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Here’s what you need to know to get started with Surviving Mars – the ultimate beginner’s guide!

Surviving Mars is an amazing survival simulation game from Haemimont Games, known for the Tropico series. As its name suggests, Surviving Mars is all about surviving, on Mars. You and a few billion dollars are all that stands between your handful of colonists and domination of the red planet.

Surviving Mars at its core is a management game, where your main aim is the efficient use of resources available to you. You’ll have to manage all types of materials, deposits, colonist’s needs, oxygen, food, water, maintenance, research, and various other systems that will demand near-constant attention (depending on the difficulty you choose).

While this guide won’t go over everything you need to know (since discovery in Surviving Mars is half of the fun), these tips and pointers will help you establish a colony on Mars and avoid wiping out your brave colonists.

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Redundancy. After spearheading humanity’s first-ever Martian colony, I’ve realized redundancy is critical. You’re building one pipe between the oxygen pump and the habitation dome? Build two. Your power grid is clustered together? Make two or three groups of solar panels instead, and throw a few wind turbines into the mix for when the sun goes down. One farm? Try four.

When help is 34 million miles (or 55 million kilometers) away, your only hope is that when something goes wrong—and it will go wrong—there’s another option to fall back on. That’s the key to Surviving Mars ($40 on Green Man Gaming).

Life on Mars?

Things aren’t looking too bad on Mars these days, though. I hesitate to call the situation “stable”—I know better than to jinx myself. A meteor shower or an ill-timed dust storm could probably do some serious damage. And that’s ignoring the two colonies I abandoned when troubles mounted.

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By Daniel Starkey

It’s been said that city simulators are best thought of as a series of stocks and flows. You have essential buildings that supply resources, which are then distributed in a grand pattern etched by your design. Your success, then, depends on how artfully and effectively you’ve crafted your settlement. If that is the measure by which we are to judge city simulators, nowhere is that more beautifully or essentially or thematically distilled than in Surviving Mars.

Space is hard, and Mars isn’t any more forgiving; your goal is to command a mission that can endure the punishing conditions of the Red Planet. You can take the reigns of an international consortium, a major private enterprise, or any number of real-world space-capable nations here on Earth. From there, you choose how to guide your Martian colony. Insofar as many simulators allow a degree of role-playing, your time on Mars is yours to do with how you will. But your progress is constantly evaluated by your sponsor country or organization, offering some very loose targets like “get colonists” and “keep them alive for a while.” Beyond that, the direction is yours.

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By Marcello Perricone

Colonizing another world is a tremendous undertaking. It involves sending a preposterous amount of materials and spending a gigantic number of years and money to get a few human beings to another alien rock – a rock many – if not all of them – will never return from.

We often forget the sheer cost of such an endeavour, but anyone who’s moved countries can tell you that regardless of mental fortitude, uplifting your life is hella hard. Uplifting to another planet entirely must be soul shattering.

Unlike other colonization games, Surviving Mars makes that human cost exceedingly clear. From the moment you land your first rocket in the Red Planet to way after the first Martian baby is born, it’s an uphill struggle. Constructions wear and tear, colonists age and die, and everything requires maintenance – Surviving Mars really earns the “Surviving” part of its title.

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By Michael Ruiz

The colonization of outside worlds has been explored in video games for decades. Red Faction, Doom, Mass Effect, and more have all brought human life to the red planet. However, there haven’t been many that put you in direct control of the colonization process. Sure, it has been explored to a certain degree but the process is overshadowed by a more pressing issue. Typically, it’s some sort of enemy threat. Haemimont Games (makers of Tropico 5) and Paradox Interactive (publisher of Cities: Skylines) decided to put the colonization process in the forefront with its newest release, Surviving Mars.

This initial set-up is a creative take on an action you typically choose in a simple menu at the start of a game. It not only dictates how difficult the game will be but highlight the strategies you will want to take when setting up your colony. Seeing the difficulty bonus percentage increase and fluctuate depending on my choices had me experimenting with different combinations, trying to achieve the easiest and hardest modes possible.

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By Tom Sykes

You’ve already seen Evan Lahti play Surviving Mars for 13 of our Earth minutes, but ahead of its release on March 15, developer Haemimont Games joined us at the PC Gamer Weekender to offer a little more detail about its open-ended city-building strategy game.

Taking a cue from publisher Paradox’s Stellaris, the technologies on offer on the research screen will be randomised for each playthrough, with only a third or even a quarter of the total tech being available to players on each run through the game. Hopefully, this will keep it feeling fresh, by stopping players from falling back on the same strategies each time they start a new colony.

The above is only a glimpse of the full panel with Haemimont Games, however. If you’d like to watch the developer talking us through the early parts of a Surviving Mars mission, then get your peepers round the whopping 45 minutes of Martian footage I’ve stashed below.

 

It’s not the first appearance of Victor Vran on Kotaku, and we certainly hope it won’t be the last.

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