometer hits negative thirty Centigrade, feeling toasty warm and not feeling the faintest need to gather around a fire as you're warm enough already.

But it's still fun, somehow. Everyone's dressed in their finest monosuit, a few of them spreading their arms to their sides, reveling in how they don't need to curl up or move their backs to the wind. Slowly, the snow starts falling more intensely, and a blizzard envelops the 40 or so people enjoying the protectiveness of their snowsuits. They enjoy doing a few stretches, essentially taunting the chilling wind and waves of snow, as it fails to make them uncomfortable in the coziness of their snowsuits. A blizzard during Winter's Bone is an auspicious occasion, and the weight of the evidence has overwhelmingly concluded that cities that have gone through blizzards during Winter's Bone actually do better the following year.

But this blizzard is becoming miserable. Visibility falls to nothing; the people taunting the storm get forced to huddle, by the powerful wind; people grope around in 0 visibility, occasionally hitting each other. And the blizzard stops suddenly. And they're not in the middle of an abandoned forest, and the thermometer carried by one of the people in the group starts dropping quite a bit lower than you'd expect, even on the coldest day of the year...

People look around, in stunned confusion. They're hoping to find some sign of civilization, as a few of them race towards the edges of the crater in panic. There should be some sign of civilization; another one of them calls using his phone, hoping to reach emergency services, to ensure they don't end up lost in this... abandoned steampunk movie set, presumably.

The temperature is currently negative fifty degrees centigrade. There's no phone signal. The sun is low and looming.

A few seconds pass, and the calmest and most rational person, very calmly and deliberately, swears exceedingly loudly, once. He gets the attention of the others, explaining their dire situation.

"Okay, I need to start planning. This temperature is comfortably below anything our snowsuits can handle long-term, and the weather is unlikely to very suddenly become very much better."

"First order of business: heating up. Nobody would ever build a movie set somewhere this miserably cold, so this can be safely assumed to be a real place, where neanderthals lacking nuclear power heat themselves up by starting fires."

"I'd like to do some reconnaissance using the rarity rule. Things were built around the trio of metal objects in the middle; I want someone checking the seeming-backpack, the ring-shaped machine by the truck, and to get a quick and rough inventory of tools to see what we have to work with. Anything unusual or unfamiliar gets a twice-over. Race back to the trio of metal parts in the middle once you've found a vaguely promising plan."

The large metal lumps appear to have once been enormous steam condensers and pumps, driving recovered water deep underground for some reason. Also, there is a deep cavern under the flat area, full of scaffolding, ladders, and piping. There are also large quantities of toxic methane and sulfur dioxide leaking from down below!

The backpack was once a personal heating device. There are ports for it to accept hot steam, ruined heat-storage chemical packs and electrical batteries, and several other crude pieces of technology inside, including a startlingly elegant steam-powered alternator providing electricity for an incandescent lightbulb and an outlet on the thing.

The ring-shaped machine stuck to the truck is under thick layers of snow and partially obscured by ice. There are pistons and rotating shafts. Some sort of tool, clearly. It's not particularly obvious what it does, aside from a tidy efficient little turbine and insulated steam storage tank, unless someone particularly happens to have a hobby of early electromechanical computing.

There are a good variety of various hand tools buried in the snow or dropped in the wreckage here and there, if one looks thoroughly enough. The semi-intact workshop has incandescent lights, drafting tables, and a few simple power tools - a band saw, a drill press, a lathe. All directly steam-powered.

One of them ends up walking briskly towards the center of the building, by the 3 broken pieces of metal. She speaks up.

"We're missing something. It would be impossible to survive for remotely enough time to build anything without access to a windproof boiler of some kind. It might look unusual; there might be some way of clearing the cavern, to make it livable. The methane in the tunnels might be a trace of some kind of natural gas heating system; far from a priority, as we've seen plenty of perfectly functional coal."

"Skim every document you can find. There would be plans for the heating system in one of them; if we can understand those, we can understand how these people survived long enough to build anything remotely impressive."

"We'd probably want to try to use the workshop and the best-preserved houses near the center as the basis for shelter for people to live in. Once we've found out the, or a, heating system for this frozen hellhole."

There's a special case in the workshop that has a bunch of nicely done blueprints! They clearly put a lot of effort into designing the instructions to be unambiguous. Though it's still hard to read them, there are a lot of diagrams and pictures. These Things include a few different types of coal-powered vehicles, the heater-backpack-thing, a steel mill and sawmill, a small-scale boiler device, some sort of coal-fracking device, hunting equipment, and a huge steel tower apparently designed to rapidly inject water into the geothermal zone below, generating and distributing vast amounts of steam. Plus some sort of medical station, a gathering post, a cook-house, and blueprints for efficiently laid out bunkhouses.

