The atmosphere is lethal. You have thirty seconds of air. Everything you need is outside.

You start inside the wreck of your ship. Out there the air is dead. There is no oxygen on this planet.

At the start it's your lungs and nothing else: thirty seconds. Long enough to reach the ore. Not long enough to stand around thinking about it. The wreck is the only place that fills you back up.

So you run. You grab what you can reach. You watch the ring in the corner of your eye tick down, and you turn back a heartbeat before you have to.

Then you do it again. And each time, you get a little further from the only breathable room on the planet.

Oxygen is a leash

It isn't a resource you stockpile. It's a leash, and the whole mod is about lengthening it.

• Thirty seconds, bare. That's your starting range. It is not much.
• Armour helps. Light +10s, heavy +20s, modular and both power armours +30s.
• Research helps more. Oxygen capacity adds ten seconds a level, five levels deep, then continues infinitely.
• Tanks help most. Bolt oxygen tanks into your armour grid — but they compete for the same cells as your shields, batteries and exoskeleton. Choose.

A live HUD ring shows exactly what's left, in seconds.

Oxygen stations

Eventually, running home stops being good enough.

That's when you build an Oxygen station: a bunker that pressurises over five powered minutes at 10 MW, then holds its atmosphere on a steady 1 MW.

Walk into any of its four sides and you're inside — a real room, on the far side of the map, where your suit refills. Build machines in there and they run off whatever grid the bunker touches outside. Power crosses the wall even though nothing else does.

Let the power fail and the air is gone that instant. You keep whatever's in your suit, and you can always walk out. You just might not want to be far from home when it happens.

Below full pressure the whole building pulses red, inside and out. When it settles to steady white, it's ready.

Dying is not a shortcut

Death won't teleport you home for free.

Respawn in the wreck and you're in Rehabilitation — sixty to a hundred and eighty seconds, scaled to how much oxygen capacity you were carrying when you died. Craft, sort and build the whole time. You simply can't leave.

The mod records your peak capacity for the trip, so stripping your armour off before you die won't shorten the wait.

And your corpse never rots. That power armour full of oxygen tanks is still lying where you fell — ninety seconds past the point you can currently reach. Getting it back is its own expedition.

Good to know

• Factorio 2.1, base game only. Dead Air is declared incompatible with Space Age and cannot be enabled alongside it. The mod rebuilds how surfaces, spawning and life support work on a single planet, which Space Age's multi-planet progression fundamentally conflicts with. If you own the expansion, disable Space Age to play this.
• All artwork and sound is original. Nothing borrowed.
• Your factory is normal. Belts, bots, trains, biters — all vanilla. The only thing that changed is that stepping outside now costs you something.
• Multiplayer works — oxygen and Rehabilitation are tracked per player — though it has had far less testing than single player.
• Deliberately not in yet: sealed vehicle cabins and disposable oxygen bottles. Vehicles move you faster; they don't let you breathe.

A warning

The early game is small and tense on purpose. Your first factory will be a cramped huddle of miners barely a sprint from the airlock — and that's the point. You will feel every extra second of capacity you earn, in a way a normal Factorio start never quite delivers.

Enjoy!