Red planet colonisation sim Surviving Mars did a mostly stand-up job of transplanting Sim City tropes to a hostile new world, however a barely iffy interface and an rigid aesthetic maybe meant that its high-stakes potato-farming wasn’t at all times as epic as hoped. As is more and more custom for Paradox-published video games – hey-o, Stellaris and Cities: Skylines – it appears long-term refinement may be very a lot plan. We’ve had two main updates since its March launch, including options and tweaking annoyances, and this week sees the third, ‘Curiosity.’
This performs some fairly signficant person interface-reworking, however clearly the very first thing we’ll all be cooing at is the totally different dome designs it’s including to the hitherto ‘any shape you want, so long as it’s an upside-down pudding bowl’ choices. In different phrases, Surviving Mars is now even higher suited to taking screenshots that appear to be prog-rock LP covers.
“Curiosity introduces five new Dome types to the game,” devs Haemimont clarify. “These are not skins or variants of the old Domes, but entirely new models with new shapes, functionality and costs. With one exception, they do not require new techs to be researched.”
What this implies is which you could add these absolute models immediately into an current save for those who like, however whether or not you try this or begin afresh, the online result’s a way more varied-looking colony. Tubular domes and panelled domes and domes that appear to be breakfast pastries: the screenshots up to now counsel {that a} (comparatively) small change makes a giant distinction. And not simply aesthetically: assigning sure dome-themes to sure dome-purposes can, I think, actually assist by way of at-a-glance grokking of what constructing does what, which might in any other case get a bit tough as a colony turns into huge.
Also serving to us to maintain tabs on a giant colony’s establishment are a few massive interface tweaks, designed to shovel what grow to be important quantities of useful resource and settler well-being data into our eyes at pace, with out requiring fairly a lot clicking round. A brand new top-of-the-screen standing bar, impressed by Waywocket’s Info Bar mod, retains an entire bunch of significant knowledge in plain sight at always, the place previously you’d should dive repeatedly out and in of the colonly overview menus. “Thanks for the great idea, Waywocket, may your nickname live forever in our credits,” say Haemimont.
In an analogous vein, the brand new Command Centre display offers an enormous checklist of all the pieces in your colony – buildings, settlers, drones, autos – in an effort to verify what’s working effectively, what isn’t, what’s understaffed and what’s idle in a single fell swoop, versus manually scouring your entire map for issues. Which ought to, all being effectively, depart you a bit of extra free to concentrate on the larger image, as a substitute of getting slowed down in inefficient micro-management.
Also added in Curiosity is a brand new and much-expanded tutorial – previously, the sport’s beginning minutes did neglect to cowl a couple of ideas, plus you would rapidly find yourself with so many fires to battle that the naked requirements of e.g. cable administration and upkeep may get left out. “Creating a tutorial after release may seem like a waste of effort,” clarify the devs, “but we really want to make our game more welcoming to newcomers and we see this tutorial as very important for the future health of Surviving Mars.”
More particulars on all this are here. I’m very tempted to return now, I need to say – three updates in, SM needs to be considerably totally different and expanded sufficient that I received’t simply really feel like I’m repeating myself. The devs stated on Friday that they hoped to get the replace out yesterday, but it surely seems to be like that didn’t occur – I’ve simply fired up the sport and there are not any fancy new domes or data bars. Hopefully it’ll land sooner or later as we speak, and I’ll replace this put up when it does.
