In the Game
Life Support
A crewed craft built for one life support mod means nothing to a save running a different one, and a rescue that takes two hundred days would kill the crew it was sent to save. The add-on handles both.
Which mods are handled
USI-LSSupplies | Roverdude's life support. |
TAC-LSFood, Water, Oxygen | Thunder Aerospace Corporation life support. |
SnacksSnacks | The lighter-weight option. |
Kerbalismread from its own profile | Rates are taken from Kerbalism's live rule set rather than guessed at, since its profiles change what a kerbal consumes. |
DeepFreezecryopods | Handled as a life support participant so kerbals already in a pod are left alone. |
None of them are dependencies
All of this is done by reflection. The add-on references no life support mod in its build, works normally with none installed, and degrades to doing nothing rather than throwing when it meets a version it does not recognise.
Endurance on listings and contracts
When a crewed craft is listed for sale or attached to a contract, it is scanned for what life support mod it is provisioned for and for how long. That flag is shown on the listing and in the contract embed, so a buyer can see at a glance that a station is stocked for ninety days under TAC-LS before they spend anything on it.
The daily consumption rates behind that number are declared once per mod and feed both the endurance display and the ration kit described below, so the two cannot drift apart.
The emergency freeze
This is what makes a rescue work between two players who do not run the same life support mod, and it is three things that all have to hold.
- The crew leave the simulation. Stranded kerbals are lifted out of the vessel entirely. Nothing consumes a kerbal who is not aboard a ship, and this is the only approach that also holds under Kerbalism’s background simulation.
- Each mod is told to let go. USI-LS, TAC-LS and Snacks reconstruct hunger from a stored last-fed timestamp. Handing a kerbal back with that timestamp intact after two hundred days would kill them the instant they thawed, so the thaw gives them a clean slate.
- A ration kit goes aboard. A few days of the rescuer’s own resources are stowed on the wreck, because a ship provisioned for TAC carries nothing a USI save recognises. Three days by default, adjustable in settings.
Crew thaw on their own at ten kilometres, which is outside physics load range so the wreck is still unloaded and the game seats them as it loads. There is also a manual button, and pressing it twice is harmless.
Why a thaw is two releases
The freeze imposes two states, so undoing it has to undo both. The life support mods have to let go, and so does the roster.
Frozen crew are parked as dead so KSP’s own respawn timer cannot quietly revive them behind the add-on’s back, and the freeze record is the only note that this was deliberate. Any path that drops such a record without seating the crew has to release them too: yours back to available, borrowed ones out of the roster entirely. Left parked, they would read in the astronaut complex as kerbals who are simply not there.
Every exit path thaws first
Including the one where the wreck is already gone. Under Kerbalism the exemption flag is saved with the game, so a kerbal frozen and never thawed would be exempt from life support for the rest of that save.
Switching it off
The freeze has its own setting, on by default, and the ration size is a number of days you can change. Both live in the settings file and in the settings panel. See also Rescue Missions for the mission side of it.