Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars is a strategy game developed by Haemimont Games and published by Paradox Interactive. This Surviving Mars Wiki is intended.

Wondering how to build a base and start your first colony in Surviving Mars? We were, too. That's why we put together this beginner's tips and tricks guide for Haemimont Game's latest urban/space simulator.

From choosing the right sector in which to land to collecting concrete and generating water, here you'll find the most important beginner strategies for Surviving Mars, which will help you start your journey on a solid foot.

All giant leaps start with tiny steps. Let's get started.

Tip #1: Choose Your Landing Sector

If you just started playing Surviving Mars, it's always a good idea to choose Easy Start at the beginning. It'll give you the proper level of difficulty, enough initial funding, and the right type of cargo for your first landing on Mars. In other words, it'll ease you into the game.

Once you begin, you will need to choose the landing sector on your map (see the above image). There are obviously quite a few choices, so check them out and look at the data panel to the right of the screen, where it mentions the amount of resources and threats in the given sector. Always look out for the spot with the most resources and the least amount of threats.

When you've made your choice, you can then choose the landing spot more precisely. For this, you should use orbital probes, which are indicated by an icon at the bottom of your screen. Activate these every time you need to scan a specific sector. This time, look out for the sector with the most concrete and water.

Concrete is important for building structures, and water will sustain your colonists. Finally, click on the rocket icon in your toolbar and choose the landing spot.

Tip #2: Collect Concrete and Start Building

In order to start building your base and ultimately your colony, you need to open up the Building menu once you land. This menu can be found either in the bottom-left corner of the screen or simply by pressing RMB or the B key. You will see that there are a lot of different types of structures you can build in Surviving Mars. But right in the beginning, the most important one is the Concrete Extractor, which can be found in the Production branch of the Building menu.

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You need to place the blueprint for the Concrete Extractor over the yellow zones, which are concrete deposits. As soon as you do that and unpause your progress, drones will start delivering the necessary materials for the Extractor to be built. It usually requires 6x metal and 2x machine parts.

When construction is over, you need to connect the Extractor to the power grid. Since you don't have the power grid yet, you can start with something as simple as a Solar Panel, which will produce enough energy to let your Extractor do its work. You can find the Solar Panel in the Power branch of the Building menu.

Lastly, you need to connect your Extractor to your Solar Panel with Power Cables, which can be built from the same Power branch as the Solar Panel. Choose them and connect the two structures together. Now you're well on your way to surviving on Mars.

But there are still a few things left to do ..

Tip #3: Generate Water by Building Water Extractor

The Water Extractor is the second-most important structure in Surviving Mars after the Concrete Extractor. When you have enough concrete, you can go to the Life Support branch in your building menu and start building the Water Extractor. Place it over water deposits and connect it to your power grid.

However, unlike with the Concrete Extractor, you aren't yet done extracting water. Now you need to deliver the water and store it in your water tower through pipes. So go to your Life Support menu and build Water Pipes and the Water Tower, and then connect them to your Water Extractor.

You can also connect the extractor to an Oxygen Tank, which will produce oxygen from the water. As you can see, all this comes from one water source, and that's why it's so important to have one if you want your colony to survive.

Tip #4: Start Your First Colony by Building a Dome

After you've collected enough concrete, metal, and polymers, you can start building your first basic dome in Surviving Mars. This is the first true step to constructing your human colony on Mars. So find a good spot for it -- somewhere near your structures that generate water and oxygen.

If you don't have the necessary amount of elements to build the dome yet, then you can order a resupply rocket with all the necessary components to help you build it. Just go to your Resupply menu in the bottom-left corner and order a rocket.

When you have the dome ready, you can connect it to your power and water grids. Now you can start populating your dome by building the Living Quarter and the Hydroponic Farm, which will house your colonists and produce food for your colony respectively.

In order to bring in the people from Earth, go to the Resupply Menu and order a rocket with passengers. From the list of passengers, try to choose mostly young geologists and botanists for your first crew, as these are the most useful humans for survival on Mars.

Finally, when humans finally arrive, they will inhabit your dome, and this is where the game actually begins. So have as much fun as you can!

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Hopefully, the tips and tricks in this beginner's guide helped launch your first human colony on Mars. For other Surviving Mars guides at GameSkinny, check out the links below:

If you're reading these tips, you no doubt know that getting a colony up and running in the Mars-based survival/city builder game is a tricky business. You need more than just potatoes and poop. With an erratic hint system and no tutorial, taking those first steps towards colonising the planet—which, I should add, very much wants to kill your vulnerable colonists—can be daunting. Below are a few things that I wish I'd known before I became a stressed Martian administrator.

