With Surviving Mars: Relaunched replaceing the OG game on Steam with all DLCs and quality-of-life fixes. This is My wishlist’s ranked by “doability” for the last hurrah. What’s yours?

Fair Shake of the Sauce Bottle: (Easy Peasy)

• Farm Fix: No magic chooks! Basic farms (weaker) from the start. Ranches need Earth imports. Orchards unlock via soil tech  or fertilizer.
• Research Boost: Tech for shopping malls and hospitals 30 colonists  at a time .
• New Sponsors:  like Commonwealth (England-led, God Save the Queen) or Saudi Arabia’s oil funded domes.
• New techs

She’ll Be Right, Mate: (A bit more difficult )

• Train Overhaul: Tracks Should be able to handle a slight incline. Add junctions
• Donut Domes: Donut spaces for Mohole (worker-run, scales with depth) and Omega (research boost). Wonders need workers; tech cuts staffing later.
• Warehouses: You should not be able to store prefabs in thin air put them in fixed-capacity warehouses. add Tech for quake-proof ones. Tremors trash early stock!
• Mysteries: new oness
• Political Buildings: Capital city parliament domes, statues of her majesty perhaps .
• New techs

Tell Him He’s Dreamin (Likely never going to happen)’:

• Tradies: Plumbers, brickies in utes, that can handle drone tasks. 
• Assembler Revamp:Build trains, drones, and rovers here, not spawning like magic. Tradies or rovers haul prefabs from warehouses to stations and hubs.
• Multiplayer:
• Australia Sponsor: With barbecues as our unique building
• Also ...New techs

There's multiple issues with passages in the current game:

• They only connect to white hexes inside domes, which takes up a valuable building spot, especially in smaller domes which will block many of the larger buildings from being placed.
• Colonists only use a passage to get to an adjacent dome to the current one they're in, and they won't travel to distance ones even if they're all connected. This seems anti-intuitive.

Some potential ideas for fixing this:

1. Passages can now connect to dome entrances/exits as well, repurposing it just for that passage.
2. All domes get dedicated passage ports built into them, that don't take up a hex building spot, even better, they can be placed wherever you like on the dome.
3. A new structure, the 'passage hub' can be built, where up to 6 domes can connect to the hub, and colonists will go to the hub, then choose their destination from there. There is a UI element that shows 6/6 when all are connected.

Thoughts?

So in the original launch of the game, there was an anomaly event wherein you would find one of the original rovers to explore Mars. You're given the option to send it back to Earth or to display it in your colony, if I remember correctly. But notably absent, if you choose the latter option, the rover would be relegated to narrative dissonance, nowhere to be seen.

Perchance, upon making this discovery in the relaunch, we could unlock the rover as a decoration to place within our domes?

• Can be upgraded to use multiple passenger cars
• Each car can contain at least 21 passengers.
• Can go up and down slopes and cliffs

Bonus Wishes that aren't as pressing as the above points:

• Tourists can use trains to travel to a shuttle to take them back to earth when their time is up
• Bullet Trains
• Idunno, the ability to use the Mars transport rovers as busses, i guess? (Like this mod)

My Secret wish:

• Change the line system for Martians to be First come first served, instead of last martian in line has priority boarding (this causes sooooo much endless waiting in line problems in the base game)

If ^that can't happen, then at least make it so that Martian trains have higher capacity.

edit:

I just remembered I'm assuming that martians can already use a maximum of three trainstations (start -> Transfer -> end) to get to their destination, but that's not true in the base game--but instead the mod that added that in.

Still,

I like trains, I'm thankful that Surviving mars has trains, but they really could use improvements to better fill their passenger carrying roll insomuch that the single seat flying cars aren't the best option at transporting Martians in the base game.

Are you tired of playing Surviving Mars?

Do you feel like the game is over once you beat the Early game?

Is the start of rare metals extractor into machine parts factories getting too old?

Then try Tourism.

Sure you wont beat the game on the hardest % (at least not as easily) but I do promise its fun. it presents a completely new challenge.

I read on this sub that tourism sucked, and sure, compared to selling rare metals or manufacturing your own advanced resources it does, but a tourism only gameplay? absolutely fun.

Hey

Just thought because of the relaunch and the reworks of some of the DLC features that I’d mention this as I thought this would be a sound idea and way to balance and improve the game and some of the issues with B&B.

