![]() Self-sufficiency may allow your colony to survive indefinitely, but without profit your colony cannot deal with emergencies or expand its operations. In short, success in Surviving Mars can be summed up with these two lines: You don't have to worry about building a farm or polymer factory just as your colony is beginning to fall apart. With money you can buy food to feed your starving colonists, or arrange for a shipment of polymers to fix your broken battery. Players keep forgetting that you can import additional resources from Earth - using either a supply pod or your rocket - in order to make up for any shortfall. Instead, beginners should focus on the one resource in Surviving Mars which can fix any deadlock situation - namely money. There are multiple types of resource and a shortage of any single type can lead to deadlock. This is why - contrary to the advice of most Youtube Streamers - beginners should NOT aim for self-sufficiency to begin with. If you are unprofitable for too long then a situation can occur called a "deadlock" - wherein you can no longer acquire/produce specific key resources to keep your system running, causing everything else to stop running and fall apart. This can occur if your consumption of resources - particularly the maintenance of buildings - exceeds your production. However, engine-building games are suceptible to something called "systems collapse". At this point, the sky is the limit with regards to what you can build and achieve (and thanks to the Green Planet expansion, this end objective should be to fully Terraform Mars into Earth-like conditions). ![]() ![]() ![]() Done consistently, this leads to a "virtuous cycle" wherein your produce more and more resources to the point you enter the state of permanent surplus. Newly produced resources are then converted into more investments which expand the engine. power plants, mines, colonists) which produce more resources. You start with a pile of resources, which you convert into investments (e.g. Surviving Mars is instead a management simulation - more specifically an engine-building game. Indeed most "survival" games are misleading because they are not really about survival - instead you simply collect more and more resources to build bigger and bigger things. Surviving Mars, despite the name, is NOT a "survival" game. For Terraforming, head to the very last addendum of the guide. This guide is also divided into a basic introduction section for first-time players, and an addendum filled with notes for advanced players. If you have just the base / Space Race version of the game you can check my original guide here: It therefore refers to some buildings that are available only in the expansions. It's a tricky but satisfying space disaster, but I do wish I’d managed to save those 300 colonists.Note: This guide is meant for players which have bought not only the base game but also all the expansions (which you should, it's a really good game). I actually like that even once you get a pretty advanced colony going you still need to be hands on, but there’s often just too much to juggle at once.Īs fiddly and stressful as Surviving Mars can be, nothing else marries survival and city building so deftly. The result is a lot of extra micromanagement, which seems out of place in a game where you command armies of automated helpers and hoard state of the art technology. It provides a broad overview of the colony, but there need to be more ways to dig into the details. There are quality of life features, like the ability to pin things to a taskbar for quick access, but the menus are messy and there’s a lot missing. Unfortunately, the one it has isn't up to the task. Since these complex colonies can grow to a gargantuan size, Surviving Mars needs a solid UI to make sense of it. That’s the tension at the heart of Surviving Mars: it constantly drives you to expand, whether through resources running out or colonists needing more services, but expansion puts even more demands on your colony. These places give colonists somewhere to blow off steam and get help, but they also need to be staffed and maintained, necessitating more resources and colonists. That's why domes need to be filled with infirmaries and social spaces. Working during the dark hours, getting sick, seeing someone die-there are so many invisible threats to colonists' mental state, and they can eventually culminate in depression or even suicide. Mars is an awful place and living there takes its toll, so colonists need their mental well-being looked after. If only humans were as great workers as drones.
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