So we have boilers, hunting equipment and compact bunkhouses. That's sufficient for a foundation of so-called "Barracks Communism". It's only through intense, ferocious effort and sacrifice that the wealth of thomassia was built; and it is through it that we shall reconstruct the prosperity of our homeland.

But before anything else, an inventory. There are 40 people living here; looking through the workshop and ruins of homes, how miserable a condition would the 40th person be forced to live under? Would they eventually weaken and succumb to hypothermia, or would they be able to at least be healthy enough to work, if they slept wearing the snowsuit they wore to every Winter's Bone? Other than the workshop, are there reasonably well-preserved buildings anywhere to be found, potential cores that can be built around, to reconstruct some faint hint of the glory of thomassia's towering cities, keeping as many and as much as possible under one roof?

The homes are wrecked and torn apart enough to be essentially write-offs. They will need to build new structures. The workshop, a warehouse of sorts, and a set of disassembled tents are around. The tents may not be very insulated, but a roof, even a flapping one, should be a comfort. The only other real candidate for a core is the cookhouse, which is mostly intact.

A simple list appears in the head of the people looking around: 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks. There's plenty of coal, some it maybe even usable. There's plenty of snow and ice, and plenty of water if there's plenty of heat. Now, all they need is a furnace for the coal, vessels for the water and traps for the meat. The most experienced economic planner among them, returns to the Rarity Rule, as he thinks of how to proceed:

- 1 person can do all the work of keeping inventory, planning, research and long-term thinking; they'd want to set up in the workshop, having blueprints and notes readily at hand.

- 5 people would likely be able to feed furnaces or boilers in the cookhouse, workshop and warehouse; using the relatively nearby piles of coal, at least.

- It doesn't seem like there is sufficient equipment to let more than... 7 or 8 people, perhaps, work on crudely forging simple metal devices: furnaces, hunting equipment, using the means of production to make more means of production, all competing with each other; rounding up, 4 people would get assigned to working on using the steam-powered machines to make crude stoves, and 4 of them assigned to trying to make traps to permit them to hunt animals.

- And that's 26 people without an obvious role. Brainstorming a bit... rebuilding housing, or finding a way to rebuild the broken steam network, are long-term projects with vast promise. We'll need quite a bit of wood and iron in any case, so moving as much building material as we can manage to fit into the warehouse is probably the single largest task we have yet to complete. Once the traps and stoves are finished, they could start getting to work on making and using more simple tools like saws or hammers, to let them be able to construct sufficient housing. The thomassian system of "self-voting" gets put to use. One man shouts that a meeting to find out who will do what will begin at the earliest practicable opportunity, resulting in people rapidly gathering around him near the center of the crater.

"Anyone who's better than me at strategic thinking and economic planning, raise your hand." Nobody does.

"Anyone above the 80th percentile in terms of their ability to haul coal and wood to the warehouse, raise your hand." 8 thomassians raise their hands.

"Lower your hand if you're less physically capable than most people in your group." Only 5 thomassians keep their hands in the air.

"Raise your hand if you're in the 80th percentile in terms of constructing crude iron furnaces or hunting traps." 8 thomassians raise their hands, trembling and scared; 80th percentile won't help them much.

"Everyone else, I think it makes the most sense for you to haul wood and iron into the warehouse, gradually transforming them into building material. Do what I want, not what I tell you. Now, are there any BIEs that invalidate this economic plan? Good; let's get rich."

Everyone gets to work: preparing piles of coal for when the furnaces get done, making crude iron furnaces and animal traps, hauling construction materials into the warehouse, and thinking carefully about future threats and dangers, investigating this new world's blueprints.

There turns out to be a buried cache of food. Potatoes in sacks. The plans and designs for equipment are built to work even with crude workmanship.

The workshop has more documents scattered around, but fragmentary and damaged, needing some amount of work and maybe prototyping to recover. A hothouse, apparently to grow food with. A beacon to rise up above. Airships powered by steam. Sophisticated machines for coal mining and more. Most of it relies on Steam Cores- like the one trapped in the snow on the outskirts. Plans for the Generator, and the specialized tools to build the parts for it.

Potatoes! Thomassians are obsessed with making simple food that's far more delicious than it simplicity might suggest. If these are remotely fresh, the party's single amateur chef will be able to turn out something quite amazing, they'd expect. These probably aren't seed potatoes, but a few will still be saved for when the hothouse gets ready to turn them into crops - hopefully.