Don’t pick the Easy StartThe 'Easy Start' option in the main menu is a bit weird. Selecting it flings you straight into a Martian map and removes all of the big choices you'd normally make at the start of the game.

Your mission sponsor, commander, the site of your colony—all of these are chosen for you. Even though all of the picks it makes ostensibly make the game easier, it means you start off a bit clueless, having not been able to pick your rocket's loadout or browse any of the other options.If you start the game normally, you'll notice that the sponsors and commanders have clear difficulty levels, and you can still choose the default rocket loadout if you want. More important is the ability to choose where on Mars you're going to settle. When I used the Early Start, the area it sent me to had a dearth of metal deposits and frequent tornadoes. Nobody in their right mind would want to live there. You can find easier places yourself.

Explore before you landThere are a few things, like drone hubs and rovers, that you'll absolutely want to bring with you in your first rocket, but don't forget about orbital probes. After you select what part of Mars you want to set up shop on, you've then got to pick where in this region you want your first rocket to land.

If the landing zone the game's picked for you looks rubbish, you can search for another one, or you can explore the areas around the landing zone, getting a headstart on the hunt for water and metal deposits. Keep dust away from solar panelsYou'll be plonking down a lot of solar panels as you expand your colony, and that means you're going to really start hating dust. Mars is an extremely dusty place, and all of that red dirt loves to cling to your shiny solar panels.

Unfortunately, dusty panels don't soak up as much of the sun's rays, reducing the efficiency of your extremely important power network. If you've not set up redundancies, dusty panels could cause blackouts and even halt oxygen production.Eventually you'll unlock technology that makes them less attractive to dust, but it's not something you'll have access to early on. Dust's inevitable, but you can reduce it by keeping anything that kicks up big clouds of dust away from the solar panels. Don't land your rockets near them, for example, and keep mines far away. Tornadoes are the worst, but they usually crop up in the same place, so move your panels a long way from them.Don't make long stretches of pipe or cableYou're going to need to spread your colony out to take advantage of Mars' sparse resources, making little, discrete bases. When you do that, there's a temptation to siphon life support from the pre-existing network, using pipes and cables to bring it to the new base.

That's just asking for trouble. It's the first thing they would teach you not to do in Martian Administrator School.Inevitably, a pipe will burst, or a cable will break, and then that's the new base without water, oxygen or power. To make sure that these problems get fixed quickly, you'd need to have drone coverage across the whole thing, and probably a few storage areas too. It's a massive waste, and it ends up being ten times as much work as simply generating power, water and oxygen at the new base.

Keep manufacturing facilities fully staffedBy purchasing prefabricated buildings from Earth, you can start plonking down manufacturing facilities as soon as you want, but you should hold off until you've brought a few rockets full of colonists over to Mars. While a building can start working with only a single colonist working in it, any unstaffed positions reduce its effectiveness, up to the point where it's simply wasting resources.If you've got lots of open slots, it's probably because you don't have specialists to fill them. By changing the priority of the building, however, you can employ workers for other disciplines or unspecialised colonists. They're not as effective, but it's still better than leaving the slots open. You can also increase a building's production by creating other shifts (though this can negatively affect colonists working unsociable hours) and, by clicking the clock next to them, push your colonists harder.

Make shuttles a priorityOnce you've expanded, you're going to be moving resources around all the time. Concrete needs to get from extractors to building projects, food needs to get from farms to colonists' bellies and countless resources have to get dragged all over the planet to various manufacturing plants. Drones automatically move things to where they need to be, but only if all of the tasks are within either the rover or the drone hub's radius of influence.Shuttles go everywhere.

And they're fast. They'll constantly flit between storage areas, delivering demanded resources, but they can also shuttle colonists between domes, linking them together even if they're at other ends of the map. If a dome needs a continuous supply of food, you'll still want to use a trade route with a transport rover, but shuttles are great at keeping places topped up. It's an extra layer of automation that alleviates a lot of the micromanagement. The rocket scientist mission commander gets shuttle technology straight away, making it a great choice for beginners. Don't be afraid to scrap a gameSome disasters—like the loss of 300 colonists—are so huge that trying to come back from them can just feel a bit too much like hard work. Sometimes it might not even be possible.

Surviving Mars provides a few safety nets, like getting resupplied by Earth, but there are some things that you just can't come back from. If it looks like that might happen, or it already has, just start fresh with a new map, and maybe even a new sponsor and commander. Even if you've got a bunch of saves, it can be better to apply what you've learned to a new canvas.