Develop a Plan Based on What’s Around You to Start
Surviving Mars: Tips and Tricks For Beginners
All of the tips in this guide are centered around one key point: having a long term plan in mind. In Surviving Mars, what you’ll come to learn is that bad decisions early on can, at best, be annoying to fix later, or worse, come back to haunt you. What you’ll want to do then is think carefully about what your long term plan is for the game based on what resources are available to you right away.
Map out in your mind where buildings such as water and rare metal extractors are eventually going to go, and then make sure that you’re putting power generators nearby. You’ll save a ton of resources by not having to run cables and pipes everywhere, or having to build extra buildings because you made poor placement choices early on. Lots of buildings cost metal, and until your colony is up and running, metal will be in short supply. You can never have enough, so try to be as conservative with it as possible. Think two steps ahead. When the game is at normal speed, it’s essentially moving at a crawl. You have plenty of time to think things through, there is no rush.
When you’re storing materials, keep them near buildings that will need those resources. That way your drones aren’t wasting time traveling long distances. Or, worse, you don’t realize for a long period of time that your resources are completely out of the range of the drones that need them. You think you ran out and call in a resupply, but in actuality you hid them from yourself.
If there is nothing particularly interesting near you, use your orbital drones to try and find something that is helpful to give you a boost in the slow early game phase.
Finally, think hard and long about where domes are going to go, because going through the effort of setting up a dome full of costly materials, and human colonists, just to realize later that it’s actually useless, is very frustrating. It’s natural for your first dome to kind of be sloppy because you’re still learning the game, how it works, and just want everyone to not die. But make sure you know what you’re doing the second time around.
Again, it’s all about mapping in your mind, before you build it, what your colony is going to look like.