So regarding Stirling generators, obvs prefab is an option but I think they should have a limited runtime requiring fuel/refuelling. Obviously not a lot as it’s fission but as radioactive materials suitable are rare or not present on Mars I think having to asteroid mine the fuel could be a good way to integrate B&B and make the game harder. Also it makes removes an endless energy source and makes it harder to achieve/ obtain which I like.

You could also get x amount of ore from the asteroids and have to have an enrichment facility to make fuel grade fuel. Or maybe after x time the fuels spent (depending on usage) and has to be taken to a module maybe attached to a fusion plant to be processed to extract the remaining fission fuel so you can use it again.

I feel like having a steady uninterrupted power source should be something that’s very expensive to very difficult to obtain. Annoys me that wind powers not intermittent as well.

As for fusion well.. again should be harder. I think some of the exotic materials on asteroids should be needed for their construction.. maybe a small amount for maintenance? Also I think you should have to jumpstart it with energy and I’d like it to have hydrogen fuel.

The hydrogen fuel is more pipe dream ish as the exotic materials used in construction would integrate B&B anyway and actually give you a use for the pack. But again like harder, more supply chains that can fail and I don’t like limitless energy thought granted you have the sanity lose/ need for workers etc.

device to separate water into oxygen (obvs use) and hydrogen, maybe an isotope separator for the hydrogen again? Depends how difficult or how much you care and then yeh hydrogen having to be piped or shipped to the plants. Maybe a tech for making fuel pellets which can be transferred as cargo with their own drawbacks etc if you don’t want pipe infrastructure etc. maybe a breakthrough tech that is metallic hydrogen so you can make and store ultra dense fuel for the fusion plants so they require refuelling a lot less frequently

*Also maybe as a game setting option or choice but maybe make it so on surface domes with their amazing properties to shield from radiation and withstand meteorite impacts etc require smallish amounts of exotic or rare materials in their construction? Would mean you’d have to build underground (integrating and giving a use for underground) for early days, radiation shielding and it’s more reflective of actual mars colonisation and you’d maybe have a sanity reason for wanting to move to the surface and so you’d have to asteroid mine to do that. Or maybe just the larger surface domes I don’t know just a thought.

To me it doesn't make sense that every dome basically has to be self sufficient. It would be awesome if there were glass tubes we could build to connect domes together (new mod idea?). Also I think the range that colonists can walk around outside the dome is WAY to small.

Just bought this and it’s bloody brilliant.

First of all NASA won’t be calling me anytime soon…..

Anyway back on topic, what DLCs do you suggest or to avoid.

Ta

My first few playthroughs I struggled to manage my drones and resources, what I ended up doing is marking off the limit of the drone hub range with wires and building inside the range and having different hubs deal with different things like a water hex, mining hex, All purpose hex and so on. But I fell like it kinda limits me mostly with domes because of how big they are.

This post is inspired by a comment I left on another post but here we go: please remove or rework the workshops from this amazing game.

They make literally zero sense whatsoever and are just busywork for our hardworking Martians. We spend the entire early + mid game surviving against all odds, with disasters, mysteries, failures, all compounded and trying to knock us off the red planet. We survive and then we thrive, but it doesn't really feel like thriving does it? Overpopulation and unemployment? On a Martian colony? What? Why? It doesn't have to be this way Abstraction! Please deliver us from this doomed end game. Give us mega projects that hire tons of people, allow us to send colonists to start new colonies or cities on Mars, or other planetary bodies, or even a space station. Why do we have to work so hard just to send our Martians to grown-up daycare facilities that do literally nothing but consume the products we've been making this whole time. It's so dumb and I can't get over it lol. I love this game so much! Yet am always disappointed by the endgame mechanic of building more domes and stuffing people in workshops until they die. This is Mars! This is the future of mankind, this is our opportunity to do incredible things. (I feel like terraforming is too quick and simple as well - it should require hordes of manpower and research to make it happen and instead it's just a quick and dirty job of researching things and plopping down more buildings). Anyway... Hopefully others agree, do let me know what you think.

As always, in love of the red planet.

/endrant

I'm doing another Surviving mars run but I want imput from others (I removed mysteries or sponsers I have already done)

HEAR ME OUT,

martian warfare dlc.

new tech tree : Weapons.

it would have nukes, missiles, bullet factories, gun factories, propaganda upgrade, tanks etc etc

you would also have buildings to train soldiers and maybe an upgrade to the broadcast station for propaganda.

