Welcome back, Commander!
My name is Pavel Peychev and I’m a Producer at Haemimont Games on Surviving Mars: Relaunched. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that in order to survive and thrive on the Red Planet you’ll need to come up with a lot of new tech. And today we’re going to talk about exactly that - Research.
Let’s run a refresher for those who haven’t taken the trip to Mars from 2018 till now. Surviving Mars is a colony-building game that lets you live the fantasy of colonizing and ultimately even terraforming Mars. You choose a mission sponsor, load up what you need and launch your rocket. In the first stage you run a remote outpost and prepare the base for your first colonists. You build up to a small colony deeply reliant on Earth, but grow to become more resilient. When the population, priorities and ambitions grow beyond mere survival, your colony focuses on grander tasks like terraforming Mars, building wonders like the Space Elevator, Artificial Sun and more.
But in order to reach that, we’ll need to get back to the topic at hand.
Mars is a distant, dangerous, demanding place. So it's only natural that we want to visit and look around! Call it the call to adventure, human curiosity or just FAFO syndrome :)
Picking a landing spot will determine a lot of the game prerequisites like available resources and hazardous conditions and what unique map is generated. Up for a challenge? Pick the worst possible spot to land. It might be just a couple of degrees to the North.
What you see from orbit is not everything that's down there. The map might hide many interesting things but you will need to scan each to find different deposits, anomalies or even entrances to underground caverns.
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The underground maps from “Below and Beyond” have received quality of life improvements that help with navigation of drones and rovers. We’ve made the caverns wider in order to enable fitting larger buildings into your settlements.
This entire treasure trove of anomalies is out there, waiting to be discovered. Don’t forget to pack a trusty Explorer rover so you can scan them. Some will give you research points but others might trigger events where you will need to decide how to proceed. Decisions, decisions.
And just because you’ve picked a landing spot doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to explore beyond the map. On the planetary view you’ll see different expeditions and projects that you can send rockets to. Each requires specific tools and skills, yields interesting rewards and sometimes hides risks.
And let's not forget the Asteroids. Those giant hunks of rock hurdling through space that might have all kinds of resources including Exotic Minerals. Occasionally one will pass by Mars and if you detect it, you can plan a mission to it. Extract as much as you can before they continue on their way and become out of reach.
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The Asteroid maps do have better lighting now though. And since we are an industrious species we’ve added a new way to capture asteroids and prevent them from escaping - the Asteroid Catcher. A new building that launches rockets that stabilize an asteroids’ orbit. But in order to unlock that, you’ll need to research a lot of tech.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I’m sure there’s a Matt Damon potato joke in here somewhere. What bigger necessity than being on an empty planet 225 million km away with no easy food, water or oxygen? Food, for instance, will not be as simple as plopping some seeds in the ground. So we’ll need to start with things like hydroponics and improve a lot of prototype technologies if we’re to make it in the beginning.
Back in 2018 Surviving Mars introduced a unique and expansive Research system. And expansions and DLCs added even more. The game reached a total of 100 regular technologies, 40 DLC technologies and 67 breakthroughs. But it’s not only about the scale.
Research items are divided into 7 tech trees (Biotech, Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Social, Recon & Expansion, Terraforming), each of which influences a specific aspect of the game. Researching one tech unlocks the next along that tree.
Since there will be a lot of systems to manage, you can queue up to 5 techs to research while you’re doing other Mars stuff.
Every technology has a specific Research Points cost. The further down the tech tree, the more tech expensive they get. There are many ways to generate RP.
Your sponsor contributes RP to the mission and there are ways to generate it. Be the first colony to achieve specific milestones and get RP rewards, send out expeditions to explore the planet, scan Anomalies with your trusty RC Explorer, construct Research Labs to build your body of knowledge. And if nothing else - just outsource research back to Earth to speed up your progress.
Here’s an example:
- You just landed. Congratulations!
You didn’t expect Mars to be a red-tinted Earth, did you? The environment here holds its mysteries which you can explore. That happens by discovering Anomalies and investigating them with your trusty RC Explorer(s). These can give you some RP or reveal unknown technologies in the tech trees.
Revealing technologies is probably as important as researching them. If you find a way to unlock a tech further down the tree, you can directly rush to research it.
As the game progresses, you feel the need to step up your Research Points production and decide to start building Research Labs. Those are buildings that require human workers and a lot of things influence their output. Scientists would naturally outperform other specialists working in this building. Having a shift fully staffed will increase productivity. Having the building working around the clock in 3 shifts will turbocharge it, but the workers will lose sanity.
So you might want to build a second Research Lab. But know that it's not just about spamming buildings, as each following building will have diminishing returns. You need to balance your RP production.
Each time you start a new game, the technologies in the 7 tech trees will rearrange their positions (Note, some items are always early and others always late-game). This has big implications on how you’ll be able to develop your colony. Will you get the ability to make Polymer Factories early on or have to import the building prefab from Earth?
Once in a while you’ll uncover a Breakthrough technology! Breakthroughs are powerful techs that can significantly alter your colony's abilities. But you’ll only encounter a handful of them in a playthrough. This will open specific unique opportunities for each playthrough. You can “strike gold” with Core Rare Metals and find and exploit extremely rich underground deposits. Will you develop Giant Crops, increasing the food output and allowing you to support a larger population earlier? Or maybe slash the need of a large population altogether with Factory Automation, lowering the number of workers needed in those buildings?
As you can see Commander, the journey is not a straight line.
In the noise of the moment, when you're juggling deliveries from Earth, resource shortages and tracking expeditions, it's sometimes easy to forget the overall journey of Surviving Mars.
It takes the dream of Humans living on another planet, and progresses it through its different stages.
From establishing an automated outpost that prepares the ground for the first human colonists by relying entirely on feasible tech that is pushed to its limits. Through a fledgling manned colony that develops new technologies that enable it to slowly grow and become resilient. To reach a stage where survival is no longer the preoccupation, but thriving, changing the planet itself and exploring some really sci-fi tech.
It's a journey we’d love to share with you, Commander!
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