But the thomassians haven't gotten hungry enough. Eating huge portions for dinner proved a blessing in disguise; they'll be full for a while longer, still.

After ending up with mini-furnaces to heat the warehouse, workshop and cookhouse, the metalworkers can transition to making planks, spikes, saws and hammers, and whatever else is needed to start building housing surrounding the cookhouse. It's the one place that won't have piles of supplies or tons of tools in the way, as well as having cookery equipment; the only place that it makes sense to start building out new housing to let everyone sleep indoors.

The tents would make for excellent roofs and doors, if anyone comes close to finishing some wooden walls.

It's not especially difficult to raise some wooden walls, though there is still the matter of clearing the wrecked stuff away first.

In spite of the annoyance of the wreckage slowing them down, the thomassians work hard on constructing as much crude housing as possible in a circle around the cookhouse. They have a strong desire to not force anyone to sleep without at least crude wooden walls for shelter, tonight, so they keep working for as long as they manage to stay awake, hoping that nobody would get forced to spend the day sleeping with just a tent for shelter.

Anyone getting to work inside cheerfully and unhesitatingly volunteer for taking the tents if there isn't adequate indoor space, while 3 people read various notes in the workshop, trying to improvise a way of feeding steam into the alternator to keep the incandescent light going for as long as they manage to stay awake.

Oh, that's easy, the workshop has a big electrical generator and the documented cabling standards are easy to work with. If slightly lacking in truly modern safety sensibilities.

Just 40 people? With a solid effort, decently insulated housing for everyone can be up by nightfall, using mostly material taken from the wreckage.

It's something worthy of celebration, but awkwardly enough, it's still too early to eat a properly thomassian portion in the cookhouse. So people instead try to reminisce on fun moments of their lives, or exciting fiction they're read, as they take a break from hauling anything when the darkness makes it difficult to see.

The thomassians are in high spirits; this feels just like living through the days of their forefathers, who lived to grow old in a world that had changed unrecognizably in their lifetimes. As their carefully-trained circadian rhythms tell they that they'll get nothing more done this night, they fall asleep, nearly fainting on the improvised attempts at pillows that they tried to assemble from any cloth they found.

The buzz and rattle of steam pipes keeping the improvised house interiors at a balmy negative ten degrees centigrade against the bitterly cold wind doesn't interrupt them overnight. Though in the morning, the temperature quickly rises soon after sunrise. Just a few degrees- it's negative 42 rather than negative 50 now.

The workshop still contains lots of information that's not paired with pictures and diagrams to make it easily decipherable.

The designated hunting team, 4 of the people working indoors yesterday, stand in front of the cookhouse hearth, full of excitement for the potatoes they'll be enjoying. The chef sheepishly gets to work, steaming enough potatoes to let the hunting team eat a hearty portion, as they travel off with their hunting equipment, hoping to bring back plenty of meat. They attempt to find a piece of magnetized metal, intending to use it as a compass as they travel directly south in their hunt for prey. It'd be hard to completely miss the wide crater on their return trip, if they kept their hunt for food as short as they intended.

Now, returning to the Rarity Rule: understanding this world's complicated and unfamiliar steam machines, and achieving the energy-richness that would make today's thomassia utterly unrecognizable to their ancestors, are the two limiting factors to enjoying warm homes and prosperity for all. Enough thermal energy can slay any amount of cold, after all. So the full-time economic planner takes a walk around the crater and goes through the notes, trying to learn as much about the coal resources as he can. How much do they have? How much less convenient are the farther deposits? How well would the fracking system work?

The hunters will find that any actual game is startlingly scarce. They can find something to hunt if they try hard enough, but it's likely to be a hassle. There are plenty of magnets around the workshop to make compasses with.

Already gathered into handy sacks for easy use: About two days' worth at the current level of heating for the cookhouse, buildings, and workshop. In convenient piles ready for quick gathering: About a week's worth. The seam in the distance is about ten minutes' walk away, but will require specialized mining equipment to sink a shaft down and start shearing off whole walls of coal, plus elevators and ventilation for any workers inside. The deposit itself is likely to be effectively infinite for a group of 40. It's somewhat hard to tell what the coal-fracker will be like without trying it, but it seems like a seriously engineered device, not a joke or rube goldberg machine.

The hunters mumble to themselves in annoyance, dismayed by the scarcity of game. The hothouse would presumably prove urgent, in the end... nonetheless, they try to see how much they can catch within 4 or so hours; they want to be sure that hunting is a poor option before taking it off the table.