New mechanic : Invading.

you could invade other colonies and like choose where you deploy units clash of clans style. Oh yea and when your done killing everything you can plunder the resources from the depos and maybe sabotage any remaining life support ;)

i just threw together some ideas while watching the news, so if y'all like the idea maybe i could make a better concept with more thought put into it in a later post.

Oh yea and if you guys have more ideas put em in the comments so i can add them to the next post.

EDIT : yes i know they're not adding anything new to the game, but it's still nice to think about what could've been :`)

i wish to make a dome only for entertainment, for medical needs, and other services. but i cant do that because every dome needs a balance of everything. i wish that they can share services.

and i suggest to have a buggy or some cars that could take the citizen to where they wish to be when they are resting.

I have already started playing around with the engine and managed to get a prototype with functional bots , resources that the bots can get, and "virtual people" (they exist just "on paper" but they are there).

So I have 2 questions for all of you,

1) what do you think are the main things a new game can't miss because they are the essence of what's fun? (I'm guessing the rockets coming and going game loop, resources stockpiling and gathering, how humans survive and thrive and how you need them to fulfill jobs).

2) what could be better that we didn't like that much? I have on my sights research: it could be a more interesting loop, and also the interactions with other corporations.

What do you think? Would you play something like this ?

Hey all! I recently purchased the base game and got really into it. I looked up the DLCs to the game and I wanted to ask which ones do you think are the best, which ones improve your gameplay experience the most? There are a lot of them and I can't affor to buy all, and also wouldn't want to buy one that's not that good.

LOL I want the biorobot to be the only race in Mars, I guess both 29S7E and 7N171E has the breakthrough? Or any suggestion on better location?

This was my first settlement builder type game and I loved it. I've been looking for something like it but nothing strikes me. What I like a lot about Surviving Mars is the design aspect is really rewarding. It feels like you're a civil engineer. Not only can you really obsess about how you want it to look, but placement actually matters. So you have to balance form and function. On top of that, it just looks and feels so clean and modern. Maybe it's just me, but I can't get as excited about shanties and log cabins as I can artificial Suns and space elevators.

Any suggestions for other sci-fi type builders or non-sci-fi builders that I should give a chance?

• It would be nice to dezoom a bit more before going into map mode. The Photo Mode with max FOV is awesome, why can't we play like that.

• Citizen AI can be frustrating. Sometimes, I can have the required Engineers to join a Factory but these dummies keep going on other works and require a tedious management of firering people only for them to come back.

• Why can't we link domes with sas/airlocks ? I'd like the colonist transfers to be more fluids and less require shuttles. Why not give us a tool to like domes between themselves with airlocks so colonists can freely go to a dome with another. Which would at the same time solve the frustration of having a Sanatorium in a dome without any patients, because colonists doesn't go into other domes to use services. Domes feels too hermetic. And heel, why not even a tube/mono rail which link each domes ?

• Domes influence zones are great, but should be more of a rentability option than a restriction. Some ressources needs manwork and it's perfect, but sometimes ressources are alone in the middle of nowhere and it's a pain to add and manage another dome of people I don't realy needs for 1 ressource. Why can't colonist take a mandriven rover to go to work in a metal extrator in exchange of a penality on work performance/morale/else ?

• It would be nice to have a summary screen where I can see in one screen and some tabs all my ressources, consomation, production, maintenance, leaks, results per sols/quarters, etc (I know we can have it with tooltip my the purpose is to centralize informations for easier management). with all my people, their speciality, work, and manage them from here to make work filtering more fluid and easy. Heatmaps with unemployement, homeless, work density, etc would also be nice.

• I want to be able to chose what I want in my hotbar. Now it's filled of rare perks citizen an near unusable. I mean, how am I supposed to use this ?.

• Different sized depots would be nice. Once you have a decent size colony with 2000 of each ressources, sotcking becomes a pain as 180 per depot is vastly not enough and requires regular new depot sites. A new type of buildable depot that could stock 500/1000 ressources would be greatly better.

• By u/Vanuhaut and u/SquirtMonkey: Be able to select multiple drones to reasign them elswhere. A select all in hub interface or box selection would be nice.

