Post: Mail & Correspondence of the Rim

Build a mailbox and reach the world beyond your colony - without sending a caravan. Load parcels of goods, have a colonist write a letter, send tribute, post a contract, or subscribe to the news. Carriers from the Post Office faction walk the long roads to your mailbox, collect what's waiting, and carry it off for delivery - and they bring mail back the same way.
Mailbox can be found in building>misc for 60 steel

SENDING MAIL
- Letters to factions: friendly (warms relations), formal (neutral contact), or hostile (taunts and threats that worsen relations). Your most socially skilled colonist writes the best letters.
- Letters to people your colonists know - relatives, old friends, contacts out in the world. Writing to a loved one lifts your colonist's mood, and keeping up a correspondence deepens the bond over time, like a pen pal.
- Parcels: load any goods into the mailbox and ship them; their value becomes goodwill with the recipient faction.

TWO-WAY CORRESPONDENCE
- Factions and individuals write back over time. Replies arrive by carrier and wait in your mailbox inbox - read them, keep them, or delete them. A reply might carry a gift of silver, warm news, a grievance, a threat, or a plea for refuge.
- Open the inbox to read your full correspondence history, newest first, with unread mail marked.

DIPLOMACY WITH TEETH
- Hostile letters build a faction's grievance against you. Push too far and they'll send a warning - then muster a retaliation raid.
- Send tribute (goods to appease) to reduce a grievance, buy a window of peace, and call off a pending raid.
- Post a contract: hire a one-time trade caravan to visit, or put a bounty on a hostile faction to ease the pressure they're putting on you. Contracts are paid in silver your colonists physically haul to the mailbox - the deal is only struck once the carrier collects it.

A LIVING MAILBOX
- Unsolicited mail arrives on its own: care packages from friendly factions, fond gifts from people who think of you, and refuge-seekers asking to join your colony (welcome them in or turn them away).
- Subscribe to a newsletter and receive regular dispatches of world happenings, carrier-delivered.
- Carriers face the road: a distant or risky shipment can be robbed or waylaid in transit and lost.

WORK AS A COURIER
- The Post Office is hiring. Now and again a recruitment letter lands in your inbox inviting your colony to carry mail on their behalf - reply to apply, and after they've processed your application you're on the courier roster.
- Once hired, carriers will sometimes leave a sealed parcel with you bound for a real settlement out in the world, along with where it's headed and what it pays.
- Load the parcel onto a caravan and deliver it yourself: travel to the destination, and arriving with it in hand completes the job. You're paid in silver on the spot, with a little goodwill from the grateful recipient.
- No deadlines - a parcel waits as long as you need, so courier runs layer neatly onto trips you were already making. Pay scales with distance, and jobs only ever point you toward reachable, non-hostile settlements.

THE POST OFFICE
- A neutral Post Office faction lives on the world map, with settlements you can caravan to. Its couriers wear postal blue and answer to the name Postal Carrier wherever you meet them.

If a delivery can't reach a mailbox (you never built one, or it was destroyed), nothing is lost - effects still resolve and letters show up directly. Build a mailbox to begin.

Requires Harmony. No DLC required.