Surviving Mars: How to Get Power & Connect Cables

How to Get Power (Electricity) and Connect Cables in Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars, the latest strategy game from Paradox Interactive, challenges players to well, survive on Mars. For those of you who haven’t ever been to Mars, it’s not as hospitable as Earth. This isn’t The Sims where your biggest concerns are where to poop and how to Woo Hoo. In Surviving Mars, you’re going to have scratch and claw for the even the basic resources such as Oxygen and Water. In this guide we’ll break down arguably the most basic resource, Power.

Without Power, you won’t be able to get your colony off the ground. Unlike Oxygen and Water, which are needed for human colonists (which don’t show up until later on in your game) the buildings that will lay the foundation for your first human colonists all require power.

You have a couple of options at your disposal early on in Surviving Mars for generating power. The easiest and quickest is to build large Solar Panels. You can build solar panels (and anything else we’re going to talk about) by bringing up the build menu and going to Power. If you’re on PC you can press B to access the build menu quickly.

Solar Panels will very quickly be built by nearby drones for a nominal amount of metal. Solar Panels are reliable, but only produce power during the day. What you’ll probably want to do is also build a Power Accumulator, which stores excess power your Solar Panels produce that can be drawn on by power-demanding buildings such as domes.

In addition to Solar Panels, you can also construct Wind Turbines and Stirling Generators, which can produce during all hours, but have their own costs, benefits, and drawbacks depending on location and terrain. It’s up to you to decide which power sources work best for your current situation and location.

All power generators must be connected to buildings with cables to be of any use. Luckily it’s simple. All you need to do is select Power Cable from the power section of the build menu, and just drag a cable using the left click button of the mouse from the power generating source to whatever building you want to power. Just make sure that you see that the building is lighting up yellow, indicating that it’s connected properly. Otherwise, you’re building a cable that connects to nothing.

That’s all you need to get power and connect cables in Surviving Mars. For more on the game, be sure to search for Twinfinite.