The planner is mildly annoyed by the scarcity of trivially-accessible coal. The seam is likely of the kind that would be effectively served by a mining machine, of some kind; and the coal can be transported quite conveniently by a rope line or railway, of some kind, to let human workers push it without being weighed down by the weight of the coal. The planner nods, wanting to explore the resource demands of a coal mining machine before proceeding any further. He has quite a bad feeling about the fracking machine.

Meanwhile, he gathers 2 of the other people that read notes with him last night; he'll absolutely need a ton of R&D to learn the practicality of mechanized coal production. Rarity Rule strikes again:

- 3 people on R&D, he'll want to do this full-time from now on;

- 4 people hunting;

- 33 people uninvested, to use the proper terminology.

He'll have an appropriately-sized team recover a Steam Core, before having the rest stockpiling steel from within the ruins of the buildings and the closest few piles; that should give the R&D team plenty of time to discover whether the drilling machine should be our Plan A, or our Plan Eventually.

Baited traps may well prove more effective- While they spot one doe and several birds in the distance, there are the tracks of small animals somewhat more commonly, apparently burrowing in the snow. The hunters may also note down a few landmarks sticking out in the white desert- An upturned sled, a large boulder, and a tree on a hill.

According to the designs in the workshop, a semi-automated coal mining machine would require the lone Steam Core that's salvageable from the wreckage, and then still require ten operators to descend into the ground and use the tools. Building something more automated than that seems like a pretty tough project. It looks like it'll take all day for fifteen people to carefully untangle and free the device from ice, then repair any minor damage according to the handy picture-heavy manual.

Quickly seeing whether there's anything of value on the sled should take roughly no time at all; it's not even really a detour for them.

Pulling out the Steam Core and putting together the mining machine will be a big effort. But it's one they'll want to do. As few people as they can get away with go to work on taking the Steam Core; the rest, attempting to salvage steel or maybe even iron. They'll refocus their effort if the hunting expedition proves to go poorly, but until then, they're hoping that they'll be able to begin a fledgling metalwork industry.

The sled appears to have been placed as a landmark. There's a grave with a crude headstone and a large, square pile of rocks nearby. And of course the materials of the sled itself- The runners are bent and the deck cracked and splintered, but some metal and wood is recoverable.

Five hands on the steam core will probably get it eventually. A pretty solid amount of steel can be salvaged from the wrecked buildings and various other debris. They could work at this for a week at least, before running out of steel to salvage.

Those inside the workshop get to work, attempting to estimate the feasibility of constructing a metal ropeway leading out to the coal deposits; a superior transport system like the ropeway would hopefully let them focus more of their effort on the gathering of the coal, instead.

5 people remain assigned to the work digging out the steam core, at an agonizing pace, the rest preparing stockpiles of steel in the warehouse. The full-time economic planner starts writing notes, thinking of as many different huge projects as he manages to put his mind to: more beautiful alternators to let everyone enjoy electric lighting, a ropeway to ease the work of carrying the vast amounts of coal they'll need once this becomes a proper settlement, indoor plumbing, and vast, spacious, well-insulated housing or even a proper hospital, thinking of his skyscraper apartment in thomassia... no, to repeat that old phrase, "everyone means everyone". The coal seam and iron deposits are plenty sufficient to let many enjoy lives of warmth and happiness, if the thomassians were willing to share. The beacon will be built as rapidly as is possible, both to aid the hunters and future expeditions, and for letting the world know about the fledgling civilization. This will be an uplift story, not just a tale of heroism.

The scouts can find a frozen deer calf, seemingly well preserved.

A powered ropeway to move coal inward would be viable, with several poles to suspend it, but a simple flat road and carts might be faster to build.

The beacon is likely the fastest to set up- They could manage it today with what they've already gathered.

The scouts look at the calf, noting the location. Did it perhaps die of hypothermia? In any case, they'd likely be able to basically sterilize it in the cookhouse; they're not particularly worried about foodborne illness.

Constructing a powered ropeway would be a major expense, but it'd let them move the coal with ease; with the vast amounts they're hoping to transport with it, it'd take a simply unacceptable amount of human labor or complicated engines to drag that many carts behind them. Hinges to let them hide the ropeway within the snow would add to the complexity, and also impressiveness, of the design; blueprints start getting drawn up.

A beacon gets built, the thomassians working on it might get excited to use their knowledge and determination for everyone, not only thomassians like themselves.