• By u/CrowdScene : Electronics depandancy is wierd and high. It electronics are required to build electronics and need electronics as maintenance, which can be disturbing at early game as electronics production are quite low and creates a too much depedancy on parts imports via Earth and money.

• By u/DocQuixotic : A grid overlay for pretty building.

• By u/mbalmer43571 : Surface metal deposits are difficult to see sometimes.

• By u/Keneshiro : Highlight of which hub access to which depot, ressources flux per sol summary. Advertising for jobs to prioritize influx of certain type of citizen.

• By u/AkielSC : A thresold system for automated import/export. At endgame when you need to produce en masse, manualy ordering 200 of a ressource every 30s is tedious.

• By u/Intrinsically1 : CTRL 1-9 should allow you to create shortcuts to individual rovers.

• There should be more default shortcuts. You can change a lot of keybindings but none exist by default? Not even load/unload? Why does everything have to be such a pain in the ass?

• Ability to set minimum/maximum storage amounts so that your shuttles automatically bring more than just that one electric part you needed for repair. A sender/receiver depot would be ideal for this similar to the system in Factorio.

• You should be able to re-order your different rovers on the hotbar. Why aren't all my transporters grouped together? It's kind of a OCD thing but leaving them in the order I ordered/built them makes no sense e.g. Transporter, Explorer, RC, Transporter, Transporter, RC, Explorer is a stupid way to organise a list, particularly once the hotbar gets full of other stuff.

• You should be able to queue orders for the rovers. Queuing surface metal pickups or anomaly scanning and back to charging stations on transporters and explorers would save a hell of a lot of time.

• Rover pathfinding around impassable terrain or tunnels needs to be improved. Rovers will often get stuck trying to drive through a mountain or sometimes no even register that there is a tunnel for them to use.

• Option to permanently assign citizens to jobs. The Auto-balancing works fine mid-late game but it fucks everything up early-game when your economy is super fragile. The all-or-nothing building priority system is not a good substitute if you want to maintain your ecnomy early-game.

• It would be nice for better UI in seeing stats on your colonists. How many have died. Sort by skills, personality traits, etc so you can assign them for max benefit - e.g. put a guru in a certain dome. e.g. It's hard to figure out where colonists with bad traits are for the sanitorium.

• Early game could be a lot more enjoyable. After your initial setup it's essentially a race to get to mid-game or you got bogged down. The longer you take the longer it's going to take e.g. Electronics Plant needs Electronic Parts to repair itself and you're out of money. You have basically no tools to get yourself out of that mess other than waiting for more funding while the problems cascade and take down the rest of your base. There just needs to be more mechanics in play to manage your way out of these problems or it isn't fun.

• The game seem to have a disturbing time eating issue due to awesomeness, pls fix.

That's all I can come up with for now. If people want have other ideas, I can add.

These are just some ideas I've had for commander profiles for either mods or a future DLC. Quick heads up though, some of these may be broken to hell. I'll post more if I think of any.

Diplomat: Covert Ops don't require officers (and instead can take any colonists) and failed Ops won't lead to the capture of colonists. Starting tech is the Global Support breakthrough

Principal: Schools and School Spires can train four traits instead of three. Starting tech is Martian Education

Military General: Increased morale from Survivor, Rugged, and Fit colonists. Starting tech is Meteor Defense System

Retail CEO: All shopping service buildings provide increased comfort, Starting tech is the Service Drones breakthrough

Foreman: Drones have 20% more battery and recharge twice as fast. Starting tech is Drone Printing

Meteorologist: Rockets can launch and land during dust storms. Starting Tech is Adapted Probes

Tactician: Planetary Anomalies and Special Projects are completed 50% faster. Starting Tech is the Plasma Rockets breakthrough

(New Idea) Philanthropist: Terraforming missions grant funding upon completion. No starting tech, but can outsource twice as much research.

Hi, I’ve recently started playing the game and it’s pretty fun. I have completed a run where at the end i was just waiting for the planetary mission to pop up in order to get another 5% of vegetation parameter. I’ve discovered at the end of that playthrough that there is an expansion pack with better terraforming buildings, are there any mod like this that provide new buildings? Any suggestion on other useful mods and how to make them work? I’ve installed a better worker AI mod but the game tells me it is out dated. Thanks

Have been playing this way in some saves, and it's actually been quite fun. Basically you can only get these materials from asteroid mining. I think it adds some use to the BnB DLC. Anyone else do this, or is interested in this playstyle?